National Scholar Updates

(This article consists of two sections with different purposes. The first is an account of how I came to take on the observance of mitsvot, and what was going on in my family while that was happening. Though it is my personal story, it touches on issues that will resonate with others in various stages of engagement with halakhah. In the following section, I address a broader set of concerns that could be useful for potential ba’alei teshuvah, converts, and those who may be connected to them.

I make no attempt here to speak for my brother, who was a friend and companion throughout. He is a very private person, which means that his story must be as absent from these pages as I can possibly manage without obscuring my own tale.)

Origins:

I come from a family of Portuguese Jews of the Amsterdam rite who immigrated to upstate New York in the 1850s. They settled in the community of Poughkeepsie as merchants and tradesmen, and as the family grew into the fabric of American life their rigor in observing mitsvot diminished. Whether this change happened abruptly or gradually is beyond living memory, but we know that within two generations of our arrival in America, the expression of our Judaism did not extend much beyond simply having a Jewish identity.

When my father was a boy, his mother pushed the family to join a synagogue, and they eventually found a Reform Temple that his skeptical father could suffer through. While this gave him a basic Jewish education, he was unengaged in Jewish life as a young man, and our Sephardic surname gave him an easy pathway to blend in with a gentile crowd. He fell in love with an Episcopalian, and her eventual conversion to Judaism had more to do with her own spiritual journey than it did with her marriageability in his eyes. Feeling that proximity to Jewish resources should not constrain their living arrangements, the young couple moved to a small Midwestern college town where the work was good, and had two kids. Thus it happened that I was born in a Catholic hospital in downstate Illinois, taking the unlikely name of “Raif” from an Episcopalian priest, Reverend Ralph P. Brooks, Jr.

I credit the first glimmer of my parents’ interest in Jewish life to the fact that as a Jew-by-choice, my mother had a reason to think about her Jewishness in an adult way that my father rarely had before they met. Through helping to introduce her to the Jewish world, he was given a pathway back to it himself, slowly breaking down a sturdy reluctance. As they tell it, a pivotal moment occurred one Festival evening when they sat down to a meal of pork roast. Although they had eaten this dish before on holidays, this time they looked at each other and said, “this isn’t right, is it?” The seed was planted, and when my brother’s birth left them in need of a mohel and a Cohen, they were finally ready to make their first meaningful contact with the community in whose midst they had lived unobtrusively for five years.

By the time I was born, their journey had progressed enough that our household was not unlike many other American Jewish families on the liberal side of the spectrum. We were members of the local Temple, and we attended services at the Traditional minyan there as often as its intermittent schedule permitted. On Friday nights we made a point to recognize that it was Shabbat by lighting candles and having a special meal, and as the holidays came and went we marked their passing in at least some intentional way. My earliest years were colored by a definite knowledge that I was a Jew, and while I had a sense that this meant something significant, I could not have articulated what exactly that was.

Our Jewishness easily could have continued along those lines indefinitely, but the summer of 1986 marked a turning point that would change our family forever. My father had spent the spring semester in Uppsala for work, and my mother, brother, and I joined him that May for the last 10 weeks of his stay. We children were very young, and the process of acculturation marched along at the brisk pace with which that age is blessed. Although we had been away less than three months, I vividly recall a day when I could not determine whether ja and nej (“yes” and “no”) were English words or Swedish. This was not lost on my parents, and on the plane trip back to the United States, they grappled with the uncomfortable realization that our family knew more about being Swedish than we did about being Jewish! Eventually they agreed that if they expected us to take Judaism seriously, they had to give it a cardinal place in our lives.

Despite the clairvoyance of this vision, knowing how to bring it about was another matter altogether. My parents knew they wanted more, but what did “more” mean? What might they change, and how far or fast were they willing to take it? Whom could they turn to for advice in an unfamiliar world whose inhabitants might not share their values? How would they explain everything their children, who were nearly 4 and 8 years old and would be taken well outside their comfort zones? What would this be like with so few Jewish peers, and virtually none who were going through a similar experience? And that is to say nothing of the unforeseen questions, which arose frequently and could have demoralizing effects. All they could do was to try their best with the information they had – to jump in and deal with the awkward moments as they came up.

One of the first exploratory steps that they took was to increase their participation in the Traditional minyan at the local Reform Temple. In style, it was a “Conservadox” liturgy carried out under egalitarian principles, and the participants were united by a desire to actively shape their Jewish lives instead of relying on others to do it for them. We met many families and young people who would become lifelong friends and mentors, and the synagogue offered a handful of resources like an underdeveloped (but much appreciated) religious school, adult education groups, and lay leadership opportunities. Yet the Traditional minyan did not meet every week, and once we felt secure there we ventured into a small Orthodox minyan that operated out of the campus Hillel Foundation. At first this strange new expression of Jewish life was alienating, but it came with three friendly young families who reached out to us and made us feel less vulnerable. That such people existed and were so welcoming made us feel that we could have a place there, and they were a big part of why we kept coming back. Since the rest of the minyan consisted of college students, there was also a ready source of tutors to make up for lost time in my Jewish education.

All of this external exploration gradually worked its way into our home life, and that was a far more challenging, uneven process than what happened at synagogue. At some point, anyone who engages in Jewish observance must recognize that its origins lie in rabbinically articulated halakhah, and they will have to form an opinion about how that system relates to their personal practice regardless of whether they buy into it. At first it was easy for my parents to let halakhah remain in the background, but as our home life became increasingly defined by Jewish elements, it grew more difficult to ignore. Eventually they worked out a three-point policy of running the family, and this became one of the most conspicuous elements of my later childhood:

1. Engaging with mitsvot is a value, even if we have not defined that precisely. Our family practice will be influenced by halakhah, but it will not necessarily be dominated by the halakhic system.

2. It is easier to bring mitsvot into the home than it is to keep them up outside. Therefore, the best way of trying out mitsvot is to craft a home life in which there is a safe space for experimentation to occur. Creating this space is worth making compromises in the practical operation of our household, which may make us feel unsafe in other ways.

3. Once we leave the home on any given day, it is up to each family member to decide how far they personally want to take anything we have learned about Judaism and mitsvot. We may observe none of it or all of it; violating Shabbat and kashrut are just as much on the table as putting on tallit and tefillin.

Under these guidelines, we began bringing mitsvot into our lives in a process that developed over nearly ten years. We started off light, eliminating certain obvious items from the menu and finding more children’s books and play activities that were specifically Jewish. My parents read voraciously and redacted what they learned into a gloss that I could appreciate as a child, often focusing on holidays, parashat hashavua and other materials whose content refreshed regularly. As time went by, we took on more serious commitments like learning Hebrew prayers for synagogue and Modern Hebrew for ourselves. For several years before taking on the real thing, we kept a form of “practice kashrut” in which we had only one set of dishes but ate only meat or only dairy at any given meal. This was paralleled by “graduated Shabbat,” in which every few weeks we would take on a new required practice or forswear a forbidden one. The fact that the boundaries were in flux would sometimes put us into comically impractical situations, and we occasionally resorted to a “five-minute freebie” after Shabbat began in order to fix the things we had forgotten to set up in advance.

By the time of my bar mitsvah, our home space was fully shomer Shabbat and shomer kashrut, and I had enough Jewish literacy to read my entire 147-verse Torah portion in an Orthodox service with which I was very much at home. We also remained active in the Traditional minyan, which by then was the only destination to which we would drive on Shabbat. But as these sweeping changes unfolded at home and in synagogue, my personal practice in the outside world was in a completely different place. The three rules of the family contained an important compromise: although I had no choice but to learn enough about mitsvot that I could observe them if I wanted to, there was a fundamental recognition that nobody could force me to keep them against my will.

The duality of lifestyle that this permitted helped to smooth over a lot of the challenges that a consistent practice of mitsvot would have presented in my younger childhood, especially given where we lived. It meant that I could eat in the school lunchroom or a restaurant just like anybody else, and that going over to a friend’s house was as simple as walking through the door. It meant that I could take part in weekend trips with my scout troop or go to the movies with my buddies on a Friday night. Most importantly, it meant that being Jewish didn’t make me “that weird kid” who had a daunting list of special needs and couldn’t do anything fun. But it also meant that I lived in two very different worlds which were largely disconnected from each other, a convenience that diminished personal guilt even as it left behind incipient questions about my identity and integrity.

During this plastic phase my religious development, two experiences in particular made Jewish life seem like something I might one day work into my practice on my own terms. The first was being part of the campus Hillel through the Orthodox minyan. This introduced me to a small chevre of Orthodox children my age, and even though they were in a very different place than me religiously, I had far more in common with them than I did with the kids at the Reform Temple (no judgment here, it was just a fact). It also brought me in contact with a self-replacing crop of Orthodox young adults who were excited by their relationship with mitsvot. Over the years, many would become tutors and older-sibling-like friends, while others surprised me by asking me to teach them things about Judaism that they did not yet know. I was particularly inspired by my bar mitsvah tutor, a brilliant young man who had learned the entire Talmud by his early 20s, and by the Executive Director, a Reform Rabbi who embraced halakhah as an adult during his time at the helm of Hillel. But in addition to these important individuals, Hillel put me in an environment where people with vastly divergent religious beliefs had to share a space together in mutual respect. If someone did something differently from my family – which was the rule and not the exception – I had to confront it and reflect on the validity of my own perspective rather than retreating to a space where I could not be challenged.

The other experience that shaped my personal relationship with mitsvot was attending Camp Ramah in Wisconsin. It was here that I first met people whom I could call my Jewish peers, for the home-vs.-outside model is widespread in the Conservative Movement, and for once in my life people actually understood where I was coming from. Since we were interested in being kids we didn’t really talk about serious issues like that in a formal way, but the daily fact of being around them was enough to start a whole new train of subconscious thought. The camp administration played a parallel role to that of our parents, creating a Jewish “home space” from the top down knowing that the campers were all over the map in terms of how they related to their Jewishness inside. We chafed against the artificiality of this environment and felt limited by its boundaries, yet we tromped enthusiastically back to camp each year, happy to be in an intentionally Jewish place.

Some Setbacks:

Admittedly, it is only in retrospect that I can articulate so many nuances of the family’s religious trajectory and of my quest to carve out a set of personal beliefs within that context. At the time it was happening, none of us fully understood the significance or consequences of the issues at hand, which left us exposed to unforeseen pitfalls. The above narrative might sound like a beautiful reengagement with mitsvot in which each family member was a united, willing participant, but it was also a jarring disruption of our family life in which personal anchoring could not always be achieved. On the many occasions where the outside world intruded into our home, I lamented the absence of a peer group with whom I could unpack my discomfort from a place of understanding. My parents simply could not be neutral sources of guidance since they had instigated the very changes that we all struggled with, and although there is a sense in which we went through this together as a family, there is another sense in which each of us went through it alone. Without a doubt, my family’s engagement with mitsvot was one of the most fulfilling and the most upsetting experiences of my life.

Probably the highest hurdle on this obstacle course arose just a few years into our journey, threatening the entire enterprise. My mother’s conversion from Episcopalianism in the 70s had been Reconstructionist, and it dawned on my parents that many Jews would have counted neither her nor her children among their number. They began to hear of stories in which “questionable” Jews had their identities challenged by busybodies and the well-meaning alike, and they knew that such an experience would be devastating to us after all we had invested in reclaiming our Jewishness. To resolve this, they reached out to a renowned Orthodox conversion authority in a nearby city, but that predictably dragged all of their unanswered questions about halakhah out into the spotlight. It took nearly two years of persistent follow-through to convince the beit din that they were serious, and in the meantime there was no choice but to allow them to intrusively dictate how we were to think about our Jewish lives. Insulting remarks and decisions had to be absorbed without recourse, the most hurtful of which was that the beit din positively refused to put my father’s Hebrew name on my conversion certificate even though he is a born Jew. It was a bitter pill for my parents, and they did not tell me that part of the story until I was 23 years old.

After this was finally resolved, two other themes emerged as recurrent internal challenges for our family. The first was that as we took more of a mitsvah lifestyle at home, participation in the Traditional minyan at the Reform Temple became less of a fit for us. It was six miles from our house, which meant that we had to drive there even though we were phasing out the use of the car on Shabbat. Its membership did not keep strictly kosher, which progressively closed off the possibility of socializing at their houses. And although its liturgical form was remarkably close to Orthodox prayer, the handful of differences became increasingly salient. Complicating matters was the fact that each family member had a different take on what the right solution should be. Some of us believed that we could engage with mitsvot and go to the Traditional minyan with no inherent contradiction. Others felt that although we must do everything in our power to retain the wonderful friendships we had made, the minyan itself could no longer fulfill our religious needs. As these two viewpoints became irreconcilable, some of us crossed permanently over to the Orthodox minyan at Hillel and others continued going to both. While we have since found healthy ways to cope with this realignment, it tore a painful rift in the family at the time.

The other difficult theme was that the journey of a ba’al teshuvah looks very different for men than it does for women. When a man begins to take on mitsvot, the sky is the limit, and virtually no privilege or experience is barred from him. If he decides to observe halakhah in an Orthodox manner, he surrenders comparatively little of his public or private life as a Jew. But when a woman begins to observe halakhah, particularly if she is coming from an egalitarian community, she must have faith that the spiritual rewards of such a course will outweigh the sense of loss that she cannot but feel when accepting a diminution of her status. The first demonstration of this in our family happened a few years after my bar mitsvah, when my exposure to the Orthodox minyanat Hillel led me to adopt a more gender-conscious outlook to ritual without understanding how this would affect my relationship with my mother. After one Shabbat meal, she began to lead the zimun as she often had before, and I thoughtlessly blurted out that she “couldn’t do it” because she was a woman. Had they anticipated this situation, my parents could have come to an agreement about how to share halakhic spaces in our home, and might have challenged me to reflect on where this belief had come from. As it was, I surprised my father out of his composure, and he found himself justifying my rendering of the situation instead of supporting my mother in her hour of need. She was bitterly wounded, and we retreated into a surly defensiveness as her justifiable anger blew up in his face. Curiously, the version of the story that I remembered years later cast my father as the initial objector who provoked her outburst. I take this as an indication of how far my position on women and halakhah has changed in the meantime.

By now we have been navigating these minefields in our family life for many years, agreeing on a set of compromises and truces that have taken the teeth out of the problem, if not the sting. Our unconditional love for one another has meant that we try to meet each family member were they are, knowing that no single choice will satisfy everyone. If I said that we have worked out all the issues and are going along just fine, it would plainly be a lie, but we have made a lot of progress. Sometimes it is better to serve an unusual mix of ingredients in a salad bowl than to burn them in a melting pot.

Taking the Tiller:

Until my early teens, the development of my Jewish self took place in an environment in which my parents were the principal actors. While I could define my own boundaries within their story, it was they who set the ship in motion and oversaw its general course. The first time that I made an independent decision about my relationship with Judaism happened the summer after seventh grade, through a situation that was created unintentionally by the staff at Camp Ramah. Since the administration valued having services three times a day, campers would frequently get into trouble for leaving their kippot in their bunks, and I took to wearing one all the time as a purely practical measure to prevent this from happening. The morning after I returned to the real world, I thoughtlessly plopped a kippah on my head just as I had done every day for the past two months. Looking in the mirror, I was quite surprised that I didn’t want to take it off. It just “felt right,” whatever that means, and I have worn a kippah every day of my life since then despite the many eyebrows that it raised among my peers in the beginning.

As it turned out, this particular habit would have a far greater significance for me than I anticipated when I first adopted it. For reasons that are only tangential to this narrative I began hanging out with “the bad kids” at school around this time, forming meaningful friendships that would affect the next few years of my life for both good and ill. Unlike many of them I did well in school, but I readily adopted their freewheeling lifestyle and became a source of worry for my parents. On a fateful Friday evening a few months after my bar mitsvah, I met up with one such friend to hang out, and we decided to see if we could get our hands on some beer. While this would not have been hard for under-aged college kids at a party campus like my hometown, we middle schoolers were too young looking to pull that off, and petty theft was more our line. Strolling into a convenience store not half a mile from where I would pray the next morning, I engaged the clerk in conversation while my friend snuck back to the cooler and stuffed a six-pack into his oversized jacket. After a brief round of small talk, the clerk noticed my kippah (yes, I was wearing it even then!) and began asking me an intelligent series of questions about Jewish practice. It turned out that he was an observant Ethiopian Christian, and he was fascinated by the concept of a divine law governing all human behavior. I found myself describing halakhah and mitsvot in terms of “we do X” or “we don’t do Y,” and the whole time a little voice in the back of my head was saying “...uh, aren’t you stealing beer from this guy to go under-aged drinking on Shabbat?!‘We’ my aunt Fanny!”

When I got home that night, I decided that I had crossed a line with myself that I could never repeat. To recover my integrity, I had to either try and keep mitsvot in a real way or stop representing myself as someone who does. Aware that both choices would involve giving something up, I decided to try the mitsvot option for a period of one month and see how it felt. My parents were supportive of this even though I couldn’t bring myself to tell them the real impetus behind it, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my motley crew of friends deeply respected the direction I was headed in. While on the surface they were a shady bunch that exerted a “bad influence” on me, I don’t think that I could have gotten through the transitional period without them. They were nearly all gentiles, yet they arranged our social gatherings so that I wouldn’t need to drive or use the telephone on Shabbat, and they went out of their way to buy kosher products if they planned on sharing food. At school, they aggressively put down the slightest whiff of disrespect for Jewish practice on the part of others, whether accurate or perceived. Even the curious risked their ire, and I sometimes had to call off their dogs as they defended me in their endearingly foul-mouthed way when some well-meaning student asked me to explain “them goofy strings hangin’ offayo’ belt.”

I sensed that I had made the right decision when I didn’t even notice how the first month flew by. The structural duality of my religious life was finally beginning to disappear, and with friends and family rooting for me I wanted to do what I could to close the gap at a pace that worked for me. For the first year I simply brought the mitsvot into my personal life without attempting to change its secular and hedonistic nature, treating halakhah as a set of logistical limitations within which it was still possible to keep the company that I kept before and do most of the things that I did before. Though imperfect, this stage was well suited to a high schooler with limited personal space who lived outside of a major Jewish center – only an exceptionally strong kid could have withstood the isolation that would have accompanied the abrupt adoption of a Torah life. The next major development came somewhat serendipitously, when a story that is unrelated to this text drove me to abandon all of my friends in a single night. Although I still looked for a band of misfits when carving out a new social niche, the tenor of my new existence was more loving of general mankind than in the group I had left, and willy-nilly this fit better with a halakhic worldview. In practice, the seriousness of my observance of mitsvot increased only by degrees, but the attitudinal change was paramount, and it made my personal life feel more Jewish for the rest of my high school experience.

By the time I graduated I was committed to the general direction that I had been going religiously, but the next step could have taken many different forms. I had lived an Orthodox-looking lifestyle for four years and was used to it, but I understood that its prime motivation was a striving for personal integrity before God, not an endorsement of the halakhic system per se. The only thing that I knew for sure was that I was not ready for college, having been worn out by the unremitting cycle of school and summer camp that left me ahead of my years in some respects and deeply immature in others. Because I still had religious questions, I thought it would be useful to spend the next year in Israel, which my parents encouraged. However, I had a profound suspicion of the yeshivah world because of its reputation for predatory indoctrination, and I began searching for Hebrew-language-focused programs as a more ideologically neutral alternative. The ensuing school shopping only underscored that there weren’t too many people like me in the Jewish world: if I found a program that had a high enough level of Hebrew for me, it could not accommodate those interested in keeping mitsvot, while all of the programs that accommodated mitsvot were invariably yeshivot.

After a not inconsiderable struggle I took a second look at the yeshivah courses, eventually finding a non-judgmental, left-leaning Orthodox program with Hebrew-only classes called Yeshivat Hakibbutz Hadati at Ein Tzurim. It was a huge gamble: with little preparation I traveled 6000 miles from home to spend a year in an out-of-the way agricultural community where I had no prior acquaintances and only a dim idea of what the courses would be like. The daily schedule began at 6:30 am and ended at 10:30 pm, so there would be precious little escape if I didn’t enjoy the environment. But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and as it turned out I hit the jackpot. Not only did the staff succeed in making Jewish texts and halakhah come alive for me, turning a detached interest into a budding passion, but they did so in a loving way that met me where I was. Never did they demand that I cease thinking critically or surrender my sense of self-worth, and I finally had a model of a truly modern Orthodox thinking that aligned with my own innate values.

Only when I returned to the US for college did I fully appreciate the change that was manifest in my Jewish outlook. During my year abroad I successfully maintained a long-distance relationship with a gentile girlfriend at home, but once we were back in the same city, things fell apart. It rapidly became clear that I was uncomfortable with the halakhic challenges posed by our relationship, even though they hadn’t seemed to bother me the previous year. I wanted to make it work because we loved each other and had invested a lot in staying together, but the only long-term solution would have been for her to become a Jew, and neither of us had any illusions that this would be a good fit for her. Although our interpersonal issues were still the ultimate reason behind our (multiple) breakup(s), I am certain that the religious development that I had undergone was a significant contributing factor. When I finally got over the pain of separation, I was surprised by the sense of spiritual closure that came with resolving one of the last great contradictions in my religious life. I am still not entirely sure when I started to think of myself as a “real” Orthodox Jew, but I could not date that point until sometime after her absence from my life felt right to me.

Epilogue:

Since my return to a life of mitsvot is the subject of this article, I will leave the many evolutions that reshaped my Orthodoxy in the ensuing ten years for another time. Suffice it to say that I have evolved a great deal in the interim, and owe a deep debt of gratitude to the people and institutions that have helped and encouraged me along the way. Chief among them is my wife, who has kept me on my toes in a beautiful quest of reflective growth over the seven years we have been a couple, and who supported me in my recent decision to join the rabbinical seminary at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. Her loving and well-articulated challenges of my ideological positions are an important part of the Jew that I am today, and have affected the way in which I interpret the meaning of my story before we met. I have great hopes for what we will accomplish together as a Jewish household, and wherever we end up we will have come a long way from my parents’ Festival dinner of pork roast 35 years ago.

Just because a personal story is meaningful and transformative does not necessarily make it a universal model that everyone should emulate. That being said, the pathway I took to adopting Orthodoxy covered a fertile ground that could speak to a variety of people involved in a ba’al teshuvah or conversion story, whether as central actors or as elements of their emotional, religious, and social context. Because of this, I have shared my outlook on some of the central issues concerning the adoption of mitsvot, with the acknowledgement that my interpretation comes from a subjective experience. I published it because I believe that it will contribute to an important discussion, but I also make no claims of infallibility.

For Parents:

One of the most meaningful experiences for a Jewish parent is to witness a continuity of Jewish life unfold through their children and grandchildren. Yet this is not always something that happens organically, even in a household with a specifically Jewish atmosphere. While I recognize that the Jewish developmental environment in which I grew up was not ideal, it instilled two important values in me that I believe are transferrable to an a priori situation:

The first is that positive modeling sets a followable lead. If you expect your kids to connect with mitsvot when they grow up, then it is important to demonstrate that Orthodox Judaism is an “intellectually sound, spiritually compelling, and emotionally satisfying” way of life that enriches your experience together as a family. By consciously bringing out the greatness of Jewish life and welcoming your kids to access why you appreciate it, you increase the possibility that they will attach a similar significance to it. If you allow it to become an arbitrary, authoritarian system that continually emphasizes what can’t be done, then a negative take-home for your children will hardly be surprising. To put it in other words, you may not be in control of the Torah itself, but you have tremendous power to frame it in a way that shows why it is worthwhile for one to follow its precepts.

Parallel to this is the importance of recognizing that your children will one day grow up and enter a world in which their association with Judaism and the Jewish community is entirely voluntary. The more you can make observance of mitsvot an informative, empowering experience that gives them the tools to continue on their own, the more likely they will be to want to claim mitsvot for themselves. If they passively receive a version of mitsvot where the difficult choices are either handed to them ready-made or forced down their throats, then Jewishness may come off as something to be devalued or cast aside. No technique is guaranteed, but my experience suggests that these two values can smooth an admittedly difficult way.

For Ba’alei Teshuvah and Converts:

There are many reasons why someone might adopt a life of mitsvot, which means that each person’s path will take a different course than then next – will travel at different speeds and produce different results. Because of this, it is vital to maintain an intentional and ongoing conversation with yourself in which you articulate what you are doing and what you hope to achieve by it. This is particularly true since your journey will not take place in a vacuum, and may have extensive consequences for the people you know and love:

• What about your previous life do you feel was not working for you?
• What aspects of assuming a life of mitsvot do you believe will address that?
• What changes and sacrifices might you need to make along the way?
• Is what you hope to get worth what you are giving up?
• Who else besides you will be affected by what you are going through?
• What conversations might you need to have with them about what is happening?
• What style and rate of change will accommodate your needs and theirs?
• According to what parameters will you evaluate your progress?
• Whom will you look to for mentorship and guidance?
• What social and educational resources will you use to stay informed?
• What qualifies these mentors and resources as authoritative for you?

You may not be able to answer all of these questions at any given time, but knowing that you cannot answer an important question is better than not knowing that the question even exists. If you keep up good communication with yourself and those around you, then you will be better equipped to meet the inevitable obstacles as they come, and you will maximize your potential to grow and learn from the experience. It will be useful to ask yourself questions like these every few months, to compare your experience with your goals and assess whether you need to make any adjustments.

