National Scholar Updates

To Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo:

Dear Rabbi:

Your article the Spring 2010 issue of Conversations on “The Nature and Function of Halakha in Relation to Autonomous Religiosity” has inspired quite a bit of discussion in our family. Your comments have hit squarely home and crystallize the religious anomie of several of our recently married children. You issued a passionate call for responsible rabbinic leadership to meet the challenges of a less-than-dynamic halakhic process. This is vital to the authentic continuity of our traditions. Please grant me a few moments for a layman’s reflections on this matter.

Halakhic decision-making, since the sealing of the Talmud by Ravina and Rav Ashei in the fifth century C.E., has always been the province of local rabbinic authorities. The subtleties required for rendering the decision of complex issues can only be appreciated by the local Rabbi. The local socio-cultural context provides the framework for a proper and relevant understanding of the issues involved. This feature of our halakhic process has kept our oral law perpetually dynamic and eternally relevant. The application of legal principles to changing local circumstance and nuance demands continuous adaptation. What may be right for one local community at a particular time and place may not necessarily be right for another congregation at the same time but in another region or country. How the values and principles of Torah are applied depends on the subtleties of social context.

The convergence of several unique factors in the broad social context of our information age has indeed bred the paralysis of halakhic evolution. To borrow a term from a popular author and journalist, I call these factors “flatteners”—“Halakhic Flatteners”

1. The emergence of the “professional rabbi” in combination with other flatteners detailed below is probably the most important factor. The Sephardic tradition as detailed by Maimonides calls for community rabbis to serve the local community while pursuing their own professional or commercial career goals. Accepting fees for formal positions as “judge” or halakhic decisor was frowned upon. Yes, valid arguments against that position are made for today’s rabbinic leaders, especially in a world that is increasingly specialized. However, Maimonides’ point needs to be understood. The politics of deciding how to apply law need to be removed—decisions have to be rendered with complete INDEPENDENCE. The current legal decisions of the “professional rabbi” are not and cannot be free of political considerations. The dictates of serving synagogue boards as well as of supporting large yeshiva study centers promotes the practice of what we can label “political/commercial rabbinics” rather than practical rabbinics. Halakhic decision making becomes hostage to the necessity of maintaining crowd/communal popularity and raising money for rabbinic institutions to sustain salaried rabbinic positions rather than what may be necessarily “legally correct.”

2. Instant global communication - Any creative or innovative practice of any remote community is now instantly communicated. It is then subject to analysis and critique by the “professional rabbis” whose interest may very likely be the promotion of their own authority, their own ideology and their own local and vocal constituencies. The political and peer pressure of e-mails, blogs and the internet can suffocate innovation and inhibit the correct application of law to circumstances that may demand a different rabbinic approach than the norm. Flat and politicized worlds cannot accommodate the flexibilities needed for dealing with the subtleties of local social context.

3. Mass education—With lifestyles focused on leisure rather than survival, more than ever before, more people are engaging in religious study. This establishes an exciting base for intellectual ferment and the possibility of a true Jewish Renaissance—unseen for centuries. However, there is nothing more dangerous than a little knowledge, especially when politicized in a world of instant communication. When all of these flatteners combine with the next flattener, the results are explosive.

4. The revolt against secularism and the concurrent rise of religious fundamentalism. This is an understandable reaction to the excesses of an indulgent society and an amoral culture. The constant bombardment of the individual with anti-traditional messages through every media portal can provide a justifiable basis for isolationism in ghettos. It is a rather natural reaction to the excesses of the age of greed and materialism (the 1980s and 1990s) and our new, in the words of President Obama, “culture of irresponsibility.”

5. The rate of change of the social condition has quickened. Women are now, for the most part, treated as equal in ability and opportunity to men. The nuclear family is under siege. Revolutions in the fields of medical and life sciences pose serious ethical and halakhic dilemmas. The major institutions that dominated society for millennia are withering. Indeed, the very premises of traditional cultural values are seriously challenged. Before the twentieth century, history was defined mostly by political and religious institutions. In the past century, this paradigm has changed. Technology, more than ever, is rapidly changing the institutional landscape. (an example: The Mideast revolutions and social media). In order to remain relevant, halakha must address these major and continuously changing social dynamics.

6. The paranoia in the Orthodox world created by Conservative and Reform Judaism (as well as the overwhelming success of assimilation.) The success of alternate forms of Judaism in nineteenth-century Europe and later in America has created a charged atmosphere among Orthodox Rabbinic circles that promotes instant overreaction to any creative or lenient halakhic decision. The defense of “tradition,” is paramount, whether the suggested practice or halakhic ruling even defies Torah law itself.

These six convergent forces have contributed to the paralysis of the world of halakha. Set within this petrifying framework, the current method of rabbinic decision making cannot address rapidly changing general and local needs. It cannot address subtleties and shies away from confronting the serious moral dilemmas that accompany a world changing faster than ever. It loses elasticity as well as its dynamic capability. As we have stated, it is subject to the many political/commercial dictates of a centralized and remote Ivory Tower of rabbinic authority, most of whose leaders have retreated into the world of Fundamentalism, where change is anathema. And those Rabbis who do attempt to resolve burning issues or deal with local needs are themselves burned in the process. Just look at the reactions to Rabbi Rackman, a”h,” on the aguna issue or Rabbi Avi Weiss on just about any issue.

Hence, Rabbi Cardozo, halakhic paralysis.

I would like to suggest that the solution to halakhic paralysis has to be halakhic. I propose that we respect the legal process set in place after the Talmud was sealed in the fifth century. The Rabbis determined that halakha must be locally applied; kal vaHomer (how much more so) in a world where the rates of change vary in its different social and local contexts, However, the current definition of a “local community” must be understood in terms of new 21st century understandings. Communities are no longer merely small towns, shtetls or even local city neighborhoods. Communities are today defined as groups of individuals with common interest. Mention the word “community” today and most people think of the concept of virtual community, social media, Facebook, and web blogs. In an age of leisure and mass transportation, mass education and global communication, I suggest that this definition be broadened.

The traditional physical neighborhoods of major urban centers and suburban enclaves can no longer be considered exclusively as local communities. Communities are now defined by activity or interest rather than exclusively by geography. There are gym and health club communities, golf clubs, dance clubs, and political clubs. Communal life itself previously was characterized by long hours of work, the nuclear non-working mother family, and a local house of worship. This image of a local community is history.

Therefore, the concept of halakhic rulings being rendered by LOCAL community rabbis must now respect the need for this expansion of the term “local community.”

Let me provide a concrete example:

Several years back I attended an unusual Saturday minyan on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was presented as an Orthodox service, where men and women sat separated by a mehitsah, in accordance with Orthodox custom. Otherwise, women were equal participants with men as Cantors, Torah readers and Torah olim. It felt funny to me at first, since my background is Sephardic Orthodox. I approached the young, bearded Orthodox Rabbi at the end of the service and inquired how he could halakhically justify this type of service. He answered that for this group, the egalitarian activity of the women is halakhically acceptable. He explained that the traditional reason of not allowing women to participate in the services is due to the concept of “kavod tsibbur,” or the fact that male congregants would not respect women as they would men, and that involving a woman in any part of the service would detract from the majesty of the service. This particular community of individuals defined their attendance at that minyan by their commitment to egalitarian principles. Therefore, the issue of kavod tsibbur, preventing women from participation alongside men in their minyan, just did not apply.

Here we have the halakhic process totally respected with complete authenticity but non-traditional practice.

Perhaps the evolution of halakha, which eternalizes our Torah and its values, has to respect the new expanded definition of “community” and allow the time honored practice of having “local” rabbis properly posek for their new communities.

Consider the results of an exposure of our new young Jewish “activity/interest” communities to halakhic principles and their new “local” and contemporary application (as to why they might differ from other halakhic communities). This would not only inspire active inter and intra community debate, but stimulate new understandings of halakha and a new appreciation for committing and living our sacred halakha directed lifestyle.

In addition to a re-definition of “local community,” perhaps our leading rabbis should consider the use of twenty-first century technology to mitigate or “unflatten” some of our previously detailed “flatteners.” Perhaps our leading rabbis can develop a “Virtual Sanhedrin.” By that I suggest the development of a secure blog site where rabbis who share a common philosophy and respect for each other, can debate issues honestly, openly and in the cool, calm medium of a confidential and secure blog site, with controlled access only by this Rabbinic group . Furthermore, i suggest that the debates conducted over this web blog be done anonymously, with specific reference numbers assigned to each rabbi who would present their issues by numerical code. For important issues, this medium can provide the time to flesh out complications and develop more authentic legal rulings. The flatteners of rabbinic commercial/political issues, of larger than life personalities, and of instant publicity would be much more controlled. Real issues can be thoughtfully addressed and more honestly debated. This healthier debate process will result in more meaningful halakhic consensus and decision making. The fact that decisions are arrived at anonymously by group consensus will also provide political cover for any specific congregational or professional rabbi. I think the Rabbis of the Babylonian Academies, would have loved these incredible modern tools of communication for enhanced debate.

Perhaps this very same communication technology can be used to promote learning and to stimulate debate amongst active and involved community laymen. The e-mailing of “halakhic issue alerts” from the local community rabbi can become:
1. a terrific teaching tool
2. a confidential polling tool for the Rabbi to feel out public opinion prior to issuing local decisions.
(a halakhic ruling should not be openly promoted if the community would not respect it :
ex. A young adult singles mixed dancing in Orthodox synagogues during the 1950s and 1960s)
3. a community energizer on large, common and serious issues.

Imagine the ferment and excitement generated by exploring an issue like “organ donation.”
(Fragile—handle with care)

Indeed, in a rapidly evolving, technologically developed world, certain halakhic questions require specific technical expertise. Here, perhaps, rabbis of like philosophy and mutual respect should consider establishing virtual panels of specialists to deal with technical issues. Let us call this “the specialist blog.”

The panels can debate internally (a la the previous “virtual Sanhedrin” model) and, in turn, e-mail the rabbi who faces the difficult question.

I am sure this type of process currently functions in an informal manner. Why not formalize it and publicize its structure to the group of rabbis of like philosophy. I can suggest panels on:
1. Medically Assisted Conception and Birth
2. Living Wills and the Ethics of Artificial Life Support
3. The Digital Home on Shabbat

Lastly, and rather simply, why not utilize the medium of large flat screen streaming video and or DVD to present the positions and/or debates of rabbinic Superstars. Imagine a remote far flung community gathering in a synagogue to hear a presentation of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Pluralism and its impact on halakha.

We have here several 21st century platforms that can truly energize local synagogue life as well as stimulate adult learning and commitment to a relevant halakhic process.
If I may summarize some of these ideas:
a. an expansion of the term “local community”
b. the “Virtual Sanhedrin”
c. the “specialist” blog
c. “Halakhic Issue Alerts”
d. the “Streaming Superstar”

These simple ideas can be part of an overall process to liberate halakha from its paralyzing flatteners. Rabbi Riskin offers a wonderful spin to the classic Talmudic episode of “the Tanur of Achnai.” This story deals with halakhic authority and ends with God chuckling as His support for the minority opinion on a halakhic issue is overturned by a rabbinic court. The classic Divine response is “Nitzhuni Banai”—“My children have defeated my argument.” Rabbi Riskin answers that perhaps we should read the text as “Netzahuni Banai “—as God saying “You have eternalized me”—that by making law subject to rabbinic decision making “You have kept my law eternally relevant.”

Rabbi Cardozo, we salute your inspired call to restore halakhic dynamism. As you have pleaded so forcefully, our rabbinic leadership must respond now with new methods of decision making to keep our Torah eternally relevant.

Response to Eli Haddad:

Dear Eli,
I read your observations with great interest. While I fully agree with your thesis that halakha has been flattened for all the reasons you give, and while I admire the solutions you suggest, I believe there is another, much more fundamental problem we need to deal with. Unless we do, your solutions will not have the result you so desperately seek.

We are confronted with a terrible misunderstanding of what halakha is really all about and what it wants to accomplish.
It is not just on the practical level that halakha is flattened, but also on the ideological, religious level. We have separated halakha from a conscious awareness of God. Our halakhic living has ignored Him. We are more concerned about the specifics of halakha than we are about our existential relationship with God. No doubt this is partially the fault of the halakhic process itself. Even the Sages, when discussing these issues, rarely mention God in their conversation, making it very legal and often dry in a religious sense. The reason for this is obvious. There was no need to mention God in all these debates because they were thoroughly touched by His presence, just as water touches every part of our body while we are swimming. One does not have to mention water when completely immersed in it. God was the great background music to anything the Sages felt and said. In their view God was a challenge, not a mere notion. They had a trembling sense of the “hereness” of God. They realized that they were more known by God than God could ever be known by them.

In modern times, this religious experience has been lost on us. We study Talmud and halakha in ways that have been deeply affected by the secular environment in which we live. God-consciousness has left us. The majority of us are no longer God-intoxicated. Most if not all of our halakhic authorities have also fallen victim to this sad situation without even being aware of it. They decide on halakhic matters while God is not actively present. This does not mean that they do not believe in God or that they have no yirath shamayim, but it does mean that they are not stirred by His presence while dealing with halakhic issues. How often is God mentioned in sheeloth u-teshuvoth?

One needs to have a religious experience while deciding the halakha. Rabbis do not realize that one can only render a halakhic decision while simultaneously experiencing the wonder of life, the astonishment of existence and the marvel of Judaism. halakha can only be decided on and lived when we ask the question: How are we able to, even dare to, live in His presence? Halakha is a protest against taking life for granted. One of its aims is to make us aware that there is no commonplace, no moment of insignificance, and no deed of triviality. Halakha is the attempt to undo the attitude of “everydayness,” but it can only work when we are fully conscious of this impediment and realize that there is no way to understand the meaning of halakha unless we make this goal our most important concern. If the posek (halakhic arbiter) does not realize that this is the function of the halakha and that this should be his ultimate goal when making a decision, his attempt to lay down the halakha is futile.

The problem we face is not realizing that halakhic living may become, if it hasn’t already, a form of avodah zarah (idol-worship). When we think that by following halakhic demands we will automatically draw closer to God, we are guilty of self-deception. We do not realize that we often use halakha as a way to escape Him. We believe that as long as we are living a halakhic life we do not have to make a supreme effort to draw closer to Him through the development of our God-consciousness. But this cannot be done by halakha. It needs to come from awe, from radical amazement, as Abraham Joshua Heschel called it. Only then is the halakha able to develop and deepen these notions.

This, however, is no longer part of Jewish Education. We have allowed the spirit of halakha to be flattened and have incorporated this dullness into the way we teach our children Judaism. We have made Judaism common instead of an astonishing experience. No wonder many of our young people drop their Judaism!

Only after we have cultivated this God-awareness can we start speaking about proper halakhic observance. Its goal is to take this cognizance and introduce it into every level of our lives. The fact that we see an unhealthy emphasis on rituals, but a disregard for matters that relate to ethical standards, proves my point. Violence, a severe dislike for non-Jews, and financial corruption within the Orthodox community, all of which are not even properly and fiercely condemned by our rabbinical authorities, are the obvious result of this escape from God in the name of halakha. If Orthodox Jews would really experience the awesome presence of God, how would it be possible for them to engage in these practices? (Is it not most remarkable that rabbis who suggest slight changes in Jewish rituals for the sake of greater religious devotion are condemned as heretics and as non-Orthodox, while those so-called Orthodox Jews who violate major tenets on the ethical side of Judaism are still considered to be Orthodox?)

When conversing with yeshiva students I often ask them how many years they have spent learning in yeshiva and how many masekhtot (talmudic tractates) they have studied. Once they tell me that they have mastered a good portion of the Talmud, I ask them what they would answer if a secular Jew, or a non-Jew, would ask them why they are religious. Nearly all of the students respond in total indignation and are completely taken back by this question. They have no answer. When I ask them how is it possible that after so many years of intensive study of religious texts they are still incapable of responding, the usual answer I receive is they have never thought about these questions, nor have their teachers ever discussed these matters with them. Topics such as religion, God and the meaning of life are taboo in many yeshivoth. The half hour spent on mussar literature is, for the most part, nothing but lip service. These topics are treated as hukath hagoyim, meant for religious non-Jews, and too inferior for Jews to discuss. On several occasions I have challenged their teachers or rashei yeshivoth about this. Most of them, although not all, avoided my questions by telling me that more gemara learning or “another tosafoth” would do the trick. They were sincerely convinced that this was the solution to the problem. When I showed them the inadequacy of such an answer and kept pressuring them, it became crystal clear that they themselves were deadly scared of these topics. The policy was to ignore these issues and bury one’s head in the sand. When their students abandon yeshiva and, in today’s parlance, “go off the derekh,” they are totally surprised. But is this not obvious? What else should we expect?

God’s voice needs to be heard rising from the text, but we have long stopped teaching our students to hear it. It has been replaced with ceremonies, “observance” and humroth (stringencies), but not with holy deeds. God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance, said Heschel.

In fact, many yeshivoth will skip—and not without pride—all non-halakhic texts, such as the aggadoth, which in fact deal with the most important dimension of halakhic living—the religious transformational purpose of the halakha. By ignoring these texts, they are sending a message to their students, not only that this part of the Talmud is inferior but that authentic religiosity is of little value. Teachers do not seem to realize that although halakha may be able to inform a man how to act in any given situation, it cannot provide insight into the quality of a given act, nor can it provide a sense of spiritual change that is the result of the performance of, or adherence to, a specific dictate. The power of aggadic and other non-halakhic material is in preventing mechanical observance and freeing man’s spirit, as well as in suggesting what one’s religious aspirations should be all about. Halakha is only the minimum of these religious aspirations. Religious non-halakhic material allows the unseen to enter the visible world and was formulated to give man the ability to go beyond the realms of the definable, perceivable and demonstrable.

Methods such as the Brisker approach to Talmud learning—today immensely popular in many yeshivoth—have in fact made this experience nearly impossible. While “hakiroth” and even “pilpul” may give spice to the discussion, they are unable to draw the student’s attention to the existential meaning of what religiously needs to be accomplished through the engagement with these texts. This is a tragedy of the first order, for which Orthodoxy pays a heavy price.
Precisely that which needs to be its most important goal has been totally dismissed and buried under the sand of halakhic discourse.

Another most important issue, which should be central to halakhic conversation, is the Jews’ obligation to be “a light unto the nations.” The Jewish people have been called upon by God to be the instrument through which He enters into the lives of all people. The universal purpose of Am Yisrael is to inspire and to transform. This has serious consequences for how halakha should be applied and, above all, how it should be taught. Nearly no halakhic authority seems to make this a central point when dealing with halakhic issues. Most halakha is decided by focusing solely on the exclusive needs of the Jewish people. Universalistic issues are ignored. While some profound Hassidic thinkers and people like Chief Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook dealt with these issues when writing non-halakhic works, I can think of only Hakham Benzion Uziel, the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, who incorporated the universalistic mission as expressed by the prophets in his way of halakhic decision making. (See also Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel’s book: Loving Truth and Peace: The Grand Religious Worldview of Rabbi Benzion Uziel, Jason Aronson, Inc., Northvale, New Jersey, Jerusalem, 1999)

Most present-day halakha is self-centered and often under the pressures of our galuth experience and defensiveness. (See Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits’s Hahalakha, Koha V’Tafkida.) What is urgently needed is prophetic halakha.

