National Scholar Updates

When I was in high school, a friend and I decided we needed to know whether God existed. It was a big public high school on Long Island, full of Catholics and Protestants who went to church and enough Jews to support a kosher bakery just around the corner from the football field. Everyone got along pretty well. But apart from bar mitzvahs, first communions, and the Civil Rights Movement—which galvanized much of the town’s clergy—daily life didn’t seem to have much to do with religion. God was mostly for holidays.

Yet I myself sensed God’s presence much more often, from an early age. For whatever reason, I always felt there was more going on than met the eye, that there was a Being up there Who cared about me and cared about right and wrong, and had set a right and a wrong in this world. It wasn’t a popular topic as the Vietnam War raged and college dorms started going co-ed and offering birth control pills. But for a few of us, it was pressing, and endured.

My friend was Presbyterian, and we met in choir at school, where I had some of the most intense and moving experiences of my life singing texts such as “O Magnum Mysterium” and “Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs.” What was I to make of this? My family didn’t keep kosher, but I went to Hebrew school three times a week. I didn’t believe what I was singing, but I believed what I was feeling. So did my Christian friend. Our discussions were heartfelt and searching. We were hoping God existed, because without God the world seemed random and notions of good and evil too subjective. And if God did exist, it would matter a lot how we behaved—and we’d have to find a path.

In retrospect it’s obvious that we both really did believe, though I don’t think either of us thought there was only one correct path to follow. We knew we weren’t the first to ask these questions, and we didn’t expect to have to invent religion for ourselves. But we thought it mattered a lot to God what we would do. For me, it was going to mean looking at the best evidence there was of what God had said, what had been revealed to humankind in words—I needed a source. Sooner or later, that would mean text.

And so I set about searching, and though the only path to God is one that takes a lifetime and renews itself every day, I do feel that I found what God wanted of me in Modern Orthodoxy. I don’t think I could have landed anywhere else, and I’m always surprised to learn what a small—and to hear some tell it, fragile—outcropping of world Jewry it is. I don’t think my experience of God or life is unusual, or the demands of Modern Orthodoxy philosophically difficult or severe (financially might be another matter), at least not for anyone who believes in God as a Being, Creator, or Consciousness outside of ourselves. Perhaps what’s unique about my journey is just that I kept running into people who could explain things, and as diverse as these people were, all of them believed, and all of them were careful with language—words being so powerful, of course, that God used them to create the world. One by one, these teachers and what I learned from them prepared my steps: Baruch Ata ... haMeichin m’tsadei gaver. The first time I said that blessing after we moved into Los Angeles’ Pico-Robertson neighborhood, I knew that I was home.

So my journey began at the intersection of words and music, cobbled with contradictions and smoothed by these teachers, who seemed to come along at just the right moment. An avid piano student from the age of 7, I first signed up for choir at age 12, just when Hebrew School was ending and Junior Congregation was now for younger kids. I fell completely in love: music plus poetry, each making the other more compelling, sending the other to soar! The next years overflowed with madrigals and motets, oratorios and gem-like modern works—Brahms and Barber, Randall Thompson, Debussy and Distler—in a choir that met first period every day in high school. Beautiful years! All of it gorgeous and emotional, yet separate, mostly, from my Judaism. Would I allow myself to think about God while rehearsing Haydn’s Creation, lost in the exquisite trio section of Psalm 19: The day that is coming speaks it the day, the night that is gone to following night…? In a word, yes. Even so tortuously translated, it sang and it spoke. When the texts turned Christian—“For unto us a child is born”—I found a way. My cousin had a baby boy; Handel’s bursting fountain of sixteenth notes captured the miracle. On Sabbath and holidays in my Conservative synagogue, we prayed, well, differently; Cantor Victor Jacoby’s ringing baritone filled the room, brought down a heaven of its own. It was exotic, and it, too, was mine.

In college I began to feel more self-conscious about all this. Still hooked on choir, I noticed that the other choral majors sang in church groups and planned for church jobs. I also noticed that the occasional Jewish piece we sang was much less affecting than the Christian works. Then in graduate school, where I went to earn a Master of Music degree, I met my first important religious teacher, a secular Israeli: the great maestro Abraham Kaplan, whose father had formed the first choirs in Israel (then Palestine) and who himself spent 16 years teaching at Juilliard, directing New York’s Camarata Singers and preparing choirs for Leonard Bernstein. The first time I visited his study at the University of Washington, I saw on his desk a small stained-glass ornament that said, “The Lord works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.” Then, under his baton I sang the great Requiem masses of Mozart and Verdi, transported into a realm of holy inspiration grounded in texts that must have been relevant but that he didn’t believe either. Yet he led, and taught, with complete certainty, his interpretations informed by the text but transcending it; in performance it seemed he dissolved into the mind of the music. It’s a little hard to imagine if you haven’t performed with a great conductor, but perhaps if you’ve watched Dudamel you’ve seen it for yourself.

