Last year, on the Fast of the 17th of Tammuz, I had the privilege of hearing Irit, the wife of Chaim ben Aryeh, at Kehilat Pardes in Rockville MD. See the end of this essay for some exciting news…
לעילוי נשמת חיים בן אריה, הי׳ד
Chaim ben Aryeh, a bus driver from the Otef Gaza region was somewhat of a local legend; the father of eight, he had been a bus driver in Gush Katif, where he had been known as “Everyone’s Chaim.” He was Chaim the school bus driver, Chaim the troop transporter, Chaim the volunteer medic. On that dreadful Saturday night of October 7th, Chaim once again climbed into his bus to drive the children. But these were not children chatting on their way to school, children excited for a day trip to the museum. These children were the survivors of the massacre. And unlike all the children he had ever driven, they sat in their seats completely silent. For the very first time in his life, he felt utterly helpless.
Chaim had witnessed tragedies before. He had driven buses that had been shot at, driven over roadside bombs, and driven the local ambulance to and from scenes of unimaginable suffering. But this was different. He returned home in the early hours of Sunday morning, and with tears in his eyes he uttered to his wife Irit these simple words: “I could not save them.” He told her of the children on his bus whose clothes and faces were covered with blood, of the few surviving adults who had sat behind them wearing only their underwear and wrapped with a towel. The children made no sound. There was no crying. Chaim could not save them.
Chaim carried much, but this was unbearable. He spent the next several days watching the television, watching the news unfold, and then he took his own life on the bus he had driven on that terrible night.[1]
Chaim ended his own life, but Hamas killed him.
How are we supposed to respond to the unthinkable, to live in a world that is without justice? This is of course not a new challenge. I started writing this from the old Jewish quarter in Krakow, where the Nazis murdered Jewish children in the orphanage by throwing them out of the window. Depravity is always just a moment away. But somehow, and like in so many other ways, this seems different. There are, and continue to be stories of heroism and compassion. They are often as utterly fantastic as the circumstances that caused them. But sometimes they are not enough. They never will be. Sometimes the flame that is the will to continue is extinguished.
For those with faith, with resolve, the path forward is clear. But for the rest of us, on what shall we lean? What happens when, once again in our lachrymose history, the pain of life seems worse than the abyss of death?
*
Rabbi Shimon Pollack and the First World War
Austro-Hungarian Jews played a large role during World War I, when it is thought that over 300,000 served in the army. The military made several accommodations for its Jewish servicemen. Kosher kitchens were established, and almost 80 Jewish chaplains served their co-religionists. The Jewish community of Vienna even produced a pocket-sized siddur that could be carried into battle. It is little wonder then, that during the chaotic years of the war, many of those Jewish soldiers went missing or died without their immediate family being notified.[2]
Rabbi Shimon Pollak was born in Hungary, around 1850, and died in May 1930. He served as the rabbi of Beiuș (Belényes in Hungarian) in the Bihar region of western Romania for twenty-eight years, and where about 14% of the population were Jewish. In his later life moved to the Romanian city of Oradea, known as Großwardein in German (and Groysvardeyn in Yiddish) where he is buried.[3], [4] But it was while he lived in Beiuș that he wrote Kol Berama, which was published in 1916. The book was dedicated to his daughter Rama, who died, most likely from tuberculosis, in March 1915, and it addresses one topic: should the Jewish people continue to have children, given the tragedy of their circumstances? Perhaps, ventured the rabbi, now was the time to finally give up all hope, and allow the Jewish people to quietly disappear.
To understand the essence of this shocking suggestion we must turn to a passage in the Talmud that discusses intimate behavior during famine and natural disasters. According to the third-century sage Resh Lakish, “it is prohibited for a person to have conjugal relations in years of famine . . . nevertheless, those without children may have marital relations in years of famine.”[5]
תענית יא, א
אָמַר רֵישׁ לָקִישׁ: אָסוּר לְאָדָם לְשַׁמֵּשׁ מִטָּתוֹ בִּשְׁנֵי רְעָבוֹן, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״וּלְיוֹסֵף יֻלַּד שְׁנֵי בָנִים בְּטֶרֶם תָּבוֹא שְׁנַת הָרָעָב״. תָּנָא: חֲסוּכֵי בָּנִים מְשַׁמְּשִׁין מִטּוֹתֵיהֶן בִּשְׁנֵי רְעָבוֹן
Another sage, Rav Avin, who lived in the early fourth century, had a similar teaching. He cited a verse from the Book of Job, “Wasted from want and starvation, they flee to a parched land,” and taught “when there is any want in the word, make your wife lonely.”[6] These two teachings found their way into normative Jewish law. The first was codified in the Shulchan Aruch, first published in Venice in 1565. The second was added to a gloss on it written by the Polish rabbi Moshe Isserles who died in 1572. “This applies,” he wrote in his commentary that became the accepted code of practice for Ashkenazi Jews, “to all kinds of natural disasters, for they are just like a famine.”[7]
אסור לשמש מטתו בשני רעבון אלא לחשוכי בנים הגה וע"ל סי' תקע"ד ס"ד וה"ה בשאר צרות שהם כרעבון [ירושלמי דתענית]
It was during the First World War that Pollack revisited this question in the book he had named for his dead daughter. Over 30 dense pages he wrote about the awful situation in which the Jews of war-stricken eastern Europe found themselves. He quickly came to his thesis, an unambiguous declaration of his halakhic ruling.
