Highlighting: “Kinyan Halacha: From Pesukim to Poskim” by Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz. 2024. 288 Pages. ISBN-13: 979-8985216813.
Mark Twain understood the human condition when he said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Twain recognized that writing a concise message takes much more thought and effort than writing a long one. It also requires the writer to achieve a mastery of the subject in order to convey the idea in such a brief format.
Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz is the director of the semicha program at Yeshiva University and a congregational rabbi in North Woodmere, New York. While he doesn’t write short stories, he has done the equivalent by recording over 4,000 10-minute halacha shiurim.
By listening to these concise shiurim, one gains a tremendous overview and understanding of the topic. Rabbi Lebowitz conveys complex and intricate halachic ideas in a most understandable manner. The listener comes away feeling enlightened and never talked down to.
One of his students, Rabbi Yehuda Balsam (now the Rosh Beis Medrash at MTA), did the reading public a tremendous service by putting many of these 10-minute halacha shiurim into writing. He has arranged them according to the weekly parasha in “Kinyan Halacha: From Pesukim to Poskim” (RIETS Press). While Bereishis and Shemos are already in print, the author plans to ultimately put together a five-volume set of the entire Torah.
Rabbi Lebowitz’s mastery of the Talmud, Halacha and Jewish thought enables him to articulate his ideas in just 10 minutes. Producing that in written form is not an easy feat, and Rabbi Balsam has done an impressive job.
As the title indicates, Rabbi Lebowitz takes the reader from the Biblical verses, the pesukim, to their modern-day application, poskim. That is not a trivial endeavor in the least. Traversing that aspect of Jewish law and doing it sensibly requires dedication to the mesora and a signficant mastery of the Talmud. There’s a huge divide between the posuk and the pesak, which many stumble in if they are not intellectually honest or dedicated to the halachic tradition.
Rabbi Lebowitz quotes often from his rebbe, Rav Hershel Schachter. Rav Schachter said in a shiur last month that talmidei chachamim need to know every line of Shas. This is a common theme emerging from these volumes — that although it is now quite easy to look up answers to halachic questions on the Internet, Google and Halacha databases, going from pesukim to poskim requires much more than finding an obscure source in the Bar Ilan Responsa Project. It requires following the halachic process from start to finish and knowing that trajectory to come to an honest answer. That is what Rabbi Lebowitz does extraordinarily well.
These two volumes cover the gamut of halachic topics from the more mundane topics, such as birthday celebrations and donor names on buildings, to very serious issues such as abortion and a father receiving a kidney donation from a developmentally disabled child. Rabbi Lebowitz does not shy away from controversial topics, such as prisoner exchanges in halacha and honoring wicked parents.
Every topic in these two volumes is engaging and inspiring, leaving the reader wanting more. For those looking to bring engaging topics related to the parsha to their Shabbos table that will stimulate significant dialogue, this series of books is for you.
My friend Meyer Mandel once said that the definition of a good shiur is one that, after it’s over, makes you want to go and open up a sefer. Rabbi Leibowitz has a lot of really good 10-minute shiurim. And in Kinyan Halacha: From Pesukim to Poskim are really good seforim you will definitely want to open.
Ben Rothke lives in New Jersey and works in the information security field. He reviews books on religion, technology, philosophy, and science. Follow him on Twitter at @benrothke.
