Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin:
Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour of the entire Talmud. And today we are discussing the history and personalities associated with Tractate Shabbos. And what I want to explore today is how this work of Talmudic law, which, you know, is written more than a thousand years ago, was kind of updated to the modern experience of Shabbos. How did we get from the Talmud all the way to where we are now? Now, I’m not going to go through an entire history of the development of halacha, though I promise you we will get to that in future weeks. But what I want to talk about is specifically Shabbos, which is the halachic system that was most challenged by modernity, and specifically the advent of electricity.
When Tractate Shabbos was written, when it was formulated, compiled, put together, there was no such thing as cars, cell phones, and there was not even such a thing as lights, electric lights. People would light lamps, and a lot of Shabbos is about what kind of lights you can lamp, and how can you extinguish it, if at all, etc., etc., etc. But how did they deal with electricity?
So, electricity really became popularized in the 1800s, and right away people noticed this is going to be very tricky for Shabbos observance. Now, the way that most approach these questions is we have these 39 categories that operationalize Shabbos observance week in and week out.
But the question is, does it fit neatly into one of these categories? Or maybe there is just a hierarchy. There is an overarching principle that animates all of these, which is the concept of meleches machsheves, which is the term that means a thoughtful action. That’s really the overriding category that animates everything. We can’t have any creative work, and electricity may or may not fall into a specific category, or it may be this overarching idea of not being involved in creative work on Shabbos.
Already in the 1800s, people were putting Shabbos into different categories. Maybe it is the category of like building, because you’re building an electric circuit. Maybe it is the category of lighting a fire, if there’s fire involved in creating electric circuits. And these were debates that went on and on. There was a specific person who I want to highlight, who I think captures the modern idea of Shabbos observance, and that is a person named Rav Yehoshua Neuwirth or Rav Yehoshua Neuwirth. I think he traditionally pronounced his last name Neuwirth, but it’s spelled like Neuwirth.
And this is a remarkable story. He wrote a work called Shemiras Shabbos Kehilchasa, Following Shabbos According to the Law, and this was published in 1965. The story of this work is remarkable, and I think captures the very idea of bringing the idea of Shabbos observance into the modern era. Rav Yehoshua Neuwirth grew up in Berlin, and the story behind his work, known as Shemiras Shabbos Kehilchasa, Following the Shabbos According to the Law, is really the story of how Shabbos became a Talmudic concept, and was really nurtured and developed into contemporary times.
The most basic text of Jewish law following the Talmud, which has the same story as the Talmud in many ways, is the work known as the Shulchan Aruch. We will talk in depth about the Shulchan Aruch, which is a compendium of all Jewish law from the sixteenth century that was published by Rav Yosef Karo, and its authority, much like the Talmud, comes from its acceptance that all Jewish people began writing works around it and commentaries around it. If you open up the page, it looks a lot like a page of Talmud, with all the commentaries around it. On the section of Orach Chaim, there is another work that was written by the Chofetz Chaim, Rav Yisrael Meir Kagan, called the Mishnah Berurah. It sounds like it’s a mishnah. Itwas not written in Mishnaic times, but it kind of gathered all of the later opinions, and brought Shabbos observance up until, you know, the early 1900s. But there were a lot of issues that were still outstanding: refrigerators, how to really deal with the mass acceptance of electricity, how do we deal with all of this stuff in Jewish law?
Enter somebody incredible named Rav Yehoshua Neuwirth. Rav Yehoshua Neuwirth grew up in Berlin in the shadow of the Nazis seizing power, and they had to literally spend their time in a bunker, in a tiny little bunker with him and his family, and they only had two Jewish works. One Jewish work was a tractate of Talmud known as Kesubos, and Kesubos is all about marriage and the kesubah, which we will get to.
The second work that they had is the third volume of Mishnah Berurah. As I mentioned, the Mishnah Berurah is a commentary on the first volume of Shulchan Aruch, which is about daily laws, called Orach Chaim, and Mishna Berurah is a commentary on that. And he had this third volume, the third volume is all about the laws of Shabbos. And this Rav Yehoshua Neuwirth sat in a bunker as a young kid, re-reading over and over again all of the laws of Shabbos and all of the debates among the later authorities and questions. And he would just sit in this bunker and go through it over and over and over and over again.
And then what happened? They finally were able to flee. They fled to Amsterdam, and while they were in Amsterdam—this is somebody who literally was sustained by reviewing over and over the laws of Shabbos. The only way to get to Israel was a boat that was leaving, but the boat, in order to flee and be safe and finally go to the land of Israel, the boat was leaving on Shabbos. And Rav Yehoshua Neuwirth was crestfallen. “I just spent years and years in a bunker going through laws and laws of Shabbos, and I know that you are not supposed to board a boat on Shabbos. What am I supposed to do over there?” And he made a promise right then and right there that he was going to dedicate the remainder of his life to sharing and educating the masses about Shabbos observance specifically with an eye towards modern technological developments.
So he did board the boat because one value that even trumps Shabbos is the sanctity and importance of life itself. God forbid, if somebody is injured on Shabbos. Somebody is worried. You pick up the phone. You call an ambulance. You call a doctor. That is the number one, in all of halachic values, the number one hierarchy is the preservation of life.
