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Rav Avi: Hi and welcome to Responsa Radio where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, executive vice president at Hadar, here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, a center for Jewish learning and community building based in New York City. You can check us out and learn more at hadar.org. This question I appreciate the way they asked the question. I'm going to read it for us. I recently and for the first time in my life started regularly attending a Shul that gives joint Aliyot. I'm curious about two things. Here they are.

One: what, if any, are the Halakhic issues with two people receiving an Aliyah at the same time? And two: do any of the issues rise to the level such that I should privately request only solo Aliyot from the Gabbai or perhaps even not receive an Aliyah at all? I think this is a really interesting question. I'll say I grew up in a Conservative synagogue in Atlanta where joint Aliyot were very common. I probably thought that an Aliyah was something that like a husband and wife took together actually as like a standard approach.

So I'm curious to hear where this practice came from. I don't know if you have a sense of that and how we should think about it now in terms of its Halakhic implications and then some practical advice for the listener actually of like, do they need to duck out or can they play along when this is what's happening in their current context?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, while this practice that you're describing, I think is definitely a 20th century, you know, mid, mid-20th century and later practice. I think largely in North American synagogues but it would be interesting to sort of probe that more broadly.

Maybe in Latin America in some places also it might have spread. That is definitely wrapped up with you talking about a husband and wife taking it together, which I think often was part of the vanguard of a move towards egalitarianism in some synagogues. There was a sense of like, well, you know, only men get Aliyot. Oh, that doesn't feel quite right.

The women shouldn't be left out but not quite being on board with the notion that a woman could just have an Aliyah. So, oh, maybe we'll bring the couple up together, you know, and that'll be more inclusive. While that I think is the context for the questioner, I presume, and what you're describing that you experienced growing up, there is an older pedigree to the question of joint Aliyah in general. So let's dig into that.

Let's remember one thing which will become very relevant soon, which is that in classic rabbinic times, the person having the Aliyah and the person reading the Torah were the same person. That is to say what it meant to be offered an Aliyah was to be offered the opportunity to read the Torah. If you think about, you know, in a lot of homes the way the Seder is run, you'll sort of go around and people are asked to read a different part of the Haggadah.

Rav Avi: Or this is how we do the Haftarah now, right? The person who does the Haftarah blessings is the person who read the Haftarah. That feels perfectly natural to us.

Rav Eitan: Exactly right. So you would have gotten up and said Asher Bachar Banu and then read that portion and said Asher Natan Lanu. For all kinds of reasons that splits into two functions in the Middle Ages, primarily because the set of people you wanted to honor with an Aliyah to the Torah was considerably larger than the set of people who had the skill to read from the Torah without vowels, without notes and all of that stuff. The early sources wonder about which kinds of things can be read by multiple people as opposed to must be read by one person.

Rav Avi: And we mean sequentially or literally multiple voices at the same time?

Rav Eitan: At the same time, multiple voices. So for instance the Megillah, okay, the Megillah that we read on Purim, Megillat Esther, the Mishnah says two people can read that at the same time, right? More than two. You could have a...

Rav Avi: We could have a Megillah sing-along?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, you could have a Greek chorus style Megillah.

Rav Avi: Why don't we do this? It sounds awesome.

Rav Eitan: I know, it would be kind of awesome. Yeah, and there's other things like this actually where Hallel... well, can be recited or sung also basically by a choir.

Rav Avi: Now, that we do more or less often.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, we do it sort of as a community, but if you think about, you know, a choir up there singing and you do have, you did have like in the German tradition and a bunch of places where that would be integrated. So you've got things like that. And that appears in the mishna. But the tosefta, companion text to the mishna, in a passage that gets cited in both the talmud yerushalmi, the talmud bavli, so it's a sort of oft-cited text, says explicitly ma she'ein ken batorah, but you cannot do that when reading from the Torah.

