You have heard from others how Rav Elazar Mayer Teitz, zt”l was a respected community rabbi and accomplished educator who impacted the lives of thousands in his community. I am here to talk about a completely different aspect of his life. The Gemara, in Bava Kamma,צב ע”ב discusses a number of popular sayings and tries to find hints for them in the Torah. One of those sayings is: “כד הוינן זוטרי כגברי— When we were little, we were like adults, השתא דקשישא כדרדקי; now that we are old, we are like children.” This saying has profound meaning on multiple levels and particularly to anyone who has raised precocious children and cared for elderly parents.
However, in today’s age, it takes on new meaning. That saying perfectly describes our interaction with technology. When it comes to new technology, the young take the lead and understand how to use it. They are the adults. And those of us with more “life experience,” struggle to get things to work. If you need help changing a setting on your phone, ask your child or grandchild. As the Gemara says, when it comes to technology, now that we are old, we are like children who need help. And yet some people defy that stereotype and break away from the norm. Rabbi Teitz was one such person when it comes to the early Internet.
I’m not going to say that Rabbi Teitz was a tech whiz because I’m pretty sure that is not true. However, despite his age, he was active in Internet Torah learning from almost the beginning. He was a pioneering rabbi on the Internet. Even before there was a World Wide Web, there was Usenet, and on Usenet there was a Jewish newsgroup called Soc.Culture.Jewish.Moderated, or SCJM, where people of all backgrounds asked questions and discussed topics of Jewish interest. Historians can correct me, but I believe that SCJM was the first gathering place for serious online Torah discussion. In the late 1990s, Rabbi Teitz was active in SCJM under a pseudonym, experimenting with Jewish conversation online when it was all very new. He was answering questions and engaging in conversation with people from all different walks of life, hearing from Jews around the country and all over the world. Through this experiment, Rabbi Teitz found that people are thirsty for Torah and turning to this new thing called the Internet to get answers and, more importantly, find friendship. He decided that he would be there, but not as a rabbi answering questions.
You see, on the Internet, the world is flat. There are no hierarchies. You can be the greatest expert in the world and someone with no background in the subject will feel free to argue with you. You can have Yadin Yadin (ordination) from the chief rabbi of Israel and someone with only a Hebrew school education will disagree with you about what the Torah says. One possible way to correct this imbalance is to emphasize your pedigree and your accomplishments. Many have tried this and failed. Rabbi Teitz went in the opposite direction. He became part of the chevra, equal to others whose arguments—their prooftexts and their logic—stand on their own and not on his ample authority. On SCJM, he used a pseudonym—perhaps because he was experimenting or maybe because he realized that using his name would be counterproductive because it would seem like he was asserting authority as a rabbi. Authority is wasted on the internet, even damaging, because it directs focus toward the individual and away from ideas.
In September 1999, Rabbi Teitz sent his first contribution to the Avodah email list. This email list, run for two and a half decades by Rabbi Micha Berger, is a gathering of individuals of varying backgrounds—mostly men, but not exclusively, many yeshiva-educated but some with limited background—solely to discuss Torah. Anonymity was not allowed, so when I joined in November 1999 there were questions about whether I was using my real name. Members discuss every Torah topic under the sun. Lomdus, Mussar, practical Halacha, dikduk (grammar) —anything. Keep in mind that at the time, the World Wide Web was only a few years old. Most people were new to email. At this time, there were no blogs and no social media. The Internet was still new and raw. Rabbi Teitz’s impact on Avodah and its spinoff Areivim would span 25 years and would influence many people who went on to develop large followings online and in the real world.
Looking back at his contributions over the years, Rabbi Teitz seems to have focused on tefillah and Hebrew language. His first Avodah contribution was a comparison of Hebrew and Aramaic grammar. He continued discussing such issues but also responded to other people’s interests. I remember one occasion on which he responded to the claim that Rabbi Akiva Eiger holds that someone who says “Good Shabbos” late Friday afternoon has effectively accepted on himself the restrictions of Shabbos. Rabbi Teitz pointed out that R. Akiva Eiger did not say that but rather said that someone who said “Good Shabbos” on Shabbos may have fulfilled the mitzvah of kiddush on a biblical level. There are significant practical implications to the different claims and, of course, Rabbi Teitz was correct. On another occasion, he explained the proper usage of the terms “im yirtze Hashem” and “be-ezras Hashem.” When stating the intent to do something, you add “im yirtze Hashem,” indicating the awareness that man proposes, but God disposes. When indicating the desire for an outcome, you say “be-ezras Hashem,” expressing the hope that He will bring about the desired outcome. Such as: Iy”H, I am going to the dentist tomorrow; BE”H, he will not find any cavities.