Of course this was very affirming. Professor Kaplan seemed to have no problem feeling and expressing the power of music as real or holy in a generic sort of way; like him, I could reject the meaning of the words without denying what the music was teaching me in vague spiritual terms. This now seems obvious; words are just humanity’s best attempt to share what people think they know—approximations, tools. No one would confuse the word “love” with the feeling, or say it encompassed it. So I could make a kind of separation in my mind between what the music offered and the words that had carried the composer to its discovery.

But it didn’t answer my religious questions. How was I to relate to God myself? Words are important too. Hadn’t God communicated with humanity that way? Calling Lekh lekha to Abraham, sending Moses off to Pharoah armed with verbal admonitions? Not to mention dictating the entire Torah, exactly general and specific enough to last 3,000 years so far and presumably to eternity? Whatever I’d learned studying music, it wasn’t the Torah. That was still to be found.

Around the same time I met Professor Kaplan, I also met another Presbyterian, though he considered himself “lapsed.” This young man, a medical student, was also very concerned about both religion and words and—first one, then two conversions to Judaism later—he became my husband. He had a strong belief in God, but the religion he’d been raised with, he said, was built on metaphors, and the metaphors no longer made sense to him. This became an insurmountable problem for him as a Christian, but only increased his desire to understand what God really did want. Late into the night when he wasn’t at the hospital, we would wrestle these questions together, until finally he started his residency and said he’d have to revisit religion when he was sleeping more than one night in three. That left me on my own for three years, during which I thought long and hard about whether Judaism might be wrong and Christianity right—I read the New Testament and wondered whether it was possible that God’s kingdom was already here, and that all we had to do was love one another and He would be with us. I didn’t have any Christian teachers outside of the great composers, but in any case I couldn’t accept it, couldn’t believe.

I went on to study journalism in New York while David finished his residency, and when we both returned to the Northwest, I invited him to visit the synagogue I’d joined in Tacoma, Washington. At Temple Beth El there, he found that the words of the Reform siddur Gates of Prayer made more sense to him than what he’d left behind in church. With Beth El’s very thoughtful Rabbi Richard Rosenthal, z”l, he started reading Franz Rozensweig and Rav Kook, and studying them with him on Wednesdays. One day he asked what it would take to convert, and Rabbi Rosenthal said, “Whenever you’re ready.” David had a Reform conversion, and that meant—to my understanding and training at that time—that my best friend and I would be able to marry, and continue a religious journey together. A year and a half later, we did.

We ended up in Los Angeles in the post-denominational congregation of Reform Rabbi Mordecai Finley, whose services plus lunch and bentching lasted until 2 P.M. on Saturdays and who taught us not only the weekly parasha—including stories I’d never learned, like Jacob and Tamar, Pinhas, Bilaam, Nadav and Abihu—but also the concept of spiritual discipline, the idea that the ritual commandments provide opportunities for us to bring God into more of our day-to-day actions and that, moreover, they were in the text. This was something I’d been waiting for: a way to live with God in mind. Although they were presented as voluntary, I loved each new mitzvah and concept I discovered.

The Torah asks us not to eat pork or shellfish. The Torah tells us not to place a stumbling block before the blind, literally or metaphorically. The Torah—God’s instructions!—held all sorts of commandments and stories, and by the way, many of them were very confusing without the interpretation of sages over the generations since. With that ancient elucidation, Rabbi Finley noted, they became both clear and ingenious—separating milk and meat, for example, as a way to delineate life and death in the world hour by hour; separating wool and flax, adjuring us to know when to be strong and forceful versus when to be soft. There were other commandments too, he noted, that we couldn’t understand but could take on faith—faith, something that came easily to me!

Rabbi Finley also encouraged us to hear Orthodox teachers—one year he sent us out to Orthodox synagogues on Shabuoth, and my husband David and I actually went to B'nai David-Judea, which many years later would become our home. But religiously we were still comfortable where we were. I served as one of three lay cantors, singing and arranging prayers, even directing a choir and trying to find some spiritual richness in the music. I did, a little, especially Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. Our eldest daughter became bat mitzvah there, and when my beloved father died, there were tools both elevating and comforting with which to mourn him. We studied Hebrew with Rebbetzin Meirav Finley, and the holy language began to speak to us on its own.