One of the most serious complaints by young searching Jews, when studying halakha, is the absence of the notion of mission and concern for the rest of mankind. This flattens the halakha in ways that do great damage to its very image.
All that is mentioned in this letter is only the tip of the iceberg. Mainstream halakhic Judaism will become more and more irrelevant in the years to come, except for a small but growing community of religious Jews. But the more they will dedicate their lives to halakha, the more the rest of our people will be detached from it, for the very reasons the religious Jews get more involved: the stabilization of and self-satisfaction with halakhic living. halakha has become a platitude instead of being a great spiritual challenge. Our thinking is behind the times.

Spring 2013

We are very pleased to announce that beginning June 1, 2013, Rabbi Hayyim Angel will serve as National Scholar of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals. A remarkable scholar and teacher, Rabbi Hayyim Angel will dramatically increase the programming of our Institute by offering classes, serving as scholar in residence in communities throughout North America, organizing public conferences, conducting seminars for Judaica teachers…and more. Along with his work for our Institute, he will be expanding his teaching at Yeshiva University.

This dramatic new development has been made possible through the generosity of major supporters of our Institute who are also devoted admirers of Rabbi Hayyim Angel’s outstanding qualities as teacher and lecturer. This is a tremendous step forward in our Institute’s ongoing efforts to foster an intellectually vibrant, compassionate and inclusive Orthodox Judaism.

The well-known author, Naomi Ragen, recently wrote an article in praise of our Institute. “The truth is, something good is happening in Orthodoxy….The Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals is one of the prime movers of the Orthodox Spring….The Institute has been publishing an influential journal called ‘Conversations’ in which distinguished Orthodox rabbis and personalities express a wide cross-section of eye-opening opinions…encouraging a new kind of leadership.” Rabbi Hayyim Angel typifies this new kind of wise and creative leadership.

As we enter this new stage in the life of our Institute, we invite your added support and commitment.  Together, we can move forward to shape a better Jewish future.

SPECIAL BONUS:  Those who contribute $165 or more before June 20, 2013, will receive a complimentary copy of Rabbi Hayyim Angel’s new book surveying the Prophets and Writings of the Bible; Contributors of $1000 or more will also receive a copy of Dr. Pinchas Polonsky’s new book of commentaries on the Arfilei Tohar of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook; Contributors of $5000 or more will also receive an additional special publication.

All contributors will receive the satisfaction of being the Institute’s partners in promoting an intellectually vibrant, compassionate and inclusive Orthodox Judaism.

Shalom uvrakha,

Rabbi Marc D. Angel

Poet Robert Bly speaks of two periods of “opening” in human life, roughly between 18 and 23 years of age, and then again sometime in one’s mid-40s. The first of these coincides with our college years, a time of notable openness to new ideas, new ways. It was as a freshman at Yeshiva College that I was introduced to serious religion, and I became an enthusiastic participant. My engagement lasted only five years. I was very much in love with the Orthodox life, the practices, and the learning. But for better or worse I had a philosophical conscience.

I entered Yeshiva in 1960. Having no substantial Jewish education--I don’t count the horrors of pre-bar mitzvah Hebrew School--entered (what was then called) JSP, the Jewish Studies Program. The program was led and inspired by Rabbi Morris Besdin, a wonderful human being, gifted educator, and incisive interpreter of the Ramban. Rabbi Besdin was strikingly undogmatic; he loved good, even impossible, questions, so long as they were the product of honest probing. That Orthodox religion could be a source of such intellectual richness was something I never expected—and equally so, the deep spirituality in the air. I felt as if I had come home and to something I had not known to exist.

At the same time I was troubled by the ambitious truth claims of Orthodoxy. Beginning with belief in God and continuing from there, I was less than sure about any of it. Philosophy¾something equally new, equally wonderful ¾was of great help here. My introduction was provided by a visiting student from the University of Toronto, Sydney Goldenberg. There were lots of wonderful late nights in Ruben dorm talking through the thorny questions of faith.

As my engagement with traditional Jewish life intensified, and especially as I was introduced to the joys of Talmud, my theological worries fell into the background. I simply loved the life, the learning, and the community. I spent three years in JSP, and then moved to Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein’s shiur in the regular yeshiva program. Rav Lichtenstein modeled what I took to be a very advanced form of religious engagement: intellectual rigor combined with an almost breathtaking humility. I felt a sense of privilege learning in his presence, not to speak of under his guidance. Religion, for Rav Lichtenstein, enhanced the human project; serious religion and serious humanism—a dream.

The Orthodox world to which I was exposed suited my political and social instincts pretty much perfectly. This was in the early 1960s, before many of us were awakened to issues about the engagement of women. But the atmosphere I lived in¾others at YU lived in different worlds¾exuded a sense of fairness and decency, a sense that serious human concerns would never be dismissed in the name of religion. Looking back, it was a world of the 1960s (minus the excesses of that period), and Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik was its inspiration and spokesperson, a golden age of Modern Orthodoxy.

After five years of college¾I had extended college to devote time to Talmud¾I entered the semikha program and the Kollel. But for reasons or causes that I only partly understand, my theological concerns were again becoming prominent. The summer after college and before semikha I was teaching Talmud at YU’s Camp Morasha by day and obsessing by night about theology. By the end of the summer, I knew that I had to leave the semikha program. I had thought through (and under and over) my belief in God to the extent that, as I would have put it, (and this is only a little embarrassing) a just God would understand why I could not believe.

I started dating Barbara Lipner during my Yeshiva College days. Our families were next-door neighbors in Spring Valley, NY; we had met when I was 13 and she was eight. The Lipners were the only Orthodox people in the neighborhood and I spent many Shabbat meals with them. When I left religious life Barbara and I parted ways but then unparted them a short time later. Our marriage¾now 44 years old--was respectful of our religious differences and mutually supporting. Still, our differences, and especially raising children in the light or shadow of such differences, required discussion, work, attention.

And then, in my 40s--Bly’s second opening--religion exercised its magic a second time and I became a real ba’al t’shuvah. (I refer here not to fervor but quite literally to a return to something I had left.) Not that I had resolved my philosophic issues. But life was taking me in new directions that were not to be denied, and I took on the project, personally and academically, of making sense of my religious life. [1] In writing this I am struck by the energy it must have taken, the sort of stress that is part and parcel of such life changes. But that’s not how I experienced it; it was a time of new beginnings.

My wife reports that there was a day she was walking past the dining room, saw me with tefillin in place and actually did a double take. And I can imagine what it seemed like to my philosophy colleagues: One day I was thinking about the philosophy of language--exploring concepts of reference and meaning¾the next day about God. Perhaps this is why God created tenure.

What sorts of things, what sorts of life changes, might move a 40-something atheist academic toward Orthodox life? I’ve addressed the question more fully in an essay, “Man Thinks, God Laughs,” in my book, The Significance of Religious Experience.[2] There I spoke about various life events that contributed to my change in religious orientation. Here I provide only a sense of the new direction of my thinking and feeling.

As a young man, taken with philosophy, Talmud, and such things, the life of intellect was very much a first love. So much so that while there was a place in my life for music, poetry was beyond the pale. I remember trying to read A. J. Heschel, the twentieth-century poet/philosopher of Jewish religious life; the work was inaccessible, far too poetic, too mushy. By my mid-40s, though, my Jungian shadow had begun to emerge: I found myself reading poetry, amazed that I could, stunned by its power. Heschel became available and with his help, religion in a new key. Rationality seemed to pale a bit; Heschel’s emphasis on awe seemed to capture something essential to the life of the spirit.

My atheism, if that’s what it was, did not involve any sort of disdain for religion. I remember arguing with a friend at Notre Dame about the matter. My practice was to use the adjective, “religious,” as a sort of honorific; he, with Marxist sensibilities, the opposite. My atheism was a metaphysical position; I couldn’t wrap my mind around the supernatural. But my finding spiritual power, meaning, solace in religious life didn’t feel like it had anything to do with belief in another realm, removed from the natural world. It’s true that God remained a puzzle; the central idea of religion was what I found the most difficult. But as I gained more than a foothold, it seemed more and more natural for the idea of God to be elusive. After all, I mused, there is a substantial religious intuition that when we try to think about God we are over our heads, out of our depth. Lots of people supposed that God has to come first, then some form of religious life. I was increasingly at home in religious life, even prayer; but lost about what it was I was talking about. Buber comments that it is one thing to talk to God, and quite another to talk about Him. One who attempts the latter reaches beyond his competence.[3]

And so my thinking about religion, about religious life, about God, began to take on a direction. I met Charles Taylor, a traditional Catholic, at a conference in which we both presented material. I asked him about the more theoretical aspects of his religious commitments. “I’m an orthodox Catholic,” he said. “I believe every bit of it, but I have not much of an idea what it means.” And this was not, I believed, an evasion. Overstated perhaps, under-explained, but not an evasion.

My first sojourn in Orthodoxy was a gift of hessed. I showed up in Washington Heights (of all places) and there it was, almost waiting for me. The second time around it was very different. The world had moved to the right in politics and religion. A kind of yeshivish Orthodoxy had become something of the norm, for which the black hat is not a bad symbol. A moment of confusion: early in this period my family was away at a Pessah hotel. I was walking through the corridor, to the shul, walking behind a group of men of various ages, all wearing large black hats. But their conversation was not that of b’nei Torah. I was learning my way around the new world.

The world seemed to have shrunk spiritually and ethically in the intervening period. In America, and noticeably among my students (largely Christian), religion grew stronger but seemed less open, more evangelical (or in our vocabulary, more eager for outreach). The religious humanism with which I had so strongly identified seemed less in evidence. Religion seemed both on the move and more identified with right wing political and social attitudes.

When I was at YU, the learning was at the core of my religious life. And returning to the life, I was eager to return to the learning. I never forgot how to learn; the mode of thinking was deeply inscribed. But Aramaic and the text of the Gemara was another thing; I had only been involved for a few years. And trying to find a havrutah was now a serious challenge.

Learning opportunities were in a way abundant; daf yomi, for example, had become widely available. But the learning that I knew and loved was very different. (Rabbi Moshe Chait, z”l, my former JSP teacher and mentor who had become the Dean of Jerusalem’s Yeshivat Chaftetz Chaim, later told me¾we were discussing daf yomi¾that he was once encouraged to take a speed reading class…and he failed.) Where was I to find a learning partner? I tried a Kollel of Lakewood mushmakhim in Los Angeles. Their offer¾if I wanted a one-on-one havrutah¾was for 20 minutes a week. Twenty minutes! A local rabbi in Los Angeles told me that he could arrange a havrutah. My excitement was short-lived¾seconds¾he immediately added that I would have to pay for it. Not only that but I had the sense that he was thinking about doing it himself. I felt quite confused by all this and seriously considered paying. But Rabbi Chait advised against it.

Rav Chait once told me that the boys in YU were nowadays “not like you fellows were.” I asked what he meant. “They don’t know how to challenge stubbornly, to fight their way to clarity.”[4] I said, “They are frum.” I was thinking about a conversation I had with my brother, about my son who was then about 10 years old and in Little League baseball. I was lamenting my son’s lack of aggressivness. “Of course he’s not so aggressive,” my brother said. “He’s so sweet. You can’t have it both ways.”

During our travels Barbara maintained her observance. Shabbat was a family holiday. But strange things happened in our super-galut world. If we ever make the movie, it will feature prominently a scene of me flagging down a bus in western Minnesota during the winter. It had a shipment of kosher meat from Minneapolis. Among our memorable Sukkot stories: My father-in-law built us a heavy wood sukkah in Minnesota. It protected us from the wind, but we still needed down parkas and a camping heater. The first year we spent there, before the advent our own sukkah, a colleague from biology built a sukkah more or less in Barbara’s honor; he said it was something he always wanted to do. I, severely lacking in the gifts of carpentry, helped him, as it were. A non-Jewish friend looked at the sukkah and commented that he now understood why they didn’t let Jews into the carpentry union. Some of the places we lived lacked anything like a Jewish community. Others lacked Orthodox shuls, or lacked ones in which Barbara felt comfortable.

In 1989, before my return to religious life, I moved from the University of Notre Dame to the University of California, Riverside. I was motivated by a lifelong dream, to help build a first-rate philosophy department and a graduate program that I would have enjoyed as a student. We moved to Redlands, California, a lovely orange-grove town, with more of a Jewish community than anything nearby and a small Conservative shul. My observance grew during this period; as time went on I would sometimes daven for the amud and sometimes give divrei Torah. But I was never at home in the Conservative environment, not even when I was barely observant. It seemed like thin soup with only a taste of the real thing.

After a number of years in Redlands, Barbara wisely saw that we needed a more focused Jewish community, and we moved to Los Angeles. By this time, I had found my way back to observance. We joined a Modern Orthodox synagogue that was halakhically, socially, and politically congenial. But as my engagement intensified, it became difficult to daven there. There was so much talking and the rhythm felt all wrong: rushing through the most important parts of the tefillah, taking enormous amounts of time for more conventionally appreciated aspects of the ritual. Tefillah in a local yeshiva was more satisfying, until it came time for the talk. So I would attend one synagogue and then the other.

For over 15 years, I have been going every summer to Jerusalem. It started with a letter I wrote to David Hartman, z”l, with whom I was acquainted from the old days. I explained my situation and expressed a desire to connect with his institution, especially with its annual philosophy conference. Hartman invited me to the next conference and I have been a regular ever since. Part of what we do at the Hartman conferences is to study talmudic texts; these are mined for their political or social content, but are not studied in depth. And so I sought a more intense learning experience during my visits to Jerusalem. And here a funny story ensues.

The year after my first Hartman conference, I contacted an old YU friend who was teaching at an Israeli yeshiva known to be on the liberal end of the Orthodox spectrum. I asked if I could come the following summer for 10 days to study at the yeshiva. The plan was to go to the Hartman conference and then to the yeshiva. I was told that I could … but a condition was imposed: that I did not speak to the students. It was a bit titillating to feel like a dangerous character. But what were they thinking? Would I use a discussion with students to insert questions in their minds? Why would I do that? A simple question addressed to me would have allayed such concerns. But life is strange, and I moved on.

Subsequently, an old and wonderful friend of mine from YU, Rabbi Yitzhak Frank, mentioned that he had met Rabbi Chait, who asked about me. I told Yitzhak the story of my recent experience. He laughed and volunteered to speak with Rabbi Chait about finding me a havrutah. Rabbi Chait also laughed, and then suggested that he would be happy to help. Strange that a more Hareidi yeshiva was less concerned about the danger I posed.

Thus began my havrutah with Rabbi Menachem Diamond, one that continues to this day. We spend two to three weeks every summer, two to four hours a day depending on his teaching demands. It began as a kind of tutorial. The first day I learned with Menachem was like basic training in the military. I was completely winded after an hour. But over the years, our learning, supplemented by various havrutahs in Los Angeles, has turned into something closer to a real learning partnership. It has become one of the most important highlights of my year.

My summers in Jerusalem, sometimes with Barbara but often alone, were and often are magical. The time often has a monastic quality: solitary and focused on the spiritual. Central has been my relationship with Yakar synagogue, especially with its late Rabbi, Mickey Rosen, z’l. Rosen was or is an unforgettable character, a man of spiritual intensity, so focused on his relationship to God and on the orientation, the stance that this relationship engendered, that he failed to notice many of the things that are prominent for many of us. Davening with him was a privilege and I think he taught me by example how it is to be done. He often davened be-yehidut in the mornings, to minor-keyed, second movements of classical compositions. His religious devotion stood alongside his deep commitment to an ethical stance that was inseparable from his relationship to God.

Twice a year he gave a sermon on unsere; on how our collective self-absorption blinds us to our ethical shortcomings. This would not have been problematic for his Jerusalem congregants, except that his case in point was the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, which he took to be unacceptable. He would lose a lot of people twice a year, but his musical gifts drew them close after a short time. The davening in Yakar was breathtaking, a few hundred people in a small enclosure, singing their hearts out in spontaneous harmony. The music began some years ago, I believe, as the sort of Carlebach minyan that has now become almost normative. But Mickey was not seeking a routine; he was seeking intimacy with God, and so the music was dynamic, alive to the state of his soul.

Here are two illustrative incidents. One Shabbat afternoon during se’udah shelishit (which at Yakar meant very little se’udah, but lots of intense music) an American (without a kippah) wandered into the darkened room. It was as if he were an actor playing the evil son of the Seder. “Why do you folks bother with all these little silly, picky details?” he asked. Rabbi Rosen looked at him, unruffled, “It’s the way we express our intimacy.” The comment took me a year or so to assimilate fully. It seemed to me to suggest a new way to think about the hukim, more generally about mitzvoth and their details the point of which are obscure.

A second incident: I gave a lecture at Yakar on the thought of Wittgenstein, a terribly difficult but profound thinker. Perhaps I should not have volunteered to do so, and I was not happy with the lecture; Wittgenstein is simply too difficult to try to unravel in an hour or so. During the question period, someone asked a penetrating question about which I needed to think. So I paused and thought about it a moment and responded. Several hours later, Mickey and I were visiting a friend in a hospital and the friend asked how my lecture went. I told him that I wasn’t happy with it. Mickey commented that he didn’t know about that, but that when someone asked a good question, I paused for a full 30 seconds before replying. The report was meant as a high compliment.

There is an aspect to my religious attitude, to my religious being, that I hesitate to highlight here. I am not an Israeli and so I speak very hesitantly about Israeli politics and policy. This is not because “if one doesn’t live there and share the risk, one should not offer opinions.” Indeed, when Ehud Barak sought compromise, right-leaning American Jews did not hesitate to criticize in very strong terms. They did so out of care and concern for Israel. My hesitation instead reflects my belief that unless one lives in the country, day by day, one’s perspective is partial and limited. When I am in Israel for even a few days, I feel an intangible sense of an enlarged perspective. So viewing things from a distance, even if it has some advantages, has serious disadvantages. At the same time, Israel is my other home, one that I love and honor, one about which I feel an enormous pride, a place whose history and policies are of great interest and concern. It has always seemed strange in the extreme that criticism of the State’s policies are seen by some as disloyal or as indicating a lack of support. This is not the place for the sort of extended discussion that the matter deserves. But I do feel an obligation to read, to think, to learn, to support policy where that seems right and to criticize forthrightly when that is what is called for.

