New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)  Tonight and tomorrow, the 21st of Av is the yahrtzeit of Rav Chaim Soloveitchik zatzal (1853–1918). For many people, Rav Chaim is their great-grand Rebbe. One of this author’s rebbeim, Rav Avrohom Kanarek zt”l, was a talmid of Reb Boruch Ber Leibowitz zt”l, one of the premier talmidim of Rav Chaim.

Rav Chaim was born in the town of Volozhin, where his father, the Beis HaLevi, was one of the Maggidei Shiurim. His father later took the rabbinate of Brisk, a position that Rav Chaim assumed after his father’s passing.

A MARRIAGE THAT PLACED HIM IN VOLOZHIN

Rav Chaim’s position in the Volozhin yeshiva cannot be understood apart from the family he married into. He married Lifsha, the daughter of Rav Refoel Shapiro, who was himself the son-in-law of the Netziv and who would eventually head the yeshiva. In a world in which the Volozhin roshei yeshiva were bound to one another by marriage as much as by appointment, this union placed Rav Chaim inside the household that ran the yeshiva rather than alongside it.

The practical consequence was that a young man in his twenties was installed as a maggid shiur in the most prestigious yeshiva in the Russian empire, delivering a shiur alongside the Netziv himself. A method as radical as the one Rav Chaim was developing needed a platform of that stature to spread; had he been teaching in a smaller town, the derech might have remained a local curiosity. The talmidim who sat in that shiur – among them young men who would later head the great yeshivos of Lithuania and Poland – carried it outward.

1892: THE CLOSING OF VOLOZHIN

The Volozhin chapter did not end by choice. Through the 1880s the Russian government pressed the yeshiva to conform to imperial educational policy – a fixed curriculum of secular subjects, instruction in the Russian language, certified teachers of general studies, and limits on the hours devoted to Torah study. The Netziv and the yeshiva’s leadership regarded the demands as an attempt to reshape the institution from within, and refused terms that would have subordinated the beis medrash to a state syllabus.

In 1892 the authorities ordered the yeshiva closed. The Netziv, then an elderly man, was compelled to leave the town where he had taught for four decades, and the student body scattered across Eastern Europe. That same year the Beis HaLevi passed away in Brisk.

Rav Chaim thus lost his position and his father within months of each other, and went to Brisk to succeed him. The move mattered for more than his biography. Volozhin had been a yeshiva; Brisk was a city with a Jewish population that needed a rav. The analytic method that had been forged in a lecture hall would now be carried by a man occupying himself daily with agunos, kashrus, communal charity, and the sick – and the two halves of that life were not, as will be seen, kept in separate compartments.

THE CHILDREN

Rav Chaim had four children:

• Rav Yisrael Gershon, the eldest, who served in the rabbinate and died relatively young.
• Rav Moshe (1879–1941), who served in Rasein and Chaslavich and later in Warsaw, and who came to the United States in 1929 to teach at RIETS – making him the conduit through which the Brisker derech entered American soil, and, through his son Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, reached Boston and a generation of American talmidim.
• Rav Yitzchok Zev (1886–1959), known simply as the Brisker Rav, who succeeded his father in Brisk, escaped Europe during the war after losing much of his family, and re-established the derech in Yerushalayim, where it became one of the defining forces in the Torah world of Eretz Yisrael.
• A daughter, Sara Rasha, who married Rav Tzvi Hirsch Glickson hy”d.

The two lines are worth noticing together. One son carried the method west across the Atlantic into an American university setting; the other carried it east into Yerushalayim, into a world deliberately insulated from that setting. Both regarded themselves as transmitting their father.

THE RAV WHOSE DOOR DID NOT CLOSE

A reader who knows Rav Chaim only through the printed chiddushim will form a picture of a man of pure abstraction. Brisk knew him first as something else entirely.

His house was open. Not open in the conventional sense in which every rav’s house is described as open, but open to the point that his own family’s comfort was routinely surrendered to whoever had arrived. The story that his home was heated so that anyone with nowhere else to go could sleep there – and that the wood budget of the rav’s household was consumed by strangers – was told in Brisk not as a marvel but as a description of ordinary conditions. Petitioners came at all hours. Poor people were received before wealthy ones. He was known to be pained by the humiliation of a man forced to ask, and to arrange matters so that the asking would be as painless as possible.