It was a time of unfolding light, affirming to me what I’d long suspected: that my ancestors had hung on tight through persecution and pogroms to more than Shabbat candles and Pessah seders, as wonderful as those were. There was more there, enough to fill many lifetimes, and we were beginning to see what it was.

What drew us the rest of the way, once we encountered it, was the beauty of observance and a growing certainty that it was, in fact, commanded—as I’d sensed since high school, God surely cared what we actually did. We attended a three-part-seminar on the Orthodox view of marriage, taught by Rabbi Baruch Gradon of the Los Angeles Kollel, to which we were invited by friends who’d become Orthodox the year before, and after that I joined a series of living room classes sponsored by a Hareidi “outreach” organization called Ashreinu. The leaders of that group, Mrs. Shira Shapiro and Rabbi Moshe and Bracha Zaret, welcomed us into their modest homes for Shabbat dinners, the first we’d experienced in an observant setting, not minding that we drove there.

We were very moved by their example. Everyone at their tables, including the youngest of their children, could discuss the parasha better than most of the adult Jews we’d ever met. They were gracious and intelligent and their conversation was always rich with meaning. They were notably comfortable talking about God—something I’d only been able to do before with my Christian friends in high school, and then with my husband. And they were distinctly un-cranky—about their children, their jobs, whatever they discussed. In these religious homes, everything was seen as a miracle—exactly as I had been experiencing life all along. A high goal, they said, was to see God behind every tree, every lamp, every occurrence—to see far more than met the eye.
In my new class, taught by Mrs. Ivy Kalazan, concept after new concept lit up my world.

The shofar, she taught us, represented the blowing of God’s breath through the shell of our physicality. Our connection to God was un-severable, like the vertebrae of the spine, and could be damaged but never broken. The flame of Shabbat candles represented our yearning and reaching toward heaven, and the beauty of Judaism could bring holiness to a humble leaf of lettuce—by our washing and checking it to ensure it held no bugs. Everything physical has a spiritual correlate, she taught, and since God made men and women different physically, there must be spiritual differences as well.
This politically incorrect observation was something I’d always believed; here I had a religious explanation, grounded in the most basic understanding of creation.

I also read Blu Greenberg’s How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household and started observing the mikvah laws on my own, and then I read Rabbi Ezriel Tauber’s To Become One and studied privately; these laws and the concepts behind them, from the notion of what’s hidden being the most sacred to the idea that water is the closest we have to a physical emanation of God’s presence, were dazzling and answered questions I didn’t know I had. They illuminated, decoded in a way, my relationship with my husband, while protecting it at the same time from any possibility of boredom or routine. These ideas are so basic to Orthodox understanding, growing out of hundreds of generations’ grappling with text (in this case, Bereishith and Vayikra), and yet to David and me they were entirely new, while at the same time not seeming foreign. And it was ancient, proven wisdom: my grandmothers, and their grandmothers, had followed these laws. I was restoring a link in the chain.

For all of these reasons, really from the very first Orthodox lectures we attended, David and I began to walk our lives into this world of beauty and commandment. We loved our synagogue but my leading services on Shabbat mornings now seemed off; shouldn’t I be present for my family, instead of warming up my singing voice in the shower and getting ready to perform? We had long ago stopped shopping on Shabbat, but shouldn’t we also stop driving, and gardening, and turning on the lights? It might mean alienating my non-observant Jewish family, not to mention David’s Protestant one, which had been tested enough by his first conversion; it would also mean a second conversion for him. We loved our mixed neighborhood and we’d have to sell our home. We loved our local public school, but Ivy Kalazan taught in a religious high school—this material was available to children, during the day?—so they would change schools; that was probably the hardest thing of all. But we wanted them to know the beauty of this new way of life, and to understand it, just as we wanted them to take music lessons, study science and learn to read.

When the time came, we asked Shira Shapiro of Ashreinu to recommend a synagogue, and she suggested three: B’nai David, another that was Modern Orthodox and an Aish HaTorah center, all in Pico-Robertson—not the more Hareidi part of town where she lived. Later I asked her why, and she said that because I’d been leading services, she thought I’d be more comfortable in a synagogue where women had a larger role. That surprised me—it hadn’t seemed important to me at the time—but it turned out to be good foresight on her part.

Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, at B’nai David-Judea, won us right away. Rav Yosef’s derashot were all about the text—how Moshe’s trials inform our own, how commentators understand the characters through back stories gleaned from textual hints, how individual words—individual words!—open windows onto worlds of meaning beneath the surface, and how all of this calls us to high personal responsibility every moment of our lives. On top of that, B’nai David was full of people just like us; by some estimates, fewer than a third of its members (at least at that time) had been raised in Orthodox homes. We were greeted there with lunch and dinner invitations, Purim baskets, and Pessah recipes, shiurim about holidays, lashon haRa, medical ethics, and maintaining the dignity of the dead while preparing them for burial. We also heard, though less frequently, about mixed Arab-Jewish schools in the Negev, and occasionally we heard from Israeli thinkers and journalists, and leaders of projects for Ethiopian emigres or Darfur. We signed up to deliver meals to the poor through a program very careful to protect their anonymity. More recently, we’ve joined a group of about 15 congregants who meet bi-monthly with a similar demographic from the liberal Islamic Center of Southern California. Coming from such a rich and challenging intellectual world before Torah, all of this was absolutely necessary for us to be observant and still feel like ourselves. I think this is true of most of the congregation, and of all of our friends there.

I hadn’t thought the shul’s women’s tefillah group, called Shirat Chana, would matter to me; remember, I’d decided that leading services compromised my observance of Shabbat. But it turned out to be quite helpful in our transition; when my middle daughter was bat mitzvah age, she was able to lain and lead services just as her older sister had, albeit at Minha with only nine men allowed to be present. Other innovations I would appreciate only later: for example, women carrying the Torah through the women’s section, which thrills me every time, especially when I carry it myself. The mehitzah at B’nai David goes right down the middle, and women can get as close to the bima, the Torah and the derasha as any man can, meaning we can see and hear everything and move if we can’t. Women at my shul say Kaddish, and I am able to say Kaddish for my father every fall. Sometimes we have women as scholars-in-residence, a woman is president of the congregation this year, and I myself am a kind of gabbai: for seven years now, I’ve been in charge of arranging which men and boys will lead Shabbat Shaharit, Musaf, and Anim Zemirot. David and I did not join B’nai David-Judea for any of this, but I would have felt much less included—and increasingly so, as time went on—without them. Because our journey has always been a joint one, if I were not fully involved (my husband does go to daily minyan on his own, a pleasure for him), it’s hard to see how it could have endured.

I’m not saying it’s been perfect. We had to step farther out of the world we knew than I had expected. Travel is harder, most restaurants are out. Raising our son and daughters, some things turned out to be impossible because of Shabbat; sadly for me, this included Los Angeles’ excellent children’s choir, along with any high school with a full orchestra or band. Even at Shalhevet High School, which is unusual in its attention to the arts, against the competing demands of four Judaic classes and a full academic program, the choir I direct meets just twice a week after school—far short of what defined my own high school years. This kind of thing has raised questions that Modern Orthodoxy tries to answer but doesn’t quite—for example, does God want us to be a light unto the nations while hiding our children away in schools with only one another, at a time and place in history when children learn together from every place on earth?

Also, I sometimes encounter signs of tribal chauvinism—a sense that Jews are somehow superior, ethnically, culturally, or otherwise, to non-Jews. This is beyond my ken, and strikes me as wholly unworthy of a worldview that celebrates the ultimate value of every human being.

But no culture is perfect, and every choice has its price. David and I still live in the big, diverse city of Los Angeles; we’re still news junkies; and we’re still hopelessly romantic about the flow of history and our small place in it—now we’re tied to a particular strand, one that feels ancient, eternal, and true. The evidence we have for this is partly on paper and partly in our hearts, as close as breathing and a just a bookshelf away.
And Modern Orthodoxy opened to us huge troves of text, all growing from the root of the Torah like the branches of a flowering tree, exquisite separately and together. That is what I set out so many years ago to find: a way to follow God’s instructions, one that works in the world we live in with all its challenges and mystery, and that ties us to God. Whatever our failings, David and I now can try to make our lives the fullest possible expression of those instructions as we are so grateful to finally understand them. This is a gratefulness that goes, and takes us, far beyond words.

In Praise of Praising Together - A review essay in Praise of Nehalel (Jerusalem: Nevarech, 2013)
By Rabbi Alan Yuter

This engaging Siddur is the post-modern expression of a thoughtful, educated, worldly, urbane, and religiously sensitive modern Orthodox lay person. The Siddur’s magic lies in the originality of its concept, the personal voice that provides an Everyman’s perspective as expressed by one thinking and feeling individual, and the public sharing of one person’s personal response to prayer.