A final word about the religious life for which I am so grateful, actually about the question of how to describe that life, and how to describe myself as a participant. There are some words, “Impressionism” comes to mind, that are introduced into the language by opponents or critics of the designated movement. “What you are doing is mere impressionism” was originally hardly a compliment. But the term stuck and eventually was adopted by those we call the Impressionists. “Obamacare” is another. And “Orthodoxy” in the context of religious Judaism is a third. The word literally means “correct belief” and its appropriateness to our religious ways seems to me questionable. Perhaps it’s no worse than “Judaism,” which suggests an ideology, an “ism.”

________________
[1] See my book, The Significance of Religious Experience (Oxford University Press, 2012), a collection of essays written over a 15-year period, all aimed at the project mentioned.
[2] Oxford University Press, 2012.
[3] As Larry Wright would put it.
[4] I’m reconstructing our conversation.

I.
Let’s start with “Elohenu she-baShamayim.” It’s a Passover counting song.

Most of the Sephardic songs I know I learned from my father. Until I was twelve we lived in Manhattan, but when we learned to be Americans by moving to the suburbs, we got a new activity in our lives—one that nearly all Americans practice day in and day out—regular bouts of riding in the car. For some reason, whenever my mother was driving with me over the Atlantic Beach Bridge from forays to the supermarket or to the bakery for a Jewish rye, the dashboard of our pea-green stub-nosed 1950 Dodge would smoke. The upward lilting smoke accompanied terribly tense conversations about hairstyles or other deeply painful mother-teenage daughter issues. Driving in general did not suit my mother’s Bronx Turkish temperament, if you’ll forgive a stereotype; it made her anxious; it did not come naturally to her. Within a few years, she rebelled entirely against the suburban life, and we moved back to the city, where she could go to Carnegie Hall or a museum in a civilized way, by subway or cab or on foot, and could get a job as a payroll secretary.

During the suburban interlude, my father, as the provider who had to drive from Long Island to his office in Brooklyn, had the better car, a 1958 two-toned blue Dodge with tailfins (!); he had acclimated far better to this American business of driving because he’d been doing it for years. As a man, he had no gendered driving dysfunction, although I did realize years later that all along he had this habit of putting his foot up and down on the gas pedal, as if he hadn’t really decided yet to go forward body and soul with being a high-fueled American. One summer I took a job at another branch of his company in Brooklyn, and so we had a steady two months of car-rides to Brooklyn and back, he dropping me off on the way to his office and later picking me up. This was a good routine. During these rides, father and daughter in a legitimate business enterprise could reap all the rewards of time together, and it was not surprising that he used the time to sing me songs, or to teach me how to say it’s raining in Italian (piove!), or the nursery rhyme by which he learned the French vowels in Turkey in 1909. The songs he loved to sing while driving were mostly those he learned from his mother. Sephardic songs belonged to women, because men sang the liturgy of prayers and blessings. Singing his mother’s songs called up all the pleasures of being a treasured son. He also loved his father’s blessings, and sang them at the table or at synagogue with conviction in a happy natural way, but those didn’t come up in the car.

We’ll get to the car songs shortly, but “Elohenu she-baShamayim” calls out to me first because, although my father learned it as a child, with all the excitement that followed, a world war in Turkey and the American twentieth century, he forgot the song until about 75 years after he learned it, when I commandeered my family to take a weekly class with me given by Joe Elias, the son of a Monastirli cantor, at the Hebrew Arts School on West 67th Street in Manhattan. My family included my Sephardi-looking Ashkenazi husband, our youngest babe in utero, and then in arms, and my father and mother. Although my mother had disdain for Turkish songs, which she’d grown up with from brittle heavy 78s played with unconscionable frequency by her parents, and rowdy Saturday night Turkish musical gatherings in the Bronx, she rose to join any activity that got the family together and brought social focus to the week. Our oldest son, at ten years old, along with our seven-year-old, managed to elude this weekly gathering. For an hour or so one night a week for two years, a bunch of us sat in a little circle learning songs that Joe remembered from his mother and collected from women informants. He’d been a District Superintendent for the Board of Education, but his passion was the repertoire of songs that his mother knew by heart, hundreds of them, and I gather—I found this out many years later—that Rabbi Marc Angel, descended from the Jews of Turkey and Rhodes, had encouraged him to perform and preserve. My cousin, Elliott Kerman showed up also, Elliott soon founding his well-known barbershop, doo-wop, and pop Rockapella; while his group’s usual fare was great snappy black t-shirt choreographed popular love and zombie songs, he was still drawn to the Zamir Chorale and Sephardic songs. Elliott’s grandmother—did he know this?— my father’s sister Esther, had been a beloved kanoun (zither) player in Turkey as a girl. We sat around Joe’s small classroom, listening to his stories, and singing through his self-published 20-page photocopied song-books, rich with Isaac Levy folk music collection borrowings and with black and white cartoonish covers showing a mustached oud player in a fez and a tall thin festively dressed woman holding high a tambourine. Joe mostly played the guitar, his foot on the chair, his guitar propped up on his knee, and especially after retiring from the Board of Education went on to play concerts here and in Israel, finding especially rapt audiences in Florida. It was a point of pride with him that he was an authentic Sephardic singer, as opposed to many people springing up on the concert circuit. He never said anything like purity of blood, of course, because of the phrase’s provenance in Spain, but the many Johnny-come-latelies who sang Sephardic songs earned a certain dismissal from him. He was the real thing.

And his son Danny played (and still plays) a superb Balkan clarinet. Joe never mentioned that a truly authentic Sephardic singer would be a woman. He had a corner on the market, and while he generously had us share in his glory—we performed at street fairs and at the Sephardic Home for the Aged—my dad and I did one song with my new baby in my arms, written up in, not the Huffington Post, but the Sephardic Homes News; and another day our middle son belted out a song with us on the Lower East Side. But Joe was the professional and a total pleasure, and we were the tag-alongs, and rightly so.

When Joe introduced a variant of Elohenu one evening, what a gift. Although my father’s version was slightly different, here was a cherished counting song thrillingly recovered from my father’s Ottoman era. My father ignored Joe’s wording, more complicated and less appealing than his own, but regained a piece of his Anatolian-peninsula childhood. And once he reclaimed it, there it was for the rest of us, for every Passover thereafter for our sons and, among others, the extended Elliott Kerman clan. I eventually created a brief song sheet for these seders; and as my father passed into his eighties and nineties, his eyebrows ever bushier, we kept up the validation of generations celebrating the same holiday with the same song. “Elohenu” didn’t displace “Dayenu,” or “God of Might,” or the Ashkenazic version of Mah nishtanah ha laila hazeh, but there it was:

Eloheno she-baShamayim, el dio nos yeva a Yerushalaim (the refrain, our God in the heavens will bring us to Jerusalem).
Kualo es el uno? Uno es el Kriador, Barukh Hu uBarukh shemo (bless Him, bless His name).
Kualo son los dos? Dos, Moshe y Aron, Uno es el Kriador, Barukh Hu uBarukh shemo.
Two is Moshe and Aaron. Three is our three fathers, four, the four mothers of Israel, five, the five books of the Law, six, six days of the week, seven, seven days counting Shabbat, eight, eight days for berit milah, nine, nine months of pregnancy, ten, ten commandments of the Law. The Spanish is so easy, the concepts so central to what matters in life, and no small thing too that the mamas numerically beat out the papas.

Kualo son los tres? tres, muestros padres son.
Kualo son los kuatro? kuatro madres de Israel.
Kualo son los sinco? sinco libros de la ley.
Kualo son los sesh? sesh dias de la semana.
Kualo son los siete? siete dias kon Shabbat.
Kualo son los ocho? ocho dias de berit milah.
Kualo son los mueve? mueve meses de la pregnada.
Kualo son los diez? diez komandimientos de la ley.

Going past verse ten has never been of interest; ten verses are enough. And my father never talked about the 50,000 Salonika Ladino-speaking Jews murdered in the Holocaust. He was very focused on the present, and if he read the December 6, 1983 New York Times article Joe handed out about the horror of that decimation, my father never mentioned it. For him, a song reclaimed was a happiness reclaimed. Incidentally, I added to the song sheet the Ladino chant, when you hold up the matzah, which everyone knows in English, but here it is in Ladino: Este el pan de la africion ke komyeron muestros padres en tierra de Ayifto, todo el ke tiene hambre venga i koma, todo lo ke tiene de menester, venga y paskue, este anyo aki, el anyo ke viene en tierra de Yisrael, este anyo siervos, al anyo ke viene en tierra de Yisrael, hijos foros. My father always sang this at Passover, and I finally realized what it was and put it on our Passover song sheet. It’s in Rabbi Angel’s Sephardic Haggadah, be assured.

II
The second song is a one-line lullaby. I think it’s a Turkish song translated into Ladino, and the words say “Ya se va durmir,” and then the child’s name. Lullabies usher a child into the sweet nether world of sleep. Joe Elias didn’t know this one, and I’ve never seen it in a book. But the simple words are so-and-so is falling asleep already; that’s it. The line is repeated three times, and then a fourth time without the child’s name. I think it was my father who sang this to me at bedtime when he happened to be home on time; my mother didn’t go in for this kind of stuff. But over and over again, with a modal twang, the words kept coming, lulling the child to sleep gently and ineluctably, as if someone simply made up the line as an easy way to soothe a child to rest. I in turn sang it to my children. And then when my father was on East 5th Street in Dr. Nichols’s nursing home at the end of his one hundred years of life, and struggling with the inability to be his charming instructive optimistic self, I placed my cool hand on his forehead, to soothe him with Ya se va durmir, Victor, Ya se va durmir ir ir ir , Vi i i i i c tor, Ya se va durmir ir ir ir , Vi—i ictor, Ya se va durmir-ir ir ir ir . It’s possible my father’s mother sang this song to me, but I doubt it. I think it was just my father, whispering like Athena into my ear, and calming me from the uproars of family life.

I don’t know that I actually ever heard my father’s mother sing any of these songs which he told me she’d taught him. Knowing that she’d sung them to him was just a fact of my growing up, but I don’t think I ever experienced it directly. The singing came down to me as a gift from her via my father.

III
And so, did I ever hear my father’s mother actually sing “Ken ve va kerer a mi?” Probably not, but this one was definitely for the car. And soon I was wailing out the chorus along with my father, Who is going to love me, who is going to love me, Sabiendo ke yo te amo y me muero de amor de ti, knowing I love you, your love is the death of me, as if the greatest questions of life were decided in Ladino driving on Flatbush Avenue, famously the longest street in the world, or so said my father. But it was the song she sang most often, he told me. Who is going to love me, you’re abandoning me for another woman. Why such sad lyrics, why such a tragically bitter song when my father’s father was truly a good Jewish man, and my father’s mother such a well-loved joyful woman? Yo me acodro de aquella noche, cuando la luna me enganyo (I remember that night when the moon tricked me!). Why did she take such pleasure in those lines? The song said, She fell in love, and the man abandoned her. And my father’s mother sang it with zest and force of spirit!

Why?

Ethnomusicologist Dr. Judith Cohen tells me this song was not from medieval Spain (people erroneously think most Sephardic songs are from medieval Spain—forget it!). Probably instead, she said, Ken me va kerer a mi was one of many modern songs that appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Spain and reached Ottoman Sephardic communities “through touring Spanish singers, and perhaps on the ‘new’ phonograph machines. Istanbul,” says Judith, “was a very early center of the recording industry.” We can picture that the song became very popular.

The feisty woman’s complaint emboldened popular singers, who began to make their way across the cultural landscape with aplomb. The very idea of a woman’s song must have lit up women’s lives and made a lament into a complaint, capturing all the intention of a woman’s purpose-driven hectic domestic life to survive in tough times, even with sunny Turkish skies above. Who is going to love me, you tricked me, you abandoned me for another woman, you know well I have a son, he was born from that misery, I was so disgraced even my mother abandoned me, tomorrow night I’m going to make my way with my son to the salty sea, to throw away all my sins, because I know that I am going to die. None of it was true to my father’s mother’s circumstances. It was the very differentness that appealed.

Above all, this was entertainment—and entertainment before technology took over and made women singing while cooking a thing of the past. But the feeling of heroism in the angry singer made this song a live rebuttal to whatever might face her on the horizon, whether a great war at home, or transporting herself and her husband and six children across the seas to a new land.

IV
The fourth song is famous, “Arboles”—Trees Cry for Rain. This was a great car song. Readers probably know it. Arboles yoran por luvyas, montanyas por ayres (trees cry for rain, mountains for wind). Then my father and I sang it at my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary party. We sang it at the microphone to the gathered guests. I was newly pregnant with my third child and we sang in Ladino, Trees cry for rain, so do I cry for you, my beloved. Come hither, my beloved, come, come see me; I want to speak but cannot, my heart sighs. Come hither, my beloved, and we’ll unite—aunaremos! See that word una in the middle of the Spanish word a-una-remos—let’s become one.

Now here’s the thing about this song. It’s so famous that there are books named after it, and videos. The internet and YouTube have many versions of it. But there’s a chorus that my father never sang. It’s a key part of the song, but my father never sang it, and neither do we: Penso y digo, ke va ser de mi? En tieras ajenas no puedo bivir (I think—I ask—what will become of me?—I cannot live in foreign lands).

It’s easy to imagine the song is about the expulsion from Spain, or about leaving beautiful Turkey when there was no way to make a living there. How can we sing in foreign lands? My father never wanted that lament—or maybe his mother simply never sang it, and he’d never heard it. Arboles for him was simply a love song. There was something poignant about my father wanting to sing that song, when his relationship with my mother was stormy and vexing. But, as always, joy was uppermost, celebrating a fifty-year marriage and children and grandchildren represented the best happiness. My husband and I and three sons sang Arboles at our eldest son’s wedding this August at a state park in Oregon. Enfrente de me, ay un angelo, con dos ojos me mira. Avlar kero i non puedo, mi korazon suspira (an angel stands before me looking at me with her beautiful eyes, I want to speak and cannot, my heart sighs). Hello and welcome to our new daughter-in-law.

V
At many weddings, a famous song that gets many women onto the dance floor is the Misirlu. Women, and often men too, get up to join this Greek dance, a single line winding in and around the dance floor. I get up with them, but for me, the Misirlu is first of all a song. My father’s mother was quiet and soft-spoken in her old age, while my mother’s mother could be brash and mean, although always interesting, and excited about being in the world. My brash mother’s mother used to sing the famous Greek song about the alluring Egyptian girl, Misirlu. It would be bedtime and my sister and I would be in bed, and I’d call her and say, Grandma, sing us Ach ya habibi (that’s the refrain, but also the title we used for the song). She’d come in, a big woman with stature and a Turkish hauteur, she’d sit down in my room on the edge of my bed with all her many bangle bracelets on her arm. She’d get a diva-ish Turkish puckering of her lips, and start with a low mysterious sweetness,
O polimo I gli casu imay ya (my little bird, you’re sweet),
O polimo I gli casu imay ya
Ach ya habibi, ah ya haleli, ah (my dear, my beloved, o my love),
Mono no si klepso (I will steal her away)
Mam aptin ara pia (from Arabic lands).
Aah, a-ah ah, ah ah ah, a a Ah, Misirlu.

This grandmother in front of the house once when she didn’t realize that I, a little bit of a thing, was right behind her, stepped back landing hard on my foot. Grandma, I piped up bravely, you stepped on my foot. Don’t you say you’re sorry? From the perch of her grand height, she glanced around and down at me, and pronounced magisterially, You’re lucky I didn’t press. I was. But at bedtime, I’d say, grandma, do the head thing. She’d sing a little, put her arms up over her head, her arms with her twenty bangle bracelets, as her head slid forward and back like a belly dancer’s, awing her grand-daughters in pajamas. It’s clear most people are cheated and unaware that Misirlu is a song, one of the richest in the world’s repertory. Its haunting sensual melody has long been famous, used in many movies, like Pulp Fiction. Let’s not get this wrong. This is not a Ladino song, but a Greek song. Sephardic songs include French, Greek, Turkish, and Hebrew songs. What they reflect is a predilection to make the entertainment of singing a part of daily life, in whatever guises or languages or occasions present themselves.

VI
As I said, my mother didn’t hold much truck with Turkish or Ladino music. She decided early that the patriarchal unfairness inflicted upon her by her father was attributable to Judaism itself. She certainly didn’t want to buy into that worldview at a time when American culture was sweeping women into the future. She found the Metropolitan Opera elevating, a key to the future somehow of the savvy woman. She went with her brother and sister-in-law and took my father along to all the operas, and bought the librettos, those soft gray-clad somber treatises on women’s tragedies and comedies sung into high-class art.

But there was one song that made her laugh. It would pop out of her without her thinking about it, because it represented a salty rebelliousness that fit her refusal to be brought up a second-class citizen as a girl. The song was “La Vida Do Por El Raki.” That means I’d give my life for raki, a potent licorice-flavored brandy, and my mother was all too happy to sing its pleasures and the raffishness it liberated in her from the tight constraints she felt her father represented, for instance: no college, you’re a girl. So she could sing it and feel Free! Rakish and raffish, she’d sing La vida do por el raki, no puedo yo desharlo, de bever nunca me arti de tanto amarlo (I give my life to raki, I can’t stop drinking it because I love it madly.) Of course, it didn’t matter that her father loved the song as well, her mother too. It threw everyone in together to a great need for singing, for the wish to be free of impossible constraints. Kuando esta en el baril, el no avla del todo, kuando me ago yo kandil, ago bayuos de lodo (when it’s in the barrel, it doesn’t say a thing to me, but when I’m drunk, I go down in infamy). Me siento yo ijo varon, me siento yo primario, sin tener liras en el kashon, me siento milionario (I feel myself a young man, I feel myself top dog, without liras in the cashbox, I’m a millionaire). La vida do por el raki.

VII
Here’s the seventh song, “Oseh shalom bimromav.” At our youngest son’s bar mitzvah, after my mother and I did the hamotzi (this was unusual, but fine), my father asked me to remain at the front of the gathering. So there he and I stood, and when he began singing “Oseh shalom,” I joined in and everyone joined in. It’s that way with the important songs. We know them. We know them well, from our whole lives. “Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleynu, ve’al kol Yisrael ve’imru amen.” The song is simple and short. No one has to think, do I know the words? It’s right there. Here’s how Rabbi David de Sola Pool translates it, “May He who creates the harmony of the spheres, create peace for us and for all Israel: and say ye, Amen.”

Coda
My mother’s name was Estelle or Stella, like the word Estrella pronounced Streya, meaning star, and although she was a difficult impetuous woman, no one could help loving her force of spirit. So another song reminded us of what she was about, “Streya Biva,” which ends very differently from the songs in which the lover throws herself tragically into the sea. “Streya Biva” is a new addition to our family songbook. My middle son took it up from our reconstructed Ladino song sheets this year and sang it at a little dinner for my husband and me and his friends, as a surprise for us on a special occasion. When he was a child, I said, I’ll tell you what I want for Hanukkah. Work with grandpa and learn the long blessing that he sings on the first night of Hanukkah. What scarf or book or even jug of honey could compare with that most perfect gift? He got it just right, and, many Hanukahs since my father died, my son has launched into it quietly, bringing light unto the nations, bringing a sense of calm and connectedness. This night at dinner, he sang “Streya Biva.”
Tu sos una streya biva, abaxada de ariva, si venites a tomarme, en tus brasos abrasarme, en tus brasos abrasarme. (You’re a living star, descended from above, if you come to take me, you’ll take me in your arms to embrace me).

