From: friedenb@sapphire.egr.msu.edu (Gedaliah Friedenberg)
Subject: Driving on the Sabbath - Essay by R' L. Mozeson
Reply-To: friedenb@sapphire.egr.msu.edu (Gedaliah Friedenberg)
Organization: College of Engineering, Michigan State University
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 92 20:33:47 GMT


In my many email discussions regarding the Conservative Movement and
its deviation from halacha (IMHO), I regularly site a source that most
people do not have access to.  I decided, therefore, to post it, since
it is a short essay (47 lines of text), and I have a few minutes to spare.

From the book:  _Echoes of the Song of the Nightingale_ 
           by:  Rabbi Leon M. Mozeson
     Overview:  Rabbi Mozeson recounts lectures of, and private
                learning with, Rabbi Dr. Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, 
                the famous dean of Yeshiva University's Rabbinical
                School, as well as personal essays.


"Conservative Rabbis Permit Driving to the Synagogue on the Sabbath"

	Recently, at the request of Mrs. Harry Keller, I searched and
found an article written by me for the _Jewish Western Bulletin_ of 
Vancouver, Canada, entitled "Orthodox Versus Conservative Judaism."  
In the article I evaluated Orthodox and Conservative trends and specifically
demonstrated the invalidity of the Conservative sanctioning of driving
to the synagogue on the Sabbath.
	The Conservatives relied on a passage of Maimonides, who wrote
(Hilkhot Mamrim 2:4) that just as a physician amputates the limb of a
patient in order to save his life, so may the rabbis temporarily
disregard a law of the Torah for the sake of preserving its entirety.
Similarly, the Conservative rabbis reasoned that synagogue attendance
on the Sabbath was so vital to the existence of Judaism that the
Sabbath was to be sacrificed in its behalf.
	In refuting the Conservative claim, I wrote that the analogy
was weak for several reasons.  Judaism is not a religion centralized
and confined to a house of worship.  Public prayer is only one aspect
of Judaism.  Observance of the Sabbath is another aspect.  How can we
subordinate one for the sake of the other?  Technically the Sabbath
laws are rooted in the Torah, whereas prayer is the synagogue was
instituted by the rabbis.  It takes sheer ignorance of Judaism to
assume that synagogue worship is higher than Sabbath observance.
	Secondly, I wrote, the analogy was wrong because we cannot
equate the Conservative rabbis to the surgeon operating on the
patient.  The temporary eclipse of any Biblical law can only be
entrusted to the highest authorities of the Jewish people (and then
only temporarily so), just as society permits only the specialist to
indulge in a delicate operation.  The Conservative rabbis are not
superior, neither qualitatively nor quantitatively, and their sanction
cannot be regarded as binding upon Jewry.
	The coup de grace which I delivered against the Conservative
sanction was based on studying the source of the view of Maimonides.
This eminent Talmudist and physician was influenced by a statement of
Rabbi Elazer ben Yaakov (Sanhedrin 46a), who related how a rabbinical
court pronounced a death sentence on a Jew who rode a horse on the
Sabbath.  The rider had not even violated a Biblical law; he
disregarded a rabbinic ban forbidding riding.  Yet due to the fact
that the incident occurred in the crucial days of the Maccabees, when
the traditionalists fought the secularists, the rabbinic court deemed
the death sentence necessary--as a means of preserving Judaism.
	Without realizing the source of Maimonidies, the Conservative
rabbis have approved of driving to the synagogue on the Sabbath, which
entails the Biblical violation of the Sabbath, in order to preserve
Judaism.  And yet the decision of Maimonides stems from an incident in
which rabbis regarded a minor infringement of the Sabbath as
destructive to Judaism.  How far the Conservative rabbis have
traveled--from the ban on riding a horse on the Sabbath to the
sanction of driving an automobile on the Sabbath.

 

Gedaliah Friedenberg
-=-Department of Mechanical Engineering
-=-Department of Metallurgy, Mechanics and Materials Science
-=-Michigan State University


                   
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish