[Avodah] Reading Newspapers and Other secular Literature on Shabbos

[Toby Katz]

From: "Prof. Levine" <larry62341 at optonline.net>
>: Please see
>: http://personal.stevens.edu/~llevine/Reading%20Newspapers%20on%20Shabbos.pdf
>: The author points out that many are unaware of these halachas.

My father asked me not to read novels on Shabbos. He didn't say anything
to me about reading non-fiction. I was a teenager at the time.

I said he asked me, not he told me. I understood that novels were not
Shabbosdig. Secular novels, that is. There were almost no Jewish novels
back then. It is possible that he phrased it as a request rather than
halachic statement because he did not want to impose on me some stricture
that might turn me off. Possibly we are now discussing chinuch advice
for parents of teenage daughters rather than hilchos Shabbos.


From: Micha Berger <micha at aishdas.org>
> And yet, the Netziv spend Friday night reading the haskalishe newspapers.
> One of the things in My Uncle the Netziv, a translation of excerpts from
> the Torah Temimah's Meqor Baruch, that got BMG to recall a mailing of
> them a couple of decades ago.

> Add to the list of issues with rewriting the past that it can cause an
> artificial evolution of halakha.

Not Friday night and not maskilishe papers.

I have a copy of the letter that was sent out by the Lakewood Cheder
School, recalling the book <<My Uncle the Netziv>> which it had sent out
as a fundraiser. The letter does not say what is wrong with the book. All
it says is, <<It does not correctly portray the Netziv, his hashkafos,
kedusha, and yiras shamayim as related to us by his revered talmidim,
the ones who knew him best.>>

There seems to be a little dig there at the Torah Temima, R' Baruch
Epstein, who was the Netziv's nephew and also a ben bayis in the Netziv's
home and of course a talmid of the Netziv in the Volozhin yeshiva. But
apparently because he thought his uncle was human, a very great man but
still human, he somehow didn't <<really>> know his uncle. After the death
of his first wife, the Netziv married the sister of the Torah Temima
(yes, married his niece), thereupon becoming not only the uncle but
also the brother-in-law of the TT. Who nevertheless never really knew
his uncle/brother-in-law, according to Lakewood.

My father (R' Nachman Bulman) wrote a haskama for the book My Uncle the
Netziv, which is a translation (by Moshe Dombey) of parts of the TT's
memoirs, called in Hebrew <<Mekor Baruch.>> The book came out in 1988. To
quote part of my father's letter, which is the first page of the book:

> The experience of Torah life derives first and foremost from Torah
> learning. But the impact of Torah learning is immeasurably richer when
> the lives of living Sifrei Torah, of Torah Sages, become educative models
> for our people. Further, such lives are vital links in the chain of Jewish
> historical knowledge. Mekor Baruch is a matchless compendium of biography,
> memoirs, and lore....A glowing portrayal of Volozhin and its last central
> figure, the venerable Netziv, is a major part of the work....

I ran into a friend of mine in Brooklyn shortly after Lakewood recalled
the book, and he asked me, <<How could your father have gotten mixed up
in something like this, to write a haskama for a treif book? How could
he have made such a mistake?>>

At that point I had no idea who the Netziv was and had never heard of
the book or of the Lakewood recall, but I knew my father. <<If my father
gave a haskama I guarantee you the book is one hundred percent kosher
and it is Lakewood that has made the mistake>> was my instant reply.

I called my father up and asked him for the lowdown. He said that
some people in Lakewood were upset because the TT said his uncle read
newspapers, but it was because Lakewood was unfamiliar with the papers
mentioned in the book. My father actually laughed out loud as he told
me this. <<Do they think the Netziv was reading the New York Times?! He
was reading the equivalent of the Jewish Observer!>>

(The other thing that upset Lakewood, according to my father, was the
book's portrayal of the Netziv's first wife as a woman who loved to
learn and had seforim piled high on her kitchen table. My father was
amused by this, too. <<We never had learned women in our history!?>>)

I will quote a couple of paragraphs from My Uncle the Netziv, to give
the flavor of the book and of the humanity, the depth and breadth of
the Netziv's personality.

    He used to say that he considered the newspapers like greetings
    from the entire world and therefore waited expectantly for their
    arrival. [They were weeklies that arrived on Friday.] He would
    not look at the paper Friday night as that time was set aside for
    reviewing [his Torah learning]. He would save his perusal of the
    paper for Shabbos morning [after kiddush].

    It upset him greatly when one newspaper slandered another....My
    uncle's wrath was particularly provoked by his favorite papers--the
    Magid and Levanon--who could not seem to talk about each other with
    any sense of dignity and derech eretz....The owner of the Levanon,
    Yechiel Brill, had unilaterally decided that his paper would be the
    sole voice of the rabbinical community and Torah outlook on all the
    issues of the day....to his great chagrin, he found out that many
    rabbonim and members of the Torah community were also avid readers
    of his arch rival paper, the Magid...

The Levanon and the Magid were both Torah publications. So no, the
Netziv's Shabbos relaxation did not consist of reading maskilishe
newspapers!

I recently heard, by the way, that My Uncle the Netziv is once again
being sold openly in Lakewood seforim stores (apparently it has been
reprinted) and no one remembers that old controversy anymore. They
will sell you the book without putting it in a plain brown wrapper,
and I wouldn't be surprised if some people read the book on Shabbos.

-Toby Katz
t613k at aol.com