Benjamin Brown, The Hazon Ish: Halakhist, Believer and Leader of the Haredi Revolution [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2011). xiv + 951 pages, + English summary. ISBN: 978-965 -493-528-9
Haredi Judaism, also known as “ultra-Orthodoxy”, is much in the news recently. It has come to be seen as a strong and controversial force on the social and political scene in Israel, the United States, and elsewhere. How did this come to be when, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust of European Jewry, Orthodox Judaism seemed to be a spent force, barely alive and living on borrowed time?
Benjamin Brown’s important book attempts to deal head on with this question in his analysis of one of the major leaders of Haredi Judaism in the twentieth century, Rabbi Abraham Yeshayahu Karelitz (1878-1953), known popularly by the title of his books as “Hazon Ish”. That Brown’s is the first major scholarly work devoted to Hazon Ish has less to do with the subject’s intrinsic importance and more to do with the daunting difficulty of the undertaking.
Anyone attempting, like Brown, to deal adequately with the subject has first of all to gain expertise in the contemporary and historical discourse of halakha [Judaic law] in all its currents and nuances. Then such a scholar has to master the communal history, sociology, and phenomenology of modern Judaism. Finally, that scholar has to be able to sift through a plethora of primary sources, well aware that oral testimony as well as written documents have often been subject to conscious alteration in order that the story told by the document should adhere to a specific “party line”.
Brown has come to his task as well prepared as an academic scholar could be, and it is to his credit that he has taken on such a large and challenging topic with a great measure of success. His work is divided into four major parts. The first of these gives a biographical sketch of Rabbi Karelitz. The second relates to his theological and ethical perspectives. The third section speaks of his communal leadership, and the fourth attempts to understand his halakhic positions.
These four sections are not equal in length or in importance. While the first section is the smallest, at approximately seventy pages, it is successful in orienting the reader to the significance of the other sections, where the biographical facts are skillfully woven into the exposition. The theological/ethical section, at approximately one hundred pages, is probably the least in intrinsic importance. Brown in general makes clear that Hazon Ish was not really all that original in his theological views when compared to his contemporaries in the Torah world of nineteenth century Lithuania.
The third section, deals with Hazon Ish’s communal leadership in the Yishuv [Jewish community] of British Mandate Palestine and in the first years of the State of Israel. At slightly over one hundred pages, it is as crucial as the biography and makes clear how and why Rabbi Karelitz emerged from relative obscurity in his native Lithuania to become the major personality behind what Brown calls the “Haredi revolution” in Israel.
The fourth section, on Hazon Ish as a halakhist, is by far the longest and most ambitious at over five hundred pages. Even at that, the section does not claim completeness. It contains thirteen chapters, twelve of which deal with specific halakhic issues that the author considers most relevant to a consideration of Hazon Ish, with the thirteenth serving as a sort of summary.
It is the section on halakha that the author clearly thinks is most important to our understanding of Hazon Ish, and it is precisely here that the author faces his greatest challenge. That is because the academic study of contemporary Orthodox halakhic discourse has still not completely matured. Whereas the academic study of ancient and even medieval rabbinic sources has engendered an increasingly sophisticated body of research in the past few decades, the scholarly study of rabbinic texts of the last couple of centuries is really still in its infancy. The works of the great halakhists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan (Hafez Haim) have still not been systematically investigated by academic scholarship. In this respect, Brown is a pioneer.
In his pioneering work on Hazon Ish’s halakhic vision, Brown attempts with great success to situate Hazon Ish in his halakhic milieu. He does so by bringing the reader into contact with the classical rabbinic stances on the subjects at hand, from the Talmud, to the classical medieval works, to the salient issues of the twentieth century halakhic debate. This halakhic section is crucial to the design of the book as a whole, but is necessarily less accessible to the non-specialist than the other sections of the book. The author also attempts to connect the halakhic reasoning of Hazon Ish with issues in contemporary academic legal theory. This is perhaps the weakest link in his design. He is far more successful in understanding Hazon Ish in his immediate universe of discourse.
In general, Brown successfully demonstrates that Hazon Ish was highly influential in building the Haredi community in Israel into a relatively cohesive and powerful factor in Israeli society. He does so by showing how Hazon Ish served as a largely moderate voice in the context of non-Zionist Orthodoxy in Israel, one that was not ideologically opposed to the existence of the State of Israel as were the Neturei Karta. Hazon Ish was identified with the “new” Jewish settlement, as opposed to the traditional “old Yishuv”, and was sensitive to the difficult issues facing Orthodox Jews attempting to work the land in Israel in accordance with the dictates of halakha. Hazon Ish further showed himself able to utilize and exploit the Israeli political system in order to achieve goals like freeing Haredi women from both being drafted into the IDF and from any alternative “National Service”. According to Brown, his success came largely because he tended to work locally and pragmatically, largely eschewing wider political debates. He thus created Bnai Brak as a center of yeshivot and other Haredi institutions. He also set the stage for what Brown terms the “Haredi Revolution”, the creation of a society now numbering in the hundreds of thousands that for the first time in Jewish history is largely able to give its men the opportunity to study Torah as a lifetime vocation.
That Hazon Ish is central to the development of Haredi society in Israel is crystal clear from Brown’s analysis. That the “Haredi Revolution” has gone in directions that Hazon Ish did not and could not have foreseen is another of Brown’s well-founded conclusions. Brown ultimately concludes:
Both the thriving culture developed by this [Haredi] society and the entanglements that it has gone through may be traced back to the wheels set into motion by “The Great Torah Master” from Bnei Brak. (English abstract, vii).
Those who wish to go beyond the current headlines and understand Haredi Jewry in a profound way would do well to take the time necessary to encounter the Hazon Ish through Brown’s masterful evocation.
Ira Robinson
Academic Fellow, CIJR
Department of Religion, Concordia University
