Book Review
Changing The Immutable
5/5 stars
"R'Schwab: We do not need realism, we need inspiration from our forefathers in order to pass it on to posterity."
*******
Of the book:

-283 pages of prose over 8 chapters, ≈35/ chapter
-Estimated 1450 bibliographic sources (5.1 citations per page)!
-Replete with examples of censorship (Photoshop, reformatting) of highly variable quality.

This is a serious scholarly text. 

I did check two further things about this book:

1. The first is that I had a Big Rosh Kollel take a look at the sources and tell me whether or not they were mostly books or short responsa. He said that he thought there were mostly heavy books that comprised the bibliography.

2. The second is that I contacted the author directly and asked how he had time to read 1,450 books, and what he told me was: this is "not the type of book that somebody can directly research."  He had already studied the sources in other contexts, and realized that there was enough information over some number of decades of study to write a book about in its own right. In this case, the censorship of Jewish texts.

I spoke to one of my teaching rabbis, and he endorsed the author as a "big Talmud chacham."
*******
It's really hard to put together a pithy description of all of the overarching themes here.

But, I will try.

Second order thoughts:

1. The takeaway message is that: If you wanted to build a mass movement and you had a choice between trying to be intellectually honest, versus creating a bunch of mythology in order to sustain your adherents...... I would say that the latter is emphatically the best choice.

Conservative Judaism did try to be intellectually honest ("Conservative Judaism," Neil Gillman), but they just were not able to keep their people. They are fading away into obscurity, and the best that I can say about Modern Orthodoxy is that it is at least stable (but aging)? 

The Corrupt Haredim have created a historical narrative for their followers about a time that never existed. But, they do have a lot of babies! And they teach them what they believe.

2. It's meaningless AND overburdensome to try to determine what is "truth." (I really hate to give a nod to the postmodernists, but this book FORCES me to do just that.)

(p.25) Truth can be many things:

∆"Historical" (i.e., you go about the business of trying to find out what really did happen)

∆"Pragmatic"/"utilitarian"/"instrumental" (ie, the results justify whatever definition of "truth" there is; no problem to mix up biblical and rabbinic commandments, nor to lie to someone if it will modify their behavior in a way that you think is appropriate [p.247-8]).

∆ "Pedagogical" (think of all of those times when a Hasidic rabbi is giving a drasha involving a bunch of characters that never existed)

∆ "Moral" (i.e, if everybody decides what morality is, then you can make statements within that conceptual framework - - but the conceptual framework is completely arbitrary).

3. The rewriting of religious texts is something that happens so slowly that is imperceptible. If there are 18 editions of a book published, by the time a censor cuts out a little bit from each printing..... At the end of the day, you have something that is not quite the same as the original. (And we can only know this because the author searched through almost every edition of each book published.)

4. Conversion law has been many different things just in the past couple of centuries. These days, it is: a) provisional; b) reversible; c) excessively arduous/traumatic.

But it wasn't always that way!

If you go back just a century ago, It was believed that: a) a person could convert to Judaism knowing nothing about the religion; b) the conversion was valid as long as someone regarded himself as a member of the People of Israel (p.235).

Spillover Questions:

1. What is the point of study? All of these men sit around here in Kollel for YEARS on end in order to "understand" (gemara/halacha), but it's a wild goose chase: whatever people believe could change over time, and the people whose scholarship supported the disfavored position are/can/will be airbrushed out of history - - along with their scholarship.

It may well be that the statements "I know more than you"/"Ploni is such a big talmud chacham" have NO objective meaning.

2. Is it completely meaningless to try to objectively understand anything?

In my own study of how to read the Torah, I have learned that that the Torah was originally written in paleo Hebrew, and that there was a lot more gemination of letters than there is currently, and the fact that many Hebrew letters [ש/ת/ס]have been merged.

But, the memory of this information has been completely rewritten out of History and replaced with a bunch of Kabbalistic gobbledygook about the origin of the alphabet. 

The bad news is that 90% of Black Hats believe the Kabbalistic version of events and the other 10% have actually picked up a history book.

3. Maybe too much of anything is not good. The author specifically talks about the extreme lengths that Haredim go through so that people don't even have to hear any word that could be vaguely sexual (to the point where they can't even put Breast Cancer Awareness Ads in their publications because it would require the use of the word "breast").

But just the same:

a. I have read more than a couple of autobiographies of sex workers and Haredim have shown up in every one of them. (Sex worker Kayley Sciortino, in "Slutever," recapitulates what every Israeli taxi driver already knows--predictably conflating "Hasidim" with "all Haredim.")

b. I have read comments from OTD gay people as well as observations by Deborah Feldman ("Unorthodox") that Haredi yeshiva'ot are a smorgasbord for gay/curious/"sexually expansive" guys (and also "sexually expansive" girls if you believe Reva Mann).

c. When I pick up the newspaper and read about the semi-monthly Haredi sexual abuse scandal, it's 90% of the time Boy-on-Boy Action for some reason--so, all of those euphemisms may not have helped all that much.