Las tus karas koloradas, la dulsura ke me dates, komo ti ya no ay otra, ni aki ni en Evropa, ni aki ni en Evropa (your cheeks are rosy, ah the sweetness you bring me, there’s no one like you, not here or in Europe).

Las tus ojos son brilyantes, parecen dos diamantes, arelumbras korazones, de donzeyas y barones, de donzeyas i barones (your eyes are like diamonds, lighting up the hearts of young girls and young men).

Sos yena de ermozura, venida de la natura, en tus brazos me tomates, a la kama me yevates, a la kama me yevates (you are beautiful, your beauty is natural, you took me in your arms to bed, in your arms you carried me to bed).

In an interesting footnote to Jewish History, we find the triumph of the human spirit.

Rabbi Yaakov Yehoshua Falk (1680-1756) was born in Krakow, the scion of a rabbinic family. Newly married and working as the inspector of the local school, Rabbi Falk became a respected community leader in Lemberg, Poland. But in 1702, the trajectory of his life was irrevocably altered. A powder keg explosion took the life of his wife, daughter, mother-in-law and her father. Trapped under debris, Rabbi Falk narrowly escaped himself. While still threatened by the specter of death, he vowed to compose an original commentary on the Talmud. He swore to find meaning and purpose in this tragedy.

Rabbi Falk published his novellae on the Talmud as P’nei Yehoshua, a title that bears the same name as a work of responsa by his illustrious grandfather, Rabbi Yehoshua Heschel, for whom he was named. In Meginei Shlomo, Rabbi Yehoshua Heschel defends Rashi against the challenges posed by the Ba’alei HaTosafot. His grandson, Rabbi Yaakov Yehoshua Falk, would continue the tradition, and do the same in his own work.
P’nei Yehoshua was first published in Amsterdam in 1739. In his Introduction, Rabbi Falk writes:

Behold, I accepted upon myself an obligation and vowed this vow at the moment of my anguish, on the day of Hashem’s wrath – 3 Kislev, 5463 - in the holy community of Levov [Lemberg]. ‘I was tranquil in my home and invigorated in my sanctuary,’ together with my friends and students who were listening to my voice, when suddenly the city was turned into a heap: ‘Overturned in a moment, though no hands were laid on her.’ The sound of a cry was not heard. But the sound of a blaze was singled out, together with the appearance of a great flame that rose through our palace and windows, due to some large and frightful kegs filled with gunpowder. They were the cause of a fire that destroyed the homes, making them uninhabitable. A number of large and very tall, walled homes were lowered to the dust, razed to their very foundations, and thirty-six holy souls of Israel were killed. Among the casualties were also members of my household – my first wife (her soul in Eden), her mother, and her mother’s father. The tragedy reached my young daughter, her mother’s only child. She was beloved to me - ‘foremost in rank.’ I too was among the fallen of this ‘lofty place into a deep pit.’ I came to the deepest depths of the ground underneath, just like under a press, because of the heavy burden of the heaps and heaps that fell upon me – pillars of our home – more than the pillars in a mill. ‘He did not allow me to refresh my spirit.’ My hands and limbs were not under my control. ‘I said, I am doomed,’ ‘with my days cut short… deprived of the rest of my years… I will not again behold a man with the inhabitants of the earth.’

...Therefore, I said, when I was still under the heap, ‘if the Lord be with me and take me out from this place to peace, and build for me a faithful house to increase its boundaries with students – then I will not remove myself from the walls of the Beit Midrash and I will be diligent in the doors of study of topics in Shas and Poskim, and I will lodge in the depths of Halakha, even spending many nights on one issue.’

At the tender age of twenty-two, Rabbi Falk’s life was forever changed. Yet he possessed the strength and courage to execute what would be his life’s mission: To carry on in the tradition of his grandfather and commit himself completely to Torah study. In doing so, he created one of the most original and important commentaries to the Talmud of the Modern Era.

Rabbi Falk became renown for his great diligence and piety. It is told that before he began writing his P’nei Yehoshua, Rabbi Falk studied the entire Talmud thirty-six times, corresponding to the thirty-six lives that were lost in the explosion. Describing an encounter with Rabbi Falk, Rabbi Hayyim Yosef Dovid Azulai wrote, “I, the youth, merited to receive the face of the Shekhina in those days. And his appearance was that of an Angel of the Lord.”

But Rabbi Falk was also famous for his stubbornness. His unwillingness to compromise forced him to move from community to community. He served as rabbi in Lemberg, Tarlow, Kurow, Lesko, Berlin, Metz and, at the height of his career, was appointed Chief Rabbi of Frankfurt am Main. There he would become embroiled in the famous Emden-Eybeschutz controversy. Due to his vociferous support of Rabbi Yaakov Emden, Rabbi Falk was forced to leave Frankfurt in 1751. When he was invited back to Frankfurt several years later, his opponents prevented him from teaching publicly, causing him to flee once again. Rabbi Falk lived in Worms and Offenbach until his death in 1756. And although he requested no eulogy, Rabbi Falk was eulogized by Rabbi Yechezkel Landau, the famed Noda B’Yehudah. Rabbi Falk was buried in Frankfurt, where his grave remains until today.

Since time immemorial, man has tried to comprehend suffering. One may never find an answer to the question of theodicy, but he may find meaning in his pain. As Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik wrote:

Suffering comes to elevate man, to purify his spirit and sanctify him, to cleanse his mind and purify it from the chaff of superficiality and the dross of crudeness; to sensitize his soul and expand his horizons.

By transcending his personal tragedy and authoring P’nei Yehoshua, Rabbi Ya’akov Yehoshua Falk would expand his horizons and ours too, as students of the Talmud.

During the last decade, the State of Israel has struggled to refine policies related to conversion to Judaism on multiple levels. There have been a number of conversion annulments, even more attempted annulments, some of which were rejected in Israel’s rabbinical courts. Others were dealt with by Israel’s Supreme Court. There have been hundreds of cases of converts who were unrecognized by local rabbinates, hundreds more who converted overseas and were denied entry into Israel under the Law of Return, and finally, thousands who sought conversion in Israel but were unable to convert through the national system, either because the process was too burdensome, or alternatively, because they were rejected out of hand by the Ministry of Interior.

Is the State of Israel, the Israeli rabbinate, or the Ministry of Israel anti-conversion? If one were to perform a cursory reading of media stories related to conversion in Israel, one might get that impression. As a friend wrote to me recently after reading an article about conversion, “Is Israel simply a banana republic? … Here you have a woman who has converted through two different Batei Din; she is Jewish by any definition (even for the most extreme Haredim); and Israel won't let her live in the country? … I don't know who is worse when it comes to converts, the Batei Din or the Israeli government?”

This article seeks to address these issues from the ideational perspective. It highlights the tension that is latent in the emended law of return from 1971, which enables converts to make aliya and receive Israeli citizenship automatically. It also discusses the role of the rabbinate in overseeing conversion in Israel. Ultimately, it argues that even though there is significant unnecessary anguish inflicted upon converts and those seeking conversion, the issues that motivate the seemingly (and often deliberate) arbitrariness of the Israeli establishment need to be addressed on a more comprehensive level.

Conversions Performed Outside of Israel

One of the great debates of the last 30 years relates to the responsibility of the State of Israel to recognize conversions performed outside of Israel. This issue has a double aspect, since Israel’s political establishment has divided the “recognition” into two areas. For purposes of aliya, it is the Ministry of Interior that recognizes conversions. For purposes of marriage, it is the rabbinical courts who are empowered to certify the conversions.

Regarding the Ministry of Interior, it should be noted from the outset that from the perspective of emigration, the Law of Return’s relevance to conversion is even more problematic than the law’s acceptance of those born Jewish. It is one thing to accept someone based on ethnicity for emigration purposes. It is another thing to accept a Jew by choice. This was made clear to me once by the State Attorney General who asked me, “Why should someone in New Square who has never visited Israel, and might not even believe in Israel’s right to exist, be able to determine who can emigrate to Israel?”

In one sense, this is a compelling argument. On the other, if the thrust of Jewish tradition is to accept converts as full members of the people, and moreover, if Israel’s law (as it currently does) anchors the rights of converts, then the Ministry has no choice but to accept converts.

Thus, the question becomes not “Should the State civil authorities accept converts?” but rather “Who is considered a convert?” This may be relevant to the question of “who is considered a rabbi,” but given the fact that the halakha makes it clear that a Bet Din may be composed of non-rabbis (in addition to qualifying that there is no real semikha today), it seems to me that we need not identify our criteria for rabbis today. Instead, we need to speak of Jewish communities.

During the last decade, the Ministry of Justice has sought to limit the civil rights of those who completed conversions overseas, by denying them the status of a “convert.” Rather than rely on the local Jewish community’s definition of conversion, the ministry has adopted an objective definition of convert: one who immerses in the mikvah; who, if male, undergoes circumcision; who studies a particular curriculum for a particular amount of time; and who lives in the community prior to and following the conversion for a particular amount of time.

These requirements were challenged in the Israeli Supreme Court and in a repercussive decision penned by then Chief Justice, Aaron Barak, they were summarily rejected. Justice Barak wrote:

Regarding the Law of Return, we should recognize conversions performed in recognized communities based on their self-determined principles. For this purpose it is immaterial whether the convert joins the same community following his conversion, if he transfers to another Jewish community outside Israel, and then goes to Israel, or if he comes to Israel soon after the conversion. Regarding this last point it is immaterial, whether before immigrating to Israel, he resided in Israel or came to Israel for the first time after the conversion. In all cases, conversions conducted abroad should be recognized by the Law of Return….

We are aware of the need the State to maintain control of recognized conversions in the context of the Law of Return. This prompted a state's natural need to monitor the process of becoming a citizen in person. Conversion is not just a private act with a religious dimension. Conversion also has a national-civil aspect. This second dimension demands governmental oversight. This should be manifest in our conception that conversions performed abroad be effected in the framework of a recognized Jewish community. These will meet the demands of the Law of Return. With this the State maintains its oversight, while maintaining the connection between people in Zion and the people in the Diaspora. [1]

Chief Justice Barak, who clearly was seeking to empower the autonomy of the local Jewish communities, demanded from the Ministry of Interior to retract their policy and establish new criteria for allowing converts to be eligible for aliya.

Although two attempts at new criteria have been proposed since 2005, this issue has yet to be resolved, and a number of lawsuits have challenged the ministry on this issue, most recently, in 2011. [2]

The issue of recognizing conversions for purposes of aliya has nothing, prima facie, to do with halakha or Jewish tradition. In fact, based on an Israeli Supreme Court decision in 1988, the State must recognize conversions from all of the denominations, Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative. And yet, even this decision is repercussive given the new landscape of the Diaspora Jewish community. Consider for a moment whether Israel ought to accept as a candidate for aliya someone who converted to Judaism in a post-denominational community, or someone who has converted through the internet, or, perhaps, through a Jews-for-Jesus community. My sense is that in the first case, there would be some deliberation, in the second, less so, and there would be general consensus that in the latter case, the individual shouldn’t be able to emigrate as a Jew under the Law of Return.

The confusing (or “banana-republic”) approach of the Ministry of Interior regarding converts is partly due to inefficiency and naiveté on the part of clerks who are unaware of the nuances of the Diaspora communities. But it is connected to the diverse landscape of the Jewish community as well. I have participated in a number of meetings where I found myself as an Orthodox rabbi advocating on behalf of a convert and found the Conservative or Reform movements fighting against me.

Given these complexities, it is not surprising, even as it is disturbing, that the Ministry of Interior has significantly raised the bar on who it perceives as a legitimate convert, and its clerks resort to seemingly absurd tactics to certify a conversion. The most extreme measure of this began in late 2010, when the Ministry began consulting with the Chief Rabbi of Israel regarding the recognition of Orthodox conversions from abroad for purposes of aliya. As stated above, the Supreme Court had already ruled that non-Orthodox conversions were accepted, and because of this, there could be little hope that the Chief Rabbi would certify most conversions. And yet, in response to a query regarding who determines a “recognized Orthodox community abroad,” the spokesman for the Israel population registry wrote that Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi is the leader of Orthodox communities around the world—a statement that I would imagine would cause alarm in the Diaspora.

In the end, the issue has been joined by the Ministry agreeing that the Israeli Chief Rabbi has no authority to determine the legitimacy of conversions. Instead, the ministry committed to consult with the Jewish Agency on matters of “recognized” Jewish communities.

Still, the attempt to introduce the Chief Rabbi into the picture stems from a bind that highlights the problematic nature of the Law of Return, on one hand, and the desire to be inclusive when it comes to converts on the other. Even after the agreement was reached in July 2011, the Ministry of Interior continued to consult with the rabbinate on foreign Orthodox conversions, and the new directives continue to be monitored.

The Role of the Rabbinate

If the responsibility over certifying conversions performed outside of Israel is problematic, the legal status of conversions performed in Israel is equally fraught with tension. In Israel, there are national conversion courts that operate under the auspices of the Prime Minister’s office and employ some 30 rabbinical court judges. For our purposes, the conversions performed in the Israel Defense Forces (army conversions) also fall into this category. These conversions are all performed by Orthodox rabbis chosen by the Chief Rabbi. Then there are private conversion courts, which exist in the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform communities in Israel.

The national conversion system is grounded in a pre-mandatory law which enables those completing the course of study and passing the rabbinical court’s test (and mikvah) to receive a teudat hamara, or conversion certificate, which for non-citizens allows for aliya, and for citizens, allows for marriage through the rabbinate. [3]

The following chart illustrates the number of individuals who have converted in the national system in the past four years.

Year FSU Ethiopia Other Total
2007 1864 5538 606 8008
2008 1804 3614 803 6221
2009 1849 3710 672 6231
2010 2159 1813 673 4645
2011 1936 1647 710 4293

During the same period, the Reform and Conservative communities have effected together approximately 100 conversions in Israel each year, while private Orthodox rabbinical courts such as that of Rabbi Nissim Karelitz in Benei B’rak, have moved from converting 20 to 25 people a year to converting more than 400 a year.

The remarkable growth of the Orthodox private conversion “industry” raises two questions: first, why is there such growth, and second, what are the implications of the conversions in the legal sphere?

There are two essential factors that would lead someone to a private Orthodox conversion in Israel: Either the national system won’t accept them as a candidate, or the national conversion won’t meet their own standards of Jewishness. It is this first area that I would like to address in our context to demonstrate that there is a real tension latent in conversion in Israel, even when it borders on the absurd.

The Israeli conversion system is built for citizens of Israel, and addressing non-citizens who seek conversion isn’t exclusively a halakhic area. And still, Israeli halakhists and particularly the head of the conversion courts must address this issue frontally.

According to directives of the Prime Minister’s office, if a student, foreign worker, or even non-Jewish spouse of a Jewish Israeli seeks conversion in Israel, he or she cannot open a file with the conversion courts. First they have to prove to a “committee on exceptions” that they are not trying to convert only to receive citizenship.The committee (or vaadat harigim) is made up of representatives of the Ministry of the Interior, the Legal Department of the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Office of the Chief Rabbi.

The committee automatically rejects any application from foreign nationals in one of the following categories:

1. Illegal residents
2. Infiltrators
3. Local residents or a resident of neighboring countries
4. A foreign citizen holding a B-1 visa
5. A temporary resident holding an A-5 visa who has lived in Israel for less than one year

Now this may seem technical, but even if someone is completely committed to halakha, or is married to a Jewish Israeli, he or she cannot even approach the rabbinical court, since he/she is stopped by the committee. If someone does meet the basic threshold, he/she must still demonstrate to a non-rabbinic body that his/her intentions to convert are genuine. This can sometimes take months, and sometimes years, and ultimately is arbitrary. I should note that at present, the functioning of this committee as the arbiter of the future of people’s lives has been broached in the Knesset and is now being investigated by the State Ombudsman’s office. But in the meantime, this issue is still a challenge.
Just to provide an example to illustrate the challenges: I am presently trying to help a woman to convert. She is completely committed to halakhic observance. She was married civilly to an Israeli man more than four years ago. She began the process of converting, and was approved to convert by the State authorities. The rabbinical court demanded that both she and her husband begin a process of study. However, as she became more observant, her husband refused to adopt her full halakhic lifestyle, and recently she divorced him. As soon as the conversion authority heard that she was divorced, the rabbi in charge of the committee said that she was ineligible to convert, and she is now in limbo, unable to convert, but equally unable to turn the clock back on her commitment to the Jewish people.

The director of the committee who has rejected this young woman is the representative of the Chief Rabbi of Israel. As the committee’s regulations have become more draconian, more and more individuals seeking conversion have sought private conversions, in order to join the religious community, if not the national one.

There is an ironic twist to the legal aspect of private conversions. In 2002, the Reform and Conservative denominations convinced the high court in Israel that their local converts should be registered as Jews in the population registry, even if they didn’t receive a teudat hamara. However, today, with the increase of private Orthodox conversions, no such arrangement exists and the Orthodox conversions are not recognized by anyone official in the State of Israel.

In short, the rabbinate—both by trying to play a role in the criteria of aliya of Orthodox converts, and by trying to raise the threshold of eligibility for those seeking to convert in Israel—is actually downgrading halakhic conversions. Because the Reform and Conservative denominations have stronger legal representation in Israel, their converts are actually being treated better than Orthodox ones.

Moreover, even though the issues of emigration of converts or eligibility for conversion are not purely halakhic issues, halakhic authorities are being asked to make decisions on these issues that are relevant to the policies of the State of Israel, something that in the end may undermine both the halakha and the policies of the State.

Future Directions

As I articulated at the outset, the policy issues facing the State are complex. I don’t believe that Israel is a banana republic, but I do believe that a lot more critical thinking must be done to determine how conversion functions in Israel, and how the State of Israel can ensure—in the spirit of Jewish tradition—that those genuinely seeking conversion and those who have completed conversion can be full members of the Jewish people.

Israel is not a halakhic State, and given the needs of the Jewish people today, that is a good thing. However, to allow State institutions, and particularly the rabbinate, to function counter to Jewish tradition when it comes to a vulnerable population such as the community of converts is
irresponsible. Much more advocacy needs to be done on behalf of Orthodox converts so that the rabbinate will not be able to maltreat this group in the name of “halakha.”
Over the coming years, hundreds of thousands of individuals will consider conversion to Judaism and tens of thousands will convert in an Orthodox manner in Israel. How the State relates to them both during the process and beyond will, to a large extent, determine the very fabric of Israeli Jewish society in the coming generation.

[1] Supreme Court decision 2597/99 Makarena vs. Interior Ministry.
[2] Supreme Court case 9411/11 Lidia Bicos vs. Interior Ministry.
[3] This seems to be the perspective of the court although the actual law simply states that someone with a teudat hamara can be judged in the religious court system rather than in the civil system.

