This past week, Rabbi Prof. David Weiss-Halivni passed at the age of 94. He was born Duvid Weiss in 1927 to a Chassidic family in Carpathian Ruthenia, at the time in the territory known as Czechoslovakia. When his parents separated, when he was four years old, he was sent to the home of his grandfather, Yeshayahu Weiss, in Sighet, Romania. He was known from a young age as a Talmudic prodigy, an iluy, mastering the entire Talmud and commentaries by heart and earning Rabbinic ordination at the age of 15 (!). At the age of 16, he was sent to Auschwitz, which he survived- but was the only member of his family to do so. He arrived in America at the age of 18 and was placed in a Jewish orphanage, where he aroused controversy because he questioned the kashrut standards of a place whose supervisor did not have a beard, or any familiarity with the commentary of Rav Yosef Teomim called Peri Megadim on the Shulchan Aruch. He enrolled in Yeshiva Chaim Berlin, and over the next decade, he received degrees from Brooklyn College, NYU, and then received a doctorate in Talmud at JTS under the tutelage of Prof. Saul Lieberman. Furthermore, he taught Talmud at JTS until 1983, but resigned from the faculty over his disagreement with the Seminary’s stance on the ordination of women. In his letter of resignation, he penned a line that has become inextricably associated with him:
It is my personal tragedy that the people I daven [pray] with I cannot talk to and the people I talk to I cannot daven with. However, when the chips are down I will always side with the people I daven with. For I can live without talking, I cannot live without davening.
While he was affiliated with the flagship Rabbinical Seminary of the Conservative movement, and played an integral role in the training of generations of Conservative Rabbis, he always davened in the more traditional separate seating minyan. As a result of his disagreement with the policies of the Seminary, he went on to found the Union for Traditional Judaism, and served as the Rabbi at Kehillat Orach Eliezer, a left-wing Orthodox congregation on the Harlem border. He served as a professor of Talmud at Columbia until 2005, when, approaching age 80, he retired and made aliyah. He lived in the Rechavia neighborhood of Jerusalem, teaching at Hebrew University and Bar Ilan and writing his Talmud commentary at the Israeli National Library. In 2008, he won the Israel Prize for his research on the Talmud.
Rabbi Prof. HaLivni (a Hebraization of “Weiss,” a name he considered dropping but kept out of reverence for his grandfather) was a prolific author, most notably of a commentary called Mekorot UMesorot, which covered nearly the entire Babylonian Talmud. He also authored an autobiography called The Book and the Sword, which I highly recommend. In it, he tells his life story, from his youth in Europe to his career in America, as he rebuilt himself after the cataclysmic events of the Holocaust.
Above all, he was a genuinely warm, loving person who cared deeply about his students and loved teaching them. Former Shaare Tefilla Scholar in Residence Dr. Elana Stein Hain, of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, wrote in a Facebook post,
“He genuinely loved teaching Torah to such a degree that he felt we were helping him by being willing to learn from him.”
May his memory be for a blessing.
Rabbi’s Recommendation- This clip is of Prof. HaLivni telling his favorite joke from childhood relating to learning. If you understand Yiddish, the joke will be funny. If you don’t, there is still value in a one minute clip of an old Jew speaking in his mother tongue…
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Ariel Rackovsky
Congregation Shaare Tefilla 6131 Churchill Way Dallas, TX 75230
