Dr. Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg: Discovering Your Halachic Story

David Bashevkin:

Hello, and welcome to the 18Forty podcast, where each month we explore a different topic, balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities, to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and this month we’re exploring halacha. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big, juicy, Jewish ideas. So be sure to check out 18Forty.org — that’s 1-8-F-O-R-T-Y.org — where you can also find videos, articles, emails, and recommended readings.

Throughout this series, we have not been translating the word “halacha,” which derives from the word hiluch, to walk, halach. That’s somebody who is walking, journeying. And deliberately so because I think too often we instinctively translate the word “halacha” as Jewish law. As we have been mentioning, we superimpose our relationship with our governments, penal systems, civil law, criminal law, and superimpose that on halacha. They certainly have a lot in common, but it’s not a perfect analogy. There’s so many other aspects to halacha: the religious component, the spiritual component. What we discussed in our conversation with Moshe Koppel, halacha as language. That’s why we deliberately have not been translating this term, although, when you see it discussed, it is usually translated as Jewish law.

I think one of the most moving conceptual ideas for how to understand halacha is not just halacha as language, but halacha as our home. The Talmud in Brachos has the following line, “Miyom shecharav beis hamikdash ein lo l’Hakadosh Baruch Hu ela daled amos shel halacha.” When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, God only resided in the four cubits, the four feet, so to speak, of halacha itself. It’s a really moving passage of Talmud, and it could also be somewhat startling. What does that mean? If I don’t have a perfect and precise relationship to halacha, I will never be able to enter and be in the room that God resides?

I think the Talmud is telling us something quite profound about the role and function of halacha, and that is, halacha is, so to speak, a home. It is our home. The collective home of the Jewish people. When the Temple in Jerusalem was built, we had a centralized home. It was made of brick and mortar, and all the Jews contributed to it through the shekalim. They would contribute a little bit, a half a coin, a half a dollar. They would make sure that everybody participated and built this beautiful edifice that resided in Yerushalayim, in Jerusalem. Following its destruction, I think if you were a Jew living at that time, you would wonder, “Wow, we have lost any centralized gathering place where we can now all gather, and be a part, and feel that centrality and stability.”

What I think this passage in Talmud is saying is that what replaced that centrality, that home-like quality that we once had and gathered at least three times a year during the major Jewish holidays, instead of having a beis hamikdash, a Temple in Yerushalayim, our enduring home, even after its destruction, now becomes the halachic system.

The system of halacha can be envisioned as a home. It’s something that generations, throughout Jewish history, we have contributed to, that no matter how much we were wandering, no matter how dispersed we were, we still had centralizing rituals that gave disparate Jewish communities a great deal of stability and anchored them, no matter where they were, no matter who was chasing them. No matter where they were wandering, halacha served as a home. It was the four cubits of halacha, so to speak, that was a blueprint to build a home for the Jewish people, no matter where they were. That we no longer had a centralized home in Yerushalayim, but now we had a home we could take with us, no matter how nomadic the experience was, no matter how much we wandered.

There’s an absolutely beautiful essay by Rav Yaakov Yechiel Weinberg in his collection of essays, which is known as “Li-Ferakim.” It was originally printed in Hebrew. I don’t believe that this work has been translated into English, to my knowledge. I just want to state for the record, that’s insane, because the essays in Rav Yaakov Yechiel Weinberg’s, who is sometimes known as the Seridei Eish after his responsa, but he wrote this collection of essays called “Li-Ferakim,” which really contend with modernity, with the spirit of Judaism and Yiddishkeit.

It is an absolute must-read, but it is written in a very modern, pretty difficult, poetic Hebrew that if you’re not used to, and you’re really immersed in Hebrew, even myself, I sometimes really have to break my teeth, crack out the old dictionary to make sure I understand what he’s saying. He has an absolutely beautiful essay where he talks about the yoke of halacha, the responsibility towards halacha, and also the creativity and individuality of halacha.

One of the things that he writes in this absolutely moving essay is he imagines a bar mitzvah ceremony and a 13-year-old boy going to take a lulav and etrog that we do on Sukkot into his hands. In this essay, he has this absolutely moving line that I want to share with you in the original Hebrew. I’m sorry for all the Hebrew. Hopefully, our listeners won’t turn this off if you’re not familiar with it. Of course, I will translate afterwards.

He says even a young child who takes a lulav and is just 13 years old, “B’Sha’a sheochez halulav b’yado u’mitztaref im haminyan hagadol shel me’ah hadoros u’gdoleihem.” That when you seize that lulav in your home, you are now joining with that great collective minyan, that collective body of the Jewish people, of the hundreds of generations and their leaders that preceded you.

He uses the imagery of halacha as a home, a home that belonged to a family no matter what land they lived in, no matter where they were coming from, whether you’re from Morocco, Iraq, South America, America, Canada, Australia. Halachais a home that is able to bind Jewish communities, no matter where they find theirselves, and connect themselves to the greater edifice, the Temple that we still have, that resides in our rituals and practices as a way to collectively and centrally connect to God.

Now, if halacha is in fact a home and you have ever, in fact, built a home, you will know that it is not easy to build a home. We have done a little bit of work in our house. We haven’t done a tremendous amount. We’re working now on, perhaps, building a bathroom in our master bedroom, and moving upwards. Whenever you build a home, there’s so much that goes into it. You have to find first the architect. You have to find the contractor. You have to find somebody who you can work with. You have to figure out the blueprints and materials.

One thing that I know is that my wife and I have very different approaches to how we build homes. I just want to know what it’s going to cost. I’m just like, “How much does this cost?” I don’t know a thing, and I don’t pay attention to it. That leaves me in a really bad spot once we build something. The only thing I really paid close attention to that we built, and my wife always reminds me of this, is my office. I was very obsessed with the shelf space and how big it was going to be. I was extraordinarily excited by it.

My wife takes much greater care and detail towards how you build, and how to use the space, and how to make sure that it really comes together properly. Really, my wife, in many ways, is the leader of these things. I know that because anytime something goes wrong, my wife is able to diagnose what the problem is much faster than myself. If you have a leak, if you feel like something broke, you’re not sure of something, my wife really knows how to diagnose, “What is going wrong here? What are the steps we need to take in order to fix it?” It’s because she has taken ownership and responsibility of the project.

She really understands what went into it, what are the materials, who was the contractor involved? Who’s the handyman who set up the windows, or whatever it is, and me, who took almost no ownership, except the fancy shades that I bought for myself in my office, and a $30 pillow I bought for the chair at my desk. I’m not proud of that. I spent so much money on a pillow, but it’s awesome. It’s a pillow by an artist named Anshie Kagan who does this killer Judaica artwork, and I bought a pillow from him that looks like the old machberes, those blue notebooks that I used to write in in first, second, and third grade, and I have a pillow made out of it. An expenditure that I can’t really justify, but I absolutely love it.

I don’t really pay that much attention to the work and the details that go into the house. When something breaks or if something needs fixing, it’s a headache for me, as opposed to my wife, who really understands the layout, and the details, and the piping, and everything that goes into the house. She really understands how to fix it. I think there is a distinction. If halacha is your home, then there’s something to be said of taking ownership of the home. I think some people live in a house and they don’t know where the water main is, or they don’t take any responsibility to make sure that the pipes don’t freeze. They don’t know when to do gutter checks. They don’t know who the window person is.

The home ends up being a headache because they take no ownership and responsibility of the details of their house. They’re just like, “Look, I just want to live here. Anytime a problem comes up, I’m just going to scream and be upset, and make 100,000 phone calls because I don’t know where, or why, or what anything is in this place. It’s just where I live.” You don’t take any ownership of what went into building this house, or what is the edifice of this house.