The best-known expression of this is halachic rather than anecdotal. Rav Chaim was famously and consistently lenient in permitting the sick to eat on Yom Kippur – so much so that it became a point of comment. His response has been repeated for over a century in one form or another: he was not being lenient with regard to Yom Kippur; he was being stringent with regard to pikuach nefesh.

That formulation is not a piece of wit. It is the same analytic instinct that produced the chiddushim, applied to a bed rather than a page. The question of whether a given halachic outcome is a leniency or a stringency depends entirely on which obligation one has correctly identified as governing the case – and Rav Chaim held that the governing obligation at a sickbed on Yom Kippur is the preservation of life, in which anything less than full seriousness is itself the leniency.

His grandson’s portrait in Halakhic Man makes the point explicitly. There the rabbinate is described not as an office of ritual supervision but as a post whose business is redressing the grievances of the abandoned and defending the dignity of those with no one to defend them – and that conception of the position is attributed directly to Rav Chaim. The halachic man of that book is not a scholar who withdraws from the world in order to think clearly; he is a scholar who thinks clearly in order to act correctly in the world.

This is the reason the analysis that follows is worth a reader’s attention. The pieces below are not intellectual exercises detached from life. They are the working instruments of a man who used them at bedsides.

THE FATHER OF THE BRISKER METHOD

Rav Chaim is known as the father of the Brisker method. Four of its most characteristic tools are set out below, each with an illustration.

Siman versus sibah – symptom versus cause. As an illustration from the medical world: an acquaintance of this author once had excessive muscle growth to the extent that he had no feeling in his fingers. The doctor thought he had solved the problem by cutting out the muscle tissue under the wrist. A few weeks later it returned. The doctor had thought the muscle tissue was the cause – it was really an effect of an over-active pituitary gland. When that gland was cut in half through an operation through the nose, the problem was resolved.

The Talmudic application is exact. The Rambam (Hilchos Edus 9:9) lists the behaviors that mark a person as a shoteh – one who goes out alone at night, who sleeps in a cemetery, who tears his clothing. Read as a definition, the list produces obvious difficulties: it is neither complete nor decisive, and the Gemara itself entertains other conduct. Rav Chaim read the list as a set of simanim rather than a sibah. The shoteh is not defined by any behavior on the list; he is a person whose mind is deranged, and the listed behaviors are the indicators by which that underlying condition becomes visible to a beis din. This is why the Rambam concludes that the matter rests on the assessment of the dayan – a judge is evaluating a condition, not checking a checklist.

Active versus passive. There is often a difference between violating a prohibition through action and finding oneself in violation of it passively. The clearest case appears further on in this article: the Gemara’s treatment of Esther, where the concept of karka olam turns on precisely this distinction, and Rav Chaim’s reading of Tosfos there extends the same distinction into the laws of murder itself.

Tzvei dinim – two components where one was assumed. The classic example is kavanah in tefillah. The Rambam (Hilchos Tefillah 4:15–16) writes that tefillah without kavanah is not tefillah and must be repeated – yet elsewhere he rules that only the absence of kavanah in the first bracha requires one to go back. Rav Chaim resolves the apparent contradiction by separating two entirely different requirements that had been treated as one: kavanah in the sense of awareness of the meaning of the words, which is me’akev only in the first bracha; and kavanah in the sense of knowing that one is standing before the Shechinah, which is not a requirement within the act of tefillah at all but the definition of the act – without it there is no tefillah to speak of, anywhere in the Shemoneh Esrei.

Cheftza versus gavra – the object versus the person. The cleanest illustration in shas is the difference between nedarim and shevuos. A neder attaches the prohibition to the item: the loaf itself becomes forbidden, and it is forbidden to anyone the vow was directed against. A shevuah attaches the obligation to the person: the loaf remains an ordinary loaf, and it is this individual who has bound himself not to eat it. Two prohibitions that look identical in practice – a man who may not eat bread – sit in entirely different halachic categories, and the differences between them cascade through the laws of hafara, of shevuah on a mitzvah, and of what happens when the item passes to someone else.

L’zaicher nishmaso, some of his Torah is presented below, as translated by this author.

