[Avodah] Minhag Avos and Minhag haMaqom

[Michael Makovi]

> The question that always bothered me is when (and why)  did the nature
> change from primarily community based to family based? I say primarily
> because IIRC the chatam sofer and R' Moshe allowed a ben Yeshiva to
> change his minhag to that of the Yeshiva.
>
> R' Joel Rich

See the post I just made to "Minhag Avos and Sephardim"
(http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/getindex.cgi?section=M#MINHAG AVOS AND
SEPHARDIM), the references to Professor Menachem Friedman.

Professor Friedman sees the rise of the higher yeshivot as one of the
THE primary causes of the rise of Haredism, and I might note that
Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits's article "Review of Recent Halakhic
Literature: Rabbis and Deans" (Tradition 7:4-8:1, Winter, 1965-Spring,
1966) seems to agree with Professor Friedman. (I saw the reference to
Rabbi Jakobovits in Professor Marc Shapiro's review of The Uses of
Tradition, Tradition 28:2, Winter 1994.)

Professor Friedman notes that traditionally, the yeshivot were part of
the community, and the rosh yeshiva was also the local communal rabbi.
Also, students would eat and sleep with local families. By contrast,
in the new Volozhin-type yeshivot, the rosh yeshiva was distinct from
the local rabbi, and the students rarely met the local townspeople.
Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan (the son of the Netziv) notes that there was
almost no relationship between the townspeople and students of
Volozhin.

The result, says Professor Friedman, is that students lived in an
ivory tower where the realities of real life meant little. One could
double his double cup size, because he wasn't confronted with any
living tradition to the contrary. The real traditions of Judaism were
in the common people, but the yeshiva students were not exposed to
these. Thus, a hyper-textual anti-mimetic Judaism evolved.

Your discussion of roshei yeshiva allowing students to adopt the
yeshiva's minhagim over that of their parents would bear all this out.

However, Professor Haym Soloveitchik disagrees, in footnotes 68 and 85
of "Rupture and Reconstruction"
(http://www.lookstein.org/links/orthodoxy.htm).

Michael Makovi