Reply To: Denigrating Gedolim

Home Forums Decaffeinated Coffee Denigrating Gedolim Reply To: Denigrating Gedolim

#2081319
AviraDeArah
Participant

Aside from the very unique exception of Rav Yaakov emden’s statements about rav yonasan eibeshutz(an issue that rav hutner said is the one area of Jewish history that is impossible to understand) we don’t have any other machlokes in which one side considered the other to be reshoim. Sharp differences, yes, but not to that level. Like i said, that’s an excision on a personal level, but rather than dwell on rabbi kook the gavra, i focus more on the individual opinions and actions he professed. Before him and after him, no one condoned such beliefs or statements. Therefore, he was not mesorah-based, and any statements by gedolim about him need to be taken with that in mind. Haskama on a gavra to me means very little if the same gedolim would recoil in horror if you told them that it’s ok to praise chilul shabbos and that such people are better than the frum.

I’d like to reiterate that if we take rabbi kooks words with a grain of salt….is there such a thing as a gadol too caught up in poetry and philosophy that we cannot take his words directly as torah? That itself is a disqualification. We might not take mekubalim at face value, because they were talking to people who were on a very high level of learning… The arizal was talking to other mekubalim, after all. Rabbi kook was talking to everyone…where do we have a person accepted as a gadol whose words cannot be accepted as they are because of their personality? Torah makes a person above personal bias.

I will agree that at one point, rabbi kook learned a lot of torah(this is why i continually refer to him as rabbi), and the only context where it is appropriate to point out his non-gadol-ship is a constructive conversation about why his views are incorrect. That’s my policy on rabbi yoshe ber too, though his issues are probably less consequential than rabbi kook’s, in my opinion.