[Avodah] Halacha vs. Policy - Poll re: Who To Marry

[Isaac Balbin]

> 
> Message: 5
> Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2010 14:56:53 +0200
> From: Michael Makovi <mikewinddale at gmail.com>
> 
> I've seen this before, and I've never understood where Rabbi Kaminetsky
> gets his prima facie from.

Indeed, and this is why you have a problem with it. Consider the talmid whose apprenticeship with a Posek serves not only to refine his halachic nouse, but to expose him to the world of experience and life.
You have life and experience by virtue of the fact that you have not spent your days in a cloistered environment surrounded only by limudei kodesh. I don't say that disparagingly. This may well not be the case for the brilliant avreich who is ready to serve his apprenticeship. In certain groups it's in fact the rule rather than the exception.


> I haven't served as an apprentice to a poseq,
> but nevertheless, it was still my gut reaction that marrying the Jewish
> woman who violates niddah is preferable to marrying the non-Jew. This is
> obvious, and you don't need to serve under a poseq to know it.

As above, if your life and attachment to Torah has only seen the empirical boundaries of Sachar V'Onesh and Issur V'Hetter in determining right and wrong, limited to black letters on white pages, then yes.

> I don't see
> why serving under a poseq would make this any more or less obvious.

Oh yes it would. Serving under a posek would expose the avreich to real people and real people's problems. Do not for one minute underestimate the incredible enormity of that experience for many who undertake shimush.

[As an aside, it is said that someone who became exposed to R' Aharon Soloveitchik and the topics brought to him made the [what's obvious to you and me] statement that "R' Aharon is also a psychologist giving eytzes". They won't learn that in the Shach and Taz]
 

> Why on
> earth would someone think that it is better to marry the non-Jew??!! Just
> read all the Tanakhic narratives and midrashim about marrying gentiles,
> versus the narratives and midrashim about niddah, and see which one says
> worse things.

Narratives and Midrashim (let alone Zohar and Kabala) which don't determine law in shulchan aruch are just that in the eyes of the black and white avreich serving an apprenticeship. 

> I believe Ezra compares intermarriage to worshiping other
> gods, but I don't recall seeing anything like this about niddah. Rabbi
> Kaminetsky's opinion, that the unexperienced unlearned will say that it
> is better to marry a non-Jew, is simply false in my experience.

Yes, and that is precisely the point. In YOUR experience. V'dal.

I'll leave it at that, but note that perhaps youthful exuberance also filled you with a little to much leeway in the manner in which you wrote about a revered figure. I too don't subscribe to unthinking consideration of halachic imperatives and the "obvious", but I know enough to confidently state that R' Kaminetsky lived in this world and was an Ish [HaChesed and Ish] HaEmes. 

He was not the naive thinker you may have portrayed in your response.