[Avodah] Reb Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz on RSRH's 19 Letters

[Prof. Levine]

At 08:09 PM 8/1/2010, Moshe Y. Gluck wrote:
>R' SFM wasn't saying that every American Yeshiva student needs to read the
>Nineteen Letters to be Jewish; he was saying that he didn't understand _how_
>they remained Jewish even though they didn't read the Nineteen letters. That
>they _did_ stay Jewish, even though they did not read that estimable work,
>was not in question. In RSFM son's and son-in-law's Yeshiva, TTBOMK, the
>Nineteen Letters were not studied (certainly not in my years there), nor
>were any other of R' SRH's works.

First of all, what does TTBOMK stand for? Secondly, it appears that
his son and son-in-law did not follow in his derech! The following is
from his bio, pages 37-38:

He was alive to every facet of genuine Torah expression. "Some souls,"
he used to say, "drink from Tanya. Others from the Ramchal. Still others
from Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. I drink from all of them, though at any
given time, I might drink from one in particular." He had the genius
to draw from every strand of authentic Jewish thought, to place those
various strands in relation to one another, and to see each of them as
simply another path to knowledge and service of the Divine. Who else could
have used the works of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch to explain a difficult
passage in a classic chassidic work such as Tanya, or vice versa.

Having concluded that a comprehensive grounding in traditional Jewish
thought was an indispensable weapon in his upcoming battle, Reb Shraga
Feivel did not study the classic texts in isolation. His analytic mind
probed the differences in terminology and presentation between the
various presentations of Torah Judaism, which sometimes obscured the
much larger areas of agreement.

For the impending battle, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch became the
model. Rabbi Hirsch's success in arresting the rush to Reform in Germany
served as an example of what one man could do. Rabbi Hirsch's ability to
speak the language of modem man - the product of the Enlightenment and
the scientific worldview - while remaining entirely rooted in classic
Jewish sources and thought, was something Reb Shraga Feivel explicitly
sought to emulate. Rabbi Hirsch had not been intimidated by 19th-century
thought or the rapid advance of science in his day, and neither would Reb
Shraga Feivel shy away from the challenges of the 20th century. Having
identified Rabbi Hirsch as one of the exemplars of what he hoped to
achieve in life, Reb Shraga Feivel pored over his vast corpus of writings.

Yitzchok Levine