Outlook

A 14-year-old prodigy Moshe Raziel Sharify finds himself at the center of a dispute between his father and Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar. The boy recently sat for five-and-a-half hours of exams of the Chief Rabbinate but Chief Rabbi Amar has ordered that his exams not be graded because of a long-standing rule of the Council of the Chief Rabbi that semichah not be granted to anyone under the age of twenty-two.

His father Nisan Sharify has already written the Attorney-General Yehudah Weinstein that he will petition the High Court of Justice to order that his son’s exam be graded if the Chief Rabbinate remains resolute in its refusal. In a lengthy article in the Jerusalem Post one of the many Israeli news outlets to give extensive coverage to the issue the elder Sharify cites many examples of other prodigies such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who were granted semicha as teenagers though none as young as fourteen.

I have no reason to doubt that Moshe Raziel Sharify is phenomenally bright. Both his parents hold doctorates and an older brother completed university studies in his mid-teens. Furthermore numerous senior rabbis and dayanim have attested to Moshe’s clarity in the areas of halachah in which he was tested and to his phenomenal grasp of the subject matter. Nor do I doubt his religious devotion. His father told the Post that as a two-year-old he cried all night one Shabbos when his father did not take him to shul because of a hailstorm and only stopped when his father took him early the next morning.

My problem is with his father who seems obsessed with the idea of his son being the youngest rabbi in Israel if not in modern times. In the process he risks destroying a potential treasure to Klal Yisrael by conveying the message that great Torah knowledge is a means to prestige. And the threat to bring the Israeli Supreme Court into the inner workings of the rabbinic council – i.e. to have the Supreme Court order the rabbinical council what procedures to adopt for granting semichah – over what is nothing more than an honorific title with no practical significance for his son suggests a profound contempt for the rabbinate to which his son aspires.