On the Rate and Definition of Progress:

My experience has been that taking on mitsvot gradually is less overwhelming. Once you buy into a halakhic worldview, it can be tempting to hold yourself to a binary standard that uses unequivocal language like permitted/prohibited, authentic/inauthentic, and right/wrong. I will suggest that this thinking can impede a successful assumption of mitsvot for two reasons. First, halakhah is by its very nature the outgrowth of dispute among rabbinic authorities, and unanimous agreement about a given halakhic problem is the exception, not the rule. The most renowned sages in each generation have disagreed about issues of every kind, making the halakhah more of an oscillating band than an undeviating line. Going from zero to sixty and holding yourself to such a demanding standard overnight creates the possibility that you will find the burden of mitsvot too heavy to bear, and might give up the enterprise entirely. Second, halakhah is so rich and all-encompassing that you will not be able to understand it fully at first. When attempting to adhere to a system with which you are not completely acquainted, you must resort to the stringent position in cases of doubt, which means that the form of Jewish life that you observe will be much more rigid than for people who are aware of accepted leniencies. This too can lead to an experience of an unforgiving system that asks more than you can give, and may be fatally discouraging.

Far better, I will suggest, to try things out slowly in an ongoing process of experimentation. Take on one mitsvah for a while and see how it feels, then add more in a rolling process that moves at a pace that is manageable for you. Don’t be afraid to say that it doesn’t feel right or that you aren’t ready yet, or to stop doing something that you started if that is what you need. When you begin to introduce yourself to observant communities whom you might look to for mentoring, be open about the fact that you are not exactly sure where you are going, and have not yet adopted mitsvot completely. If they reject you because of this, then it is not a safe place for you in any case. Ideally, you should be able to find a social support network that understands your vulnerability – that helps you along the way at your own speed without taking advantage of your weaknesses to perpetuate their own agendas. Sometimes the journey can be as meaningful as the final destination, and it is helpful to do your traveling in a company that is open to this even if they have never been in that kind of place themselves.

On Pseudo-Authenticity and Oversimplification:

Many of us have had at least some exposure to forms of Orthodox Judaism that are led by charismatic figures who appear enviably self-assured in the world of mitsvot, and who wear the label of “authentic” Judaism proudly on their sleeves. They seem to have an answer for every challenge and a gem of sagacious advice for every seeker. No problem in the world appears to ruffle their sense that the black-and-white system that they present to all comers is unassailable from every possible angle. They project confidence in a reality that is filled with uncertainty, and their magnetic personalities have a broad appeal to many who suffer from the gnawing sense of doubt that eats at us all.

I would advise newcomers to the world of mitsvot to be extremely cautious around such people. Their brand of one-size-fits all Judaism is not necessarily suitable to everyone, and until you are in a position to critically assess the things you hear from them yourself, they will wield all the apparent power and credibility that comes from superior knowledge. This is not to say that you should avoid the kinds of experiences that they have to offer, but rather that if you do decide to explore in that direction, you should keep some important things in the back of your mind:

The understanding of Orthodoxy that these leaders represent is a product of historical revisionism. As they would have it, Orthodoxy is the one authentic branch of Judaism that existed from the revelation at Sinai until today, emerging from the massive upheavals of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) entirely unscathed. In reality, Orthodoxy is a direct response to the Haskalah, and it represents a novel departure from the looser heterogeneousness that preceded it. While today’s Orthodoxy shares a commitment to halakhah with pre-Modern Judaism, its leaders were only able to defend the halakhic lifestyle by instituting unprecedented social and religious innovations that would have been viewed as dangerous and seditious in a prior age. The reforming denominations may have created the initial rupture by stepping outside of halakhic norms, but the mere fact that they are innovative does not make them any less “authentic” than their Orthodox brethren.

Something else to remember is that life, like halakhah, is filled with gray areas and contradictions. People are inconsistent, morality can be equivocal, and we know very few things with complete certainty. When you encounter someone who tells you otherwise, regardless of whether it is in a Jewish context, you should take a step back and get another perspective on the situation. Critical thinking is an instrument that will serve you well here as in many other places, and abandoning it need not be a pre-condition for membership in the halakhic community.

In Summation:

While the preceding paragraphs highlight that adopting a life of mitsvot is not a simple undertaking, it can nevertheless be a source of meaningful growth and spiritual fulfillment if carried out lovingly, seriously, and introspectively. I would never recommend that someone start down this path merely because they are a Jew or want to become one. However, I believe that if a questioning soul goes into it with and open mind that understands and validates the risks, there is a potential for profound enrichment that could be worth the toll that it takes.

A final note that I will add is that during the writing of this article, I unearthed many dusty memories of an adolescent’s unfolding spiritual development, and was forced to synthesize and interpret them through the eyes of an adult who has moved on to another place. By engaging in this important introspective exercise, I recognized that the knowledge I acquired from those now distant experiences is an ongoing part of who I am today, and if only for that it was worth putting pen to paper. If I may be indulged in a parting recommendation, I will suggest that anyone, regardless of where they are in relation to mitsvot, stands only to gain by taking the time to think about what being a Jew means to them and how they came to the ideological space that they currently inhabit.

Secular subjects are taught with various approaches in Jewish schools. Some take the approach that they are a necessary evil, and are taught only because they are required to do so by the civil authorities. They believe that only really worthwhile learning is that of limudei qodesh. Others take a more positive attitude toward limudei chol, considering them important at least for purposes of earning a living. Others go even further and consider all knowledge to have some intrinsic value. Scientific truth has sanctity in that it attests to the wisdom of the Creator.

Mathematics stands out somewhat from other subjects. Not only is the truth in mathematics not merely empirical but provable by reason, but there are also many areas in limudei qodesh for which an understanding of mathematics is essential. In some cases, the mathematics may even be considered part of limudei qodesh. An excellent example of this is the study of RMBM’s Hilchot Qiddush Hachodesh. There RMBM presents what is essentially a mathematical algorithm for determining the Jewish calendar.

Hilchot Qiddush Hachodesh of RMBM’s Mishneh Torah is divided into 3 distinct parts, which were almost certainly written at 3 distinct times in RMBM’s life. The first 5 chapters describe how the calendar was set during Talmudic times. It follows the rest of Misheneh Torah in relying on Talmudic sources. Chapters 6 through 10 comprise the second part and in chapters 6-8, contain the algorithm for determining the calendar in our times. It is this material that we are concerned with here. [1] The last part deals with astronomical calculations useful for determining when the new lunar crescent may be observable. This is only relevant for when the calendar is determined through observation, and has no direct bearing on the previous 5 chapters.

We will first sketch an outline of the ideas in Chapters 6-8 of RMBM. The summary we give will take advantage of our modern notation for numbers and some modern terminology. RMBM used the common gematria notation, which makes the explanation more cumbersome. We will then examine some of the mathematics that we can learn by studying RMBM.

A Summary of RMBM’s Calendar Algorithm

The modern Hebrew calendar is fixed, so that it is generated by a mathematical algorithm which is based on approximations to the lengths of orbits of celestial bodies. The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, which means that it is based on approximations to the length of the month and the length of the year. [2] The day is divided into 25920 units, called helakim or parts. Thus there are 7 x 25920=181,440 parts in a week. A month is considered on average to have 29 days plus 13753 parts. Thus a month has on average 29 plus 13753/25920 days, or about 29.5305941 days. This is remarkably close to the modern astronomical value (29.5305888 days).

The length of the solar year is based on the assumption that nineteen years have 235 months. Multiplying the number of parts in a month by 235 gives 179,876,755 parts in 19 years, or 6939 days plus 17,875 parts. Dividing by 19, gives an estimate of 365 days plus 6397 and 12/19 parts in a year. In decimals, this is about 365.2468 days. The modern astronomical value of the mean tropical year is about 365.2422 days, so this is closer to the modern astronomical value than that of the Julian calendar estimate (365.25 days), but not as close as that of the Gregorian calendar (365.2425 days).[3]

The calendar is divided into 19-year cycles. The 235 months in each cycle are apportioned to the years so that 7 of the years have 13 months while the other 12 have 12 months. This is known as the Metonic cycle and was used in the ancient Babylonian calendar. The Jewish calendar version has the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th and 19th months in the cycle as the ones with 13 months.

What remains is to set the calendar for each particular year. This is done by first setting the day of week that Rosh Hashanna of each year falls on. Since we know the approximate length of the year, knowing the days of the week of 2 successive Rosh Hashannas determines the exact length of the intervening year.

The determination of the day of the week for Rosh Hashanna is done through the calculation of a number called the molad.[4] This is a number associated with every month of every year, and is defined by an inductive algorithm. An epochal molad is associated with the first month of the first year, and the molad for any subsequent month is calculated by adding the number of parts in a month to the molad of the previous month, modulo the number of parts in a week.[5] The day of week that Rosh Hashanna of a particular year falls is determined by the range of values in which the molad for Tishrei of that year falls, according to some precise rules. Generally, these rules say that the day of the week should correspond roughly to the number of days that the molad value represents. Adjustments are made so that Rosh Hashanna never falls on days 1, 4 or 6, and so that the length of year is always within certain parameters.

The actual calendar for a given year depends on the length of the year and the day of the week on which it starts. The algorithm is formulated so that there are only 3 possible lengths for a 12-month year and for a 13-month year respectively.[6] The lengths of months within the year are determined by the length of year. The final refinement of the calendar is a function of the days of week of Rosh Hashanna of 2 successive years, which determines Torah readings.

It is evident from the above description that the calendar algorithm is a purely mathematical one. The terms year, day etc, are purely notional ones, and should be thought of as numbers consisting of the number of parts which the algorithm assigns to them. To be sure, in implementing the algorithm, we use actual days. However, this involves a simple process of counting these days by observing sunrises and sunsets. Anyone who knows the current year, the position of the current day in that year and the current day of week can implement the algorithm.

Mathematics of the Calendar

Joseph Justus Scaliger was a 16th century French scholar. In his De Emendatione Temporum (1593) he writes: “Of all methods of intercalation that exist today, the Jewish calculation is the oldest, the most skillful, and the most elegant." There is indeed much interesting mathematics in the calendar that is well worth studying. Here we give an outline of some such topics.

1)Representations of numbers and their operations.

We learn about our number representation at an early age. As a consequence, we tend to identify a number with its representation. In truth, a number has an intrinsic meaning apart from its representation, and it is only comparatively recently in human history that our current way from representing it has become widely accepted.

The modern representation of numbers is a decimal (base ten) positional system. There are ten symbols:0,1,..,9 which are strung together, and their position in the string determines their value. The rightmost symbol has the value assigned to the symbol if it were standing alone. The one to the left of it has ten times this value, the next one a hundred times its value, and so on. These values are then added together to get the value of the string.

The operations of addition and multiplication on numbers are straightforward using this system. If an operation results in a number greater than ten, it is divided by 10, the symbol for the remainder , being between 1 and 9, is put in the rightmost column, and the quotient is carried over to the remaining columns. We continue this way, going column to column.

An alternative system of representing numbers is the gematria system used in many ancient societies. This is an ordinal system, where numbers are represented by the letters of the alphabet, the value of a letter being dependent on its position in the alphabet. Larger numbers are formed by stringing together smaller numbers. A disadvantage of this system is that very large numbers must be formed using very lengthy strings. The rules for operations on numbers using this system are also much more complicated.

The decimal positional system originated in India. It became known to Persian and Arab scholars in the 9th century, and it greatly facilitated their study of mathematics and astronomy. RMBM, erudite scholar that he was, surely was familiar with it and must have used it in his private computations. Nevertheless, in Mishneh Torah he uses the gematria system which his readers would be familiar with. [7]

A close examination of RMBM however reveals that he actually is using the essential ideas of positional notation, albeit in a different form. After all, he has to use numbers as large as 181,440 (the number of parts in a week). When he says that an hour consists of 1080 parts, he is really saying that he is using another unit to handle numbers greater than 1080. Similarly, the unit of a day is used to handle numbers greater than 24 hours, or 25920 parts. Thus, instead of using position to deal with large numbers, he simply gives special names to the numbers 1080 (an hour) and 25920 (a day). And instead of using a uniform base 10 system, he uses a system with mixed bases (1080, 24 and 7).

All this is explained by RMBM in 6.9. where he states:

When in doing the computations for the molad, whenever the parts add up to 1080, you discard them, and add 1 to the count of hours.

This is the analogue in our notation of carrying over values greater than ten to the next column. RMBM gives a similar algorithm for handling values greater than 24 hours.

These days, the use of the decimal position system is widely accepted. Even the purists among Jewish educators appreciate its simplicity, elegance and ease of use, despite its foreign origin. Most translations of RMBM's Hilchot Qiddush Hachodesh render his numbers using our decimal notation. It certainly makes the computations easier to follow, but is somewhat misleading, as his original readers would mostly have had to do these calculations solely within the gematria system. For someone whose goal is to study RMBM for its own sake, an interesting exercise is to try to reconstruct these calculations. It takes patience, but can be done.

At the other extreme, if one's goal is to understand the calendar as efficiently as possible, it makes sense to abandon RMBM's day-hour-part system completely and represent all values using decimal notation. Although this loses some of the significance of the role of the numbers in setting the calendar - the day of week of Rosh Hashanna is primarily determined by the day-value, but with notable modifications - it certainly makes the algorithm easier to analyze and program.[8]

2)The Euclidean Division Algorithm

The division algorithm is taught in grade school. So much attention is focused on the mechanics of carrying out the algorithm with modern number representation that the essential simplicity of the idea behind it and its justification is lost. Euclid did not use
positional representation , and the algorithm is independent of the particular representation of the numbers involved.

The algorithm says that if a and b are whole numbers, then either b divides a evenly, or b can be divided into a to produce a quotient q and remainder r, with the property that r is
smaller than b. The method for finding q and r is as follows: If b is already less than a, then q=0 and r=b. Otherwise, start subtracting multiples of b from a. The differences become smaller as the multiples increase, so eventually we must reach a point where it is less than b. This is the remainder r.

When determining the representation of a number greater than 10 in the decimal positional system, by moving multiples of ten a position to the right, one is implementing this algorithm by dividing by 10. Likewise in RMBM's algorithm, when converting
parts larger than 1080 to hours and parts, one is dividing by 1080 to get the quotient (hours) and the remainder (parts). Thus RMBM is giving a clear statement of the algorithm in the quote from 6.9 above.

3)Modular Arithmetic

At the end of 6.9, RMBM says:

When the days add up to more than 7, you discard 7 from the count and keep the rest. For we do not calculate to know the actual number of days, but to know on which day of the week, and in which hour and in which part the molad will be.

The concept that RMBM is introducing is that of congruence modulo an integer m.

If m is a positive integer, we say that 2 integers are congruent modulo m if their
difference is divisible by m, or, equivalently, if they have the same remainder when they are divided by m. For a given integer a, the set of integers congruent to it modulo a is called the congruence class of a. The set of all such congruence classes is a finite set, called the integers modulo m, and denoted Zm. Thus multiples of m are considered to be equivalent to 0 in this set. We deal with Zm when we are interested, not in the number itself, but in its remainder when divided by m.

So, RMBM says, the relevant set of values for the molad is not the integers (Z), but Z181440 .

Another instance where modular arithmetic arises in calendar calculations is in the 19-year Metonic cycle, where the relevant set is Z19 .

4) Functions

The notion of function is essential to modern mathematics. If to every value in a domain, a value is assigned in another domain, we say that we have a function from the first domain to the second. An example is the assignment of a Tishrei molad value to each year, which is a function from Z to Z181440. Another example is the assignment of day of week to a molad value. This assignment depends on the position of a year in the Metonic cycle, so is a function from Z181440 x Z19 to Z7. The composition of these two functions gives the assignment that we are really interested in, from Z to Z7. (The function from Z to Z19 is reduction modulo 19, the assignment of an integer to its congruence class modulo 19.)

5) Induction

The principle of mathematical induction says that if one has a function assigning a value to the integer 1, and a rule telling how to define a value for an integer provided that the value for the previous integer is known, that one has a function assigning a value to all positive integers.

In 6.8 RMBM states:

If you know the molad of the current year, and add to it the appropriate remainder [depending on whether it is a regular year or a leap year], you will obtain the molad of the following year. And so it is year after year until the end of time. The first molad is that of the first year of creation (2 days, 5 hours 204 parts).

Thus RMBM is giving a precise application of the principle of induction.

6)Other mathematical topics

A more detailed analysis of the calendar gives rise to several other interesting mathematical topics.

One can ask for the periodicity of the calendar, that is how often the calendar repeats itself. It turns out that the period is 19 x 181440 /d years, where d is the greatest common divisor of 181440 and 69715 (the number of parts mod 181440 in a 19-year period, which is 5. Thus the period is 689472 years. As a consequence we can consider the molad function as one from Z689472 to Z181440.

One can ask for the inverse of this function, that is, which years have a given molad. The answer uses a concept that is known as the extended Euclidean Greatest Common Divisor algorithm. It turns out that for a given molad there are either 3 or 4 values in Z689472 which take on that molad value, depending on its congruence modulo 5.

Details of these and other topics can be found in the reference in footnote 8.

Conclusion

The calendar plays a central part in Jewish ritual life, yet the principles behind it are generally not well understood.[9] From the point of view of Jewish studies, mathematics is essential for a thorough understanding of its calendar. RMBM’s superb understanding of the mathematics involved and his lucid exposition come through in the study. The contemporary student has the advantage of modern notation and terminology which makes the mathematics considerably more accessible than previously.

From the point of mathematics education, the calendar offers motivation for studying several important topics. The mathematics teacher often encounters skepticism from students as to the usefulness of the subject, and studying the calendar makes the mathematics come to life and gives it meaning. There is a natural symbiosis between the two subjects, and serious thought should be given to find a way to integrate them.

[1] A description of the Jewish calendar was by the Muslim scholar al-Birundi in the early 10th century. An earlier work by Saadia Gaon exists only in fragments. The mathematician R. Abraham b. Hiyya (also known as Savasorda), in his Sefer Ha’Ibbur, described the calendar about 50 years before RMBM. His work closely resembles that of RMBM, who may have used him as his source.

[2] The lengths are of necessity approximations, since they are not constant over time.

[3]The discrepancy between the approximate length of the calendar year and the length of the tropical year implies that the calendar dates in our days occur about a week later in the season than when the calendar was first instituted. If instead of using the metonic estimate for the number of months in a year, we used the astronomical value, the average year length would be about 365.242256 days. Thus about 99% of the discrepancy in year length is due to the error in the metonic estimate. However, the sages in instituting the calendar had to find a small integral number of months to fit into a small integral number of years. Given this constraint, the choice of Metonic cycle was probably optimal.

[4] Molad is usually traslated as lunar conjunction. RMBM distinguishes beteween molad amiti, the true molad, and molad emtzai, which is best thought of as a theoretical number. It doesn’t correspond to any real time, but is a value used to determine the calendar.

[5] This concept is presented in more detail below.

[6] Since the difference between the moladim of 2 subsequent months equals the number of parts in a month, the difference between the moladim of 2 months which are 19 years apart will differ by the number of parts in 19 years. This guarantees that, although there is much variation in the length of the year, the average length of the calendar year will be exactly 365 days plus 6397 and 12/19 parts.

[7] In contrast, al-Biruni used Indian decimals in his description of the Jewish calendar.
His readers had already been introduced to this representation of numbers by the mathematician
Al-Khwarizmi. RMBM's readers, on the other hand, were mostly not familiar with this notation.

[8] See “A Mathematical Analysis of the Hebrew Calendar”, http://www.math.uga.edu/~lenny/papers/PaperList.html, where this is done.

[9] The mischaracterization of the molad as a physical event in the Artscroll siddur and the Chabad web site attests to this. This is also seen in the way the molad is described in printed calendars and announced in synagogues. Instead of using the natural, Jewish way of referring to the week day by its number, it is translated into its secular equivalent. For example, Day 2, 5 hours becomes Sunday evening at 11 PM. The purpose of such a translation eludes us, since to use the molad for its intended purpose, one would have to translate it back into a number. What is even more bizarre, some calendars adjust the molad in summer for daylight savings time!

In 1954, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the acknowledged leader of Modern Orthodoxy in America, was asked whether it was permissible for Orthodox rabbis and congregations to unite or to cooperate with their non-Orthodox counterparts. The question came amidst gathering controversy concerning Orthodox membership in joint rabbinic councils, formation of community-wide rabbinical courts, growing adoption of Conservative practices in Orthodox congregations (such as mixed seating), and new deviations from traditional observance authorized by the Conservative rabbinate (such as permitting driving to Sabbath services). The Rav, as his followers referred to him, gave his answer in a column in the Yiddish daily, Tog Morgen Journal, which was republished several years ago in Community, Covenant and Commitment: Selected Letters and Communications, Rabbi Joseph. B. Soloveitchik, edited by Nathaniel Helfgot. [1] The answer, paradoxically, was, in a nutshell, that unity and separation must co-exist. The Rav’s answer emanated from his understanding of how the concepts of unity and separation grow out of two covenants recounted in the Book of Exodus, which together define the nature of Jewish identity: one covenant based on G-d’s “taking” the Jews to be His People, and the other covenant based on the People’s declaration of readiness to accept G-d and his terms. We examine here the basis for the Rav’s accommodation of contacts between Orthodox rabbis and leaders and their non-Orthodox counterparts, which in turn is based on the Rav’s examination of how and why unity and separation must co-exist within the Jewish People, and how the changed circumstances six decades later have undermined the Rav’s solution to resolving the two fundamental forces driving Jewish identity.

The principle of unity, the Rav wrote, is a basic principle of Judaism, succinctly stated in the Sabbath afternoon prayer, “You are One, Your Name is One, and who is like Your people Israel, a unique nation on earth.” However, unity in Judaism is expressed in two ways: the unity of Jews as a spiritual community, living a Jewish way of life, which he called the edah – a voluntary congregation of witnesses [tied] to the collective memory and future of the tradition; and the unity of Jews as a unique political/historical nation – the am.

The Rav’s conceptualization of two expressions of Jewish unity is based on two covenantal acts, recounted in the Torah, through which the Jewish identity is created. The first is made at Sinai, in which Jews individually and collectively commit themselves to be a community based on the unique Jewish way of life. The Rav cites as his proof-text: “You shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” [2] The heart of this unity, he says, is a collective “transcendental-ethical consciousness” of a special purpose. Jews who have bought into the edah commit not only to a separate and different way of life from the nations, but to be “priests,” with each member striving to be an example to all peoples of how to live in the world. This is a separateness of means, not necessarily of ends. To be a member of the edah means to adhere to particularistic rules and ways of living (the Torah tradition) expressing a Divinely commanded universal ethical conception of how to live. Conversely, as the Rav states it: “[T]he Jew who erases from his memory this great testimony [the tradition], and destroys the unique collective tradition, breaks the tie which joins him with the Jewish community as part of a congregation, as part of a spiritual Torah entity.” [3]

The second expression of Jewish unity is derived from G-d’s declaration, passed on to the Israelites in Egypt, of the historical covenant that is about to unfold, “And I shall take you unto me as a nation, and I shall be unto you a G-d.” [4] As the Rav puts it, “this covenant forced upon us all one uniform historical fate.”[5] He also cites the blessing that G-d put in Balaam’s mouth: “Lo, it is a people that shall live alone, and among the nations shall not reckon itself.” [6] “No Jew can renounce his part of the unity,” says the Rav, which encompasses the non-traditional as well as the traditional Jew. It is this unbreakable bond, welded through our unique historical transmigrations and in our paradoxical fate, characterized by loneliness and affliction, according to the Rav, that requires all Jews to “fight the enemy, who does not differentiate between those who believe in G-d and those who reject Him.”[7]

In short, to the Rav, Jewish identity paradoxically is an amalgam of two unities, one a spiritual/ethical unity affirmed and expressed through a particular and unique system of Jewish law and practices, as well as a transcendental world view, the preservation of which may require separation from non-affirming Jews; and the other an existential uniqueness experienced in the historical aloneness and affliction of the Jewish People, which all Jews experience in common and whose existence is threatened by disunity. Under this conception, the spiritual unity of the edah can only be destroyed from within and this must be resisted by separation from those of do not accept this spiritual unity; whereas the existential unity of the am (i.e., the People, rather than the tradition) is destroyed from without, and must be resisted by means of a unified fight against the common outside enemy. Put another way, one can, by choice, separate himself from the tradition; however, all Jews share the same fate, whether they follow the tradition or not.

