ALIYAH: CONFLICT AND AMBIVALENCE

keep my Sabbaths™—it is the duty of all of you to honor me, for at the end of the verse is written:‘I am the Lord.””

Using highly sophisticated Talmudic exegeses, R. Moshe Trani presents his questioner with a surprising resolution of the conflict:

Both son and father are commanded to dwell in the Land of Israel. The son is not liable for failing to observe the mitzvah of honoring his parents, because they can also go on aliyah with him and thereby both the commandments of dwelling in the Land and filial respect will be fulfilled."

We may well induce that Trani ’s personal life experience, no less than his knowledge of Torah , influenced this verdict. He

emigrated to Safed from Turkey at the age of eighteen. From the age of twenty-one, he served on the beit din of R. Joseph Caro, whom he succeeded as the Rabbi of Safed. In all he lived sixty-two years in this Galilee town and served its Jewish community for more than a half century. His love of Zion was not in the abstract. It is therefore not surprising that he interpreted the halakhah of aliyah in this manner.

Halakhic decisors do not render their judgments merely from a cold analytic perspective of halakhah, but are influenced by ther own ethical values and weltanschauung."':

About a century before Trani , Rabbi Simeon ben Zemah Dura? (1361-1444), known as the Rashbatz, approached this problem 0! parents, children, and aliyah from a different angle.'> After hyperbolic recital of the Talmudic praises of the Holy Land, he ruled that going abroad from the Land of Israel is permitted for two purposes;(1) if

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