Linked Article
by JEROME A. CHANES
The Jewish Link of Bergen County
http://www.jewishlinkbc.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1187:daas-torah&catid=153:divrei-torah&Itemid=565
Da’as-Torah—the idea that there is a “Torah view” on everything—has taken hold of the Orthodox world. And how can it not? If indeed the Torah, the revealed (and unrevealed?) word of God is all encompassing, all embracing, all comprehending, it then follows, ineluctably, that the Torah encompasses contemporary public-affairs as well.
There is no secret about my personal view of this phenomenon in American Jewish religious life, regnant in some circles: it’s an unhealthy phenomenon.
“Da’as Torah,” the “Torah view,” was developed in the 19th century in some Eastern European Yeshivot (some historians maintain that it was in the twentieth century) as a panic response to the liberalization of Jewish life. Now it is not at all obvious that there is a Da’as Torah—a “Torah view” that is decisive—for every development in Jewish life. This idea that Talmud masters were to be unquestionably followed not just on ritual matters but on communal policy as well—or on anything, for that matter—has led to a situation in which yeshiva deans, often cloistered from the complexities of public life, were making the kinds of practical decisions and setting public policy, that for centuries had been in the hands of communal rabbis and lay leaders. By the 1960s Da’as Torah had taken hold big time. Da’as Torah is one of a number of dynamics that characterize the dropping out of an Orthodox “center,” and is of a piece with the revisionism of the teachings of rabbinic leadership over the past hundred years, including those of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
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