Vision from the Prophet and Counsel from the Elders
By Rabbi Hayyim Angel
OU Press, 2013, 368 pages
Reviewed by Rabbi Israel Drazin

This scholarly, very readable, and informative book by a teacher of rabbinical students and advanced undergraduates at Yeshiva University is a superb book for anyone of any religion who wants to learn what the Bible is actually saying. Rabbi Angel examines the nineteen books of the Hebrew Bible that follow the five books of Moses, from Joshua through Chronicles, the prophets and writings. He exposes the plain meaning of the texts, not the homiletical, sermonic, lessons that others draw from them. He also offers some guidelines how to read the plain meaning of Scripture. Readers will discover that many of the books do not say what they think they say and will be enjoyably surprised to learn what they are saying.

For example: Angel explains why Joshua was a perfect candidate to succeed Moses. Both the books of Joshua and Judges report incidences out of chronological order, and the second century CE Rabbi Ishmael said that the five books of Moses also sometimes do so. Many of the biblical heroes had sons who did not follow their ways, even turning to idols. Some Bible commentators understood biblical statements literally that others insisted are allegories; thus Nachmanides believed Isaiah’s prophecy about a wolf and lamb lying together (11:6-9), that animals would become non-carnivorous in the messianic age. Similarly, while many people understood biblical prophecies as predictions of what will occur, others, such as Tosaphot Yevamot 50a, s.v. teda, and Malbim on Isaiah 11, took the prophecies as predictions of what should happen. In fact, they note that many famous prophecies never occurred.

Rabbi Angel reveals that frequently we need to read biblical narratives both forward and backward. For example: “When one reads the narrative from beginning to end, it appears that (King) Solomon failed spiritually only toward the end of his life…. Once we know the tragic end of Solomon, however, it is possible to look back through the narrative and trace the roots of Solomon’s failure to the beginning of his reign.” Angel also uses this reading-back technique to understand other biblical figures. He shows that Bible readers need to pay close attention to the text. Thus, he discloses that some biblical stories, such as Ruth “initially appear clear (but) are more elusive after further scrutiny.” This scrutiny, which many fail to make, but which Angel does, reveals that the “short narrative (of Ruth) captures so many subtleties in so short a space.” Sometimes commentators are able to see problems and need to argue poetic flexibility in their interpretations: Many rabbis explain Psalm 37:25’s “I have been young and am now old, but I have never seen a righteous man abandoned, or his children seeking bread” as “never totally abandoned.”

Readers will find surprising facts in this splendid book. Some examples are: Our current breakdown of biblical books is different than they were in the past. The books of Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah were not divided into two books. Conversely, Psalms 1 and 2 were originally considered by several sages to be one psalm. The order of the Hebrew alphabet was not yet fixed during the ancient biblical period. Some rabbis suggest that some of the Proverbs in chapters 30-31 were composed by non-Jews. Remarkably, the Greek version of Esther, the Septuagint, mentions God’s name over fifty times, but the Hebrew version doesn’t refer to God even once. Additionally, it is possible to read, and Rabbi Angel shows how, that the main character of the book Esther is King Ahasuerus.

Among many other thought-provoking revelations, Angel notes the non-prophetic perspective of the book Ecclesiastes and writes: “Significantly, Ecclesiastes’ inclusion in Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) and its consideration as a divinely inspired book elevates human perception into the realm of the sacred, joining revelation and received wisdom as aspects of religious truth.”

These are just a very small fraction of the multiple insights that Rabbi Hayyim Angel divulges in this splendid book.

How much legal autonomy—and how much exemption from otherwise applicable laws—ought religious groups to have?
When government grows larger and more ambitious, laying down the law in more and more areas of life, these questions arise more often and more urgently.

It is a common motif that without some “special accommodation” or exemption from various laws, it would be difficult for religious communities or even individuals to live religious lives. If public law forbids employment discrimination on the basis of religion, for example, religious groups have an obvious claim for exemption when choosing their clergy, and a claim for autonomy to decide who qualifies to be rabbi, priest, or pastor.

The controversy in recent months over the Obama Administration’s mandate to Roman Catholic institutions over abortive drugs and contraception is just one example of the almost limitless situations in which the question of special accommodation can arise. Should Native American (or Rastafarian) sects be exempted from drug laws that forbid peyote or marijuana? Should Mormons (or Muslims) be exempted from laws against polygamy? Should Christian Scientists be exempted from laws requiring parents to provide for medical treatment for sick children? Should Sikhs be exempted from laws prohibiting carrying knives in public? Should observant Jewish soldiers or officers be exempted from military uniform rules, which would not permit wearing a kippah? Should religious individuals be exempted from duties that would otherwise be required on the job: a nurse who refuses to assist in an abortion or administration of contraception? A police officer who refuses to arrest anti-war, or anti-abortion, protesters? A postal worker who refuses to deliver mail that he or she considers blasphemous, or (as is now an issue in Israel) who refuses to deliver pamphlets proselytizing for Christianity, or who refuses to process military conscription documents?

In the United States, these questions—as with so many things in American life—can often be framed as Constitutional issues. The first Amendment says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So perhaps some or all of the claims for religious exemption must be granted in order to satisfy “free exercise.” On the other hand if they are granted, but people who might want to smoke peyote, marry polygamously, and/or carry ceremonial but sharp knives in public for non-religious reasons are prohibited from doing so, this can be said to be an “establishment of religion”: it would certainly discriminate in favor of religion and against people who might want exemptions from the law for secular (but perhaps for serious or conscientious) reasons. Free exercise and establishment, especially if each is construed broadly, threaten to collide with one another.

The U.S. Supreme Court has followed a notably up-and-down course in recent decades about special religious accommodation. In two famous cases decided in 1963 and 1972, the Court held that the First Amendment requires exemptions from generally applicable federal and state laws unless there is a “compelling state interest” (or something close to it) for enforcing the law—a constitutional standard that usually means the government has to give way to a claim under the Bill of Rights. The first case, Sherbert v. Verner, involved a Seventh Day Adventist who wanted an exemption from a requirement to be available for work on Saturday as a condition of receiving unemployment benefit; the second, Wisconsin v. Yoder, involved an Amish community that wanted its children excused from compulsory school attendance past the eighth grade.1 The Court held that Free Exercise requires a religious exemption in both cases.

But in 1990, in a case called Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court reversed course and said that the Free Exercise Clause does not require religious exceptions from generally applicable laws that are enacted for secular purposes.2 The idea implicit in the decision, clearly, is no official preference for religion over non-religion. The U.S. Congress reacted sharply to the decision by enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), seeking to restore the pre-Smith “compelling state interest” standard, which favored religious exemptions. In 1997, the Supreme Court struck back, and struck down RFRA as unconstitutional: Congress has no power to impose this pro-exemption requirement on the states.3 Recently, in yet another turn, the Court tacitly upheld RFRA for religious exemptions from federal laws (although Congress still cannot require such exemptions from state laws).

In practice, there has been less change in public policy toward religious exemptions than a reading of the (somewhat dizzying) Supreme Court decisions might suggest. In the era before Smith, exemptions were by no means granted as readily as Sherbert and Yoder might imply, and after Smith they are still available in various guises. Even in the post-1960s (but pre-Smith) era, the Supreme Court rejected all religious claims for exemption from tax laws; it rejected all claims arising from prisons and the military; it rejected a claim for exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act. Virtually the only claims the Court accepted were—like Sherbert—for religious exemption from (Sabbath) requirements to be available for work under unemployment benefit laws. And after Smith, religious claimants still sometimes win in the Supreme Court. For example, the Court says that where the government actually considers individual eligibilities—as it does in unemployment cases—it still has to grant religious exemptions. The Court also strikes down laws that it finds to be discriminatory against particular religions or their practices, such as, in a famous case, animal sacrifices by the Santeria sect.4
Perhaps more importantly, federal and state laws—even, or especially, after Smith—have been strongly favorable toward religious exemptions.5 RFRA was enacted by unanimous vote in the House of Representatives (better than the Declaration of War after Pearl Harbor), and by almost unanimous vote in the Senate; it still applies to the federal government, requiring religious exemption unless a “compelling state interest” militates against it. More than half the states have enacted their own RFRA-like laws. Twenty-three states and the federal government allow sacramental use of peyote.

Congress granted the Amish an exemption from social security taxes after the Supreme Court turned it down. Congress granted members of the armed forces the right to wear “religious apparel” after the Supreme Court turned down a claim by an Air Force doctor, an observant Jew, to wear a kippah on duty.

Some of these enactments might actually give cause for second thoughts, even if one supports generous religious exemptions. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, prohibits employment discrimination on account of race, religion, sex, and national origin. But under a 1972 Amendment, religious corporations and institutions may discriminate on the basis of religion.6 (The original 1964 law had allowed such religious discrimination more narrowly, only in relation to “religious activities.”) The Supreme Court upheld the broadened exemption in the case of a gymnasium (open to the paying—not necessarily praying—public) operated by the Church of Latter Day Saints, which fired a janitor for failing to live by Mormon standards of religious practice.7 The exemption from anti-discrimination law is not merely for a few religious groups, under the new law, or for a narrow range of religious employees. Religious organizations employ more than a million Americans, and religious bodies can have large-scale business interests, with a lot of leverage over would-be employees. Churches own (or have owned) a major secular news agency (the United Press International), the largest beef ranch in the United States, and a major life insurance company. With the broad (or over-broad) exemption, there is the potential for enterprises owned by religious bodies to swallow the anti-discrimination law, at least in some localities or in some trades.

Meanwhile, there have been increasing calls in recent years both in the United States and in other Western democracies, not merely for religious exemptions from secular laws, but also for actual power to adjudicate under religious law. There are already steps in this direction with binding arbitration in religious courts: halakhic or sharia tribunals, for example, created by religious groups. An extensive network of Batei Din, or rabbinical arbitration courts, now exists in the United States. More recently, Islamic groups have called for the establishment of comparable Sharia courts. Thus, businesspeople can contract to arbitrate future disputes in a religious court; or a couple might sign a prenuptial agreement to arbitrate family disputes, including divorce, under religious law. Going further, there have been suggestions in the academic literature that “insular” or self-contained religious groups might be given public judicial powers, by analogy to the powers of tribal courts on Indian reservations.8 The Archbishop of Canterbury recently provoked a flurry when he called, in somewhat general terms, for aspects of Islamic Sharia law to be adopted in Britain. The role of religious courts in Israel is sometimes cited as an example of how religious adjudication might function in a democratic society.

In a sense, even “special accommodation” or religious exemption from secular law implies that religious groups must have some autonomy and power to decide, hence in a more or less formal sense, to adjudicate, relevant questions by their own standards: to decide at what age Mennonite children should leave school, for instance, or which day is the Sabbath and what are the rules of Sabbath observance, what apparel is religious apparel, what use of peyote is sacramental, and so on.

The creation of actual state religious courts in the United States, comparable to the Israeli religious court system, is improbable, to put it gently, given “separation of church and state” under the First Amendment. But to the extent that halakhic or Islamic arbitration awards are enforceable in the secular courts, such religious judgments would have binding force under American law. Supporters of religious “multiculturalism” and increased autonomy for religious groups have suggested that the usual rules of arbitration law should be relaxed for religious tribunals. For example, whereas a standard arbitration award is unenforceable if a court finds it to offend “public policy,” it has been suggested that religious adjudication should be enforced by the secular courts unless the judgment is “unconscionable.”9 On the other side, opposition to religious courts—in particular to the spread of Islamic Sharia law—has also grown. Oklahoma adopted a referendum in 2010, subsequently struck down by the federal courts, forbidding state courts to consider Sharia. At least six other states have considered similar measures, which might forbid state courts to enforce the judgments of religious arbitral courts. Along the same lines, after public statements by an Islamic leader in Toronto that only “bad Muslims” would fail to submit their disputes to Sharia arbitration panels, the Canadian province of Ontario now bans the enforceability of religious family law arbitration. In the words of the Premier of the Province: “There will be no religious arbitration in Ontario. There will be one law for all Ontarians.” But despite occasional rebuffs, halakhic tribunals and their caseloads—and Muslim interest in Sharia tribunals—have grown in the United States in recent years. It remains an open question to what degree and on what terms the secular courts will accept and enforce their judgments.

The attractive side of increased religious autonomy is fairly obvious. Generous exemption from secular laws and increased availability and enforceability of religious adjudication all provide a framework for people to live more religious lives, under religious law if they choose. These developments empower religion accordingly. They might seem especially well suited to “nomo-centric” or law-intensive religions like Judaism and Islam. After all, Jews are obliged under Jewish law, at least under appropriate circumstances, to adjudicate disputes before halakhic courts and not to turn to secular tribunals.10
When religious autonomy is enshrined in secular law, however, there are potential and actual problems and drawbacks as well.

In the first place, the substance of religious law may be at odds with the values of a liberal society. This arises most obviously on points where both Jewish and Islamic law, for example, are not egalitarian as between men and women. Divergences from liberal norms can arise in religious commercial law and in other areas as well. For example, it may conflict with federal and state antitrust laws in the United States for Batei Din or rabbinic arbitration tribunals to enforce the halakhic principle of hasagat gevul, which restricts competitive business practices that might put an existing business out of business.11

A plausible response to this sort of concern is that a liberal society is pluralist and does not require everyone to live by liberal norms: indeed that it would be illiberal to do so. So long as there are ample choices and full freedom to affiliate and disaffiliate, and so long as the interests of third parties are not compromised, liberal society should not be offended if some people and groups, including religious groups, voluntarily opt for non-liberal ways of life. In the case of hasagat gevul, this runs into the objection that third parties are compromised: that the purpose of antitrust, and of public policy favoring competition, is to promote lower prices and better quality goods and services for everyone, and that the public suffers whenever there is less competition. As for respecting people’s free choice to submit to religious law: the more readily secular courts enforce religious arbitral judgments, the more this implies scrutiny by the courts into just how voluntary, and how fully informed, the parties were when they consented to religious adjudication. Religious communities might feel such scrutiny intrusive, both as to the community pressures which undoubtedly affect whether people agree to religious adjudication, and also as to how much is known in advance about the interpretive or ideological leanings or commitments of particular religious tribunals.

There is also a concern, in terms of social cohesion, about the balkanizing effects of group autonomy, especially where religious groups, identity groups, or other groups inspiring deep passion and commitment are involved. This concern traces back to Hobbes and Locke, who wrote during or just after a period of religious civil war, and it has been a perennial worry in the history of liberal thought.12 The apprehension, of course, is that when such groups are empowered, it tends to diminish their members’ loyalty to, or even involvement in, the broader liberal community. If things go too far, it threatens to begin pulling liberal society apart. This concern has re-emerged sharply in Western European countries in recent years, where Muslim communities have grown, and where Islamic or Islamist leaders have achieved a degree of autonomy under “multicultural” policy. The concern, of course, is that group differences, far from shrinking, are growing more intractable and more threatening as a result of these policies.

If religions are granted exemption and autonomy that others might not be granted, there is also the ever-more-uncertain question of who or what is a religion. When Will Herberg’s famous book Protestant Catholic Jew appeared in the 1950s, it was broadly true that those were the three religious alternatives in America, with subdivisions among each of course, but each with a recognizable identity as well, and broad consensus about what is a religion, such that Americans could feel that they would know it when they saw it. Today it would be fair to say that there is an ever-expanding psychic shopping mall of religious, semi-religious, and quasi-religious beliefs, notions, groups, and ideologies. In American prisons, for example—not an entirely representative subset of the country, to be sure—there has been dramatic growth in adherence to a variety of sects including the Nation of Islam (“Black Muslims”), pagan groups such as Wicca, Odinism, Asatru, and Druidism (often associated with White Supremacists among the prisoners), and Native American spirituality.13 An American court today may confront not only the question of whether an Air Force doctor who is an observant Jew may wear a kippah on duty, but also a case of a Free Exercise claimant who asserts that his religious beliefs require him to dress like a chicken when going to court.14

If religions are granted exemption from otherwise applicable laws, and even a degree of autonomous authority, there is an obvious temptation for all sorts of groups to claim to be religions and to demand special privileges and powers. A well-known but by no means unique example is the Church of Scientology, which began as an entirely secular therapy-marketing enterprise founded by the science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, but which went on to claim religious status, partly in hope of a tax exemption. Despite its considerable criminal history by then, Scientology was eventually granted tax exemption in 1993 as a bona fide religion.15

There is a further point, which perhaps deserves more emphasis than it sometimes receives. If the state offers a significant degree of religious autonomy—power over jobs, resources, and decisions that affect people’s lives—it can encourage the take-over of religious communities by authoritarian and factional religious leaders. This may partly be due to the attraction that autonomous power might have for the most enthusiastic people within a religious group or its leadership, who may tend to be the most extreme people.

But autonomy has a perverse logic of its own, which more directly encourages extremism: namely, if autonomous rulings are not going to differ from the rules of secular, liberal society, then why is it important that the religious group should have autonomy? Whereas the more radically the group’s rulings do differ—including the rulings of religious arbitration courts—the more necessary and justified the claim for autonomy. Once there is autonomy, in other words, there is liable to be a “cascade” effect towards more distinctive, which is to say more extreme, positions on the part of the autonomous institutions and those who steer them, if only to justify the idea that autonomy is necessary in the first place.

The religious courts in Israel may be a cautionary example in this context. The State of Israel, as is the case with many Muslim-majority countries, maintains a religious court system within the state framework, with jurisdiction over family law, including marriage and divorce and related questions of “personal status”. The religious courts trace back to the “Millet” system under the Ottoman Empire—where the phenomenon of “Balkanization” originated—and was kept on under the British mandate in Palestine and again after the establishment of the State in 1948. It is common knowledge in Israel that the religious courts have increasingly come under the sway of Haredi rabbinical judges in recent years, and there have been notorious cases of the religious courts refusing to issue marriage licenses where one of the parties is a non-Haredi convert to Judaism; the religious courts have even attempted to revoke Orthodox but non-Haredi conversions retroactively and to render Jewish families abruptly “non-Jewish”.16 The polarization of religious life in Israel, and the growing power of Haredi ultra-Orthodoxy, undoubtedly has complex origins, and can surely not be laid to the existence of state religious courts alone.

But the religious court system, and the autonomous power of the religious “establishment” in Israel, have certainly not stopped the drift towards religious extremism in the Orthodox rabbinic world, nor prevented the estrangement of Jews of various religious tendencies from one another, both in Israel and abroad.

Extensive religious autonomy, in short, can lead to the creation—with state approval—of “islands” of authoritarianism in an otherwise free and democratic society. It can also promote corruption of various kinds, which often accompanies authoritarianism. Corruption, not on a modest scale, has certainly been one of the issues in Israel in the context of religious legal autonomy and political power.

