Did the Mishna Brurah kill Local Customs?
I read a comment to that effect the other day on some blog, and I can’t remember where, otherwise I would post this there.
I asked my Chavrusa at the Kollel about this last night, and he had a very interesting answer.
When Jews lived in Pre-WWII Europe, every community had a rav who would Paskin Shaalos for them. Most Jews were fairly uneducated, and Halachos were passed on from one generation to the next. So if you lived in France you would follow the minhagim of France; German Jews had their own Mesorah dating back 1,000 years.
When the Chofetz Chaim wrote the Mishna Brurah, he went through all the opinions of the rishonim and achronim that he could get his hands on, and determined what made the most sense to him. (This apparently goes on in the Beur Halacha section. I don’t know, for sure, I am taking my Chavrusa’s word on it.) That is, he chose the opinion that had the least difficulties with it.
There were other communities that disagreed with the Chofetz Chaim, and followed their minhagim, which they had been practicing for generations.
Two things happened to change that, though. WWII, where much of the passing down from Father to Son was destroyed, and the explosion of Yeshiva education. For the first time ever, average jews were going to Yeshiva and learning the Mishna Brurah. They would stay in Yeshiva for a few years, and pick up the Minhagim of their Roshei Yeshivas. When they would return home, and their father would say this is the Halacha, the sons would disagree. The sons knew more than their fathers; they went to yeshiva. The yeshiva generation asked itself who is right, my unlearned father who never went to Yeshiva, or me, who learned from a Rosh Yeshiva and saw the Halacha in a sefer.
As a side point, my chavrusa said if someone lived in Germany in 1200, and moved to Spain to live there, they would be expected to take on Spanish minhagim, even if those minhagim were not as strict as those practiced in Germany (such as eating Kitnios on Pesach) or if one moved to Holland, where they only wait an hour between milk and meat, one would be expected to switch minhagim.
Today, though, Minhag HaMakom is pretty much lost.
I asked my Chavrusa at the Kollel about this last night, and he had a very interesting answer.
When Jews lived in Pre-WWII Europe, every community had a rav who would Paskin Shaalos for them. Most Jews were fairly uneducated, and Halachos were passed on from one generation to the next. So if you lived in France you would follow the minhagim of France; German Jews had their own Mesorah dating back 1,000 years.
When the Chofetz Chaim wrote the Mishna Brurah, he went through all the opinions of the rishonim and achronim that he could get his hands on, and determined what made the most sense to him. (This apparently goes on in the Beur Halacha section. I don’t know, for sure, I am taking my Chavrusa’s word on it.) That is, he chose the opinion that had the least difficulties with it.
There were other communities that disagreed with the Chofetz Chaim, and followed their minhagim, which they had been practicing for generations.
Two things happened to change that, though. WWII, where much of the passing down from Father to Son was destroyed, and the explosion of Yeshiva education. For the first time ever, average jews were going to Yeshiva and learning the Mishna Brurah. They would stay in Yeshiva for a few years, and pick up the Minhagim of their Roshei Yeshivas. When they would return home, and their father would say this is the Halacha, the sons would disagree. The sons knew more than their fathers; they went to yeshiva. The yeshiva generation asked itself who is right, my unlearned father who never went to Yeshiva, or me, who learned from a Rosh Yeshiva and saw the Halacha in a sefer.
As a side point, my chavrusa said if someone lived in Germany in 1200, and moved to Spain to live there, they would be expected to take on Spanish minhagim, even if those minhagim were not as strict as those practiced in Germany (such as eating Kitnios on Pesach) or if one moved to Holland, where they only wait an hour between milk and meat, one would be expected to switch minhagim.
Today, though, Minhag HaMakom is pretty much lost.
posted by Air Time at 4:31 PM
11 Comments:
AT, have you read this: http://www.lookstein.org/links/orthodoxy.htm?
"my chavrusa said if someone lived in Germany in 1200, and moved to Spain to live there, they would be expected to take on Spanish minhagim"
-ask your chavroosa,why then did the Rush Z"L (1200 years ago)keep his german minhaghim when he moved to spain,and enforced them on the rest of the population?
I'll ask him next Tuesday when i see him again.
Krum -
That is really long. Has anyone read it?
Many people have. It made a huge splash when it came out and it his hard to overstate how enormously influential it has been. For me at least, it explains a lot about contemporary orthodoxy.
Mirty-
Judging by the number of rabbis I have seen smoking, including some who used to smoke in our elementary school, it is not widely accepted as being asur.
Krum -
ok, i'll have to try and get through it. Reading that type of article isn't my strong suit.
The article is very imprssionistic (although a bit of jargon is thrown about) and is not very dense. The best part:
In 1959, I came to Israel before the High Holidays. Having grown up in Boston and never having had an opportunity to pray in a haredi yeshivah, I spent the entire High Holiday period—from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur—at a famous yeshiva in Bnei Brak. The prayer there was long, intense, and uplifting, certainly far more powerful than anything I had previously experienced. And yet, there was something missing, something that I had experienced before, something, perhaps, I had taken for granted. Upon reflection, I realized that there was introspection, self-ascent, even moments of self-transcendence, but there was no fear in the thronged student body, most of whom were Israeli born.95 Nor was that experience a solitary one. Over the subsequent thirty-five years, I have passed the High holidays generally in the United States or Israel, and occasionally in England, attending services in haredi and non-haredi communities alike. I have yet to find that fear present, to any significant degree, among the native born in either circle. The ten-day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are now Holy Days, but they are not Yamim Noraim—Days of Awe or, more accurately Days of Dread –as they have been traditionally called.
I grew up in a Jewishly non-observant community, and prayed in a synagogue where most of the older congregants neither observed the Sabbath nor even ate kosher. They all hailed from Eastern Europe, largely from shtetlach, like Shepetovka and Shnipishok. Most of their religious observance, however, had been washed away in the sea-change, and the little left had further eroded in the "new country." Indeed, the only time the synagogue was ever full was during the High Holidays. Even then the service was hardly edifying. Most didn't know what they were saying, and bored, wandered in and out. Yet, at the closing service of Yom Kippur, the Ne'ilah, the synagogue filled and a hush set in upon the crowd. The tension was palpable and tears were shed.
What had been instilled in these people in their earliest childhood, and which they never quite shook off, was that every person was judged on Yom Kippur, and, as the sun was setting, the final decision was being rendered (in the words of the famous prayer) “who for life, who for death, / who for tranquility, who for unrest.”96 These people did not cry from religiosity but from self- interest, from an instinctive fear for their lives.97 Their tears were courtroom tears, with whatever degree of sincerity such tears have. What was absent among the thronged students in Bnei Brak and in their contemporary services and, lest I be thought to be exempting myself from this assessment, absent in my own religious life too- was that primal fear of Divine judgment, simple and direct.98
The Mishna Berura's MO is to try to be yotze l'chol ha-deos. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is a departure from what was generally the case. This was a departure from earlier authorities like the Rema and even the Arukh Hashulhan (which the Mishna Berura basically supplanted) which tried to find halakhic justification for practices as opposed to trying to comply with as many shittos as possible.
And I don't think the Chafetz Chaim was trying to make a cultural revolution either. That was only possible in the wake of the destruction of Europe. As Krum as a Bagel says: Rupture and Reconstruction, baby.
Best regards from NY! »
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