The Dor Revii, Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner רבי משה שמואל גלזנר
Rabbi of Cluj, a great grandson of the Chatam Sofer and one of the few Hungarian rabbis who stood for Zionism
He was born in Cluj and took his father's place there, giving it up forty five years later when he left for Jerusalem. His mother's great grandfather was the Chatam Sofer, and in Hungary that meant more than any title: the name obliged a man to side with those who changed nothing.
He held the other side. In the introduction to his Dor Revii, his study of tractate Hullin, Glasner asks why the Oral Torah was forbidden to be written down, and answers: so that it would not set hard. What is written is held by its letter; what is unwritten lives by being expounded, and so the work of the expounder is not a retelling of something long finished but a share in something still being made. From the same principle he held that a court's ruling binds not because the court guessed the truth but because the Torah placed the ruling in the hands of living men.
The second half of his life was just as awkward for his surroundings. Glasner stood at the beginning of Mizrachi, the Zionists who kept the commandments, and in 1921 he represented them at the twelfth Zionist Congress in Carlsbad. The Hungarian rabbis turned away; in the Lithuanian yeshivot, on the other hand, his work was read and valued. In 1923 he left for Jerusalem and died there a year later.
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Dor Revii on tractate Hullin, the introduction — the argument that the Oral Torah was deliberately left unwritten, and that the expounder takes part rather than retells
Scholarship
- Glasner, Mosheh Shemuel, article in an encyclopedia of East European Jewry — the years of his life, his descent from the Chatam Sofer, his years at the head of the Cluj community, his part in Mizrachi and his departure for Jerusalem
Basis: documents and evidence.