The Topper Rov: a missing page in Jewish history

No, there is no Topper Rov. This title was however an affectionate appellation and a play on words based on phonetic similarity with the surname Toperoff.

Rabbis come and rabbis go. Some make a name that resounds through the ages, while others are little noticed and soon forgotten. I doubt that many readers of this post will have heard of Rabbi Shlomo Pesach Toperoff, but I hope that they will not object if I write a few words about him.

R’ Toperoff was a pulpit rabbi in North East England. While Gateshead is famously known as a leading contemporary powerhouse of Torah scholarship, numerous other communities existed during the past century. These included Sunderland, where R’ Toperoff served as the minister of the Ryhope Road shul from 1934 to 1951, and Newcastle upon Tyne, where he held various positions before he made Aliyah in 1973.  A son-in-law of the saintly scholar Rabbi Tzvi Ferber (author of Higionei Avot), he wrote in his retirement an English-language commentary on Avot which he entitled Lev Avot: A comprehensive commentary on the Ethics of the Fathers.

In the Foreword to Lev Avot, the then Chief Rabbi Sir Immanuel Jakobovits welcomed it with the comment that “The literary output of Anglo-Jewish Rabbis is none too prolific” [this book was published in 1984, six years before Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks was to rectify this situation virtually single-handed with the first of his remarkably popular series of books and writings].  

The style of the book may strike the modern reader as being often somewhat stilted, formal and non-colloquial, as if to echo the solemnity of the Soncino Chumash and the Authorised Prayer Book that were popular in the United Kingdom in the pre-ArtScroll era. Given its slightly archaic flavour, I was surprised to discover that it was reprinted in the United States as late as 1997 under the same title but with the word Lev omitted. I do not know whether anyone apart from me has ever read it; nor have I ever seen any mention made of it in either popular or scholarly writings. If any reader has information to the contrary, I am eager to receive it.

Lev Avot is a strange book. Explaining each mishnah and baraita, R’ Toperoff draws on sources as varied as the Babylonian Talmud, the works of the Me’iri, the Rashba, Rabbenu Yonah, Rav Kook and occasionally Graetz, as well as numerous authors unknown to me, who are referenced solely by their surnames (Lev Avot lacks both footnotes and a bibliography). In each instance the commentary is rounded off with text described as ‘Hasidic Lore’. This feature is quite perplexing, since it is often difficult or even impossible to relate the relevant Chasidic tale to the mishnah or baraita in question. My feeling is that the book would have read better and been far more useful to its readership if the ‘Hasidic Lore’ component was either enlarged and made more relevant to Avot or simply omitted.

The commentary section is interesting as an historical perspective on Jewish life in post-War Britain. The author deprecates the downward trend in public morality and the decline in quality of Jewish education in the absence of Jewish schools. He also offers some highly personal and occasionally original insights into the mishnayot and baraitot of Avot which I hope to mention in future posts.

By the way, when I found my copy of Lev Avot in a small store dedicated to the sale of second-hand and unwanted books and articles to raise money for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, it was in perfect condition—but for the fact that someone had brutally ripped out from it a leaf upon which were printed pages 27 and 28. I should love to know what this gentle and mildly-spoken rabbi might have written that would have attracted the ire of the book’s original owner. Once again, if any reader can enlighten me, I shall be most grateful.

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Above: R' Toperoff (middle row, third from the left) is easily identifiable by his clerical collar.

Whether anyone has ever read Lev Avot or not, R’ Toperoff deserves an honourable mention for something he did not write for publication but which was avidly consumed by those who laid their hands on it. From 1942 to 1946 he took it upon himself to write a monthly news-and-views bulletin that was sent to every one of the young Jewish men and women from Sunderland who were called up for military service. The entire sequence of bulletins has since been published as a 300-page book, Sunderland Jewry at War. The bulletins contain a good deal of material generated by third parties too: extracts from letters from those on active service, quizzes and even reports on local football teams and sporting events. Together they constitute a remarkable and moving compendium of information about Jewish life during World War 2: they are at the same time poignant, tragic, funny, courageous and immensely moving.

Like rabbis, commentaries on Pirkei Avot come and go. Some are remembered, others sink without trace. But if R’ Toperoff is to be remembered for only one thing in his life, it should be for this.