The Siddur’s concept is a call to prayer, Nehalel, “let us praise the Lord together,” as individuals in community. This tasteful title is an invitation to the sacred, calling upon individuals to join in the common commitment to prayer. This Halakhic Siddur, as innovative that it is, never strays beyond the legal limits of the Orthodox rubric. It follows the Ashkenazic Nusach.

This Siddur, prepared by Michael Haruni, is dedicated to the memory of his parents; the dedicatory words of which bring to life the visions of religion lived, honestly, naturally, and piously. His mother “lived every smallest and largest moment of her life intensely aware this is happening under the gaze of her Creator.” This sensibility permeates the pictures that breathe new life into the old words of Nehalel.

Nehalel is a visual tribute to this vision. Haruni uses photography to juxtapose nature, Israeli historical and spiritual sights, and the expansive beauty of Creation, all in order to animate the words of the Siddur. This literary technique is not common in Jewish religious literature. The Torah, which contains Laws, Prose and Poetry, and is called “poetry” by God [Deut. 31:19], provides the precedent for Nehalel’s religious—aesthetic agenda. The Laws memorialize the narratives, while the narratives interpret the Laws, and the poetry moves the person toward God, the Creator of the world, the Torah’s Narrator, and Lawgiver. Haruni’s art serves as a visual commentary on the liturgy’s written words, providing the music to which the words are sung as well as the meanings that dart in and out of our souls as we pray. By praising together, Nehalel’s audience finds God in the written word, the historical moment, and in the natural world, all of which are summoned to converge in the spiritual moment of communal prayer.

Haruni’s father’s biography embodied the image of the archetypal Jew who wandered from the oppression of Iran to the freedom afforded by the sacred stones of Jerusalem. Both father and son share the insight that God is the non-slumbering Keeper of Israel; the father, with the faith to suffer adversity on the road to redemption; the son, with the inner vision to make music by harmonizing the insight of eye and ear, the logic of mind and heart, and the passion of conception and conviction.

Haruni, an exceptionally well-informed Orthodox layman, who is neither a professional Judaic scholar nor an ordained rabbi, translates the liturgy accurately, tastefully and thoughtfully. Quibbles regarding details are inevitable; his renderings are always thoughtfully responsive and reveal a thinking and traditional Jewish mind.

The volume opens with a two page picture of billowing clouds, dark green leaved trees, and a pasture that moves from dark to light green. The visual statement being made is that God the Author of Nature is the same God Who gave the Torah and Who hears prayer, the concern of the Nehalel prayer book.

The elegant God Who created nature also gave Haruni, the religious artist, the wisdom to know what he does not know and to seek the learned advice of others more erudite, including some very high powered rabbis and Orthodox academics. This standard of excellence of execution is prefaced by wonderfully inspiring Forward and Introductory essays.

Rabbi Daniel Landes, the senior scholar of Pardes Institute, with his erudite passion for the poetry of prayer, is the perfect choice to introduce this particular prayer book. Following the master Halakhist graced with the poetic soul, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, R. Landes explains to the reader how to change literature into liturgy, how this prayer book is a book which will help one to pray, how to see the invisible Divine light, how to dialogue with God and find answers in the words and scenes of this Siddur. Additionally, R. Landes provides the hermeneutic key that unlocks the theological magic of Nehalel. The reader is asked to see the words and read the scenes visually, and see how everything comes alive, hopefully including the reader/prayer. The volume’s title, Nehalel, “let us praise,” is the invitation for us to experience this together.

In his introduction to this Siddur, Rabbi Dr. Zvi Grumet, one of modern Orthodoxy’s most literate, professional, accomplished, and sensitive souls, focuses on Nehalel’s juxtaposition of “word and image;” he teaches that when we pray we talk to God and when we are spiritually open, God talks to us in the words that we use. Note well that R. Grumet is a master teacher whose trove of learning is shaped by his aesthetically and literary sensibilities. By declaring, clearly, correctly and astutely, that Nehalel “is a visual midrash on the liturgy,” R. Grumet concisely and precisely points to how the prayer book is to be read, understood, and used.

Ever aware that Maimonides demands that prayer is more than the mantic mumbling of words, Haruni, in his words, says “by juxtaposing of photographs that portray the meanings of the texts,” the words merge into the picture. This technique recalls liturgical public reading of the Torah. The reader must not read from a pointed, vocalized text. The reader must supply the vowels and thereby interpret and confront the text with his own, individual, idea contributing mind. Haruni asks his readers to make the effort to pray and spend the time to make prayer meaningful. He also challenges the reader, when engaged in prayer, to soar one’s soul, to be sincerely and authentically religious in the prayer moment.

