[Avodah] Rav Shimon Schwab - TIDE is not a Hora'as Sha'ah

[Prof. Levine via Avodah]

The following is from the article The Ish 
Haemes,  A Man of Unimpeachable Integrity,  Rabbi 
Shimon Schwab by Eliyahu Meir Klugman that 
appeared in the Jewish Observer ,  Summer 1995 
issue.  One may read the entire article at

http://web.stevens.edu/golem/llevine/rsrh/jo_r_schwab.pdf

Revision, For the Sake of Truth

His [Rav Shimon Schwab,  ZT"L]  adherence to emes was
such that he was willing to
revise long held views. even if
that meant a reassessment of publicly
stated positions. His views on the relevance
of Torah im Derech Eretz are a
case in point With the rise of Nazism
in the l 930's, Rabbi Schwab was convinced
that Torah im Derech Eretz as
expounded by Rabbi S.R Hirsch was
no longer relevant, not as an educational
program and certainly not as a
Weltanschauung. The barbarity of the
Nazi beast (even before World Warm.
the virulent anti-Semitism in Germany,
and the total failure of the ideals
of enlightened humanism and
Western culture to change the essential
nature of gentile society led him to
conclude that the only path for the Torah-
observant German Jew was to return
to the 'Torah Only» approach,
and to shun Western culture and the
world at large as much as possible.
Rabbi Hirsch's Torah im Derech Eretz
ideal, he averred, was only a hora'as
sha'ah, a temporary measure for a
temporary situation. In 1934, he aired
these views in a slim volume entitled
Heimkehr ins Judentum (Homecoming
into Judaism), which caused a sensation
in German Orthodoxy.

But after coming to America, he
concluded that the realities of the
ghetto and the shtetl where one could
spend all one's life in the local beis
hamidrash, with its total dissociation
from the rest of society, was a way of
life that had also been consumed in
the flames of the Holocaust. The realities
of life in the United States and
other Western countries. where the
Jew traveled in non-Jewish circles
and could not live totally apart from
around him, were not essentially different from the situation
in the Western Europe of Rabbi
Hirsch. Furthermore, a careful study
of all of Rabbi Hirsch's writings led
him to the inevitable conclusion that
he had never meant Torah im Derech
Eretz as a hom'as sha'ah at all. It was
not a compromise, a kula, or a hetter.
Although Rav Hirsch did not insist
that it was for everyone, he certainly
did not see it as time bound. Rabbi
Schwab then publicly retracted his
earlier insistence on 'Torah Only" as
the sole way of life for the Torah Jew
in Western society. (Rabbi Schwab always
viewed the situation in Eretz
Yisroel as essentially unique, but that
is beyond the purview of this article.)
To that end he published in 1966 a
booklet entitled These and Those {Eilu
v'Eilu), wherein he set forth the arguments
and counter-arguments for
both positions, with the conclusion,
as the title indicates, that both, in
their proper time and place, are legitimate
ways of life for the Torah Jew in
Western society.
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