קאווע שטיבל

[left]Over the 20th century, Litvish Jewry, previously Hasidism’s fiercest opponent, developed a doctrine strikingly similar to the hasidic notion of the saintly rebbe, the tzaddik. This doctrine is termed Da’as Torah, whose central claim was formulated by R. Yisrael Meir Kagan, the Hafetz Hayim, as follows: “Whoever’s knowledge is the knowledge of the Torah (da’at Torah) can solve all of the problems in the world, for the individual and for the collective.” The Hafetz Hayim and others declared that the Torah has an answer not only for patently halakhic questions but for those arising from the marketplace of life. The Hafetz Hayim himself, though, referred to “the Torah’s counsel” (‘atzat haTorah), which is not necessarily binding but benefits its followers. He thought that anyone who delves into the Torah honestly and without any preconceived notions can discover this counsel

The Hafetz Hayim’s disciple, R. Elhanan Wasserman, transformed this “counsel” into a normative obligation and restricted the authority to speak in the name of Da’as Torah to the greatest Torah scholars of the age, the gdoilim. He considered the obligation to obey Da’as Torah to be the unspoken implication of the Biblical command of “Thou shalt not deviate” (Deut 17:11), the law that one must obey the supreme rabbinic legislative body known as the Sanhedrin. According to him, the gdoilim who dedicate their lives to Torah are the only people who contemplate Torah — to the exclusion of everything else — day and night, day in and day out; they do not let their mind wander to the street or even to their home. With this began the “halakhization” of Da’as Torah, which particularly intensified after the Holocaust

The Hazon Ish, R. Kanievsky’s uncle, negated the notion that one could expect to receive a manifest blessing in this world by obeying Torah scholars. One must heed the guidance of gdoilim in all aspects of life the same way one must obey their halakhic rulings. Keeping the Sabbath is the fulfillment of God’s will and holds no promise of the good life in this world, and the same is true of following what the rabbis pronounce as the product of their Da’as Torah. His contemporary, R. Yitzchok Zev Soloveitchik, the Brisker Rov, expressed a similar idea. In this way, the doctrine of Da’as Torah blurred the lines between rulings on halakhic matters and rulings about everything else in life. The range of topics treated by R. Kanievsky provides evidence of yet another stage in this breakdown of boundaries between the halakhic and the non-halakhic. Like rulings propounded as Da’as Torah, R. Kanievsky does not see the need to provide the reasoning behind his decisions. Despite his omission of supporting sources, his responsa are understood to constitute a form of halakhic ruling that demands complete compliance. That is how most of his questioners take them, in any case[/left]

[left]Critics of instant responsa argue that the skyrocketing number of questions emerges from people’s unwillingness to think for themselves; they would rather outsource the intellectual labor to rabbis. But this is not necessarily the correct assessment of the phenomenon. I think that we are not observing widespread intellectual laziness so much as a desire for decisive answers in an age when one can find every possible answer to any dilemma[/left]