4. This rewriting of historical narratives goes both ways. Hasidim are mainstream these days, but during the time of R'Yaakov Emden and the Vilna Gaon, they were Public Enemy Number One. 


Memorable Quotes:

1. (p.3, Simon Schwab): "We do not need realism, we need inspiration from our forefathers in order to pass it on to posterity."

2. (p.4, Yosef Chaim Yerushalmi): "Israel is told only that it must be a kingdom of priests and a holy people; nowhere is it suggested that it become a nation of historians.")

3. ("this is the halaka, but we do not teach it.") הלכה ואין מורין כן  

4. (p.251). geneivat da'at. ("Leaving someone with a false impression.") גניבת דעת.

5. Antinomianism in Jewish (!!!) life? (p.228) Female Hasidic Rebbes ? (Maiden of Ludmir, ibid.)

Selected interesting points per chapter:

1. Truth is not absolute. It is instrumental and contextual. Distinction between necessary and true beliefs. The author mentions that his target are Haredim, and I guess it's because they take the most "liberties" with sources in order to support community growth.

2. Recapitulation of his book "The Limits of Orthodox Theology." Halachic truth≠pshat truth. If a cleric writes something down, there's no guarantee that future generations will not reinterpret/excise his positions. (And it doesn't even matter if the scholar is someone as big as Maimonides.)

3. What happens in the case that some Jewish people were doing something it a matter of fact way for several centuries that later poskim decided was not okay? (This author uses the controversy of Italian Jewish people drinking non-Jewish wine because of the vanishingly small probability that it had been used in idol worship; the author could just as easily have chosen the sturgeon controversy.) Of course, you can just delete any references to it in current/future texts. (p. 109: "These responsa should be omitted in order to protect Schick's honor, and that is what was done... 22 responsum from Schick that were not included with the responsa published after his death"; p.114: "Most common way is simply not to mention these opinions in halachic discussions.")

4. The case of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. He did a lot of good, but he had a lot of positions that other people were uncomfortable with. Hmm..... How to deal with this? I know! (p.123: "....the latter told Wolf that he was obligated to alter such passages as this, or to omit them entirely.... When Netzah reprinted the '19 Letters' in the late 1960s ... All criticism of Maimonides were cut out."). This chapter also seems to contain the majority of (badly) photoshopped images.

5. This chapter is the special case of Rav Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel under the Mandate government. Of course, he wrote voluminously, and was a Zionist. Since Zionism is not yet popular in the Haredi world, this chapter is a study of how a prolific Chief Rabbi is excised from history. Books remove his haskamot. His name is no longer featured in the index of books. Eulogies that were written for him have all uses of his name expunged to where the obituary may as well have been written about Ploni.

6. If you go back to original printings from the 1600s, there are topless women all over the place. In the Mishneh Torah, for example. Some of these rulings are so shocking, that you just have to look them up. (Sefer Hasidim,176.) Rashi's commentary on Adam's, um,  sexual proclivities before the arrival of Eve (p.200). A guy who believes that marital disputes can be resolved by beating his wife's ass only need to go back in time far enough to find a ruling that says he can. Maimonides. R'Eliezer Papo. The Rema (p. 207).

7. a. In these days of modern translations, messages in Hebrew and the local language (English, in this case) don't quite line up--and that's not an accident.

b. People of earlier times may have had warm relationships with people who later became bêtes noires. Moses Mendelssohn has become one such because of his movement of Haskalah, but he actually had a respectful relationship with the Chatam Sofer (p.219), but later writers deleted this.....R'Moses Hagiz was a good friend of an Xtian Hebraist, J.C. Wolff, but that got extracted, too 

8. The truth is not important. ONLY Scholars/The Rabbinate do have the right to create pseudoepigraphic works as long as it is being advanced in a noble cause. Subheadings in this chapter include:  When Can One Lie / False Attribution/The Problem of Where to Draw The Line/Other Examples of Lying For a Good Purpose/Lying as an Educational Tool / a Rabbinic Doctrine of the Noble Lie / Redefining Truth. The Zohar is a literary forgery (p.264), but a halachic case can be made as to why that's ok! (Remember this the next time someone starts up with an Sokal Hoax-style Kabbalah instead of cracking open a history book.)

Verdict: This is a great book, and I see why it is so expensive. (Still.) It's going to be kept on myself and reread at various points. "One of the harder things about being a normative, Orthodox Jew is trying to predict the past."

There's just so much information here that it could not be absorbed all in one reading--and to be honest, I'm surprised that this book could be written.