You cannot have two people reading from the Torah at the same time. Okay, that's just the rule, that's the law, no dissent, no complication.

Rav Avi: And no explanation.

Rav Eitan: And no explanation.
So the key thing then is to ask as we always care about, like whenever you get a law, you're like oh but why? And the why is not just to be a nudnik, it's usually to get sharp for ourselves. Well I want to be clear if some of the variables in the assumed picture change, how would the application of this rule shake out? Okay, so we'll try to just narrate briefly. There's a discussion in the talmud yerushalmi, the Talmud of the Land of Israel, which basically asks the question of why? Why can't two people read simultaneously from the Torah? So rabbi zeira there says mishum habracha, because of the blessing said over the Torah reading.

Having two people read Torah means, in his time, two people saying the bracha, and rabbi zeira basically seems to feel there's no justification for two people taking God's name in that moment. It would sort of be like one of them is taking God's name in vain because the Torah reading as it were only requires one blessing before, one after. How can two people say that bracha at the same time?

Rav Avi: But why wouldn't that apply to the megilla or hallel?

Rav Eitan: Two reasons it would not apply to those cases. Number one, if you're imagining just in the middle of the megilla or hallel having a bunch of multiple voices weigh in.

So maybe one person said the bracha at the beginning and then in the middle basically there's a choral piece for betzeit yisrael or various parts of the megilla that feel like they'll benefit from, you know, multivocality or throwing in those voices. You may not be—there's not a bracha right between every chapter, right, of hallel and megilla?

Rav Avi: So long as one person does the opening and the closing, maybe you're fine.

Rav Eitan: But more to the point, in those cases, the bracha is a birkat hamitzva, it's a bracha that you say to fulfill your obligation in reading the megilla. There's no problem in anyone who's reading the megilla to say that bracha.

They would say that bracha if they were reading it on their own at home. Or in hallel, think about the way we do it today: the leader says the bracha, you say amen, you say the bracha, and then you start singing hallel. So those brachot, both in terms of their placement but also in terms of their function, are fundamentally different. That's probably even what led rabbi zeira to say what he said.

He looked at these things, he said these otherwise feel like they're the same, oh, but they have a different bracha function and structure, that must be the reason why you can't read the Torah with multiple people.

Rav Avi: Okay, so it's not that what I thought you might say, right? You could have said you can't read the Torah with multiple voices, therefore we can't have joint aliyot. Actually you're saying no, no, no, we can't read the Torah with multiple voices because we can't have joint aliyot.

Rav Eitan: That seems to be rabbi zeira's exact point. Okay, we'll come back to this.

Rav Avi: It's not looking good for the joint aliyah right now.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, that's pretty bad. I'd say that's like game, set, match.
Except then the talmud yerushalmi comes along as it does and says wait a minute, but you didn't read to the end of the tosefta. That text that said you can't do that with Torah reading also says you can't translate the Torah, the targum of the Torah cannot be recited by more than one person. So this is the ancient practice—I think we also had an episode where we reflected on this—the ancient practice of rendering the Torah into usually an authorized Aramaic translation. And basically, right, the Torah reader reads one verse in the original Hebrew and then the meturgeman, the person with this job, projects the Aramaic rendering of that same verse. And the Tosefta says you can't have two people reading the Torah and you can't have two people doing this translation. But guess what? There's no blessing over the translation.

So says the Talmud, hey Rabbi Zeira, your theory is not accounting for the end of this text. And if I can add this in, the theory for why you can't read from the Torah should also be able to account for why you can't translate the Torah with more than one person, because they're in the same text juxtaposed to each other and seem like they emerge from a shared theory.

Rav Avi: So it feels more like, oh, this is just meant to be a solo. You can't have a duet during a solo, it won't be a solo anymore.