I have seen with my own eyes, these terrible times of trouble…with voices wailing in new refugee camps [iray miklat] that were established by the government for our bereaved brethren, that there are no ritual baths [mikva’ot] for women to use…And as for myself, I am extremely distressed and wonder, if, in these times of sin, anger, war and famine, if it is permitted for anyone to have conjugal relations. This is not just for the pious; this is absolutely prohibited for any couple.
The book weaves together sources from the two Talmuds, Midrash and halakha as the author addresses the many and varied aspects of this ruling. Did this only apply to famine as its talmudic author Resh Lakish had ruled, or did it extend to other disasters, as Rabbi Moshe Isserles had ruled in his gloss to the Shulchan Aruch?
Rabbi Pollack weaves practical and mystical explanations into a seamless stream of consciousness. Practically, he wonders, did Resh Lakish rule as he did because during a famine there would not be enough food to feed the children brought into the world?[8] Mystically, perhaps this only applies when there is specifically a lack of grain, which somehow is under the direct jurisdiction of God? Perhaps intercourse is forbidden only on a Wednesday and Friday evening, because of something to do with the creation of the planets and the mitzvah to have relations on the eve of Shabbat? He also addressed some strangely contemporary philosophical questions: do existing persons have greater rights than potential persons?[9]
Pollack looked back at Biblical history with a critical eye. How did Joseph allow himself to have children, and to eat so lavishly during the terrible seven-year famine described in Genesis? Certainly, he wrote, that when Joseph invited his brothers to a feast “this would not have been permitted according to the spirit of Torah law…why did Joseph rule leniently about this matter?”[10] While remaining deeply mindful of the chain of Jewish tradition, of course, he ventured his own answer. “Where I not fearful of offering a solution, I would have ventured to suggest that Joseph died before his older brothers because he allowed himself to provide an excessive meal, when all around there was a famine.”[11] He raised similar questions about the behavior of King David, who took Uriah’s wife as his own during an intense war with the Philistines.[12] And here he ventured beyond the traditional respect he gave to the motives of biblical figures. “Since David didn’t care about the grave sin of adultery, why would he care about the lesser sin of procreation during a war?”[13] He even speculated about whether the father of Moses had erred in fathering not one but three children (Miriam, Moses, and Aaron) while his entire nation was enslaved.[14]
After answering these and several other questions about the conduct of biblical figures to his satisfaction, Pollack reached his conclusion (again). In a larger font he wrote:
ומכ״ש אם נלוה להצרות רבות ורעות - של מכת חרבו הרג ואבדון ושרפת אש ונשים בציון המצוינות נתענו ובתולות בערי יהודים נתחללו לאין מספר ושרי ישראל ביד אויביהם נתלים ואף פני זקנים וזקנות ועוללים ויונקים לא התחוננו לחמול ולחוס עליהם - והא בביזתא והא בשביא והא במלקיותא או מיתה במקום מלקות — והילול שבת ומאכלות אסורות של כמה אלפים ורבבות ורבי רבבות נפשות מארבע כנפות הארץ וטלטולא דגברי ונשיהם העגונות וטפלי התלוים בהם הנעים ונדים ולא ימצאו מנוח לכף רגלם ונדחה קראו להם מדחי אל דחי ואינם יודעים אפי' מקום אביהם ואמותיהם או בניהם ובנותיהם ואחיהם ואחיותיהם וכדומ׳ ואיפה הם רועים ואם הם עוד בחיים או לא וכו׳ עד שאבן מקיר יזעק וכו' - עוד הצרה דרעבון ורעב״א דרעבון שבודאי ישי בו איסור תשמיש כפול ומוכפל בכפלי כפלים
. . . Consider the many terrible troubles, blows, the sword, murder, loss and the fires consuming the women of Zion and the countless young girls in Jewish towns who are ravaged, and the young Jewish men who are hanged by the enemy, not to mention the elderly and the infants. We could never end mourning for them . . . and then there is the desecration of Shabbat, and the eating of non-kosher food that thousands upon thousands have committed . . . and there are the women who do not know what has become of their husbands, and the many children who depend upon them, all of whom wander without respite for their weary feet . . . they do not know the fates of their fathers or their mothers, their sons or their daughters, their brothers and sisters. Where are they wandering? Are they even still alive? . . . It is certain therefore that there is a complete and utter prohibition against conjugal relations.”[15]
