Rabbi Joseph B.

Soloveitchik on the Teen Tallit: A

Window into the Real Religion of Official Orthodox
Judaism. By mdangel Created 06/07/2010 - 10:14am Alan Yuter
Rabbi Alan Yuter is Mara D'Atra of Baltimore's downtown Orthodox synagogue.
With the exception of Orthodox Jews whose background and heritage traces to
Eastern Europe, observant males wear the tallit, or prayer shawl, upon reaching
their religious majority, after reaching the age of thirteen years and one day.

After asking teens to wear the tallit upon reaching religious majority, I was told
• it is not our family tradition. The father comes to the synagogue with a hat, the
children wear suits and no tallit. [tallis in their pronunciation of Hebrew]
• we do not want to be different
• my parents object and I am required to honor their requests
• the yeshiva teachers do not think that I should, and they wear their fringes
outside of their trousers, they wear black hats, they live 100% Judaism; how can
they be wrong?

When explaining that a custom of culture carries less weight than a rabbinic
enactment or Torah mandate [1] and customs are communal and not familial, [2]
I came to realize that the religion that Orthodox Jews profess-fidelity to Torah
based on the canons of interpretation-and the religion that they live and identify
as Orthodox, are two very different culture dialects.

R, Meir Yisroel Kagan, best know as the Chofetz Chaim,

ruled that according to the logic of the letter of Jewish law, the tallit should be
worn from the onset of Jewish adulthood, because there is no reasonable reason
to avoid observing a divine mandate. [3] He recounts that the Maharil [R. Jacob
Molein], Laws of Marriage, issues a strange explanation to justify the popular
practice of bachelors avoiding the tallit. [4] Since Scripture juxtaposes the rule
that fringes, "gedilim," be placed on the four corners of your outer [i.e., not inner]
garment [kesutekha]"[5] to "when a man takes a wife and [happens] to dislike
her," [6] Maharil maintains that until a man has a wife, he should not wear the
gedilim, or ritual fringes. What is strange is the mildness of R. Kagan's complaint;
that a post-Talmudic sage invents a legal exegesis to justify the abrogation of a
Divine mandate is not merely strange, it is seemingly heretical! Were a Modern
Orthodox rabbi to make such a claim for the first time in the 21st Century,
protests would rightly be heard. That contemporary confessing, professing, and
affiliating Orthodox Jews assent to this interpretation indicates that its real as
opposed to expressed and professed religion is unorthodox indeed, as such a
legal exegesis requires a Sanhedrin's approval in order that the exegesis be
regarded as normative.

In a remarkably candid halakhic column, [7] Rabbi Aharon Ziegler reports Rabbi
Joseph Soloveitchik's views that one should wear tallit at reaching Jewish
maturity [8] and that tefilin be worn during the intermediate festival days. The
merits of the contending sides of the disagreement are not here germane; the
facts are that Rabbi Soloveitchik concedes that tefilin by logic should be worn but
that one should uphold the practice of parents and grandparents. This version of
Judaism reflects how affiliating Orthodox Jews actually practice; but the
precedent, as emotionally compelling for some that it may be, seems to
undermine Judaism as a religion[9] of sacred law. There is no obligation to follow
parental practice if legal logic demands otherwise. R. Soloveitchik therefore
"subdued his intellectual understanding" out of respect for family tradition. R.
Zeigler's report is corroborated by R. Soloveitchik's Hebrew essay, "Two Kinds of
Tradition,"[10] where R. Solovetichik indeed affirms popular Orthodox culture and
inherited culture even in the face of what seems to be a less compelling legal
claim. It emerges from R. Soloveitchik's view that one may argue with text
tradition but culture tradition must be accepted uncritically.
1. One may argue dialectically with the canon.
2. the culture allows no argument but must be accepted submissively

Two scholars have already noted this ambiguity. R. Soloveitchik's son, Prof.
Haym Soloveitchik calls attention to the "rupture and reconstruction" [11] of
Jewish Orthodoxy in the condition of modernity. Prof. Dov Schwartz takes a
discerning reading of the ambiguities of traditional and secular motifs in R.
Soloveitchik's "Halakhic Man," [12] who unlike the typological "Religious Man," is
not threatened by secularity. I strongly suspect-but am as yet unable to
demonstrate-that R. Soloveichik's "modernity" is an outreach strategy to
intellectuals who are open to Tradition but, in a secular age in which Tradition is
under assault, the emergency principle [13] is applied to defend what the
Orthodox street by convention regards to be Tradition.

Since R. Soloveitchik did not abide the culture busting of Tradition by American
Judaism's non-Orthodox street yet defended mimetic usage-like no tallitot for
teens or tefilin on the intermediate festival days, it would seem that R.
Soloveitchik is flexible when defending the Tradition of the Orthodox franchise,
which will leave religious culture in tact, but uncompromising regarding deviations
that undermine the ethos of Orthodoxy.

Professors Haym Soloveitchik and Dov Schwartz

correctly call attention to the fact that there is in R. Soloveitchik's thought an
apparent and perhaps strategic disconnect between the Judaism of the
covenantal canon and the Judaism of the Orthodox street.