Rav Eitan: Okay, so that's exactly a great way actually of paraphrasing what the Talmud says, which is you can't hear two voices at once. Okay? It's a little less of the way you're formulating it of oh, that's, that's the sort of prescribed, you know, dramatic choreography, right, of the whole thing. But in a way it might actually be another way of saying that, which is no, these are functions where we don't want people experiencing it as a sort of choral mix of lots of different things. We want just clear, crisp taking in of the words of the Torah, the words of the Targum.

And then if you ask, oh well, why isn't that a problem for the Megillah or for Hallel? So either you would say something like, well there actually at the end of the day, like, it's not the Torah or its translation. So if you don't hear it perfectly, it's sort of okay.

Rav Avi: Although the Megillah we do make a pretty big deal about word for word, but maybe there's less of a like precision, obsession with precision.

Rav Eitan: Right. Exactly. It's like you need to hear it, it has to wash over you, but you don't need the individual, you know, words to be like crisp in that way. But if you want to take the need to hear the Megillah very seriously, you'll say something like what the Talmud says when dealing with this question, because the Megillah is havivah, because it's so precious and dear to people and unusual and you only get it once a year, yahvei da'ataihu, people like pay very close attention.

Rav Avi: I do experience that.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. Whereas Torah reading like, eh, hear it again next week. Like it could be a much more sacred text.

Rav Avi: I heard it already on Monday.

Rav Eitan: Exactly. But the experience might be less special. And Hallel similarly, it's like oh today's a Hallel day, right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna listen. Again, the Hallel example is back when they were not saying Hallel themselves but listening to someone.

Rav Avi: It's like nobody brings another book to read during Megillah reading. Right. You wouldn't have come.

Rav Eitan: Right. That's right. At least we, we hope not. So just to go back for a minute now to the Yerushalmi, where I think we have a remaining question of what is the afterlife, if anything, of Rabbi Zeira's concern about two people saying the berakhah. Like we know two people can't read the Torah, but where did that concern of Rabbi Zeira land? And I want to just clarify this is a great example of there are two ways to read that Yerushalmi.

We have a methodological split in terms of how to read that passage. Here's option one, okay? Option one... You're getting two voices.

Rav Avi: Two voices, there we go.

Rav Eitan: Option one is Rabbi Zeira is alive, remains relevant. Yes, it is a problem to have two people say the berakhot. When the Yerushalmi objected to him, it was just looking for an explanation that would account for both the Torah reading and the translation, and if you're looking for a reason that could explain why neither of those can be read by multiple people, well then it's got to be something like you can't hear two voices at once in this ritual where we need that.

But not that Rabbi Zeira was wrong, like it's also a problem to have two people say the berakhah, it's just there's two problems right with double Torah reading, one is the berakhah and one is the double reading, and the double reading piece also applies to the translation. That's possibility one.

Rav Avi: Right. So whether or not you thought his argument was good or bad, it's still true.

Rav Eitan: That's right. It may not be, yeah, it doesn't like exhaust the work you needed to do on that text, but it's true. The alternative is when the Yerushalmi rejected rejects Rabbi Zeira as being able to explain the whole text, it's also rejecting his concern, which is to say the only way to read that Tosefta, the Yerushalmi would say is: No, no, no. Whatever's wrong with multiple reading of the Torah is wrong with multiple people translating the Torah and nothing else.

You need to find the one explanation which is the reason that it is a problem for both of them. And actually, Rabbi Zeira's whole thing about oh, two people will say the Bracha is just wrong. We don't care about that and we've proved that by showing that that's not a factor in the translation. Those make a big difference once you live in the world where the Torah reading has been split from the aliyah.

It wouldn't have mattered that much in a world where you're having the aliyah, you're also going to read the Torah because we know at the end of the day two people for sure can't read the text of the Torah or have the aliyah or whatever it is.

Rav Avi: And I'll just say, interestingly, I've never seen that. Meaning, nowhere in the Jewish world that I know of do we have multiple people reading the Torah simultaneously. That's right. So there is something about that that actually has been universally sort of ingrained.

