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"Q. On several occasions, you have recommended that the reader should consult a daas Torah. What or who constitutes a daas Torah? Furthermore, since you are a rabbi yourself, why can't you give the opinion as daas Torah?"
"A. Although a rabbi may be authorized to give rulings on questions that can be answered by halacha, that does not necessarily qualify him to render an opinion on matters on which there are no halachic guidelines. In such cases, one should be guided by Torah hashkafa.
There are principles of Torah hashkafa that can serve as guidelines to all situations in life. However, a person giving an opinion must be certain that his opinion is based on pure Torah concepts. This can only be someone whose entire thought process are the result of Torah knowledge.
I have studied psychology, and it is possible that that my thinking may have been influenced by psychology. Even if I had adequate Torah knowledge, I could not be considered a daas Torah because I have been subject to concepts that did not derive from Torah.
Therefore, daas Torah is a talmid chacham who was never influenced by anything other than Torah."
If it isn't yet obvious, my bewilderment stems from the fact that Rabbi Dr. Twerski is quite a prolific author of Torah thought. Besides the "Jewish self-help" genre that he has generated single-handedly, he has written extensive commentaries on Torah-only texts like the Siddur and Pirkei Avos, and has entire books that give a detailed outline to what he apparently considers pure Torah hashkafa.
(To make things a little personal, "Let Us Make Man" and "I am I" were life-changing books for me as a teen-ager, and I have built large chunks of my Torah hashkafa upon those books.
Now he's telling me that those books cannot contain dass Torah??)
My attempts at resolution to this conflict developed in an interesting progression from lower to higher. We start with the bottom and work our way to the top:
- Political correctness: He doesn't want to be a liability to his Charedi publisher by publicly acknowledging that anyone trained academically in a field that overlaps with Torah can actually acquire new/deeper Torah insight by virtue of his secular training. But the truth is too hard for this paper to swallow.
This one, aside from being shallow, is not realistic. Rabbi Dr. Twerski is a very brave writer and is not one to be intimidated by a publisher. He says what he thinks too often.
Also, faking frummie answers with false piety is just not his style. He could have finessed the question in many other ways: "I don't give personal advice to people whose situation I do not know", "Newspapers aren't the proper forum to give specific advice that should not be generally applied", etc.
- He lives in two worlds: the insulated chassidic one , and the general Orthodox one which includes everyone to the left of chassidic. The above response in this particular column was for the benefit of the former, and his published books are true daas Torah for the latter. Different communities have different standards of dass Torah.
This solution may have merit. But the conviction with which he writes his response here seems to go overboard if his views are really more nuanced. Again, he could have finessed the question altogether to avoid this apparent tension in his approach to daas Torah.
- He could be genuinely humble about his lack of daas Torah. Note, he said one must be certain that his entire thought processes are pure Torah. Who can be certain that he was "never influenced by anything other than Torah"?
Okay, but then, why publish all those books on Torah hashkafa? Is he retracting the implicit claim that those books contain an authentic Torah view? Is he telling us to now take it all with a grain of salt? I highly doubt it.
- I think the truth can be found by closer examination of the first sentence in the second paragraph: "There are principles of Torah hashkafa that can serve as guidelines in all situations in life. However, a person giving an opinion..." This distinction may be the critical difference between writing books that elaborate on the principles of dass Torah that have been received by pure Torah sources, and the practical application of those principles to people's real lives.
The former can be offered as rough approximations of authentic daas Torah that do not demand the utmost purity of formulation or the formulator. The latter must be laser-accurate, and 10000% pure.
This makes a lot of sense to me and can be seen in other areas of Torah expertise like halacha. Rabbi David J. Bleich's books and other Torah journals that have detailed discussions of halachic problems serve an important function: A greater awareness of the relevance of halacha to modern life. But woe to the person who will skim though such a volume (or even study them rigorously) in order to decide for one's self if they can engage in birth control, abortion, or end-of-life decisions on their basis!
In any event, back to my favorite topic...
Rabbis who write books on "generic dass Torah" like Rabbis Bleich and Twerski, are considered to be more than academics who know their material well, even if they use their academic training to enhance/supplement their understanding of Torah concepts.
I would submit that spiritual qualifications are still necessary to write on such topics too. They have to have the religious instincts and values of a genuine Torah scholar that clearly guides them in their formulations and presentations.
Such cannot be said of the typical Jewish academic who writes on these subjects with an anti-establishment agenda.
But that's just my own personal daas Torah. And didn't Rav Wasserman state that dass Torah doesn't have to be all or nothing as Rav Twerski claimed? Does one need dass Torah to give an opinion on what daas Torah is? Or maybe that is a principle and not an application?
Still somewhat foggy on this matter after all.