If God really wants Israel to obey the commandments, then the Eastern
European Orthodox street tradition, following the Maharil's legal midrash, that
postpones the wearing of the wearing of the tallit until marriage is an illegitimate
opinion for several reasons.

Tradition does not privilege parents over the law. Parents teach the law but are
not by definition sources of law. Ezekiel did not endorse parental behavior as
always being proper, [14] and Lamentations explicitly measures the behavior of
ancestors against the grid of divine benchmarks. [15] Rav taught that the Israelite
ancestors were idolators. [16] According to Rashi, when parents order children to
disobey the Torah law, Torah law demands that parents be disobeyed, because
both parents and children are duty bound to honor God's command.[17]
Alternatively, Maimonides requires that the child respectfully confront the parent
whose actions are deficient according to Torah law by confronting the parent with
the text of the Torah law.[18] From the above citations it emerges that authentic
or reliable Tradition does not accord parental precedent the privilege of piety.
The texts of the oral Torah library are also readable, accessible, and the Jewish
normative benchmarks.

By viewing respect as deference and the actual practice of ancestors to be a

source of divine Torah, the God of the fathers becomes the god who is revealed
in the intuition of the fathers. In the sacred canon, parents transmit the heritage
[19] but are not themselves the embodiment of authority. Shulhan Arukh Hoshen
Mishpat 34 teaches that well intentioned innocent error is not sinful; invoking
"Tradition" and "the ways of the ancestors" is an insufficient criterion for vetoing
innovation. By earning a doctorate in philosophy, by teaching Talmud in English
and to females [20] and by affiliating with Zionism, R. Soloveitchik's biographic
example indicates that he did not
himself actually believe that culture Tradition and text Tradition carry similar
religious valence.

The Orthodox street looks to popular culture and identifies descriptive habit with
prescriptive mandate. By suggesting that the practice of the past may override
statutory law, not only by forbidding the permitted [21] but by disallowing the teen
tallit, justifying the non-observance of a command.

Orthodoxy's challenge in the condition of modernity is to remain Orthodox; God is

the Author of the Torah from Heaven, and not necessarily the usages of
yesteryear.
When ancestors become de facto givers of Torah, rebbe cards iconize those
whose images embody Torah, whose proclamations about Torah are taken as
unreviewable [daas] Torah, and the letter of the law, where the still small voice of
the Torah's Author is found, appears to be de-authorized.

Israel is required to submit to the Law and not to people.

By deferring to popular culture, divine service is reconstructed into social
expectations and the will of God is expressed in the expectations of the folk.
Authentic Judaism is blessed with a book, a Torah, and a system of legal
interpretation. The trivial debate regarding the tallit for teens is ultimately a critical
debate regarding the essence of Torah; is Jewish folk religion the creator of or
the servant of covenant religion. The Jewry/Jury is still out on this question.
[1] Maimonnides, Introduction to Yad.
[2] The idiom that is Torah normative is "place where they practiced the custom."
bPesahim 50a.
[3] Mishna Berura to Orah Hayyim 17:3, n. 9.
[4] Supra.
[5] Deuteronomy 22:12.
[6] Supra., v. 13.
[7] Jewish Press, May 28, 2010, p. 33.

[8] This view is confirmed by R. Soloveitchik's close student, Rabbi Stuart Grant,
oral communication.
[9] R. Ziegler's two reports in this paper, that R. Solovetichik believed that the
talleit be worn before marriage, and culture tradition is de jure normative, enjoy
independent attestion. In my view, his reports are meticulously reliable, even
though his reports are secondary sources.
[10] Sheni Sugei Masoret, in Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Shiurim le-Zecher Abba
Mori, z"l (Jerusalem: 5743
[11] Haym Soloveitchik, ‘Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of
Contemporary Orthodoxy,"
Tradition, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 1994).
[12] Dov Schwartz, Religion or Halakha: the Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph B.
Soloveitchik, trans. Batya Stein (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007)
[13] Maimonides, Laws of Dissenters, 2:4.
[14] Ezekiel 2:3.
[15] Lamentations 5:7.
[16] bPesahim 116a.
[17] Rashi to Leviticus 19:3.
[18] Laws of Disseners 9:11.
[19] Deueronomy 32:7-8.
[20] See tBerachot 2:12, which is rarely cited because this clear oral Torah
source represents a canonical Oral Torah tradition that contradicts what others
take to be culture tradition.. See Doniel Frank, Rav Yaakov Weinberg talks about
Chinuch (Southfield, Michigan: Tarhum 2006), 122-124, where it reported that R.
Weinberg blames feminism for challenging traditional social femalel roles, and
outlaw. R. Weinberg cites bSota 20a, 21b, and Maimonides, Torah Study 1:13
but ignores the Toseftan report. R. Soloveitchik taught oral Torah to women at
Stern College for women. It is on the basis of these facts that we conclude that
R. Soloveitchik's advocacy of culture tradition is strategic and not absolute.
[21] See Bet Yosef Yoreh Deah 1:1 and Shulhan Aruch, supra., for a
conversation regarding forbidding the Talmudically authorized but culturally
restricted right of women to slaughter animals.