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<font size=3>At 11:19 AM 10/28/2018, Micha Berger wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at
12:04:29PM +0000, Professor L. Levine via Avodah wrote:<br>
: Please see
<a href="http://personal.stevens.edu/~llevine/Reading%20Newspapers%20on%20Shabbos.pdf" eudora="autourl">
http://personal.stevens.edu/~llevine/Reading%20Newspapers%20on%20Shabbos.pdf</a>
<br>
: The author points out that many are unaware of these halachas.<br><br>
And yet, the Netziv spend Friday night reading the haskalishe
newspapers.<br>
One of the things in My Uncle the Netziv, a translation of excerpts
from<br>
the Torah Temimah's Meqor Baruch, that got BMG to recall a mailing
of<br>
them a couple of decades ago.<br><br>
Add to the list of issues with rewriting the past that it can cause
an<br>
artificial evolution of halakh.</blockquote><br><br>
I have been told that R. Baruch Epstein was not known for the
accurateness of his writings. The person who told me this claimed that
RYBS said this. <br><br>
In any event see<br><br>
<a href="http://traditionarchive.org/news/originals/Volume%2035/No.%201/Rayna%20Batya%20and.pdf" eudora="autourl">
http://traditionarchive.org/news/originals/Volume%2035/No.%201/Rayna%20Batya%20and.pdf</a>
<br><br>
From there<br><br>
The findings in this article seem to confirm the judgment of some<br>
scholars that the rabbinic sources cited by R. Epstein should not be<br>
taken as accurate and that they require independent confirmation
from<br>
the original sources.61 Certainly the inconsistencies found in MB
cast<br>
serious doubt as to its value as a completely accurate historical
account.<br>
We will never know what lies behind the puzzling inaccuracies in R.<br>
Epstein's oeuvre, nor is it for us to speculate. R. Menachem Kasher,<br>
after setting severe strictures about the reliability of R. Epstein's
citations, nevertheless expresses a charitable <br>
understanding of the circumstances that may have brought this about.
Noting R. Epstein's statement in MB<br>
that he lived a "life of suffering" (hayyei tsa)ar), R.
Kasher<br>
writes that R. Epstein was a "great man" (adam gadol) whose ))
is "a<br>
monumental work" (avoda anakit), and he attributes the many
inaccuracies<br>
in the work to R. Epstein's difficult and inordinately busy
life<br>
which did not permit him to check his sources as carefully as he
should<br>
have. <br><br>
One old lesson emerges reinforced from all this-a lesson for<br>
researchers in any field, especially the field of Torah scholarship.<br>
Primary material must be carefully examined, and if only secondary<br>
sources are available, their veracity must be meticulously
ascertained.<br>
Rayna Batya seems to have been an extraordinary woman, but the
inaccuracies<br>
in R Epstein's telling of her story cloud our ability to know
her<br>
and her absorbing story.<br><br>
We close this article, which is written in sadness rather than glee,
by<br>
noting one final irony. When Mesorah Publications published a translation
<br>
of R. Epstein's MB, tided My Uncle the Netziv, it deleted certain<br>
key words.64 The passage in which we learned of Rayna Batya's
scholar-<br>
ship was one of the changed passages. The original passage, for example,
<br>
mentioned the venous books she used and included, among others,<br>
Mishnayot and books of aggada. In the English translation, these
books<br>
were deleted from the list, causing much indignation in the
scholarly<br>
world at this attempt to revise history.<br><br>
How ironic it is that this effort to "sanitize" R. Epstein's
reputation<br>
should have inadvertency hit upon the truth: that the story of Rayna<br>
Batya lie many other elements in MB and Torah Temima are in fact in<br>
need of serious revision.<br><br>
_________________________________<br>
In light of all this can we really be sure that the Netziv read
newspapers on Shabbos?<br><br>
YL<br>
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