Rav Eitan: That's correct. The one exception, just as a sort of a side note, is when they institute the Baal Kore, the designated, assigned Torah reader, they do still hold the notion, which is practiced, I practice it, it's the recommended ideal practice, that if you have the aliyah, you're supposed to read along quietly with the reader. And medieval authorities will say, but what? What do you mean? But that's like two people reading from the Torah.

And they sort of have to grapple with either saying, well, we have to do it because no one knows how to read and this is the only way to honor people and not shame them and this and that or the other thing. Others, I think more reasonably say, yeah, but if that person's reading quietly, it's not experienced as multiple people reading. But yes, other than those sort of rough edges on the developing practice, no one's having a choir sing the Torah reading. But the question is: do you have more leeway with joint aliyot where all the aliyah is is getting up and saying Asher Bachar Banu?

Rav Avi: It does feel like that would feel somewhat logical to me.

Rav Eitan: Okay. So this is then a debate that comes up among early modern poskim who are addressing a practice, hard to know exactly when it starts, but they're addressing a practice in Ashkenazi communities of group aliyot on Simchat Torah. I don't think they were saying on Simchat Torah like, if you're feeling really amazing about Sefer Bereishit, come up for aliyah number one. But they are inviting people in some kind of groups, like all the Kohanim, all the Levi'im, maybe then all the people who were contributed to the annual fund that year, in a group up to an aliyah.

Rav Avi: So just to be clear, the reason this is happening on Simchat Torah is because we're so excited about the Torah and we're so excited about starting over that there is this desire to give the honor of an aliyah to every person in the room and the way to do that is to invite I can remember in my shul growing up, they would do this on Simchat Torah. They would get to a point where the last aliyah was like, and anyone who didn't have an aliyah, come up and have an aliyah.

Rav Eitan: Yes! Yes! And by the way, in a lot of

Rav Avi: shuls or the left side of the shul, now the right side of the shul.

Rav Eitan: This lives on. You see also with the Kol HaNearim aliyah, the aliyah of all the kids who go up together and are under a tallit.

Rav Avi: Even the children.

Rav Eitan: Even the children. This is just a remnant of the fact that there was...
You're essentially asking why were we doing this? I think it's always interesting to think about the moments in the Jewish year that are sort of like re-upping your membership dues. It's like on Pesach, it's sort of like re-upping your membership dues in like belonging to the Jewish people. Yom Kippur is like re-upping your membership dues on trying to be a righteous person. Simchat Torah is re-upping your membership dues of like this is my Torah and I love it.

And you basically want everyone, a combination of you from a position of leadership in a community want to facilitate everyone doing that, and the hamon am, like the people themselves, are like, I want a piece of the Torah today. This ritual clearly emerges in response to that notion of today is the day when every Jew gets an aliyah. We're going to do it in groups.

Rav Eitan: And I want to just paint the scene for our listeners so you understand the debate we're about to describe. The scene is, I don't know, you're in a shul with 150 people, let's say, okay, something like that, and 30 of them get up for the fourth aliyah as a group and they all say Baruch Atah Hashem Elokeinu Melech Haolam, whatever their exact tune was, right? Asher bachar banu in choral unison and everyone who's not getting that aliyah answers Amen, okay? And then a single Torah reader reads in one voice the Torah reading, okay? The Magen Avraham, 17th century Poland, is aware of this practice. It is a widespread practice. So he's not he's not sort of inventing it, it's there. And he says this is terrible, it should be stopped, because it violates Rabbi Zeira in the Yerushalmi. Rabbi Zeira in the Yerushalmi said you can't have multiple reading of the Torah, multiple people reading the Torah mishum beracha because of multiple people saying the beracha.

That may or may not have explained the text exhaustively there, but it's a true concern and this practice is violating that.

Rav Avi: And we don't hear anyone saying no until it's already sort of a normative thing that he's seeing? Yes, correct. He's like, uh oh, I found a Yerushalmi. Alert the press.