From this conceptual and textual foundation, the Rav concluded in his essay that with regard to spiritual and religious matters “Orthodoxy cannot and should not unite” with groups that deny the fundamentals of the tradition. He placed both the Reform and Conservative movements in this category. But, when Jews face the outside world in defense of their rights, “then all groups and movements must be united.” Disunity in the latter context could be “disastrous for the entire people.” Thus, on the one hand, the Rav railed at Conservative “Halakhic” deviations, which he worried could, in the name of harmony, “erase the [] boundaries between Orthodoxy and other movements” and “cause confusion in the minds” of Orthodox congregations. Separation of the edah from such practices is required to preserve the uniqueness of the tradition. On the other hand, he adamantly opposed creation of separate Conservative rabbinical courts to decide family issues (for non-Orthodox Jews), which he presciently warned would split the Jews into “two camps,” threatening the unity of the am. Similarly, behind the scenes, the Rav, worked (albeit without success) to create a joint beit din with authority to decide all Jewish family law issues arising in both Modern Orthodox and Conservative congregations.[8]

One of the most prominent examples of applying this paradigm – that is, including non-traditional Jews within the unity of the am, while at the same time retaining a strict division between traditional Jews (the edah) and non-traditional approaches – was the Rav’s role in preserving the Synagogue Council of America.[9] The Synagogue Council of America had been organized in 1926 by the six organizations comprising the three mainstream Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox rabbinical and congregational associations, including the RCA and Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. Formed to represent Jewish religious interests to the outside world, both in the United States and abroad, the SCA often found itself crippled by differences among its member organizations, and survived as long as it did on the strength of a one-organizational veto, which allowed the Orthodox groups to reject any joint action (particularly one that might be perceived as straying into the “spiritual” realm) they disagreed with. [10]

In 1956, the Rav’s support for the SCA came under attack both from within his community (the RCA) and from without (the Lithuanian yeshivah world). Just days before the RCA’s Halakha Commission, of which the Rav was the chair, was to meet to address a petition from the RCA’s leadership to require withdrawal from the SCA, the ultra-Orthodox Rabbinical Alliance issued a public ban on all Orthodox participation in the SCA as well as other joint rabbinical boards. Neither the Rav nor the Halakhic Commission ever formally ruled on the question, despite repeated efforts by the RCA leadership to force the issue.[11] Indeed, the issue continued to simmer, but despite a widening of the gap between the “two camps,” the RCA and UOJCA remained members of the SCA until the Rav’s death in 1993.[12]

The Rav’s conception of Jewish identity as a dynamic tension between a traditional edah that separated itself from non-traditional “deniers” and a united am (including these same deniers) defending itself from outside forces seems to have enjoyed ever diminishing popular support from within his own community. It is likely that respect for the Rav was an important factor keeping the SCA together for forty years following the Tog Morgen Journal article, but both the SCA and the enterprise of joint defense of the am were gradually being sapped of their force by social forces at work both within the Jewish community and outside it. The dissolution of the SCA in 1994 simply put a punctuation mark on a completed era. With the Rav gone, it was as if the last remaining force (within the Orthodox world) trying to maintain the tension between unity and separation, to restrain the deep separatist forces at work within Orthodoxy, within the larger Jewish world, and in the wider society, was released. It was in fact a watershed. [16] What the Rav’s death marked was not so much the end of the Rav’s influence, but the end of the milieu in which Conservative as well as Orthodox rabbis (and to some extent even Reform rabbis) came from (and in some cases adhered to) traditional roots and perspectives that made debates among them still possible.

What certainly seems to be the case is that even the Rav could not restrain the deep (and bi-polar) forces of Jewish social consciousness driving religious and non-religious Jewry apart. In the decades following the Tog Morgen Journal article, the Rav’s (and Modern Orthodoxy’s) attempt to maintain a creative tension between tradition and the secular world became increasingly difficult.[13] The Holocaust produced two competing (and conflicting) visions of the American Jewish future – one aimed at recreating the lost European world of traditional Jewry, and one aimed at creating a “post-Holocaust” Jew, fully integrating into American culture and abandoning all outward signs of cultural distinctiveness.

With the perspective of six decades, the Jewish world of the 1950s, despite its fissures, was a much smaller, tighter, and more ethnically united world than we have today. Though acculturation away from Jewish literacy and learning, which had profound impacts on participation in the edah, was then already well under way, the social consequences of illiteracy and acculturation were still to be seen. For example, the societal revolutions of personal identity – intermarriage, equal rights for women and gays, and the personalization of religious self-identification – all of which were to have profound impacts on the am – had yet to become the norms of the society. After all, the world of the 1950s was a world where the division between Jew and non-Jew was still palpable throughout American society, which conversely tended to bring Jews of divergent ideologies closer to one another. It also was a world in which great Jewish minds on both sides of the Orthodox/non-Orthodox divide still talked to each other about the issue of unity and could think that the social fabric was still susceptible to mending. The Rav’s warnings to the Conservative movement in Tog Morgen Journal[14] evinced an awareness that the edah was coming under assault from internal forces; but his concept that the am is “forced upon us” by historical forces beyond our control, and that we must “fight the enemy” in “defense of Jewish rights” suggests that the European experience, and particularly the Holocaust, deeply affected the Rav’s conception of the am.[15] The Rav did not then foresee the extent of acceptance of the Jews in America; how small a role outside forces would soon play in enforcing the unity of Jewish aloneness; and how, over the next half-century, internal forces would play a larger role in fragmenting Jewish cohesion, undermining the potency of the covenant of the am.

The problems facing the edah and the am today are not only radically different from what they were 60 years ago, they look remarkably similar to each other. If existential threats to the edah and the am exist today, they come not from without, but from within. Orthodox Jews today are not flocking out of traditional shuls to join Conservative, Reform or other non-Orthodox institutions. If anything, it is the reverse. It is traditional Judaism that is attracting Jews into the edah.

Similarly, few would argue that an American Jew is physically threatened by the outside world, requiring all Jews to unite in order to protect themselves from that threat. Indeed, acceptance and integration of Jews in America have been principal reasons for the weakened potency of the am as an element American Jewish identity. For the majority of American Jews, calls to unite around an aloneness of the am, enforced from without, fail to address the world they live in. Moreover, across the board, from the most traditional to the least, positive assertions of Jewish identity have replaced defensive postures. As a general matter, Jewish identity increasingly is expressed through affirmative Jewish behaviors and “spiritual/ethical consciousness,” and less through defense of forced aloneness. Even the most distinctive groups feel safe to openly assert their Jewish practices, programs and political positions. But, the flip side of the decline of external enemies is the readiness, across the board, to assert a particularistic and separatist vision of who are “my People.” Thus, at the same time that the am is shrinking in absolute terms, other Jews increasingly are seen as the “other,” whether one is traditional or non-traditional. To paraphrase Pogo’s words, “We have found the enemy, and the enemy is us!”[16]

The question may therefore legitimately be raised whether, in these times, the Rav’s paradigm of edah and am, and his proof-texts, call for a more dynamic approach to the two spheres, one in which the fuel for energizing the outer sphere, the am, is not the threat of external enemies, but rather the same power of the testimony that drives the inner sphere – the edah. The Rav sanctioned cooperation among the rabbinical and congregational organizations only to the extent that such cooperation did not require or involve discussion of religious or Halakhic issues. The Tog Morgen Journal essay was equally clear that what the Rav considered heretical ideas emanating from the non-Orthodox movements were the principal reason for not engaging in cooperation with these movements on such issues.

Does that mean that the traditional community is powerless to engage the non-traditional community in order to prevent the dissolution of what now constitutes the majority of the am? Do the Rav’s textual sources require the sort of dichotomy between edah and am advanced by the Rav in his Tog Morgen Journal essay? For example, is there any basis in his proof-texts for declaring that “ethical/spiritual consciousness” of the “collective memory” – that is, the tradition – is an essential characteristic of the edah, but not an essential characteristic of those who “shall live alone” and are taken “as an am”? Another look at these verses suggests as much overlap as division.

Just as the Sabbath afternoon prayer describes “Your people” as a “unique nation,” all of the cited Biblical verses, both the covenant in Egypt (“And I shall take you unto me as a nation, and I shall be unto you a G-d”) and the covenant at Sinai (“You shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”) make the “nation” the partner of G-d in His enterprise. It is the nation that at Sinai is called upon to “witness” the covenant by undertaking the Torah as an expression of “transcendental/ethical consciousness,” thereby becoming a “kingdom of priests.” So too with “aloneness.” In the verse, “Lo, it is a people that shall live alone, and among the nations shall not reckon itself,” separation is from other nations, not from within; and the Jewish nation is to be “reckoned” according to another standard, that is, before G-d. Like the other verses, this one also pairs unity and aloneness with bearing witness to G-d’s will.[17]

Of course, we cannot know how the Rav himself would have applied his liturgical and biblical sources in light of the current situation. However, if our conclusion is that, in this generation, defense against an external enemy is no longer a compelling basis for preserving the am, what sort of glue remains to prevent its dissolution?[18] Similarly, if non-traditional movements are no longer attractive alternatives to Orthodox Jews, to what extent is separation for the sake of the edah necessary to protect traditional communities? What does erection of barriers do other than impede the spread of the “collective testimony” of the tradition? Indeed, wouldn’t the test of interaction strengthen, not weaken, the edah? If the traditional community retreats behind a wall of separation what is left of the “unique nation?” To continue in the same direction under these circumstances would appear to destroy the very covenantal relationship that the Rav sought to preserve.

Even more fundamentally, treating other Jews, no matter how different in their approach to the tradition, as “the Other” creates a duality in Judaism that undermines the unity of G-d, which is the foundation of the ethical/spiritual consciousness which Judaism seeks to instill in its people through Halakha and universally by example. What appears to be required is for both the Orthodox and non-Orthodox communities to recognize that believing or acting as if other Jews are “the Other” is a form of idolatry – a fundamental denial of the unity of G-d. Jews who not only profess a belief in G-d but seek to devote their lives to fulfilling G-d’s will will find this conclusion very difficult to accept, and may reject it out of hand. But this conclusion derives directly from the Rav’s concept of the inclusion of all Jews within the am. Non-Orthodox Jews, including affiliated non-Orthodox Jews, may find it no less difficult to recognize the obligation to reach across the wall in the other direction, to accept the authority of the tradition, and to discuss with an open mind traditional positions on a host of issues. Unfortunately, treating Jews on the other side of this wall as “the Other” has permeated American Jewish culture to a degree that is not readily acknowledged, and which undermines the feasibility of exchanging ideas about the tradition and physical encounter that is needed. Nevertheless, breaking down the wall between the self and the other is itself a fundamental teaching of the Torah. [19]

In approaching the difficulties raised for traditional Jews by incorporating non-traditional thinking and practices into the traditional community itself, the Rav dealt with this inherent tension through externalization. Non-traditional thinking and practices, and particularly non-traditional rabbis and religious institutions, are essentially kept out of the Torah sphere by defining a second, larger, sphere around it that incorporates traditional Jews without letting non-traditional Jews affect the Torah sphere. The Rav conceptualized this arrangement as maintaining the unity of the covenant of the am, while maintaining the integrity of traditional learning and practice. The experience of the past 60 years shows, however, the corrosive effects of this solution. There no longer is a common enemy that unites all Jews. What is left is an Orthodoxy that claims exclusive possession of the tradition and of the people, and a non-Orthodox world that has little cohesion forced upon it from outside and fewer tools to explore, waning attachment to, and less and less knowledge or understanding of, the testimony of the tradition to nourish it from the inside. The result has been disintegration of the larger sphere, and a failure of the inner sphere to recognize and address the breaking of the covenant of the am. More practically, it deprives those in the larger non-traditional sphere from exposure to the values of living and learning in a Torah-centered world; and it deprives those in the Torah world of the opportunity to spread those same values to the majority of the people to whom the Sabbath afternoon prayer refers – that is, to make “a unique people on earth” a reality.

As a result, it is difficult to imagine the Rav, were he still with us, proposing the same solutions he did nearly 60 years ago. Would the Rav propose reconstitution of the Synagogue Council of America, which sought outreach to the gentile world, and never had the whole-hearted endorsement of the Orthodox world in any event? Or would he emphasize the inter-relationship and inter-dependence of the two expressions of Jewish unity – the ethical transcendental consciousness of the Sinai covenant of witnesses to the testimony and the political/historical covenant of a shared fate – in order to find a new synthesis of these fundamental building blocks of Jewish identity to address the existential issues facing Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews alike?[20]

The Rav’s articulation, in his essay, Kol Dodi Dofek, of a covenant of “shared destiny” engrafted upon the covenant of the “nation-encampment” suggests that the Rav saw a dynamic relationship between the two covenants, with the Covenant of Sinai having the potential to transform from within all of the Jewish People. How he would apply these insights to Orthodox-non-Orthodox dialogue today is uncertain. Nevertheless, the paradigm presented in the Rav’s Tog Morgen Journal essay provides students of the Rav and followers of his teaching (in both the narrow and broader sense) a jumping off point. In short, we should draw from the two-part (edah and am) covenantal partnership between the Jewish People and G-d a call to rebuild Jewish unity from within, not based on the need to fight an external enemy, but on the need to return the entire Jewish nation to a ethical/transcendental consciousness of its unique covenantal relationship with G-d.

This cannot be done without dialogue between Orthodox and non-Orthodox leaders and laymen on how to spread the testimony of the tradition. A central idea behind the concept of the am is that even the most tangentially connected Jew is part of the covenant, and a necessary part of the “unique nation on earth.” This generation is experiencing an unparalleled level and breadth of Torah scholarship and living, but with some notable exceptions, has largely turned away from the imperative of Jewish unity.
We – and by “we” I mean thinkers and leaders from Orthodox and non-Orthodox educational and communal institutions – can start down this path by examining why it is that Jews are fighting each other, why we have come to think of other Jews as the “Other,” or even the “enemy.” This involves studying the texts the Rav relied upon in his Tog Morgen Journal article, but much more – the rest of rabbinic literature, the ebb and flow of Jewish unity and separation throughout Jewish history, as well as the sparks of the tradition that lie embedded in the various forms of contemporary non-traditional and secular Jewish culture. The unifying purpose of this effort should be to study what it means in our situation and our time to be a people “living alone” in a relationship with G-d. And a basic component of such study should be “partnering” with others, at whatever level of partnership appears to be achievable. The Rav’s belief in outreach to the non-Orthodox community is evident in a recent compilation of the Rav’s 1970s lectures. In one of these, the Rav drew from Moses’ encounter with the burning bush that the spiritual flame of the Jew is inextinguishable, and therefore the road back to G-d is never closed.

“This message was crucial not only for Moses thousands of years ago, but is so for us as well. No Jew should be given up on as hopeless! A Jew may look quite like a thornbush . . . We might think that it does not pay to concern ourselves with him. But in truth we must try to expand our concern to embrace everyone.”

If involvement of all Jews in defense of the am from external threats served, in the Rav’s time, to protect and defend the edah, the Torah-living community, wouldn’t strengthening the knowledge and attachment of the entire am to the Torah tradition, in whatever measures are possible, serve as even a better defense today? This “re-purposing” of the defense of the am presents a different, and perhaps more difficult, type of challenge, because it involves a kind of partnering that addresses not merely the fact of our aloneness, but the purpose of our aloneness. It carries more risk, but isn’t facing this risk itself part of the tradition?

1/18/13 GEJ

[1] (New York: Ktav, 2005 )(“Helfgot Collection”) at 143. The Tog Morgen Journal article was first published in English in Amos Bunim, “Fire in His Soul,” (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1989).
[2]Ex. 19:6.
[3]Helfgot Collection at 144. The Rav’s paradigm would thus appear to leave out of the edah many Jews who consider themselves “religious,” but either do not believe in “Torah me-Sinai” or do not fully observe the mitzvot.
[4] Ex. 6:7.
[5] Helfgot Collection at 145 (emphasis added).
[6] Num. 23:9.
[7] Helfgot Collection at 144-5.
[8] The beit din was to be composed solely of Orthodox rabbis jointly selected by rabbis from the Modern Orthodox and Conservative movements. A proposal for such an entity was rejected in January 1956 by the Rabbinical Council of America’s Halakhic Commission, by an 11-6 vote. See, Elijah J. Schochet and Solomon Spiro, Saul Lieberman, The Man and His Work, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2005, pages 45-46.
[9] Rabbi Walter Wurtzburger, in an essay on the Rav’s life and writings, writes unequivocally that the Rav strongly supported continuation of RCA and UOJCA participation in the SCA, recounting that he and the Rav, along with Rabbi Klavan had strategized how to keep the SCA status quo from falling apart. See, “Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik as Posek of Post-Modern Orthodoxy,” in Angel, Marc D., Exploring the Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, at 14 (1997).
[10] See, “From Cooperation to Confrontation: The Rise and Fall of the Synagogue Council of America,” Jonathan J. Golden, at 138-9, 2008. Indeed, cooperation within the SCA framework appeared to be at its highest where the “threat level” to Jews as a whole was greatest and where differences in religious ideology and practice were least relevant.
[11] Three letters from the Rav relating to requests by the RCA’s leadership to obtain a formal ruling, published in the Helfgot Collection (151-155), appear to be the Rav’s sole published writings on the matter. The Rav, together with Dr. Samuel Belkin, then president of Yeshiva University, wrote successive RCA presidents that the highly-charged political atmosphere prevailing at the time made objective consideration of the issue impossible, and deferred any ruling until an atmosphere of political calm might prevail.
[12] The Orthodox groups did leave the SCA briefly in 1974 and then finally in 1994, a year after the Rav’s death.
[13] See Heilman, Samuel, Sliding to the Right, University of California (2006), at 1-14.
[14] See Helfgot Collection at 146-149.
[15] The depth of the Rav’s anguish over American Jewry’s failure to come to the defense of European Jewry during the 1930s and 1940s was more directly expressed in Kol Dodi Dofek, discussed more fully below.
[16] Walt Kelley, Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us, Vintage, 1972, 1987.
Internal separation and division has been an enduring theme throughout Jewish history, but often it has been akin to a cancer in the body of the Jewish People, associated with its downfall.
[17] There are, in fact, countless responses to this question to be found in the “organized Jewish community.” One recent example, written by two Federation professionals, is : Erica Brown and Misha Galperin, “The Case for Jewish Peoplehood. Can We Be One?” Jewish Lights, 2009, which discusses the relationship between Jewish identity and Jewish Peoplehood from a variety of perspectives.
[18] Rabbi Akiva said: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is the fundamental rule of the Torah (Rashi on Lev. 19:18). A central Mussar teaching is that bearing the burden of the other is the primary pathway to this love. See, Stone, Ira F., A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of Mussar,” (New York: Aviv, 2006) 160 et seq., annotations to Hochmah U’Mussar of Rabbi Simha Zissel Braude of Kelm. This understanding of the Torah, together with the principle of kavod habreyut (respecting the dignity of others), provide a traditional rationale for the “outreach” that is here suggested.
[19] The potential for such a synthesis is implied in the Rav’s essay “Kol Dodi Dofek,” first published in 1961, but originating in an address in commemoration of the eighth anniversary of Israel independence, in 1956, and therefore dated only a short time after his Tog Morgen Journal article. There, the Rav articulated a synthesis of the two covenants. He characterized the Covenant of Egypt as the covenant of a “nation-camp realized through shared fate and forced isolation,” in contrast to the Covenant of Sinai, which he saw as “the covenant of a sacred community and people that finds expression in a shared destiny of a sacred life.” “Our historic obligation today,” he wrote, “is to raise ourselves from a people to a holy nation, from the Covenant of Egypt to the Covenant of Sinai, from a compelled existence to an original way of life, permeated with morality and religious principles that transcends history.” See, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Kol Dodi Dofek, Listen – My Beloved Knocks (New York: Yeshiva University, 2006), at 84, 89.
[20] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Vision and Leadership: Reflections on Joseph and Moses, editors, David Schatz, Joel B. Wolowelsky, Rabbi Reuven Ziegler (New York: OU Press, 2012), at 84-85.

“Rabbi, what will you do about the rain?”

Exhausted and in shock from my first exposure to the realities of the swarming, squalid city of Mumbai, then called Bombay, I stared back, perplexed and concerned.

“Don’t you know, Rabbi, there is a drought here in Maharashtra.” Their thoughts, though unsaid, were loud and clear: “We have survived as Jews for 2,000 years without rabbis; if you can not bring rain we do not need you.”

My first internal response to the question of rain was to be incredulous. Did they really believe I could bring rain? My next thought was that there is an entire tractate of Talmud that deals in detail with what a community should do when there is not enough rain. For the Jews of India, and for that matter other peoples in the East, the spiritual and physical worlds are perceptibly and intimately intertwined. When there is not enough rain, their immediate, visceral response is to turn to the spiritual realm.

With this first question asked of me as the community rabbi of India, I realized that in many ways I would learn more about Judaism living with the Jews of India than I had from years of Jewish book study.

In the Western world in which I had grown, though quite a religious one, there was a bifurcation of the spiritual and physical realms. No matter how religious one is in the West, the worlds of spirit and matter are perceived as discrete, even if intellectually or religiously they are believed interdependent. In contrast, in the East, the interweaving of spiritual and physical is viewed as seamless and obvious.

Though I had studied Ta’anit, the talmudic tractate regarding drought, I could not imagine putting it so simply and pragmatically into practice; yet for the Jews of India who had not studied its words, the notion was plainly clear. This must be, I thought, part of the true Jewish meaning of Tractate Ta’anit, an angle less central to intellectual talmudists of my realm. So we prayed, and—lucky for me—it rained, and I was thus able to keep my job.

In 1995 my wife and I were sent by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to India; I as community rabbi and resource to the 4,000-person, ten-synagogue strong Jewish community of India, and my wife as volunteer educator.

The vast majority of Indian Jews live in the city of Mumbai, though several hundred live in smaller Indian cities such as Pune, Ahmadabad, and Cochin, each of which boasts two synagogues, several of them cavernous and beautiful, dating from the period of the British Raj. Some of the native Bene Israel villages along the Konkon coast of India still contain synagogues also. Each Indian synagogue employs a hazzan, a cantor, who often doubles as shohet, ritual slaughterer, and mohel, circumciser.

There are four small but distinct groups of Jews in India today, each with a unique history. The largest is the Bene Israel. According to the Bene Israel’s ancient tradition they descend from seven families who were shipwrecked over 2,000 years ago on the Konkon coast, south of what is now Mumbai, in a village know as Nawgaon; home of their ancient burial ground which is still regularly visited.

This group’s Maharati (the language native to the region of the Bene Israel) name was the Shanwar Tali, the “Saturday Oil Pressers.” They pressed oil from seeds for a living, lived in villages of their own, did not intermarry with local Hindus, circumcised their children, and did something the surrounding Hindu peoples did not, observed a day off each week, a Sabbath each Saturday. Tradition holds they also said the Shemah, and retained such biblically related customs as putting blood on their doorpost in the spring and not leaving their homes for 40 days after the birth of a boy and 80 days after the birth of a girl.

The Bene Israel were “discovered” about 500 years ago by a Jewish merchant named David Rahabi who realized the Shanwar Teli were Jews and began to teach them. Subsequently, the Bene Israel came in contact with the Jewish community of Cochin, a group connected with the rest of the Jewish world via Jewish Yemeni merchants who traveled the trade winds from Aden to Kerala in the south of India. Many of these traders’ letters home and ship manifests, written in Hebrew, were uncovered in the Cairo Geniza.

The Bene Israel do not have a tradition of rabbis and so often perceived me with awe, the likes of which I know I shall never experience again. For example, one Jew said to me, “I just want to look at you, I have never seen a rabbi before.” Though the Jews of India are a tiny group in the shadow one hundred million Muslims and almost a billion Hindus, I was often asked to represent the Jewish people to Indian groups, among them the Archbishop of Bombay, the Zoroastrian community, and in newspapers and on radio.

The Jews of India are not like Western Jews, who need convincing that religion is relevant and meaningful. In India almost everyone is religious in some way, and the Jews of India just want to know how to observe, not why. I taught Torah regularly while dancing carefully between honoring their ancient oral tradition and customs and trying to educate them further in halakha, Jewish history, and thought, most of which had been written down long after the Bene Israel had exited the known Jewish world.

Another aspect of Judaism that I came to understand more fully through living with the Jews of India is the nature of our oral tradition. Though not all are fully Sabbath observant, the Jews of India are very pious and scrupulous. Since theirs is an oral tradition and not a written one, they do not have a black and white structure in which to precisely place the various mitzvoth, as we have. The Jews of India might easily consider kissing the mezuzah on par with, or more important than, not riding in a bus on the Shabbat.

I witnessed the development of custom and law before my eyes in this almost purely oral tradition and came to realize that though an oral tradition has its weaknesses such as a less black and white sense of clarity, paradoxically one of its strengths is its consistency and commitment. The Jews of India do not look up their traditions or ritual laws in books to know its whys and hows, they just know what to do and know how and when to do it, which is their bottom line.

For example, when I discussed the Western Jewish practice of selling hametz for Passover they could not fathom it: “You sell your hametz—and then keep it in your house?” While a purely oral tradition does not lend itself to such legalistic innovation as selling one’s hametz, it is fertile ground for seeing in real time the organic development of custom, and it shed light for me on why custom might be the same as law in Judaism. Indeed, in such a mimetic system, gradations of importance that are often predicated on the reasons for customs (rabbinic verses biblical, law versus minhag) are not preserved, only the how and when of the practice it retained.

While for western Jews, books are the storehouse of Jewish knowledge, law, and authority, for the Jews of India such is not the case. Knowledge of how to follow the Torah and how to live as a Jew is embedded in their Jewish culture. We can see from their oral Jewish culture that our oral tradition prior to the Mishna was probably not so much a reciting and teaching of structured legal knowledge but the practicing of Jewish tradition organically passed from one generation into another. In such an atmosphere there is no distinction between the past and present. What is done is assumed to have always been done and is perceived to continue in its current state.

One example I saw of organically developed custom becoming law was in regard to Passover. There are no hashgachot, no kosher stores, no supermarkets and not much processed food in India at all. One buys raw ingredients and cooks from scratch, as had been the case in our more developed countries until the previous generation.

As the month before Passover came the Jews of India gathered to bake matza in a clay oven under the watchful eye of the local hazzan. The cleaning and shopping also began, and I had the opportunity to spend a day shopping with them during the week before Passover. As I was assisting in the open market they instructed me, “Do not buy brown masala (spice mixture) only green masalsa.” When I enquired why, their answer was a curt, “Because it is Pessah.”

“Yes,” I replied “but why only green masala for Passover?”

“Why? Because it is Pessah, Rabbi,” they answered. When I suggested that maybe green masala reflects the spring theme of Passover as carpas, the green vegetable on the seder plate does, they answered me with a blank, inquisitive stare.

Upon investigating further I learned that brown masala is made from dried spices and green masala from fresh ones. I finally understood what I think is certainly the historical roots of this Bene Israel Passover “law.” Green masala, composed of fresh herbs would have no suspicion of being hametz, but brown masala whose ingredients were dried spices could have the occasional grain speck mixed in from the market in which it was purchased. When I explained my theory, I again received only incredulous looks. Indeed, the power of the oral tradition.

