Min haMuvhar

How Not to Make Halakhic Rulings *

Daniel Sperber

Introduction

In a series of articles and publications I discussed the question of how halakhic decisors (poskim) should act in our day and age, arguing that they should seek to bring people closer to a love of Judaism and halakha, to be inclusive rather than exclusive, and to practice what I called "friendly decision making" (pesikah yedidutit). I am wont to quote a passage from R. Aryeh Leib Friedman's Tzidkat ha-Tzadik (undated, but after 1953), p.115:

1. A recent conversion case

There was no Rabbi more concerned with tseni'ut (modesty) than R. Moshe Feinstein. He was against men shaking a woman's hand even as a polite greeting (IM OH 1:113; EH 1:56). Even in circumstances when the law didn't strictly prohibit the mingling of men and women, he encouraged God-fearing people to avoid such situations.

The problem of the agunah—the woman whose husband refuses to give her a Jewish divorce—challenges the viability of Orthodoxy in a modern world that stands, if I may be given some poetic license, on the three pillars of equality, human rights, and the autonomy of the individual. How can it be that a Jewish woman in the twenty-first century is still dependent on the whims of her husband for her marital freedom?
In this article, I have three goals:

Question: Confidentiality is a vital concern that impacts the freedom of expression of quite a number of professions. Many professionals receive confidential information as part and parcel of their normal involvement with their clients and/or patients. Rabbis are also privy to confidential data.

Maimonides, Spinoza and Us: Toward an Intellectually Vibrant Judaism
by
Rabbi Marc D. Angel

has been selected as a finalist of the

2009 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD
in the category of
Scholarship

In 1964, Rabbi Dr. Joseph Soloveitchik (the Rav), the formative intellectual leader of postwar American Modern Orthodoxy, wrote that Jewish-Christian interfaith relations "must be outer-directed and related to the secular orders with which men of faith come face to face.

Rav David Bigman, Rosh Yeshiva of the Yeshiva Hesder of Maale Gilboa, will be the guest speaker at a breakfast program sponsored by the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals. The event will be held at Congregation Shearith Israel, 2 West 70th Street, in Manhattan, on Wednesday morning December 23.