FIRST PIECE FROM RAV CHAIM SOLOVEITCHIK’S WRITINGS

It is found in Chidushei Rabbeinu Chaim (on Rambam Yesodei HaTorah 5:1 – the first piece). Rav Chaim Soloveitchik’s writings were published in 1936, some 18 years after his passing. The issue he discusses deals with the following question:

What does one do when told to violate one of the three cardinal sins of Judaism – idolatry, adultery and other arayos, or the taking of another’s life – or one’s own life will be forfeit?

LIVE BY THE TORAH – NOT DIE BY IT

Generally speaking, the Torah tells us “veChai Bahem – and you shall live by the Torah.” Our sages teach (see Yuma 85b and Sanhedrin 74a) to live by them and not die by them – all except for the three cardinal sins. When faced with these three, one must never violate them, even if one’s life is at stake.

THE THREE EXCEPTIONS

The Gemorah in Sanhedrin tells us that we must let ourselves be killed rather than violate these three sins.

• Idolatry’s exception is derived from the Shma: And you shall love Hashem your G-d with all your soul – bechol nafshecha.
• Arayos is derived from a hekesh to the taking of life – the hyper-text-like connection which applies the laws of one topic to another (Dvarim 22:26). Just as one is allowed to kill a would-be murderer chasing someone, so too may one kill a would-be rapist chasing someone. Since this halacha is true, the exception to “and you shall live by them” is also true.
• And where is the exception of the taking of life derived from? It is a compelling logical rationale, concludes the Gemorah in Sanhedrin: who can say that your blood is any redder than his? The Gemorah quotes Rava, who gave this answer to someone who asked him about how his local temporal administrator, Marei Durai, had told him to kill others or be killed himself.

ESTHER’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ACHASHVEIROSH

The Gemorah in Sanhedrin mentions another caveat – that when the matter is in public, one must also give up one’s life for one of the non-cardinal sins on account of the idea of Chillul Hashem. The Gemorah brings up its original prima facie understanding of the case of Esther as a question on this caveat, declaring that it too should be considered a public matter. One answer that the Gemorah gives is that of “Karka Olam” – that Esther was only violating this sin passively.

TOSFOS’ QUESTION

The Baalei Tosfos in Sanhedrin (74b “Veha”) ask that Esther’s sin should have been considered full-fledged Gilui Arayos – exception #2 to vechai bahem – and she should have given up her life even if it were not public. The Baalei Tosfos answer that for the issue of exception #2, and thus exception #3 as well, the Gemorah was well aware that the notion of karka olam, the passive violation, applies to both of these exceptions, and therefore only chose to ask from the private/public factor.

RAV CHAIM’S VIEW OF TOSFOS

Rav Chaim Soloveitchik states that according to the view of Tosfos, one does not have to give up one’s life in a case where the killing of others is a passive violation. In other words, if the official is about to use a person as the murder weapon – throwing him on top of the victim and killing him – he is not obligated to give up his life to prevent it. Indeed, in such a case one can make the opposite argument: why is the victim’s blood any redder than mine if I am not actively violating anything?

The reach of this reading is considerable. It supplies the halachic vocabulary for an entire family of contemporary questions in which a person’s conduct contributes to a death without constituting the act of killing – the withdrawal as against the withholding of treatment, the physician who declines to intervene, the administrator who implements a policy whose foreseeable consequence is loss of life. In each case the threshold question is not whether death followed, but whether the person stood in the position of an actor or of ground.

RAV CHAIM’S VIEW OF THE RAMBAM

Rav Chaim, however, points out that the Rambam learns differently, and nowhere does he draw any distinction between an active violation and a passive violation. He makes no mention of karka olam – neither in arayos nor in the taking of another life.

THE TWO VIEWS OF “WHY IS YOUR BLOOD ANY REDDER?”

Rav Chaim presents two possible understandings of the concept of “why is your blood any redder than his” within the Rambam. The first view is that one must always remain passive. The second view is that there is always an obligation to give up one’s life rather than cause the death of another – even if the causing is only indirect.

PROVING THE SECOND VIEW

Rav Chaim cites a Gemorah from Bava Metziah 62a to prove only that when saving a life we apply the dictum of VeChai Achicha Imach – that your life takes precedence. There, the case is where two people are in the desert and one has a container of water, but it is not enough for both to survive. The pasuk of veChai achicha imach is applied to say that only when you will also live are you obligated to give him the water. It is not a case of murder, however. We see, therefore, that the idea of one’s life taking precedence does not apply when dealing with the prohibition of actually taking the life of another person – even if it were passive.

