In one of your Jewish history lectures you attribute the loss of dikduk to a backlash against secular Zionists and other modern Jews who embraced it.
Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky said that. He said secular Jews stole the Hebrew language, stole the Land of Israel, and stole history and knowledge from us. And we let them have it.
It’ll come back, don’t worry.
What will?
Why do you think so?
Because all of these problems are cumulative and there comes a tipping point. There comes a time when it cannot go on any longer. It’s true in all of history. There comes a moment – that’s when revolutions come, that’s when the Soviet Union collapsed. And now pretty much, the Jewish people are going through a few moments.
What makes you say that?
Because you can’t have a system that’s broke and expect it to go on forever.
You recently wrote an article criticizing Israel’s haredi community for its stance on serving in the army. Can you elaborate?
Army service is a symptom of the problem. The problem is how to deal with the Jewish state. How do you deal with Jews who are not just like you? How do you deal with Jews who are not observant? Those are the issues. Until we come face to face and deal with them, you’re only going to have arguments about symptoms, not about the cause.
For a long period of time we were able to deny that the state existed. We pretended that we were still in the exile except that it’s a Hebrew-speaking exile. But that’s part of the system that’s broke.
We didn’t really believe it was going to happen. But God fooled us. It happened – 66 years ago. And now that there’s a Jewish state, we don’t know how to deal with it.
You seem to straddle two worlds. Your education was black hat, but many of your views would be characterized as Modern Orthodox nowadays.
I’m not Modern Orthodox. I’m trying to be a shomer Shabbos Jew. I see myself as a continuity of my grandfather and my father and my teachers in the yeshiva. That’s how I see myself.
It seems, though, that the two camps – black hat and Modern Orthodox – are drifting further and further apart. When you were growing up…
…When I was growing up, you knew every shomer Shabbos Jew in Chicago. That’s how few there were, and no one could afford to say, “I don’t go there,” “I don’t belong to that [organization].”
We’re a victim of our own success. Everybody’s big enough so they don’t need the other guy. It’s a different world.
You write in your book that you completed a doctoral thesis…
…I have a D.H.L. – Doctor of Hebrew Letters.
If so, why don’t you call yourself Rabbi Dr. Berel Wein? It might lend your works greater prestige or acceptance.
I’m not looking for greater prestige or acceptance. Whatever I do has to stand and fall on its own merits – not on whether I’m a doctor or not.
In one of your lectures years ago you made an interesting observation on human nature based on your years in the rabbinate. You said a rabbi is forced by his position to pretend to care about other people. After pretending for enough years, though, you said a rabbi would surprisingly begin to actually care. Can you elaborate?
A rabbi gets paid for doing mitzvos – visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, listening to people. So you get paid for doing what you really should be doing anyway. The only thing is now it becomes your job. And after a while, that becomes part of you. That’s why I think the rabbinate is a great profession even though it’s a very, very difficult and wearying one.