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Rav Avi: We have a question that I want to bring today that is definitely very relevant, in particular in Israel this year. It has to do with one of the many, many halakhic and religious questions and consequences of this ongoing war and of having so many people serving in the army, and serving in the army in all sorts of different extended periods of time. And so this question is really a question for modern times. I would say, it's very relevant and very practical question for some, and for many of us, probably all of us in America, it is going to be more theoretical. And I feel like it's a question that will have maybe as much at stake in the theoretical as it does in the practical.
The questioner writes, I live in Israel where I, as a kohen, make the blessing of Birkat Kohanim every day. After October 7th, I was recruited to my town's kitat konanut, First Responders Team, and am required to carry at all times, especially in the Beit Knesset, my machine gun. I also carry a handgun. Is it prohibited to make the blessing of Birkat Kohanim while carrying a weapon? Intuitively, it would seem problematic, but I've not seen any sources discussing this question.
Rav Eitan: As opposed to some other questions, I have a strong instinct and take here, an answer, that I think is the right answer, but we'll get to that further on.
Rav Avi: So, there are a lot of different angles that we can and should unpack here. There's just a technical piece that I would love for you to start us off on, which is, in Israel, a kohen makes the blessing of Birkat Kohanim, the priestly blessing, every day. That's different than in America? Can you just maybe start off by just quickly explaining that distinction, and then we can dive into the heart of the question.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, it seems originally the priestly blessing, Birkat Kohanim, was a part of the Amidah, the public prayer, if not every day, then every Shabbat. And those are the dominant practices in Israel until today. In much of the country, certainly Jerusalem, it's offered every day. In parts of the north, it's every Shabbat. But what happened over time, and it's an interesting question of exactly why it happened, when Jews moved to Europe, they essentially dropped doing Birkat Kohanim, except on the festivals. So Pesah, Shavuot, Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and only on the Yom Tov days.
Rav Avi: Maybe just explain, we do have the text in our Amidah. So what do you mean by “dropped doing it?”
Rav Eitan: That's right. So they replaced the kind of live action, kohanim coming up to the front of the room, spreading out their hands and blessing the community, with the leader of the Amidah reciting a text, oh bless us, you God, with the priestly blessing, and then rattling off the words, everyone answering, ken yehi ratzon, may it be so, but not with the sort of word by word chant and answering, amen. There are a lot of explanations given for why it got scaled down in the diaspora. One of them was, you need a certain elevated sense of joy and a sense of peace to offer a blessing and during the week and even on a regular shabbat, people are too focused on their livelihood or maybe the travails of living in the diaspora, and they just can't get to that elevated state. But there's other reasons scholars speculate may have been the case, but that explains the questioner saying, I, because I live in Israel, am offering this every day.
Rav Avi: It's really interesting actually, even already in that short explanation, there is a sense that you should be at peace when you are reciting this blessing, and an underlying assumption that you would be more at peace in Israel and less at peace in the Diaspora, where we are looking at this modern version of the question actually, where the person in Israel is the person saying, I have to have my gun with me for protection. Okay, he seems to have an instinct that there's something wrong with these two things being incompatible, but he doesn't actually know why.
Where do we start?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, so let's begin with weapons and sacred spaces, and then eventually we can get to the priestly blessing and where this might fit in. And some of these sources, I think, to anyone who's even had a cursory exposure to questions like this will be familiar, but they're sources I always find powerful to encounter again and again. So, the Torah already says, if you make a stone altar, lo tivne et-hen gazit, don't make it of hewn stone. That is to say, don't make it cut with a metal tool into a nice, beautiful, cube, or rectangular prism. Why? Ki harbekha hinafta ale-hah vatehhalale-ah, Because you have wielded your sword over that stone, and thereby desecrated it. Now, you probably didn't even cut the stone with an actual sword, but you cut it with some kind of sharp metal object, which has the connotation, and maybe even the function more broadly, of something with which one can do violence. And the Torah says, you cannot build my altar with a tool that is a sword or sword-like. And we get a kind of pithy summary of the idea in the Sifra, the early rabbinic midrash on the Book of Vayikra, Leviticus. Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar says, and I'll quote it in the original and translate it, because I think the language is so potent, habarzel nivra lekatzer yamav shal adam. Iron was created to shorten human life.
Vehamizbe’ah nivra leha’arikh yamav shal adam. And the altar was created in order to lengthen human life through the atonement of the sacrifices and enabling people to overcome sin, et cetera. Eino badin sheyanif hamekatzer al hama’arikh. It is illogical, incoherent, unjustified, to wield the shortener over the lengthener. You can't build the tools of lengthening life with other tools that shorten life.
