THREE WHO ATE
GREENBERG, IRVING
REACCESS THREE WHO ATE Irving Greenberg "Three Who Ate," the well-known story about Yom Kippur by the Hebrew writer David Frishman, has already become something of a folk classic. The story, the...
...Salanter's teachings formed the basis for the Mussar Movement (after the Mussar, or ethical literature of the past whose study and application it stressed...
...Instead, he sought to found a movement for inner renewal of Jewish tradition through special emphasis on the ethical, interpersonal aspects of Jewish law and through the enrichment of personal character development out of traditional sources...
...Irving Greenberg, an author and educator, is on the faculty of Judaic Studies at City College in New York...
...His attempts to adapt the techniques and cultural values of modernity ran into serious difficulties in Eastern Europe...
...TISHREI 5736 MOMENT 15...
...Salanter's life and writings are not well known today, yet he remains one of the most intriguing and important figures of traditional Jewry in the past hundred years...
...He hoped to develop a self-critical inner-directed traditional ideology, one that was at the same time open to modernity and also critical of it...
...ligious revolution which modernity was bringing in its wake...
...He failed because traditional Jewry was unwilling to incorporate new values, and modern Jewry was already too committed to integration and modernization to challenge and question these same values...
...Despite his stature as a great scholar and saintly figure in Lithuania and Russian Poland, Salanter spent most of the last twenty-six years of his life in Western Europe...
...The incident in Vilna, described in this story, was not, then, merely a beau geste, but was, rather, part of a new thrust for ethical sensitivity growing out of the kind of traditionalism which Salanter attempted to influence...
...Salanter succeeded in developing a cadre of followers who took over and revitalized many yeshivot in Eastern Europe, but he failed to make it a movement of the masses of laymen, as Chas-sidism had become in its time...
...Salanter was one of the few Rabbis who grasped the cultural and reREACCESS presents classics and other documents out of the Jewish past...
...In addition, he is Director of the National Jewish Conference Center...
...He realized that this development could not be stopped by social opposition, nor its influence eliminated by simple rejection...
...The story, the account of a conflict between Jewish law and the immediate needs of life, is based on an actual event in the life of Rabbi Israel Salanter(18IO- 1883), a leading figure in nineteenth century East European Jewish life...
Vol. 1 • September 1975 • No. 3