I think an analogy can be made towards halacha. I think there are some people who, they just want to know the bottom line, “Just tell me.” That often leads to headaches. If you don’t understand the mechanics of the system, where the pipes lead, where you can build, where you can’t build, where the load-bearing walls are, it could end up being a headache because you have no idea what went into this. You don’t know where you can make an extension and where you cannot. You have no idea what you can build of your own, and you have no idea what … If you poke a hole in this wall, the whole exterior’s going to fall apart.

I think that we live in a generation where we need to learn how to take more ownership of our home as halacha and use the halachic system, not only to understand the mechanics, but to connect us to previous generations. I think if home is a halacha — I’m going to say something now, which can be a little bit dangerous, but I think it’s important, because I know that we have a lot of listeners who struggle with a relationship with halacha, who find it difficult, who find it rigid, suffocating. I think the analogy of halacha as your home is instructive for those individuals as well.

There is a book that I don’t know that I can recommend because it was really, it was kind of hard to understand. It’s written in a very poetic, essayist style. The book is called “The Going: A Meditation on Jewish Law” by Leon Wiener Dow. I did read the book. I did find much of it extraordinarily fascinating, but one thing always stuck with me, and that is an interview he did when the book first came out. He was asked, “What do you tell people who, they’re just struggling? It’s not working for them. They’ve tried 100,000 times and really building a healthy relationship with halacha, it’s not working. It keeps on collapsing.” I thought his answer was quite profound, especially because it builds upon this notion of halacha as our home.

This is the answer that he gives. He quotes from a letter, I believe from 1925, from the great Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, to his friend, Joseph Prager. Rosenzweig, he writes to Joseph Prager that he must set up a tent outside of the building of halacha. “The protection over her head will not be identical to the roof that the halacha provides, and yet the placement of the tent across from the entry to the world of halacha indicates that this non-halachic Jew continues to live her life in relationship to normative communal life.”

“Over time,” avers Rosenzweig, “As more and more tents are erected on its front lawn, the building of halacha may well move. It might. That is the self-reform that characterizes the halacha. It never fully excludes those Jews who live according to their ability and who insist upon maintaining relationship with the communal norm.”

I’m seeing more and more of this lately, and I actually think, while I know why some people will find this offensive or difficult, and please, write in letters. Tell me why this is wrong. I do like the imagery of setting a tent right outside of the edifice, that strong building, that home of halacha, and say, “Look, I don’t yet have a life that will allow me to live inside of that home, but I do want to pitch a tent right outside. Maybe over the years and generations, the infrastructure of that home is going to expand and include me as well,” and that has happened in many different ways over the generations.

You can read Dr. Haym Soloveitchik’s article of how that happens, when that happens, why that happens. I’m not referring to “Rupture and Reconstruction.” I’m referring to his earlier work, but that is absolutely something that has happened over the generations. What I think I find so moving about this is it’s saying, don’t leave. Don’t move to a different neighborhood. Don’t move to a different country. Take solace in the shadow and the shade that the halachic home provides and stay in the vicinity. Set up a tent outside the home of halacha. Still be a part of it, be adjacent. There is still communal interactions that can provide the uplift, the spirituality, the sense of affiliation and connectivity, that even though it may be difficult to live inside the home, you can live next door to it in a tent of your own.

It’s through this analogy of halacha as a home that I am so excited to introduce our guest, Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg, who is absolutely a vision of a scholar. Dr. Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg is a junior fellow right now at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She received her PhD from the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania under, I believe, Dr. David Ruderman. The title of her dissertation, “The Organization of Halakhic Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: The Transformation of a Scholarly Culture” is, as she entitled an email that she sent to me, a monster.

When she sent me the dissertation, which cannot be circulated because she’s working out and adapting it into a book or books, plural, but it is really a monster in the best way. It goes in-depth to try to understand how the organization of halacha throughout the generations impacted our relationship with halacha itself. She is a scholar of the highest order.

What I appreciate most about her is she has a deep, organic relationship with halachic commitment itself, which is why that integration of scholarship about halacha of the highest order, while also having the lived experience of halachiccommitment, it is scholars like Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg that I think are so instructive to learn from and connect with. Because they’re able to integrate two worlds that are too often disparate. That is why I’m so excited for our conversation. She is an emerging scholar that I have no doubt our listeners will be hearing a great deal about going forward. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce our conversation with Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg.

I am so excited to speak with our guest. I’m going to try to make sure I nail the name correctly. I hope she doesn’t have to correct me. Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

That’s right.

David Bashevkin:

I did that. I’m so happy, Tamara, I am so happy that you were able to join us today. I wanted to begin with a direction maybe that’s a little bit unusual, but I think our listeners would appreciate it a lot. You are part of the Harvard Society of Fellows. You did your PhD in Penn. We’re going to talk about all of your scholarship, but maybe you could introduce yourself, because you’ve published in more high-end journals. Your PhD is, undoubtedly, known to scholars, but for our listeners, can you maybe introduce, where did you grow up? Where are you from? Who are you? Tell us about, where did Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg come from?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

I grew up in Antwerp in Belgium, in the Jewish community there. I went to Bais Yaakov. I went to Israel after high school. I did my BA at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At that point, I was married, living in Israel, and decided to move to Philadelphia. I did my PhD at UPenn, as you said, so I went straight from a BA to a PhD. My BA was actually majoring in philosophy, not history and not Jewish thought, just general philosophy, so lots of Kant, and Aristotle, and Heidegger.

David Bashevkin:

The good stuff, sure.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Yeah, and other good stuff. From there, I went and did my PhD in history. My advisor was Professor David Ruderman.

David Bashevkin:

A fabulous scholar.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Very fabulous scholar of early modern Jewish history. I think when I went in, I thought I would do more like modern Jewish history, 19th, 20th century stuff. He has a very infectious excitement about the stuff he studied, and he really convinced me that the early modern period, so the period after the Middle Ages but before the Enlightenment, is really the exciting period to study, and I was convinced. I decided to write my dissertation on the early modern period, specifically on Ashkenaz. I’m sure we’ll get more into those topics later. I worked with Professor Ruderman and an important historian of early modern Jewish history from Israel, Professor Elhanan Reiner. I had the wonderful luck to also work with a very important historian of book history and history of knowledge named Roger Chartier, who is a professor at Penn. Obviously, his interest is not Jewish history, but he deals a lot with the history of knowledge and the history of the book in early modern Europe in general, so it was really a wonderful education.

From there, I did some fellowships here and there, at the Center for Jewish History at NYU Law and most recently at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where I worked on postdoctoral research, published some articles. Right now, I live on the West Side of Manhattan with my husband Ori and three sons. Yeah, that’s more or less it.

David Bashevkin:

I have a thousand questions that we’ll probably come back to, but I wanted to dive in for why we invited and why did I feel it was so important to have Tamara come on specifically to speak … I always ask this. It’s a running joke on the podcast. I didn’t ask it initially. The running joke on this podcast is that I invite the highest scholars ever. Somebody said that I would have the pope on, and my first question would be, “Do you mind if I call you Francis?” I didn’t even ask that question because we had spoken earlier and I do apologize, but are you comfortable, is it okay if I call you Tamara?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Yes. I think I could say that I’m still in my low-30s, so please call me Tamara. After the many years that it takes to get your dissertation, you think that you’re going to make everyone call you “Dr.” every single day, because what else do you do with a PhD? Please, call me Tamara.