A consideration of these various problems, actual and potential, with religious autonomy is not to suggest that religious exemptions from secular law, and a measure of a religious autonomy, are simply undesirable. On the contrary, they may be indispensable for religious people and groups to be free to live religious lives. Special accommodation of religious needs under secular law, and arbitral “alternate dispute resolution” in religious courts, may actually work reasonably well if there is a degree of moderation on all sides. If the government authorities are basically respectful towards religious concerns—which they generally have been in American history; if a rough consensus about who and what is a “religion” does not break down in a welter of opportunistic or unhinged claims; if religious groups themselves do not seek to abuse either the host society or their own members: then there is the prospect of a reasonable balance of interests. All this presupposes a degree of social cohesion and good faith, of course: that all concerned should be “touched... by the better angels of our nature.”17

Relying on everyone’s being touched by the better angels of our nature, unfortunately, can sometimes be uncertain. It is all the more uncertain in a fractious and polarized society. At root, the question of special accommodation, and of religious adjudicatory independence, arise most urgently when government grows in its reach and ambition. After all, if most areas of life, including those that touch on religious life, are left to people’s private arrangement, then not much special accommodation will be necessary. But when government takes control over more and more areas of life, regulating who shall do what, under what rules and conditions, then clashes with one or another religious way of life are almost inevitable. The dispute over government mandates to provide abortive drugs and contraception, in the framework of increasing government control of health care in America, is merely a well-known recent example.

With a relatively open market in health care and private health insurance, religious institutions needed no special exemptions to adopt their own approaches, on questions of contraception and abortion as on other matters. But greatly increased government regulation implies more uniform standards and rules, and hence more controversy over whether there should be religious exemptions, and if so, for whom, to what degree, and on what terms.

Special accommodation for religion, and special adjudicatory powers, are problematic, for reasons I have tried to suggest. In the long run, especially under less-than-favorable social circumstances, they might not be workable. If not, then society may ultimately have to choose between big government—an ever-growing and ever-more-powerful administrative and redistributive state—on the one hand, and lively religious pluralism and thriving religious life on the other. This, perhaps, is what religious people and groups ought to fix their attention on.

1 Sherbert v. Verner, 374 US 398 (1963); Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 US 205 (1972). Justice William O. Douglas dissented in Yoder, suggesting that a high school child may or may not want to be “harnessed” for life to the Amish community: “[h]e may want to be a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer. To do so, he will have to break with the Amish tradition… The child, therefore, should be given an opportunity to be heard before the State gives the exemption which we honor today.”
2 Employment Div. Dept of Human Resources v. Smith, 49 US 872 (1990).
3 City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 US 507 (1997).
4 Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 US 520 (1993).
5 The Supreme Court decisions are about whether religious exemptions are required as a matter of Free Exercise by the Constitution. But federal or state statutes are free to grant more “special accommodation” than the Constitution (minimally) requires: so long, of course, as the “special accommodation” isn’t viewed as rising to the level of an Establishment of religion.
6 42 US Code 2000e -1.
7 Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos, 483 US 327 (1987).
8 E.g. Mark Rosen, “The Radical Possibility of Limited Community-Based Interpretation of the Constitution,” 43 William and Mary Law Review 927 (2002).
9 E.g. Michael A. Helfand, “Religious Arbitration and the New Multiculturalism: Negotiating Conflicting Legal Orders,” 86 NYU Law Review 1231, 1287-8 (2011).
10 Gittin 88b; but see Sanhedrin 23a. See generally J. David Bleich, “Survey of Recent Halakhic Periodical Literature: Litigation and Arbitration Before Non-Jews,” 34:3 Tradition 58 (2000); Michael A. Helfand & Yaacov Feit, “Confirming Piskei Din as Arbitration Awards,” 61 Journal of Halacha & Contemporary Society 5 (2011). Of course Jewish law does not, because it cannot, prescribe to what extent (if at all) non-Jewish secular courts will enforce halakhic arbitration judgments in cases where the losing party does not submit voluntarily to the judgment.
11 See generally Simcha Krauss, “Hasagath Gvul,” 29 Journal of Halacha & Contemporary Society 5 (Spring 1995).
12 See Richard Boyd, Uncivil Society: The Perils of Pluralism and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Lexington Books 2004).
13 For the religious situation in the prisons, see the United States Commission on Civil Rights report, Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison, September 2008: http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/STAT2008ERFIP.pdf, especially the Statement of Commissioner Gail Heriot at p. 118. For a statistical survey of American religion generally, see the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, US Religious Landscape Survey 2010: http://religions.pewforum.org/reports. The Pew Survey summarises: “religious affiliation in the US is both very diverse and extremely fluid. More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion—or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation... or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.”
14 Compare Goldman v Weinberger, 475 US 503 (1986) (upholding prohibition of the kippah) with State v Hodges 695 S.W. 2d 171 (Tenn 1985) (quashing a contempt citation and remanding to the trial court for further consideration of the religious claim for the chicken costume). In a nutshell, the kippah lost. The chicken costume, at least tentatively, won.
15 See Hugh B.Urban, The Church of Scientology (Princeton University Press 2011).
16 See Marc D. Angel, “The Conversion Crisis and Challenge” (November 2008): http://www.jewishideas.org/min-hamuvhar/conversion-crisis; Zvi Zohar, “From Periphery to Core,” 10 Conversations 93 (2011). For an account of a case in which the rabbinic court purported to revoke a conversion, see “The Interrogation of the Convert “X” by the Israeli Rabbinic Courts” (February 2011):
http://www.jewishideas.org/susan-weiss/interrogation-convert-x-israeli-rabbinic-courts

The Center for Women’s Justice in Jerusalem is active in behalf of converts entangled in such cases, and posts about recent developments:
http://cwj.org.il/home/cwj-news/newrabbiniccourtrulingcwjclientsarejewish
17 Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address (1861).

The Orthodox-secular rift has threatened the Zionist movement from its outset. To facilitate cooperation despite the deep differences, the "status quo" was established, so that it would not be necessary to deal comprehensively with the place of religion in Zionism and the State of Israel. Piece by piece, various "arrangements" were established in order to avoid making fundamental decisions.

We wish to present a new message: Polar ideologies will be replaced by a wide national consensus. From right and left, from Meretz to the National Religious there will be agreement of a basic principle of intensifying the Jewish identity of the State of Israel out of free choice and not coercion. On many questions of religion and state there is agreement in principle of more than three quarters of the Jews in Israel. The working plan presented below is intended to offer a new agenda for the relationship between religion and the state, rebuilding this relationship on the basis of widespread agreement in principle.

Instead of the tension between loyalty to tradition and reaction to progress, a new plan is presented here. Progress will foster tradition—the Jewish Scriptures encourage progress. The protests for social justice in the summer of 2011 were described in the report of the Trachtenberg Committee—which was constituted in their wake—as encouraging participative democracy. We believe that nurturing participative democracy through communities will make the Israeli society more Jewish and more faithful to tradition. Social pluralism will lead to a flourishing Jewish tradition, imbued with the value of the dignity of each human being specifically, and democracy in general. These values are essential in reinforcing the base of democracy in Israel.

Renewal of the Jewish character of Israel necessitates changes in all sectors of society. We are not making accusations against any sector of the Jewish people. The Zionist majority in the state must assist the ultra-Orthodox minority to renew the learning of core subjects, the obligation to teach practical skills so that its children will be able to participate in ensuring the physical existence of the Jewish people. The Zionist majority should call for intensified Bible studies in the various educational systems, leading to more meaningful participation in the Jewish heritage.

Introduction

The Zionist movement has been headed by "secular" leaders since Herzl's time. Many ultra-Orthodox were opposed to the movement. The religious Zionist movement, established by "Mizrachi," was a bridge between the Zionist faction and ultra-Orthodox community. The vast majority of the religious Zionists in Israel, during the British Mandate and after the establishment of the State, were active participants in building the country, in its defense, in immigration and in settlement.

The leadership of pre-State Israel and the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel political party did not integrate in the pre-State institutions, and the ultra-Orthodox remained outside the mainstream. In their opposition to the secular leadership, they rejected modernity and progress in ultra-Orthodox education. The boys' educational institutions, from haderim to yeshivas, turned their backs on the basic requirement to teach an occupation and to teach skills that enable one to make a living. On the other hand, study of the Jewish traditions was neglected in the pre-State secular schools. In the words of one of the leaders of a secular party: "We wanted to bring up skeptics, and we brought up ignoramuses."

The Zionist leadership entrusted the National Religious sector, in its various forms, to set up the religious and rabbinical establishments in Israel. The heads of the rabbinical establishment declared its responsibility for all of Israel's citizens, but those carrying out the work were members of political parties. The party administration made its impression on the basic structure of the rabbinical establishment of Israel from the beginning.

The crises of Jewish identity, the ultra-Orthodox isolationism, and the decline of the religious establishment all merged together. The rabbinical establishment that was controlled by the political party bowed to the ultra-Orthodox parties and their functionaries. It was not able to inspire a generation seeking its roots. The growth of the ultra-Orthodox population in recent generations has led to abject poverty among them. The increase in magnitude of an education system which does not prepare its graduates to earn a living and support families has become a threat to Israel's growth and prosperity.

However, this crisis offers an opportunity to take a new direction. The ultra-Orthodox community is ready to recognize, in view of spreading poverty, "that a father should teach his son a livelihood" and progress is essential. The vulnerability of religious Zionism brought about the realization that Jewish tradition cannot be placed in the hands of the political parties. In fact, ignorance of Judaism has led to a thirst for knowledge in secular society. This brought about a demand for books from the traditional Jewish library.

Our basic premise is that the Torah was given to all Jews. We hope it will become the common property of all the people. Moreover, the responsibility of participating in the day-to-day existence of the individual, the family, the people, and the State belongs to all sectors of society. The study of the Torah should be the right of everyone and learning an occupation should be expected of all sectors.

From a Political Institution to a Civil Society

The Jewish nation consists of many ethnic groups, with no single religious leader of them all. Diversity and pluralism are its most outstanding characteristics. The religious leadership draws its strength from Jewish communities everywhere. Historically, each community appointed a rabbi spiritually suited to its members. The democratic and pluralistic character of the Jewish people was expressed in its rabbis.

However, after the founding of the State of Israel, the rabbinical establishment was based on a central authority. The Minister of Religion became the main factor in choosing the rabbis of towns and settlements in Israel. However, a religious leadership drawing its strength from politicians and political party sectors cannot be a source of inspiration for general society. The main democratic principle, according to which the leadership draws its authority from society, was neglected.

The central leadership, the government, the Knesset and the law courts, made decisions on religion: the best conversion methods, the most suitable kashruth certificates, the suitability—or unsuitability—of rabbis to serve communities. The political system's decisions were reached, as usual, by distasteful bargaining and not by persuasion, influence, and discussion. Shamefully, the discussions on the content of religion too often led to a distancing between the Jews in the Diaspora and in Israel. The damage to Israel, the Jewish people and religion as a result of the political influence on the religious system was obvious.

We recommend reversing the system and turning over control to the community: leadership and Jewish culture, financial resources, and authority should all be turned over to the general public. Each community will receive a budget according to the number of registered members who pay a voluntary religious levy (as done in some European countries). The community will plan its activities and the level of Jewish practice consistent with its members and its chosen leadership. The rabbis will be employees of the community, as has been the practice in the Diaspora for generations, and not government or local authority employees.

Matters requiring a broader forum than the community, such as kashruth, marriage, and conversion, will be carried out by voluntary community associations. The public and not the government will determine kashruth standards and conversion principles. The state will grant a number of communal associations (the larger ones) licenses for kashruth, marriage, and conversion. The general public will supervise, resolve, and authorize the various bodies to implement whatever necessary.

The range of tasks to be carried out by the communities are described below.

Community

1. A minimum number of people who are interested may be registered as a community and receive budgets according to the number of members.
2. The conditions to becoming a community are holding at least a weekly meeting and promoting mutual activities according to the Jewish tradition, such as prayer, Torah study, and Kabbalat Shabbat. Each community will decide on its character, and there will be no limitations regarding the religious, the ultra-Orthodox, or secular, ethnic groups, or other streams. Each community will decide on its character as it chooses.
3. Communities may become associations. Licenses to grant kashruth certificates, marriage ceremonies, and conversions will be granted to the largest communities.
4. The state will finance the community activities, but not control them. A regulator, and not a director, will prevent exploitation of the communities.

Rabbinical Authority

1. Every community can decide whether to employ a rabbi and the scope of that rabbi’s position.
2. The rabbi will be employed by the community, in accordance with an agreement between them.

Spreading of the Torah

1. Budgets for Yeshivas and Kollels will be transferred, in the main, to the various communities.
2. The communities will decide on the best ways, according to their understanding, to spread Torah among their members and the general public.

Kashruth

1. The state will grant licenses to issue kashruth certificates to a number of the larger communal associations.
2. The communal associations will select a "Kashruth Committee," which will decide on the kashruth policy of the association and will supervise its activities. [1]
3. The kashruth certificates will be issued by the various associations throughout the country.
4. Profits from the kashruth certification will be transferred to the communities, to develop and expand their activities.

Marriage and Divorce

1. The state will issue permits to grant marriage licenses to a number of the larger community associations.
2. Each couple may choose under which association's auspices to hold its wedding, not limited to the couple's place of residence.

Conversion

1. The state will issue licenses to grant conversion certificates to the largest community associations.
2. Each community association will establish a national conversion system.
3. These conversion systems will set up learning institutions and religious law courts which will carry out conversions according to their own policies.

Immediate reforms

Since the Mandate period, the religious establishment was developed with disregard for the local communities. Restoring authority to the communities will require a period of transition. Listed below are changes regarding religion and the state which should be carried out immediately. We believe that within a year it is feasible and essential to improve the religious establishment in Israel. These changes will increase the respect for the Torah and its followers.

Rabbinate

Before the transition to communities a number of outstanding distortions in the Israeli rabbinical establishment should be annulled.

Termination of the ethnic duplication

1. The Israel law calls for ethnic duplication in the rabbinical positions as well as in the various rabbinical bodies (the Chief Rabbis' Council, the body that elects the chief rabbis). All ethnic considerations in rabbinical positions should be cancelled immediately.
2. Only one Chief Rabbi should be in office, regardless of ethnic origin.
3. The president of the rabbinical court will be elected by a committee for the appointment of rabbinical judges.

Time limits in appointing rabbis

1. The appointment of rabbis will be limited to seven-year terms.
2. At the end of the term, the election committee will decide (by a majority of two-thirds) whether the rabbi should continue in the position. If the rabbi's term is not extended, the position will be open to other candidates.
3. Term limitations will apply to all categories of rabbis: neighborhood rabbis, community rabbis, area council and local council rabbis and municipal rabbis.

Council for Higher Religious Education

1. A council for higher religious education will be established, similar to the Council for Higher Education.
2. The goal of the council will be to extend Torah study to all sectors of the population. A budget for this purpose will be granted for a limited period.
3. The council members will be elected from various bodies—the central and local government, the Council for Higher Education and municipal rabbis. The goal of the selection will be to prevent sectorial control of the council.
4. The council will be in charge of deciding the guidelines for the religious education systems' budget.
5. The budget for Torah education will be granted mainly to those who have served in the army.

Kashruth

The word "kashruth" has regrettably become a synonym for shady deals. At a cost to the majority of Israelis who request kosher food and the rabbis who assist them, the various ultra-Orthodox (Badatz) certifications are raking in a fortune, sometimes assisted by the Israeli rabbinical administration in ways that are certainly not "kosher." We have presented a comprehensive proposal for a kashruth system supervised by the community associations, the profits of which will be directed to their wellbeing. Here we will propose principles which can immediately facilitate the struggle against the corruption existing in the present system.

Transparency

1. Each kashruth entity, official or not, will be required to publish its kashruth regulations on an internet site accessible to the public.
2. Each kashruth entity will be obliged to publish the regulations governing its tariffs and the price charged to each supervised entity.
3. All payments for kashruth certificates will be made directly to the kashruth entity and not to the kashruth supervisor.

Non-profit entities

Private companies will not be allowed to issue kashruth certificates, supervise kashruth etc. An ultra-Orthodox entity which wishes to issue kashruth certificates will be required to register as a non-profit association with full transparency.

The Rabbinical Courts

The political party control of religious services to the public and the hegemony of the ultra-Orthodox parties in the rabbinical establishment are seen predominantly in the rabbinical courts. To our sorrow, we cannot state that the many complaints directed towards the system are groundless. A number of immediate steps can be taken, which will contribute to the dignity of the religious courts.

General Education for Rabbinical Court Judges

The rabbinical courts deal mainly with disputes between married couples. Very often complaints are made that in these courts women are discriminated against. It is also maintained that some of the rabbinical judges are not anchored in the real world. The concepts and world views of those appearing before them are not understood by the judges, who come from a completely different background. On the other hand, there are complaints that the civil judges are detached from the Jewish sources. The following is therefore proposed:

1. Only rabbinical judges with a certain standard of general education will be appointed.
2. Only rabbinical judges with a certain standard of education in Judaism (such as Hebrew law) will be appointed.

Increased Representation of Women in the Rabbinical Courts

In principle, halakha adjudicators do not allow women to act as rabbinical judges. This causes a feeling of alienation in the women who appear before "a man's world" in the courts. To balance this situation it is proposed to ensure a majority for women in the committee for the appointment of rabbinical judges. Our proposal is based on halakha and is intended to improve the status of women. The integration of women in the system, even if they do not preside as rabbinical judges, will improve the attitude of the women appearing in court and will advance the dignity of the court, the Torah and its implementers. The Committee for the Appointment of Rabbinical Judges will consist of: [2]
a. The Justice Minister
b. The President of the Rabbinical Court and the Chief Rabbi One rabbinical judge
c. A female minister (or deputy minister) chosen by the government.
d. Two female members of the Knesset.
e. Two female rabbinical pleaders.
The rabbinical judges will be elected by a majority of seven of the committee members. A female rabbinical pleader will be chosen as the director of the rabbinical court. Approximately half of the rabbinical courts' area secretaries will be female.

Marriage and Divorce

1. Regional marriage registers will be set up.
2. The possibility of civil marriages will be advanced, based on the proposal of Rabbi Bakshi-Doron.

Conversion

The concentration of the conversion system in the hands of one central entity exposes the system to pressure from the ultra-Orthodox. Therefore the conversion process should be decentralized, as follows:

1. Three rabbis from each local committee will be authorized to sign conversion certificates. The "Tzohar Law"—drawn up by an independent group of the younger generation of advanced thinking rabbis—is more extreme, as it permits all municipality rabbis to convert. We have limited this to three rabbis.
2. A convert, like any other Jew, will be able to register for marriage in any place of his choosing.