Later that day I entered the Jewish community office. Excited that it was ‘erev Pessah the secretary ran toward me: “Rabbi, do you want my eldest brother to dip his hand in goat’s blood for you?” she asked excitedly. “Goat’s blood?” I repeated, confused. “Yes, yes,” she exclaimed, “Passover is coming tomorrow. You know, for your door!” I looked up and sure enough, there above the front door of the office was a sheet of lined lose leaf paper with a big red bloody handprint.

Processing quickly, consciously trying to balance between respect for tradition and all I knew of Judaism and halakha, I answered, “yes, of course I would like him to,” fervently hoping she would forget to relay the message.

Before I left for India, my first rabbinical position after graduation from Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchonon Theological seminary, Rabbi Norman Lamm, then president of Yeshiva University called me into his office. He related that 30 years prior he had gone to India and met with the Bene Israel. They had had one important question for him which was asked several times and he wanted to be sure I was prepared for it. He said that the answer I would give was very important and had enormous bearing for them on who they are as Jews. The question, which is hardly ever asked of me in the United States, was asked of me often in India: “Rabbi, do we Jews believe in reincarnation?”

The answer I must give them, Rabbi Lamm told me, was not a complex one drawing on Kabbala or the Talmud, but rather, a clear, “no, we Jews do not believe in reincarnation.” Reincarnation is perhaps the central tenant of Hinduism, the Bene Israel’s host culture. The Bene Israel work hard to be separate from their polytheistic Hindu neighbors while still living integrated among them. Knowing full well that much of Kabbala, philosophy, and even Midrash does accept the notion of reincarnation, I tried to muster a definitive “No!”

In addition to such customs, there is a religious ceremony which is unique to the Jews of India, the Melida. In celebration of Jewish semahot, five kinds of fruits and a large mound of sweet rice is placed on a decorative plate, the Melida. Blessings are made on the fruits which are then consumed by the participants and finally prayers are said which center on Eliyahu haNavi, Elijah the prophet, who is perhaps the most important Jewish figure for the Bene Israel.

Aside from semahot and special events, there is one other time that the Melida is held—upon pilgrimages to the spot at which the Bene Israel believe Elijah the Prophet’s chariot took off for heaven. This spot, in the tiny Jewish native Konkan village of Alibag, is marked by a deep cleft in a large rock in a clearing in the village.

My wife and I merited to take this pilgrimage with the Stree Mandl, the women’s sewing group, which has in recent years morphed into a Rosh Hodesh gathering in which they sing traditional Bene Israel songs about Jewish history and Torah in their native language. After several hours by slow bus over bumpy roads we arrived in the native Bene Israel village of Alibag. There indeed was a large rock approximately 40 feet long with a deep gouge in it, reminiscent of wheel skids, which I was told was the place of the chariot’s wheels lifting off.

Coconut milk was poured on the chariot track marks and candles lit in deference to Eliyahu haNavi. We gathered nearby for the Melida. “You are the rabbi, you should conduct the Melida of course,” they instructed me matter-of-factly. Though I must have missed Melida day in my rabbinical studies at Yeshiva University, I apparently did a plausible job, and the women were happy to have the rabbi facilitate the holy ceremony.

Following the ceremony the women solemnly warned me, “Rabbi, be sure when you return to America to tell the Jews there to come to Alibag, to see the Eliuyahu haNavi and make the Melida.” And so I have taken it upon myself at the end of every lecture about the Jews of India to admonish the Jews of America to make the holy pilgrimage to Alibag. Indeed after living in India for a year, I came to understand that one never knows, the world is a much more mysterious and mystical place than we Westerners would have it. So dear reader, I say it again now: come to Alibag, light a candle, and make the Melida. It is a mystical place.

In what was probably the greatest Yom Kippur sermon ever preached, the prophet Isaiah enjoins us to “make a path,” to “clear the way,” to “remove all obstacles” from the path of the Lord’s people. We read Isaiah’s searing words today because we believe they speak not just to the inhabitants of ancient Israel but to us as well. The prophet’s urgent call to the Jews of his day, and to us, to observe Yom Kippur by clearing away all obstacles to our “fasting” in the way the Lord has chosen – to take decisive action ourselves – is consistent with the emphasis that Judaism has traditionally placed on human agency, an emphasis we will see affirmed later this afternoon when we once again recall the trials of Jonah.

Isaiah’s injunction that we remove all obstacles raises two immediate questions. First, what are the obstacles to be removed? And second, who should take responsibility for removing them? Yes, we should, of course; but we need to explore just who, and what, are “we” for this purpose. Both questions – the what and the who – turn out to be central to the issues we are confronting now, in our own place and time.

At one level, the prophet is quite specific about the obstacles he has in mind. His sermon is, in the first instance, an attack on the Israelite aristocracy of that day, for its narrow conception of its moral and religious responsibilities. To the contrary, Isaiah’s sweep is broad. Our charge is “to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke.” We are to share our bread with the hungry, take the homeless into our homes, clothe the naked, and not turn away from people in need. The word our prayer book translates as “obstacle” – mikhshol – is the same word that we normally translate as “stumbling block” when parashat Kedoshim commands us, “You shall not … place a stumbling block before the blind.” But there as well, the commentaries interpret both what is a stumbling block, and who are the blind, expansively. Blindness, for this purpose, is not just a physical condition of the optic system but any inherent impediment to one’s living a productive and moral life. In parallel, an obstacle is any spiritual or moral hazard.

The overarching theme is again consistent with the entirety of our tradition. The Hebrew Bible, whether in discussing Sabbath observance, or sexual relations, or the treatment of slaves, or remission of debts, or any of a hundred other specific subjects, prioritizes the dignity of the human condition – and the need to maintain it. Our laws make clear that we are to lead our lives consistently with this precept, and we are to enable others to do so as well. Jewish law and practice are replete with injunctions to insure that every household has the material makings of a dignified Jewish life. The Mishna, in tractate Pesahim, commands that “On the eve of Passover … even the poorest in Israel must not eat unless he sits down to table,” and he must receive “not … less than four cups of wine to drink” – even if they must be bought by the public fund.

This role of specific elements of physical consumption, in a specific context, as an essential ingredient of human dignity has been familiar ever since. Adam Smith, ever the insightful moral philosopher, observed that in “the greater part of Europe” of his day even the poorest day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt.

The reason, he explained, was not foolish vanity but moral dignity. “The want of” a linen shirt, he wrote, “would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can fall into without extreme bad conduct.” But what provides for moral dignity is clearly a matter of context. There is no reason to presume that “no less than four cups of wine” would be essential to the dignity of a non-Jew, or, for that matter, to a Jew on any evening other than the Passover seder. Smith likewise observed that wearing leather shoes was essential to a person’s dignity in England, while in Scotland leather shoes were essential in this way only for men; and in France, for neither men nor women.

If the obstacles that we are to clear away are those that prevent our fellow men and women from living a life consistent with human dignity, we therefore must address our attention to two groups: those who in principle could be productive and support themselves, but currently cannot – largely, the young and the unemployed; and those who even in principle will not be able to be productive on their own – for the most part, the old and the disabled. Our charge is to enable the former to become productive so that they will be able to achieve dignified lives on their own; and to provide, ourselves, for the dignified lives of the latter.

Our tradition is clear on both. It is the obligation of every Jewish father to teach his son a trade, and today we would of course extend the obligation to our daughters and include the role of mothers in likewise educating their children. It is the obligation of every Jewish community to establish a school to instruct their young, not only in religious education but literacy. Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah, in the Laws Concerning Gifts to the Needy, tells us that “The highest degree, exceeded by none, is that of a person who assists a poor Jew by providing him with a gift or loan or by accepting him into a business partnership, or by helping him find employment.”

Our obligation is clear, although in today’s context the practical rendering of it is less so. The subject is a particular challenge in America today. Our public education system is increasingly failing us. But we may – and as an economist I say this especially reluctantly – we may be coming to the end of the era in which we can look to education, as we know it, as the all-purpose corrective to the lack of individual economic opportunity. If so, whether the answer is radical reform of what we now know as education, or some yet more ambitious undertaking, remains to be seen.

Our tradition is also straightforward about our responsibilities to those who are unable to be productive. In parashat Re’eh, the Torah assures us that “there shall be no needy among you” (if, that is, “you only heed the Lord your God and take care to keep all his instruction”). But just three verses later, the parasha goes on, “If, however, there is a needy person among you, … you must open your hand and lend him sufficient for what he needs.” And the tradition takes a broad interpretation of what he needs for this purpose. Maimonides, again in the Laws Concerning Gifts to the Needy, explains the phrase “sufficient for what he needs”: “You are commanded to give to the needy person according to that which he lacks. If he has no raiment, one clothes him. If he has no wife, one finds him a wife, and if the needy person be a woman, one finds her a husband. Even if the particular person, before falling from his wealth, had formerly been accustomed to ride out upon a horse with a servant running before him, and then became impoverished and lost his wealth, one acquires for him a horse to ride upon and a servant to run before him – as it is written, ‘sufficient for his need’.”

In our approach toward the needy, especially including those who have fallen on hard times, Judaism presents a sharp contrast with some forms of Christianity, including some that have historically played a particular role in shaping American attitudes on such matters. Calvin concluded that “Adversity is a sign of God’s absence, prosperity of his presence.” Russell Conwell, one of America’s leading Protestant clergymen in the latter half of the 19th century and on into the 20th, repeatedly preached that “There is not a poor person in the United States who has not been made poor by his own shortcomings or by the shortcomings of someone else. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, thus to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, no doubt about it.” Echoes of these views, especially in discussions of our public policy toward the disadvantaged in America, are entirely familiar today. Our tradition points us in a very different direction. The Talmud, in tractate Yebamoth, addresses King David’s puzzlement that the Lord has simultaneously told him that King Saul was guilty of a grievous crime and chastised him for not having cared for Saul in death as he ought to have done, with the proper rites of mourning. “Where the Lord’s judgment is,” says the Talmud, “there you must act.”

If we accept that our charge is to enable those who are not now productive but could be, as well as to provide for those who cannot be, who, then, is to take up these responsibilities? Each of us, to be sure, must shoulder our individual private obligations. But here as well, our tradition is far more expansive. For example, Isaiah tells us we are not to “pursue business as usual.” The prophet’s point is not simply a matter of how we should spend our time on the day of Yom Kippur. Rather, we are to reconsider what our “business as usual” comprises. In the alternative Torah reading for this afternoon, again from Kedoshim, we are commanded not to reap our fields “all the way to the edges, or gather the gleanings” of the harvest, nor to pick our vineyard bare or gather its fallen fruit. “You shall leave them for the poor and the stranger,” the Torah says. In other words, it is not adequate for us to conduct our business as sharply as possible – maximizing profit, as my profession puts it – and then give to the needy out of what we earn from it. The Torah is clear that our making provision for the needy in the course of carrying out our economic affairs themselves is also part of our responsibility.

Importantly, both Isaiah and our other texts are also clear that we bear these responsibilities not just individually but collectively. The point is especially apt today. When we confess our sins – ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu – we do so in the first person plural. We then say to the Lord, together, “We have ignored your commandments and statutes.” Shortly after, in the Al Het, we repeatedly use first person plural verbs to describe the many ways we, as a community, have transgressed. And we say to Aveinue Malkeinu, “we have sinned against you.” Isaiah drives home the point as well. When he commands us to make a path and clear the way, to remove all the obstacles, the verbs are plural imperatives.

How, then should we think, today, about the injunction to leave the corners of our fields, and the fallen grapes, for the needy? In the middle east of nearly three thousand years ago, economic production was almost entirely agricultural, and so in referring to fields and vineyards the prophet was talking about what was then the people’s main form of economic activity. Is there any reason to believe that simply by shifting our production from agriculture to manufacturing and services we have somehow escaped what we have been commanded to do? Similarly, today much of our economic production is carried out not in activities owned by single individuals but under the auspices of corporations deliberately set up to have many owners. Many people today, alas including many in my profession, argue that business corporations have no responsibility other than to maximize profits – or, what amounts to the same thing, maximize their shareholders’ value – while of course obeying the laws of the land. Their argument is that it is not up to the corporation as an entity to act generously, not toward its workers and not toward anyone else; its shareholders can do that, as individuals, if they so choose. Do we really believe that the Torah’s injunction to make our responsibilities to the disadvantaged not just a private matter, but directly a part of how we conduct our economic activity, is vitiated by the mere change in form of business organization?

And what about our collective responsibilities, via our community? And, for that matter, what is our community for this purpose?

Our tradition has always been clear about the communal nature of our obligation toward those who cannot provide a dignified life for themselves. Maimonides, once again in the Laws of Giving to the Needy, writes, “In every city where Jews live, they are obligated to appoint from among them collectors of tzedakah – gabbai tzedakah. They should circulate among the people from erev Shabbat to erev Shabbat, and take from each person what is appropriate for him to give, and the assessment made upon him. They then allocated the money from erev Shabbat to erev Shabbat, giving each poor person sufficient food for seven days.” The function of the gabbai tzedakah is the origin of the communal officials whom we today call the “gabbais” of our congregation. We look to our high holiday gabbaim to organize these services; and they do so superbly. Our regular gabbaim keep our minyan running smoothly throughout the year. But the gabbais’ original function, and the meaning of the word, is as collectors. Moreover, no one is exempt from contributing. The Talmud, in tractate Gittin, even tells us that being poor does not release a person from participation in this public, collective responsibility. Even someone who depends on tzedakah himself is obligated to give tzedakah to sustain others.

Today our broader community for these purposes is the nation. Those of us sitting here this morning have not opted out of the Jewish community, and therefore the reach of the gabbaim; but we could. This choice was not open in former times. For us, today’s equivalent of the community that Isaiah, or Maimonides, had in mind is the United States of America.

One would have to be living in a closet not to know that what provision those who are productive should make for those who currently are not, including those who never again will be, is one of the topmost questions under debate in our country today. The issue is a serious one, and it goes to the heart of who we are as a society. It is altogether right that we should have that debate. We do not advance our consideration of the matter, however, by conducting it in confusing euphemisms that misdirect our attention away from what the real questions are.

Today, at the federal level, our public debate over this issue focuses on what we call “entitlements.” Our government has many programs classified as entitlements, ranging from food stamps to subsidized housing to farm supports to retirement benefits for the government’s own civilian employees. But just two of these programs, Social Security and Medicare, account for two-thirds of the total spending. Adding in the portion of Medicaid that pays for nursing home stays by patients aged 65 or older brings the share of the entitlement budget now devoted to the support and care of America’s retired elderly population to 72 percent. And, for reasons both demographic and technological, over the next decade that share will rise to 77 percent. At what level to provide income and medical care for our retired elderly is a fundamental question for our society. We do not advance our ability to resolve it by pretending that the issue is something other than what it is.

This challenge is an economic one, to be sure, and so is the challenge of enabling the young, and others who are not now economically productive members of our society, to become so. But we should see these challenges in not just economic but moral terms. Both are fundamental to the moral character of who and what we are as a society. Both are squarely in the range of what this morning’s Haftarah, written long ago but addressing eternal issues of the human condition, charges us to see as our particular obligation. Isaiah commands these responsibilities upon us in the same way as we are commanded on this day to abstain from eating and to come together to confess our failures. And, in parallel to the communal way in which, on this day, we together make our confession, both the prophet and our rich tradition tell us that it is in part communally, through collective action undertaken by our community which has now become the state, that we are to meet these challenges.

Most discussions of the recent gathering at Citi Field have focused on the logistics of the event and the topic – the dangers of the Internet. With such a focus, however, we may very well be missing something of great importance. What struck my attention was the name of the organization staging the event: Ichud HaKehillos Letohar HaMachaneh, or the Union of the Communities for the Purity of the Camp.

It is my understanding that though this is far from the first use of the expression “the Purity of the Camp,” it has risen to prominence only in recent decades. I think it is a telling term, both for what it says and what it leaves unmentioned. And I would suggest that understanding its use might help us make some sense of contemporary dynamics in the Orthodox world.

What are the goals of purification, and how might the goals be different for an organization dedicated to making the camp upright as compared with one seeking to purify it?

Purification aims to remove impurities, to make something 100 percent unadulterated. It is about perfection. Anything threatening such perfection must be identified and eradicated. As with disease, a small infection left uncontained can sicken the entire body.

The emphasis, in some communities, on purity and purification might help explain why, for example, the Internet is seen as deserving of a stadium-scale event. With the easy availability of pornography and foreign ideas, the Internet is a danger to ensuring purity.

It also, I would suggest, explains a number of other phenomena: the increase in recent years of book bans to ensure ideological purity; the homogenization of Jewish day school education, with parents seeking to place their children in increasingly less diverse environments – ideological bubbles where they will not be exposed to those children, let alone those ideas, not certified as pure; and the narrowing of the diversity of Torah perspectives into one true and exclusive interpretation (by which many people of different perspectives all proclaim that Jewish unity is achieved only when everyone agrees with me).

We can now also explain the efforts over the last decade to make ever more stringent the requirements for conversion, and the attempts to annul retroactively, years later and en masse, previously unsuspicious conversions. This is only possible when there is a fear of admitting impure elements and not rooting out hidden impurities. And some people thus fear that the purity of the camp is under grave threat.

These issues and the generally widening distrust over kashrus and many other matters are all about purity and impurity – and when purity is the highest value, the slightest impurity is the greatest danger.

Yet there is something critical missing here: morality.

A focus on – an obsession with – purity does not require any particular concern with morality. And so now perhaps we can understand why the dangers of the Internet appear to be a greater concern among some people than the dangers of child abuse. Even why reporting abusers to secular authorities can be seen as worse than the abuse itself – the former, involving the impure secular world, threatens purity in a way that abuse, within the community of the pure, does not. It might also be why all sorts of financial crimes seem so common – they do not threaten purity and perhaps are, according to some odd logic, justified by strengthening the purity of the community.

Too often these days it appears that some of us have lost touch with very basic moral values, including respecting the dignity of all of God’s creations. If we ask ourselves whether or not our actions meet a standard of yashrus/uprightness instead of tohar/purity, perhaps we would be more reluctant to undertake some of these actions.

How did purity become raised to such exalted status anyway, and become applied to the Camp or Community rather than to individuals in their religious improvement?

The weekday Amidah, the central prayer of Jewish worship, includes among all its praise, requests and thankfulness nothing about purity. We pray for tzedek and wisdom and a number of other character traits and blessings, but not for purity.

We often talk about the importance Kiddush Hashem and the horror of Chillul Hashem. When we elevate purity above other values such as yashrus, then we also rank it above avoiding its opposite, and end up justifying chillulei Hashem in the name of purity – after all, it need not matter what the impure think of us, and it becomes irrelevant when impure Jews and non-Jews witness what to most observers appear to be lapses in morality and desecrations of God’s name.
Do we really want our children to grow up and be pure souls without being upright souls, to live in a purified camp rather than one recognized the world over for its uprightness? Perhaps it is time to form an organization called Ichud HaKehillos LeYashrus HaMachaneh, the Union of Communities for the Uprightness of the Camp.

Issachar and Zebulun are said to have founded an economic model that has become popular within a segment of Orthodox Jewish society. The model is commonly viewed as follows: Issachar “bore the yoke of Torah,” devoting himself exclusively to study, while Zebulun was a successful global merchant. Recognizing the benefits and deficiencies of their single-track careers, they contracted to share the rewards, if not the burdens, of their respective interests. Each brother received goods produced by the labor of the other. Lacking time for constant study, Zebulun financed his brother’s cerebrally pious lifestyle and, in return, was guaranteed a portion of Issachar’s metaphysical reward. Issachar avoided traditional work but, thanks to Zebulun, he could still put food on the table.

The paradigm just described turns out to be based on a superficial and incomplete reading of Issachar’s image in the Bible, in the traditional biblical commentaries, and in the literature of the Sages.

As with many midrashic themes, the Sages derived the concept of an Issachar-Zebulun partnership from cryptic but suggestive biblical language. The relevant biblical passages are below. The first is from Jacob’s poetic blessings of the tribes; the second, from the blessings of Moses. The final passage is from an account of King David’s coronation in the Book of Chronicles (translations from the New JPS version):

Issachar is a strong-boned ass,
Crouching among the sheepfolds.
When he saw how good was security,
And how pleasant was the country,
He bent his shoulder to the burden,
And became a toiling serf (Gen. 49:14-15).

And of Zebulun he said:
Rejoice, Zebulun, on your journeys;
And, Issachar, in your tents (Deut. 33:18).

Of the Issacharites, men who knew how to interpret the signs of the times, to determine how Israel should act; their chiefs were two-hundred, and all their kinsmen followed them (I Chron. 12:33).

To celebrate David’s ascension to the throne, Chronicles reports, nearly all the tribes of Israel sent large delegations of their best soldiers to Hebron. The Issacharite team was unique; instead of fighters, they sent a small cadre of two-hundred men who were expert in reading the ”signs of the times.” This expression is ambiguous, and the precise nature of the two-hundred Issacharites is something of a mystery. Jewish translations and commentaries provide multiple explanations, including suggestions that they were astrologers, astronomers, or gifted policy makers with broad expertise on national issues. The Midrash identified them as legislators who were experts on the Hebrew calendar, specifically, the rules of intercalation (i.e., when and how to add a thirteenth lunar month to the year). Having mastered this highly technical area of the law, the Issacharite council was charged with determining -- for an entire people -- the proper days to observe the biblical holidays. This must have been a daunting responsibility, as both religious observance and national unity depended on it.

The central biblical source-text on Issachar is our passage from Genesis. However, the metaphors in Jacob’s blessing, while detailed and colorful, are hardly transparent. Jacob compares the tribe to a crouching, toiling donkey, who willingly bears some sort of burden as “a toiling serf (mas ‘oved)”; but it is unclear from the text whom Issachar serves and of what his service consists. Rashi, following the Sages, defines Issachar’s burden as Torah study, and he adds Zebulun’s supporting role to his portrait. On the surface, Rashi appears to promote the current paradigm, in which Zebulun goes to work and earns a living while Issachar “sits and learns.” Read carefully, however, Rashi’s description is nuanced and strikingly different from that paradigm.

The popular model assumes that by virtue of his single-minded dedication to Torah study, Issachar had a right to Zebulun’s financial support. But Rashi himself underlines Issachar’s responsibilities, rather than his privileges, and says nothing at all about Issachar’s rights to external subsidies. As a serf who “bent his shoulder to the burden,” Issachar owed specific services, not only to his patron but, in Rashi’s words, to “all of his Israelite kinsmen.” For the privilege (not the right) of Zebulun’s investment, Issachar was obligated, according to Rashi, “to provide [the nation of Israel] with religious instruction and with [decisions on] the intercalation of the calendar,” i.e., setting the calendar and the holidays. Rashi’s model essentially depicts Issachar as a utility, providing a real, if spiritual, commodity to the nation. Issachar’s scholarship was only a means to satisfy the Jewish people’s religious and cultural needs; it was not as an end in itself.

In Rashi’s portrayal, as it happens, Issachar also brought a physical commodity to his partnership with Zebulun. On the words “he saw how good was security (va-yar menuha ki tov),” Rashi cites the view of the midrash and Onkelos that Issachar’s land produced superior fruit, allowing him to spend minimal time at work in the orchard. A related midrashic opinion, not cited by Rashi, takes the expression “when he saw . . . how pleasant was the country” at face value; “this refers to his land,” in the words of an alternate view (yesh omrim) in the midrash. But even Rashi’s conception of Issachar includes an element of real labor. Rather than a completely passive recipient of charitable gifts from Zebulun, Issachar grew his own fruit and utilized his merchant brother to bring them to market. On at least some days, we would find Rashi’s Issachar in the orchard, rather than the beit midrash.

Other exegetes on the pages of Mikraot Gedolot offer alternative views of Issachar that are worth considering in contrast to the currently popular model. Rashbam, following the midrashic thread mentioned previously, portrays Issachar as a farmer rather than a scholar. Seeing “how pleasant was the country,” Issachar preferred an agrarian lifestyle, became highly successful and wealthy, but was also heavily taxed by the Israelite kings in the form of tithes from his vast produce. Much more harshly, Ibn Ezra suggests the Issacharites “lacked courage” and were thus assessed a draft-dodging fine or, to avoid conquest, they paid protection money to the surrounding powers. Ibn Ezra’s portrait of a rather emasculated Issachar appears to be inspired by our passage in Chronicles; if they were able to fight, why would Issachar not send soldiers to King David’s inauguration, like the other tribes? (Interestingly, Onkelos portrays Issachar in the very opposite light. Following another midrash, he says that Issachar achieved extraordinary military success against his enemies, turning them into “toiling serfs.”) For the Rashbam and Ibn Ezra, Issachar was never dependent on the financial support of any other tribe. In fact, the reality was just the opposite; by establishing a mostly self-serving economy, Issachar -- not Zebulun -- was in debt to his brothers. His books were regularly audited and he was forced to give up a substantial percentage of profits to the national treasury.

Moses’ two-word blessing to Issachar is even more mysterious than Jacob’s. How should we interpret a blessing of “rejoicing in tents”? The peshat (natural) approach, taken by several traditional commentaries, is straightforward and parallel to the previously cited explanations of Jacob’s blessing. Represented by tents, the Issacharites were shepherds and farmers, in contrast to the merchant-marine Zebulunites. Again, midrashic exegesis takes a different approach. The Sages read “tents” as a symbol of Torah study; recall that Jacob is also called a “dweller in tents” (Gen. 25:27). Like Jacob’s, Issachar’s “tents” were taken to mean “tents of Torah study,” i.e. batei midrash, financially maintained by Zebulun’s profits. One may be tempted to say that the midrashic approach supersedes the natural one, and that in this case the popular Issachar-Zebulun model is in perfect agreement with the midrash. But peshat and derash are both legitimate and religiously significant layers of biblical interpretation. I believe that the Sages did not preclude the idea of Issachar being blessed with agricultural fruitfulness; rather, they added the additional element of scholarship to the more obvious peshat interpretation. When we imagine Issachar, we may picture both.

