Does this man look like a progressive halakhic thinker to you? Not to us, either. But looks can be deceiving.
In our last post, we talked about the recent controversy over the plan by Israel Railways to undertake necessary repair work on Shabbat, a day when the trains don’t run, in order to avoid massive disruptions of service during the work week. The resultant political firestorm raised once again an old conundrum: is the existence of a sovereign Jewish state compatible with traditional Jewish law? Specifically, is it possible for vital public and private institutions to conduct normal operations without transgressing against the prohibition of work (מלאכה, m’lakhah) on Shabbat and festival days? The debate has been going on ever since the establishment of the state, and it has never been resolved within Orthodox halakhic circles. One leading Orthodox politician proposed the employment of non-Jews to perform these critical activities on those days. But that idea, as we discussed, is vulnerable to objections both practical and theoretical. Is there any other solution in sight?
The most obvious place to look for an answer is in the halakhic doctrine of pikuaḥ nefesh (פקוח נפש), which permits and even obligates Jews to perform on Shabbat any and all actions necessary for the saving of human life, even when under other circumstances those actions violate the Torah’s prohibition of m’lakhah. Could the rabbis find that railroad repair falls under the pikuaḥ nefesh rubric? That’s unlikely, because Orthodox poskim have traditionally applied pikuaḥ nefesh in a restrictive way, limiting it to actions that touch directly upon situations of emergency, when human life is in clear and present danger. They have not seen fit to extend the boundaries of the concept to cover actions that, while “vital” to the community, are not linked in some immediate and causative way to the saving of a particular identifiable human life or lives. Thus, the normal and routine functions of many vital public and private institutions, including the railroad, do not fall into the category of pikuaḥ nefesh.
Enter Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli (1909-1995), the man pictured above. Rabbi Yisraeli, who in 1933 managed a daring escape from the Soviet Union, arrived in Eretz Yisrael and began a life-long association with Mizraḥi, the Orthodox faction of the Zionist movement. By the time of the founding of the state of Israel, Yisraeli had become one of Mizraḥi’s leading halakhic authorities. As editor of the journal התורה והמדינה (Hatorah V’ham’dinah),[1] he spearheaded an impressive intellectual effort on the part of Zionist rabbis to find suitable halakhic solutions to the entire range of political, social, economic and cultural issues raised by the restoration of Jewish national sovereignty.[2] The point of that enterprise, as indicated by the subtitle of this post, was to show that the halakhah is truly “ready for prime time”: i.e., that halakhah and sovereignty are truly compatible, that traditional Jewish law, though it had dealt with such questions for many centuries, is sufficiently flexible to meet the variegated needs of a modern Jewish state.
In the 1954 edition of the journal, Rabbi Yisraeli addresses the functioning of Israel’s police forces on Shabbat.[3] While nobody would question the need for a working police force every day of the week, the problem is that routine police activities, patrols and the like which transgress the prohibition of m’lakhah, are not connected directly with immediate threat to life and limb and for that reason are not to be defined as pikuaḥ nefesh. Yisraeli, however, asks us to see these actions as an indirect instance of pikuaḥ nefesh, since they enable the police to save life at some indefinite time in the future. He argues: if the police refrain from patrols and other routine, non-emergency activity on Shabbat, they will not be prepared to respond quickly to emergency situations. It is certain, therefore, that sooner or later a human life or lives will be lost due to the absence of patrols. “This particular action, which at this moment is defined as ḥilul shabbat (a violation of the Shabbat prohibitions), is absolutely necessary in order to assure the saving of life at some point in the future.” Yisraeli calls such actions classifies such actions מכשירי פקוח נפש (makhshirei pikuaḥ nefesh): i.e., actions that do not directly save human life but that are nonetheless required to enable true lifesaving activity to take place. The routine work of a police force obviously falls into this category. And, arguably, so does the work of many government agencies, as well as those other institutions, including the railroad, charged with the task of keeping the public infrastructure in good and safe working order.
Let’s not fail to appreciate what Yisraeli has done here. The classical and medieval halakhic sources offer him scant support; nowhere in their pages do we find a mention of something called makhshirei pikuaḥ nefesh. The idea is Yisraeli’s ḥidush, an innovative halakhic insight. It is his creation. Yes, he argues that it flows logically from the sources, but again, those sources contain no explicit support for it. Nor, it seems, has anyone ever followed up on the idea. The current crop of leading Orthodox poskim certainly do not resort to makhshirei pikuaḥ nefesh to permit railroad repairs and other necessary public work on Shabbat. But the idea, nonetheless, exists. And it exists because an Orthodox rabbi innovated: he invented (or, as he would likely have put it, he found) something new in the law. In response to a particular challenge posed by the reestablishment of Jewish national sovereignty, he devised a new way of thinking about the old concept of pikuaḥ nefesh that takes it beyond its recognized, time-honored boundaries. He pushed the halakhah to a place where it had never gone before, and so demonstrated that the Jewish legal tradition is capable of responding positively to the changes and challenges of the time. That is an important achievement for an Orthodox rabbi, and it deserves to be remembered even if his proposal did not persuade his Orthodox colleagues.
For our part, we would add simply that Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli’s suggestion is a picture-book example of progressive halakhah in action. Though he undoubtedly would have objected to the title, we have no trouble in regarding him, at least on this issue, as a progressive halakhic thinker.
Even if he didn’t look like one!
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[1] Literally, “The Torah and the State.” The journal, published under the auspices of the Rabbinical Council of Hapo’el Hamizraḥi, appeared more or less annually from 1949-1962.
[2] For Hebrew readers, Yisraeli’s introduction to the first volume, available at HebrewBooks.org, is a clear and powerful description of the task that the Zionist rabbis set for themselves as well as of the opposition they encountered from anti-Zionist Orthodox circles.
[3] The article – הבטחון הפנימי במדינה בשבת: פעולות המשטרה – is republished in Yisraeli’s 1960 collection עמוד הימיני, ch. 17.