Rav Avi: It's very compelling to me, really moving actually, and also feels like it would negate a lot of other things that we do way before we get to birkat kohanim. It resonates with me in the same way that I feel disjointed and uncomfortable every time I see an armed guard outside of a synagogue. And I think like” this just can’t be right.” Like there's something wrong here. Do people ever use this as a source to argue against that?
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So I haven't seen that. We'll get back to the fact that the temple was full of knives. And they were being used all the time to slaughter animals. So this can't be reduced to, you can't have anything in the presence of the temple that could shorten life. But there's something focused on when you're actually constructing the agent of atonement and life-lengthening, you cannot do that with something that is a potential tool of violence. So you're absolutely right to ask, what's the line? What puts something in the category of wielding it over the stones of the altar? And what puts it in the category of, this is a slaughter knife, which we need to do our job?
Rav Avi: Right. That's actually a helpful reminder. Does that make you feel like this is meant to be more of a symbolic statement than a sort of technical one? Like it's not, you can't technically never have knives around the altar. That wouldn't be possible.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So it might be. Look, in the follow up narrative on this in the Bible, when King Solomon actually builds the temple, the Book of Kings goes out of its way to say, when the temple was being built, they used complete stones that were brought in. You couldn't hear a hammer or an ax or any iron tool being wielded when the temple was being built. Now, it seems like the plain sense of that is, well, they did hew the stones.
Rav Avi: They just hewed them somewhere else?
Rav Eitan: They did them far away, and then they brought them in done so that you would have this symbolic, to use your word, peace and quiet and sense of, wow, the temple just went up kind of silently, even though there was some power plant, as it were, way out in the exurbs that was generating all the energy for the electric bikes, which are just clean vehicles, but I have a sense of, right, that's how it's playing. But the rabbis take this further, and they say, well, no, no, no, if you're really gonna take seriously that you can't hew the stones anywhere, since we know they were hewn stones, they must have been hewn by a magical worm called the Shamir, which was able to simply cut these stones without any metal tool. That's probably somewhere sitting on, that's at least one view in the rabbis that there was this worm.
That's sitting somewhere on the spectrum of, was it a symbolism? We at least want to project peace, even though of course we gotta do this work elsewhere, or no, maybe actually magically, as it were, the temple of God was built. In a way that enabled there to be no violence or shade of it.
Rav Avi: Yeah, or it's like a grand scavenger hunt. They had to find the rocks that were the right size before they could…
Rav Eitan: Exactly. So, okay, that's one piece, right? That's one thing, the question is instinct. Is there something incompatible here? Hey, I'm building the temple, I can't have a sword.
Another classic text comes out of the laws of what you're allowed to carry on Shabbat.
Let's say outside an eruv, in general, the things that you're allowed to transport other than your body are clothing, things you really need to protect from the elements or dress up, and things that are in the category of what's called a tahshit. So think about a brooch.
Rav Avi: Jewelry.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, exactly, like something that you're not wearing, per se, as clothing, but it's part of your outfit. And there's a debate over our weapons, a tahshit. Can weapons be understood to be something that's kind of part of your uniform? Another thing that might be like this, think about like a decorative pocket handkerchief, right? It's in your pocket, you're not really wearing it, you're not going to use it to blow your nose, but it's there. So that's a tahshit. What about a weapon? So the Mishnah says you can't carry a sword, a bow, a shield, a spear. And if you carry those outside on Shabbat, that's a core violation of Shabbat, you’re libel, et cetera.
Rav Avi: Meaning you can never say: “the weapon is part of my outfit.”
Rav Eitan: Right. But then Rabbi Eliezer comes along and says, what are you talking about? That's just a part of the guy's outfit, right? Think about a picture of a Roman soldier, and he's holding a spear and he's holding a shield, that's how he's dressed up. Of course he should be able to walk outside on Shabbat that way. And there were Jews in the Roman Imperial Army.
Rav Avi: The image that comes to mind for me is like, the cowboy who has the gun and his holster. That's part of the cowboy outfit. Like, if you order a cowboy costume, that's what you'll get. If you order a pirate costume, it comes with a sword.