One additional biblical reference to Issachar must be included in this discussion. From Deborah’s Song in the book of Judges, we get a view of Issachar’s character during a period of national crisis:

And Issachar’s chiefs were with Deborah;
As Barak, so was Issachar --
Rushing after him into the valley.
Among the clans of Reuben
Were great decisions of heart.
Why did you stay among the sheepfolds
And listen as they pipe for the flocks?
Among the clans of Reuben
Were great searchings of heart! (Judges 5:15-16)

Perhaps Ibn Ezra was correct and the Issacharites would have made poor soldiers. Still, when Barak and Deborah led Naphtali and Zebulun in battle against Sisera, Issachar enlisted voluntarily and served courageously. The neighboring tribe of Reuben, in contrast, sat out the war. The Reubenites themselves, of course, believed that their lofty contributions were necessary and sufficient: “Among the clans of Reuben were great decisions of heart,” Deborah sang with bitterness and sarcasm. After all, the Reubenites were the (self-appointed) thought leaders of Israel, who could count on thousands of their flock to attend spirited rallies at a moment’s notice. At their conferences, they had “great searchings of heart,” analyzing the issues of the day from all possible sides. But Reuben’s meetings and pronouncements were irrelevant to the public, produced no meaningful action, and only highlighted Reuben’s isolation; in the end, they “stayed among the sheepfolds,” (bein ha-mishpetayim; ironically, the very same expression Jacob used with respect to Issachar) remaining on the nation’s periphery. In an earlier era, Reuben had fought at the front lines with Joshua, to pay his debt for the patrimony Moses granted him east of the Jordan. But now, in the age of the Judges, the Reubenites were secure in remote villages far from the Canaanite armies, and they saw no personal gain from joining Barak’s war. Issachar, in stark contrast, remained empathetic to their brothers, and fought alongside them when needed.

Orthodox Judaism promotes neither a single religious archetype, nor an ideal “Torah personality,” nor a monolithic economic theory. Over the centuries, our religion has accommodated multiple paradigms for all aspects of life. There are many great and varied figures in our history and in our literature from whom we can draw inspiration. The Issachar most of us know -- the full-time scholar -- was never held up by our Torah or our Sages as the one and only model of authentic Jewish living. His image has taken on other, no less ideal, forms in biblical and rabbinic tradition, including that of a man who loves to work the soil under his feet and returns home daily soaked in the sweat of physical labor. That Issachar is no less a ben Torah than the one who has never left the beit midrash. With a sense of responsibility stretching beyond his own borders, the Issachar we have described is the one the Jewish people can look to for support and for leadership, on and off the battlefield. It is time to rethink our fixation on the two-dimensional Issachar, to the exclusion of all others. The others, on closer examination, may be even more inspiring.

Ethnic tensions among Jews are a transnational, diachronic phenomenon, amply documented by Jews as well as by outside observers. Tradition prescribes Jews to rescue other Jews from affliction, underscored by the halakhic concept of pidyon shvu’im (redemption of captives) and the talmudic dictum kol Israel arevim ze baZe, which teaches that every Jew is responsible for the other.[1] Yet, when the factor of physical remoteness between two communities was eliminated, these time-honored values frequently dissipated. As one eminent historian quipped, “ahavat Israel is inversely proportionate to distance.” [2]

Scholars of the American Jewish experience have discussed such conflicts at length and have usually understood them as one defining feature of a particular historiographical period. During the so-called Sephardi era of American Jewish immigration (1654?1840), we are told, Sephardim lorded it over their Germanic coreligionists, sometimes refusing to marry them, while beginning in the 1880s Germanic Jews gave their Eastern European brethren the cold shoulder, labeling them “wild Russians” and “uncouth Asiatics,” until all groups seamlessly mingled following restrictive quotas of the 1920s that largely barred further Jewish immigration.[3] But historians have not yet examined in comparative context ethnic tensions among the world’s Jewish communities, nor are they accustomed to applying sociological, psychological, or anthropological tools to deepen our understanding of these conflicts. This article, inspired by social scientific approaches, reveals two distinct clashes among Jewish ethnic groups that appear consistent across space and time: “ranked stratification,” where issues of superiority and inferiority inform the discourse, and “co-ethnic recognition failure,” where ethnic belonging is denied.

Both historians and sociologists recognize that ethnic belonging is constantly negotiated and that a group’s self-ascribed definitions are contextual and transform through time. Particularly in the case of Jews, whose variegated ethnic and religious identities overlap and are exceedingly complex, an explanation of terminology is imperative. Our frame of reference begins in the late seventeenth century with two groups conventionally known as “Sephardim” and “Ashkenazim.” In recent centuries, Ashkenazim have been understood to comprise two subgroups, both of whom ultimately trace their roots back to “Ashkenaz,” the medieval Hebrew word for “Germany”: Jews of Central European or Germanic origin, who spoke German or a western form of Yiddish, and Eastern European Jews, who typically spoke Yiddish or Slavic languages. Sephardim—from the medieval Hebrew word for “Spain”—are also divided into two subcategories, both of them of remote Iberian origin: Western Sephardim, who after their exile from the Peninsula settled in various lands in the West, including the Americas, and spoke Portuguese and Spanish; and Eastern Sephardim, Jews who settled in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey and the Balkans) and mainly spoke Ladino, a Jewish language that fused early modern Castilian with Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Aramaic, and French, and developed in the East after the exile from Iberia. A third group, much larger than both of these two Sephardi subgroups combined, are Jews native to Arab and Muslim lands with no Iberian origins, who largely spoke Arabic and Persian languages. Since World War I, these ancient communities, indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, have increasingly been subsumed under the category of “Sephardim,” itself a process of diasporic Jewish reunion, as we shall see. However, for the sake of geographical and linguistic accuracy, this third group will be referred to in a separate category—for lack of a better term, as Mizrahim (the Hebrew term for “Easterners”).

Brothers and Strangers

Ranked stratification among ethnic groups is perhaps inevitable. Psychologists have found that “individuals who identify strongly with a group will be particularly motivated to establish its positive distinctiveness vis-à-vis other groups.” [4] Phrased another way, intense ethnic identity often goes hand-in-hand with self-exaltation or disparagement of the other. The gulf separating Sephardi from Ashkenazi Jews was in part informed by a variety of ethnic superiority myths that traced the ancestry of the former group to King David and the Judean Kingdom, and more recently to the glories of “Golden Age Spain,” a period from roughly the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, when Jews in the Muslim Iberian Peninsula supposedly attained a high degree of socially integrated culture and learning without losing their religious allegiance. By contrast, Ashkenazim and other Jews seem to have not cultivated parallel ethnic superiority myths, although some individuals did tout lineage to great Jewish scholars or ancient mystical traditions. Historian David Nirenberg suggests that the Sephardi obsession with noble roots arose after the persecutions of 1391, when thousands of Iberian Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity, thereby blurring the distinctions between the peninsula’s ethno-religious communities. Claims to aristocratic lineage—reinforced by armorial bearings and often fabricated family trees—helped individuals and families distinguish themselves from Christian neophytes. [5] The absence of parallel nobility myths among Ashkenazim may help to explain why Sephardi hegemony continued in the Americas even after Ashkenazim became the numerically dominant Jewish population.

Demands of the “host society” that Jews adopt Westernization is a second factor that exacerbated intra-group tensions during the process of diasporic reunion. The east-west divide among Ashkenazim did not arise until the first half of the nineteenth century, when emerging nation states in Western and Central Europe, implementing programs of Emancipation, demanded that Jews wholly identify as French-, German-, or Englishmen by discarding their linguistic and sartorial distinctions and shrinking their Jewishness into nothing more than a religion, devoid of any sense of peoplehood or yearning for the Land of Israel. By the mid-nineteenth century, once the majority of urban, Central European Jews had left the “ghetto” and acquired middle class status, they re-identified as “German Jews” and labeled their unemancipated brethren as “Ostjuden” (Eastern Jews) or those of “Halb-Asien” (Half Asia) [6]. With the mass westward immigration of Eastern European Jews in the 1880s, these latter began to fully embody their two functions, as both threat and foil to German Jews.[7]

American Sephardi Jews, whose ancestors in Spain and Portugal had been forcibly converted to Christianity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and were thus fully conversant with Western society by the time they abandoned the Iberian Peninsula and reverted to Judaism, underwent similar embarrassment and redefinition during the mass influx of Eastern Sephardim and Mizrahim from the disintegrating Ottoman Empire beginning in the early 1900s. This encounter, most notably developed in the United States of America, brought into currency the dichotomous terms “Old” or “Western Sephardim” versus “New” or “Oriental Jews,” and eventually “Eastern Jews” or “Eastern Sephardim.” Both diasporic reunions—those among “Ashkenazi” Jews and those among “Sephardi” Jews—were informed by the “modernization of Jewish life and consciousness,”[8] perhaps better described as modern Westernization.

The approach of German Ashkenazi and Western Sephardi Jews toward their “Eastern” coreligionists was undeniably philanthropic. But this benevolence was deeply informed by a double-pronged goal: to “deflect from themselves political and popular opinion critical of immigration and the immigrant and to set a standard of conduct for the immigrants that would effectively neutralize nativist sentiment.” [9] Historian Steven Aschheim’s description of encounters between the two Ashkenazi groups in Central Europe also holds true for Western and Eastern Sephardim in America: they were at once “brothers and strangers.” [10]

We can locate some parallels to the Sephardi/Ashkenazi fissure in the Dutch American colonies. In Suriname, where Portuguese-speaking Jews had founded an autonomous Jewish community in the 1660s, friction arose after Ashkenazim began to immigrate in the late seventeenth century. Initially, they prayed alongside their Western Sephardi coreligionists and adopted their rituals and Hebrew pronunciation. Joint worship under Sephardi cultural and political hegemony had also been the norm in Recife, Brazil, where an open, largely Iberian-origin community openly professed Judaism from the 1630s until the fall of the Dutch colony to the Portuguese in 1654. [11] Recife’s community was too short-lived to experience the full ramifications of diasporic reunion. But in Suriname, once Ashkenazim had reached a critical mass in the 1710s, cracks in the blended community began to appear. Sephardi leaders designated a separate house of prayer for Ashkenazim, even as the latter remained under the legal jurisdiction of the Sephardi Jewish court. Continuing religious disagreements led Sephardi leaders in 1724 to petition the colonial governor for an official separation, which was formalized in 1734, resulting in the formation of an independent Ashkenazi court of Jewish law. [12] Anti-Ashkenazi animosity persisted for generations. Sephardim perceived German Jews as more assimilable than those of Polish origin to Portuguese Jewish culture, but both Central and Eastern European Jews were vulnerable to disparaging remarks. In the 1780s, Surinamese Sephardi leader David Cohen Nassy sneered at his coreligionists’ “ridiculous manners,” “superstitions,” and “bigotry,” which he thought were exacerbated by the influx of Polish Jews.[13] That these internecine prejudices could prevail in a colony 90 percent of whose population was enslaved and of African origin speaks to both the insularity of the Jewish community from white Christian society and the power of intra-Jewish conflicts to override the ascriptive identity that would ultimately recast Sephardim and Ashkenazim as simply “Jews.”

Over a century later, similar dilemmas developed in Britain’s overseas colonies, where Jews of primarily Iraqi origin and Ashkenazim from various European lands relocated in the late nineteenth century. Arnold Wright, at the turn of the next century, noted that in Singapore there “was always a certain element of antipathy between the Ashkenasi and the Sephardi Jews which found expression more often in the first generation than in the second…The Baghdad Jews have two synagogues which they frequent, the German [or Ashkenasi] Jew keeping himself strictly apart and being as often as not rationalist.” Memoirist Eze Nathan, who had himself grown up in the Singaporean Arabic-speaking community, found Wright’s account “only slightly exaggerated.” [14]

Rifts also developed in Australia, whose native-born Jewish community was less than half of one percent of the total population in the early 1900s. These Jews, primarily of Ashkenazi origins, had limited observance or knowledge of Jewish traditions, identified as Australians (or British subjects) of the Jewish faith, and saw themselves as part of Australian society in every realm except religion.[15] They actively opposed the immigration of 2,000 Eastern European refugees in the 1920s, balking at their Yiddish and strong Jewish observance. Like the nineteenth-century “German” Jews of America, Australian Jews feared their own status in broader society would fall. Their rabbis and secular Jewish leaders supported restrictive immigration, petitioning the government in the 1920s to stem the influx because, they claimed, it would pull the existing Jewish community into destitution. With the rise of Nazi power the following decade, the Australian Jewish community’s German Jewish Relief Fund raised £50,000, even as they attempted to bar Jewish refugees from entering the country. The Australian Jewish Welfare Society, fearing an intensification of anti-Semitism locally, advocated that no more than six Jewish exiles enter on any ship, each group to be accompanied by an English teacher.[16] Nonetheless, it should be noted that Australia’s acceptance of 15,000 German refugees over three years was relatively speaking the most generous policy of any nation.[17]

During the mid-twentieth century, a new subethnic group further diversified Australia’s Jewish community. Its members, the majority of whom had been dislodged from their homes in India, Burma, Singapore, and Shanghai during World War II, and shared distant Iraqi origins, founded The New South Wales Hebrew Association in 1953. [18] The selection of an ethnically vague name suggests not only uncertainty about collective self-definition, but also a reluctance to choose an identity associated with things “Oriental.”[19] Three years later, amidst internal dissension, the group re-launched itself as the “New South Wales Association of Sephardim.” A local Ashkenazi rabbi and advocate had urged them to do so since [sic]: “The fact is all of you are Sephardim and the Sephardim have a proud heritage.” [20] Anthropologist Myer Samra argues that the “imputation of Spanish genetic origins” served multiple purposes: the established Australian Jews were familiar with what a Sephardi (but not an Iraqi or Mizrahi) Jew was; it countered the inferiority of Oriental self- and ascribed-identity; and it facilitated Jewish immigration during the White Australia Policy, which barred non-whites, including initially most Mizrahim, from settling in the country.[21] By the mid-1980s, Myer observes, the “need to stress Spanishness” had declined in the Australian Jewish community, in part as a result of their acculturation to normative Jewish identity, in part due to the rescinding of the White Australia Policy in 1973. [22]

Australia is a particularly interesting case since the recency of internal Jewish friction allows us to examine the process of identity amalgamation and separation as it was taking place.[23] The striking parallels to the contemporaneous U.S. and Israeli Jewish communities confirm a worldwide trend beginning in World War I whereby Sephardi Jews (of Iberian origin) and Mizrahim (Jews native to Arab and Muslim lands) banded together with other non-Ashkenazi Jews under the “Sephardi” banner in order to achieve political power, visibility, and acceptance in the larger, normative Jewish community.[24] In the United States, a parallel decision was ultimately made to politically unite—under the “Sephardi” banner—all non-Ashkenazi Jews, who in the process were implicitly proffered Iberian ancestry, even when it had never existed, as in the case of Iranian, Ethiopian, or Bukharian Jews. [25]

As we have seen, similar dynamics of confrontation and re-definition were repeated whenever and wherever two disparate and sufficiently sizeable Jewish diasporic groups were brought together in the same locale after generations of no direct contact. Their initial differences included geographical origin and language, and consequent variations in cultural and religious background, profession, and formal education. Often, as in the case of native-born Jews and immigrants, class exacerbated these tensions. Each of these diasporic reunions was characterized by a reluctance or refusal to participate together in religious rites or communal matters, to intramarry, to identify as members of the same group, and in some cases to support immigration, all of which coexisted with the impulse of philanthropy. Sometimes these group relations displayed an arc beginning with coexistence, culminating in formal separation, and ending with mingling as either the group boundaries blurred through acculturation and intramarriage or, as in the case of Suriname, when the colonial authorities brought a formal end to separatist practices.[26] In other cases, such as “Ashkenazi” versus “Sephardi/Mizrahi” relations in Australia and the United States, the impediments against a unified Jewish community have not yet been fully dissolved.

Co-Ethnic Recognition Failure: The Denial of Shared Identity

One overlooked aspect of intra-ethnic Jewish tensions in modern times, much more puzzling than any antipathy heretofore discussed, is co-ethnic recognition failure, one person’s denial of a group member’s common ethnicity. In contrast to the disparaging “we are Israelites, they are Jews” mantra of the German-Eastern European encounter,[27] or “we are Sephardim, they are Oriental Jews” [28] impulse in Western-Eastern Sephardi relations, the cause of this failure to include is genuine ignorance of Jewish cultural variation. Co-ethnic recognition failure is a category of “experience-distance,” intended for use by social analysts, in distinction to “native, folk or lay categories,” which are “categories of everyday social experience, developed and deployed by ordinary social actors.” [29] Phrased bluntly, “co-ethnic recognition failure” is an awkward term that obscures to non-specialists its immediately identifiable meaning. Yet the concept of “failing to recognize” approximates the experience as retold by its targets, who recalled not “being taken for Jews,” and not being “believed to be Jews.” [30]

Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, who are the principle targets of this phenomenon, have recorded their experiences in oral interviews, newspaper articles, and memoirs over the course of the twentieth century, and continue to do so. More recent targets are “Jews of Color,” who trace their non-Ashkenazi ancestry to conversion, inter- and intramarriage, or adoption. [31] Their testimonies suggest that many Ashkenazi Jews are “generally unaware of Jewish multiculturalism.”[32] As anthropologist Jack Glazier notes, co-ethnic recognition failure also underscores the parochial self-awareness of Jews who assumed that only “Yiddish and its associated cultural symbols defined Jewish identity.”[33]

One early example dates to the tenure of Mayor William Jay Gaynor (1909?1913), when a number of Ashkenazi Jews of the Lower East Side, protesting street disturbances and neighborhood disputes, petitioned him to remove the “Turks in our midst.” The main problem with the complaint was that these “Turks” were actually fellow Jews. Upon learning of their mistake, the Ashkenazim—primarily Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern European origin—withdrew the petition, deciding to settle the matter “among themselves.”[34] Eastern Sephardi Jews, with their unfamiliar physiognomy, Mediterranean tongues, and distinct religious and social customs baffled their Ashkenazi brethren. One young Russian-born woman of New York City was both captivated and confused by Jack, a young man of uncertain ethno-religious identity she had met at a ball in 1916 organized by a Ladino newspaper. “At first glance,” Clara wrote, “I thought him Italian. The way he spoke, his countenance and his gestures were like those of the Italians. But later, when we began seeing each other, he swore to me that he is a Spanish-speaking Jew.” Clara’s parents objected to the union because they did not believe that Jack was indeed Jewish, forcing Clara to appeal to the newspaper editor to verify in print “if it is possible, that a Jew who doesn’t speak Jewish, and doesn’t look Jewish, can nevertheless have a Jewish soul.” [35]

This problem of co-ethnic recognition failure propelled Bulgarian-born Moise Gadol to launch the country’s first Ladino newspaper in 1910. The Eastern Sephardi newcomers Gadol first met when he arrived in New York described shared identity denial as their worst immigrant hardship.[36] With tears in their eyes, they related that when they presented themselves for employment, they were “not believed by the Ashkenazim to be Jews, except with very great efforts and with all sorts of explanations…”[37] Many Eastern Sephardi job seekers learned to arrive at Ashkenazi-owned establishments bearing copies of Gadol’s weekly La America in their hands, and were able to convince incredulous employers of their Jewish identity “by showing our newspaper with [its] Hebrew letters,” peppered with announcements from the Ashkenazi press. [38]

The multiple reports of this experience from a variety of sources—contemporaneous and reminiscent, Jewish and non-Jewish—make it clear that co-ethnic recognition failure was neither folkloric nor a case of social snobbery. Forged of genuine ignorance, it occurred in every place where Eastern Sephardim settled, including, aside from New York, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Seattle.[39] Even without full and detailed cognizance of the multiple cases experienced across the country, Gadol was a good enough journalist to recognize that his weekly “would not suffice to recount one part of this sad situation.” [40]

Jews of Arab lands, whose mass immigration began after the rise of the State of Israel, also confronted this irksome phenomenon. Both Nitza Druyan and Dina Dahbany-Miraglia document that Ashkenazim often failed to recognize Yemenite Jews as coreligionists and coethnics.[41] This denial of shared ethno-religious identity, however, carried with it a sharper racial sting. With their “dark skin” and “curly hair” (the terms are Dahbany’s), Yemenite Jews were frequently mistaken for gentile African Americans and resorted to strategies long familiar to the country’s black community. When seeking apartments in Jewish neighborhoods, Yemenite Jews would dispatch a lighter-skinned family member or friend in their stead. When soliciting employment, particularly before the 1960s, they sought “the mediation of a friend or a relative.” [42] Yemenite Jews, with no Judeo-Arabic newspaper they might present to incredulous Ashkenazim as proof of their Jewishness, were forced to employ tactics traditionally used by many African Americans and Hispanics in a racially discriminatory America. The denial by Ashkenazim of shared ethnicity with Eastern Sephardim (and more recently, with “Jews of Color”) reflects the racialist idea, which intensified in the nineteenth century, that one defining marker of Jewishness is phenotype. [43]

Sephardim and Mizrahim experienced the repercussions of co-ethnic recognition failure on many levels. On the one hand, as we have seen, the denial of shared ethnicity and religion was personally painful and frustrating to immigrants who had been born and raised as Jews, understood their Jewishness as a heritable—and thus inalienable—identity, and were now being mistaken for non-Jews. Psychological studies suggest that “individuals require connectedness and belonging with others in order to function optimally,” and that “rejection and exclusion from social relationships…can lead to anxiety, negative affect and depressed self-esteem,”[44] something Gadol seems to have fully understood. Ashkenazi rejection of Sephardim as potential marriage partners may have played a role in the high rates of intermarriage among first- and second-generation Eastern Sephardim. According to estimates, unions between Eastern Sephardim and non-Jews in Seattle during the 1930s and early 1970s were four and three times as common, respectively, as marriages between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. [45]

Another unintended consequence of co-ethnic identity failure was unintentionally passing for other ethnic groups. In 1914, David de Sola Pool, spiritual leader of New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel, remarked that many Eastern Sephardim and Mizrahim had not been included in Jewish immigration statistics “because they have been passed as Turks or Greeks, not being easily recognizable as Jews, either in name, language or physical appearance.” [46] HIAS officials stationed at Ellis Island were qualified to deal with Eastern European Ashkenazim, but were not familiar with the languages or names of Mizrahi and Eastern Sephardi Jews. Thus, many or most of these Jews passed by Ashkenazi immigration officials unnoticed and did not receive the assistance to which they were entitled. [47] Until Eastern Sephardim were appointed as volunteer interpreters at Ellis Island, many others slipped through HIAS’s philanthropic cracks and were often turned back to their native lands.

Nevertheless, some Jewish immigrants embraced being passed over as an opportunity. As early as 1893, Eastern Sephardi Jews were asked to pose as indigenous (and implicitly Muslim) Middle Easterners at the Chicago World’s Fair. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes that roughly four-fifths of the “inhabitants of the Turkish village on the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Exposition were Jews,” from merchants, clerks and actors, to servants, musicians, and dancing girls. Only when the “Streets of Constantinople” came to a virtual standstill on Yom Kippur was the charade exposed as a public secret.[48] New York Sephardi leader Joseph Gedalecia, who had himself immigrated to the United States via Paris as “a Frenchman,” noted in 1914 that many Jewish immigrants native to Greece and other Mediterranean countries intentionally passed as non-Jewish. [49] Reminiscing on Sephardi communal affairs from his Los Angeles home in 1976, Albert J. Amateau claimed he knew “fifty or more” Sephardim who “changed their names and pretended they were anything but Jews,” one passing for a Christian Italo-Frenchman.[50] Many Eastern Sephardim allegedly succumbed to the temptation to “pass” for business reasons, Amateau alleged, including the multi-millionaire Schinasi brothers of New York tobacco factory fame. This, however, did not prevent them from later embracing the Sephardi community as prominent leaders and philanthropists. [51] This apparent relief at being excluded from or by a group highlights a recent finding that “social exclusion can sometimes be a positive experience.” Eastern Sephardim who actively embraced or willingly accepted a variety of non-Jewish Mediterranean identities are paradigmatic of the “self-expansion model,” whereby individuals seeking more benefits than their natal group provide and pursuing more desirable opportunities elsewhere, happily sever their ties.[52]

Co-ethnic recognition failure seems to have led some Eastern Sephardim and Mizrahim to internalize the Ashkenazi image of them as non-Jews or “Turks.” American-born Ben Cohen, whose family had immigrated from Monastir in 1910, confessed: “We used to speak about the Jewish guys, and the Sephardics were different. Really strange.”[53] An elderly Eastern Sephardi of Indianapolis interviewed in the 1980s recalled being warmly greeted at a recent party by many “Sephardics” and “even Jewish people.” [54] Eastern Sephardim in Los Angeles also tended to identify as “Sephardic” and to reject the term Jewish as a self-referential.[55] The Ladino term for Eastern European Ashkenazim, “Yiddishim” (composed of the word “Yiddish,” a reference to both the language and Jewishness, and appended to the Hebrew plural suffix[56] ) reinforced the idea that Ashkenazim were the only authentic Jews. Syrian Jews were also complicit in reinforcing a model of “authentic” Jewishness. These immigrants referred to Eastern European Ashkenazim as “Jewish” or “Iddish.” A male Ashkenazi Jew was an “Iddshy,” while a female an “Iddshiyeh.” Syrian Jews referred (and still refer) to themselves as “S-Ys,” the first two letters of “Syrian,” and nicknamed Ashkenazi Jews (of any background) as “J.W.s” or “J-Dubs,” from the first and last letters of the word “Jew.”[57] New York’s Syrian Jews used these terms unabashedly, constructing a world trifurcated into “Syrians” (meaning Syrian Jews), “Jews” (Ashkenazim), and “Gentiles.”[58] These ethnic terms, like the use of Ladino and Arabic words and phrases in English speech, undoubtedly cultivated an “‘in-group’ spirit,” as Joseph Sutton suggests,[59] but reveal much more. If the established group was Jewish, what was the immigrant, minority group? The origin of these monikers within immigrant Jewish communities suggests that Eastern Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in a part of their psyches assigned “true” Jewish identity to Ashkenazim, with the implicit negation of their own authentic Jewish belonging. An extreme example is the case of Yemenite Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States after World War II and sometimes called each other shvartze and shvartze khaye, the derogatory Yiddish expressions for “nigger” (literally, “black”) and “nigger beast” (literally, “black beast”), respectively, terms they heard from the mouths of their Ashkenazi contemporaries.[60] Here again a Jewish subgroup internalized the majority group’s parochial—and in this case racist—perception.

