Elli Fischer
Rabbi Elli Fischer is a writer, translator, editor, and heritage travel consultant. He has rabbinical ordination from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and is pursuing a doctorate in Modern European Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. His chief interests are rabbinic biography, the history of halakha, and the interaction between religion and state in Israel.His original writing has appeared in a variety of Jewish publications, and he has translated and edited popular and acclaimed books. Prior to moving to Israel, he was the JLIC campus rabbi at the University of Maryland. He maintains a lively social media presence.
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Papers by Elli Fischer
Hoffmann’s halakhic writings have lamented that the almost complete
absence of dates in She’elot u-Teshuvot Melamed Leho’il makes it
impossible to chart Rabbi Hoffmann’s development in this field. However,
close scrutiny of Rabbi Hoffmann’s vast correspondence and of the
chronological record from which Melamed Leho’il was abstracted allows
us to begin to reconstruct his development.
This paper will demonstrate the sources and methods by which this
reconstruction can be accomplished by looking at one particular issue: the
status of sesame oil on Passover. Rabbi Hoffmann addresses the question
in one lengthy (and composite) responsum in Melamed Leho’il and refers
to it obliquely in another. Additional correspondences have come to light
more recently, and a newspaper article from the early 1900s completes the
picture and demonstrates how Rabbi Hoffmann’s position changed over
the course of five years. This is but one example of Rabbi Hoffmann’s
evolution as a halakhist when he took up the mantle of posek during the
last two decades of his life.
We demonstrate that R. Hoffmann both recorded his halakhic decisions in his notebook and copied directly from the notebook into the letters of response to various correspondents. We also show that R. Hoffmann continued to update his notebook through the years, until the end of his life, revisiting previously rendered decisions. Thus, even a single responsum, as printed in Melamed Le-ho'il, may reflect several stages of R. Hoffmann's halakhic thinking about a particular topic over time.
This article adds a new layer of understanding to the genesis of this law by looking at the official and unofficial role of rabbis in Diaspora communities, especially Tsarist Russia and its successor states, birthplaces of most of Israel's founding leaders, and demonstrating the continuities between those arrangements and the arrangements in the new state.
The surprising answer is the comedy of Lenny Bruce - and it betrays something of his own hybrid identity.