Pollack had opened with a discussion of how Jewish family life had become impossible without mikva’ot, and returned to this theme towards the end of his book. He even suggested that it may have been a good thing that that mikva’ot had not been built in the refugee camps, because without them, intercourse was forbidden, and couples would not be able to transgress the prohibition made by Resh Lakish.[16] At the very least, he suggested posting notices in any of the remaining functioning mikva’ot that their use was only permitted for those whose sexual drive could not be controlled. The logical consequence of his reasoning was that new marriages should be forbidden.[17] And this was precisely the opinion he held. In a radical departure from normative tradition, now was not the time for new Jewish homes to be established. “How can we start a marriage and a Jewish home when God is engaged in the destruction of his world?”[18]
Despite his lengthy passages declaring the contrary, Pollack ended with a more muted ruling than that with which he had started.
In light of all this, I am not ruling in general terms and for all people. Rather, my ruling is for those who are able to withstand the temptation. But for those whose urges are too powerful to resist, it is better to choose the lesser of two evils. Each person should make their own decision, and this is a deeply private matter.
And with this, Shimon Pollack ends perhaps one of the most painful of Jewish works written since the Book of Lamentations.
All of us are familiar with the marriage ceremony at which a glass is broken as a memory of Jerusalem’s destruction. But this act is immediately followed with singing and dancing as the bride and groom step away from under their chuppah and begin to build their bayit ne’eman beyisrael. Could we ever have thought it possible that Jewish law would capitulate to the horrors that the Jewish people encountered? And yet, it is here, in this ruling of Rabbi Shimon Pollack’s long forgotten text. The Jews have been defeated. We need not go on.
It should be emphasised that Kol Haramah was written in eastern Europe during the First World War, and not during the Second. The worst (if it is even possible to compare tragedies of this magnitude) was still to come. And when it did, the same question was raised and the same inevitable ruling followed.
Rabbi Yisroel Alter Landau and the Second World War
In 1940, Rabbi Yisroel Alter Landau (c. 1884–1942), the Head of the Rabbinic Court in the northern Hungarian town of Edeleny (in Yiddish, Edelen) was asked whether under the circumstances - which at the time were the Hungarians collaborating with the Axis powers - the talmudic prohibition should be re-instated. “As a result of our many sins this is a time of great hardship for Jacob and Israel,” he wrote to his interlocutor,
Israel is enslaved in most countries [in Europe] and also here [in Edeleny] both physically and spiritually. We are made to work very hard, just as we did in Egypt. We have to repair the roads, and in many places the yeshivot and mikva’ot have been closed . . . Because of our many sins there are new decrees against Israel each and every day. May God have mercy on us and may we see his deliverance very soon.
As a result, it would seem fitting for every Jewish husband to separate physically from his wife and not engage in marital relations, even if he himself is not in any danger, for it is a time of great hardship for Israel.
In his lengthy responsa, Rabbi Landau reviewed the same sources and reached the same general conclusion as had Rabbi Pollack his predecessor. Still, he was more circumspect, and cited the verse in Exodus (1:12 ) in support: “The more the Egyptians oppressed them, the more they multiplied.” While there was no need to rule strictly and forbid conjugal relations, each person should decide for themselves “for a wise person has eyes in his head” (Ecclesiastes 2:14). Deep inside Nazi occupied eastern Europe, Rabbi Landau ended with this prayer:
May the Holy One, Blessed Be He, come to our aid, as He did for our ancestors in Egypt. May he perform miracles as He did for our ancestors in Egypt, and may we merit the salvation of Israel and a merciful and complete redemption speedily and in our time.