David Bashevkin:

Okay. We’re going to do something else with your PhD and that is we’re going to talk about it with the public, and it is absolutely fascinating. Tell us, what is the title of your dissertation? Usually, I ask this at the very end, an imagined dissertation, which we’ll get to. What is the title of your dissertation?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

The dissertation as it is now, as I wrote it, is a very, very big project. I think what might be more interesting are the two titles. I’m working on two books based on it, and these are two titles for the book project to come out of it. I just think they give you more of an idea of what it’s about. The title for one of the book projects, it’s called “Remaking a Culture.” It’s about how halacha was transmitted from roughly the 15th to the 16th century in Ashkenaz, so what happened there. The second project I’m working on zeros in specifically on the type of halachic text called responsa, or she’elot u-teshuvot, also for that same period, and that one is called “Law and Disorder.”

David Bashevkin:

Ooh, that’s a good title.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Yes. I think it’s a fun title. It’s about how SHUT represents-

David Bashevkin:

SHUT is an acronym for she’elot u-teshuvot, which is the genre of responsa.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Yes, so in English, I’ll be referring to it as responsa, but she’elot u-teshuvot, questions and answers about halacha, how they represent maybe not the typical way you would think about halacha. We think about halacha, very often, as this very fixed, stable list of things you can and cannot do, this just list of laws. I think what responsa or she’elot u-teshuvot really show is this much messier but also richer and more creative side of halacha. That’s really what I focus on in the second project.

David Bashevkin:

I want to dive into both of those, but I want to surface a question that I’m sure many of our listeners are wondering. It’s one we discussed a little bit. You had mentioned you went to Bais Yaakov. I’m sure you went to traditional seminary, and you have a life that is anchored in halacha in a fairly traditional sense. I’m curious, how does scholarship in the world of halacha, you studied the history and development of halacha. How did it interplay, if at all, with your personal relationship with halacha itself?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Leaving aside the question of how traditional the educational institutions I went to are, I don’t know if everyone would call of the institutions I attended as traditional. I think the thing they had in common was a deep respect for halacha, a deep commitment and engagement to halacha, but also a deep commitment and engagement to understanding and studying halacha and knowing these texts. To me, and I’m sure we’ll get to that as well later on, to me, halacha is one of the most important, if not the most important, Jewish cultural creation. It’s far beyond just telling you what to do. It’s a whole world, and a whole language, and a whole … Both a textual and conceptual, very dense world and a way of relating to the world around you. I think, personally, it’s not just a question of commitment of living a life of halacha, but also let’s call it of being, if not necessarily an expert of being, at least seriously literate in this world. I think, to me, those two go hand-in-hand.

I’ve definitely, throughout my life, met people for who they don’t necessarily and who could be deeply committed to halacha without necessarily needing to even understand how it functions beyond knowing what they’re supposed to do, and that works as a model. For me, personally, since that’s the question you’re asking right now, for me, personally, I think it’s a big loss to not get more engaged and involved, and study this and understand how it works.

David Bashevkin:

I guess, maybe I will put on my … I grew up in the yeshiva system, and you could help me. You have some really moving articles and some citations that maybe might flush this out. I’m going to ask a fairly antiquated question, a question from my own past. The first time when I was introduced to halacha and the way most people relate to halacha is they read a lot of contemporary English works that do exactly what you say, which is they just tell you what to do.

I think there’s a very real concern that people have, which is that if you dive into the history of halacha, then the majesty, the divinity of halacha is going to erode. When we use words like the development of halacha, the evolution of halacha, that necessarily coincides with a deterioration of that pure, unadulterated, so to speak, halachic world that we need to preserve as if it came down and it’s telling me exactly what to do in this moment.

I don’t know what’s going on in your life, in your home, and how you run your household and personal life, but we’ve spoken. I met your husband, and my sense is that your relationship to halacha did not deteriorate because of your exploration of halachic history. I’m wondering, is that a misconception? Why doesn’t the history of halacha erode one’s appreciation of halacha as this kind of fixed, pure magisterial system, and poke holes into something that evolved over time, doesn’t have that same divinity and majesty?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Right. As you say, I think it’s a bit of an antiquated question. I still think it’s a good question. The way I think of this is primarily, I’m not scared of history. I think partially, that this doesn’t come from some sort of feeling people have about halacha. It comes from a certain attitude people have about history, which is in a way, that anything that’s historical is contingent. It’s a result of whatever happened. It’s not something that’s necessary or essential. It’s just all kind of coincidences and just the way things develop. What this comes from, I think, is a sense that people have that real truths need to somehow be abstract and not touched by occurrences that happen, that they need to be somehow essential, and always true, and unchanging. I get that. As I said, my BA is in philosophy. There are such attempts to think about the world. I don’t think that is how truth works in this world, certainly not to an historian.

There are parallel, in a sense, developments, definitely in intellectual history, which is the kind of history I’m interested in. In more recent years, let’s say relatively, there’s this whole field called the history of knowledge. I think to some people, even the idea — this is not limited to Jewish or even from Jewish people, although certainly, if someone’s religious and they live their whole life according to a system, the stakes are maybe higher — but even the thought that knowledge has a history is very disturbing to people. They’re like, “Well, if something is true, then who cares how we got there exactly and what the history of it is? Let’s just study the knowledge or the truth. Why is the history important?”

I think one of the really strong midrashim that I always think of when I think of this question is of Moshe going to get the Torah and bring it to the Jewish people, and him facing off with the malachim, with the angels, who say, “Why should this flesh and blood get this really holy thing?” The way he, in a sense, wins the argument is precisely by doubling down on the fact that human beings are humans, and clearly the Torah is meant for humans. If we want a halacha that’s not tainted by history, then I’m sure the malachim would have gotten it and it would all be very nice and as you said, majestic, and perfect, and not touched by history. For whatever reason, this is not what halacha is about.

Certainly, if we look at halacha the way it is now, I think it’s made for humans and it’s made to develop in history. I think that’s what’s beautiful about it. I think that one of the real contributions of this perspective of the history of knowledge is not just to say that there is a knowledge and that knowledge is constant and pure and abstract somehow, and then there’s history that messes it up somehow and corrupts it and we want to distill the essential part of it, is to really understand that these things are completely intertwined.

As much as knowledge is a human activity and a human production that happens in history, you cannot untangle these and it would be, I mean, more than that, it would be completely pointless. You would lose a lot of what is beautiful and interesting about it.

David Bashevkin:

I absolutely love that. It’s that exact midrash that you spoke about, about Moshe going up to grab the Torah, so to speak, and it being challenged by the angels that I used to couch some of our previous discussion about rationality and what it means to have something that is capital T “Truth.” I think that was quite profound and well-articulated. Which kind of brings me a little bit to the substance of your dissertation, or as you presented it, it’s two different books.

I’m just going to read the title because I do think that it’s fascinating. “The Organization of Halakhic Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: The Transformation of a Scholarly Culture.” I want to talk about that transformation because you really highlight how halacha, as a system, confronted modernity and how modernity both shaped halacha and halacha reacted and confronted modernity. What, I guess, I wanted to begin with is to continue on that line of thought about this abstract, pure, capital T “Truth,” about some of the polemic and some of the concern that emerged when people began to codify and began to organize halacha in a very organized way.

It’s the halacha that we know today. If you open up and you ask somebody, “Where do you really go for the sources of halacha?” Maybe they’ll tell you a book that was published in the 1980s in English or the 1970s in Hebrew. Maybe if they’re really fancy, they’ll go earlier and say, “No, I open up the ‘Shulchan Aruch,’” which is the compendium of Jewish law that’s organized day by day, topic by topic. This organization of halacha was actually quite contentious, as you relay in your dissertation.

Why would anybody be concerned about organizing halacha? Isn’t that like how it’s always been and the easiest way to observe halacha in your own life? What would you even lose by organizing it this way? What do you think, perhaps, we have lost, us in 2022, by almost superimposing our contemporary view of halacha on the totality of the experience?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

You’re absolutely right that the “Shulchan Aruch” is when … This is a code of Jewish law that was written by Rabbi Joseph Karo in more or less the middle of the 16th century.

