Reply To: Calling people with questionable smicha Rabbi

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yytz
Participant

Just because someone got smicha from an online or less-well-known yeshivah doesn’t mean they don’t deserve the title. Yeshivat Pirkei Shoshanim requires its students to pass the Rabbanut’s smicha exam, so they at least have to know something.

More generally, people who get smicha through such places aren’t necessarily doing it so they can get a title they don’t deserve or aggrandize themselves. A lot of people either didn’t have the opportunity to go to a regular yeshivah, because they became BTs at a late age or whatever, and simply take the smicha course as a way to challenge themselves to increase the level of their Torah knowledge. Even if these places became so widespread that nearly all men have smicha, I don’t see what’s wrong with that — it would probably increase the overall level of Torah study and observance.

In practice, anyway, if someone seems like a talmid chacham and people refer to him as rabbi, then call him rabbi regardless of whether he has smicha at all, or regardless of whether you know where he has smicha from.

If someone is bothered by their own feeling that people with less knowledge than you have smicha, because unlike them the person never went to the trouble to get smicha, then I would say that person should go ahead and get smicha already if they deserve it so much.

Of course, if places are giving away smicha without requiring people to learn anything, that’s a problem and people should keep that in mind when deciding whether to take someone’s halachic views seriously or call them a rabbi. But that doesn’t mean each graduate from such places is inadequate in their knowledge.