David Weiss Halivni (Hebrew: דָּוִד וַיְיס הַלִּבְנִי; September 27, 1927 – June 28, 2022) was a European-born American-Israeli rabbi, scholar in the domain of Jewish sciences, and Professor of Talmud.

David Weiss was born on September 27, 1927, in Kobyletska Poliana (Кобилецька Поляна, Poiana Cobilei, Gyertyánliget) in Carpathian Ruthenia, then in Czechoslovakia (now in Rakhiv Raion, Ukraine).

[1] His parents separated when he was 4 years old, and he grew up in the home of his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Isaiah (Shaye) Weiss, a Hasidic Talmud scholar in Sighet, Romania.

[1] One week after he arrived at Auschwitz, Weiss transferred to the forced labor camps at Gross-Rosen, Wolfsberg, and then Mauthausen, where he worked in a munitions plant.

A social worker introduced him to Rabbi Saul Lieberman, a leading Talmudist at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) in New York, who recognized his brilliance and took him under his wing.

[9] His methodology of source-critical analysis of the Talmud is controversial among most Orthodox Jews, but is accepted in the non-Orthodox Jewish community, and by some within Modern Orthodoxy.

Chate'u Yisrael states that in the period of neglect and syncretism after the conquest of Canaan when the originally monotheistic Israelites adopted pagan practices from their neighbours, the Torah of Moses became "blemished and maculated".

Halivni's published works include: The central thesis of "Breaking the Tablets" is that the history of the Jews is "bookmarked" by two diametrically opposing "revelations": Sinai and Auschwitz.

Halivni's conviction is that Auschwitz represents not merely God's "hiding his face" from Israel, as a consequence of the Jews' sins — a familiar trope in rabbinic theology — but also his actual, ontological withdrawal from human history.

[12] In Breaking the Tablets Halivni explicitly rejected the notion that this withdrawal is simply an example of "God hiding his face" as viewed in normative Judaism.