Discovering the Netziv and his Ha'amaik Davar - Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin

Judaism, Summer, 2002 by Henry A. Sosland

Genesis 2:20. (AND THE MAN GAVE NAMES TO ALL THE CATTLE AND TO THE BIRDS OF THE SKY AND TO ALL THE WILD BEASTS) BUT FOR ADAM NO FITTING HELPER WAS FOUND. In the process of giving names to all the creatures and their mates, he realized that it is difficult to find a mate for himself. The explanation for this is that in the beginning Adam did not know whether he himself possessed various emotions. After all, he had never been angry. How was he to know he was capable of anger? The same was true about whether he was able to express compassion. Now from this experience of encountering and giving names to all the animals, he understood that he, too, possessed all the different emotions. Without this discovery about himself, he would not have understood their various attributes, as one who has not been angry cannot know or even believe what anger is. Once he understood that he, too, had those same emotions (having seen them first in the animal world), he knew that he must find a mate who will have the capacity and s trength to be a true helpmate, acting as a counterbalance to him. (20)

As traditional as he was, the Netziv's recognition of women and the significant role that they play not only in their home but even in matters outside of the home, seems perhaps to foreshadow the modem attitude of appreciating women as individuals in their own right We are generalizing from his own wife who played a major role in the daily affairs of the yeshiva. Meir Berlin describes his mother as being intimately involved with all phases of the yeshiva, from providing stipends to students for their needs, to payments to the local Jewish population of Volozhin for their giving room and board for the young men. She was also directly responsible for most of the financial obligations of the yeshiva. Extraordinary in her love for Torah and for the students and staff of the yeshiva, his mother was such an exceptional woman that "all the alumni of the school, even the most brilliant and famous among them, saw themselves as her students in her love for Torah so much so that she was regarded as a gaon of a rebbetzin ." (21)

The Netziv's respect for women may be illustrated, too, in a comment he makes regarding the absence of adequate mention of women in the Torah. Being the close reader he was, his attention to such details as in Genesis 46:15 brings him to try to account for the presence of women in the families of the patriarchs. Note this comment he makes on the two Hebrew words kol nefesh, translated by the NJPS as PERSONS IN ALL:

(THOSE WERE THE SONS WHOM LEAH BORE TO JACOB IN PADDANARAM, IN ADDITION TO HIS DAUGHTER DINAH.) PERSONS IN ALL, MALE AND FEMALE: THIRTY-THREE. Similarly, it is written regarding the Sons of Rachel (vs. 22) and the sons of Bilhah (vs. 25), whereas PERSONS IN ALL is not written with the sons of Zilpah (vs. 18). According to what we have said, all of these family trees included additional daughters. However, those women were not a part of the census of seventy (vs. 27). For that reason it was written, PERSONS IN ALL (alluding to others) whose (names were) not included, whereas in the case of Zilpah's descendants, there were in fact no daughters at the time of their arrival in Egypt. Because of that with her descendants PERSONS IN ALL is not written.