David Bashevkin:

Can I just interject, on both of our behalf and to all of our listeners, this is a pro-“Shulchan Aruch” podcast. We’re not here, God forbid, to knock the “Shulchan Aruch,” before you write letters or call in. We’re trying to understand, almost the innovation of what it was, and why people found it unsettling. Please continue. I’m sorry for interrupting.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

No problem. I’m definitely, definitely not anti-“Shulchan Aruch” here, but I think what’s important is to broaden it. I think you’re absolutely right. This was a code, as I said, written by Rabbi Joseph Karo, who, again, he didn’t make this up out of nowhere. He took several important earlier codes of Jewish law and really just summarized them, reorganized them. He has his work that he wrote before that, Beit Yosef, where he goes more into the argumentation, but Shulchan Aruch was really meant to be short, well-organized, accessible. It’s one of the first … I mean, Beit Yosef really is one of the first halachic codes to go straight to print, so it didn’t have this sort of manuscript life before. It was created to be printed.

I discuss a lot in my dissertation how, and I’m certainly not the first one who came up with this, but how organizational schemes and very systematic displays of knowledge go together very well with print. No technology is the ultimate thing, and we had ways of managing before as well, but the standardization and print, you can imagine why, go together very well. It both allows you to have many reproductions of the same organizational scheme that people see. Because something is now so much easier to disseminate and reproduce, it’s cheaper, it takes less labor, and so on, it’s going to go further and people using it will be people who were not necessarily familiar with it before.

It’s also, from the user side, it’s more necessary to have something that’s well-organized, as opposed to if you’re teaching your student or if your student is just copying something for himself. When you copy something, you know more or less where to find it in your notes, but when you’re suddenly putting out this thing for a very broad readership, it’s much more important to have good organization. These things are very synergetic, the technology and the mode of organization.

As you said, if we want to think back to when did the world of halacha become familiar to the world we have today that is, in many ways, the starting point. You discussed it as halacha confronting modernity. I think what is interesting about this point in time that I study is that, usually when you think of halacha confronting modernity, you’re thinking of more modern things, more post-Enlightenment issues, and these very ideologically heavy questions, and like haskalah and those type of issues.

What you have here that is interesting to me is that, ideologically, this is not the kind of ideological confrontation with ideas for modernity. What we’re really talking about is just the world changing. If you want to see how the Jewish world changed in the early modern period, the best book to go to is David Ruderman’s book, where you really get a summary of all these different things that were changing at the same time.

David Bashevkin:

Do you have that title offhand?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

I think it’s “Early Modern Jewry.” There is a subtitle. Maybe, “A New History,” or something like that.

David Bashevkin:

Yeah.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

It’s really the basic go-to book, if you want to get a glimpse of how the role of rabbis was changing, communities were shifting, people were moving. Obviously, there’s all the non-intellectual history stuff that’s happening. There are expulsions. There are questions of their Sabbateanism. There are many Sephardi Jews who fled the Inquisition who are now all over the Jewish world, and so on. You have all these very profound changes happening, and one of them is the invention of print and the possibility to print books, which also shapes the whole world of Jewish books. “Shulchan Aruch” is definitely a part of that story. After Rabbi Joseph Karo writes “Shulchan Aruch,” Rabbi Moses Isserles in Poland writes his glosses, his haga’os on “Shulchan Aruch” to adapt it to Ashkenazi minhag. This is really where, if you want to talk about it and the way you framed it in the question was more as this polemic and people who had problems with it, it’s really coming from, in a sense, this Ashkenazic world, mainly because, and this is where I think “we’re not anti-‘Shulchan Aruch’” comes in, they had a different way of doing things before.

Again, they knew about codes. Codes certainly existed. They were studied, they worked a lot. They were familiar, of course, with “Mishneh Torah,” the Rambam. More than that, they would often use the “Arba Turim.” They were teaching that way, so in the manuscripts of many early Ashkenazi rabbis, we have their glosses and their notes that either they or their students wrote, as they would teach halacha using the tool as their basic text.

It’s not that these codes weren’t there, it’s just that it wasn’t their main way of structuring halacha, and certainly, having this one universal code for almost the whole Jewish world that summarized, and certainly in print, was just not the way things were, partially again, for practical reasons. It just wasn’t the way they functioned. Often these are traditional institutions and they have their own traditions, and they worked fine.

Not only did they work fine, and I think the most interesting text to look at there is something called “Vikku’aḥ Mayim Ḥayyim” by Rabbi Hayyim of Friedberg, the brother of Maharal of Prague. It was written in many circles, printed only later, I think, in the 18th century maybe for the first time. There you really get an expression of partially what halachalooked like before in Ashkenaz and why there would be a problem with “Shulchan Aruch.”

David Bashevkin:

Could you just elaborate on that distinction of what halacha looked like before and what changed?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

What halacha looked like before, I don’t mean in the sense, and this is something I do a lot in the dissertation. I have specific examples. I don’t mean in the sense that this bottom-line halacha was necessarily different, although with innovative thinker, like Rabbi Moses Isserles, often, you might pasken differently or be slightly more meikel in certain circumstances. That’s not what I’m talking about.

David Bashevkin:

Lenient.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

More lenient. I’m not talking about whether he decides one way or another. What I’m really talking about is just the whole conception of how halacha works. In Ashkenaz, certainly, the way Rav Hayyim ben Betzalel, for example, portrays it as opposed to what Rabbi Moses Isserles did by jumping on the “Shulchan Aruch” bandwagon, is that halacha was very local in many ways. It was very flexible. If it was written down, it was written down as student notes, but there was no attempt to create this one big very systematic work. Professor Elhanan Reiner has written also, very interestingly, on how, in many ways, even after “Shulchan Aruch” and Rama writes his haga’ot, in the later generations, you get this opening up again and it becomes this discussion once again, so it doesn’t necessarily remain with these very neat, clean bottom lines.

This idea that halacha should be systematized to such an extent, was really counter to this idea, so you had, it was more local. It was more fluid. In “Vikku’aḥ Mayim Ḥayyim” you get an expression of saying not only that every rabbi has their own take, but also that the same rabbi does not necessarily pasken the same way in different points in time. It’s this much more fluid, flexible thing, and I think also, the distinction between halacha and minhag, between halacha and what we call custom is much, much less solid, so you have a much more blurred distinction between the two. I think those would be the characteristics that I would give to the way it was happening before.

David Bashevkin:

I guess I want you to speak a little bit about what we lost. I know in your introduction, you talk a little bit about the polemic that was not directed at the “Shulchan Aruch,” but that was directed at the Rambam by the scholar and rabbinic leader Rav Jacob Emden, who’s famous for a thousand and one different things, but his critique, if I am quoting correctly of the Rambam systematization …. Did I say that correctly?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

I think so.

David Bashevkin:

… of halacha, and the concern that human historical element would be lost if it becomes this abstract system. I’m asking you a two-part question, which you really already danced around, and that is, what did we lose, so to speak, by having halacha systematized, and what did we gain? Meaning, were they self-aware, so to speak, in history of why this was necessary? Why, at this point in history, we needed to move quite rapidly? Aside from the factors of print making it easier to have these compendiums, was there a mission-oriented, similar to the way the Rambam was mission-oriented in realizing the world, in his opinion, needed the “Mishneh Torah,” and there was pushback to that as well. What do we lose and what do we gain by this new era of the organization of halachic knowledge?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

I’d like to hope that we didn’t lose it completely. I think what you get is just certain tendencies that are sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker, and certain circumstances that make these different ways of relating to halacha, and sometimes easier and more attractive, and that people go to more. I think they always exist to some extent. I think in the case of … The Rambam is a good example. I think that’s why I wouldn’t want to say that Rav Jacob Emden critiques the Rambam. It’s a very small remark. The famous Rav Jacob Emden Rambam thing is where he, I think, says that the “Moreh Nevukhim” was maybe not written by Rambam. He sort of takes that back very quickly.

