[Avodah] Rav Chazkel Levenstein On The Capture Of Adolf Eichmamm ym"s

[Micha Berger]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2011 at 04:07:39PM -0500, Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer wrote:
> On 2/24/2011 3:02 PM, Micha Berger wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 11:30:24AM -0500, Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer wrote:
>>> The variation on this theme that I heard, from Rabbi Meir Schlesinger,
>>> is that Reb Chatzkel if you gave your typical yeshiva bachur 007 license
>>> to kill, with exemption from punishment in both this world and the next,
>>> he would become a serial killer (perhaps he said mass murderer - it
>>> amounts to the same thing).

>> I'm curious to know RCL's intent. I could read this at least two ways:
...
>> 2- Yeshiva bachurim get used to positing abstract rules without a
>>     general gefeel for morality, and thus would do evil if there were
>>     no rule against it.

> It was presented to us as more of the latter (#2).

This reminds me of a contrast made by RABrill between RYAmital and
RALichtenstein <http://www.edah.org/backend/JournalArticle/BRILL_5_2.pdf>,
pp 5-6:
    The second story concerns the scenario where one is in an extreme
    situation and has this choice: whether to either eat human flesh or
    pork. The standard halakhah designates pork as a biblical prohibition
    and human flesh as only a rabbinic prohibition (assuming the flesh
    is already dead and there is no question of murder); hence one
    should eat the human flesh. R. Lichtenstein is wont to go further
    and consistently point out that the punishment for the consumption
    of pork is only lashes while eating fruits from the priestly portion
    that has not been taken is excision (karet). In contrast, R. Amital
    almost shouts out from his soul that human flesh should be repulsive
    to everyone's natural sense of morality so that one should eat the
    pork, and the reason that the prohibition was not stated in the
    Torah was because this revulsion is a natural intuition not needing
    to be stated. R. Amital also adds a more halakhic reason that the
    calculation of choosing to violate a rabbinic prohibition over a
    biblical one is itself only rabbinic.

I heard it put this way (semi-seriously), if the two were to survive
a plane crash with only the proverbial two choices for food, both
would choose the pork over the bodies of those who didn't survive. The
difference is RAL, the Brisker, would feel guilty about it afterward.
Whereas R' Amital... Well, let me continue quoting RABrill's article:

    He further cites as a paradigm for his thought the famous statement of
    Rabbi Moses Samuel Glasner (1856-1924) in his Introduction to Hullin,
    where he states that just because something is not forbidden does not
    mean that it is permitted, e.g., the case of choosing to eat human
    flesh over pork. R. Amital guards himself in the halakhic realm by
    noting that some say R. Glazer went too far -- and may not be correct
    as halakhah. However, for R. Amital, R. Glazer's approach can still
    serve as our paradigm of ethics and as a rejection of legal formalism
    by affirming mandates outside of texts (page 40). Once again we are
    left without criteria about when to rely on this moral sense;...

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy,
micha at aishdas.org        if only because it offers us the opportunity of
http://www.aishdas.org   self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                              - Arthur C. Clarke