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Ethics of Our Fighters: a review

Ethics of Our Fighters, by Rabbi Shlomo M. Brody, was published by Koren at the very end of 2023.  Apart from being a rabbi, the author is a teacher, scholar and researcher who holds a doctorate in law and a journalist. His writings  on contemporary moral dilemmas have been cited by the Israeli Supreme Court—a body that is no stranger to moral dilemmas, having over the years created more than one of their own.

Avot Today noted this book when it first appeared (see our initial observations at avot-today.com/2023/12/hitting-mark-missing-point.html). I have now had a chance to read it carefully and here are my thoughts.

Despite the resonance between the title with the English name by which Avot is best known—Ethics of the Fathers—and despite the reference to Avot in the book’s publicity, this is emphatically not a book about Avot and there are very few points of even possible contact between them. One is Avot 3:18, where Rabbi Akiva reminds us that all humans are dear to God, being created in His likeness—a mishnah based on a Torah verse that, taken literally, would hold fighting forces to moral standards that most would regard as quite unreasonably too high.

Rabbi Brody’s book provides a detailed and well researched discussion of the Jewish response to the legitimacy of various issues. These include national security, human rights, conduct in regular battle, pre-emptive action, dealing with non-combatants, collective punishment, responses to terrorism, reprisals and deterrents. The most fascinating feature of many of these debates is the nature of the debaters themselves: orthodox and non-orthodox rabbis and religious scholars, secular Jews, Zionists, nationalists, military leaders, politicians and philosophers. Given the extreme importance of the subject matter and the extent to which influential opinions are liable to lead to action, these are debates in which no party and no argument can be safely ignored, and where no opinion can be discarded on the basis of the status of the person who expresses it.

This is not a casual read for the curious, since it demands one’s full attention. However, it will repay the effort involved in studying it seriously and in following the various analyses and discussions as they travel through time and space. For me, the best bit of this book is one of the shortest: it’s chapter 8 (‘The Jewish Multivalue Framework for Military Ethics’). This is because it highlights for military ethics, in like manner to Pirkei Avot, the impossibility of finding a single answer or of establishing a hierarchy of norms to situations that inevitably depend on their own unique facts. It is helpful to bear this in mind when reading, for example, chapter 23 (‘Once the War Starts: Shifting Moral Responsibilities in Urban Warfare’), where it is moral responsibilities that come into conflict.

We readers are not all the same and no publisher can cater equally for every taste. However, my personal preference for a work of this nature is that it should present references to source material and other useful or relevant notes at the bottom of each page, rather than in an appendix of nearly 70 pages where these items are listed chapter by chapter.  I do not believe that the sort of people who are likely to read this book in any sort of depth will be deterred by the appearance of footnotes, and they will be greatly assisted if they do not have to keep turning to the back of the book for the information they seek.

With that one small proviso, I very much enjoyed reading Rabbi Brody’s work and believe that it is not only a useful contribution to discussion on the ethics of war but, in effect, an agenda that will be enormously helpful to those seeking to understand the topic, to teach it or to take it to the next level.

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Not just what his Rebbe told him

I recently came across a copy of an unusual and idiosyncratic work on Pirkei Avot bearing the curious title Reflections on Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers): Not Just What My Rebbe Taught Me. The author of this work is Joseph G. Rosenstein, who impressively styles himself Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, Rutgers University.

What's this book all about? According to the author's website, it differs from many other such books by:

     — writing in an informal, easily understood manner
     — comparing and contrasting different teachings that deal with the same topic.
     — relating the historic contexts of the teachings.
     — relating the teachings to contemporary events.
     — often challenging the assumptions of the ancient teachers.
     — pointing out when teachings may be faulty and when commentators misinterpret the teachings.
     — having separate chapters on major themes, such as life after death.

I would characterise the book somewhat differently. The author is in effect carrying on a dialogue with the ancient teachers and subsequent commentators which also incidentally describes or explains some of his own life experiences, thoughts and opinions. While it is difficult for anyone writing on Avot to exclude him- or herself from a discussion of its contents, I doubt that I have ever seen a book on the topic in which one encounters the author quite so often and I must admit that I sometimes found this presence quite obtrusive.

