[Avodah] Normal People Don't Care About Those Things

[Ben Bradley]

'To the best of my knowledge, Rav Moshe Mendelssohn himself was most
definitely Orthodox (although that term may be a bit anachronistic?), even
if his ideas later became important in the development of Reform. The view
that he himself was somehow Reform seems to be based primarily on ignorance.'


Yes it is anachronistic to call Mendelson Orthodox or Reform, as neither term was yet in use. However he was certainly a trail blazer, and the trail he blazed lead straight to Reform within a generation. He was a traditionally trained talmid chacham and his writings remained technically and halachically within the bounds of Torah thought. But in his thoughts about the relationship between being German and being Jewish , and his openly unreserved desire to embrace German culture, he paved an obvious path to the deviances of Reform from derech haTorah, not only in hindsight but also in the view of some contemporaries. So perhaps viewing him as being proto-Reform is more accurate. I certainly see no need to accord him the honorific of Rabbi. The damage he wrought is tremendous.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20260121/810860e6/attachment.htm>