David Bashevkin:

Yeah, I’m not referring to that. Yeah.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Right? This is a small remark in the process of a long teshuvah. It’s basically something in parentheses, literally, where he just tries to explain that halacha can’t really be distilled. He writes it in the sense of, he says, “Kol sifrei hakodesh tzrichim ze l’ze.” “All our sacred books need each other.”

David Bashevkin:

Beautiful.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Basically saying, this is a big web. You can’t pull out one thing. I think that’s where it really goes to the richness and the depth of the whole halachic world, as opposed to this, just the halachic bottom line of, what is the conclusion? I think the reason he pulls out the Rambam as the example, and he says, and the Rambam sort of, he doesn’t say it in these words, but almost succeeded, but even the Rambam has places where it doesn’t work.

The reason I think he goes to the Rambam is: a) because Rambam probably is the one who came closest to actually systematizing all of halacha, so it’s just our best example of the fact that it can almost be done, so Rambam is the one you have to contend with when you want to say that it can’t be done.

He shows there are few places where not, but I think also because as opposed to, I think, what you brought up before, this idea that maybe it’s just a pragmatic, like we need this as one of the tools to deal with halacha, which I think definitely many of these codes, they don’t present themselves as anything else. I think for the Rambam, especially if you read the introduction to “Mishneh Torah,” but also the whole way in which it’s presented, there’s a sense that this reflects some deep philosophy of what he imagines halacha should look like. I think there’s a distinction there between saying, “I’m creating these tools and maybe there’s a risk that people will now use only that, or that this becomes people’s way of relating to the full wealth of halacha.”

There’s a difference between that and saying, “Look at this book. This is what halacha is.” I think when it comes to your question, “What have we lost?” I think that’s what it comes down to. I don’t think we’ve lost anything. It’s all still there, but I think if people related to halacha as, “Here is this …” Even the “Shulchan Aruch,” if you look at the first printed edition, the way it looked then and the way it looks now with all the layers, and layers, and layers of glosses and discussions, even if you look at it now, it’s already so much, you have evidence of there being so much there beyond only the laws.

If you relate to it as, “Here’s a list of hundreds of just rules telling you the dos and don’ts of life,” then we’ve lost something. If you don’t leave it at that, it’s all still there. It takes investment and some work to tap into that, but I don’t think we’ve lost it.

David Bashevkin:

I want to shift to some contemporary issues that you just touched upon and that is, I’ve mentioned this before. I operate in a Facebook group, I’m sorry, that creates dialogue between people who are no longer frum. Grew up Orthodox and are no longer Orthodox, and people who are still Orthodox. It’s called Frum/OTD Dialogue. It’s not the most common theme, but one of the themes that comes up constantly is the trauma of halacha, of how being educated as this very long list of dos and don’ts, people can find quite suffocating and almost destabilizing. I want to contrast that and maybe have you discuss, in light of your scholarship … You have this amazing quote that, if you’ll allow me, I want to read it in full because I found it so moving.

During the corona outbreak, you actually flip that notion on its head. You’re cited in this article by our dear friend, Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt. You have a quote in this article that says as follows, “Halacha can help us process trauma. Not in the sense that it always resolves the issue, but if the meaning of trauma is facing something that we have no tools to deal with, halacha offers the vocabulary that lets us take whatever we’re faced with and begin to grasp it. Like any great work of culture, halacha can leave us feeling comforted or sometimes unsettled, but it also leaves us feeling understood or like we understood something.”

This, when I read it, and I appreciate you … I remember when this article first came out and it uncovered something in me. I always said that when the pandemic first started, I felt like my world was upside down. The moment that I felt like it turned right side up and there was just a path forward was the first responsa, so to speak, I read from Rav Hershel Schachter, where I saw that there was somebody who was confronting this through a preexisting lens. Tell me more about how, for you, halacha isn’t aggravating trauma, but in fact, can help us process trauma.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

That’s a very full question, I mean, all the way from OTD, from dialogue, to the pandemic and then some other minor things that have happened to us recently. I think, definitely, if we relate to halacha just as a list of dos and don’ts, it will be problematic. I think what is beautiful about halacha is that it goes all the way down to your tiniest day-to-day actions and the minutia, and the really just small decisions, and the really very mundane seeming things and from there, spans all the way to these big, abstract ideas. I think even just in terms of what it covers, it goes from very small to very big, and from very mundane to very spiritual.

Also, historically I think you have a system that it’s both conceptually and textually very dense. You have many layers. You have many texts. It gives you a lot of baggage in a positive sense. A lot of words and concepts. I think as a lens of relating to the world, it’s a way of relating to the world that gives you on the one hand, a certain sense of dealing with everything there is in the world with all the messiness that that implies. Just eating, and sleeping and all of that, but also just unexpected, problematic, and terrible things. Since the idea of halacha is to tell us how to live our lives, it has to deal with all that.

On the other hand, there is this requirement and desire, and that’s what halacha on the scholarship side of it is all about, that it has to make sense, it has to be consistent. We take this mess we’re given and we try to figure it out. The conceptual system we use to figure it out is this, by now, very long, historical system that gives you a whole world, and a language, and imagery, and all of that, and we keep adding to it.

It was beautiful that you brought up the response of SHUT now, and Rav Hershel Schachter, and teshuvahs. The fact that this keeps growing and being richer. I’d say that is why I see halacha as a system of doing this. I found myself, and this is quite towards the beginning of the pandemic, and that’s when I wrote that article. The article came out of us having to decide what to do. I’m sure, I don’t know if you want to revisit those times, but I’m sure you can remember exactly how people were feeling.

David Bashevkin:

Sure.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

We were glued to our phones. There were constant updates. We didn’t know what was happening. Was this going to be a two-week situation, a two-month situation? I didn’t even dare think it then, a two-year situation?

David Bashevkin:

Yeah, here we are.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Right. “What will happen? What do we do?” All these small decisions. School was suddenly canceled. We were not sure how long that would go on and, “What do we tell the children?” Pesach was coming up, and the whole … We were all just really thrown. I think all I kept hearing was, “Unprecedented, unprecedented, unprecedented.” I remembered, because I read a lot of teshuvahs in the process from the early modern period, in the process of my research. I remember, there are lots of teshuvahs about plagues. They’re not pandemics because people weren’t traveling around the world as far and as quickly, so things didn’t spread, but serious plagues.

One of those evenings of not being able to sleep and not knowing what was happening. I was very pregnant and we didn’t know, should our hospital … It was just a very, very crazy time. I think lots of us experienced insomnia at the time. I just went back and started reading those teshuvahs, and slowly, I started to calm down. We were wondering about tuition, and school, and there I am reading a teshuvah about a tutor in Padua whose student fled back to, I think it was Poland, and he didn’t know who was supposed to pay for the rest of the semester.

We left New York, at some point, and were thinking of the landlord, and the lease, and, “Do we renew it?” There are teshuvahs about people asking the Rama in Krakow whether they have to take in people who rented a room, I think it was, or maybe a house of theirs, if the woman is sick, and can they use that as a reason to break their contract?

Slowly, I started to calm down. I wrote a very rough draft of all those teshuvahs and sent it to a few friends. Some of them actually told me … “We had these things going around on WhatsApp at the time, of this means, I don’t know what, that Mashiach is coming, and this is happening. I didn’t want to hear any of it. None of it made me feel any better. This is the first time I feel like I’m getting some chizuk.” That I’m somehow feeling relieved or strengthened at least.