[1] Some have observed: who will be responsible for the kashruth of the certificate? Kashruth supervision, like all quality control, requires specific expertise and specialization. The sages, who said "go out and see how the people behave," have already replied to this question. To ensure that the relevant experts will be responsible for kashruth one must trust in the wisdom of the people. A license to confer a kashruth certificate will be granted only to a limited number of kashruth associations, chosen by the members of the communities. It is a given that an expert will head the association. The U.S. OU organization is an example. Not only a bureaucratic system, chosen and controlled by government, local authorities and legislators, which organize and arbitrate, can be responsible for food kashruth.
Moreover, the marketplace today, with its many tens of ultra-orthodox courts, some tiny, each of which grants certificates to its followers, will be replaced by a limited number of associations, controlled by the general public transparently. Not only will respect for the Torah increase, but also observance of the commandments.
[2] The committee members at present are: the Justice Minister and an additional minister chosen by the government, the two chief rabbis and two rabbinical judges, two Knesset members and two members of the Lawyers' Bureau. At the time of writing (April, 2012) there is no woman among the twelve committee members.

Identifying the Problem

…the player directly responsible for Hapoel losing this critical game was the team's goalkeeper, Haim Cohen. His amateurish blunder in letting the ball slip through his hands gave Maccabi their first goal, and the second was the result of Cohen's poor positioning for the free kick. Nor was this the first game this season in which Hapoel has been let down by Cohen. His tendency to make mistakes under pressure has surely eroded his teammates' confidence in him; Hapoel manager Aryeh Rubin is rumored to be looking for a replacement...

…but the star of the game was referee Shimon Levy, who capped a series of strange decisions by ignoring a clear foul in the 43rd minute, when Maccabi defender Shai Golan brought down Hapoel's Yuval Sharabi several meters inside the Maccabi penalty area. Had Levy awarded the penalty to Hapoel it this point, when they were only one goal down, the whole game would have developed quite differently. The foul was plain to see and the TELEVISION replays left no room for doubt—but Levy brushed aside Hapoel's demand for a penalty kick. Hapoel's complaints over this decision are entirely justified and should force the Football Association to reconsider whether Levy is suitable to serve as a referee in Premier Division games…

These are fairly typical, albeit fictitious, excerpts from reports on football games. American readers are invited to translate the terminology into that used for the gladiatorial contests they call "football,” but the essentials will remain valid in any parallel sporting context. Player X played poorly, player Y was outstanding, this one did this and that one failed to do that, and so forth. In short, this is standard fare for followers of sports reports in the papers, radio, and television, or for one who shares impressions with his or her friends in the pub, bar, or wherever.

But is it kosher? Is it halakhically permissible to write, read, speak, or otherwise communicate such sentiments in this way?

Let's skip over any potential halakhic issues that may or may not exist with regard to professional sports per se and focus solely on the seemingly minor aspect of the way a game is reported and analyzed, whether in real time or afterward.

From a halakhic standpoint, material such as that above is riddled with major problems. The main problems stem from the fact that in the commentary, reporting, and “Monday morning quarterbacking” that accompanies and follows every game, the people involved are being publicly vilified—the goalkeeper was “amateurish,” he positioned himself “poorly,” he “let down” his team in a critical game—and not for the first time. As for the referee, he is presented as being totally incompetent.

These are serious charges and they run the gamut of halakhic prohibitions stretching from rekhilut, which is usually translated as “tale-bearing,” to lashon haRa (malicious reports) if the material is factually true, to motsi shem ra (slander) if it is not.

Let me stress immediately that I am not interested, here or anywhere in this article, in entering the halakhic jungle of what does or might constitute an infraction of each of these prohibitions. I am not personally qualified to define what does or might come under each heading, but even if I was, the detailed legal analysis is not the issue. At this stage, the point I wish to make as strongly as possible is that the everyday activity of following the news and keeping up with current affairs—via reading the papers, listening to the radio, and watching television—involves exposure to (and likely infringement of) halakhic prohibitions relating to the complex of topics we commonly lump together under the “lashon haRa” label.

Nor is the lashon haRa complex the only set of halakhic issues involved: urging that someone be fired, as the report does with respect to both the player and the referee, is also problematic—on both moral and legal grounds. Talking the same way with your buddy in the bar seems to be in a different category to writing in a paper or commenting on the radio—because the guys in the bar are just “letting off steam” and have no way to translate their assessments of players into practice. Or so we used to think. But nowadays, when thousands of irate fans can write comments on the team's website or Facebook page, their comments become part of a mass campaign that can and does result in actions—such as dismissing that player or pushing the referee out of top-level football. Taking someone's livelihood away, without compelling cause and due process, is not only morally reprehensible but also proscribed by halakha.

What might constitute “compelling cause” and who has the right to decide that it exists, are legal issues. Once again, I am not concerned here with the practical legalities; rather, I seek to create the awareness that there is a halakhic issue, potentially a serious one, in something as seemingly marginal and “innocent” as talking about a sports game and criticizing the performance of the participants (players, referees, coaches, etc.) involved. Certainly, the fact that in societal terms this is considered normative behavior does not make it halakhically permissible.

I have deliberately chosen to start with the seemingly flippant example of a sports report as a method of highlighting some of the halakhic problems that we all ignore every single day. By “we,” I mean everyone who consumes media of any sort. Anyone who never reads a newspaper, listens to the radio, watches any television, surfs the net, or uses social media, is not included in “we”—but if such a person exists at all, he or she is not going to be reading this publication either.

Having made that admission, let me now broaden the scope and, in so doing, deepen the problem. All the issues pertaining to the football game cross over from the sports pages/programs to the culture pages. The book/movie/theatre review is an even bigger halakhic minefield. Cohen's new novel is silly—and downright childish in parts; Levy's performance as Macbeth was shrill, unconvincing, and generally over-the-top—he really isn’t capable of taking on Shakespearean tragedy. As for Sharabi's latest album, it's nowhere near the quality of his earlier ones.

Turning to the business pages, we find Cohen Manufacturing Ltd. reported lower sales and profits last year. The company's most recent acquisition has contributed nothing to earnings so far, while its costs are higher than those of its peers—yet it paid larger bonuses to senior management than last year. The paper's business columnist summarizes the company's performance as follows: the CEO's vision is flawed; management is doing a lousy job; and the board is stuffed with pals of the CEO, who have no compunction in awarding outsize remuneration packages to the CEO and other senior managers. Not only is the recent fall in Cohen Manufacturing's share price justified, it says, but further falls can be expected. There is no good reason to hold these shares at current prices, certainly not to buy them.

Finally reaching the front page, we find that the mayor of a small town, one Shimon Levy, is under investigation for molesting and, in some cases, raping women who sought his help to obtain welfare support. The Trade Minister, Haim Cohen, is being accused of receiving kickbacks on trade deals he was instrumental in negotiating with some foreign countries. And the main headline is that the Prime Minister, Aryeh Rubin, secretly met Arab leaders to discuss a proposed peace treaty in which Israel would cede control of territories it holds.

Back in the pub—or perhaps outside the shul—where you and your friend usually meet and shoot the breeze, you both express disgust and revulsion about Levy's purported crimes. You suggest he should be locked up for 20 years, but your friend says that people like him should be forcibly sterilized—a comment that is overheard by some other people and generates a spirited debate, because one of them is a friend of Shimon Levy and another is his wife's cousin. However, everyone agrees that Cohen, the minister who took bribes (reportedly…) should “do the honorable thing” and resign immediately, thereby cutting short his promising political career.

As for the Prime Minister, the usual split develops between those willing to give peace a chance and those who believe you can’t trust any Arab leader and should not offer them anything. One young fellow mutters that if Aryeh Rubin agrees to an Israeli withdrawal, he should be “eliminated.”…

The Solution—Part 1: Getting Real about the Problem

So it's not just Monday-morning quarterbacking about the sports game over the weekend. It's certainly not just about what constitutes rekhilut, or lashon haRa, or whatever. It is actually far more fundamental than legal definitions regarding specific halakhic prohibitions.

The real problem, I venture to suggest, is this: One of the most important areas in modern life with which halakha has yet to confront, in the most basic sense, is the one we call “mass media.”

The interaction between technological progress and sociological and political development has driven—and is continuing to drive—huge changes in the way people communicate with and about each other. Mass media began in the eighteenth century with the development of pamphlets and newssheets, moved into newspapers in the nineteenth century and then—in the last 100 years—exploded into radio, television, internet, and now, the newest stage, social media.

Yet while all this has been happening, halakha has fallen ever further behind. The primary focus of halakhic concern with regard to the media, at least in recent decades, has been in the area of immorality in the sexual context. Thus attention has been centered on offensive content in the various media, with “offensive” referring largely to the gamut of sex-related issues, from modesty (and lack thereof) to outright pornography, and their impact and influence on individuals—especially children—and on society as a whole.

This is, of course, entirely justified. Indeed, the severity of the moral and legal problems posed by the internet in general and now by social media, is such that it has long transcended religious/conservative groups and is now widely recognized by all parts of society. In the halakhic context, it is obvious that not only overtly pornographic material, but also the use of scantily-clad models in advertisements, involves transgressions of various laws, as well as being morally offensive.

Unfortunately, the focus on sex-related problems has become obsessive and all-encompassing—and this may be the reason why other halakhic problems stemming from the production and consumption of mass-media materials are downplayed, overlooked, and even ignored. I was personally made very aware of the dichotomous and distorted view that religious (from Hareidi to Modern Orthodox) people took of the media when I worked as a journalist. It can be summed up in the reaction of "Oh, you cover economics and finance—that's OK,” which I heard umpteen times, from rabbis, rebbes, and laypeople alike.

That statement is not merely completely wrong and utterly fatuous. It also betrays stunning ignorance of the problems posed by the media. It is, in fact, a far-reaching admission by the person making the statement that Judaism as he or she understands it and halakha as he or she observes it are totally disconnected from modern media and communications—which is to say, from modern life.

For some reason, Orthodoxy has decided to draw the line between it and the modern world on the sex front, but not on other key fronts—such as communications. This is a convenient state of affairs, but it doesn’t stand up to any kind of rigorous scrutiny.

The comparison between the ongoing intensive struggle against sexual license on the one hand versus the lack of struggle over the production and consumption of regular media content, is the starting–point for any serious discussion of “media and halakha.”

Probably the most fundamental question that needs to be raised and to which answers need at least to be sought is philosophical: Does Judaism accept modern notions of free speech? If this strikes you as far-fetched, perhaps you should think again and try not to react from the gut.

It's pretty clear that Judaism is opposed to free sex, free love, or whatever other slogan is used to legitimize sexual license. It is also clear that there are major restrictions on what you can say about people in the context of normal inter-personal discourse—the lashon haRa complex of laws referred to above. But what about free speech as a basic element of democracy, in politics and society? What can you say, in the public arena, about people who are public persona, in whatever sphere?

The question, in other words, is whether it is possible to construct a theoretical framework relating the halakhic concepts defining permitted and forbidden topics of discussion and methods of expression to the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of democratic societies? If such a construct can be developed, then it should be possible to derive practical guidelines as to how to report, comment, and discuss matters ranging from sports games to national security in the various media, with these guidelines covering everyone from participants in chat rooms on the internet to editorial writers in the leading newspapers. On the other hand, maybe the gulf between the demands of halakha and the reality of modern mass media is too wide to be bridged?
If—and only if—such a theoretical construct can be put in place, then it is possible to advance to the more practical, but no less fascinating, question of whether there can be “kosher media.” That phrase currently relates to media that are “clean” in the context of adhering to laws and mores regarding modesty and avoiding content and material that is sexually provocative or otherwise immoral. It does NOT relate to the substantive content of the material appearing in the media or to its implications in a wider societal context, as will be discussed below.

First, however, some comments with regard to the theoretical/philosophical issues. I have not conducted an extensive, let alone exhaustive, search of all likely or possible sources, even those accessible on the internet. Nevertheless, on the basis of the search I have made myself, or indirectly through others, I strongly suspect that there is very little discussion of these issues. However, there certainly has been some analysis, in articles published in both rabbinic and general publications, mostly in Hebrew, mostly written by Modern Orthodox rabbis. Hareidi material on this topic, if it exists, is more difficult to locate because it is not published on the internet.

Based on the material that I have seen and read, the following tentative conclusions emerge:

• There is very little attempt to address the underlying philosophical questions. The thrust of the discussion tends to be practically halakhic—may one do this or that, is specific behavior permissible (in the public arena, e.g. criticizing incumbent office-holders or candidates for office). The deeper issues are largely ignored or glossed over.
• There is a corpus of halakhic material relating to the issues under discussion, notably the works of the Hafetz Haim in the area of lashon haRa and allied prohibitions—although both the Hafetz Haim himself and contemporary scholars use other sources, including the main codes (Shulhan Arukh, etc.) and other important works (such as Rabbi Yonah of Gerondi, in medieval Spain). Although all the halakhic literature, going back to the Talmud, relates to publication or dissemination of information, facts and rumors, innuendo, and so forth in the public sphere, none of it takes into account a culture in which a) the public's “right to know”—and to comment—is a central value and feature of social and political life; b) holders of virtually all public positions are required—and hence expect—to be criticized and held accountable for their actions; and c) proactive dissemination of (partial and one-sided) information is the norm (press releases and press conferences), and/or is obligatory (corporate and other disclosure mechanisms) and hence taken for granted.

• Within this practically-oriented approach, the analysis—even of authors sympathetic to democratic society as we know it—points strongly in the direction of a negative conclusion. That is to say, the halakhic framework makes it very difficult in theory, and virtually impossible in practice, to permissibly produce and even to consume most of the news and current affairs (in the widest sense) material presented in the various mass media. I realize that that is a rather sweeping statement, but that's my assessment of the material I have seen.

• That conclusion is not usually overtly stated, for whatever reason. But the result is that the entire discussion then moves from leKhathila (a priori) to bediavad (a posteriori), which is probably one of the reasons that the analysis is then one of practical halakha: the starting point is, "in the existing circumstances, what can one do or not do.”

• Since the issue is presented as a practical halakhic one, it is perhaps unsurprising that the direction or approach adopted as a general solution is to establish an entity (e.g. a newspaper, or a political party or faction) that is separate and distinct from those already existing in the public arena and to place this entity under direct, ongoing rabbinic supervision. This mechanism, it is assumed and proposed, will enable specific problems to be dealt with in an authoritative and timely manner.

• However, the analyses themselves disclose several flaws in the way the authors approach the problem. The first flaw, as already noted, is the avoidance of an overall theoretical structure. The construction of such a structure is relegated to a vague and utopian future with quasi-messianic undertones—meaning that it's not something achievable in the here-and-now, so let's not relate to it in detail.

• Other flaws stem from a tendency to confuse the problem with the solution or from the unintended consequences of proposed solutions. Both of these subjects need to be considered in greater depth.

The Solution—Part 2: Don't Confuse the Problem with the Solution, and Don’t Make the Solution into a New Problem

In any attempt to define and analyze the problems posed to halakha by modern mass media, it is essential to realize—and accept—that many of the attempts to “solve” aspects of these problems have proven to be unhelpful. That is because either their premise is flawed from the outset—they are unaware of the real problems or they ignore them—or, worse, they become part of the problem rather than comprising part of the solution.

The most obvious and most widespread “solution” to the problem posed by mass media is to categorize the problem as being part of the wider phenomenon of secularization. Since this is, by definition, a negative phenomenon from the perspective of religious Jews, the solution has been to apply the standard response toward aspects of secularization, namely to proscribe it—to make it assur, illegal. However, this negativity is a very blunt weapon and is very hard to live with. The second part of the solution, therefore, is to replace the offensive mass media with acceptable or “kosher'” ones.

In practice, since at least the late nineteenth century, this has been the main response of Orthodox Judaism to the rise of mass media. The main battleground was—and to a great extent still is—print media, primarily newspapers and magazines, but it has extended to radio and, after largely skipping television, is now focused on electronic media, i.e., the internet and its derivatives.

Reviewing this prolonged struggle and how it has played out and is still being waged, it seems to me that it has been a strategic failure, although it may be argued that in tactical terms—meaning the specific cultural battles fought between Orthodox and non-Orthodox in various countries and cultures over the last 150 years—the existence of separate Orthodox media outlets was helpful and perhaps even essential. Nevertheless, over the long run, the attempt to create and maintain so-called kosher media has generated negative consequences that, I would argue, have ultimately outweighed the positive achievements.

The negative consequences fall into three categories:

1. "kosher pigs"
2. "echo chambers"
3. unintended consequences

"Kosher Pigs"

The most common problem resulting from the establishment of "kosher media" is that these are only kosher in some respects, while in others they are as flawed as the regular media. This is reminiscent of the midrashic comment on the difference between pigs and other ritually unacceptable animals. Of the two criteria for "kosherness" laid down in the Torah, namely chewing the cud and cloven hoofs, the pig falls down only on the former. Because its hoofs are cloven, it proudly presents its paws and hoofs to onlookers—whereas its digestive system, of course, remains hidden.

Orthodox media are obviously "kosher" with regard to lewd and sexually provocative content, and this can be ascertained immediately. However, the way they present news, information, and, especially, commentary and criticism, requires much more careful examination. The examination should encompass two elements: what they do report, and in what terms, prominence, and tone? Similarly, what do they not report, or relegate to relative obscurity, or adopt a negative tone in their reporting? Whom and what do they criticize, with what degree of vehemence—and with what motives?

This topic is obviously extremely sensitive, although it is quite amenable to analysis, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Almost all Orthodox media were ideological in origin and were established to serve an agenda, whether overtly religious and/or ideological, or political/religious. Therefore each media form had, from inception, its clearly defined "good guys" and "bad guys.”

Furthermore, within the framework of the lashon haRa halakhic complex, there are categories of people—such as "evil-doers,” "heretics," and so forth—whom it is permissible or even desirable to present in a negative light, to criticize, and even to vilify in public. Once a media outlet is established by a religious group with a clearly defined agenda that identifies "them" as "bad guys"—and obviously "us" as "good guys"—then the ground rules are clear-cut. "They" must be either ignored or, if mentioned, then in a negative tone or undertone.

All Hareidi and, over time, almost all dati-leumi media (I relate to those in Israel; I assume the American scene is similar, if not identical), have been sucked into this self-righteous mode of self-censorship, which is usually accompanied by "rabbinic oversight" to make sure the relevant rules are being obeyed. A simple, relatively innocent but nonetheless telling example of this mindset is the following story:

In the mid-1990s, the then Satmarer Rebbe visited Israel and, naturally, conducted large gatherings such as tischen during his visit. The Shabbat he spent in Jerusalem was a major event in Hareidi circles, not just for his direct followers but for many "unaffiliated" Hareidi youngsters. Despite these objective facts—or, more likely, because of them—Hamodia, the party newspaper of Agudat Yisrael and hence a bitter ideological foe of Satmar, totally ignored the visit and the events held during it, although its readership was fully aware of them and many participated in or were directly impacted by them.

This level of reality-denial is increasingly impossible in the modern world, as information permeates all but the most hermetically sealed societies. Even in the mid-1990s it was a pathetic attempt, but it spoke volumes about the theory and practice of Hareidi media.

