[Avodah] Characterizing our era (was: Re: shabbas//mishum eiva, etc???)

[Elazar M. Teitz]

Resonding to RMicha Berger's comment
 
>I didn't even know there /was/ a post-acharonic, although I have argued
that history would someday draw a line at the Shoah,<

RMoshe Y. Gluck wrote

>I like drawing the line at R' Chaim Volozhiner, and calling everything
afterward the era of the Roshei Yeshivos.<

     In pre-WWII Europe, the g'dolei Torah, with few exceptions, were the rabbonim, not the roshei yeshiva.  R. Chaim Soloveitchik was not a rosh yeshiva; he was Brisker Rov, as were his father and son.  R. Chaim Ozer did not have a yeshiva; he was Vilner Rov.  R. Moshe Feinstein was a rov in a shtetl. Even in the "new world," R. Yaakov Kamenetzky, e.g., became what he was a a rov, and only later in life became a rosh yeshiva.  Many had talmidim, but that was one of the functions of a rov, if he chose to assume it.  Where there was a yeshiva, its head either was, or was subservient to, the rav ha'ir.

     It was only after the churban of European Jewry, when the center of the Torah world shifted to the US and Israel, that the situation changed.  Rabbonus was unlike the European model: many of the demands made on a modern-day rabbi are not conducive to Torah growth.  Furthermore, by their attitude towards rabbonim and rabbonus, the roshei yeshiva willy-nilly discouraged major talmidei chachomim -- who might have elevated the status of the rabbinate -- from undertaking rabbonus. 

    In sum, RMYG is right: we are now in the era of the roshei yeshiva.  But RMB, too, is correct: the dividing  line at which this new era was ushered in is the shoa.

EMT

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