I think it’s not just from seeing something in the sources that just sounds very familiar. It’s not just saying, “Oh, this is actually precedented,” which I think many historians had, as they started going back to plague sources, and you have people reading Boccaccio and you had lots of these attempts to go back and see what history did with it. It’s not just the fact that it’s precedented. It’s the fact that we have a system to deal with this, and dealing with it doesn’t mean it will go away but it says, “Okay. You have this situation thrown at you. You’re at a loss. You don’t know what to do. Let’s break it down. What are the categories? How do we call this?” We have names, and concepts, and ideas to at least wrap our minds around it.

There, I think I would have to go back to your initial question, which is many people experience halacha as, in a way, traumatic. I think the condition there is what I’d call … I mean, I don’t think everyone has to become an expert at halacha, or a practitioner, or in that sense, but this only works if you have ownership of Halacha, which, I think, should at least be basic literacy and understanding. If you don’t, I think you still experience it as something that is being dumped on you and told to you. If you want this to be something that’s part of your heritage and that is reassuring somehow, it needs to be a language that you speak. Otherwise, it’s going to stay just as foreign.

David Bashevkin:

That is incredibly moving. We’ve been talking a great deal about how going back in history and the interaction of halachaand what history has taught you about halachic development. I want to kind of … This is a parentheses. It’s not central, but I found it so interesting when we spoke last night. I called it the “halachic Indiana Jones” category of literature.

You came out with an article called “Iconoclash in Northern Italy Circa 1500.” I was smitten by the story here. We don’t have time to go in-depth, but I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of a taste of what you learned. Not what history taught you about halacha, but what halacha illuminated about history from this very short responsa of a group of rabbis who approach a rabbi in the 1500s, and asked them about a case of a broken piece of idolatrous art, and whether or not the Jewish person was allowed to reconstitute that broken piece of art. What did you learn from this seemingly … It’s interesting, but this illuminating, historical story that you uncovered in partnership with your co-author Joseph Leo Koerner? What did this halachic incident tell you about history?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

It’s a great story. It taught me a lot about history and a lot about halacha, actually, especially when we were grappling about how to write this project. The way that this started was that part of the Society of Fellows, we have these dinners where the junior fellows like myself sit with the senior fellows and we just discuss everything. Since these are scholars in all kinds of fields, it’s really fun because you get exposed to a little bit of everything.

He was discussing this painting that hangs in the Louvre, right outside where the Mona Lisa hangs. It’s one of the most famous Renaissance paintings by an artist named Mantegna who lived in … This was painted in the end of the 1400s, so towards the end of the 15th century. He tells me about how there’s this backstory to the painting that not many people know about.

That really, a Jew named Daniele da Norsa, a Jewish Italian banker, was coerced into paying for this painting. There’s a famous patron on the painting, Gonzaga, who was the Duke of Mantua at the time. The real patron was this Jew who was made to pay the money by force. I left this dinner. It was pretty late and this kept going around in my mind.

He told me that the story around it was somehow that this Jew was accused of destroying some other painting and breaking it, and that’s how they framed him, in a sense, and told him he has to pay. We have the letters, back and forth, between Norsa and I don’t know if it was Gonzaga himself or someone working for him who told him he has to pay. In one of these discussions between Gonzaga and another, I don’t know if it was his brother or some other figure who were plotting this together, he wrote, “Tell this Jew that either he makes sure the painting is hung there, or the Jew will be hung there,” so this was clearly a dangerous situation.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

He told me this story and I kept thinking, “This sounds so familiar.” Then I started combing through teshuvahs because it rang familiar. It was not in the teshuvahs where I first was looking because this was included in a collection of responsa by Rabbi Joseph Colon that were not printed right away. They were printed only hundreds of years later and they’re in a separate collection.

David Bashevkin:

He may be known, for those who don’t know them, from their historical name. You walk into a classically organized bais medrash library, which isn’t organized by Colon or any of this. His responsa are known as the teshuvahs of the Maharik.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Maharik. Rabbi Joseph Colon.

David Bashevkin:

Yeah.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Yes. Some people think of Maharik as Joseph Karo, but this is Rav Joseph Colon, and he lived in Mantua around the same time. Sure enough, once I start looking through it, I find this question of a group of rabbis asking Rav Joseph Colon, there is this painting, or they call it tzurah m’pesel, which I took to mean seal of the pesel. We know that it’s a painting. From the way he writes the teshuvah, he mentions that it’s a painting and not a statue.

There’s this painting of avoda zara, and the Jew was in mortal danger if he didn’t fix it. Is he allowed to fix it or not? Once I found that, I got really excited. Thanks to digitalized everything, even once COVID hit and I had to continue research, I actually found the manuscript version of this teshuvah, probably written and signed by Maharik himself in a library in Parma.

We started discussing, “What do we do with this?” I think the most marvelous thing about it is when you look at the painting, it just hits you. It’s a very Christian painting. There’s Mary and there’s the crucifix, everything.

David Bashevkin:

Yeah.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

It’s a very Christian painting. It was used as part of Christian ritual. We think of painting and art often as decorations. This was they lit candles before it, they’d pray to it. They marched it around in a procession. When you look at the teshuvah, there’s worlds there. There’s Abaye and Rava. There’s Mordechai HaTzaddik. There’s the Rambam and the “Sefer Yereim.” There’s no Christianity mentioned anywhere. That, to me, very much brought home how full and rich our source material is. What it also brought home is that this, as I said it earlier at some point, that halacha is a form of Jewish culture. It’s a form of Jewish art, but again, not art in the decorative sense of the word. Not culture in the sense of entertainment. In the sense of this is a conceptual world and it’s an activity through which we can filter the world and the things around us. It is independent and it is very robust. We thought about it a lot. Koerner and I thought about it a lot in terms of, “How are we going to write this article?” Because, in a sense, the two pieces almost seem to not talk to each other. We had this painting and we had this teshuvah that I very much wanted to present as a Jewish work of art, but where do they connect? How does this become one story?

The way we thought of it, eventually, after a lot of discussing it and this goes, obviously, into a very long historiography also of Jewish-Christian violence and Jewish existence in Europe, and so on. The way we really thought of it is, this is the way to present the victim’s side of the story, in a sense, without it being a victim. This is the Jewish narrative as its own narrative. It’s saying, “Let’s not bring the voice of the subdued, humiliated victim and say, ‘This is the beautiful work of art. Here’s the dark back story.’” It’s saying, “Here’s another completely different way of casting this whole chain of events.” The meishiv, or the person writing the responsa, Maharik in this case, doesn’t change a thing. Not only that, as with happens in teshuvot, he was asked after the fact, right?

David Bashevkin:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Norsa was given three days to pay up. He paid up. He didn’t wait. He didn’t wait to be hung. He paid up and then asked if he did correctly. The rabbis who ask … Maharik actually asked, “Does he need a kaparah?”

David Bashevkin:

Repentance and absolution.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Not only does Maharik say, “No.” Does he need repentance? In some cases, you’d have people ask rabbis what actions they should do, either going forward or to deal with the guilt somehow, what should they do? He says not only was it permissible to him for saving his life, he did the right thing. Not only did he do the right thing. Had he done anything differently, it would have been problematic. Therefore, he doesn’t even need a kaparah. He doesn’t even need any form of repentance in that sense.

You see him taking the same case. He changed nothing, but he tells it in his own … He creates his own narrative. He tells it in his own language, and in that sense, a teshuvah, obviously, a responsum is called a responsum because it answers questions, but it’s also a response in a much deeper sense. It’s a way to take reality and respond to it, and respond to it not in a sense that you could change anything. You’re not going to necessarily make it right, but you can cast it in your categories. In that sense, it’s a work of art, in that very, very deep sense.