SECOND PIECE

The Chidushei Rabbi Chaim, his classic work, was published in 1936 by his children. There was another collection of his Torah thoughts, known as the “stencils” or the tagbuch, which have appeared sporadically throughout the years. The bulk of this work was published from Rav Chaim’s original hand in 5778. The piece below is translated from this latter work.

A BRIS WITHIN 8 DAYS VERSUS A BRIS AT NIGHT

The Ramah (YD 262:1) rules that if a baby was circumcised within the eight-day period, there is no need to perform a hatafas dam bris – taking a drop of blood afterward. If, however, the baby was circumcised at night, a hatafas dam bris is required. The commentators (TaZ 262:2) have already asked, “What is the difference between the two cases?”

Rav Chaim answers this contradiction by writing:

It would appear to me [that this can be answered] according to that which is stated in Shabbos [135b]: Whomsoever would not set aside the Shabbos for his circumcision [on account of his not yet being Jewish] – there is no requirement to wait until the 8th day to circumcise him. Previously, the Gemorah stated [135a] regarding an androgynous person that there is a drasha (Vayikra 12:3), “orlaso” – full removal of the foreskin sets aside the Shabbos – but a requirement of taking a drop of blood does not require that the bris be performed on the eighth day.

If so, it is not relevant to say that someone who was circumcised within the 8 days requires a hatafas dam bris. This is because the taking of the drop would have to be immediate and right afterward – because there would not be a requirement to wait for the 8th day. Whereas this would not be the case where the milah took place at night [of the 8th], as we see in Yevamos 72 that even the hatafas dam bris must be done in the daytime. If so, regarding this nighttime milah, a hatafas dam bris would be ineffective. Therefore, it makes sense that it would require a new hatafa in the daytime.

See the Rosh (tractate Shabbos, Perek Rabbi Eliezer, end of Siman 5) and the Rambam (Mila 1:7), who both rule that [a requirement of] hatafas dam bris necessitates 8th day circumcisions. However, this is because the foreskin of the androgynous is considered safaik orlah kevusha. Here, however, this is not the case, for he has already been circumcised and the requirement is only that there be dam bris alone. One can say that this would, therefore, not have a requirement of circumcising on the 8th day.

ONLY WORKS ACCORDING TO ROSH AND RAAVAD – NOT RAMBAM

However, all this will only work in accordance with the view of the Rosh. The Rambam, on the other hand (Trumos 7:11), holds that it is not considered safek orlah kevushah, and nonetheless rules that the circumcision must happen on the eighth day. However, see that the Rambam’s view in Hilchos Mila (1:10–11) is that the requirement for it to be on the eighth day is not dependent on Shabbos. This is not the view of the Raavad (Mila 1:10), who argues and holds that the requirement for waiting eight days and the laws of not performing it on the Shabbos are dependent upon each other. Therefore, we can certainly say as we have written.

THIRD PIECE: THE TWO KAVANOS OF TEFILLAH

The two pieces above are both narrow – a question in the laws of martyrdom and a question in the laws of milah. The piece below, from Chidushei Rabbeinu Chaim HaLevi on Hilchos Tefillah, is the one most often cited as the specimen of the method, and it touches something every person does three times a day.

THE CONTRADICTION IN THE RAMBAM

The Rambam writes (Hilchos Tefillah 4:15) that any tefillah which is not accompanied by kavanah is not tefillah, and that one who has davened without kavanah must go back and daven with kavanah. He then explains (4:16) what kavanah consists of: that one clear his heart of all other thoughts and see himself as standing before the Shechinah.

Yet the Rambam rules elsewhere (Hilchos Tefillah 10:1) that one who did not have kavanah in the first bracha goes back, whereas if he had kavanah in the first bracha and then recited the rest by rote, he does not go back. The two rulings appear irreconcilable. If tefillah without kavanah is not tefillah, why should the last sixteen brachos be any different from the first?

RAV CHAIM’S ANSWER

Rav Chaim writes, in substance:

It appears that there are two separate matters of kavanah here. The first is kavanah in the sense of the meaning of the words – that a person understand what he is saying as he says it. The second is the kavanah that a person is standing in prayer before Hashem, as the Rambam wrote, that he see himself as though he is standing before the Shechinah.

