Even one single word can make the difference

EVEN one single word in sophisticated rabbinic writings can make all the difference.

Not even a technical word. Not even, it seems, a substantive one.

This word is nir’eh, which in English translates into two words, “it seems.”

The rabbinic writings to which I refer — “responsa” — are Hebrew literature consisting of questions and answers. A person is in need of guidance from the Torah concerning a specific problem. He writes a learned rabbi. The rabbi writes back with an answer. These are “responsa,” or, in Hebrew, simply, “Questions and Answers.”

They are of great interest not only because of their learned discourse, but because they reflect the times. For example, there is actually a book of responsa based on questions asked during the Holocaust, in the ghetto and in the camps. As you can imagine, these questions were very different from those asked in 1950s America or 1350s Spain.

Many of the great rabbinic minds of the centuries acquired their stature substantially from their responsa. One thinks of Rabbi Moses Feinstein in the 20th century or of Rashba in the 13th century.

Responsa are where “the rubber hits the road,” so to speak. It is one thing to discourse on a teaching of the Torah in theory; quite something else, in real life. The laws of levirate marriage, laid down in the Torah, are clear, if complicated. But what about this:

A woman’s husband died. They had no children. The woman’s late husband’s brother is a Marrano, i.e., born Jewish but now a practicing Catholic. He refuses to perform halitzah, the ceremony that will release this woman to marry someone else. For 12 years he refuses to appear to perform the ceremony. Can he be declared not Jewish, thus freeing the woman of the need for the ceremony and allowing her to remarry, if she so wishes?

These are complications not foreseen by the Torah’s statement of the laws. The learned rabbinic authority must know how to apply the laws to this case.

As I say, this not only reveals erudition — learned discourse about the Torah, of interest to Torah scholars — but also social circumstances, of interest to a variety of inquisitive people.

Responsa are simultaneously pure Torah and applied Torah, both theory and life.

THERE is one single word that appears often in these responsa: nir’eh, “it seems.” It introduces, often, the answer to the question, or the stages in Torah logic on the way to the answer to the question. What does it mean?

Nir’eh denotes “it appears.” That is, “I am not dogmatic on the question.” This is just the way it seems to me.

Not exactly a confidence builder for the questioner. If one seeks guidance, one wants an answer, not a maybe.

Take a closer took at the context of the word, however. While nir’eh denotes “it seems,” it frequently connotes something very different.

For example, the word nir’eh is found up and down the writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaiah Karelitz, more widely known by the title of his books, Hazon Ish, “Vision of a Man.” The initials of his first names spell the first two letters of the Hebrew for man; hence, “Vision of a Man” is a poetic rendering of “Vision of Abraham Isaiah.”

His writings are not answers to questions submitted to him, but they do contain rulings about contemporaneous circumstances.

Countless times, Hazon Ish introduces his thinking by “it seems.” What this connotes is that a mere mortal, about to make a pronouncement on the Divine Law — a being of flesh and blood who will some day die, about to act in light of the tremendous weight of the generations of halachic masters and claiming to reflect the will of G-d Himself in the Torah — will couch his conclusions modestly.

He will say only, “nir’eh, it seems to me.”

That is vis-a-vis tradition and vis-a-vis G-d.

But in the authority’s determination to ascertain the Divine intent in the given case, he is not hedging as he uses nir’eh. Not hedging. Indeed, the readings and opinions of that formidable scholar, Hazon Ish, are frequently introduced by “nir’eh” — a modest abnegation before G-d coexisting with a ferocious determination to have his halachic rulings seen as compelled by the sources.

So, too, in my acquaintance with the comments of the Vilna Gaon on the Shulchan Aruch. When this extraordinary genius and independent mind introduces a source with “it seems to me,” this is nothing if not a statement of profound analysis and hammering confidence.

In our own era, when Rabbi Feinstein (d. 1986) wrote, “it seems,” he meant: the full force of my polymathic halachic knowledge sees a lenient or a stringent ruling in the case at hand to be compelled by the sources.

Often, in rabbinic discourse, one word is chosen to reflect an opposite meaning. A blind person, for example, is termed “a person of abundant light.” “It seems” (nir’eh) often means nothing other than the untrammeled expression of truth.

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