Rav Eitan: Exactly right. So, you could have a crown, you could have a pocket handkerchief, you could have a shield, you could have a pistol. And Rabi Eliezer says, those are tahshitin, those are part of the outfit. And then the sages come back, defending that earlier ruling with a real hard punch here and say, well, they are tahshitin, but einan elah legnai, they are shameful. We're embarrassed of them. Why? Because the messianic vision laid out in Isaiah is, they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and there will be no war in the future. That's the world we long for. So implicitly, on Shabbat, when we are thinking about creating some microcosm of the perfect ideal world, where we draw the line as saying, this is a part of my uniform. If you can't imagine something being part of your messianic age uniform, you don't get to carry it outside on Shabbat.
Rav Avi: Yeah, I feel I have a very personal, emotional response to this text. I happened to come across it in studying Mishnah with my son last October or November. And it was really in a moment where the Jewish community had a lot of messaging around gratitude to our heroes and glorifying our heroes of the Israeli army, and then coming across this Mishnah with him that just had such a clear message of, we should be ashamed of our guns, we should be ashamed of our weapons, or not we should be ashamed, but like we...
Rav Eitan: We long for a world without them.
Rav Avi: Yeah, or like there's something wrong, we have to acknowledge that there is something wrong and feeling like there was something incompatible about weapons and on Shabbat. And knowing that October 7th was Shabbat, holding those two things together was nearly impossible and saying with my son to say, what's the message that I want to teach when we can't live in a world that you could just say quite simply, weapons are incompatible with Shabbes. You don't need weapons on Shabbes, when I knew that we did in fact need weapons on Shabbes. So where does that leave us?
Rav Eitan: Right, and thank God there were people who had weapons who went and stopped the slaughter where it stopped, as opposed to it going much further. We'll get back to that sort of functional piece. But what this Mishnah is getting at again, just fleshing out your question of where does the questioner’s instinct come from? Well, this is another place it comes from. If there's a vision of, well, the world we want to live in doesn't have weapons. In a way that the world we live in does have clothes, does have food, does have all kinds of other things, but the world we long for has no weapons. We're not going to use the category of tahshit, of ornament, of jewelry, of uniform, to house these objects in a Shabbat context.
There is one more amazing text on this, a story of Pinhas, Aharon's grandson, who is confronted with a public brazen act of sexual violation, where Zimri, the chieftain of Shimon, is cohabiting with a Midianite princess right in front of the tent of meeting, and it seems like everything is breaking down, and this intense moment of vigilante violence and justice, where Pinchas gets up and grabs a spear and goes and kills them, and then there's follow-up of God recognizing that act, etc. But there's a midrash that focuses on the particular locution there. It says, Pinchas got up from the midst of the community, taking a spear in hand, and went after them. But the word Eidah in Rabbinic tradition, based on basically the fourth chapter of Vayikra and a couple other places, encodes the sanhedrin, or the seat of power and authority in the community. So when they imagine vayakom mitoch ha-eidah, they imagine Pinchas was sitting in a judicial deliberative body when this chaos broke out. And what does he do? He gets up from that body, and then goes and takes a spear. From here, we learn that you may not go into the Beit Midrash with a weapon. The fact that it says he got up and then took a spear, as opposed to he got up with a spear, shows that you can't walk into a house of study with a weapon. We could argue, does that also imply a synagogue? Or is the Beit Midrash, the study house, a higher level of allergy to weapons? But here we have another text that indicates there's something incompatible about a weapon or a weapon-like object we've learned so far and the stones of the altar, some of the aspects of the laws of Shabbat and creating sacred spaces, and the space of study and learning Torah.
So, the question is, where do those precedents go? In the Middle Ages, the Maharam of Rotenberg, who is a figure we've talked about a number of times on this podcast, prominent 13th century German rabbi. It's reported about him that if he saw someone entering shul with a long knife, he would object. He would say, get that out of here, I don't want that in here. Why? He quoted that earlier thing: prayer is meant to lengthen life. This knife shortens life and therefore, you can't bring it in here. Notice the move now from the stones of the altar to just the space of the synagogue. And the Shulhan Arukh in the 16th century, he brings this view as there's some who forbid bringing a long knife into the synagogue, seems to give it weight.
Rav Avi: Do you think the length of the knife is meant to indicate the aesthetic? It's like it will make everyone on edge. Like when one person has a gun, everyone in the room is a little on edge.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, so this is exactly one of the questions that comes up. Is it okay if the knife is covered?
Rav Avi: Right, a concealed weapon.
