[Avodah] More on Reviving a Ritual of Tending to the dead

[Chana Luntz]

 RJK wrote:
> Well, that may be the only way it makes sense to Rn"CL, but that's simply
> not what RYBS wrote or said.  He never extended his position, which he
> reiterated a number of times, to any halachic act other than davening in a
> mixed pew shul -- a critical issue to the Orthodox community in the 1950s
> when these statements were made and when many shuls with mechitzot were
> changing to mixed pews.

I wasn't suggesting he did, or at least, that wasn't the thrust of my
post (or in other words it is irrelevant whether he did or he did not),
what is relevant is the logic applied. If it will make you happier, I
will refer to the Movement For Mixed Pews (MFMP) as opposed to the C or
R movement as the one where RYBS felt there need to be a line in the sand.

The point is the same. We have a situation where a specific halachic
situation is innocuous (shofar blowing) and yet the psak is that an
individual should not avail themselves of this halachic situation in order
to fulfil their obligation (even in circumstances where no other option is
available), because of other surrounding problematic halachic situations.

Which group or scenario it is that is deemed sufficiently problematic
and in what circumstances is secondary. A halachic purist would say,
if this particular halachic act is mutar, what is the problem? What is
noteworthy is that this is often not the approach taken, and once one
takes a different approach, then it is just a matter of identifying
which groups or scenarios one regards as sufficiently problematic to
apply the logic.

>    If one reads his statements (I wonder whether Rn'CL did that), it's all
> about mixed pews; there's no indication that it can, or should, be extended
> to any other "halachic act from the R or C movements as a whole."  It wasn't
> a case of not "recognizing the[ir] shofar blowing";

> it was a case of keeping the O Jews out of mixed pew shuls. The clear
> implication, if one actually reads what he said (a number of his statements
> on this issue can be found in Baruch Litvin's "The Sanctity of the
> Synagogue"), is that if the C Jew who blew the shofar in the mixed pew shul
> would come to the O Jew's house to blow it for him/her after davening, there
> would be no problem.

That is precisely the point I was making, it is this fact that
demonstrates that the act of shofar blowing was itself deemed halachically
innocuous (if there was a problem with the individual coming to the house,
then one might say there was an intrinsic problem in the shofar blowing,
ie the person could not be an appropriate shaliach or whatever).

Once it is clear that the shofar blowing itself is halachically innocuous
and mutar, then it becomes clear that (according to some, including
RYBS) sometimes the mutar becomes assur because of the other things that
the environment or group doing the otherwise halachically mutar act are
doing (for example, having mixed pews). This is by no means intuitively
correct (and in fact I am not at all convinced that everybody by any means
would agree that it is correct in the kind of circumstances described).
But once you make that leap, then it becomes very easy to argue for it to
apply to groups different from the ones that perhaps RYBS applied it to,
wherever the line in the sand is now to be drawn. It is precisely the
same logic which might say, even if a tahara (shofar) by a C or R Jew
(MFMP) is halachically mutar, we need to keep people out of the domain
of C and R (MMFP).

> Joseph Kaplan