The book is certainly easy to read and understand. It addresses the modern educated reader; it also reflects the author's enthusiasm, sense of excitement and scholarship. As his description of the book above indicates, he is confident to challenge the wisdom of bygone ages and he states his case in trenchant terms. Readers will probably guess that he does not believe in the transmission of an oral Torah from God and down through the ages long before he states as much in a footnote on p 96 of this 400+ page work.

One unusual element of this book deserves a mention: the author makes a point of flagging and numbering each Ethical Principle as it appears in Avot. He finds a total of 69. I think this is helpful, since it is possible to read and engage with Pirkei Avot from one end to the other without identifying individual ethical principles and therefore without appreciating how many there are. 

Relevance in retrospect

Regular readers will know that I spend a good deal of time browsing second-hand bookshops, street sales and even piles of abandoned books in my search for hitherto unfamiliar commentaries on Pirkei Avot. My latest find is in autographed copy of Relevance: Pirkei Avos For The Twenty-First Century, by Rabbi Dan Roth, founder of the interactive multimedia educational platform Torah Live. This tome had been left in a pile of unwanted books that had been left to the elements. Fortunately I was able to save it from the first of Israel’s early seasonal rains. Being a full 15 years too late to write a review of Relevance, I thought I’d look at it in retrospect.

How does this commentary differ from all the rest? The jacket-flap declaration sets out the book’s objectives thus:

The teachings of Pirkei Avos are timeless and contain answers to the moral challenges of every generation. The particular application of those messages to the needs of each generation, however, changes according to the times. As such, every generation needs to delve anew into the words of Chazal to discover how to apply the eternal truths of the Torah to the challenges of the day.

Relevance fulfills this need by showing how each Mishnah pertains to the modern world, revealing Pirkei Avos to be as vibrant and contemporary as if it were written today.

The claim that the book shows how “each Mishnah pertains to the modern world” is not strictly true. Avot contains over 120 mishnayot and baraitot, of which this book discusses just 24, omitting any discussion of the baraitot in the sixth and final perek. Some added features are however worthy of note. One is a glossary of non-English terms found in the text; another is the impressive bibliography, and a third is a short but useful index of names and topics.

The author’s selection of mishnayot suggests to me that he may have started with a collection of contemporary issues and points which he was seeking to make, working back towards whichever mishnah was the appropriate peg on which to hang it. This approach would also explain why, to the relief of many modern readers, there are no flights into the realms of linguistics, semantics and philology. Nor are there lengthy anecdote-laden biographies of the sages or philosophical speculations. The overall effect is to provide a direct, accessible statement of the sort of day-to-day moral values that a Torah-conscious Jew should put into practice. 

This is a book for believers, not doubters. The tone of the text is direct, confident and assertive. I would imagine that the ideal reader is a recent ba’al teshuvah whose enthusiasm for living a Jewish life has resulted in the adoption of a lifestyle where the person’s commitment exceeds their knowledge. Its overall message is clear. It tells the reader: “you too can live a good Jewish life and don’t be embarrassed at the antiquity of its source materials since they are eternally relevant”.

 On a personal note, I enjoyed the author’s approach to Avot 5:23, in which Yehudah ben Teyma teaches us to be as bold as leopards, light as eagles, swift as deer and strong as lions in our service to God. Though his analysis is different from mine, he takes the same line as I do in my book, looking afresh at the natural qualities of these four creatures—but he got there a decade and a half ahead of me.

I’d like to conclude with a word of criticism, to be addressed to the publisher, not the author. Although the main content of the book spans 268 pages, readers will find themselves getting to the end of it rather sooner than they imagined they might. This is not only a consequence of the fact that the print is agreeably large. It also reflects the fact that, of those 268 pages, a remarkable 63—or around nearly 25%--are either completely blank or contain nothing except the title of the discussion that follows two pages later. This seems to be a regrettably large quantity of paper to sacrifice at the altar of aesthetic appeal.

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Pirkei Avos For The Twenty-First Century was published by Feldheim, Jerusalem in 2007. It is available on Amazon in Kindle and hardback formats.