Rav Eitan: A concealed weapon. Is the length of the knife just to indicate, well, a long knife, you can't conceal. Like a short knife, you could hide in your belt or something like that. But a long knife, everyone's gonna see. Is it the optics? Is it some other aspect of how it will be received by the person themselves? This is one interpretation. The Eliyahu Rabbah says, I checked the other things of the Maharam of Rotenberg, and he didn't want you coming into shul with your wallet either. And later people pointed out, yeah, but you can obviously come into shul with your wallet. He just didn't want you having your wallet out. It should be in your pocket, it should be covered up. So he says the same thing is true of the knife. And the reason later people will say he said it was a long knife, again, as a short knife you can conceal. But concealed carry, according to the Eliyahu Rabbah, is different from open carry.
Rav Avi: Right, it's interesting, our questioner is asking about “my machine gun,” and then actually put in parentheses, I also carry a handgun. It's sort of like they are implicitly saying, I think of the handgun as different. And I just want to actually go back and sort of amend, I sort of opened by saying, I imagine this is relevant for Israelis who are engaged in a war and not for Americans, but I should just make clear that actually, the mandate that you must wear your gun all the time is probably unique to Israelis who are in an army. But I'm from Atlanta, Georgia, where actually you can have a concealed weapon in church, in synagogue, and presumably could have your gun in your pocket when you're doing Birkat Kohanim. So actually, the concealed weapon version of this actually could be just as relevant for listeners, especially in the South.
Rav Eitan: That's correct. So we haven't yet gotten to the priestly blessing, birkat kohanim, which we'll get to in a second. But one dimension here is maybe concealed carry is different from open. And yeah, the questioner I think is really asking about that machine gun slung over the shoulder. Is that different from something that might be in a hip holster in a way that might be concealed? There's another piece here, the Be’ur Halakhah by the author of the Mishnah Berurah, who in the early 20th century says, you can't bring a long knife in, but let's say it's Yeshiva students who are learning in the shul afterwards, and they need a knife to cut up their lunch. Basically, they need it to advance their learning in the Beit Midrash. They can bring it in. The band, says the Be’ur Halakhah wants to argue is it's either performative or you don't need this in this space, and yet you are bringing it in as opposed to leaving it outside.
Rav Avi: That makes me actually think back to the text about tahshitim, the text about like, well, is it a, you use the word ornament, but I always think of it as jewelry. Like, is it part of your outfit? It can't be part of your outfit. I think actually a lot, again, being from Georgia about, gun culture and the ways in which some of that gun culture is about safety and protection, but a lot of it actually is just ornamental. It's like, this is a thing you can collect. Some people collect cars, and in the South and maybe the Western United States, people collect guns as ornaments, and feeling like maybe this text is saying like, it's one thing if you need a gun because you're a soldier, it's a different thing if you're bringing, you're walking around with your AR-15 rifle because AR-15 rifles are cool and you like them.
Rav Eitan: Right, and then that's not appropriate, according to at least the Maharam of Rottenberg's approach to bring into the synagogue. It would seem, the Be’ur Halakhah, once you're bringing it in for a functional purpose, it seems like he allows even as it were open carry of the knife, that is to say, you don't necessarily need to conceal it. If it's obvious while you're doing it, though, you might say, well, no, you still need some sensitivity to the optics of it.
Rav Avi: So I experienced that as different, experientially, when I'm in Israel and I see young soldiers who are out, sometimes it used to be soldiers were only young people before we had so many reserves, where you would see teenagers out at a restaurant with large guns. I actually did take some comfort in the fact of like, I know they have that gun because they were told they have to carry it. They didn't bring it to this restaurant because they think they need it right now or because they think it's cool, they're doing it because of a purpose. They're fulfilling a purpose, which was they were told this is mandatory. I don't know if that maybe relates to this in terms of, if it's for your lunch, then I'm not like, why is she holding a knife? I'm like, she's holding a knife because she's about to cut a slice of bread.
Rav Eitan: I do think there is a pathway here, particularly relying on the Be'ur Halakhah to say, look, if you are bringing this in for a function, which in this case is self-defense, and you are expected to have it on you at all times, it's not even really your choice, well then, of course you can have that with you in the synagogue, and you might decide that you are going to sort of tack on the Eliyahu Rabbah's element of concealed carry makes a difference. But if at the end of the day, you have to hold a rifle or a machine gun as part of the self-defense regime, you are going to have to do that, and we are not going to say, it doesn't make any sense, in my mind, to say that person who is actually performing a civic and religious function is not allowed to come into synagogue, because that seems like what the alternative is.
Rav Avi: Okay, so that's just about being in the space, which feels different than either leading the Tefillah, the prayer service, and/or doing this priestly blessing as a priest.