This sensibility is uniquely both modern and Orthodox; in liberal Judaisms,” like liberal Protestantism, prayer is not about talking to God. It is about saying and affirming what a particular voluntary community believes or does not believe about God. For most Orthodox Jews, prayer is something to be done, an obligation to be discharged, and when done in a prayer quorum, an exercise to be performed in an identity affirming social context. Yet for the modern Orthodox Jew, real prayer is indeed a statement of what we should believe as we also affirm our place in our own community, but that is only prayer’s moral minimum. In Haruni’s words, prayer is premised on “the awareness that we stand in the presence of our Creator,” and it is to this end that Haruni’s pictures of Creation inform the visualizing individual in prayer by stimulating the soul to spiritual growth.

For Rabbinic Judaism and the prayer rubric it created, the God of nature is also the God of history. After kindling the Shabbat candles, which is redemptive human fire made by human initiative, two contrasting evocative pictures of the Western Wall are presented; one a photo in black and white of old Jews remembering the sad past, which is followed by a dark night view of an orange-yellow fire-like light piercing the darkest of the night. The black and white photo is an epitath; this contrasts with the fire-like light that praises the God of the past Who brought the dry bones of the Jewish past back to life. This stunning juxtaposition reminded me of the 9th of Av Nahem prayer where it is recalled that God brought the Wall down in fire and with that very same fire will in the messianic future build up that Wall. That picture reminds the visual reader that prayerful future is now, the Shechina has in our time returned before our eyes in mercy to Zion, and so too has Israel returned home.

After offering the liturgical blessings to be recited, those same dazzling colors, yellow and orange, color and comment on the hands of a female reciting the Sabbath candle blessing. When Israel observes the Sabbath, paraphrasing Ahad Ha’am, the Sabbath preserves Israel. Given their juxtaposition, the engaged reader/praying person uses the visual stimulation of the photo to react and more critically, to respond to the literature of liturgy, allowing the liturgy to serve as a stimulating libretto to the prayer enterprise that is called “life.”

At the very center of the Shabbat candles photo cast in orange and yellow hues is a small, pure white light. In the next picture, commenting on “those seated in your house have found happiness,” the beginning of the weekday prayer recited before the Sabbath, that white light, shining from the East [See Deuteronomy 33:2 and Isaiah 58:10] , alluding to the primordial Eden [in Aramaic, “Eedan” means time!], is more pronounced, more visible, and lightens the entire view. This light now emanates from the recesses, shadows, and tunnels of the Wall, deftly and lovingly making the statement that God has indeed come home and so too has His people. This insight is available if we have the inner eye to pray with the Siddur with the perspective of living history.

In modern Orthodox synagogues, Yedid Nefesh, very appropriately and correctly translated as “soul mate,” is sung before the Sabbath Greeting, or Qabbalat Shabbat, prayers are recited. The sun, here colored in white light, emanates a yellow glow above it and an orange glow below it. At this sacred, liminal moment, the prayerful Jew is entering what Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the “sanctuary in time.” The ordering of photos provides the footlight to the high light, that pure white light that we now realize was that Divine light that was created on the first day of creation, that lit Moses’ scrub bush but did not singe it, that shined inside the cloud that guided our ancestors in the wilderness and exile, and now has three residences: [1] in the infinite reaches of the cosmos, [2] in the sacred Temple precinct, and [3] in our praying hearts, if we start the fire. The highlighted passage, in brown/orange, “Light up the earth with your glory and we shall delight and rejoice in You,” animates the shining words. The theological statement here being made is that God’s cosmic light informs and inspires the first person’s inner state of being, delight, which gives rise to an outer expression, to rejoice in the Lord. Here the attentive reader realizes that the volume’s title, Nehalel, is the human dialectical response to the personal Divine call.

The Siddur then turns to Psalm 95, where the Hebrew text is set in a cloud-filled sky which flows from the cloud sky white to the oceanic visual blue, anticipating the colors of the Israeli flag, and the wilderness whose sun drenched sand is slowly being covered by the inevitably encroaching Shabbat shadows. Both Hebrew and English texts are shrouded in blue, with the highlighted passage, the words on and by which we are invited to meditate, “The ocean is His—He produced it and the terrain, too, was formed by His hands.” At the moment when the Divine and the ephemeral meet, the Creator and creation both rest, together, and the prayerful Jew responds to the infinite eternity of which the finite individual is a part.