Rav Eitan: And it's every rabbi's nightmare where you come across something that you are very deeply convinced is wrong and it is deeply entrenched. That's what he is dealing with. We'll get to the afterlife of his position in a minute, but he basically says this is wrong, it should stop. The Eliyah Rabba, who's a slightly later but similar time period commentator, halakhic decisor, explicitly adopts the other reading of the Yerushalmi to defend the practice.

He says what are you talking about? Rabbi Zeira was totally rejected. He raised some theory, it doesn't pan out, we reject that, therefore it's totally fine for two people to say the beracha as long as the Torah reader is unitary voice, exactly. And therefore this Simchat Torah practice is totally fine. Leave people alone.

Rav Avi: He's like, chill out man.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. And on some level also is saying you're not really you're not really getting it, right? In other words, they're arguing I think both about the proper way to read the Yerushalmi and they're also arguing over how to understand what the ritual of Torah reading is sort of about and what it's doing. For the Magen Avraham, this is a ritual where like there's a prescribed beracha, it's just the whole thing is supposed to be done by one person and it actually is sort of allergic to multiple people participating in any way.

And the Eliyah Rabba is like we care about the words of the Torah, but why should I care that multiple people are saying the beracha? You already have seven people taking aliyot and all saying the beracha or in Yom Tov five, right? Since when do we care about that? So multiple people say it at the same time, right? And the place in the Yerushalmi you want to reach for was rejected.

Rav Avi: So we have two people using different readings to support very different sort of takes on what the correct practice would be and they have essentially the exact same goal in mind which is kavod for the Torah and you know respecting the way the Torah should be read.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think that's a good point to make here, which is that it's not just about one person being strict and one person being lenient here. There's sort of different visions of, I might add, both what gives honor to the Torah and also what is the best way to give honor to the Torah through the communal enthusiasm to be engaged.

Let's close out the story on Simchat Torah and then we can bring it back to our question, which of course is playing out on a regular week. So you know it's interesting here, the Eliyah Rabba's reading, which is the one that justifies the practice of the group aliyot, I would add, has some additional support potentially from the fact that the Talmud Bavli. Bavli when it engages this question of multiple people reading the Torah only engages the discourse of you can't hear two voices and never talks about the mishum ha-berakhah concern.

And you know it's not always rock solid to read texts this way, but sometimes authorities will say well the Yerushalmi raised a concern that the Bavli didn't even engage and that should be taken as indicative of the fact that it thought that concern was silly right and maybe the Talmud Bavli's silence on the Rabbi Zeira concerns implies a rejection of them and then you've got the weight of the Babylonian Talmud right behind you as well.

Rav Avi: Feels like a tough read.

Rav Eitan: Yeah I mean it always it goes to the question of how to read silence right because you might just say no didn't engage that but there's there's another place here. In any event I would say and would love if any listeners want to write in with data we always love hearing after we do a show you know things you may you may know but my sense right of the lay of the land on this is there are some synagogues that have retained this practice on Simchat Torah around joint aliyot.

For the most part in my experience certainly Orthodox synagogues at least in North America which is what I'm familiar with basically adopted the Magen Avraham's approach essentially stamped out the practice of the joint aliyah even on Simchat Torah. The way they retained some fidelity to or responded to the ongoing need of everyone in those contexts adult men to get an aliyah was to do what's a kind of crazy thing that's developed which is keep reading through the whole Torah reading over and over and over and over and over until everyone gets an aliyah. Break up into seven corners of the shul and do this.

Rav Avi: So this is where our listeners might need to to see the previous episode that we did on adding aliyot.

Rav Eitan: Yeah yeah and this becomes a real sort of test case and difficult spot for people who don't like adding unnecessary aliyot like what are you doing? You have a hundred aliyot and you're breaking up into seven different readings I mean what's going on.