As with ranked stratification, co-ethnic recognition failure in Jewish immigrant communities appears to be a transnational phenomenon. In 1920s Argentina, when an Ashkenazi woman wed a Syrian Jew, her family “suspected that she was involved in an exogamic relationship. The groom’s knowledge of Hebrew prayers helped convince them that they were not giving their blessing to a “‘mixed’ marriage.’”[61] Ashkenazi denial of the Jewishness of Eastern Sephardim and Mizrahim was among the longest-lived of immigrant memories, perhaps because it threatened the most crucial aspects of a newcomer’s adjustment: collective identity, livelihood, and love.

Yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that this failure to recognize group belonging was not exclusively a function of a hegemonic Ashkenazi majority interacting with an Eastern Sephardi or Mizrahi minority. Steven Aschheim found that during World War I, many Eastern European Jews were apparently unconvinced that German Jewish soldiers were fellow Jews.[62] José Estrugo, an Ottoman-born Sephardi who settled in Los Angeles in 1920, noted that Ashkenazim who immigrated to the Anatolian Peninsula in early 1900s were not believed to be Jews, since they did not have “Spanish” names, nor did they speak “Spanish.” The matriarch of one prominent Sephardi family of Istanbul, whose granddaughter had fallen in love with an Ashkenazi merchant, objected to the union because, to her understanding, someone who did not speak Spanish could not be a Jew.[63] In the course of his fieldwork among Indianapolis Sephardim, Jack Glazier once observed a non-Jewish Spanish-speaker chatting with older Ladino-speaking congregants in the local Sephardi synagogue. One worshiper asked the visitor how she managed to speak such good Spanish, despite not being Jewish.[64] Acculturated European and American Ashkenazim who traveled to lands with majority Sephardi/Mizrahi populations in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were often taken for European-origin Christians, largely based on their dress. U.S.-born Semitic scholar Cyrus Adler, who visited Damascus in 1891, noted that one “old [Jewish] man wasn’t satisfied that I was a Jew simply from being able to speak Hebrew, so he made me recite the Shema.” [65] Nahum Slouschz (1872?1969), an Odessa-born writer and Hebrew literature specialist who was traveling in Libya, found that both the governor of Tripoli and a Turkish administrative officer assumed he was a European Christian accompanied by a Jewish dragoman. Hayyim Habshush, Slouschz’s hired translator, probably presumed the same. “It was no avail for me to explain that I was not a Rumi (Christian),” Slouschz recalled, “nobody would believe me.” [66] Slouschz was even more astonished by his reception by Jews on the island of Jerba: “I passed through the market unnoticed. I was evidently taken for some French Colonial, loafing through the town.” Only after he began to converse in Hebrew to an “old rabbi” did the local Jews realize his Jewish identity.[67]

The impulse to equate one’s own Jewish culture with normativity and even exclusivity seems to be a factor of membership in an overwhelming majority, or of insulation from the wider world and its ethno-linguistic complexity (or both). But more broadly, these encounters speak to what Aschheim calls “the problem of Jewish identity in the modern world,”[68] or perhaps better phrased, the consequences of westernization for modern Jewish diasporic relations. This crisis, as it effected Jews worldwide, brought into question the “nature and meaning of Jewish culture, commitment, and assimilation.”[69] It also raised questions about the non-Jewish groups Jews were “mistaken” for. Where did one boundary begin and the other end?

History Lessons: Ashkenazi/Sephardi Relations in Historical Perspective

Ranked stratification and co-ethnic recognition failure may be the most salient features of Ashkenazi/Sephardi conflicts in modern times. Yet, as this brief comparative survey suggests, these tensions are structural in nature, rather than culturally specific to any Jewish ethnic group. Social class, longevity in the land, ethnic superiority myths, fear that newcomers would cause status demotion, and the Westernizing demands of broader society seems to be the main factors that interfered with intramarriage, communal worship and cooperation, and support for unimpeded immigration. Cultural insulation and hegemony, on the other hand, determined the denial of shared ethno-religious belonging. Yet, ranked stratification and co-ethnic recognition failure were two sides of the same diasporic coin, an international currency that memorialized what happened “when diasporas met” in a Westernizing age.

Some would argue that intra-Jewish friction has been transient and minor when compared to ethno-religious solidarity, and that the frequency or severity of “prejudice” or “discrimination” in the Jewish community is exaggerated. This skepticism compels us to think about the nature of historical sources, what causes such sources to come into being, and what ensures their preservation. It is not an accident that nearly every documented case of co-ethnic recognition failure is told from the perspective of the person denied shared ethnicity, or that most complaints about “Ashkenazi racism” come from Eastern Sephardim, Mizrahim, or “Jews of Color,” for it is they who bore the consequences. Such an experience was memorable and meaningful for them because it imperiled employment opportunities, romantic or marital liaisons, participation in the Jewish community, and the psychological wellbeing that social inclusion can bring. The denier of shared identity, on the other hand, would have found the experience of little importance, and thus had few incentives to recall or document it. Good historiographical practice demands that we consider the experiences and memories of non-normative groups, even if the narratives of the mainstream do not echo them.

Another important incentive for downplaying intra-Jewish hostilities may be that they are embarrassing to lay members of the communities and to scholars of the American Jewish experience whose academic and Jewish identities overlap. Intra-ethnic conflicts—whether past or current—contradict the dominant themes of American Jewish history, and subvert a “Jewish ascent narrative” that begins with flight from persecution, continues on to immigration and hardship, and resolves in a unified, albeit acculturated, American Jewish community. This imagined progression has been popularized in the best known U.S. Jewish novels, memoirs, and films (if not in much of American Jewish historiography), and represents the mainstream community’s preferred mode of self-representation to the outside world.[70] But ignoring or deemphasizing internal conflict also means dismissing the power differentials between groups that erase or edit out marginal views from the historical transcript. It also means neglecting the multi-lingual immigrant documents (such as the Ladino press or interviews recorded in Spanish, Arabic, or Farsi) that centrally position immigrant hardships and exclusion from the broader Jewish community. Here again, the historical discipline demands that we consider neglected sources and how these may reshape our narrative of the American Jewish past.

The argument that intra-Jewish tensions were insignificant tacitly implies that a unified Jewish community has already been created via an American-style “mizug galuyyot,” a Jewish melting pot of diasporic groups into one cohesive people.[71] Advocates of this ethical imperative seldom if ever acknowledge that the process of Jewish diasporic encounter and redefinition has always been closely informed by power differentials, with numerically dominant or hegemonic Jews shaping much of the discourse, arbitrating Jewish normativity, and dictating the cultural model. The risk for smaller or disempowered Jewish groups is always that Jewish unity will be achieved through the assimilation—in effect, disappearance—of their subcultures, rather than through the amalgamation or incorporation that “mizug galuyot” deceptively implies. No conversation about ahavat Israel within the framework of Jewish communal unity should ever take place without the awareness of the power dynamics we have examined in historical context. Similarly, no narrative of American Jewish history should ignore the process that dictates how we should remember the Jewish past, and what we should forget or ignore as “unimportant” or “unrepresentative.”

The increasing ancestral diversity of the American Jewish community in recent years ensures us that these uncomfortable issues are not confined to the past.[72] It would be foolhardy to argue that Jews were and are somehow unaffected by received attitudes, or by the fears and racial ideas of their broader non-Jewish environments. No degree of Jewish religious or ideological conviction can ever overpower these influences. If Jews today were to view their intra-group relations less in religious terms, and more in historical terms, a new conversation could begin.

[1] On some of these issues see Babylonian Talmud, Shavuot 39a and Selwyn Ilan Troen and Benjamin Pinkus, Organizing Rescue: National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern Period (London, England: F. Cass, 1992). I thank my students Lily Brown and Tamara Chung-Constant for the social scientific insights they inspired while enrolled in my classes at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst during the fall 2010 and fall 2011 semesters.
[2] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932?2009) related this maxim in a graduate seminar on Jews in the Ottoman Empire, which I attended at Columbia University in the early 1990s. The Hebrew phrase may be roughly translated in this context as “love for one’s fellow Jews.”
[3] This view is best summarized by Jacob Rader Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492?1776, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 2: 1000?1006.
[4] Christopher M. Federico and Shana Levin, “Intergroup Biases as a Function of Reflected Status Appraisals and Support for Legitimizing Ideologies: Evidence from the USA and Israel,” Social Justice Research 17: 1 (March 2004), 47?73; 52.
[5]David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (2002): 3?41.
[6]Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800?1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin: 1982), 3; 31.
[7] Ibid., 12.
[8] Ibid., 3.
[9] Jack Glazier, Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 9.
[10]Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers.
[11] Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 12.
[12] Wieke Vink, Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname (Leiden: KITLV, 2010), 196–197; Gemeentearchief Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Stukken betreffende gemeenten te Amsterdam, Curaçao, Suriname en Constantinopel, 1650–1798, no. 1029, “Extracte uijt het Register der Resolutien van de Ed. Agthb. Heeren directeuren van de Societeijt van Suriname,” January 6, 1734, 890–894.
[13]David Cohen Nassy, Essai Historique sur la Colonie de Surinam (Paramaribo, 1788;
reprinted Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1968), part 1, 83 and 85.
[14]Eze Nathan, The History of Jews in Singapore, 1830?1945: A Personal Account by Eze Nathan (Singapore: Herbilu, 1986), 58. The square brackets in the quote are Nathan’s.
[15]Myer Samra, “Israel Rhammana: Constructions of Identity Among Iraqi Jews in Sydney, Australia,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney, 1987, 106?107.
[16] Ibid., 107?108.
[17] Ibid., 109.
[18] Aaron Aaron, The Sephardim of Australia and New Zealand (New South Wales, Australia: self-published, 1979), 55.
[19] Samra, “Israel Rhammana,” 267.
[20] Ibid., 268.
[21] Ibid., 314.
[22] Ibid., 317; A. C. Palfreeman, “Non-white Immigration to Australia,” Pacific Affairs 47: 3 (Autumn 1974), 344?357; 349.
[23] Samra, “Israel Rhammana,” 36.
[24] For the emergence of this trend during World War I see N.a., “Sefardíes,” in Eduardo Weinfeld and Isaac Babani, eds., Enciclopedia Judaica Castellana, 10 vols. (México: Editorial Enciclopedia Judaica Castellana, 1951): 9: 496?519; 496.
[25] Ben-Sion Behar, “Sefardím, Ma No Orientales,” La America (October 29, 1915): 2; http://www.americansephardifederation.org/about.html (last accessed 1/11/12).
[26] On the end of the practice in Suriname see Vink, Creole Jews, 202–204.
[27] Isaac Mayer Wise in The American Israelite (January 28, 1887): 4. The exact phrase, which actually alludes more to national origin than an east-west ethnic divide, is: “We are Israelites of the nineteenth century and a free country, and they gnaw the dead bones of past centuries…we let them be Jews and we are the American Israelites.”
[28] Joseph M. Papo, Sephardim in Twentieth Century America: In Search of Unity (San José and Berkeley: Pelé Yoetz Books, 1987), 52; 54.
[29] Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 2005, 62. The authors prefer the expression “category of practice.”
[30] See, for example, Moise Gadol, “El rolo del jurnal ‘La Amerika,’” (December 29, 1911), p. 2.
[31] Joel Sanchez, “Wrestling with the Angel of Identity: Jews of Color,” M.S.W. thesis, Smith College, 2006, 17. See also Diane Kaufmann Tobin, Gary A. Tobin, and Scott Rubin, In Every Tongue: The Racial and Ethnic Diversity of the Jewish People (San Francisco, CA: Institute for Jewish and Community Research, 2005) and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007).
[32] Sanchez, “Wrestling with the Angel of Identity,” 17.
[33] Glazier, “The Indianapolis Sephardim: An Essay,” Shofar 3:3 (1985): 27?34; 31.
[34] William Isaac Thomas, Old World Traits Transplanted (Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1971 [1921], 200, citing “Rene Darmstadter, The Jewish Community (manuscript),” which I have not been able to locate.
[35] “Tribuna Libera: Lo Ke Nuestros Lektores Pensan: Porke No?,” La Bos del Pueblo (May 26, 1916): 6. Clara’s letter appears in Ladino translation only.
[36] [Moise Gadol], “El rolo del jurnal ‘La Amerika,’” La America (December 29, 1911): 2. The short-lived newspaper Gadol says he launched before La America in reaction to co-ethnic recognition failure was probably La Aguila, the country’s first Ladino newspaper.
[37] [Moise Gadol], “Por La Lingua,” La America (December 9, 1910): 1.
[38] Ibid. For another example of La America used as proof of Jewishness see [Moise Gadol], “La Nasión Judía i nuestros ermanos de Turkía,” La America (January 5, 1912): 3.
[39] Max Aaron Luria, “Judeo-Spanish Dialects in New York City,” in John D. Fitz-Gerald and Pauline Taylor, eds., Todd Memorial Volume Philological Studies, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 2: 7?16; Jack Glazier, “American Sephardim, Memory, and Representation of European Life,” in Stacy N. Beckwith, ed., Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000), 307-309, 310, “Stigma, Identity, and Sephardi-Ashkenazic Relations in Indianapolis,” in Walter P. Zenner, ed., Persistence and Flexibility: Anthropological Perspectives on the American Jewish Experience (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 47?62, 51?52, and “The Indianapolis Sephardim: An Essay,” Shofar 3:3 (Spring 1985): 27?34, 31?32; Leon A. Ligier, “The Chicago and Los Angeles Sephardic Communities in Transition,” The American Sephardi 2: 1-2 (1968): 80-82; 80; Walter P. Zenner, “Chicago’s Sephardim,” American Jewish History 79:2 (1990): 221?241, 233?234; Stephen Stern, The Sephardic Jewish Community of Los Angeles (New York: Arno Press, 1990), 98?100 and “Ethnic Identity Among the Sephardic Jews of Los Angeles,” Young Sephardic Voice (1974): 143; Joan Dash, “Sephardim in Seattle,” National Jewish Monthly (May 1963): 12–13, 49–50; 12; Marc D. Angel, “Sephardic Culture in America,” in Abraham D. Lavender, ed., A Coat of Many Colors: Jewish Subcommunities in the United States (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977), 277?280; 277 and La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982), 52; Papo, Sephardim in Twentieth Century America, 47; Richard Glaser, “Greek Jews in Baltimore,” Jewish Social Studies 38: 3/4 (summer-autumn 1976): 321?336; 328; for Atlanta, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Matzoh ball gumbo: culinary tales of the Jewish South (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 166; and for Syrian Jews, Joseph A. D. Sutton, Magic Carpet: Aleppo-in-Flatbush: The Story of a Unique Ethnic Jewish Community (New York: Thayer-Jacoby, 1979), 23.
[40] [Moise Gadol], “Por La Lingua,” La America (December 9, 1910): 1.
[41] Nitza Druyan, “Yemenite Jews on American Soil: Community Organizations and Constitutional Documents,” in Daniel J. Elazar, et al., eds., A Double Bond: Constitutional Documents of American Jewry (Lanham, New York and London: University Press of America: 1992), 93?100; and Dina Dahbany-Miraglia, “American Yemenite Jews: Interethnic Strategies,” in Walter P. Zenner, ed., Persistence and Flexibility: Anthropological Perspectives on the American Jewish Experience (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 63?78.
[42] Dahbany-Miraglia, “American Yemenite Jews: Interethnic Strategies,” 67. For Yemeni Jews as a physiologically varied group often mistaken for gentile Hispanic and black in the United States, see Yael Arami, “A Synagogue of One’s Own,” in Loolwa Khazzoom, ed., The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage (New York: Seal Press, 2003), 101?113; 104.
[43] The idea that Jews embody indelible, physical differences, however, is much older. See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).
[44] Cynthia L. Pickett and Marilynn B. Brewer, “The Role of Exclusion in Maintaining Ingroup Inclusion,” in Dominic Abrahams, et al., eds., in The Social psychology of inclusion and exclusion (New York: Psychology Press, 2005), 89?111; 90.
[45] Albert Adatto, “Sephardim and the Seattle Sephardic Community,” M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1939, 63 and 64; David Sitton, Sephardi Communities Today (Jerusalem: Council of Sephardi and Oriental Communities, 1985), 357.
[46] David de Sola Pool, “The Immigration of Levantine Jews into the United States,” Jewish Charities (1914): 4,11: 20.
[47] See, for example, [Moise Gadol], “La Nasión Judía i nuestros ermanos de Turkía,” La America (January 5, 1912): 3 and “El emportante raporto del Bureau Oriental,” La America (January 12, 1912): 2.
[48] Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “A Place in the World: Jews and the Holy Land at the World’s Fairs,” in Jeffrey Shandler and Beth S. Wenger, eds., Encounters with the “Holy Land”: Place, Past and Future in American Jewish Culture (Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1997): 60?82; 68.
[49] N.a., “Discussion,” in Jewish Charities 4:2 (1914): 29.
[50] American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati), Joseph M. Papo papers, Albert J. Amateau to Joseph M. Papo, April 7, 1976, 2 pages, p. 1.
[51] Ibid., p. 2.
[52] Tracy McLaughlin-Volpe, Art Aron, Stephen C. Wright, and Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., “Exclusion of the Self by Close Others and by Groups: Implications of the Self-Expansion Model,” in Dominic Abrahams, et al., eds., in The Social psychology of inclusion and exclusion (New York: Psychology Press, 2005), 113?134; 126?127.
[53]Glazier, “The Indianapolis Sephardim” and “American Sephardim,” 309. Cohen was a World War II veteran and resided in Indianapolis until the 1950s. Monastir is today the city of Bitola in the Republic of Macedonia.
[54] Glazier, “Stigma, Identity, and Sephardic-Ashkenazic Relations,” 51.
[55] Stern, “Ethnic Identity Among the Sephardic Jews of Los Angeles,” 136.
[56] See, for example, Maír José Benardete, “A Look into the Historical Significance of the Sephardim, their History and Culture,” in Marc D. Angel, et al., Four Review on Stephen Birmingham’s Book The Grandees, Tract No. 9 (New York: Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 1971), 27?37; 35?36.
[57] Sutton, Magic Carpet, 151; Jack Marshall, From Baghdad to Brooklyn: Growing up in a Jewish-Arabic Family in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2005), 46; Victory Bulletin [Brooklyn, N.Y.], 1942?1945, passim; and personal observation.
[58] Linda Cohen, “Captain Silvera, Community, M.D. Doing Valiant Work in England,” Victory Bulletin 3: 2?3 (February-March 1944): 3.
[59] Sutton, Magic Carpet, 151.
[60] Dahbany-Miraglia, “An Analysis of Ethnic Identity Among Yemenite Jews,” 179, “Acculturation and Assimilation: American Yemenite Jews,” Perspectives: Research, instruction and curriculum development, a journal of the faculty, New York City Technical College, CUNY X (1987?1988): 121?134; 130, and “On the Outside Looking In: Reflections of a Natural Feminist,” [3], [4] and [5] (unpublished, unpaginated manuscript, courtesy of the author). For parallel examples in the State of Israel see the aforementioned works by Dahbany-Miraglia; Morris B. Gross, “Exploration of the Differences in Pre-School Learning Readiness and Concomitant Differences in Certain Cultural Attitudes Between Two Subcultural Jewish Groups,” Columbia University, Ed.D., 1966, 1; and Lev Hakak (Dorothea Shefer-Vanson, trans.), Stranger among Brothers (Los Angeles: Ridgefield Publishing, 1984), 117?118. For an example of the term applied to an Eastern Sephardic Jew see Jodi Varon, Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 52.
[61] Ignacio Klich, “Arab-Jewish Coexistence in 1900’s Argentina: Overcoming Self-Imposed Amnesia,” in Ignacio Klich and Jeffrey Lesser, eds., Arab and Jewish Immigrants in Latin America: Images and Realities (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998), 1?37; 19?20.
[62] Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 250.
[63] José M. Estrugo, Los Sefardíes (Havana: Editorial Lex, 1958), 65.
[64] Glazier, “American Sephardim,” 315.
[65] Ira Robinson, ed., Cyrus Adler: Selected Letters, 2 volumes (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of American/New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1985): I: 46.
[66] Nahum Slouschz, Travels in North Africa (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1927), 168.
[67] Ibid., 253.
[68] Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 252.
[69] Ibid.
[70] See the literature and media discussed in Edward S. Shapiro: We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005).
[71] See, for example, Nissim Rejwan, “From mixing to participation: Social implications of the rise of Israel’s ‘Black Panthers,’” The New Middle East 32 (May 1971), 20?24; 22.
[72] Tobin, et al., In Every Tongue; Suzanne Selengut, “Jewish Like Me,” The Jerusalem Report (April 11, 2011), 28?31 and 33.

Lately, a strange feeling has gotten hold of me. I am not yet able to fully articulate it, but something tells me that God is relocating to a different residence. He has hired a moving company, and they are at this time loading all His furniture and possessions into a van and awaiting His instructions as to the destination. The truth is He’s been thinking about moving for a long time but has not yet done so because we, in our ignorance, are still busy visiting His old home, completely blind to the fact that the curtains have been taken down, most of His furniture has already been removed, and He is standing in the doorway, dressed in His jacket and ready to go. He nevertheless listens to us, smiling and feeling sorry for us that in our utter blindness we still believe we are sitting comfortably in His living room, chatting, and having coffee with Him, while in fact He is sitting on the edge of His chair, gazing longingly at the door, dreaming of His new home.

Synagogues—whether Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform—are no longer His primary residence. Surely some of the worshippers are pious people who try to communicate with their Creator, but overall, the majority of these places have become religiously sterile and spiritually empty. So God is moving to unconventional minyanim and places such as Israeli cafes, debating clubs, community centers, unaffiliated religious gatherings, and atypical batei midrash. The reason is obvious. In some of those places people are actually looking for Him. And that is what He loves; not those who have already found Him and take Him for granted. He is moving in with the young people who have a sense that He is there but cannot yet find Him. It gives Him a thrill. In some of these cafes He encounters young men sporting ponytails, without kippot, but with tzitziyot hanging out of their T-shirts, praying in their own words, attempting to find Him. In secular yeshivot, He meets women in trousers and mini-skirts who are earnestly arguing about what it means to be Jewish and who kiss mezuzot when they enter a fashion show. Then there are those who, to His delight, are keen on putting on tefillin once in a while and do this with great excitement; or who enthusiastically light Shabbat candles Friday night and can get into a serious discussion about Buddhism and how to combine some of its wisdom with Kabbalah and incorporate it into Jewish practice.

No, they don’t do so because it is tradition, or nostalgia, as their grandparents did, but because they sincerely want to connect, to grow and become better, deeper, and more authentic Jews—but at their own pace and without being told by others what they ought to do. They won’t go for the conventional outreach programs, which try to indoctrinate them and are often terribly simplistic. No, they strive to come closer because of an enormous urge and inner explosion of their neshamot. No better place for God to be, even if these attempts may not always achieve the correct goals and are sometimes misdirected.

At these unconventional sites, theological discourses take place over a glass of beer, and the participants talk deep into the night because they can’t get enough of this great stuff called Judaism. Many of these people want to study God and understand why He created the world and what the meaning of life is all about. What is the human condition? What is a religious experience? How do we confront death? What is the meaning of halakha? What are we Jews doing here in this strange universe? They realize that life becomes more and more perplexing, and these questions are therefore of radical importance. These are, after all, eternal issues. Who wants to live a life that passes by unnoticed? It is in this mysterious stratosphere that God loves to dwell. He can’t get enough of it.

Regrettably, His interest wavers when He enters conventional synagogues. He finds little excitement there. Many of His worshippers seem to go through the motions, activate their automatic pilot, do what they are told, say the words in the prayer book, and go home to make Kiddush. Few are asking questions on how to relate to God, why they are Jewish, or what their lives really are all about. Many do not want to be confronted with these nasty issues. They only disturb their peace of mind. A nice, conventional devar Torah is good enough. After all, everything has already been discussed and resolved. Regular synagogue visitors only speak to Him when they need Him, but almost nobody ever speaks about Him or hears Him when He calls for help in pursuing the purpose of His creation.