Rav Eitan: Good, so let's get to that, because we've got to drill down now on what does it mean to hold a weapon while offering a blessing. So one other text, which is not directly on point, but I think gives us some direction on this. There is a halacha, which has some complicated application, but the base point is clear: If a kohen, a priest, accidentally kills someone, okay? Totally exonerated, like, it's acknowledged that it was completely accidental. But they did it, and they know it, and other people know it. That person cannot offer birkat kohanim.
Rav Avi: The kohen cannot.
Rav Eitan: The kohen cannot, okay? Ever again. That’s it, they’re out, okay? As you can imagine, there's a lot of arguing over, does it at least have to have been negligent? Are we only talking about people who are guilty of manslaughter, even if they're exempt from murder? But there's an idea of, I agree, you did not intend this, and this was a genuine mistake that you made. But I'm sorry, we think of you as the guy who killed that person. That's not gonna work for us being blessed by you. Okay, now that's a very intense halacha, but it gives you a direction of, and by the way, that person is allowed to lead davening, they count on a minyan, they're a fully upstanding member of the community. Part of what it shows you is, and in a way it echoes with that diaspora tradition of not offering the blessing every day, which is to say, there's a high standard for getting to birkat kohanim. What is everyone's mood? What's the frame? et cetera. Acknowledge that is different in Israel, it's more work a day, it's day in, day out. And you therefore find any number of Israeli poskim, maybe we'll do it in a separate podcast, to take up the question of, a Kohen got in a car accident and killed someone. Like, is that it? They're really gone forever?
Rav Avi: And do they usually uphold it?
Rav Eitan: We'll find ways around it in some cases, and in other cases, hold the line, and it might depend on the fact. But I'm bringing that text first, so we're not surprised by the idea that you might, not because you're blaming or shaming this person in any way, even though I acknowledge it can have that effect, you might, because of your standards of what it means to channel God's blessing to the people, have a different standard of what it is to otherwise be an emissary of the community. We have to remember the kohanim, particularly the way we do it, they cover themselves in the tallit, we don't look at them, their identity, it's not a public role. Like you lead Musaf, you're up there, it's a public role. They're almost kind of invisible conduits of God's blessing, as a different standard tells us this text, for what makes that work.
Rav Avi: I guess maybe this is the obvious follow up question, but how do we apply that to soldiers nowadays? And/or soldiers then, I guess, but certainly soldiers nowadays where the person standing with a machine gun is more likely to be a person who has killed someone. I don't know if the accidental is different than like intentional, but exonerated for a different reason or something. But certainly the symbolic implication that someone who has caused death can't cause life.
Rav Eitan: Correct. We’d need to devote more dedicated time to give that question its due. On a broad level, yeah, there's a difference between something that's more on the level of negligence as opposed to someone who was actually doing their job in self-defense or on some operation. But you're right that it doesn't simply address the shortening life, lengthening life piece. You know, it's interesting, you said at the introduction here, this is a question that's particularly relevant now and since October 7th, so many people have been on duty, and that's true. It's also not a new question. Rav Chaim David Halevi got this question as the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv in 1987, even before the first intifada. So at a time that was as quiet as things ever are or were, and he's asked by a kohen, can I hold the gun while offering the priestly blessing? And so he says a bunch of interesting things. One thing he points out, he says, the whole ban on having knives in the synagogue that we talked about, it's a little bit weak, because he says there were knives all over the temple, as we mentioned earlier, for slaughter. You just weren't allowed to do it for making the stone. So maybe you shouldn't use a chainsaw to make the beams for the Aron Kodesh. I don't know, but what do you mean the presence of the knife? So he says, so already that's kind of a weak prohibition. It's a humra, it's a stringency. Just cover the weapon when you bring it into the synagogue, that's fine. He sort of lands there on coming into the space. He says, concealed is fine. When he gets to the priestly blessing, he says, I don't really think if you have a rifle or a machine gun that can't be concealed, I don't really think you should bring that up to the priestly blessing. Like, you can be in shul with it.
Rav Avi: I don't really think you should, or it's forbidden?
Rav Eitan: Okay, so his language here is very interesting. If you look inside the text, you watch him sort of struggling back and forth. He clearly wants concealment, ideally, for all weapons in synagogue. He then says, look, but the Be’ur Halakhah, that text about scholars using the knife to eat, means if you have a legitimate purpose for the knife, then even open carry is fine, and that would extend to the rifle and any weapons. Maybe even open carry is fine, maybe even for Birkat Kohanim, but he doesn't love it and says, could you just find someone else to hold it even for a moment? Now we know in terms of army regulations, that's not always so simple to be allowed to hand it off.