So he got on the boat, but he made a promise to himself that when I’m going from this old world that I’m fleeing to the new world of Israel and rebuild my life there, I’m going to spend the remainder of my life educating people about Shabbos. And he developed this work called Shemiras Shabbos Kehilchasa, published in 1965, and it was later translated.
Now this is an incredible work and a controversial work. It’s an incredible work because it really goes through all of the laws of Shabbos. Not the original categories, but how they play out and are applied to contemporary life, with all of the technology and tools that we now have access to. It was written in the 1960s, so refrigerators and lights and swimming pools—all these things are discussed in Shemiras Shabbos Kehilchasa. It’s a really valuable work. But what it ushered in was this new idea of a halachic compendium, of saying, look, not everybody’s going to be able to go back all the way to the Talmud, understand all of the conceptual principles, how they apply and mirror nowadays. You need to be a genius of geniuses to be able to do that.
So he said, “In contemporary times, I’m going to do the work for you. I’m going to help you figure out how these Talmudic principles actually apply so we can have a Shabbos even in the modern world. And what he did was absolutely amazing, but it was criticized. It was criticized in two different ways.
It was criticized by some more in the more right-wing community. Some very important scholars in Bnei Brak, most notably Rav Dov Landau, who is still alive, believe it or not—one of the great leaders of Chareidi Judaism in Israel. And Rav Dov Landau wrote a pamphlet, basically said, “What are you doing over here? No, no, no, no, no, no. You can’t just make a quick compendium telling you the bottom line of how to observe Shabbos. You have to know the concepts. You have to know all the background, the conceptual information that emerges from the Talmud. If you give people a list like this, they’re going to make so many errors, this is like a cheat sheet. We can’t have a work-around with Shabbos.”
So as real as his concerns are, there is no question that battle was won by Rav Neuwirth. Shemiras Shabbos Kehilchasa became a bestseller. It was published once, twice, three [times.]I think they’re up to their fourth, fifth, sixth publishing already. [It]is constantly, constantly republished. He is no longer alive, but I think in his lifetime, he had four or five editions.
The other criticism came from the other side, which is something that many people will be familiar [with]. When you have all of these halachic compendia telling you every single detail, and now you’re writing in English, sometimes the way that we get introduced to Jewish life can feel very stilted. Like we’re reading out of a rule book, like, “Okay, this line, is this okay? Is that okay?” And he got criticized most notably, and it wasn’t directed at him. It was just a lament about how halachic observance has changed in the modern world, and that is a very important article that I would recommend if you if you could get through a semi-academic article. [It] was written by an absolutely brilliant scholar named Professor Haym Soloveitchik, who we have actually had the opportunity to interview twice on 18Forty, an absolutely incredible scholar. And he wrote an article called “Rupture and Reconstruction” that laments a little bit about how halacha is transmitted. What he described is that before the Holocaust, how did people learn how to practice Judaism? They learned it from their home. What did my mother do? What did my grandmother do? What did I see Bubby doing, Zeidy doing? They learned it—the term he uses is mimetically. They would just kind of soak it up.
The problem is, after the decimation of the Holocaust and all of our educational institutions, everything was decimated, nobody knew what the practice was anymore. You go to your father, mother—half of them were killed! So how do people now know what to do? So we now needed to go back to the text to reclaim authenticity. Authenticity was no longer just through this mimetic process of seeing what other families do. We had to kind of go back to the original text.
This is a feature of modern Jewish life, and really a feature of modern life in general. When that mimetic tradition breaks down, we have to go back to that text. But what I think is so amazing about his work is that this is the dichotomy of the Talmud itself. We have that fixed text, and then we have the mimetic tradition—how it plays out and applies in our life.
And his only lament is that these kinds of large-scale halachic works, specifically ones that have been translated into English, can sometimes make Judaism feel very stilted, as just it’s just a long rule book. But that’s because we no longer have access, or we might not have the educational background or the understanding, of how to preserve that mimetic tradition. But ultimately, what is Yiddishkeit, what is Jewish life, what emerges from the Talmud, is that mimetic tradition. It’s anchored in the text of the Talmud, but it’s the way Jewish life is actually practiced—that is the center of Jewish life and Jewish law.
And what Rav Yehoshua Neuwirth did with the work Shemiras Shabbos Kehilchasa is he literally bridged worlds old and new, and that’s why I think there’s a beautiful poetry in this work—that it emerged from a promise that he made as he was about to board a boat taking him from one world from the next. This is the promise that every Jewish home and every Jewish family strives to fulfill. We’re all on that boat bridging worlds old and new. The world is changing so rapidly, but the same promise that he made that brought him from the world of Nazi Germany into the world and the serenity of Israel is the same promise that we’re trying to fulfill and keep every single week.
It’s the promise that Shabbos is eternal. It is a program, it is a system, that restores our most essential self. And even though halacha and life has developed substantially since the Talmud, we’re still anchored in those operational definitions, and we still have the ability to make Shabbos come alive, and that that promise of Shabbos should never be broken because that sustained the Jewish people. [It] has sustained our most essential self, the original origin that we each return to. Shabbos from the word of return, shav. It is that promise that we continue to fulfill and nourish every single week.
So you can check out that work Shemiras Shabbos Kehilchasa. It has been translated in English, or of course, our favorite, I’ll bring it out one more time—the 39 melachos book, which is colorful and beautiful and really brings these operational definitions to life. And however you choose to continue that experience, the beauty of Shabbos belongs to you, and let’s together keep making Torah sweet.