So God is moving to more interesting places. He laughs when He thinks of the old slogan, “God is dead.” It was a childhood disease. He knows we learned our lesson. It is too easy, too simplistic, and has not solved anything. He knows that He has not yet been replaced with something better. Oh yes, there are still run-of-the-mill scientists who believe that they have it all worked out. Some neurologists sincerely believe that “we are our brains” and that our thinking is nothing more than sensory activity. They seem to believe that one can find the essence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by analyzing the ink with which the composer wrote this masterpiece. There are even Nobel Prize winners who believe that we will soon enter God’s mind and know it all, no longer needing Him. They are like the man who searches for his watch in the middle of the night. When asked why he is looking under the street lamp, if he lost his watch a block away, he answers: “This is the only place where I can see anything.” These scientists have still not realized that there are more things, on earth and in heaven, than their research will ever grasp. They have convinced themselves that they are merely objective spectators and have not yet understood that they themselves are actors in the mysterious drama of what is called life.

And God simply winks. During the duration of this long-term disease beginning in the nineteenth century, antibodies have been developing to fight against the denial of His very being. Although atheism is still alive and kicking, many have become immune to all these simplistic ideas. Over the years, more and more antitoxins have accumulated, and we are now stunned by the fact that He, after all, may indeed be in our midst. Suddenly, an outdated hypothesis has come to life again. God is a real possibility, and we had better become aware of that.

But here’s the catch: While the religious establishment is now shouting from the rooftops “We told you so,” it has not yet grasped that this is completely untrue. The discovery of God did not happen because of conventional religion but in spite of it.

The truth is that the great shift concerning God took place far away from the official religious establishment. It is in fact a miracle that some people continued believing in God while religion often did everything to make this impossible. For centuries the church blundered time after time. Since the days when Galileo proved the Church wrong, it was constantly forced to change its position. And even then it did so reluctantly. The enormous loss of prestige that religion suffered because of it is beyond description. God was pushed into the corner. Not because He was not there, but because He was constantly misrepresented by people who spoke in His name. Since the Renaissance, many other great minds have moved the world forward; and although several may have missed the boat, a large number of them introduced radical new perspectives of the greatest importance. Yet, the Church’s only response was to fight them tooth and nail until, out of utter necessity, when all its arguments had run out, it had to succumb and apologize once again for its mistakes. Time and again, religion lagged behind in sharing the victory of new scientific and philosophical insights. Ironically, long before the Church officially sanctioned these new discoveries, they were already part and parcel of the new world. As always, the imprimatur came too late.

Thus, religion paid a heavy price. Its territory became smaller and smaller. The constant need for capitulation made many people leave the world of religion and opt for the secular approach. And the story is not over yet. Scientists are now discussing the possibility of creating life forms in the laboratory that do not depend on DNA to survive and evolve. In all likelihood, several religious leaders will fight this again, with force and ferocity, and will probably have to succumb once more when they can no longer deny the hard facts of science.

But what was happening in the Jewish religious world? Although it cannot be denied that Judaism, too, got caught up in all these debates, and quite a few staunch traditionalists were not much better than some of the church fathers, the overall situation within Judaism was much more receptive to scientific developments. Whereas the Church declared in one authoritative voice— often the synod— that these new scientific discoveries were outright heresy, such pronouncements never took place in the synagogue. This is because Judaism is so different from other religions. Positions of unconditional belief were never its main concern. They were always debated, but never finalized, as was the case with the Church. What kept Judaism busy was the question of how to live one’s life while living in the presence of God and humanity, as expressed in the all-encompassing halakhic literature. Because of that, it did not see scientific discoveries as much of a challenge. There was also a strong feeling that scientific progress was a God-given blessing. The greatest Jewish religious thinker of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, was even prepared to give up on the concept of creation ex nihilo if it would be proven untrue. [1] Although he was attacked for some of these radical and enlightened ideas, the general attitude was: Let science do its thing, and if we were wrong in the past because we relied on the science of those days, we will now rectify our position. Even when the Talmud made scientific statements, many—although certainly not all—understood them to be the result of scientific knowledge of the day, and not sacrosanct. And even when these debates became more intensive, it was never argued that opposing views should be absolutely silenced. There was no final authority in matters of belief, no Jewish synod. At the same time, many sages warned against making science into an idol that is all-knowing and can solve life’s riddles.

Louis Kronenberger notes that

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all…of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.[2]

But today all this has changed. In many Orthodox circles, Judaism’s beliefs have become more holy than the pope. Suddenly, there is an attempt to outdo old-fashioned Catholicism; to insist that the world is actually nearly 5,800 years old; that the creation chapter must be taken literally; that the seven days of creation consisted of twenty-four hours each and not one minute more; that there is no foundation to the theory of evolution; and that the Talmud’s scientific observations came straight from Sinai. That this happened in the past, when there was limited scientific knowledge, is understandable; but that such claims are still made today is downright embarrassing. It makes us blush. We can laugh about it only because the hopelessness of some of these ideas has already passed the point of being disputable. They have faded into flickering embers soon to be extinguished.

Surely it could be argued that possibly science will change its mind. But if the core beliefs of Judaism are not undermined (and they are not!), and as long as there is no indication that science will change its mind in the near future, there is no need to reject these scientific positions. And let us never forget that it is not even completely clear what these core beliefs are! So why fight modern science? [3]

The incredible damage done by doing so is beyond description. It makes Judaism laughable and, in the eyes of many intelligent people, completely outmoded. It makes it impossible to inspire many searching souls who know what science teaches us. If not for this mistaken understanding of Judaism, many people would not have left the fold and could actually have enjoyed Judaism as a major force in their lives.

And it is here that many of us, including myself, are at fault. We blame the Synagogue for this failure, as we blamed the Church hundreds of years ago. Many of us have said, “Judaism has failed”; “It is outdated”; “I am getting out.” But such statements are as unfair as they are illogical. Judaism is not an institution external to us, which one can abandon as one quits a hockey club. We are the Synagogue, and we are Judaism. When Galileo revolutionized our view concerning the solar system, it was not only the Church that failed; we all failed. Those who from the perspective of Galileo claim that the Church was backward are reasoning post factum.

We must realize that although Judaism consists of core beliefs and values that are eternal and divine, it is also the product of the culture during which time it developed. That, too, is part of God’s plan and has a higher purpose. And when history moves on and God reveals new knowledge, the purpose is to incorporate that into our thinking and religious experience. Ignoring this is silencing God’s voice.

According to Alfred North Whitehead,

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.[4]

That is why God is relocating. He doesn’t want to live in a place where His ongoing creation is unappreciated and even denied.

We have replaced God with prayers, no longer realizing to Whom we are praying. We even use halakha as an escape from experiencing Him. We are so busy with creating halakhic problems, and so completely absorbed by trying to solve them, that we are unaware of our hiding behind this practice so as not to deal with His existence. In many ways this is understandable. Since the days of the Holocaust, we have refused to confront the problem of His existence due to the enormity of the evil, which He allowed to happen. So we threw ourselves into halakha to escape the question. But although the problem of God’s involvement in the Holocaust will probably never be solved, we must realize that the purpose of halakha is to have an encounter with Him, not just with the halakha. Halakha is the channel through which we can reach Him, not just laws to live by.

Notwithstanding the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust, we must return to God. It’s high time we realize that His being is of a total different nature than we have ever imagined. God can only be understood in a way that is similar to the relationship between a computer hard disk and what you see on the screen. What you see on the screen is totally different from what is inscribed in the hard disk. You can examine the inside of the disk using the most powerful microscope, but you will see nothing even slightly resembling pictures, colors, or words. We are mistaken when we picture God based on the world screen. In no way does it reveal the actual contents of the hard disk, God Himself. All we know is that God’s ways—which we see only through the external sense of sight—is somehow related to the disk. The problem is that we believe we can have a good look at God by watching the screen. But we haven’t the slightest clue of what is actually going on in the disk. The Holocaust will almost certainly remain an enigma, but it can never deny the divine disk.[5]

It is in those who are still uncomfortable with God that new insights about Him are formed. And it will be in those uneasy environments that Judaism will be rediscovered and developed. The need for religious transcendence, and for the spiritual thread that keeps many young people on their toes, is enormous. Numerous secular people are joining a new category of spiritual theologians. Matters of weltanschauung are pivotal to many secular Jews now. The problem is that for them, and for the religious, the Torah is transmitted on a wavelength that is out of range of their spiritual transistors’ frequency.

Yes, we turn on the radio, but we hear strange noises and unusual static. There is serious transmission failure. We are no longer sure where the pipelines are. God has relocated.

In the world of physics, matters are becoming increasingly hazy. Our brains are penetrating places where well-established notions, such as matter and substance, have evaporated. They have been transformed to puzzling phenomena. They have moved, and God has moved with them. Science is becoming intangible, and it’s happening at a speed that we can’t keep up with. It puts us in a difficult position and causes us anxiety. We are all living in exile, within a mystical landscape. Those who are aware of this are alive; those who are not have left this world unwittingly.

The question is whether we move our synagogues to where God is now dwelling. Will we, the religious, live up to the expectations of the young people in cafes and discussions groups who have preceded us? Will we apologize to them and join in their discussions, creating a real religious experience out of our synagogue service? Or will we, as usual, stay put, fight the truth, and then be put to shame?

When will we move Judaism to the front seat so that it once again becomes the leader instead of a follower?

Will we move to God’s new habitat, or are we still drinking coffee in His old home, where the curtains have been removed and He is long gone?

***
There is a serious breakdown that has taken place in the Orthodox community worldwide. Today, most of these communities view themselves as observant, not model, communities. An observant community is one that is concerned primarily with religious observance. As such, it views halakha and a proper Orthodox environment to execute its demands as its priority. It sees its main obligation as ensuring that Orthodox Judaism survives the ongoing encroachment of secularism and assimilation. To a certain degree, its interest in halakha comes at the expense of Judaism itself. It lacks the language and spirit necessary to become a model community conveying the great message of Judaism to all other Jews, and even Gentiles.

Basically, it is defensive.

The Orthodox community does not realize that it is not observance that should be its main concern. Its primary goal should be to create a spiritual environment in which Jews, whether religious or not, take part in the great mission called Judaism, driven by a visionary halakha. Because it fails to understand this, it views strangers with suspicion. They are only welcome after a security check. The language spoken in these communities is of right and wrong, good and bad, safe and dangerous. It is a language of survival.

Mainstream Orthodoxy has fallen victim to a false kind of modernity in which flaunting irreverence has become the norm. Debunking is commonly practiced, and at every turn we experience the need to expose the clay feet of even the greatest. Human dignity, a phrase often used, has become a farce in real life. Instead of deliberately looking for opportunities to love our fellow men and women, as required by our holy Torah, many have rewritten this golden rule to read—in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel—“Distrust your fellow man as you distrust yourself.” People’s lack of belief in themselves has spilled over to their relationships with others. Mediocrity has led them to believe that we are a generation of spiritual orphans. Influenced by materialistic philosophies, many a religious person who once revered his fellows has become part of the problem without even being aware of it.

When observing even those who are fully committed to helping fellow Jews find their way back to Judaism, we see an attitude that is foreign to religious life and thought. We cannot escape the impression that some people, without denying their love for their brothers and sisters, tend to talk down to “secular” Jews. This has become the norm. Constant emphasis is placed on the need to cure the secular person of his or her mistaken lifestyle. But this is asking for infinite trouble. It is based on arrogance. While religious Jews see themselves as the ideal, they relegate secular Jews to second-class status and decide that it is they who needs to repent for their mistaken ways. Such an attitude is based on the notions of contrast and lack of affinity. The secular Jew will always feel inferior. Therefore, the point of departure from which one reaches out to bring fellow Jews closer to Judaism is, at the same time, its undoing. The suggestion that “One should throw oneself into a burning furnace rather than insult another person publicly” [6] may very well apply, since it is the community of secular Jews that is being shamed and treated as inferior.

For Jews to bring others back to Judaism they need to celebrate the mitzvoth that the secular Jew has been observing for all or part of his life, not condemn his failure to observe some others.

Heschel writes, “The foundation should be humility, not arrogance.” [7] There is little doubt that secular Jews, consciously or unconsciously, keep a large number of commandments. Many of them may not be in the realm of rituals, but there is massive evidence that secular Jews are firmly committed to keeping interpersonal mitzvoth. Beneath the divisiveness of ritualism lie the underpinnings of religion, such as compassion, humility, awe, and even faith. The pledges are different, but the devotions are equal. It may very well be that the meeting of minds is lacking between the religious and non-religious Jews, but their spirits touch. Who will deny that secular Jews have a sense of mystery, forgiveness, beauty, and gentleness? How many do we know who lack inner faith that God cares? And how many will not show great contempt for fraud or double standards? Each of these is the deepest of religious values. We must try and make the so-called non-religious Jews aware of the fact that they are much more religious than they may know; that God’s light shines on their faces just as much, if not more, than on the faces of those we call religious Jews.

This not only calls for celebration but may well become an inspiration for religious Jews—not just by honoring secular Jews for keeping these mitzvoth but by taking an example from their non-observant brothers, by renewing these mitzvoth and good deeds in their own lives.

Just as the non-religious person needs to prove his or her worthiness to be the friend of a religious Jew, so the religious Jew needs to be worthy of the friendship of a secular fellow Jew. It would be a most welcome undertaking if the religious would call on the non-religious for guidance in mitzvoth in which they, the religious Jews, have been lax, as well as in how to improve themselves.

There is a significant need for calling Jews back to their roots by showing them that they never left. Once religious Jews learn that secular Jews are their equals, not their inferiors, a return to Judaism on the right terms will come about.

Orthodoxy celebrates its massive growth and unprecedented birthrate, but by doing so, it masks the tragedy of the thousands who are never given an opportunity to get in touch with Judaism or are unaware of how Jewish they really are. The language of condemnation and devaluation that permeates Orthodox classrooms not only makes it impossible for many to enter—but also causes numerous young people who were raised in a religious environment to leave the fold and turn their backs on Judaism. Even worse is the fact that Orthodoxy continues to point to this trend as evidence in support of the need for its insularity and separatism, blaming secularity for this tragic state of affairs, while the truth is that to a great extent it is Orthodoxy itself that is to blame.

***
The primary concern of Judaism is the art of living. To accomplish this goal it is committed to a strong sense of tradition and a determination to realize certain optimal goals. It is this road which has made Judaism unique and makes it stand out among the community of religions. This unique directness from a historical past into a messianic future; from Mount Sinai to justice for the orphan, widow, and stranger; and the ultimate abolition of war has saved Judaism from death by ice and death by fire, from freezing in awe of a rigid tradition and from evaporating into utopian reverie. [8]

Still, what Jews always looked for in the Torah was not just a way of living, nor the discovery of a truth but—this is scarcely an exaggeration—everything. Their love for the Torah was not just molded by particular teachings but by their conviction that everything could be found within its pages. God is no doubt central to Judaism but because the Jews never lost their intimate awareness of the multifarious colors of the Torah and its tradition, no dogma could ever gain authority. Even after Maimonides attempted, under the influence of Islamic theology, to lay down definite formulations of Jewish belief, Judaism refused to accept them as sacrosanct and did not allow such attempts to come between itself and the inexhaustible Torah text. It is for this reason that the kind of tension between religion and the quest for truth is almost unknown in Judaism. No sacrifice of the intellect is demanded.

One look in the Talmud proves this point beyond doubt. The flow of thoughts, opposing ideas, and the making and rejection of opinions and insights are abundant. The interaction between legality, prose, narrative, illusion, and the hard reality is astonishing. It makes the Talmud into the richest of all literatures; not even Greek philosophy was able to produce such a symphony of ideas in which the waves of the human intellect and divinity move forward and backward. There is an absolute lack of systematization, and it is clear that any such attempt was nipped in the bud. From a modern point of view, one might argue that the search for truth in the Torah was not directed toward proportional truth because such a notion was lacking by definition. The most persistent intellectual energy and analytic efforts were devoted to the continual contrivance of beautiful and profound interpretation to discover the totality of life.

Since the Torah was considered God-given, it might have been logical that fundamentalism would ultimately triumph and lead to conflict with science and other disciplines. But this inference is founded on a major misconception. Precisely because the text is seen as the word of God the essential ambiguity of the text was granted implicitly and every verse by definition has many levels of interpretations, both poetic and legal. There is even the compatibility of playfulness with seriousness since the former is a most important component of human existence as created by God.

Today, the attempt to streamline and straightjacket the Jewish tradition and to create a final Jewish theology is a major mistake and a complete misreading of its very character. Although there is, for practical reasons, a need to put halakhic living into a pragmatic context that requires conformity in action, this should never be the goal when focusing on Judaism’s beliefs. It is the task of the rabbis to do everything in their power to rescue Judaism from dogmatism. Although it can’t be denied that Judaism incorporates certain primary beliefs, these beliefs were always kept to the minimum and were constantly a source of fierce debate. Most important, one must remember that such “dogmas” never turned into a reductio ad absurdum. Freedom in doctrine and conformity in action was the overall policy to which the talmudic rabbis were committed, even when convinced of certain fundamental truths. This is also evident when one studies the relationship between the biblical text and the Oral Torah, where we see a minimum amount of words and maximum amount of interpretation.

It is detrimental to Jewish tradition to transform words into fixed clusters of thought and the storing up of whole theories. The idea is not to become the owner of a mass of information, which is entrusted firmly in one’s memory and carefully transmitted into notes. Once one does so, one becomes scared and disturbed by new ideas, since the new puts into question the fixed sum of information that one has stored into one’s mind. As such, ideas that cannot easily be pinned down are frightening, like everything else that grows and is flexible. Instead of being passive receptacles of words and ideas, the ideal is to hear—and most important to receive and respond—in an active, productive way. It needs to stimulate a thinking process that ultimately leads to the transformation of the student.

The attempt today to halakhalize and legalize Jewish thought is missing the whole message of the talmudic way of thinking. It will undermine the halakha itself since it will kill its underlying spirit. There is little doubt that due to the pan-halakhic attitudes that we now experience in certain rabbinical circles, we see the symptoms through which the halakha becomes suffocated and often rejected by intelligent, broad-thinking people. A plant may continue to stay alive in apparent health after its roots have been cut, but its days are numbered.

If the kind of rabbinical censorship that we have lately encountered in relationship to certain books and ideas on Orthodox Judaism was to be applied to the talmudic text itself, it would mean that the best part of this great compendium on Jewish thought and law would be censored and burned.

Freedom of thought must be guaranteed if we want the Jewish tradition to have a future. This applies in particular to teaching. A man or a woman who holds a teaching post should not be forced to repress his opinions for the sake of upholding popular simplistic opinions or even more sophisticated ones. As long as his or her opinions are rooted in the authentic Jewish tradition, and expressed with the awe of Heaven, it must be encouraged—however much this is disliked by some rabbinic authorities.

Uniformity in the opinions expressed by teachers is not only not to be sought, but is, if possible, to be avoided since diversity of opinion among preceptors is essential to any sound education. No religious Jewish student can pass as educated if he or she has heard only one side of the debates that divided the earlier and later sages. One of the most important things to teach is the power of weighing arguments, and this is the foundation of all talmudic debate. To prevent the teacher from doing do so or to bring this to the attention of his or her students is misplaced rabbinic tyranny and has no place in the Jewish tradition. It is the Christianization of Judaism by rabbis.

As soon as censorship is imposed upon the opinions that teachers may avow, Jewish education ceases to serve its purpose and tends to produce instead a nation of men and women, a herd of fanatical bigots.

Today’s talmudists must realize that they can become imprisoned by their own talmudic knowledge. They may have tremendous talmudic expertise, but they may have forgotten that one needs to know more than only all the intricacies of text. One needs to hear the distinctiveness of its content, the spirit it breathes, the ideological foundations on which it stands. To know the Talmud is to know more than its sum total.

Techniques for dealing with individuals whose opinions are disliked have been well-perfected. Especially so when the condemners are people of power and the accused are young and inexperienced. It is an easy and well-known tactic to accuse the condemned of professional incompetence. Most of the time, the dissident is quietly dropped. In the case of more experienced individuals, public hostility is stirred by means of misrepresentation and character assassination. Since most teachers do not care to expose themselves to these risks, they will avoid giving public expressions to their less “Orthodox” opinions. This is a most dangerous state of affairs. It is a way to muzzle genuine and important knowledge and to deny people insight. But above all it allows obscurantism to triumph.

Certain religious leaders, including rabbis, may believe that such tactics of repression and character assassination work, but they should know that although books can be burned, the ideas expressed in them do not die. No person and no force can put a thought in a concentration camp. Trying to do so is similar to the act of somebody who is so afraid of being murdered and therefore decides to commit suicide so as to avoid assassination.

****

Torah study has become nearly impossible, and the problem lies not with the Torah but with people. To read the text requires courage. Not courage to open the Book and start reading, but courage to confront oneself. To learn Torah requires human authenticity; it means standing in front of the mirror and asking oneself the daunting question of who one really is, without masks and artificialities. Unfortunately, that is one of the qualities that modern people have lost. Modern people have convinced themselves to be intellectuals, removed from subjectivity and bowing only to scientific investigation. As such, these people have disconnected from their Self. Because people are a bundle of emotions, passions, and subjectivities, they cannot escape their inner world, much as they would like to. Still, modern people formulate ideas. They may proclaim the rights of the spirit and even pronounce laws. But these ideas enter only their books and discussions, not their lives.; they hover above their originators’ heads, rather than walking with them into the inner chambers of daily existence. These ideas don’t enter people’s trivial moments but stand as monuments—impressive, but far removed.

People are no longer able to struggle with their inner Self and therefore cannot deal with the biblical text. The text stares them in the face, and people are terrified by the confrontation. All they can do is deny the text, so that they may escape from themselves. Since they know that they must come to terms with themselves before coming to terms with the Book, they cannot negate it or disagree with it, as this requires them to deny something that they don’t even know exists.

Does that mean that these modern people are not religious? Not at all. Even the religious person is detached from the spirit. The religious person has elevated religion to such a level that its influence on his or her everyday life, in the here and now, has been lost. It is found on the top floor of his or her spiritual house, with its own very special atmosphere. It has become departmentalized. But the intention of Torah is exactly the reverse. Its words, events, and commandments are placed in the midst of the people, enveloped in history and worldly matters. What happens there does not take place in a vacuum but in the harshness of human reality. Most of the Torah deals with the natural course of a person’s life. Only sporadic miracles allow us to hear the murmurs from another world that exists beyond. These moments remind us that God is, after all, the only real Entity in all of existence. But the Torah is the story of how God exists in the midst of mortal human’s ordinary troubles and joys. It is not the story of God in heaven, but of God in human history and personal encounter.

The art of biblical interpretation is far more than just knowing how to give expression to the deeper meaning of the text. It is, after all, impossible to treat the biblical text as one would any other classical work. This is because the people of Israel, according to Jewish tradition, are not the authors of this text. Rather, the text is the author of the people. Comprising a covenant between God and humanity, the text is what brought the people into being. Moreover, despite the fact that the people often violated the commanding voice of this text, it created the specific and unique identity of the Jewish nation.

That is precisely why reading the text is not like reading a conventional literary work. It requires a reading-art, which allows the unfolding of the essence and nature of a living people struggling with life and God’s commandments.

This calls for a totally different kind of comprehension, one that must reflect a particular thought process and attitude on the part of the student.

George Steiner expressed this well when he wrote:

The script…is a contract with the inevitable. God has, in the dual sense of utterance and of binding affirmation, “given His word,” His Logos and His bond, to Israel. It cannot be broken or refuted.[9]

The text, then, must be approached in a way that reflects a human commitment to ensure that it indeed will not be broken or refuted. This has become a great challenge to modern biblical interpretation. Many scholars and thinkers have been asking whether the unparalleled calamity of the Holocaust did not create a serious existential crisis in which the text by definition has been invalidated. Can we still speak about a working covenant by which God promised to protect His people, now that six million Jews, including more than a million children, lost their lives within a span of five years under the cruelest of circumstances?

The reason for raising this question is not just because the covenant appears to have been broken, but also because history—and specifically Jewish history— was always seen as a living commentary on the biblical text. The text gave significance to history and simultaneously took on its religious meaning.

Can the text still be used in that sense, or has it lost its significance because history violated the criteria for its proper and covenantal elucidation?

Not for nothing have modern scholars suggested that there is a need, post-Holocaust, to liberate ourselves from this covenantal text in favor of shaping our destiny and history in totally secular terms. The Holocaust proved, they believe, that we have only ourselves to rely on, and even the return to Israel is to be understood as a secular liberation of the galut experience.

It is in this context that “commentary” needs to take on a new challenge: to show not only how the covenant, as articulated in the text, is not broken or refuted, but how in fact it is fully capable of dealing with the new post-Holocaust conditions of secularity. Without falling victim to apologetics, biblical interpretation will have to offer a novel approach to dealing with the Holocaust experience in a full religious setting, based on the text and taking it beyond its limits.

It will have to respond to the fact that God is the most tragic figure in all of history, making the life of humanity sometimes sublime while at other times disastrous. The biblical text is there to tell humans how to live with this God and try to see meaning behind the absurdity of the situation.

But above all, modern commentary must make sure that the Torah speaks to the atheist and the agnostic, for they need to realize that the text is replete with examples of sincere deniers and doubters who struggled all of their lives with great existential questions. The purpose is not to bring the atheists and agnostics back to the faith, but to show that one can be religious while being an atheist; to make people aware that it is impossible to live without embarking on a search for meaning, whether one finds it or not. It is the search that is important, the end result much less so. The art is to refrain from throwing such a pursuit on the dunghill of history throughout the ages. The struggle of homo religiosus is of greatest importance to the atheist.