Rav Avi: Although if you've never experienced it it's a really cool thing to see.

Rav Eitan: It's very powerful on its own terms. I do want our listeners to understand that that practice is the newer if you will less authentic practice as opposed to the group aliyah practice which is the older one but it's an effort to say oh but if the older practice came under attack by the Magen Avraham and we kind of agree with him or feel like we need to be concerned about that but we don't want to shut people out so let's creatively think about how we could make multiple and longer Torah readings.

But if you're ever like this seems a little crazy that Torah reading would go on in five rooms for over an hour you're right you're sensing that no one ever would have designed it initially that way. It's the legacy of trying to shift from an older practice in keeping with guidelines that don't conform to it. If you live in a Magen Avraham informed community that does not do joint aliyah on Simchat Torah that's pretty much the end of the story which is it sort of testifies like a hundred witnesses that you can't have joint aliyah because if joint aliyah were ever an option you would put them into play in that Simchat Torah situation. Now maybe you'll try to tell a story of but you want to give each person their own personal moment with the Torah.

I don't want to deny that entirely but you know this is where I think just sort of practically as a gabbai yeah but come on that you would allow people to do that but you wouldn't force people to do that if you know father wanted to come up with his kids or something as an aliyah you would allow that unless you had a ban on it. So in Magen Avraham driven communities really joint aliyah doesn't make any sense.

Rav Avi: It's an interesting comment you would allow that unless you had a ban. It's sort of like there's a way actually in which joint aliyot are intuitive.

Like there would be a time you would want to use it and if you're not using it it's probably because you can't.

Rav Eitan: Yes I think then the interesting question comes up in an Eliya Rabbah informed community that is to say a community that would say about itself yeah we maintain that old tradition of giving multiple aliyot on Simchat Torah so how does one think about extending that to the rest of the year? And this I think is a little more complicated right which is to say in principle you could say well Simchat Torah's a Torah reading rest of the year's a Torah reading it's God's name it's Asher bachar banu it's the same berakhah so once the Eliya Rabbah in principle has established as long as one person is reading the text of the Torah, there's no problem with multiple Brachot being said, that should in theory be extendable to any Torah reading. But here's where I think we do have to ask ourselves the question of how plausible is that reading or what would we have to say in order to make that reading make sense. Sure, apparently you've, you know, established the viability of multiple people saying the Bracha.

Yet, if you look back, even the communities that had joint Aliyot on Simchat Torah, they never had it the rest of the year. Now, how do you know that? Because the literature is full of going crazy around who gets what Aliyah before someone else or you've got to give the Kohen the first one so you don't get fights. What's the fight?

Rav Avi: And they never say just give it to everybody!

Rav Eitan: Double a bunch of people up! Oh, you have five people getting married the next Shabbat like, you know, don't start with is it a first marriage, is it a second marriage, just give them all the Aliyah together. Right? There's a certain incoherence on some level of the whole literature around the system of priority.

Rav Avi: It's exactly what you just said, right? It would solve so many problems that we would never get into the intricacies of these problems if we didn't have to.

Rav Eitan: Right. The question of the halachic phrase of Lo Ra'inu Eino Ra'ayah, the fact that we have not seen something done is not a proof that it is, right, illegitimate. There's a whole interesting like history to that where sometimes we do say that when something's been like repeated enough times or we know there's a communal practice, we could argue like how much that should be in play here, but I would say in this case overall seems pretty strong that if you just pay attention to what are the problems they are dealing with around assigning Aliyot, they never imagine that assigning a group of people, right, is going to solve it.