Psalm 98 contrasts the white sky, which happens to be God’s abode [Psalms 115:16], to Israel’s green pasture on the left in all but the end and top of the picture a clearly newly planted Israeli forest on the left. In the upper right distance we see the unredeemed Transjordan hills. Haruni’s highlighted verse, “My pasture and all within will be enraptured, while the trees of every forest sing in exultation,” captures the secret of Creation. We have here the personification—not the deification—of nature. See also Psalm 19:3, where day and night will have something to say and have an opinion to express regarding their Creator, all with the sound of sacred silence. The Creator of the world has chosen His land to be personified, to come to life, and to be renewed by the handwork of His people.

Psalm 97 presents a dark background contrasting on the top of the page with white words, alluding to pSheqalim 6:1, which describes the Torah that was written with God’s first day creation, the white and black primordial and perfect light; at the bottom of the page we find the orange natural light of lightning. As land makes borders for shapeless water, writing enables the writer, both Divine and mortal, to create worlds for words.

This celestial firework show testifies that God is the King of the cosmos. The orange highlighted verse, “His thunderbolts will illuminate the planet, the earth will witness and tremble,” announce the Presence of that King. For paganism, the god/king is a tyrant; in Israel, the God Who is King invites His people into eternity. It is as if God calls out to Israel, nehalel, let us join together in recognizing God as our king.

Psalm 98’s Hebrew text presents a white text on a hunter green background, with the light blue highlighted verse, “Adonai has made his redemption known, and His justice visible to the nations.” The secular Ben Gurion is depicted, here wearing an out of character suit and tie, with a picture of Herzl over his head and two Israeli flag banners on either side, in the now famous black and white picture, declaring that Israel a free, autonomous nation state of the Jewish people. The juxtaposition of thunder of the Divine King, given to the secular Ben Gurion, to announce in history what was declared in Heaven in thunder, is full of ancient and modern irony. Haruni’s genius in Nehalel is its invitation for all, in and with the first person collective plural, to praise God together, with no one losing their voice. Without even a suggestion of a divisive polemic, Haruni’s modern Orthodoxy sees sanctity in individual creativity.

Haruni’s Nehalel is not blindly romantic; it affirms faith in the face of realism. In Psalm 99, God is king and rules all peoples; on the other hand, that terrestrial real estate is also God’s earthly footstool; however, the Dome of the Rock and East Jerusalem are not in Jewish hands. The highlighted verse, in blue, “Exalt Adonai our God and worship at His footstool, for He is sacred,” reminds the sensitive reader that God and not the State is sacred, allowing the reader the right to read the passage according to his or her own political proclivities. The occasional red of the Palestinian homes and the Golden yellow Dome contrast with the white Temple plaza and blue Psalm verse. Haruni seems to me to be saying that the pattern of redemption is in place; with strength, faith, peace and patience, redemption will continue at God’s planned pace.

Above we described the art of artful prayer that the modern Orthodox Jew is open to embrace. The Siddur Nehalel is Zionist; it reflects popular, main stream Halakhic opinion, and is a work of soul rather than scholarship, with scholarship informing the narrative of the soul. On the other hand, Haruni carefully asked scholars to review his work and nothing was suggested that violates the modern Orthodox religious consensus..

At http://torahmusings.com/2013/02/book-review-roundup-ii/, we find another view, by Rabbi Ari Enkin:
“I was immediately taken aback by the beauty and structure of the new “Nehalel beShabbat” siddur. This nusach Ashkenaz siddur, containing all the relevant prayers for Shabbat, is extremely unique and represents a fresh new dimension in the publication of siddurim. Similar to the “Nevarech” bencher, the Nehalel siddur is packed with extremely powerful and stunning full-color glossy photographs….
The photographs are intended to assist the worshipper in finding inspiration in the words he is reciting. …One of the photographs that accompanies Lecha Dodi features a panoramic nighttime view of the Old City of Jerusalem with the words “v’nivneta ir al tila” highlighted…..
As part of the Shir Hama’alot that follow the Shabbat afternoon mincha, Tehillim 123 features the infamous Nazi-Era photograph of a rabbi wearing tefillin being taunted by Nazi soldiers on the streets of Poland with the words “rabat sava la nafsheinu; hala’ag hashananim habooz l’gei yonim”.
This siddur is extremely Zionist in nature, complete with the prayer for the State of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF. It also has a prayer for soldiers still missing in action, not to mention a special Harachaman for the soldiers in the Birkat Hamazon. So too, many of the photographs are of Zionist themes, such as the famous Ben Gurion Declaration of independence, Kibbutz and kibbutznik related photographs, as well as highlights of modern aliyah (e.g. “v’hu yolicheinu komemiyot l’artzeinu”).
It would be remiss not to point out that many of the photographs in the siddur include women, and in some cases, the sleeve lengths and neckline exposure do not meet halachic consensus.
The “Nehalel” Siddur certainly offers readers a colorful and alternative prayer experience. The typeset is exceptionally crisp, clear, and well-spaced making for a very pleasurable read. The English translation is an impressive merge of modern and ecclesiastical English. The “Adonai” transliteration rather than the more common “Hashem”, “God” or “Lord” is an important feature for those who pray in English. Women are well represented with their own zimun, a misheberach and baruch shepetarani for bat mitzva girls, and more. Even those who, for whatever reason, will choose not to use the Nehalel Siddur for regular worship will still find it to be an attractive showpiece and “coffee table” item."