Rav Avi: For good reason.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, I have a very strong inclination here to forbid doing birkat kohanim with a weapon, even if it is concealed. To be quite honest, I would just prefer the kohen walk out during that part of the service, thereby not be subject to the call up, right? There's a general thing of, if you want to be exempt from birkat kohanim, just make sure you go out at the time of the service when they call you up.
I just don't see how you can be a symbol of blessing or an effective conduit of blessing while you are holding a weapon. I would say, even if it is concealed, you know you are holding it. You are up there with even a pistol on your hip and you know that you are in that state of holding the thing that shortens life while you're trying to offer a blessing that lengthens life. This feels more like the stones of the altar to me than being in the synagogue. And yeah, it might be one of the consequences of being at war, or being at this state of alertness that if we can't find individuals who can't be without a weapon for a few minutes, we might not be able to offer birkat kohanim on that day. That might actually be a powerful ritual reminder of the moment that we're in.
I feel strongly that anyone who has to be holding a weapon should be able to be in shul. And then we get into the, okay, better concealed. If that's not possible, that's fine. But that feels to me like a line that is appropriate to draw. Don't be a source of blessing while holding something that shortens life.
Rav Avi: Don't be, or like, you can't be.
Rav Eitan: You can't. It won't work. And it feels to me like the right balance of saying, yes, Jews defend themselves, Jews have weapons, Jews may kill people sometimes because they need to in order to protect themselves.
And we might even be proud of that in all kinds of ways, even with the question of never forgetting that messianic future where we want to be out of it. But we should also brag that we're a kind of people that doesn't offer a blessing while holding a weapon. And I think you can hold those two things together. That's my instinct.
Rav Avi: Yeah, I think there's a frame or a way of understanding ritual that I am very drawn to, which is like, ritual allows us to play out the messianic future now, right? It's like, that's a way of understanding Shabbat, is that we're pretending it's olam habah, we're pretending we're in the world to come, but we're bringing that into this world. And if we want to say that this priestly blessing is this moment of elevation and peace, is to say like, actually the rules of the messianic vision have to apply to that moment, or else we aren't doing the ritual correctly, because that's the point of the ritual, is to give us that one moment of actual peace, of actual shalom, and that's incompatible with holding a machine gun. Too much would be sacrificed. You would be losing the essence of the ritual forever, as opposed to just the ritual for that one moment, when you decided to skip it, because there was no other kohen or whatever. It's interesting for us, the two of us, to sit here and answer this question. Sometimes we start with a disclaimer of like, I don't, I'm not a person who has a gun. I've never held a gun. I hope never to hold a gun. We are both sitting here in America, and that this question, just to acknowledge that this question certainly plays out here. And as I was saying, like the concealed carry certainly could be relevant, is relevant in some states, is becoming more relevant, I think across the country. But that is a different question, and it's a different life experience that we hold than the questioner who is writing to us from Israel, where this has been their experience of life for at least a year, and we don't know how many more days of birkat kohanim this could be relevant for, just to sort of acknowledge that we don't have that shared life experience.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that's beautiful about the discourse of Halakha is everyone, everywhere and in all times talks to one another. And so you can sit anywhere in the world, and actually, if you're thoughtful and careful, hopefully have something meaningful to say to anyone anywhere else in the world who cares about halakhah. But there is just a humility of recognizing that it's always hard to judge questions generally on this show as opposed to case by case. But also, as I think came out in this episode, there are important values that have to be highlighted here, even if there's some balancing that goes along with that.
Rav Avi: And maybe I'll just end by highlighting, you know, these questions take us in such different directions, and that the person who's asking the question, as I was saying, this is a super technical question, like, can I do this? Do I need to leave the room? Do I need to put my gun down? And yet, the answer pushes us to ask questions like, what is our messianic vision for the future? Is prayer compatible with violence? These are big questions. They're sort of questions about the essence of the Jewish project, of the religious project, of the human project. So what isn't sometimes very technical can also be, like, completely the most important questions for us to be asking, and just sort of gratitude for the way that these questions open up those really important discussions and commitments for us. Thanks.
Have a halakhic question you'd like answered on this show? Email us at [email protected]. Responsa Radio is a project of the Hadar Institute. Thanks to Chana Kupetz and Jeremy Tabick for producing this podcast, and to David Khabinsky for recording and editing this episode.
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