That's one thing. The second thing, now to go to the context where it's used and here I'll offer my opinion at least sitting in 5785 when we're recording and 2025 might even be the more relevant way of saying it. Look, why did this practice of joint Aliyot emerge as an option in the mid-20th century? As I said earlier, it's pretty clear it's sort of a beachhead into figuring out how to include women in the Torah reading, right? It was originally that and from that perspective, you know, anything that's an initial step towards thinking about something more deeply I think always has to be honored as an important first step, a noble grappling with something that I really don't want to denigrate and also has to be sort of evaluated at some point in retrospect for the contemporary moment. And one of the things when I've seen the practice that always like rubs me a little bit the wrong way is there's a sense in which really I don't know we have to reify this couple as a single unit as opposed to two individual people who each have the total right on their own to ascend to the Torah and to have the Aliyah.

Is it so unthinkable that yes, one of the parents irrespective of their gender might be the one who gets the Aliyah at their kid's Bat Mitzvah, Bar Mitzvah in order to represent the family and the other parent has another job? Like, would it be so terrible if sometimes the mother just had that Aliyah? There's something there that I feel like was once a step I understand but actually feels insufficiently feminist to me in terms of representing the mothers going up to the Torah, the woman's going up to the Torah on her own.

Rav Avi: Meaning that when the first time you had a wife invited up to the Torah with her husband, it was actually a feminist act because it got her out of her seat. But now it can feel actually anti-feminist because you're saying well she's not going to be capable of doing it alone, she needs her husband there with her..
This is more of a social commentary.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, or what does it feel like or what does it look like? How much do we need in these moments of worship of God and showing up to community to like reduce people to a coupling as opposed to highlight them as an individual? We wouldn't count the husband and the wife in as one. Yeah.

You would count them as two.

Rav Avi: It also has the added benefit of not making it anything that's done as a couple is hard for people who are not a couple.

Rav Eitan: That's true, that as well, I agree. There's something actually that's very powerful about shul.
I mean, this is one of the polemics back and forth around the question of mixed or family seating in prayer spaces as opposed to the segregated gender spaces and there's a lot of different angles on that. But at least one angle you will sometimes hear about what is empowering to certain people about the gender-segregated seating is it'll be like, well, I don't feel like I'm automatically being judged of like, am I there with a spouse, what does my family look like? I'm sort of there with a whole bunch of other people. And yeah, I do think this can unwittingly have that effect as well. Look, these are considerations beyond the question of how plausible is it to say that this is sort of in keeping with tradition.

Yeah, that's its own question. Again, how much was Simchat Torah sort of blatantly an exception that proves the rule? But I think these are relevant factors also. To me, this raises actually an important meta-question, which we sometimes get into on this show, which is well, sometimes we can talk you through, here are the building blocks of a halachic argument for a certain practice, and I think I always want to emphasize to our listeners, that's crucial work, it's the fundamental work, it's on some level the main work. It doesn't always exhaust the religious, sociological, historical question of how does this practice sort of stand in continuity or not with what came before, and what are you maybe consciously or inadvertently sort of projecting with a given practice.

Rav Avi: So it sounds like this is not a practice that you would recommend in general and also it's not a practice that has no halachic backing or thought behind it at all. It's not sort of a, well, if these people cared about halacha at all, they would never be doing this joint aliyah practice. What advice would you have for the listener? They ended this question with a very practical question, which was, hey, this is my community now. Should I request only solo aliyot from the gabbai and or should I just say no to an aliyah because it's always going to be in a group context? Do I need to take myself out of that or can I rely on these other opinions to sort of participate more fully in the community?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think your description's exactly right, which is to say you ask my opinion, it's not a practice I would recommend to anyone to institute, any shul that I was a gabbai or in charge of, I would not have joint aliyah. Also it is the case that well, yeah, the Eliyah Rabbah allows it on Simchat Torah and I can't say, even if I feel it's a little disingenuous to just say, oh, I can jump from that to ever offering it, it's not like there's no basis for saying that. So look, I think whenever asking questions like this, you also have to think about well, what's the real world impact? Because in principle I would say to you when you confront a fact pattern like this, where you might come down on the side of yeah, don't do that but there is basis for doing it, so my general go-to would be yeah, if you're going to create some kind of massive fight by sticking to your guns, that's a context where you rely on that other opinion and go along with it. That's my general modus operandi, I think that's the general modus operandi of poskim thinking about juggling these things.

