By -

Welcome to Nazir!


As we enter the fascinating world of Nazirite vows, we will see that it seems to have been rather prevalent in the time of the Second Temple and perhaps for a short time afterwards. But then becoming a Nazir fell out of fashion and we have no record of any medieval or modern Nezirim until we arrive in the twentieth century. Here we encounter an extraordinary individual: Rabbi David Cohen, known as the Nazir.



The Nazir (1887-1972) was born to a distinguished rabbinical family in Eastern Europe and traveled all over, studying with the Hafetz Haim, at Slobodka and at Volozhin, among other places. He also began to study philosophy and other Western disciplines. During World War I he ended up in Basel, Switzerland, where he encountered the man who changed his life: Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook. After a philosophical discussion, Rabbi Cohen stayed the night. When he heard Rabbi Kook praying in the morning, he was overcome by his holiness and: “ I became a different man. . . I had found a teacher.”


In 1922 the Nazir moved to Israel and continued to study with Rabbi Kook in his yeshiva, Mercaz HaRav. He also chose to take a Nazirite vow and from then until the end of his life he abstained from wine and grape products and did not cut his hair (he was a Cohen so he stayed away from impurity and dead bodies in any case). In effect, he was a nazir olam, a lifelong nazir, like on daf 4 of our masechet. He also took on a form of vegetarianism that would not be out of place today, refusing to wear leather as well as not eat meat or fish. In addition, he would do a taanit dibbur between Rosh Hodesh Elul and Yom Kippur, only speaking of holy things.

Why did the Nazir take on this lifestyle, something unprecedented in Jewish life for the past two thousand years? One reason was that he wanted to remind the Jews of their past and inspire in them a hope for the future:

נזיר הנני, מדרגה לנבואה. אילו זכיתי לבוא לעולם רק לשם כך, לפרסם מחדש שם זה, נזיר, כעובדת חיים בימינו, כדי להזכיר שאנחנו עומדים ערב תחיית הנבואה בישראל, דייני
I am a nazir, a step towards prophecy. If I only merited to come into this world for this reason, to make known again this concept, “nazir,” as a fact in our days, to remind us that we are on the cusp of reviving prophecy in Israel, it would be enough.

This quote leads us to the second reason for his choice  - he believed it was a step on the way to prophecy, a state that he yearned for his whole life. 

Rabbi David Cohen led an extraordinary life and had an unusual family as well. His wife, Sarah, was one of the founders of Emun which became Emunah women. She would attend his lectures and he would not start until she had arrived and was seated. His daughter, Tzipiya (צפיה לישועה I assume)married Rabbi Shlomo Goren. And his son Shear Yashuv (the name of the prophet Isaiah’s son) was a Nazir from birth. He relates that when he was a teenager, a bet din was convened in his home to release him from this status. He fought in the Haganah and was captured by the Jordanians with the fall of the Old City of Jerusalem.



Eventually, he became the Chief Rabbi of Haifa and remains a vegetarian and does not drink wine.


For an excellent article on the Nazir, with many references, see Rabbi Josh Rosenfeld at http://seforim.blogspot.co.il/2013/11/the-nazir-in-new-york.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

By -
Image
Queen for a Day  Nazir 19   Our mishnah is one of the places where we hear about the intriguing figure of Queen Helene or Heleni HaMalka. Here she is described as taking a Nazirite vow while still in the Diaspora, and then having to redo part (or all) of it when she arrives in the land of Israel. Who is Helene, where is she from and what can archaeology tell us about her? We hear about Helene and her sons Monbaz and Izates in a number of places. Josephus, who was almost her contemporary (she probably died when he was a child, in the mid first century CE), writes about the family’s conversion to Judaism. Helene and her husband Monbaz were the rulers of a country called Adiabene or חדייב in Hebrew. It is located on the northern end of the Tigris River, near ancient Nineveh and the Assyrian kingdom. Today it is in northern Iraq, in Kurdistan:   http://womenofhistory.blogspot.co.il/2014/07/queen-helena-of-adiabene.html Adiabene’s location was on a major trade route a
Read more
By -
Image
The Writing on the Wall Shabbat 149 The Gemara here discusses the Mishnah about not reading from a written guest list or menu on Shabbat. Is the concern that you might come to erase something from the list, or that it might lead you to reading material that is inappropiate for Shabbat? In this context, the Gemara discusses a case where the list is written on a wall, and how high the wall is, i.e., whether it will be difficult to erase. Those of us who regularly write out Shabbat menus and guest lists may find this Gemara somewhat strange to say the least. In what civilized home would you write your lists directly on the wall? In this situation, it is helpful to compare our case to one of the few places in the ancient world where the walls and everything on them survived completely intact: Pompeii . The volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii in the year 79 CE preserved the city and all its contents, including those people unlucky enough to not escape in time. As such, Pompeii
Read more
By -
Image
What’s Cookin’? Shabbat 38 What did our ancestors’ kitchens look like? What are all these terms thrown around in Shabbat and in Menachot: tanur תנור , kirah כירה , kupach קופח , furni פורני ? Are they at all parallel to the baking and cooling appliances we use today? To answer that question I looked at three sources: Zeev and Shmuel Safrai’s Mishnat Eretz Yisrael, Shmuel Avitzur’s encyclopedia of traditional tools אדם ועמלו , and Dr. Rafi Frankel’s comprehensive article on baking in Talmudic time (Catedra 2011, link at bottom of the post). Safrai tells us that unless you were very wealthy, no one in ancient times had a kitchen as we think of it. Not only was most of the preparing, baking and cooking done outside in the communal courtyard (everyone knows what is or isn’t in your pots!) but there rarely were surfaces to work on. The women would squat or sit on the floor and the baking and cooking “appliances” were on the floor too. Safrai gives a short description of a ta
Read more