Bidspirit auction | A very long Tshuvah from

A very long Tshuvah from Reb MOSHE FEINSTEIN : 3 Classic Topics. New York 1947 The letter, addressed to Rabbi Chaim Mednick consists of three issues all which are printed in Iggrot Moshe. [read HERE ] Tefillin That Would Need to Be Burned Trusting Doctors The Obligations of Ownership Tefillin That Would Need to Be Burned The first example responded to R. Mednick’s questions of an earlier ruling. That first ruling was published as Iggrot Moshe Orach Chayyim 1;4, R. Moshe’s reply to R. Yitzchak Hutner, then already working at (but not yet Rosh Yeshiva of) Yeshivat Chaim Berlin. Dated 20 Adar 1944, R. Moshe ruled that a person who was being quarantined for a disease, in a hospital that burned all the possessions of the sick person when they left, could not bring tefillin with him. The Jew in question could not wear tefillin for the entirety of his illness. This was a surprising ruling, because an explicit Gemara allows causing Hashem’s Name to be erased (but not doing it oneself). R. Moshe differentiated, saying that that Gemara was dealing with a case where only one Name was involved, whereas tefillin has many, or that Scripture is different. Causing the erasing of random written Names might be allowed, but once the question touches on Scripture, no such actions are permitted. In this case, that’s not even the real issue, since he held that bringing tefillin to such a hospital qualified as actively destroying them. When the rule is that anything that goes into such a place doesn’t come out, bringing it there is itself the guarantor of its destruction. Rav Moshe opens the letter with the comment that there’s not much new in R. Mednick’s claims, which seems to me interestingly candid, perhaps more biting than we’d have expected from R. Moshe (although this is a letter he’s answering three years after the original). R. Mednick had argued that the tefillin case is similar to the difference between killing a person and tying someone up at night, so that the next day’s sun will kill him or her. Rav Moshe answers that there’s not much of a distinction, even there. While the killer by sun will not incur the death penalty in a human court (R. Mednick had another example, inciting a snake to bite), it doesn’t mean the tying the person up isn’t an act of murder. It’s just not an act of murder that human courts have the ability to punish. Besides which, since the health authorities have already made the law that all items brought to such hospitals have to be burned, it’s as if the destructive item were already present, the sun as already out there, the venom already in the snake’s mouth. There, even the Talmudic view was that it was a direct act of murder. Last, R. Mednick had argued that the Gemara justifies violating Shabbat to save a life by saying that it is better to violate one Shabbat so that the person can keep many Shabbatot. That can imply that we can make a cost/benefit analysis, leading us to conclude that daily tefillin wearing for an extended recuperation is worth the eventual destruction of those tefillin. Rav Moshe again rejects the claim, noting that Chazal prohibited blowing shofar and shaking a lulav when those holidays occurred on Shabbat out of the fear that someone might carry those items in a Shabbat-prohibited way. (The reasoning for saving a life, he is implying, isn’t just a matter of many being better than one, since then we should prefer the many acts of shofar blowing and lulav shaking to the occasional carrying on Shabbat). Trusting Doctors The second responsum with that date is a follow-up to Iggrot Moshe Even HaEzer 162, dated 16 Marcheshvan 5707 (1943), to R. Shmuel Aharon Pardes, editor of the journal HaPardes (first lesson for me: the journal was a pun on its editor’s name). A widow whose husband had died childless, which theoretically obligates her in yibum or halitzah, had a deaf-mute brother-in-law, which made halitzah impossible, but did not negate her obligation to have yibum or halitzah. Rabbi Tzvi Pesach Frank, over twenty years older than R. Moshe and the rabbi of Jerusalem by that time, had ruled that this was similar enough to the Geonic presumption that a woman whose brother in law has left the religion is not required to wait for yibum or halitzah should her husband pass away childless, because she never would never have married the deceased husband unless there was an implicit condition freeing her from that. Rav Moshe rejects that, because Baba Kamma 110b raised that idea for a woman whose brother-in-law was a מוכה שחין, had a skin disease that made marital relations both unpleasant and unhealthy for the man. In that case, the Gemara says explicitly that her interest in being married was sufficiently strong that she apparently was willing to live with the possibility of having to have yibum or halitzah with this brother. The Geonim were more lenient about a brother-in-law who had left the religion, R. Moshe believed,