More Than Muscular Judaism

As a lifelong student, longtime teacher, and passionate lover of Tanakh, it was deeply satisfying to read Rabbi Ya’akov Trump’s essay outlining the ideological, historical, and sociological factors that caused the decline in the study of the Hebrew Bible among traditional Jews, and its resurgence in modern times. He presents a learned and detailed account of these developments, and of the unfortunate reality that in too many Orthodox circles—especially in the haredi community—the focus on Talmud and other rabbinic texts, to the exclusion of Tanakh, continues to this day. Indeed, in the previous century several rabbinic leaders of the haredi community themselves bemoaned this phenomenon. Rabbi Eliyahu Meir Bloch (1894–1955), one of the heads of the Lithuanian Telz Yeshiva—which survived the Holocaust and reestablished itself in Cleveland—lamented in a celebrated letter that Orthodoxy had abandoned Tanakh to the maskilim (proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment) and the Land of Israel and Hebrew to the Zionists and their religious supporters in the Mizrachi, to the great detriment of the traditional community.