Vance, Tucker, Ner Yisrael and R. Feldman
Silence is Complicity
I want to start this post with an apology. My previous post was about the letter signed by R. Aharon Feldman and others supporting R. Yitzchak Yosef, who is in in the news for his blanket opposition to any IDF enlistment and his nasty attacks on those who call for it. On the spur of the moment (I was writing it while traveling) I titled it “Baltimore Backs Them Up,” which was unfair. There is a sizeable Jewish community in Baltimore and a range of attitudes towards Israel and the IDF; for example, while some did not attend the Washington rally, others did. There is no reason to rate them as all being in the same category as R. Aharon Feldman, and I should not have implied otherwise. I was wrong and I apologize.
Yet while it is wrong to hold all of Baltimore Jewry guilty by association, R. Feldman is not the only Baltimorian who needs to be held to account for this letter. Allow me to explain by way of discussing a similar situation.
As you may be aware, while the Democrats have become plagued by Islamist sympathizers, the Republicans have become plagued by Nazi sympathizers. Nick Fuentes, a self-proclaimed Hitler fan with a million groyper followers on X, was recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Tucker did not push back on Fuentes’ support for Hitler or Stalin. Tucker’s supporters claim that this does not mean that he endorses such things, but of course everyone with a brain and a moral spine recognizes that it does. It’s not just that Tucker is renowned for challenging interviewees that he dislikes; it’s that if you don’t push back when someone says that they love Hitler and Stalin, your silence is a form of complicity.
And it goes one level up. Tucker has revealed himself to be a vile and anti-American person in several other ways, with his obsessive hatred for Israel while he runs PR for Russia and Qatar. And yet people like Megyn Kelly, Kevin Roberts, and most significantly JD Vance and unfortunately now even Trump still stand by Tucker and, while they do not endorse his views and statements, neither do they condemn him for them. They give all kinds of excuses as to why they won’t condemn him - they speak about friendship and free speech and whatnot - but these are not reasons that prevent them from condemning others.
Thus, while one can debate whether Kelly, Roberts, Vance and Trump are tacitly supporting Tucker’s evil views, they are certainly guilty of effectively supporting them. When someone as prominent as Tucker Carlson propagates such extreme positions, silence is complicity.
I think that we can all agree on that. And it’s an explicit statement in the Gemara:
“Anyone who had the capability to effectively protest the sinful conduct of the members of his household and did not protest, he himself is apprehended for the sins of the members of his household and punished. If he is in a position to protest the sinful conduct of the people of his town, and he fails to do so, he is apprehended for the sins of the people of his town. If he is in a position to protest the sinful conduct of the whole world, and he fails to do so, he is apprehended for the sins of the whole world.” (Shabbat 54b)
Now let’s get back to R. Aharon Feldman. True, he is just one person, and he is certainly not representative of the views of the faculty of Ner Yisrael. He was merely selected to be the Rosh Yeshivah for his Talmudic acumen.
Still, that’s a pretty prominent position, which confers a certain endorsement of his legitimacy as a rabbinic authority. And while his vile letter opposing IDF service was not written on formal yeshivah letterhead, his personal letterhead does present him as being the Rosh Yeshivah of Ner Yisrael, with no disclaimer that his views do not necessarily represent that of the institution. This means that the yeshivah, if they feel that his views are objectionable, has a responsibility to say so. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that if he wrote a letter encouraging people to vote for Mamdani, as some Satmar leaders did, the yeshiva would speak up.) The yeshivah’s failure to do so, even if they do not agree with his views, is a form of complicity.
But this is only one aspect of a broader problem. As far as I can tell, with the obvious exception of YU, pretty much no black-hat yeshiva in the US (and certainly not in Israel) supports IDF service. No charedi yeshiva even davvens for the welfare of soldiers. Some will davven vaguely for “the situation,” but not the misheberach for Tzahal, and nor will they explicitly recite Tehillim for soldiers. (R. Feldman himself has helpfully explicitly stated the reasons as to why the charedi world is against davening for soldiers.) And they certainly won’t talk about soldiers, even religious soldiers, as being praiseworthy role models.
As I make my way around the US on my current speaking tour, I am amazed at how many good Jews, people who naturally value the men (and women) who engage in unbelievable sacrifice and sometimes pay a terrible price in order to protect the Jews of Israel, financially support yeshivos which do not value them. It’s not as though there aren’t other yeshivot to support - yeshivot which produce these heroes rather than ignore them. So why support those that don’t?!
If you value all the sacrifices that are being made for us, then support the institutions which likewise value them, and stop supporting the institutions that do not. And make sure to tell them why.
I am going to reveal something to you as an argument for why you should please keep the machlokes between charedim and the rest of Israel only in Israel and to refrain from importing it in any way to the US. We have enough tzaros here and have our own way of trying to make progress and you are out of touch with it.
At the height of the "Slifkin Affair," I was present with Rav Shmuel Kaminetsky, shlita, when he received a phone call from someone calling on behalf of Rav Elyashiv, asking him to make a statement against your books. Rav Shmuel's response was, I am not going to bring this machlokes to America.
At the time, Rav Shmuel was a leading voice in the US yeshiva world (RAF had only been here for a couple of years, then, at most), and he said, essentially, whatever the nature of this machlokes is over there, here is different. We don't need that here. It's better that you and your books are unopposed than to cause machlokes that is always so tragic for everyone around, as we learn from Korach.
Please. The machlokes there is understandable, as the charedi position is deplorable and the legal system is terrifying them now, though I remain as deeply opposed to your approach to addressing it as ever. But it's different here. We have better ways of working through it. So, so many individuals in the Yeshiva world have their hearts in the right place, unlike charedim in Israel. But the history here and the socio-religious reality here do not allow a productive or relevant conversation about it today that will not leave our whole national community severely damaged. Whatever you think is needed in Israel, it's really, really not needed here.
It's great that you will leave Baltimore out of it, but - like Rav Shmuel did for you - please leave the rest of the country out if it, too.
I as well applaud backing off from associating Baltimore and Ner Yisroel with R' Feldman's vile letter and also understand how it would be institutional suicide for Ner Yisroel to denounce him and thereby earn the wrath of the Lakewood Machine.
The very goal of the Feldman letter is to bring the machlokes to America and publicly strongarm the rest of the American Mo'etzes, to forestall accommodation of relative moderates, be they pragmatic ba'alei battim or relatively moderate rabbonim.
So, as regards to DG's Rav Shmuel advice, hasn't that horse already left the barn, leaving the moderates with nowhere to go other than open warfare, which as DG said about Rav Shmuel, is not the moderates' style?
Looks to me like a replay of the Washington March playbook, where the extremists forced a lettter not to go and the moderates quietly went along, lest it look like there was a split in the Agudah.
Score another for the extremist team.