Monday, July 27, 2009

Instant Semicha

I saw this today and if I didn't know it was serious I would be sure that someone is playing a joke.



Semicha is not supposed to be easy and not supposed to be short. Would you trust someone who was confused by the intricacies of the Shach and Taz to pasken questions for you?

What is this semicha going to be used for? Does anyone think that someone who takes a short period of time to do this will really know anything?

This is another manifestation of the "instant" culture that we live in and is why we now have who knows how many compilation sefarim.

2 comments:

Mighty Garnel Ironheart said...

This is similar to something shemayisrael.com was trying to do about 6-8 years ago - they had a rapid semicha program consisting of 3 shiurim a week for 6 months followed by a written test in Israel for semicha in Issur v'Heter. They said it would involved about an hour a day, 2 on Shabbos to cover the material.
Then they got real ethusiastic and added similar courses in Shabbos and Niddah, promising a rabbanut position as "rav ha'ir" to any who finished all three successfully.
I had a friend who signed up. Boy was he suprised when the material started showing up. Each shiur was at least 50 pages of small print which assumed that you had first read the relevant material in Shulchan Aruch and the Nosei Keilim.
Needless to say, the program didn't last long.

Steg (dos iz nit der šteg) said...

the memory training for remembering all the information sounds like a good idea