Rabbi Teitz wrote with precision and care. When someone apologizes for typos caused by spellcheck, really they are apologizing for not bothering to reread their email or text before sending it. Because who does that nowadays? Who shows the care we used to exercise when writing a letter in long hand on a piece of paper? Rabbi Teitz’s emails were meticulous because he read your email carefully and then responded like he was writing a letter on paper, with forethought and proofreading. Rabbi Teitz did not contribute as frequently as others to the conversation,but when he wrote, you knew he had read what others had written and then submitted his own careful thoughts.
In the earlier days of the Internet, because of my blog, I received many halachic she’eilos via email. I generally directed questioners to their local Orthodox rabbi but sometimes it was clear that this was not an option. In such cases, I would forward the she’eilah to Rabbi Teitz and he would answer the halachic question. Sometimes he copied me on the reply and I was able to see how he handled the often complex she’eilah. One question that stays with me was from a museum professional who had acquired artistic pictures and was unsure whether he was permitted to hang them in his home. One of the pictures depicted a Native American transformation scene with a raven. Was this picture avodah zarah, an idolatrous image that we may not own? Rabbi Teitz replied that it might be merely a depiction of an item that was worshipped as a ritual, and not the object of ritual worship itself. Additionally, a gentile may have nullified the picture when selling it, rendering it no longer dedicated to that religion and therefore permitted. Because of the two doubts, Rabbi Teitz said, the painting is subject to a sfek sfeika (a double doubt) and permitted. Such argumentation is outside of my normal capacity and I greatly appreciated being witness to such a complex psak for a complete stranger seeking halachic guidance via email.
Unquestionably, the most remarkable aspect of Rabbi Teitz’s writings is that he did not draw on his own authority. He treated everyone with equal respect and expected nothing in return. Indeed, his humility and simplicity once caused a crisis on the Avodah list. Someone who did not know who Rabbi Teitz was kept calling him by his first name, Elazar. It was embarrassing and the moderator had to change the rule to call everyone by an honorific rather than risk the awkward situation in which a prominent rabbi is called merely by his first name. This was Rabbi Teitz’s way of leading in the Internet era. He did not assert authority but to the contrary, became part of the chevra and led by example. His carefully thought-out contributions, his immense humility,and his unfailing respect for others demanded attention. I remember one occasion in which he uncharacteristically issued a mecha’ah, an objection to someone’s behavior. One person responded to another’s argument mockingly, including mocking the writer’s name. While a third party to this conversation, Rabbi Teitz forcefully interjected that it is forbidden to call someone by an unflattering nickname. By standing up for someone else’s kavod, by insisting on respectful conversation, Rabbi Teitz immediately raised the tone and made us all aware of the obligations we have toward each other.
At the beginning of Parashas Tetzaveh, Hashem commands Moshe:
ואתה הקרב אליך את אהרן אחיך ואת בניו אתו מתוך בני ישראל לכהנו לי”
“And take unto you your brother, Aharon, and his sons with him, from among the children of Israel, to serve Me [as kohanim].”Why does Hashem say “מתוך בני ישראל— from among the children of Israel?”
Isn’t that obvious? The Midrash Rabbah (Shemos Rabbah 37:1) sees great meaning in this phrase which might explain a difficult halacha. The halacha is that a convert to Judaism, a full-fledged ger tzedek whom we are obligated to love and respect, may not serve in certain positions of communal authority. Exactly how this is or is not implemented today is not our concern right now. Our concern is how we understand this limitation. There are different ways to think about this halacha but the midrash offers perhaps another interesting path.
The midrash says that other nations, when they need a leader, they search around the world for the best they can get. When they need a king, they marry off the princess to a prince from a neighboring kingdom or to a great warrior. When they need a priest, they recruit someone with experience from another country. Not the Jews. We promote from within. When we need a king, a leader, a priest or a minister we must take from within our people. We have confidence that our communal leaders, in their various capacities, will rise to the occasion. They will learn the landscape and find the right skills that are needed in every situation. We promote from within and let people rise to the challenges they face. This is just a thought, but perhaps the Torah does not allow converts to serve in those roles of communal leadership to force us to promote from within and prevent a situation of finding an outside leader and converting him quickly. We grow our leaders organically and challenge them to rise to the need of the hour. That is why the kohanim must be specifically “from among the children of Israel.”
Rabbi Teitz was just such a leader. While firmly positioned in the traditional rabbinate, he saw the Internet developing and created a mode of leadership to fit this new medium. Instead of leading with rabbinic authority, he led by rabbinic example. Instead of dictating Torah views, he explained and argued for those views in the marketplace of ideas. In this bold, new world, by lowering himself he succeeded in raising others. Rabbi Teitz rose to the challenge and became the leader we needed, with 25 years of success. May his memory be a blessing and an example for all of us on how to rise to a challenge in a new world and find the right way to lead in uncharted territory.
Rabbi Gil Student is the editor of TorahMusings.com. His latest book, Articles of Faith: Traditional Jewish Belief in the Internet Era, is available online and in bookstores near you.
