The Jewish Star, January 27, 2016

In the 15th century, 20 years before Tzfat took off, the Iberian peninsula was plagued by the Spanish Inquisition. Many Jews left Spain for Portugal, where they had only a brief respite before moved on to Tzfat. But why Tzfat?

Citing the “Abramson rule of history,” the dean said that “money was certainly a big part of it.”

“If you don’t know the reason why something happened, it’s probably due to money,” he said. “In this case, taxes were dramatically lowered by the Ottomans to encourage international trade. It was like the Las Vegas of its time.”

Asked why Jerusalem was not the preferred destination, he said there was no tax incentive in the Holy City, where 300 years earlier there was barely minyan. “We know this because in 1269, when Ramban was there, they had to bring in Jewish farmers from the countryside to make a minyan,” he said.

For 80 years, Tzfat attracted the finest Jewish minds. Shlomo Alkabetz, known for writing L’chah Dodi, was one of the first to arrive, around the year 1500.

“Alkabetz was known for wandering around the countryside, leaving himself open to spiritual vibrations, and he located many graves of tzaddikim that way,” said Abramson. “Maybe not a scientifically or archeologically sound methodology, but this creative element built up Tzfat’s notability, as well as the new industry of spiritual tourism.”

The elder statesman of Tzfat was Yosef Caro, author of the Shulchan Aruch, whose halachic insights seemed to derive from kabbalistic inspiration as much as conventional book-learning, Abramson said. Moshe Cordovero, Alkabetz’s son-in-law, who authored Pardes Rimonim and Tomer Devorah in the early days of printing, is famous for creating a systematic guide to Kabbalah with chapters and titles, in what we now think of as Western style. Students flocked to Cordovero.

Then the Arizal, Isaac Luria, arrived in Tzfat from Egypt, and he studied with Cordovero until Cordovero died about a year later. Luria himself died shortly afterward. This group was very big on ascetic living and ritual self mortification, but they worked together as a chavurah (fellowship), gathering each night to discuss what they had done wrong during the day and how to fix it.

“Are you aware of the smicha controversy?” Abramson asked his audience. “This too started in Tzfat.” Smicha (rabbinic ordination — literally, laying on of hands) came about at this place and time. In Jewish tradition, Moshe transferred leadership and authority by laying hands on Yehoshua, who did the same with the nevi’im, and so on. In the second Temple period, this was lost as an institution. Yaakov Beirav came up with the idea to reconstitute smicha for the first time in 1,500 years, seeking to endow the title rabbi with a new level of authority and respect.

“His justification was that we are the greatest Jewish minds of the day, and as such are well-suited to determine who should hold rabbinic authority,” Abramson said.

As for parnassah, Abramson cited plentiful and well-preserved Ottoman tax records that indicated the Tzfat rabbis were supported by the community.

“However, the Arizal was an international pepper merchant. The very last thing he said was, ‘Please pay all my creditors’.”

The Ohel Sara Amen Group, in memory of Sarit Marton, a’h, meets each Rosh Chodesh at 8:15 am in Lawrence, with a lecture at 9:30 following morning brochas, Shacharit and Hallel. The group is open to all women, and provides shiurim, classes, and other programming throughout the month. There is no charge to attend. For further information, call 718-327-7040 or email OhelSaraAmen@gmail.com.

This article appeared in The Jewish Star on January 27, 2016:  http://www.thejewishstar.com/stories/Touro-dean-eyes-womens-role-in-Kabbalistic-Tzfat,6766

Source: E-Reading for the People of the Book: How Jews will Adapt to the Digital Revolution

We are living in a Gutenberg moment, plunging wildly into an unprecedented age of transformation whose dark contours obscure the uncertain future. The Information Revolution dwarfs the 18th century Industrial Revolution, which was really great at making things bigger and faster: airplanes travel faster than horses, microwaves cook faster than campfires, but they are still all about visiting relatives or making dinner. Our digital technology, by contrast, thrusts us into change that is radically new. Facebook, for example, evolved out of the idea of a printed student phone book, using the online format to easily expand and update its content. Now, twelve years after it was first launched by students at Harvard, is it anything like a phone book? Even more, is it anything like anything? And for those born after 1995: what’s a phone book?

From the first cuneiform shards to Semitic script, from scribal elegance to mass printing, Jews have always been early adopters. While the Ottoman Empire rejected the first books as ugly, hopelessly deficient replacements for hand-written Arabic calligraphy, Jews scrambled to set up presses, rushing crude editions of precious Hebrew manuscripts into print circulation. Scribal artistry was relegated to ritual documents only, while the less aesthetically pleasing leather-bound books won the day for their sheer utility. Jews recognized that the objective of learning was far more significant than the gourmet appreciation of scribal elegance. The digital revolution, however, poses an unexpected challenge: given the steady migration of books into the cloud, how may observant Jews access them on the Sabbath and holidays, when electronic devices are as banned as brisket in a dairy restaurant?

I humbly predict that Torah scholarship will flourish under the new digital regime. True, it will be harder and harder to purchase conventionally printed versions of less popular works, and Jewish bookstores will have to adapt to an altered supply-and-demand pattern. At the same time, the evolution of radically simple Print-On-Demand technology, combined with the lower threshold of modern self-printing (“indie publishing”) means that more scholars will have more books in perpetual print.

Jewish libraries will look different. Well-studied foundational texts such as the Torah and the Talmud will continue to be published conventionally, probably with many more aesthetic elements and physical improvements to binding and paper quality. Most home libraries will have fewer books, but they will be revered not only for their inherent sanctity but also as objets d’art, cherished family heirlooms like medieval illuminated manuscripts. Other Jewish books, from holy works to contemporary fiction, will migrate almost entirely to tablet-sized e-readers, and consumers will order Print On Demand copies of texts they wish to reserve for Sabbath study. This isn’t the future: it’s been happening for years with the amazing hebrewbooks.org, a site that houses PDFs of rare and out-of-print religious works, as well as an increasing number of works by young independent scholars.

Ironically, print journalism is enjoying a phenomenal renaissance among Jews at a time when secular newspapers are dying, for precisely the same reasons (for those born after 1995, a newspaper is a kind of data-dump printouts of websites so you can read them in places where there’s no Wifi or cell service, like the planet Mars). The physical quality of newspapers and magazines have always concentrated on the ephemeral, leaving more substantive, enduring work to printed books, but what can be more ephemeral than the web? Jews are also consumers of ephemera, but the Sabbath prohibits e-reading, so newspapers fill the gap for the observant. 

We will have fewer physical books on the shelves, but our reading will become richer, more diverse, and more sophisticated. Perhaps counter-intuitively, with less hard copies of books, we will need librarians even more than ever to help us navigate an expanding ocean of literature. On the whole, I’d like to echo the immortal words first recorded by Timbuk3 in 1983: “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.” Songwriter Pat MacDonald’s sentiment was intentionally ambiguous, alluding to the flash of a nuclear explosion in a world threatened by global thermonuclear war. Jewish readers may also see the digital revolution as the end of the world, but in reality that rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches towards Jerusalem in an entirely different manner. We will survive this just fine, thank you, and in fact we will emerge from the digital revolution stronger than ever.