M
y shochein tov here at the front of the magazine Reb Yonoson Rosenblum writes this week that despite his friend’s perception of lockstep Rosenblum-Kobre agreement he has come up with something on which he and I disagree. I’m not convinced the perception is correct to begin with but if it’ll help matters I’ll work on being a bit more disagreeable (although I think I’ll defer that project until after the Yamim Noraim).
Reb Yonoson writes to critique my column of two weeks ago addressing a Bret Stephens piece in the Wall Street Journal about anti-Semitism. I’ll try to restate my thoughts on the topic hopefully making my original intent clearer and allaying at least some of his concerns. But I want to note at the outset that it was not about Mr. Stephens nor did I “charge” anything about his level of Jewish knowledge. It was specifically to emphasize the substantive over the personal that I spent my first 48 precious words speaking well of Mr. Stephens as a person and writer.
But I also noted the demonstrable truth that a Jew who isn’t schooled in looking at the world through a Torah lens is inevitably going to at least partially misdiagnose historical phenomena like the “longest hatred.” I did so because the point of my column was to be a corrective to such misdiagnosis (and also ironically as a limud zechus for Mr. Stephens which apparently didn’t turn out very well).
And while it’s true that “profound grounding in Torah” may not “characterize everyone writing for Mishpacha” I don’t imagine Reb Yonoson is really arguing for a theological free-for-all in which Bret Stephens’s views on a topic on which Chazal have spoken extensively are to be given equal weight to that of Torah scholars. Readers can be assured that what we write in these pages is reviewed by people who are indeed possessed of deep Torah wisdom and importantly consult with those even wiser in Torah than they.
