Character and Personality
Rabbi Glasner was embroiled in many controversies in his long tenure as chief rabbi of Klausenburg. A sharp and powerful polemicist, he responded to his critics by seeking to demonstrate, through the force of his own arguments, the validity of his position. At the end of his haqdamah to Dor Revi'i, he summarized his approach. "The reader of this work should not suspect that I would imagine that in every place that I have criticized rabbis who came before us, I have discerned the truth, for such a haughty spirit would be incomparably ignorant... t would contradict my approach completely, for my having dared to criticize is built on the principle that every person ... is liable to err... will undoubtedly find many mistakes that I have made, because man is biased in favor of his own words and ideas. I, too, could not be secure from the snare of error that lies beneath the feet of all men. But this is the way of the Torah: one builds and another comes after and examines his words and removes the chaff from the wheat in order to find truth, which is beloved above all" (haqdamah 5a-b).
Read more about this topic: Moshe Shmuel Glasner
Famous quotes containing the words character and/or personality:
“The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)