Dayan Grunfeld on the Economics of Shabbos

A timely message

I wanted to write something about Natan, but as soon as the thought entered my mind, I discarded it.¹ I am putting my gentle and constructive criticism of Natan on hold until he hopefully recovers, or until he introduces something new and interesting in a brief moment of lucidity. Instead, I want to write briefly about a perpetually timely topic.

Today we are showered with a profusion of sefarim and Torah books in both Hebrew and English that explain our Holy Torah in the greatest of detail. But sometimes, the greatest treasures we find are in older, simpler books. This is analogous to the Bais Medrash, where we are blessed with voluminous works from the Acharonim and Roshei Yeshiva, but the most exciting insights are always contained in a few lines of Rashi or the Rambam. One such example of an older book is Dayan I. Grunfeld’s The Sabbath: a Guide to Its Understanding and Observance, which I just picked up in a local shul, and was overawed by its combination of depth and conciseness.

One of the final chapters of that work is called The Economics of Sabbath Observance, which I found is a most relevant topic to Modoxism (by this we are not referring to the conservative type of Modern Orthodoxy or Zionism characterized by Rav Herschel Schachter and the “Kav” communities in Israel, which are almost indistinguishable from our own beliefs in the key values, but the more liberal, “tolerant” strains, which have major differences).

Dayan Grunfeld starts with a historical observation about Shabbos observance, and the failure thereof:

A century and a half ago the so-called emancipation of the Jews began. Until then Sabbath observance had been almost universal among Jews. When they stepped out of the Ghetto to take part in the economic life outside, they gained wealth-some of them-, and, for a short while, political freedom. But they lost the Sabbath, and with it the soul of our people. For the ethical values that have become engrained in the Jewish character are largely due to the hallowing influence of the Sabbath. A similar situation arose fifty years ago, with the mass emigration from the great centres of Jewish population in Eastern Europe to England and America. Now those centres themselves are unfortunately no more and the Jewish masses at the present day have become almost completely estranged from the Sabbath. Observance in many cases is limited to the meaningless lighting of candles in a darkened room.

The Dayan goes on to talk about the way that these people justify their abandonment of this all-important Torah tenet, which the Dayan reveals is merely an excuse, and the real motivation is the replacement of a Torah based value system with a secular scale, reminiscent of Modoxism:

The majority of these Jews feel the loss involved in giving up the Jewish Sabbath. but their plea is, "We cannot help ourselves; present-day economic conditions force us to work on Sabbath". But do they? There are thousands upon thousands of Jews at the present time who keep the Sabbath in spite of all economic difficulties. How do they manage it? The truth is that present-day conditions are by no means exceptional in this respect. It has never been easy to keep the Sabbath. Was it easy for the farmer in ancient times…And was it easier for the medieval Jew, living in intolerable conditions and in complete insecurity…? Yet these Jews stood firm. The difference between their times and ours lies not in the external difficulties but in the will to fight where Sabbath in concerned the determination to hold on to the Jewish Sabbath as to a lifeline. Contact with a non-Jewish scale of values has robbed the Jews of their sense of Sabbath's supreme importance.

Although we have written many reasons why Modoxism is a perversion of Judaism, the Dayan Dr. has managed to sum it up in a succinct sentence with an eternally relevant message.

Dayan Grunfeld then shows the vast importance of Shabbos on a national level, by comparing the violation thereof to a betrayal of one’s country.

After all, what decent man, whatever difficulties he had in earning a living, would accept a job as a paid spy to betray his country to the enemy? Only contempt would meet a man who pleaded that, economic conditions being what they were, he was forced to do this in order to earn a living. If only our Jewish people realised that the same applies to the Sabbath… A Jew would say, "Sabbath is the supreme value in life. It must not be touched: I must conquer or die"….

This passage is like a knife in the eyes of those who claim that only material effort, such as army service, is our national responsibility, but the spiritual activities are merely between man and God, and are not an absolutely vital part of our national character.

The Dayan then promises the assistance of God to all those who keep Shabbos, and even testifies that he has seen this amazing hashgacha with his own eyes on countless occasions.

For if the Jew is convinced that by breaking the Sabbath he is destroying what is most precious in himself, and breaking the link that binds him to G-d and the Jewish nation, and if he stands firm in this conviction, however great his difficulties may be, then in the end G-d will help him. The old promise of the Torah still holds good: "See that the Lord has given you the Sabbath; therefore he gives you on the sixth day the bread of two days." The present writers have seen so many examples of the fulfilment of this promise among Sabbath-observant Jews that they can only pity those who call this argument naive. No Jew has ever died of hunger on account of the Sabbath. But many Jews and even whole Jewish communities have disappeared from the stage of their people's history through breaking the Sabbath. In the last resort Sabbath is the great measuring rod of bittachon, the touchstone of our belief that a higher force rules and guides our lives. He who knows that his livelihood depends not on men, nor on "nature", nor on "economic forces", but on G-d Himself, knows also that no real gain can come from work done in defiance of G-d on the Sabbath.

Pure, fiery emunah from the soul of an educated, rationalist Rabbi Dr., but like hot coals in the eyes of those of an anti-Torah rationalist persuasion, those who cannot even admit that Tefilah has any efficacy.

This is what we mean when we say that what binds the Torah nation together is so much deeper than the small differences between Litvish, Chassidish, Yeshivish, Heimish, Yekke, Breslov, yes, Chabad, yes, Datiim, but unfortunately excludes some strains who incessantly attempt to dispute the values and emunah that the Rabbi Dr. is expressing. May we all merit to live with the same conviction that he demonstrates.

1. Natan is now writing daily articles almost exclusively ranting and raving about chareidim. He is getting slaughtered in the comments, both by his enemies (I noticed that people are not taking my advice about not trolling him after getting banned. Oh well.) as well as by his supporters who are annoyed by his bizarre behavior. Natan keeps on raving about “a deluge of support he is getting”, but if that exists anywhere other than his deluded imagination, we are not seeing it in the comments. He doesn’t even have the simple self-awareness about how selfish it looks that he is making the entire war about his stupid little personal feud. It’s just sad. If there was any doubt about Natan’s mental instability until now, there is no doubt anymore. A once reasonably intelligent (if not particularly learned) person who produced scholarly material about nature (we will ignore his kefira for now) has been reduced to a sputtering, drooling hate machine who spends all day yelling at his enemies over the computer.