A Fanciful Love Story about the Real Rabbi Who Created the Legendary Golem

While Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague (d. 1609), known by the Hebrew acronym Maharal, is most famous today because of the legend that he used kabbalistic magic to create a golem that could defend the Jews of his city from anti-Semites, his real legacy consists of his towering achievements as a talmudist, philosopher, mystic, and leader of one of the world’s largest Jewish communities. The golem legend stems from a popular Hebrew work, published in Poland in 1909, that record various stories about the Maharal’s wondrous doings. Zack Rothbart recounts one of these—concerning the rabbi’s wife, Perl.

Reb Shmelke Reich was a wealthy and respected figure who arranged for a marriage between his daughter Perl and Judah Loew, a promising fifteen-year-old Torah scholar. Young Judah headed off to yeshiva to study and in the meantime, Reb Shmelke’s fortunes reversed and he became very poor, unable to pay a dowry for his daughter to wed.

Three years after the marriage was arranged, Reb Shmelke wrote to his son-in-law to be, letting him know that seeing as he could not afford a respectable dowry, the young man was freed of his commitment and didn’t have to marry Perl after all. The young man wouldn’t hear of it, writing back that he would wait for assistance from on high.

The righteous young Perl decided to help her parents out by opening a small bakery and selling bread to support her family. She worked in the bakery for ten years, while her betrothed continued studying Torah, waiting for the day he could marry his beloved. . . .

The story, of course, concludes with a fairy-tale ending.

Read more at The Librarians

More about: Golem, Jewish folklore, Maharal

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society