And these two are not of one law. Regarding kavanah of the meaning of the words – this is a requirement within the tefillah, and the halacha is that its absence is me’akev only in the first bracha. But the kavanah of standing before Hashem is not a requirement in the tefillah at all; rather, it is the very definition of the act. For what is tefillah? It is service of the heart. And where a person does not know that he stands before Hashem, there is no service of the heart there and no act of tefillah at all – and this is required throughout the entire Shemoneh Esrei, and its absence invalidates in every bracha equally.

WHAT THE DISTINCTION ACCOMPLISHES

This is the tzvei dinim tool operating at full strength. The word “kavanah” had been treated as naming a single obligation of varying intensity. Rav Chaim showed that it names two obligations of entirely different orders – one a condition inside the mitzvah, the other a condition on whether there is a mitzvah at all. The first can be graded, waived in part, and confined to the opening bracha. The second cannot be graded at all, because a person either knows before Whom he stands or he does not.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is frequently reversed in popular retellings. A person whose attention wandered from the meaning of the words in the middle brachos has davened. A person who stood for eighteen brachos without any awareness of standing before the Ribbono Shel Olam has not performed an act of tefillah in the first place.

RAV CHAIM’S SENSE OF HUMOR

Somewhere in the Pale of Settlement, Rav Chaim Soloveitchik was at an inn where he met a certain well-known Gaon, the Rogatchover, who attempted to answer a number of difficulties by proposing that marriage can be looked at as an institution that continuously renews its chalos – its “sanctioned legal status from shamayim,” so to speak. After the Gaon offered this explanation, which in Rav Chaim’s view was an overuse of the idea of klerring chakiros, Rav Chaim responded, “In that case, I must now offer you a Mazel Tov.”

An alternative version of the story is that Rav Chaim’s response was, “In that case, Mazel Tov, Mazel Tov, Mazel Tov…”

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE DERECH

A method often ends with its author unless it is carried. Rav Chaim’s was carried by an unusually gifted generation of talmidim, each of whom took it in a different direction:

• Reb Boruch Ber Leibowitz, who established Knesses Beis Yitzchok in Kamenitz and whose Birkas Shmuel is perhaps the most faithful rendering of his rebbe’s mode of thought in print – and whose talmidim carried it to America and Eretz Yisrael.
• Reb Shimon Shkop, who headed Sha’ar HaTorah in Grodno and whose Sha’arei Yosher fused the analytic method with a more conceptual and almost philosophical treatment of halachic categories, producing a distinct school of its own.
• Reb Elchonon Wasserman hy”d of Baranovich, whose Kovetz Shiurim and Kovetz He’aros applied the method with characteristic rigor and who extended it into questions of emunah and hashkafa.
• Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, whose Even HaAzel on the Rambam became a standard companion to the very text Rav Chaim had made the arena of the method, and who transplanted the derech to Yerushalayim through Eitz Chaim.

Beyond the individual names, the more remarkable point is structural. The standard yeshiva shiur as it is delivered today – anywhere in the world, in almost any yeshiva of almost any orientation – is his invention. The presentation of a difficulty in the Rambam, the rejection of the obvious resolution, the proposal of a distinction between two dinim, the return to the sugya to test the distinction against a series of unrelated halachos: this is not how a shiur was given before Rav Chaim, and it is very nearly the only way a shiur is given after him. Institutions that have no connection to Brisk, and some that are ideologically distant from it, teach in the form he created without particular awareness that they are doing so.

THE OBJECTIONS

Honesty requires noting that the method was not universally welcomed in its own time, and the reservations came from serious quarters rather than from opponents of Torah study.

The most substantial objection was historical and textual. The Brisker method is largely indifferent to how a text came to say what it says – to variants in girsah, to the development of a halacha across generations, to the possibility that a difficulty in the Rambam reflects a scribal error rather than a conceptual distinction. 

A second objection came from within the yeshiva world itself. There was concern that a method so satisfying to a sharp mind would displace the older ideals of bekius, of mastery of the full breadth of shas, and of the connection between learning and yiras shamayim – that a generation would arise expert in chakiros and unfamiliar with large portions of the Gemara. The mussar movement’s reservations about the intellectualization of learning were partly a response to exactly this.

Whether these objections have been borne out is a question on which serious people continue to differ. What is beyond dispute is that no other individual of the last several centuries so completely reshaped the way Torah is studied.

The author can be reached at [email protected]