Controversial Rabbi ‘changed the face of Talmudic scholarship’
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, a renowned scholar of the Talmud who started studying its labyrinthine arguments when he was 5 and devoted much of his life to the controversial idea that it was riddled with inconsistencies and incongruities that required further inquiry and reconciling to sustain its divine authority, died June 28 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by his son Baruch Weiss, who said he had been in frail health and had recently left a hospital after a bout of pneumonia.
The lone survivor of the Holocaust in his Eastern European Jewish family, Halivni, who spent most of his career in Manhattan, was considered too radical, even heretical, by many Orthodox rabbis and too regressive by many Conservative Jewish leaders.
But he carved out his own no man’s land and won praise from rabbis across the spectrum for his painstaking devotion to interpreting the Talmud, and for the books he produced. These included a nine-volume commentary, Sources and Traditions, that encompassed many of the Talmud’s 63 tractates. A 10th volume may be patched together by his family from his writings and notes.
“He changed the face of Talmudic scholarship fundamentally and forever,” said Rabbi Gordon Tucker, the former dean of the rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the fountainhead of the Conservative movement, who studied with Halivni for four years. “His work is simply too persuasive to ignore. If you’re going to argue with him, you better have good arguments.”
What was pioneering about Halivni’s work was that he burrowed deeply into the history of how the Talmud — thousands of pages of commentaries and debates by sages seeking to clarify and expand upon statutes outlined in the Bible — came to be compiled from the third to the seventh century.
Ultimately, Tucker said, “he tried to restore the pristine state of the Talmud by pointing out incorrect editorial surmises” made by later sages in an effort to explicate the concepts and conclusions of earlier ones. Since the transmission was, for generations, largely oral, it was subject to the flaws resulting from fallible memories.
Halivni conveyed his Talmud method to students at the Jewish Theological Seminary from 1957 until 1983. He broke with the seminary that year over its decision to admit women for ordination. Baruch Weiss said his father objected to the way the decision was executed, which he felt disregarded Jewish law by turning the question into a secular one of admission policy rather than requiring a vote by rabbinical authorities.
In response to that decision, Halivni co-founded a breakaway movement now called the Union of Traditional Judaism.
Halivni was born David Weiss in Kobyletska Poliana, now in Ukraine. (He later adopted the Hebrew surname Halivni, which like Weiss essentially means white, because the name Weiss also belonged to SS officers he encountered.) Although his passport rendered his birthday as Dec. 21, 1928, his son said that his true birthday was Sept. 27, 1927, and that the date was most likely altered so he could qualify for immigration to the United States under a special program for war orphans.
He married Tzipora Hager, a descendant of a grand Hasidic rabbi, in 1953, and they settled on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She gained a doctorate in Yiddish literature from New York University and taught at the City College of New York. She died in 2008. In addition to his son Baruch Weiss, Halivni is survived by two other sons, Ephraim and Shai Halivni, and six grandchildren.