David Weiss Halivni - Impact

Impact

His impact on JTS has been profound. Most of the Talmud professors at JTS follow his source-critical approach. This has impacted the manner in which Talmud is taught to its students. In recent years, the work of Halivni and Shamma Friedman has resulted in a paradigm shift in the understanding of the Talmud (Encyclopaedia Judaica 2nd ed. entry "Talmud, Babylonian"). The traditional understanding was to view the Talmud as a unified homogeneous work. While other scholars had also treated the Talmud as a multi-layered work, Halivni's innovation (primarily in the second volume of his Mekorot u-Mesorot) was to distinguish between the onymous statements, which are generally succinct Halachic rulings or inquiries attributed to known Amoraim, and the anonymous statements, characterised by a much longer analysis often consisting of lengthy dialectic discussion, which he attributed to the later authors- "Stamma'im" (or Savora'im).

It has been noted that indeed the Jerusalem Talmud is very similar to the Babylonian Talmud, minus Stammaitic activity, which is to be found only in the latter (Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed.), entry "Jerusalem Talmud").

Until recently, Halivni was the spiritual leader of Kehilat Orach Eliezer, a congregation on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a position he had held since the congregation's foundation in 1992. In 2002, there was a big controversy at this congregation, for many members of the community wanted to allow women to be called up to the Torah, which, while supported by a then-recent legal argument by Rabbi Mendel Shapiro, is opposed by many Rabbis for halakhic and sociological reasons. Halivni was not excited about the practice, and told the congregation: "I shall allow it, but only if it is done no more frequently than a few times a year, and only if it is done in a separate room from the ‘real’ service." Thus, the congregation allows this practice only under very limited circumstances. Nevertheless, even this “compromise” was far too liberal for many congregants. On the other side, many liberals favored a Partnership minyan approach and were frustrated by KOE's failure to include women in the main Torah service.