That said, you do have to think about well, will it really cause a fight or which piece of this will cause a fight? The kind of thing that can cause a fight is sitting in your seat and refusing in a demonstrative way to participate in some communal activity, right? That feels like it's probably unwise to do that. There's enough basis here that if it feels for reasons we're not going to enumerate here but you can figure out like you're going to rupture some relationship in some major way.

Rav Avi: I mean, I could imagine a lot of scenarios where it might be like all the aunts and uncles are going to take this aliyah and if I don't go, I'm the only one in that category that didn't go. Yeah, exactly.

Rav Eitan: I think you gotta get up, you gotta go up in that case and go up. I mean, by the way, I'll just add, I would outright in a place where it was the established practice take a joint aliyah on Simchat Torah because that I feel like well there you Actually have the aliyah rabbah, right? The actual precedent. But if you're talking about a situation in some other context, you can't sit in your seat if it's gonna cause a fight. You can try and say, "Oh, actually, it's not my practice to take joint aliyot," and I think if we're, you know, the questioner is saying, "Well, the gabbai is perfectly willing to, like, accommodate me," I would say, I would recommend to the listener, like, that that should be your sort of first course of action.

But let's say you go up. Is it gonna cause a fight if you stand up there and don't say the berakhah? Probably in most places and contexts, not, right? And then I think you could, for your integrity, if you're in the same Magen Avraham inflected place that I am or Eliyah Rabbah direct precedent inflected place, probably do that. And what if you sort of, like, sing along with the berakhah but don't necessarily say God's name? No one's gonna notice, right? And that I think is also something you have to keep in mind. Sometimes you actually put yourself in a space, you keep up the optics that will make you non-disruptive, but you find a way to manage your own voice in a way that might maintain your integrity at the same time, in a way that's like invisible to everyone other than yourself.

And that I feel is also really important to recognize. There's a way of accommodating other frames of reference without necessarily having to put your integrity on the table in terms of the consistency of your own practice.

Rav Avi: You wouldn't worry about, like, the way it looks to other people in that instance? That people would then say, like, "Wow, I saw Rabbi Ethan Tucker up there." I mean, most people don't have the same kind of concern as you might, but...

Rav Eitan: No, I think that you're right to raise that as another factor of, what's the context? I could actually imagine a place where I was known in a certain way or had a certain reputation, and there were other people who were present who would get either a misconstrue of my approach or suddenly think something about me that I wouldn't want them to think about me.

That might influence me to manage that in a different way than if it was a place where everyone in this room thinks this is fine and doesn't, like, have two thoughts about it. You also don't have to manage everything on a public stage. I have been in situations like that—I don't mean on a joint aliyah specifically, but I've been in situations where I felt there was something I needed to do for, sort of, the social cohesiveness of the moment, and there were one or two people in the room who I knew were...

Rav Avi: would get the wrong idea...

Rav Eitan: in a different place, and I would just go over and talk to them after and say, "You know, just want you to know, if you're wondering, here's how I thought this through, I just wanted you to have that picture." You can do that. You can actually talk to people and explain why you did what you did.

Rav Avi: Yeah, yeah, I have been in similar situations also. Thank you for for all of this. I feel like, hopefully, this was a helpful episode for the listener in a in the very particular situation and also gives all of us a little more context on what are these group aliyot and what's happening on Simchat Torah and all of our different communities. And hopefully, we all find the right ways to celebrate and honor the Torah and each other. Thanks.

Have a halakhic question you'd like answered on the show? Email us at [email protected]. Responsa Radio is a project of the Hadar Institute. Thanks to Chana Kupetz and Jeremy Tabick for producing this podcast and to David Khabinsky for recording and editing this episode.

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