In the three centuries since the prince-elector of Hanover became George I of Great Britain, few power brokers have been more detached from the populace they affected than Rabbi Menachem Shach (1898–2001). Born and bred in Lithuania, where he devoted himself to Talmudic study with some of the great masters, he arrived in Palestine in 1941 and taught at a variety of institutions, not all to his ideological liking. By the 1960s he was teaching at the elite Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak. Two decades later, in his eighties, he had become the undisputed oracle of non-Zionist, non-Hasidic Ashkenazi Orthodoxy.
Rabbi Shach’s signature moment of indifference to the general public came during the cabinet crisis of 1990. He controlled enough Orthodox votes in the Knesset to decide whether Yitzhak Shamir or Shimon Peres became prime minister. He explained his verdict at a religious event, televised only because of its secular political import. Beginning his remarks in Hebrew, Shach lapsed into Yiddish, oblivious to the eavesdropping audience to which his remarks were being broadcast. Although his dovish opinion on Israeli security policy was closer to Peres than to Shamir, he opted for Shamir. His judgment about which candidate best served the interests of the Orthodox institutions determined the government.
