A Holocaust Orphan, a Priest, and the Wall We Built Around the Law
Ronit Kertsner’s documentary Torn, screening this week, through May 28, in the Times of Israel’s DocuNation
The Oral Law was meant to stay oral — flexible, merciful, alive. We wrote it into stone, and now even our most generous statute turns away the son of murdered Jews.
In 1943, in German-occupied Poland, a Jewish woman handed her infant son to a Catholic neighbor and asked her to take him in, in the name of the Jesus she believed in. It was the only way to keep him alive. The child’s parents were murdered in the Shoah. The boy grew up Romuald Waszkinel, devout, and at seventeen he entered a seminary. He became a Catholic priest and a professor of philosophy. He did not know he was a Jew. Then, when he was thirty-five and his adoptive mother was nearing the end of her life, she told him the truth: he had been born Jakub Weksler, the son of Jews the Germans had killed for being Jews.
What he did with that knowledge is the subject of Ronit Kertsner’s documentary Torn, screening this week, through May 28, in the Times of Israel’s DocuNation series. He took back his birth name. He found he could renounce neither the faith that had formed him nor the people he had been born to and nearly erased from. In his sixties he came to Israel to live as an observant Jew. And Israel — the one state on earth founded so that no Jew would ever again be homeless — turned him away. The Law of Return did not apply to him, the government ruled, because he still believed in Jesus. The son of murdered Jews, indisputably Jewish under halakha, was denied the automatic right of return and made to crawl through a five-year naturalization process to obtain by grudging discretion what should have been his by birthright.
Take the measure of that. A man whose parents were murdered for being Jews, who was hidden in the church to survive, who came home at last — and a rule said no. This is what happens when a law forgets that it was ever meant to serve justice. And it is not the accident of one statute. It is the late fruit of a much older mistake: the day we took a living law and turned it into a wall.
There is a line in the Talmud that ought to unsettle anyone who reveres the rabbinic library. Words transmitted by mouth, the sages ruled, you are not permitted to set down in writing (Gittin 60b). The Oral Torah — the Mishnah and everything that grew from it — was forbidden as a written text. It was meant to live on the tongue, in the friction between teacher and student, in a question pressed against a particular case. The Written Torah was sealed and fixed by design. The Oral Torah was the instrument by which that fixed text kept meeting a world its words could never have named in advance: new exiles, new cruelties, new questions of who belongs. Orality was not a filing problem the sages had not yet learned to solve. Orality was the point. A teaching that must pass through a living mouth must also pass through a living mind, where it can be weighed, questioned, and bent toward the human being standing in front of it.
And then it was written anyway. Around the year 200, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi redacted the Mishnah, and the justification offered was not that the old prohibition had been mistaken. It was et la’asot la-Hashem heferu Toratecha — it is a time to act for the Lord; they have set aside Your Torah (Psalms 119:126), read as license to suspend a principle of the Torah in order to save the whole of it. Rome had shattered the houses of study; the chain of living memory was breaking. Writing the Oral Law was triage performed on a wounded body. It was never the ideal. We have forgotten that it was triage, and that forgetting is the whole of the problem.
In the language of the mystics, the Written Torah carries the severity of gevurah — the boundary, the line that does not move. The Oral Torah was meant to carry chesed into that severity: the overflow, the reach toward the particular soul. The two were to hold each other like a right hand and a left. What the long centuries of codification did — Mishnah to Talmud, Talmud to Mishneh Torah, Mishneh Torah to the Shulchan Aruch — was tilt the balance. The wall rose higher than the gate. Gevurah won, and we mistook the victory for piety.
I am not the first to fear this, and that is the part the indictment usually omits. When Maimonides issued his great code, the Ravad attacked it for handing down rulings shorn of their reasoning, severing the law from the argument that had given it life. The Maharal of Prague warned that codes stripped of their reasoning would breed Jews who obey rules they no longer understand, and who therefore cannot reason when the rules run out. This dissent has always lived inside the tradition. It deserves to be heard again.
Let me be exact about the charge, because the honest version is stronger than the slogan. The written corpus did not freeze the law overnight. For more than a thousand years it generated astonishing flexibility — the responsa that answered questions no Mishnah had foreseen, the deliberate preservation of rejected opinions, the principle that these and these are the words of the living God. The page, for a long time, behaved like a conversation. The rigidity I am describing is largely a modern affliction, and its engine is not the ink. It is the capture of the law by institutions invested in fixity, and above all the monopoly of state-backed authority over the question of who belongs. The danger the sages courted when they wrote the law down was that someone, someday, would worship the wall instead of the people it had been built to shelter. That day has come.
Nowhere is the cost clearer than in the question of who is a Jew. To its lasting credit, the State of Israel wrote an instinct of chesed into its founding: the Law of Return reaches past halakhic descent to gather in the grandchild, the spouse, the one whom the persecutors would have counted as a Jew. That was mercy made into law. But the same statute carries its own wall — the clause that excludes anyone who has become a member of another religion. And here is the bitterness at the center of the Weksler-Waszkinel case: that wall is stricter than the Torah it claims to honor. Under halakha, a Jew who sins — even one who bows to another god — remains a Jew; the Talmud says so without flinching (Sanhedrin 44a). It was not the rabbis but a secular court that, in the 1962 Brother Daniel case, reached past the halakha to a “popular” sense of peoplehood in order to keep out Oswald Rufeisen, a Jew who had survived the Holocaust and become a Carmelite monk. The Knesset then carved that exclusion into the law. So a secular Jew who believes in nothing qualifies for automatic citizenship, and the son of murdered Jews who came home to his people does not. Weksler-Waszkinel reduced the absurdity to a single question: Marx and Trotsky are Jews, but not me?
We do not need a new prophet to judge this, because the verdict was rendered long ago. When the sages stripped the heavenly voice of its authority in the dispute of the Oven of Akhnai, declaring lo ba-shamayim hi — it is not in heaven — they took the law out of God’s own hands and entrusted it to human reason. The tradition reports that God laughed and said, my children have defeated Me. That is the founding act of the entire rabbinic enterprise: living minds, applying reason to living cases, were made sovereign over the law. We have spent the centuries since handing that sovereignty back — not to heaven, but to a book, and to the clerks who guard it. Micah told us already what is asked of us: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. He did not tell us to consult the index first.
A people that defines itself by doing what is right in God’s eyes cannot permit a thicket of exclusionary rules to defeat the just decision in precisely the cases that cry out for mercy. The Oral Law was written down to keep it from dying. The tragedy is that we embalmed it instead. We can honor these texts as the record of how our people once reasoned without worshipping them as the cage that forbids us to reason now. The wall was raised in an emergency. We are permitted — we are commanded — to remember that it was always meant to have a gate. And on the far side of that gate, an old priest who is the son of murdered Jews is still waiting to be told that he is home.