But his prayer was entirely unanswered. He died of natural causes in 1942 at the age of only 58; his wife Rachel and several of their adult children were murdered by the Nazis in 1941 and 1942.[19]
Rabbi Hayyim Elazar Spira of Munkacz
While these two rulings overwhelmingly supported a ban on building a Jewish family, we should not expect them to have been universally accepted. One rabbinic leader who opposed the ban was Hayyim Elazar Spira (1871–1937), head of the Rabbinic Court of Munkacz (today Mukachevo) in western Ukraine who addressed the question in a work published in 1930. He noted that during and after the First World War the question of prohibiting conjugal relations had arisen, but that it had been permitted. One of the reasons was that the war and the later troubles that befell the Jewish people (including the Bolshevik uprising) seemed endless. Under these depressing circumstances, it would be necessary to prohibit conjugal relations “forever,” which would clearly be improper. Rabbi Spira also wrote that he had heard of “a certain leader who ruled that conjugal relations were absolutely forbidden for the duration of the [First World] war.” And then comes this remarkable passage:
This brought me incredible laughter, that which this old man (close to eighty) had warned against, and that which he ruled for his children. It made a laughingstock of us all. When we heard of this our hearts would sink, for this ruling had no basis, and it is terrible to continue to speak of such a thing. Perhaps much was hidden from the eyes and the thinking of this old man. May the Master [God] forgive him! [c.f. Sanhedrin 99a.] Still, he should be given some respect. But nevertheless, the practical halakha is that Heaven forbid would we ever prohibit this.
Although Rabbi Spira did not identify the “old man” whose ruling he so disparaged, it was almost certainly Rabbi Pollak.[20]
Such works are rare in the enormous corpus of Jewish literature. Indeed, given the history of the Jewish People, it is somewhat surprising to find that there are so few of these kinds of books. But their rarity does not imply that they describe an unusual emotional reaction. Indeed, the only surprising thing is that, as moderns, we have not felt it more frequently. And that is surely because, as moderns, we have felt perfectly at home in whichever diaspora we have lived. We have thrived, studied, earned professional or financial comfort, and have passed these values on to our families. When we have visited Israel, it was always with a thrill of coming home, even if it was equally true that it was from our homes that we had just travelled. We were Jews who were twice blessed. We had two homes, and in each we prospered.
This ended in the aftermath of the massacre of October 7th. Instead of a world that we had expected to extend to us the same courtesies that we had ourselves extended to others, we found ourselves unimaginably alone. We, which is to say we Jews, were no longer the citizens of two homes. We were outsiders, and outsiders are always treated with suspicion and often with contempt. Three generations of complacency had led us to expect that we would never feel existentially lonely in a democracy like ours. We were mistaken.
*
The choice of Isolation & the Imposition of Loneliness
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Hannah Arendt distinguished between isolation and loneliness. “I can be isolated” she wrote, “that is, in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me — without being lonely; and I can be lonely — that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship — without being isolated.” Isolation is an impasse in the political sphere of our lives, where our common goals are destroyed and “I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me.”
More recently, the philosopher Kieran Setiya has described loneliness as “the pain of social disconnection.” In his 2022 book Life is Hard, he noted that because we are “social animals with social needs,” we experience loneliness when those social needs are unmet. Setiya here is addressing the feeling that follows from a lack of family, friends, and romantic partners, and it is incontrovertibly true that for the nuclear observant Jewish family, such an absence is remarkably unusual. Why then, has the war of October 7th left so many of us feeling as alone as Robinson Crusoe on his deserted island? The social needs of most modern orthodox Jews are sustained primarily through our nuclear family and the friendships that are bonded by the regularity of a set of shared Jewish obligations. What then, has changed? Why do the Tic-Toc wars and student sit-ins result in an existential solitude that we have never before experienced?
One answer – and surely there are several – lies in a deeper understanding of the social isolation that is a defining feature of the orthodox Jewish life. While we have never really acknowledged it, we have felt all along that we are socially isolated from the larger outside non-Jewish world. The old city ghetto wall that forced Jews to live with each other has long been replaced by our choice to live with each other in close proximity surrounded by an eruv. Within the suburbs, we are sustained and nourished by those who are like us. And yet we believed – indeed, for decades our experience has taught us – that should we choose to seek it out, our acceptance by those outside of the invisible ghetto wall was never in question. Orthodox, or better, recognizable Jews might choose to be socially isolated from the wider non-Jewish world, but they were never alone. At any time, we could reach out and flourish under a shared set of liberal Western values, which, we thought, are derived from and hence similar to our own. For those who wished to enter politics, the door was open. There, our only disagreements would be with those who did not vote with us. And we could openly support Israel because she shared the values of all WEIRD societies.[21]
But in the weeks that followed the October pogrom, our choice of isolation was replaced by an imposition of loneliness. We were not the welcome equals we had long imagined ourselves. Yes, we could march on Washington, but there were still buses that refused to transport us from the airport. We could raise vast sums of money, but there were still counties – allies!- who would embargo the arms we needed to defend ourselves. Our chosen isolation turned into an existential loneliness that no one, outside of the last remaining eyewitnesses of the Holocaust, could have ever imagined.