Yet this is the way Hareidi groups relate to each other—either by ignoring rival groups' existence and viewpoints or, worse, by virulent criticism that is either overt or, in more sophisticated cases, implied through the use of biblical, midrashic, talmudic, or other metaphors, code-names, and 'role-models.’ Obviously, with regard to non-Hareidi, secular, or non-Jewish persons, groups, and organizations, there is even greater leeway, and this license is commonly used, whether to deny or distort, ignore or misinform, criticize, or vilify.

"Kosher pigs,” in short, are those many (probably most) Orthodox or Hareidi media outlets that proclaim that they are clean in terms of smutty, lewd, and sexually provocative content, and that their overall operations are under rabbinic guidance—all of which is true. However, by closely defining their ideology and mission, they effectively award themselves licenses to say what they please about—or ignore—all those persons, entities, and organizations that oppose their ideology, or that have been categorized (by the rabbinic authorities exercising guidance) as opponents.

"Echo Chambers"

The "kosher pigs" phenomenon inevitably leads to a phenomenon known in the media world as "echo chambers"—in which a paper, radio, or television station, or blog adopts a very clear line and thereby comes to attract people who largely agree with that line and to repel those who largely disagree. As the degree of interactivity in media has grown, the responders (in radio chat shows, or internet chat rooms) become ideologically and politically homogenous in a self-reinforcing process.

The result is that readers of a specific paper, listeners to a specific radio station, or viewers of a specific television channel tend not merely to hold shared views, but also to become increasingly convinced of the validity of their views—in favor of this and opposed to that—and increasingly negative toward opposing views.

This is a widespread phenomenon, symbolized in the United States by media such as the New York Times and Fox News, but it is a particular blessing for religious and especially fundamentalist groups and their media. It permits the pretense of in-depth analysis and serious discussion, although the content is seriously—and often entirely—skewed in the direction suited to the ideology of the specific medium. The essence of classic journalism, namely the presentation of different views in a fairly objective and dispassionate manner, is avoided or abused.

Religious media have always been echo chambers. As noted earlier, that is their raison d'etre. They have no truck with alternative views—even of other religious groups. In the Hareidi sector this is taken for granted: if Hamodia would not report the very fact of the Satmarer Rebbe's visit, what chance is there that he would be granted an in-depth interview to present his ideas? Or that Yated Ne'eman would run a feature on a major yeshivat hesder? The very suggestion is ludicrous—let alone that one of the leaders of a secular political party be allowed to write an op-ed explaining why he thinks Hareidi young men should serve in the army.
Although it is taken for granted that secular media should give Hareidi spokesmen space or air-time, the opposite is a non-starter.

Yet Hareidi newspapers claim to have upgraded themselves and become serious media organs—because, after all, they carry AP stories about the French presidential elections and Bloomberg analyses of Federal Reserve monetary policy. Yes, there is a problem with Germany, because the current Chancellor is of the female gender—ditto for stories on U.S. foreign policy. But at least there is coverage of world news and the larger Hareidi papers providing their readers critical information about what's happening outside the local or global Hareidi ghetto.

The underlying rationale behind this is that all the members of “our” group—however defined—should be exposed to or excluded from the same set of views and even news and, presumably, be influenced accordingly. The inevitable result is the creation and proliferation of intellectual and social echo chambers, in which group members absorb and exchange stilted perspectives that are reinforced by repetition among themselves.

This pattern is now prevalent in dati-leumi society in Israel, thanks to the proliferation of media catering to this group—which, like Hareidi society, is obsessively engaged in splitting into ever more self-defined sub-groups, but when viewed from without is actually highly homogenous. The media in question include daily and weekly publications, radio channels and a growing range of blogs and other sites. In these media spaces, datiim-leumiim talk to each other, about each other—and to the virtual exclusion of others.
Thus all the problems identified above with respect to Hareidi media have resurfaced in the dati-leumi sector—with one major difference: Whereas the trend in the Hareidi sector is of movement from a totalitarian structure, imposed rigidly from above, that is gradually opening up as the envelope is being pushed by many people in many directions, the datiim-leumiim are moving in the opposite direction.
They are coming from an open structure, in which they consumed primarily secular media, with their own as a side dish or dessert, to a structure in which they are choosing to “diet,” cutting down or eliminating secular media consumption, and increasingly preferring “their” media.

The driving force behind the change in the media consumption patterns of dati-leumi households is probably a growing backlash against the crudity (in the sexual and other contexts) of the main secular media. However, another factor is the desire to create an ideological echo chamber, especially in the area of primary interest and concern to the dati-leumi sector, namely Eretz Yisrael—meaning settlement, primarily in “the territories”/Yesha.

Unintended Consequences

The overall motivation behind the efforts to create religious media, now and in the past, can be summed up under the heading "veHaya mahanekha kadosh" (Deuteronomy 23:15)—"your camp should be holy.” This verse is interpreted so that “camp” means every social unit from household to sector of society, and “holy” means separate, as per Rashi's comment to Kedoshim tihyu (Leviticus 19:2). In other words, the goal was positive, at least in the value framework of the religious leadership, and the end justified the means, flawed as they may be.

However, as in most human endeavors, numerous unintended consequences resulted from the way this goal was pursued and how the means themselves evolved over time. Many of these unintended consequences have been negative, some profoundly so. All assessments are necessarily subjective, but the consequences that seem to me the most unfortunate are these:

1. Commercialization trumps ideology

The last 25 to 30 years have witnessed enormous changes in Israeli society, which can be summed up under the headlines of “the demise of ideology” and, in tandem, “the rise of the individual/privatization.” This process has seen a decline in the strength of all political and ideological groupings, one facet of which has been the loss of funding, whether from state sources or from the group's own membership. In the context of media activities—publishing newspapers, running a radio station, etc.—this has meant that the owners and managers of the medium have been obliged to seek funding from commercial sources, primarily advertising, but also sponsorship or co-ownership.

The inevitable result has been a process of commercialization, with all its attendant ills. Analyzing the range of halakhic issues connected directly to advertising could fill an issue of Conversations, but the general point to be made here is that the introduction of commercial considerations affects every aspect of a media enterprise, including and perhaps especially its ideological soul. Indeed, whether a so-called religious newspaper or radio station can exist in a commercial framework, and if so to what extent, is an open question.

2. The systematic desecration of synagogues and Shabbat

The most specific—and most severe—damage wrought by commercialization has been on the sanctity of the synagogue and prayer services held therein, and on the sanctity of Shabbat.

A broad spectrum of publications has developed that seek to provide material for religious Jews to read on Shabbat. Let us assume that their declared goal is to detach their target audience from the reading of secular newspapers on Shabbat—a very widespread practice in dati-leumi households in Israel and Modern Orthodox households in the Diaspora. In other words, their motivation is positive—or was, originally.

However, in order to survive in an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace, these publications have been obliged to do some or all of the following: a) expand in size; b) broaden their range of content; and c) upgrade their visual presentation (glossy format, colored photographs, etc). This costs money, which comes mainly from advertising. The result is that publications that originally presented 2 to 4 pages of divrei torah, and perhaps some “news” such as publications of new books dealing with Jewish learning, history, and similar topics, began branching out into features relating to rabbis or other personalities, historic or living, events or developments presumed to be of interest to the publication's leadership, and so on. All this is accompanied by a large and growing proportion of the space available being given over to advertising—of everything from apartments to appliances, as well as specifically religious items, from books to tefillin.

In short, the divrei torah publications metamorphosed over the years from sheets and pamphlets to newsletters and even magazines that could effectively compete for the interest of the religious household against the secular and even religious newspapers and weeklies. However, these “divrei torah publications” are distributed via synagogues, with the result that today, in the vast majority of dati-leumi synagogues in Israel, there is a large selection of these newsletters and magazines available on Friday night and usually throughout Shabbat.

Many, if not most, members of the congregation now spend some, most or all of the service reading this material—including during keriat shema, the amida, hazarat hashat"z, and the Torah reading. Furthermore, despite the unquestionable violation of umpteen halakhot regarding prayer in general, prayer in synagogue and behavior in synagogue even not during prayer, very few rabbis or wardens have taken a stand against this plague, which is intensifying steadily, in scope and scale.

As an aside, I would add that Hareidi synagogues suffer from the same syndrome, but in different forms. Interestingly, in many Hareidi synagogues the problem of extraneous literature distributed during prayer services is worse on weekdays, but is by no means absent on Shabbat. Once again, I have rarely if ever seen or heard of attempts by rabbis or wardens to prevent this practice.

In sum, what has happened in this sphere is reminiscent of the U.S. army lieutenant in Vietnam, who was instructed to "pacify" a village suspected of having been infiltrated by the Vietcong. He reported back to his commanders that "in order to pacify the village, we destroyed it.” Similarly, in order to preserve the sanctity of the Sabbath from the depredations of the secular papers, the so-called religious papers have destroyed the sanctity of the Sabbath, the synagogue, and religious services as a whole.

3. Poisoning minds and hearts

In tandem with the process of the infiltration and pollution of the synagogue with material that is increasingly a-religious, even when it isn’t overtly commercial (a recent headline I saw in one publication was "events in Beer-Sheva this week"), is the politicization and radicalization of the divrei torah themselves.

In this sphere, the process has seen the Torah material move from being a discussion of items or topics in the weekly parasha or related to festivals, fasts, etc., drawn from classic sources and presented by contemporary rabbis with their own thoughts, to the parasha or festival becoming a springboard from which the rabbi or other writer launches into his (or, only in left-wing publications, her) ideas. In many cases, the correct term for what is being presented, by specific writers and by the publication as a whole, is an agenda that, whatever its inherent merits, has subverted the purported purpose of the publication, namely to disseminate divrei torah.

Of course, the writers and publishers will claim that what they are writing and publishing ARE divrei torah. That is precisely the problem: They are so convinced of the validity and value of their ideas, ideology, or approach to issues on the local, national, or global agenda that they conflate their opinions with divrei torah. When the writers or publishers are themselves rabbis, as is more often than not the case, this identity between subjective personal opinions and so-called divrei torah is quickly and easily achieved.

Unfortunately, in many cases this attitude is not merely negative but actually dangerous. As the dati-leumi camp veers steadily toward extremist and simplistic views on a broad range of religious, political, and social issues, the echo-chamber effect of the opinionated and highly politicized pseudo-religion pumped out by many of the pamphleteers generates growing damage. The tendencies toward ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, and general intolerance, which are becoming hallmarks of dati-leumi youth, are thereby intensified and exacerbated. By extension, the effort of religious liberals to break out of the extremist mold pushes them, in turn, to “extremist liberal” approaches in their divrei torah, which are as skewed and opinionated as those of their counterparts.

4. The dilution of rabbinic authority

But the ultimate unintended consequence, if perhaps the most predictable one, is that the attempt of the rabbinic establishment (of any specific group and of the religious sector as a whole) to control the religious media has backfired and resulted in an erosion of its own authority. More correctly, it has made a major contribution to the general process of the erosion of rabbinic authority that is underway.

The erosion process takes two forms. One is what one might term the "Canute syndrome,” exemplified by King Canute, an English king in the era of the Viking invasions, who reportedly parked his throne at the seashore and commanded the tide to turn back. The rulings and even curses pumped out by a broad swathe of Hareidi rabbis and rebbes over the last generation, against the use of computers, cellular phones, MP3s and then MP4s, internet, and so on, have been of comparable effectiveness.

If anything, the fact that the rulings had some temporary influence on at least some people has made the problem worse—because the person who obeyed the rulings for some time and then found that “everyone” was using the machine in question felt that he was being made a fool of. And if he didn’t feel that way, his kids did—and drew the relevant conclusions, so that the next prohibition landed on largely deaf ears, and the one after that merely made its author look ridiculous.

But the more dangerous form of erosion of rabbinic authority stems from situations of perceived conflict of interest. The source of rabbinic authority is the perception that the rabbis in question are defending what they sincerely believe to be the demands and dictates of the Torah, as the practical expression of God's will. Thus even when the rabbinic decree seems pointless, as in the Canute syndrome, it is not considered baseless. Like much else in Jewish life, it is a clash between what looks to be a hopeless cause, even if a just one, and a seemingly inexorable force, although a negative one. It is a declaration of faith and, in Hareidi theology, it expresses the idea that we can only—but must—do whatever is in our power, and the rest is in the hands of the Almighty.

However, if the sincerity of the rabbinic motivation comes under suspicion, then the entire theological and ideological underpinning collapses. Unfortunately, the trends noted above, such as commercialization on the one hand and the swing toward extremism on the other, have cast shadows over the involvement of rabbis in the religious media (and much else besides).

Rabbis, no less than laypeople, now tend to be pigeon-holed in terms of their stance, attitudes, views, and orientation. However, to make matters worse, most rabbis do not merely have ideological agendas, as in the past. Prominent rabbis are involved in politics, directly or indirectly, at local and national levels. They seek to disseminate their ideas, dispute rival ideas, and critically gain and solidify support for themselves, their ideas, the institutions they head, and the movements or parties with which they are associated. In all of this, they are no different from any other leadership group in that they need the media—and, if they provide “good, juicy copy,” by saying or doing things that attract attention and, yes, sell newspapers, then the media needs them, too. Of course, “their” media organs will champion them in any event, while rival organs will denounce them—but from a business and even from a leadership perspective, everyone benefits.

This process means that rabbis, as public figures, have become sucked into the celeb society. Indeed, in their own circles, rabbis and rebbes are THE celebs. Hareidi kids collect rabbi cards and pictures like other kids collect athletes or rock stars. In this environment, you would have to be superhuman not to have an ego issue—and although there are a few rabbis of exceptional humility, most are merely human, not superhuman.

In short, we have a situation in which rabbis who are prominent personalities, who have institutional interests to promote, and who have a political or ideological agenda, have been granted influence or even control over media outlets that have enormous power within these rabbis' communities. Even if the rabbis themselves are capable of avoiding the conflicts of interest created by this situation—and there are some—their coterie of advisers and executives often are not. They will abuse and exploit their power, because the dictum that “all power corrupts” does not have a caveat “except when wielded by religious people”; a more plausible addendum might be “especially when wielded by self-righteous people.”

The result is a growing cynicism regarding religious leadership that is inherently no different from the widespread cynicism toward leadership generally. The cynicism stems from a lack of conviction that the leadership is motivated solely, or even mainly, by the desire to advance the cause which it proclaims. If Moshe Rabbeinu faced that problem (repeatedly), it's hardly surprising that contemporary leaders do, too. But because the media tend to exaggerate and amplify these doubts, and religious media do so with relish vis-à-vis people they identify as their opponents, in the end everyone is tarred with the same brush. In the incisive talmudic phrase: "Kol haposel, beMoomo posel"—anyone who seeks to disqualify others tends to label them with his own faults.

The Solution—Part 3: Elements of Correction

"Religious media" are not the solution to the halakhic and moral problems presented by modern mass media. They have resolved some of the existing problems but have themselves become part of the overall problem, while creating entirely new ones. What, then, can be done?

The first essential step is to recognize, on the one hand, the scale of the problem and, on the other, the unsatisfactory nature of the solutions currently being employed. The problem is not a technical one, of how to edit the front page of tomorrow's paper without violating halakha, but rather how to address the mega-issue of applying halakha in the public arena in a modern society—and, especially, in a Jewish state in which there are large religious and Hareidi minorities, along with an irreligious majority, a large number of non-Jewish citizens (Muslim, Christian and a-religious) and many foreigners, from tourists to refugees.
How is public discourse to be conducted in these circumstances? What may be said about individuals, groups, and institutions and what is forbidden or unacceptable (not necessarily the same thing)? What is the relationship between democratic concepts such as free speech, the public's right to know, accountability to voters, etc., and halakhic concepts such as rekhilut and lashon haRa?

The second step is to begin to grapple with these big issues. Ideally this would be done in a large virtual tent, in which would be gathered, from the outset, all the various viewpoints. In practice, it is more likely that individual scholars or specific institutions will begin the process on their own initiative, and that their efforts will spur responses, debate and further discussion, moving the process forward from within, rather than it being prodded forward by exogenous forces. As it moves forward, it should also broaden to encompass a wider range of approaches.
There would be no agreement on fundamental issues, at least not for a long time—but the initial object is not to achieve agreement or even consensus, rather to define what the disagreements are. That would open the way to the third critical step—and the first practical one. Once the larger debate is underway and the issues are being publicly aired, then the worst excesses of the current situation would be fully exposed.

There would then be an opportunity for developing consensual positions over ground rules—not for matters of principle, but of practice. These would be akin to ceasefires and confidence-building measures, rather than peace treaties. Religious and Hareidi groups could surely come together around a set of guidelines for how to relate to each other and their respective leaderships and, by extension, how to relate to non-religious and non-Jewish persons and groups. That would involve accepting that the halakhic permit to vilify and besmirch 'heretics,’ 'evil-doers' and others may be best left unused, in favor of the more basic axiom of not doing unto others what you would not like them to do to you. Lambasting the secular leadership while denouncing anti-religious or anti-Hareidi rhetoric is not a persuasive approach, apart from being hypocritical and self-serving.

Having thus seized the moral high ground in the debate over the role of media in society, religious thinkers could then plausibly propose ways in which various media could be made less anti-social, less raucous, and more responsible. An obvious place to start would be with talkbacks and other forms of response by the general public. Here there could be actual halakhic rulings for religious people—and perhaps non-halakhic but moral guidelines for all people—defining how they could participate in a constructive discussion with their peers, instead of abusing the anonymity granted by the internet to spew venom against other individuals and to indulge in the coarsest forms of expression.

These religious thinkers could and should include rabbis of various stripes, who would desist from their pointless and self-defeating attempts to impose their will and views on their narrow groups of followers, instead seeking to guide and influence the general public.

The one thing that is certain is that the communications revolution will continue. Personally, I believe that the mass media cannot maintain their present nihilist and socially destructive trajectory for much longer and that a major change for the better will occur. Wouldn’t it be nice if, after generations of having being dragged along by the forces of change, Jewish religious leaders became part of those forces, helping shape a change for the better?

I would not presume to present a bibliography on this topic, nor even to identify seminal articles. However, the following articles, one in English and one in Hebrew, serve admirably as an introduction to the halakhic issues involved in journalism. Even in that context, they are in no way encyclopedic, nor do they attempt to address wider issues. Fascinatingly, although they date from 2001 and 1995 respectively, they are already obsolete, in the sense that they do not relate to the internet and its impact. But they certainly succeed in providing an entrée into the halakhic source material and the legal and moral complexities of the reporting of news from an halakhic perspective.

Sources:

“Journalism, Controversy, and Responsibility: Halachic Analysis”
Steven Oppenheimer, D.D.S
Journal of Halacha & Contemporary Society XLI; Spring 2001– From 5761
http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/english/journal/oppenheimer-1.htm

Rabbi Ari Shvat
Newspapers and news – mitzvah or prohibition
Appeared originally in “Talelei Orot” and now on the Yeshivot Bnei Akiva website
http://yba.org.il/show.asp?id=33936&big_cat=1590