The Steipler and the Elections

After the Steipler's passing, one of the hespeidim printed in the Hebrew edition of Yated, during its first year, carried the title “What Does the Steipler Say?” People went on asking that question even when he could no longer be asked, a sign of how deeply his leadership had shaped the Torah community.

The Chazon Ish had guided the small, struggling Torah community of the new yishuv through its first battles to stay loyal to the Torah, against constant pressure from the Zionist establishment. His brother-in-law the Steipler then led the community as it grew larger and stronger. He guarded it against those who would weaken it from within, made sure its voice was heard in public life, and left it stronger and more confident than he found it.

Two things marked his public leadership. One was his fight against Poalei Agudas Yisroel (PAI), which he called “the party of deserters.” The other was the leadership he shared with Rav Eliezer Menachem Shach. The two gedolim rarely met, yet they saw every question brought before them the same way, and each deferred to the other in a remarkable manner.

The Steipler held that voting for the chareidi list was a great mitzvah and a means of saving Yiddishkeit. When a questioner argued that voting involved Torah prohibitions, even an acknowledgment of avodah zarah, the Steipler wrote that this had no basis and that voting involved no prohibition at all. He did not wish the Neturei Karta to change their own practice, since their holding back came from zeal for Hashem. But even for the sake of zeal, he wrote, one may not read the Torah against the halacha, and a position built on something untrue can never succeed. The letter appears in Karaino De'igarto (vol. I, #203).

For him the elections were only a battle against those who would destroy Yiddishkeit, never a way to advance any group's interests. He had no party loyalty whatsoever and judged each question on its own merits, yet he never let emotional zealotry decide what the halacha required.

In those years some were questioning what the Chazon Ish and the Brisker Rov had ruled on taking part in elections. Before the elections of 5737 (1977), Rav Shach declared that he was not giving his own opinion: both the Brisker Rov and the Chazon Ish had held that one should vote, and the Steipler held the same. Had the Steipler ever heard the Chazon Ish so much as hint at opposition, Rav Shach added, he would never back voting today.

The Steipler himself wrote that some twenty years earlier the great majority of gedolei Yisroel, the Chazon Ish among them, had found no trace of a prohibition in voting, and that most Torah sages, living and departed, saw it as a true obligation. When someone suggested he add the words “except for Yerushalayim,” he refused. He did not want to be drawn into a second dispute over whether the authority of the Badatz bound only members of the Eida HaChareidis or everyone living in Yerushalayim (Karaino De'igarto #154, 156). His own view on that point can in fact be seen in another of his letters (vol. I, #221).