That most secular people no longer read the Torah is an enormous tragedy. The Torah is too important to be left to the believer. The beauty of day-to-day life takes on a different and higher meaning through the Torah, and that will evoke in atheists a faintly mystical anticipation, which they will experience when they are alone or when they watch a sunset at the beach. A voice is born, and it speaks to them; they feels a melancholy that calls forth something far away and beyond. They happen upon a situation that suddenly throws them over the edge, and they get taken in by the experience of a loftier existence. They realize that the god they were told to believe in is not the God of the Torah. The latter is a God with Whom one argues; a God Who is criticized and Who wants people to search even if it results in the denial of Him.

This issue is related to other critical problems. Surveying Jewish history, we see drastic changes in the ways the biblical text was encountered. In the beginning the Torah was heard and not written. Moshe received the Torah through the spoken Word: “The Word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, for you to carry out.” [10] God may be unimaginably far away, but His voice is heard nearby, and it is the only way to encounter Him.

At a later stage, the Word evolved into a written form. Once this happened, there was a process by which the spoken Word was slowly silenced and gradually replaced by the written form. With the eclipse of prophecy, God’s word was completely silenced and could then only be read. As such, the Word became frozen and ran the risk of becoming stagnant. At that stage it was necessary to unfreeze the Word, which became the great task of the Sages and commentaries throughout the following centuries.

Subsequently, a third element gained dominance. The text must be relevant to the generations that study it, while at the same time remaining eternal. Commentators throughout the ages have struggled with this problem. How does one preserve the eternity of the Word and simultaneously make it relevant to a specific moment in time? Many commentators were children of their time and clearly read the text through the prism of the period in which they lived. This being so, the perspective of eternity became critical. It was often pushed to the background so as to emphasize the great message for the present. Much of the aspect of eternity was thereby compromised, and that caused a few to wonder how eternal this text really is.

Others wrote as if nothing had happened in Jewish history. That reflected the remarkable situation of the Jewish people in galut: its ahistoricity. After the destruction of the Temple, Jewish history came to a standstill. Although much happened, with dire consequences for the Jews, they essentially lived their lives outside the historical framework of natural progress. It became a period of existential waiting, with the Jewish people anticipating the moment when they could once again enter history, which eventually came about with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

Inevitably, then, some commentators wrote their exegeses in a historical vacuum. They hardly emphasized the relevance of biblical texts to a particular generation. Therefore, the student was often confronted with a dual sentiment. While dazzled by a commentator’s brilliant insight, the student was forced to ask: So what? What is the implication of the interpretation for me, at this moment in time? Here we encounter a situation in which relevance is sacrificed for the sake of eternity.

With the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland, Jews are confronted with an unprecedented situation, which has serious consequences for biblical commentary. Due to a very strong trend toward secularism, caused by the Holocaust as well as other factors, the issue of relevance versus eternity has become greatly magnified.

Today, more than ever before, there exists a greater and more pressing need to show the relevance of the text. The radical changes in Jewish history call for a bold and novel way of understanding the text as a living covenant. At the same time, the drastic secularization of world Jewry and Israeli thinking requires a completely new approach on how to present to the reader the possibility of the Torah’s eternity. With minor exceptions, the religious world has not come forward with an adequate response.

Most worrisome is the fact that the majority of Jewish commentary books published today in Orthodox circles comprise compilations and anthologies of earlier authorities without opening any new vistas. It is as if new interpretations are no longer possible. The words of God are treated as if they have been exhausted. It clearly reflects a fear of anything new, or an inability to come up with fresh and far-reaching ideas. This phenomenon has overtaken a good part of the Orthodox scholarly world. Judaism is turning more and more into a religion in which one writes glosses upon glosses, instead of creating new insights into the living covenant with God.

No doubt, not every person is equipped with the knowledge and creativity needed to undertake the task. Years of learning are an absolute requirement before one can make a genuine contribution in this field. Still, one must be aware of the danger of “over-knowledge.” When the student is overwhelmed by the interpretations of others, he or she may quite well become imprisoned by them and so lose the art of thinking independently. Instead of becoming a vehicle to look for new ideas, the student’s knowledge becomes detrimental. This has happened to many talmidei hakhamim.

What is required is innovation in receptivity, where fresh ideas can grow in the minds of those willing to think creatively about the classical sources, without being hampered by preconceived notions. Only then will we see new approaches to our biblical tradition that will stand up to the challenges of our time.

****
We are currently living in a transitional phase of monumental proportions and far-reaching consequences. Our religious beliefs are being challenged as never before. We are forced to our knees due to extreme shifts and radical changes in scientific discoveries; our understanding of the origins of our holy texts; our belief in God; the meaning of our lives; and the historical developments of our tradition. We find ourselves on the precipice, and it is becoming more and more of a balancing act not to fall off the cliff.

We keep asking ourselves: Can we survive and overcome? What are the tools to make that possible? Or, shall we drop our earlier beliefs, give in, and admit our defeat?

In the old religious climate, everything was certain. We knew the truth. Traditional Judaism gave us the foundations, and everything was under control. The tradition was safeguarded behind shatterproof glass, well-protected and unshakable. But now, all certainty is affected by skepticism and the glass has been broken.

Today, faith dangles in the free flow of doubt, and we need to learn how to live in this new stratosphere.

The truth is that Jewish Orthodoxy (from the Greek orthos ("true" or "right") and doxa ("opinion" or 'belief") never existed. Originally, Judaism was highly unorthodox. Although it always believed in God and Torah, it never offered any specifics of what God meant or what Torah consisted of. That was left to speculation, never to be determined. The early Sages, as testified by the Talmud and philosophers, disagreed on some of the most fundamental issues of faith.

But over the years, we wanted more certainty. We wanted it handed to us on a silver platter, so that we could avoid debates and live a life of religious comfort, apathy, and mediocrity. Influenced by other religions, we adopted the need for cast-iron certainty and psychological security. So we began to rewrite Judaism in a way that would fit into the notions of established religions—well-structured, with a good dose of dogma. What we did not realize is that by doing so, we misrepresented Judaism by losing sight of the plot, thus doing it a great disservice.

We need to realize that our epoch of uncertainty is in fact much more conducive to authentic Judaism than all the conviction we've had in previous generations. It forces us to rediscover what Judaism is really about and gives us the opportunity to rebuild where rebuilding is required and leave untouched what should remain untouched.

Because we are compelled to reconsider, we will delve more deeply into the great resources of Judaism and stay away from all superficiality to which Judaism has lately succumbed. The greater the challenge, the more profound are the discoveries. Knowledge is important, but doubt is what gives you an education.

Moreover, we will actually be able to enter the minds of all those biblical figures who lived in constant ambiguity about God and the Torah. Avraham’s great doubts concerning the reliability of God in connection with His request to sacrifice his son Yitzchak was a most traumatic experience. It was the pinnacle of religious uncertainty.

Moshe’s bewilderment at not knowing who God was when he asked to see Him and God’s refusal to reveal Himself are the climax of intense religious struggle. In the desert, the Israelites asked whether God was among them. This came close to pantheism or even atheism. Nadav and Avihu’s unauthorized offering of a "strange fire" in the Tent of Meeting came from a feeling of ambiguity about whether the only way to serve God was by merely following the strict demands of halakha as given by God, or whether one could explore new avenues to divine service.

On one occasion, the Israelites were not sure whether the Torah was indeed the word of God. Korah challenged this very belief and declared that it was not from heaven and that Moshe and Aaron were not prophets.[11] This must have caused a major crisis among the Israelites.

The Torah gives evidence to a most difficult religious journey traveled by the Israelites, full of doubt, struggle, and trauma. Surely some of these doubts were more existential than intellectual, but the latter cannot be disregarded.

Once we realize that uncertainty was part of the biblical personality, we will have a much better grasp of the text and what Judaism is actually claiming. But this is only possible when we find ourselves challenged by those very existential doubts.

There is nearly nothing greater than the free flow of doubt in today’s society. It offers us unprecedented opportunities to rediscover real religiosity. In contrast, the quest for certitude paralyzes the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition that impels humanity to develop its spiritual and intellectual capacity. Sure, this is a risky undertaking, but there is no authentic life choice that is risk free. Life means constantly moving and growing, whereas organic matter that fails to shift and grow decays and will eventually die. So it is with a person’s religious life. The role of religion is to accommodate the blossoming of the human soul and to prevent one from descending into a place of spiritual stagnation.

Whereas our not-so-distant ancestors in the days of the emancipation walked out and left Judaism behind, declaring it no longer relevant, we know better. We won't take that cheap and easy road. We know that Judaism is much too great to abandon, even if there are obstacles along the way. We are aware that Judaism stands head and shoulders above anything else, and that no philosophy or religious practice can replace it, but we have yet to discover what it is that gives Judaism its unique profundity. We still walk in our childhood shoes, knowing that we have not yet entered the world of adulthood. AusdemKindes—in das Mannesalter.[12] We realize that we must be careful not to obscure the real idea of growth, which is not to leave things behind us, but to leave things inside us.

What we all know deep down is that we have to renew Judaism from within. Not by letting it go, but by raising it up. Not through Reform and Conservative Judaism, or Orthodox dogma, but through a radical purifying process that will take years. Until now we have been busy digging and have found some very interesting elements, but we have not yet hit rock bottom and our findings have been too superficial and too few to make a breakthrough.

Over the years we have covered Judaism with too many clinging vines, to the point where we can no longer see or even recognize das Ding an sich, "the thing in itself." A thick scab has grown on Judaism, and it needs to be scraped off. We have to expose the founding pillars and build a superstructure. We must recognize that the barer Judaism gets and the more uncertain we become, the closer we get to where we need to be, until we hit the core. It will manifest itself in many opposing colors, creating an enormous, beautiful canvas. In this new setting it will be clear that religious uncertainty is one of the most powerful ideas, which keeps us on our toes. And it will give us great insight into Judaism’s core beliefs.

Beneath the clinging vines are divine words. For too long we have mistakenly believed that Judaism is the clinging vine itself. Yes, it had its purpose, but that is not where we will find divinity. It is deeper down, beneath the layers. The time has come to remove it. But it has to be done slowly and in such a way that we do not harm the core. We must remove outdated ideas, often borrowed from other religions; remove the galut from halakha, which became overly defensive; and have the courage to see a new religious world emerging, which will offer us the authentic meaning of the divine Torah and mitzvoth.

It will be painful for those who are looking for absolute certainty. We understand the anguish it will cause. But there is no turning back, and after a time the joy of uncertainty and of discovering the deeper meaning behind Judaism will be immensely greater than that which certainty could ever offer us.

The goal is not at all to be sure that the Torah was given at Sinai, or that all its stories are true. There are very good reasons to believe it is, but we don't know for sure and we should not know for sure. Is it not marvelous to take a leap of faith and live according to something that one cannot be sure of? Of what value are convictions that are unaccompanied by struggle?

Faith means striving for faith. It is never an arrival. It can only burst forth at singular moments. It does not arise out of logical deduction, but out of uncertainty, which is its natural breeding ground.

To have faith is to live with unresolved doubts, prepared to rise above ourselves and our wisdom. Looking into the Jewish tradition with its many debates, one clearly understands that those who deny themselves the comfort of certainty are much more authentic than those who are sure.

Faith means that we worship and praise God before we affirm His existence; we respond before we question. Man can die for something even as he is unsure of its true existence, because his inner faith tells him it is right to do so. This honest admission of doubt is not only the very reason why it is possible to be religious in modern times; it is the actual stimulus to do so.

We need to understand that faith is "the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises," [13] and "we can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand." [14]

To believe is not to prove, not to explain, but to yield to a vision.

Of course belief cannot be credo quia absurdum est. It has to make sense and have a lot to say for itself in terms of knowledge and wisdom. Still, just as no building stands on rock-bottom, but on unsure pillars deeply driven into the ground so as to resist an earthquake, so must belief have enough strength to prove its worth without ever reaching absolute certainty.

Faith is like music. It is true because of its beauty not because of its intellectual certainty. Is it not created from impossible paradoxes, as well as a great deal of imagination that surpasses rationality and scientific or historical facts?

David Weiss Halivni writes,

The truly great need no synthesis. They absorb whatever experience offers them. Their intensely creative personalities act like a fiery furnace, melting away contradictions. What emerges is either a harmonious whole or a creative parallelism with parts that mutually fructify and supplement each other. The truly great do not need to trim edges, as it were, to make genuine experiences fit with each other. They preserve them intact. And if their experiences appear contradictory, they build an emotional bridge spanning them allowing both the landscape and the water to be seen. Lesser mortals resort to logical means of harmonization. [15]

The aim of halakha is to teach us the art of living with uncertainty. Halakha was not meant for those who are sure, because nobody can act out of certainty.

The most challenging question in all of life is what do you do and what do you believe when you are not sure. It is that notion that moves the scientist, the philosopher, and most of all the religious personality. We must destroy the security of all conventional knowledge and undo the normalcy of all that is ordinary. To be religious is to realize that no final conclusions have ever been reached or can ever be reached.

Halakha is the upshot of un-finalized beliefs, a practical way of living while remaining in theological suspense. In that way, Judaism doesn't turn into a religion that either becomes paralyzed in awe of a rigid tradition, or evaporates into a utopian reverie. This dynamic can only come about when Jewish beliefs consist of fluid matter, which halakha then turns into a solid substance. The purpose of halakha is to chill the heated steel of exalted beliefs and turn them into pragmatic deeds without allowing the inner heat to be cooled off entirely. Jewish beliefs are like arrows, which dart hither and thither, wavering as though shot into the air from a slackened bowstring, while halakha must be straight and unswerving but still adaptable.

Indeed, we should be careful not to make faith into an intellectual issue. It is much more than that. The moment we look down on those who continue to have unshakable faith, considering them primitive in face of the many challenges, we have overlooked an important dimension of real faith. Besides the fact that such an attitude reflects arrogance, it also misses an important point: Faith is always more than just thinking about faith. Yes, those people who have lost their faith yet still hold on to it, honestly attempting by way of discussion and study to give their lost faith a new shape, should be deeply respected. At the same time, we should not forget that they are searching for something that the "simple" believer already has.

When we place the reflection on faith higher than the direct experience of faith, we are involved in a purely intellectual endeavor. The search for faith can only be genuine when it is personal, deep, and emotional, and the intellect only plays a small part. The accompanying qualities must be humility, the notion of inadequacy, and a strong urge to find authentic faith. Genuine belief is a way of living, not an academic undertaking. It is an experience in which the whole of the human being is engaged.

Doubt only appeals to the intellect. The intellectual approach to faith is always a barer form of existence than faith itself. The reason is obvious. Besides our critical assessment, the other human faculties remain idle. Trust, hope, love and the notion that one is part of something bigger no longer play a role. Instead, life becomes nothing more than only itself. When doubt and skepticism are no longer the most important faculties through which one seeks religious faith, only then is it possible to actually find it. Skepticism, though it has its place, should not be at the center of one’s search. In today’s climate there is a certain gratification in going to the extremes of genius and brilliance until one nearly loses that which one would like to discover. Intellectual thought and scientific discovery can never cover the sum total of the inner life of man. When one prays, one is involved in something that the intellect can never reach. When one studies Torah and hears its divine voice, it becomes something different than what academic study can ever achieve. It is in a separate category, which is closed to the solely scientific mind.

It is vital that we see these facts for what they are. Only when we realize that intellectual certainty is not the primary path toward finding religious truth, will we be able to deal with our new awareness that the transitional phase we now experience has great purpose and has to be part of our religious struggle and identity. It won’t be easy. Novelty, as always, carries with it a sense of violation, a kind of sacrilege. Most people are more at home with that which is common than with that which is different. But go it must.

God has relocated.

[1] Moreh Nevukhim, Part 2, chapter 25.
[2] Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merill Co., 1954), 94.
[3] Regarding the claim that the full text of the Torah is divine, or that miracles are possible, it is a matter of debate whether these are completely denied by scientific knowledge or not. Many of these claims are not solely within the sphere of pure science. They touch on matters related to the philosophy of science or in the case of Bible criticism, to literary interpretation and the reliability of archeological findings.
[4] Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 234.
[5] I borrow this comparison from my dear friend Professor Yehudah Gellman of Ben Gurion University. See his God’s Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us: A Contemporary Doctrine of the Jews as the Chosen People (Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah Series, Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012).
[6] Berakhot 43b.
[7] See Avraham Joshua Heschel’s many essays in his The Insecurity of Freedom, Essays on Human Existence, New York: Schocken Books, 1972.
[8] Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 268.
[9] George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text.” Salmagundi No. 66 (Winter–Spring 1985), 12.
[10] Devarim 30:14.
[11] See the Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, chapter 10.
[12] German for "from childhood to adulthood." Professor G. Heymans, Inleiding in de Metaphysica (Dutch), [Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik in German] (Groningen, the Netherlands: Wereldbiblioteek, 1933), Introduction by Professor Leo Polak.
[13] Samuel Butler and Francis Hackett, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (Nabu Press, 2010), 27.
[14] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 2010), 81.
[15] David Weiss Halivni, "Professor Saul Lieberman z.l." Conservative Judaism, vol. 38 (Spring, 1986), 6–7.

Four idealistic religious social activists started making the rounds among rabbis and other religious leaders four years ago, to see if perhaps they were missing something. Assaf, Chili, Efrat and Shmuli had grown up together in Jerusalem, been through the religious youth movements, yeshivas, army — but they were troubled. Times in Israel were difficult. Of course they were concerned about the recent Intifada and the security situation, but they were equally concerned about internal social problems: steadily rising poverty, trafficking in women, employment rights. These problematic trends were beginning to characterize their beloved country. And they could not understand why there were no organized efforts or cries of protest from the official rabbinic community, or efforts spearheaded by their own religious spiritual mentors. Where was the voice of Judaism on these issues? Thus was born the concept for a new organization in Israel, Bema'aglai Tzedek, to address the numerous social ills in Israeli society in connection with the millenia-old Jewish ethical traditions, which speak of Tzedek and Tikun Olam. These young and dynamic religious activists strongly believe that Jewish tradition has essential ideas to contribute to the current socio-economic discourse in Israeli society.

And this organization is making waves. Slowly, some rabbis are starting to acknowledge and try to deal with these issues. But why so few, and where were their voices beforehand, and where are their colleagues’ voices now, both here in Israel and in North America?

In Reform synagogues throughout North America, the voices from the pulpits talk about social justice, civil rights and other such issues. Why are these basic humanitarian issues not being regularly addressed from Orthodox pulpits? Surely humanitarian ideas do not conflict with deep-rooted Jewish values. Where is our concern for the commandments regarding social justice repeated many times in the Torah, such as "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or orphan" (Ex. 22:21-2), or "If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in any of your towns within your land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be"(Deut. 15:7-8).

I don't pretend to have answers to why the religious community has separated itself from issues relating to civil rights and social justice. In the current socio-political environment these values have become associated with the secular left. But it is unclear why that has happened. Assaf Banner, the director of Bema'aglai Tzedek, said that when he and his friends started talking the social justice lingo, people were surprised: “We didn't fit the stereotype of the secular Tel Aviv Ashkenazi with round wire glasses…."

When I discussed these issues with a colleague of mine, an intelligent young woman who grew up in the Reform movement in upstate New York, but is now a newly married, religious, head-covering Jerusalemite, she theorized that “halakhic imperatives emanating from the rabbinic tradition stipulate various laws aimed at preserving Am Yisrael, using the strategy of social isolation: inflexible kashrut laws, prohibitions against consuming alcohol in ‘mixed company’, etc. This isolationist approach has given way to the development of an Orthodoxy that is self-absorbed, ethnocentric, and the sociological backdrop to the stunted growth of social justice initiatives in the Orthodox community.” This seems to me a very important insight into our present situation, coming from someone who once sat on the other side of aisle, as it were. And it echoes certain thoughtful academic voices as well. As Menachem Lorberbaum, Chair of Hebrew Culture Studies at Tel Aviv University and a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, told me: "Part of the problem is that there is no sense of Jewish peoplehood in Orthodoxy, no appreciation of the depth of diversity of Jewish people." He sees Orthodoxy as very insular, and legitimacy has become more important than substance.

Can it be that the Orthodox establishment is more worried about punctilious and zealous application of halakha, and keeping Jews separate from the rest of the world, than about enacting the elemental responsibility to uphold the dignity and basic rights of the disadvantaged and the weak? Why do the two have to be mutually exclusive?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that the Orthodox religious community shows no concern for others. On the contrary, the commitment of Orthodox Jews to Hesed and Tzedakah is on whole exemplary. The ultra-Orthodox community takes care of its own, in a well-organized fashion, somewhat reminiscent of the institutionalized welfare-community infrastructure outlined in chapter one of the Talmudic Tractate Baba Batra. However, it seems that although the Orthodox community certainly practices Tzedakah with a laudable passion, the institutionalized and almost bureaucratic welfare state described in the Talmud has not been adopted.

There is a difference between Tzedakah and Tzedek. This distinction becomes critical in the context of the Jewish State. Tzedakah helps to ease an immediate urgent situation in a specific case, but does nothing to solve the deep-rooted social ailments which are the root of the problem.

Rambam's Tzedakah ladder is well-known. The highest degree of charity, the 8^th level, requires strengthening the hand of one’s poor Jewish brother and giving him a gift or [an interest-free] loan, or even entering into a business partnership with him. In other words, we must help a poor person to get on his feet, so that he can break his dependency and progress on his own. In the context of the Jewish State, perhaps there is a level that is even higher – a 9^th level which requires an institutionalized effort to eradicate poverty, to budget sufficiently to help the weakest citizens adequately, to enforce minimum wages and affordable health-care.

In the summer of 2003, when a series of budget cuts in Israel slashed welfare allocations, the single parents were among those hit hardest. Their summer vigil in an improvised tent-city outside of the Knesset attracted tremendous attention from the media and ultimately from the decision-makers themselves. But where was the organized rabbinic response as this group of (mainly) women fought for the State to help them provide food and shelter for their children? There was silence. This proposed 9th level requires proactive efforts for social change: if the government does not act, its citizens must raise their voices in protest; civil society organizations should not take upon themselves the State's responsibilities.

At the recent opening of a new Center for the Study of Philanthropy at Hebrew University in mid-March, the keynote lecture was delivered by Professor Leslie Lenkowski from the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Although he did not refer to a 9^th rung on the Rambam ladder, he did speak of the 8^th rung, using the classic metaphor of "not just giving the fish, but teaching to fish, and… perhaps even reforming the fishing industry." Interestingly, in the second chapter of Baba Batra, in a discussion of fair business practice, detailed regulations are provided relating to the fishing industry that essentially allow for equal access to fish for all fishermen. This chapter could well be cited by Orthodox voices of social conscience here in Israel and abroad. North American Orthodox philanthropists who generously give to Israel tend to have a knee-jerk, negative reaction to social advocacy organizations – even while fervently supporting the soup kitchens, or their favorite Yeshivas and orphanages. Those causes are indeed extremely important and worthy; but is the exclusive focus on such service-providing charities really in the spirit of Rambam's highest rung?

Bema'aglai Tzedek is running numerous programs to try to wake up the religious Jewish community to the need for strong Jewish advocacy, Tzedek (and not just Tzedakah). Together with Bet Morasha they run a Bet Midrash Program that brings Rabbis and religious leaders together to study texts and develop Jewish responsa to social issues. Rabbi Benny Lau, nephew of the former Chief Rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, has been one of the main teachers in this program. Another leader active in these efforts is Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, Rosh Yeshiva of the Yeshivat Hesder in Petach Tikva and one of the leaders of "Tzohar" (an Israel-based group of religious Zionist Rabbis trying to shape the Jewish identity of the State of Israel, according to principled understanding and moderation). Rabbi Cherlow recently published an article in a journal, “An Introduction to Questions of Social Justice in Halakha."

Among its many interesting activities, Bema'aglei Tzedek's most innovative move thus far has been the creation of the "social seal" (Tav Hevrati). This plays on the authority and status of the required Kashrut certificate. Businesses (mainly restaurants), have to live up to certain standards of employment rights, disabled access, minimum wage, in order to receive the "social seal," which they are then entitled to display in their window. The "social seal" in Israel has caught on and is now prevalent in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Kfar Saba and Be'er Sheva. In the same way that customers routinely ask to see a Kashrut certificate before buying products or services, they may now confirm that a business has conformed to the standards of the the social seal. As Assaf Banner asks, "Shouldn't an observant Jew check first that the eatery has this social seal and then the Kashrut certificate? After all, the social seal concerns requirements that are Torah laws, and a number of the Kashrut standards came only later, as rabbinical laws."

It seems so obvious. I recently came across an article written by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein in 1971, titled "Kosher Lettuce." The reference was to the boycotts on agricultural products that were being harvested by underpaid and abused migrant workers. Given the human rights violations of these workers, he argued that the lettuce was not kosher. Kashrut here has a moral basis. To drive the point home, Rabbi Lookstein cited a moving Hassidic story: “It is told of the great Hassidic sage and saint, Rabbi Simha Bunim, that he once visited a matzah factory and saw the workers there being exploited. ‘God,’ he exclaimed, ‘the gentiles falsely accuse us in a vicious libel of using the blood of gentiles in our matzah. That is false. But we do spill Jewish blood into our matzah--the blood of the exploited workers.’ He thereupon issued a most unusual ruling. He declared the matzah produced under exploitative conditions as being ‘forbidden food,’ i.e. non-kosher.”

In order for social justice to return (and I say return, because I do think it was there in the early stages of the Jewish community, and certainly present in the times of Hillel), there has to be a combination of bottom-up and top-down efforts. The grassroots efforts to establish a society on the great pillar of social justice are many and impressive, but the religious leadership has to get on board, relentlessly teaching their constituents about the importance of social justice as it affects society at large.