Something old, something new -- a long-published book comes up for review

Here's something of a novelty: a review of a book that was published nearly 30 years ago. Even more of a novelty is the fact that this review has something of a sectarian slant to it. While I have generally not singled out any religious preference for special attention, this post cannot fail to do so because this is a book on Pirkei Avot by two scholarly advocates of Reform Judaism in the United States.

As an orthodox Jew by persuasion and practice, I cannot pretend to be an expert on the Reform movement in the States. This review will not therefore discuss its principles and doctrines. My interest here is solely focused on what the book under review has to say about Avot and how it says it.

The book, Pirke Avot: A Modern Commentary on Jewish Ethics, was published in 1993 by the UAHC Press. The authors are Leonard Kravitz and Kerry M. Olitzky, both of whom held posts with the Hebrew Union College and worked as congregational rabbis. Finding this work in my local second-hand book shop, I was intrigued. What would it say about the Ethics of the Fathers?

I had expected to find some fairly revolutionary, not to say shocking, religious pronouncements in the commentary on the six chapters of Avot. The big shock, however, was that there weren't any. The authors took an eclectic approach to their choice of sources, limiting themselves to just five: the Avot deRabbi Natan, Maimonides, the commentary ascribed to Rashi, Rabbi Ovadyah MiBartenura and Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman Heller's Tosafot Yom Tov. For the benefit of readers who may not appreciate the significance of this selection, it is notable that all five belong firmly within the orthodox camp and none is modern. The author of the most recent of these works, Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman Heller, died in 1654.

Taken as a whole, the treatment of these venerable sources is most respectable. In the main, each mishnah or baraita is accompanied by a translation and a brief extract of one or more of the sources mentioned above that seeks to elucidate or contextualise it. There are a small number of exceptions, where the authors add or substitute their own comments for those of the sages, of which the most puzzling is that which follows Avot 4:26 (where Rabbi Yose ben Yehudah likens learning from the young and the old to, respectively, drinking wine that is raw or mature) and 4:27 (the account of new jars containing old wine and old jars that don't even contain new wine). The sole commentary on the two mishnayot reads:

"The use of wine growing and wine making as symbols suggests how much viticulture was part of the ancient Jewish and general world".

This comment reflects the general drift of this book in treating Avot as a useful reference point for the study of Jewish life and rabbinical thought in the mishnaic period.

There is a further issue to address here: where is the Reform content of this book?

Each of the six chapters of Pirkei Avot is followed by two further sections. The first add-on consists of short explanations, penned by the authors, of some of the concepts and issues touched upon in the preceding chapter. In these we also read a little about the Reform positions on, for instance, rabbinic legislation, reward and punishment, this world and the next, and cremation. These explanations are brief and matter-of-fact, and certainly not "preachy".

The second add-on, called "gleanings", consists of a collection of short passages that have direct or tangential reference to a mishnah or baraita in the chapter to which they are appended. All are written by influential figures within the Reform movement from the United States and beyond.

Taken individually and collectively, these "gleanings" are far more powerful than the teachings in Avot and the accompanying commentary are allowed to be. Most are stylistically elegant and eloquent, designed to stimulate the mind and stir the emotions. Strange to say, if one were to blank out the name of the authors of many of these passages, one might easily imagine that they had been spoken by a contemporary orthodox rabbi.

Nonetheless I was left feeling uncomfortable about this book. Admittedly it was neither a critique of orthodox/traditional Judaism nor a hard sell for Reform. It did however make me think of an exercise in "bait-and-switch". My attention had been caught by the fact that this was a modern commentary -- but I had assumed that it was a modern commentary on Avot. In essence, it was not. The subtitle does state that the book is a "modern commentary on Jewish ethics" -- which it is. But the choice of Maimonides and the rest, the selection of source materials that were not modern and did not engage with any discussion of Jewish ethics, rather suggested that their inclusion may have been intended to show that the rabbis of the mishnah spoke only to their peers and that the sages of yesteryear had nothing to offer the then modern world of 1993.

In other words, the reader will receive the impression that "old" Judaism is a closed book, and that Jewish ethical narrative has now relocated to the "gleanings".

I would be curious to discover whether any readers of this blog have read this book too. If there are, I hope that they will share their opinions with the rest of us.