David Bashevkin:

This entire story, aside from the kind of Indiana Jones sensationalism and this work of art sitting so close to the Mona Lisa and its backstory, this juxtaposition of Jewish art, and I’m saying that in the exact sense that you said, emerging from this backstory of Christian art, is so deeply moving and really, for me, it’s a sensational story, it’s a fascinating story, but it’s also, it’s our story, which is what I found so moving about it. You studied the history of knowledge, and you really focused on the early modern period. Why is there any contemporary relevance to now? We’ve been printing books for centuries. Do you see that the issues that were being confronted so many centuries ago still have residual relevance in the world that we live in today?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Yes. I think this goes back to our discussion about the history of knowledge and the fact that knowledge has a history and I think bringing this to halacha, the fact that halacha, if it is not just information but a human activity and a cultural activity as a whole, it is intertwined with history. I think nowadays, we are very, very conscious of how the means by which and the context in which we interact with knowledge is part of the knowledge itself. Whether you’re seeing something on a screen or in a book, that is different. You interact with it differently, the type of authority you give to it is different. The level of how you verify what is true and what is not works differently. The institution where it was created matters. The people involved in creating it, the rules they have. All of these ideas of the technology, the society, all of that matters. The interesting parallels in the age of print is, as I said, print is very synergetic with a certain type of interacting with knowledge. It’s good for organized knowledge. It’s good for displaying schemes.

It requires a high level of what’s called heuristic access, so in a sense that someone can access it and find things in it easily, that they can know their way around. Especially when the audience is big and anonymous where you need to structure it a certain way. All those aspects have turned knowledge into the way we can think of it. Books. The way we think of knowledge as being contained in books, that happened as a result of print technology.

I think what we’re seeing nowadays, which is why it’s so interesting to talk about, what we mentioned before, the question of not so much what was lost as much as, how did knowledge work before? What are alternatives? How is it different before you have print is that a lot of what we see today is, yes, on the one hand, knowledge is now very standardized and organized and everything, but what you get with the internet and especially with the internet what we call 2.0, so the internet where it’s not just everything’s accessible via the web, but also that people invest.

People shape the way knowledge is on the internet themselves. Very much too is that, in a way, you have a return to this much more fluid, not structured. That it’s user-generated in a way, so in many ways, it’s much more local, and that it’s much more malleable in that sense, and this multiplicity that, in a way, goes back to pre-print times.

You have an interaction, on the one hand, knowledge being organized and systematized. In some way now, everything’s searchable, and so on, but it’s also much, much messier. This interaction of organization and mess, as a result of technology, is one of the questions that were very important to me in looking at the early modern period, but definitely have a lot of resonance today.

David Bashevkin:

I have to ask you, excuse me if it’s too personal, are you a part of a halacha WhatsApp group? Which is a new, emerging system that a lot of people are part of these large WhatsApp groups where they text a question to a rabbi. I want to do a PhD on this because I’m a part of like 20 of them, and the types of questions they ask … I’m curious. Are you a part of any halacha WhatsApp groups?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

I am not. I feel like maybe I should be. It sounds like a very interesting way to engage with halacha. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I have to report back after I observe it a little bit. There’s one rabbi who’s like the rabbi running it?

David Bashevkin:

Exactly. There’s-

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Or everyone just says what they think?

David Bashevkin:

The latter would be so much more fun but the way they’re usually structured, I’m in, for real, four different WhatsApp groups. The way that they work is you text in a question, and the way it’s supposed to work, and the one rabbi who’s like the admin of the WhatsApp group then responds. There are two ways to do it. Some rabbis respond, “Yes. No. Maybe. Wait six hours. Wash your hands. Hot water. Cold water,” and they’ll do that.

Others respond with these mini-essays, and then put the actual directive of what you should be doing in bold at the end of the WhatsApp. To me, it’s a really fascinating new medium and platform of halachic discourse, which in some ways is like, it follows from a straight line of the chapter and period that you’re writing about, and it’s the world that we’re living in now and seeing how discourse, and the medium, and the platform, can actually shape and has always been interacting with the message of halacha itself.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Yes. It would be interesting to think, in this case, if you want to think of it as part of the history of responsa, in a way, and responsa and media, which is exactly what I study. There was a lot of talk in the period right around printing about what to print, what not to print. Not necessarily in the Jewish world, but the question of printing all kinds of halacha works and separately from that printing, teshuvot specifically, so printing responsa. I study the differences between those.

It’s not that there was so much conscious discussion of, “We should print these teshuvot, we should not.” These things evolved, as they evolved, more gradually. Certainly, teshuvot were printed later than other work, so there was a lag. You’d have like medieval teshuvot, being printed in the early modern period but people, in their own lifetimes, it took a while until they started doing it.

I would wonder, let’s say, about these WhatsApp halacha groups, especially the ones where they give you these mini-essays. What would it look like if we collected them and printed them? Feedback loop side of this, would they suddenly be written differently and would people ask questions differently when they have it in mind that this is going to become a published … How do we write differently knowing that, “Oh, this is in the context of a WhatsApp group”? These things like the audience is, whoever it is, it doesn’t leave the WhatsApp group, or if it leaves it’s also as WhatsApp, or this will one day be collected and printed.

This is part and parcel of how the question’s asked, how it’s answered, how much you go in-depth of things, how you frame it. Do you give your sources? Do you not give your … All of that plays a role in how these things are written and that intersection, to me, is always fascinating,

David Bashevkin:

Tamara, my proposition, and you don’t have to answer me now, you could WhatsApp me. We should write an article about WhatsApp halacha groups because this world is absolutely fascinating and you probably have so much to say about it. I, as an amateur, I lurk in every single one and take notes, but I have no doubt that there’s a lot that you will appreciate as a scholar and as a curious Jew of what’s going on there. I really appreciate your thoughts on that.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

It sounds fantastic. You have to get me in on these. It sounds really interesting.

David Bashevkin:

Absolutely. Before we get to our final questions, I wanted to ask one question. We spoke about you as a Jew, as a personal Jew, you as a historian. You’re also a parent, and I don’t know that you’re an educator, but I’m asking now if based on your experiences and your scholarship, is there any way that the way that you are going to transmit halacha in your home is going to be different? More than that, is there any advice you can give to educators in classrooms, in Jewish schools, to allow the beauty and the excitement of halacha to emerge? Or do you think like, “Just keep it as is”?

For me, halacha class did not have the drama of so much of what I’ve read from you and so many of the scholars that you’ve mentioned. Because at the end of the day, you got to know what to do. You got to just figure it out, and we stick to that bottom line. Is there any advice you could give to educators, or you yourself as a parent would adopt, to ensure that the richness of halacha is preserved as you transmit it to the next generation?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

I don’t know if I have any advice for educators. I think they’re doing a marvelous job. I could not teach. Starting from my kids, preschool more at the time. They’re now, one of them is one-and-a-half but he’s mainly getting his education from at home. Yeah.

David Bashevkin:

I’m just jumping in again. Again, we’re a pro-“Shulchan Aruch” and a pro-Jewish education podcast. For everyone still listening, we are pro-“Shulchan Aruch,” pro-Jewish education.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

My other two sons are nine and 12. I could not do what their rabbeim are doing in school in terms of teaching them. They’re doing a wonderful job in just immersing them. I think my advice would be definitely support our educators, in terms of advice to parents. Also, individuals. If it didn’t happen as a kid, you can always do this later.

This is our heritage. It is very beautiful but as with anything that is intellectually interesting, and profound, and full, it takes investment. It’s not the kind of thing you can summarize in 140 characters. It’s the kind of thing like anything that’s worth anything and that will sustain you in some deep way. It takes effort and it takes investment, and it’s really the kind of … The more you immerse yourself in it and the more you know, the more it will speak to you. Otherwise, it’s true. It has a higher threshold to, I think, engaging with it deeply than certain … definitely works of visual arts or music.

