rabbi, another history question, on the shtetl system.
for centuries, halacha had an address. every town had a rav, the kehilla paid him, and the kehilla could actually enforce, from taxes up to cherem. above the towns sat the vaad arba aratzos, a real central body for polish jewry from the late 1500s until 1764. psak came with institutional backing.
then modernity broke the structure. emancipation ended the kehilla’s legal power, and between 1881 and 1914 alone about 1.5 million jews left eastern europe for america, where nobody could make anyone do anything. today a rav answers questions for people he has never met, who can shop for a psak across five websites.
1. what did the kehilla actually add to psak? was the old rav more authoritative because of enforcement, or because he knew the person asking? which mattered more?
2. when the structure broke, did the center of gravity move from rabbis to books? no kehilla holding a town’s minhag anymore, so people grabbed codes, the kitzur, the chofetz chaim’s seforim, now websites. is the sefer era basically a replacement for the lost town rav?
3. is there a halachic cost to psak without a community? a psak nobody has to follow, asked by a stranger, answered in the abstract. does that change what psak is, not just how it travels?
bottom line, basically: was the shtetl system just packaging around halacha, or part of the mechanism that made psak binding? is modern psak, by sefer and by internet, running on borrowed authority from a structure that no longer exists?
Thank you Rabbi, thank you very much.
There were really two different things holding the old system together, and I think they have to be separated.
The first was institutional authority. The kehilla was an actual governing community. It collected taxes, maintained communal institutions, had a beit din, could make takkanot, and in various periods had real means of enforcement. In Poland, the Vaad Arba Aratzot functioned from roughly 1580 until 1764 as a higher communal structure dealing with taxation and many other communal matters.
That certainly gave the rav and the beit din a kind of institutional authority that most rabbis today simply do not have.
But there was a second factor that I think lasted much longer and may have been even more important for ordinary psak: geography.
If you lived in a small town and the next serious rav was three towns away, you did not wake up in the morning and ask which posek on earth you preferred. You had a rav.
If a major complicated question arose, your rav might write to or send somebody to a greater authority. That is exactly what we see throughout the responsa literature. Frequently the local rav had already ruled and afterward wrote to one of the great rabbanim asking, essentially, “This is what I paskened. Was I correct?”
For the normal person, however, the local rav was the address.
That meant communities had a very strong incentive to appoint somebody genuinely qualified. You were not hiring a lecturer or a fundraiser. This person was going to answer your sheilot, supervise the community, deal with gittin, kashrut, monetary disputes, marriages and every other serious halachic issue. If he was the only rav available for miles around, his qualifications mattered enormously.
Modern government gradually weakened the old legal autonomy of the kehilla during the nineteenth century. But I do not think that immediately destroyed the practical system of the local rav. Distance continued to preserve it.
The really dramatic change came with modern transportation and communication.
First trains made communities less isolated. Then telephones changed everything. Later came cars, airplanes, fax machines, and now the internet.
Once I can pick up a telephone and call Rav Moshe Feinstein, the fact that somebody else happens to be the rav on my block no longer gives him the same practical exclusivity that the rav of a Polish town once had.
I remember an illustration of this very clearly. Rav Pam’s son was learning in Lakewood, and, as I remember the story, Rav Pam told him that now that he was in Lakewood he should ask my father, Rav Yitzchak Abadi zt”l, his sheilot. He was in Lakewood and Rabbi Abadi was the rav there. He should not simply keep calling his father.
That was the old mentality of mara d’atra surviving into the modern world.
Today that world is largely gone.
Does that mean we are required somehow to recreate it artificially and decree that every Jew may ask only one neighborhood rabbi? I don’t see why.
There are advantages to having one rav. He gets to know you. He knows your family, your personality, your level of knowledge, your circumstances and the previous answers he has given you. More importantly, he has a consistent mahalach in Halachah. If you ask five unrelated rabbis five different questions, you can accidentally create a personal Judaism made from incompatible pieces of five different systems.
So generally I think it is wise to find a very knowledgeable rav whose approach you understand and trust and use him as your principal rav.
But I don’t think Halachah requires pretending that telephones were never invented.
Somebody may have one rav who is particularly knowledgeable in Hilchot Shabbat, another in Niddah, another in monetary Halachah, and someone else whom he learns with regularly. If those rabbanim operate within compatible approaches, I do not see anything inherently wrong with that.
The problem is not asking more than one rabbi.
The problem is shopping for answers dishonestly.
There is actually an old Halachah about this. If one chacham already ruled a particular case forbidden, you cannot simply conceal that fact and take the same case to somebody else hoping to obtain a heter. The Shulchan Aruch says that you may ask another chacham, but you must tell him that the first one already ruled. That is very different from honestly seeking another opinion or using different competent rabbanim for different subjects.
So if someone wants to call twenty rabbis until number twenty tells him exactly what he wanted to hear, he has bechirah. Nobody can stop him today. But that does not make it a sensible way to live a Torah life.
The question about books is also interesting.
Books did become more important as the old communal structure weakened, but I would not say that books simply replaced rabbis. Jews always learned sefarim and great rabbanim always wrote responsa. What changed was that printed practical guides could now reach ordinary Jews on an enormous scale without passing through the rav of the town.
The Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, published in 1864, is a perfect example. It was deliberately written as a practical handbook that ordinary people could consult, and it became enormously popular. Later works did the same thing in different ways. Today websites and searchable databases take that process much further.
But something is lost when the sefer replaces the rav entirely.
A sefer does not know who is asking.
It does not know whether the person is sick, poor, frightened, newly observant, elderly, traveling, living with a difficult spouse, or misunderstanding the facts. It cannot ask the follow-up question that changes the entire sheilah.
A real psak is often not simply, “What does the book say about X?” It is, “What is the Halachah in this person’s actual situation?”
That is one of the great advantages the old town rav naturally had. He knew the people.
So was the shtetl structure part of what made psak binding?
In communal matters, certainly. A recognized kehilla, its beit din, its takkanot and its rav had authority that was supported by communal institutions and sometimes by the government itself.
But I would not say that Halachah was true because the rav could enforce it. His police power was not what made treif treif or permitted something permitted.
The structure did something else. It established who the address was.
Today there may be no automatic address.
That means the burden has moved to the individual. Find a rav who actually knows how to learn and pasken Halachah. Ask him enough questions and you will eventually discover whether he really knows what he is doing. Try to understand his mahalach. Do not choose a rav merely because he is famous, charismatic, strict, lenient or has a good website.
And once you have found somebody competent, there is tremendous value in maintaining that relationship.
I don’t think modern psak is invalid because the old kehilla disappeared. I think this is simply the evolution of Jewish communal life.
The old system gave every Jew a rav almost automatically.
The modern system gives every Jew access to hundreds of rabbanim.
That is an enormous advantage and also an enormous danger.
Before, you had very little choice, so the community had to choose its rav carefully.
Today you have almost unlimited choice, so you have to choose carefully yourself.