Haskalah

And you think about the devastating consequences of what that led to, only to be followed in the 1400s by the Spanish Inquisition, where many of the greats were living at the time as well, to be followed by the pogroms in Worms and Vermezza, to be followed generation after generation by the same story.

And yet with all of that, it brings us to the 1500s, which is the time period when the Shulchan Aruch and the Rama, Rav Yosef Karo and The Rama came together, not came together, but wrote their commentaries, which are now the Shulchan Aruch that we study and is the foundation and the bedrock of everything we believe in and all that we live by, came out of all of this devastation and all of this destruction that led to it, which only continued into the Gzerot Tach v'Tat in the 1640s, which led us into one issue after the other into the 1800s with all of the Haskalah, all of the Enlightenment, and the Reform Movement that was sweeping across Jewish communities in Eastern Europe once again, which led us into the greatest calamity in all Jewish history, the Shoah, which leads us to where we are today, to the greatest renaissance of Torah life and Torah study that the Jewish people have ever known in their history.

Is this not the most amazingly prophetic, astounding promise that we have ever heard? Moshe Rabbeinu told us this promise from the outset, and we are the embodiment of that miracle.

We are the generation who is living that miracle.

He's not even engaging in the conduct of Havelos.

You know, in the Haskalah, one of the...

One of the distortions that the Haskalah propagated was that the halakhic-centric character of Yahadus, and then within halakha, halakha's emphasis on external action it points to .

And that was the distortion, that was the excuse for abandoning.

So there are many relevant responses, many relevant perspectives.

But there was one person that Chavez Chaim would say a curse, Yimach Shmo, Yimach Shmo means his name should be erased, V'zichro on a Jew.

And that was, the person wasn't even alive, but when the Chavez Chaim was young and he was an orphan, This person was a very prominent member of the Haskalah, and he tried to take the Chavitz Chaim away from Yeshiva as a child and get him into secular education.

That the Chavitz Chaim said he can't forgive.

He says he can forgive everybody who themselves give in to their Yetzirah.

There were those that were written by Hasidim themselves, enormous amount of writing, mostly Tairas HaChassidus, which one can glean much history from studying the great Torah works of Chassidus, and all kinds of other writings, collections of stories, other documents, and that was the main primary source.

There was also another source written from the outside, and that was critical of the Hasidic movement, and that was earlier on, that was the Misnagdim, those opposed to the Hasidic movement, and later on it was the Maskilim.

And many of the Maskilim did not like, to say the least, they hated the Hasidic movement and wrote much against them.

So when the first researchers came in the 19th century, in the late 19th century, to start writing, writing down researching the history of the hasidic movement these are the two main sources they turn to to come to conclusions and to write its history now understandably both of those are somewhat flawed one more than the other The internal sources aren't fundamentally flawed.

The Hasidic sources aren't fundamentally flawed.

The second point was to new methodologies.

new methodologies, was to look for different kind of sources.

Whereas until the 1990s, the approach had been to mostly focus on internal sources, whether they're internal internal, meaning sources within the Hasidic movement itself, or internal, meaning Jewish, as in also opponents of the Hasidic movement, such as Misnagdim or Maskilim.

A little bit modern.

His son in particular had an interest in the Haskalah.

It was an Erech, as far as I know, it was an Erech believing Jew.

But the son in particular was involved in the academic discussions of Judaism.

As I said, it goes a little beyond that.

The Rashash and even more so his son They're sometimes confused by people who are not familiar with them.

They did have slight leanings toward Haskalah.

I saw quotes that the Rosh Hashanah occasionally quotes Mendelssohn's translation of the Bible in his work, commentary of the translation.

The model we see today really crystallizes in early 19th century Eastern Europe.

The key figure is the Chetam Sofer, Rabbi Moses Sofer, who was responding to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and to the early Reform movement.

His famous line was, Anything new is forbidden by the Torah.

He wasn't just making a legal ruling, he was drawing a battle line.

I just want to go over them again so everyone clearly understands what I'm talking about when I say understanding Tanakh is going to be a major tool in all of these issues.

Now, again, as has been discussed, this has been largely neglected in the Frum Yeshiva world, Hasidic Yeshiva world, and this is the result of Haskalah, and this is life.

Like it or not, this is life.

Now, again, as has been discussed, people in the Yeshiva world, Baruch Hashem, do know how to learn Shas well.