There are those that just hit you directly and you don’t need to know more. I think, definitely, people today who are involved in any kind of subculture, specific … There are so many of these worlds out there that take a certain threshold of investment and knowledge. Definitely, the more you know about it and the more you educate yourself about it, the deeper it turns out to be and the more it gives back to you. It’s certainly easier to do if you start early.

Yesterday, I was looking. My kids just started this mishnah yomit thing where it’s sort of like daf yomi but they learn mishnayos every day. It’s definitely fun to watch your 12-year-old and your nine-year-old learning together. Not least because they might be discussing and arguing, which is a big part of halacha, but they’re not fighting, so that’s always, always a good thing

It’s beautiful in the sense that I feel that they feel at home in that world, and the world of halachic ideas and concepts, and this not just what they would type. Because many of the things don’t relate to their daily lives. To them, it’s a live and real thing, and it feels familiar. It’s a language they speak and it’s a world that they can access. I think that’s the most important thing you can do.

Again, it takes investment. It takes effort, but it is certainly something that has sustained the Jewish people, and it’s something that we can all contribute to. My advice would just be to immerse yourself in it, to study it, to understand it. We don’t all have to become experts, but at least try to be literate because, otherwise, it is hard to. The beauty of it will not hit you right away. It’s the kind of thing where you need to know more. It is really beautiful and it’s really fun.

It’s really fun, and it’s that much more fun when you know that the small, sometimes not as fun things you need to do every day have so much depth and meaning behind them. By meaning here, I don’t necessarily mean like the ta’amei hamitzvot, the reasons for the commandments type of meaning, but just that there is a deep, deep discussion behind it, that there’s a lot of investment behind it from a whole culture. I think that adds a lot to our day-to-day experiences as Jews.

David Bashevkin:

I cannot thank you enough. Some of our earlier interviews harp on the notion of halacha as language. I think, for our listeners, a lot of the imagery that you’ve been giving and using throughout our conversation, for me at least, calls to mind halacha as home, halacha as a home that you take ownership of. Some people live in a home and anytime something goes wrong, or they want to fix something, improve something, or decorate something, they have to call somebody up. They don’t know how to do anything in the home. I’m kind of like that in my home,

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Sounds familiar.

David Bashevkin:

To take ownership of your halachic home and know the basics of how things work. It doesn’t mean you have to be a general contractor. For me, is what I’ve gleaned a great deal from this conversation, that very imagery and all of the excitement, scholarship, and substance that you have shared means a great deal.

I always end my conversations with more rapid fire questions, if you’ll indulge me, just in this close. If you were to recommend a book for somebody who’s not a major scholar, but can begin to appreciate and understand the greater beauty of the halachic system as unfolding through the Jewish history, and all the wonderful things that you’ve been immersed in, where would you tell them to begin? What book recommendations could you offer?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Certainly. I think we’ve spoken about halacha in different ways. I think, if you want the really … My recommendation for the book that really, I think expresses, philosophically, and maybe even poetically, what it means to engage with the world through the lens of halacha, I would go to Rabbi Soloveitchik’s “Halakhic Man.” He has a few beautiful descriptions there. Really just evocative. In terms of the philosophy of halacha, some of the works of Moshe Halbertal, I think deal beautifully, in a philosophical way, with halacha. I’m thinking of his work on idolatry, or most recently, on doubt. In terms of history of halacha, anything really written by Jacob Katz is wonderful. I think mainly, I’d say “Halakhah ve-kabbalah” for the development of halacha, historically, especially in the period I study.

Maybe if you want to think of halacha and society, “Goy Shel Shabbat,” I think it’s “Shabbos Goy” in English, is a great way of looking at how society and halacha intersect. In terms of history of knowledge and history of the book and technology, and so on, which we talked about a little bit, I think anything you can find by Elhanan Reiner that has been translated into English is a great thing to read.

David Bashevkin:

I am contractually obligated, since you mentioned Jacob Katz, to mention the new book by Shikey Press.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Yeah.

David Bashevkin:

Jacob Katz on the origins of Orthodoxy, again, published by our dear friend, Menachem Butler, a Shikey Press production, which is the buzz of the publishing world.

My next question is, if somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical, as long as you needed, to go back to school … Sounds crazy. Don’t be traumatized or triggered. And get a second PhD. What questions, what topic do you think you would study? What do you think the title of that dissertation would be? Because let me just add, I want to say it again. You are fantastic with titles.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Thank you. I would not be traumatized. I wouldn’t want anything more. There is so much knowledge out there, and it’s amazing. Certainly, for the world of Jewish history, in general, there’s so much to know, and it’s all really interesting. I think I would do another PhD in halacha. I would definitely go back to these sources.

What I would like to do, I think, is rather than study it from the perspective of the history of knowledge, which I’ve done in this case, and was very interesting to me for many reasons, but one of them being the fact that the history of knowledge at that time dealt so much with new technologies, of disseminating knowledge, and interacting with knowledge, which is something we’re facing nowadays as well. I think the second time around, I would try to add to this a deeper knowledge of legal thought and legal history, and use that as a context and a perspective, and use those kind of ideas to understand how halacha and the period I’m interested in works.

David Bashevkin:

Absolutely fascinating. My last question. I’m always curious about people’s schedules. What time do you go to sleep at night, and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

I try to go to sleep, I’d say around midnight. Sometimes, it’s closer to 1:00. My alarm clock is set for 6:00 a.m., unless … Well, unless the baby wakes me first, but yeah, it’s the only way to fit in everything, and there’s still not enough time.

David Bashevkin:

Absolutely fascinating, Tamara. Thank you so much for joining us today. It means a great deal to me.

Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

Thank you.

David Bashevkin:

Taking ownership of your home of halacha, building that home, knowing what goes into it, is not just important for your own relationship to halacha, it’s important for your relationship to the previous generations and the collective body of the Jewish people. Not only is it spiritually uplifting and nourishing, it’s also incredibly cool.

I just want to give a shout-out to the article that she wrote and we discussed, which is some real Indiana Jones type stuff. It is, again, called “Iconoclash in Northern Italy Circa 1500,” and it’s written by our guest, Dr. Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg and Joseph Leo Koerner. I don’t know if I am pronouncing his last name correctly. If you have access to a university library, it was published in Critical Inquiry, volume 48, number 1. It just tells this absolutely amazing story, this history of the Jewish people as told through responsa literature, where so much of our lived history through the generations lived.

I just really want to recommend to our listeners, if your only exposure to halacha is through English compendiums, it’s good, it’s wonderful, but find a way. There are wonderful translations of responsa literature. I’ll recommend Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs’ “Theology in the Responsa,” which is also just a wow page-turner.

In this article, “Iconoclash in Northern Italy Circa 1500,” it just tells this jaw-dropping story about somebody struggling with the breaking of a Christian icon and how it led to commissioning a work of art that still, to this day, hangs in the Louvre just feet away from the Mona Lisa. What an incredible lens to Jewish history. What an incredible lens to howhalacha is a window and a home that doesn’t just provide shelter for your own religious life, but like a great ancestral home, it also connects you to your bubbe and your zayde, your great-great grandparents, the previous generations of Jewish history, and ultimately, knesses yisroel, the collective body of the Jewish people.

Thank you so much for listening. This episode was edited by our friend, Denah Emerson. It wouldn’t be a Jewish podcast without a little bit of Jewish guilt. If you enjoyed this episode or any episode, please subscribe, rate, review, tell your friends about it. You could also donate at 18forty.org/donate. This all really helps us reach new listeners and continue putting out great content.

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