David Weiss Halivni

 

Rabbi Professor David Weiss Halivni, born on September 27, 1927, and died on June 28, 2022, at age 94, was born in what is today called Ukraine.  His parents separated when he was 4 years old, and he grew up in the home of his maternal grandfather, Isaiah Weiss, a Hasidic rabbi in Romania, who began teaching him when he was age 5. He was considered very smart, and he received rabbinic ordination at the early age of 15. The name Weiss means “white” in German. Weiss later began to use the Hebrew word “Halivni” for “white” together with his original name.

 

German troops arrived in his town in March 1944 when Weiss was age 16 and deported the town’s Jewish population to concentration camps. His entire family was murdered by the Nazis, leaving him as its sole survivor.

When he was liberated and came to the United States, he was introduced to Rabbi Saul Lieberman of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, who recognized his mental skills. He studied with this Conservative Jewish leader for many years at the JTS. He secured his doctorate at JTS in Talmud.

He served as a Professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America for many years and resigned in 1983. He later served as a professor of Talmud at Columbia University. He retired from Columbia University in 2005 and moved to Israel, where he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar Ilan University until he died.

He made two significant contributions to Jewish thought, both controversial and not accepted by all scholars, one dealing with the Talmud and the other with the Torah.

His “source-critical approach” to Talmud study takes a radically different approach to how many others understand what the Talmud is saying. Many Orthodox Jews who read the Talmud reject his innovation. They insist that the Talmud is a single, unified document. In his book Mekorot u-Mesorot, Halivni sees it as a multi-layered work, parts of which were added to the original text by later writers.

In his Revelation Restored. Halivni developed his other idea, one that earned him the 1997 National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship.

Halivni insisted on the correctness of the traditional view that God interfered with natural law some three thousand years ago and revealed the Torah, the five books of Moses, to the Israelites after they escaped Egyptian bondage. This Torah, Halivni states, was perfect. God revealed it because he wanted to give humanity a gift of perfect knowledge that would teach them how to behave.

The problem arose following the revelation when God stopped interfering with the laws of nature that He created and ceased to involve Himself in human affairs. He gave the Torah to humanity to help them, but people, being human, ignored the Torah, and it fell into disuse.

Significantly, although readers may reject Halivni’s two significant contributions and some of his other ideas, even consider them clever but not correct or even rational, they can still learn much by thinking about what he says, and thereby improve themselves and help improve the world. The same can be said about the recent book containing his thoughts on the Torah.

In 2025, Halivni’s student, Rabbi Ronald D. Price, published a 426-page book called Divrei Halev, “words from the Heart.” Halev is probably a play on the name Halivni, making the title mean the “Words of Halivni.” He wrote and edited the book with Halivni. He gives his teacher’s views on the 54 weekly biblical portions in the book. Each idea is stated briefly, often in only a page or two, with several discussions for each portion.