Perhaps then, it is from this that our feelings of despair have arisen. Like Chaim ben Aryeh, we feel alone because we feel that this time it is different. Chaim saw it on the faces of the children he evacuated. We see it on the faces of the adults we sit next to on the subway. If we feel despair, we can acknowledge that this emotion too is an authentic Jewish response to the horrors we have witnessed from up close or from afar. Chaim could no-longer bear to go on living, and Rabbi Pollack could no-longer allow Jewish children to be born into a world of depravity.Of course we will rebuild, because that is what we do. We will flourish because that is our eternal destiny. It is just that sometimes, the price seems too high.
עד הניצחון
Post Script
It is with great joy that I can share that Irit is to be married this August 27th, Elul 14th. May she and her groom be blessed with life and happiness.
[1] All these details come from an interview with his wife: see https://www.ynet.co.il/health/article/sy2ipepfp, accessed November 8, 2023.
[2] Schmidl, Erwin: Jüdische Soldaten in der k. u. k. Armee, in: Patka, Markus im Auftrag des jüdischen Museums Wien (Hrsg.): Weltuntergang. Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Ersten Weltkrieg, Wien/Graz/Klagenfurt 2014, 45-51. Rozenblit, Marsha L.: Reconstructing a National Identity. The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I, Oxford 2001, Lichtblau, Albert (Hrsg.): Als hätten wir dazugehört. Österreichisch-jüdische Lebensgeschichten aus der Habsburgermonarchie, Wien/Köln/Weimar 1999.
[3] From https://www.geni.com/people/%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%99-%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%9F-%D7%A4%D7%90%D7%9C%D7%9C%D7%90%D7%A7-%D7%96%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%A7-%D7%9C-%D7%90%D7%91-%D7%93-Belenyes-%D7%91%D7%A2%D7%9C-%D7%A9%D7%95-%D7%AA-%D7%A9%D7%9D-%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%9F/6000000002087045307.
[4] See the frontispiece and introduction of Shem Mishimon, his book of responsa published posthumously in Satmar, Romania in 1932. It contains a brief approbation from Yosef Chaim Zonenfeld, the leading rabbi of Jerusalem.
[5] T. B. Ta’anit 11a.
[6] Job 30:3, T.J Ta’anit 1:6.
[7] Shulchan Aruch Orach Chayim 240.
[8] “It is certainly reasonable to be concerned that during a famine procreation is forbidden, for even without new children there is scarcely enough food. Were we to have children we would need to take what little the adults have and give to the children…and when a woman is pregnant, she requires more nourishment” (KH 7.)
[9] “We should never value the worth of one life over another, and we should certainly never allow potential life to take precedence over an actual life” (KH 5). The question of the value of potential compared to actual ones was the life work of the late Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit. See for example, his Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984).
[10] KH 9.
[11] KH 11. He offered some solutions on pp 38-39. He also suggested that the prohibition was based on the presence of evil spirits. See KH 55.
[12] II Samuel 11-12.
[13] KH 24
[14] KH 14. Pollack suggested that Moses’ father, through divine inspiration, knew that he would sire the savior of his people, and so allowed himself to engage in procreation. Pollack would go to rather extreme lengths to justify the behavior of biblical figures. He ventured that perhaps Moses’ father had not engaged in intercourse, but had merely acted as a sperm donor, accidentally depositing his seed in a bath in which his wife would later bathe. (See TB and KH15.) Similarly, the wives of Machlon and Chilyon mentioned in the Book of Ruth were allowed to have children because they were not born Jewish, but had converted (KH 21).
[15] See Shimon Pollak, Kol Haramah Vehafrasha [The Lofty Voice of Separation] (Waitzen (Vac): Tel Talpiot, 1916) (Hebrew), especially 31. Emphasis added.
[16] KH 70.
[17] KH 71-72.
[18] KH 72.
[19] See Yisroel Avraham Alter Landau, Shut Bet Yisrael [Responsam of the House of Israel] (New York: Brooklyn, 1994) (Hebrew), Even Ha’ezer #152.
[20] See Hayyim Elazar Spira, Nimukei Orah Hayyim [Legal Decisions on Orah Hayyim] (New York: Edison Lithographic, 1930) (Hebrew) #574, 106. Pollack would have been about 66 years old, at the time he published his book, and not 80 as Spira suggested. More recently, the question of whether intercourse was permitted during the pandemic years of COVID was raised. See Brown, J. The Eleventh Plague, Oxford University Press 2023, 313-314.
[21] Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich and Democratic. See Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020.
