For Care1 at Teaneck.
I've become friendly with one of the residents whose daughter and son-in-law visit her nearly every Friday Night.
It so happens that this son-in-law is none other than Rabbi Harvey Rosenfeld! We have chatted many times and I was quite pleased to see his d'var torah in our local Jewish Paper "The Jewish Standard".
Given R Rosenfeld's background, both the content of the d'var torah and its appearance here on this blog is a bit unconventional. Enjoy it anyway! I'm confident you will.
http://www.jstandard.com/content/item/parsha_vayera/10530
KT
RRW
2 comments:
Rabbi Rosenfeld's sadness over the denominational divide that marks Judaism, I find, to be most interesting. He laments that this divide prevented him from studying with the Rav and seems to lament the fact that this, as I believe he would define it, artifical border kept him away from this study. I wonder, though, if he knows what it meant to be in the Rav's shiur and what was the daily focus of the Rav's study. The Rav in this word on Bereishit was not the Rav of this shiur -- it was a totally different study.
My conclusion, as such, is that Rabbi Rosenfeld believes the denominational divide to be artifical because he really doesn't know what it entails. This, to me, is most sad. Perhaps there is a way to solve the major problems of friction within the Jewish People today -- and perhaps there is a need to do so -- but what is needed first is a true understanding of the nature of this divide and that it is not as simple as people make it.
Rabbi Ben Hecht
I think Rabbi Rosenfeld was not blurring the distinctions of denominations re: OBSERVANCE
Rather I think he felt the value of freedom to cross boundaries, to think outside the denominational box in ACADEMICS and EDUCATION.
I have found several non-Observant Rabbis who not only are familiar with Yeshivishe Classics, they actually find them inspriing in their own way. I found this positive attitude quite disarming, that works by EG Chofetz Chaim are readily appreciated by scholars quite far from Halachic Judaism
RRW
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