Rabbi Enkin read Nehalel, is impressed by the artwork, and judges the volume for the position it takes, against the benchmarks of Judaism as he understands them. The book is, for R. Enkin, “extremely” rather than “passionately” Zionist. This seemingly innocent choice of diction implies “excess.” Nehalel is also “Feminist,” allowing what is technically not forbidden but which has been disapproved on policy grounds by the great rabbis whose subjective taste carries the “consensus” which is the benchmark of propriety for R. Enkin’s Orthodoxy. There are indeed non-Zionist Orthodox Jews and Nehalel was not composed for them. R. Enkin is not reviewing, or explicating what Nehalel is doing artistically, religiously, or ideologically; he is measuring the volume against the norms that his social world calls “Torah.”

According to R. Enkin’s world, an ideological view revealed in the review, only an Orthodox rabbi has the right to think religiously and deeply and express onself creatively. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man, indeed does have the talent, erudition, and qualifying esoteric ancestral tradition to be creative; conventional religious Jews do as they are told to accept what they must because they lack tradition, erudition, and the talent. Therefore, as a pretty coffee table work of art, Nehalel serves a culture function. R. Enkin’s explicit—but not only—problem is “that many of the photographs in the siddur include women, and in some cases, the sleeve lengths and neckline exposure do not meet halachic consensus.” For him, halachic “consensus” refers to the opinions of the Hareidi rabbinic establishment. Hence the polite but patronizing comment that Nehalel may appear on the Orthodox coffee table because it is pretty and the volume makes for unthreatening conversation. What is also here being said, subtly, deftly, yet unmistakenly, is that Nehalel does not, for R. Enkin, belong in the main stream consensus Orthodox pew.’’

Like Rabbis Landes and Grumet, I initially took no notice of the “offending” photos of Israell women. And for good and obvious reason. According to Maimonides [Laws of Forbidden Intercourse 21:2], Jewish Law only forbids sexually suggestive non-contact gestures, gazing, and conversation. I have failed to find an explicit, religiously binding Oral Torah norm that clearly requires all Jewish women to cover their elbows. Those who care to act strictly of course have a right to do so; but without an explicit Talmudic norm, the norm may not be imposed on others. The post-Talmudic consensus of some rabbis [a] does not bind all Israel, [b] cannot be claimed to be law until we clarify these rabbis’ identity, jurisdiction, reasoning, and cogency, and [d] why would this restriction apply to a non-suggestive, two dimensional, black and white old photograph.

Haruni has created both a modern Orthodox prayer book and a modern Orthodox artifact that talks to Jews who have no time for silly, unbecoming games.
Michael Haruni has not only compiled a wonderful prayerbook, he has shown what a thinking Jew is able to accomplish; he inspires his readers, among them me, to take God seriously, and he has created a model for modern Orthodox creativity.

THE PROSELYTE WHO COMES[1]

by Rabbi Dr. Isaac Sassoon

(Rabbi Dr. Isaac Sassoon is a faculty member at the Metivta, the Institute of Traditional Judaism. Among his publications is his commentary on Torah, "Destination Torah.")

“We are gereem before Thee” (1Chr 29:15)

Rome was not surfeited with rulers as educated or as well-disposed towards the Jews as the Emperor Julian. And even though he evidently studied Judaism, Julian’s following remarks show him laboring under a sad misapprehension with respect to at least one element of Torah. For this is what he writes regarding the Torah’s attitude to non-Jews:

Moses says that the creator of the universe chose out the Hebrew nation, that to that nation alone did he pay heed and cared for it, and he gives him charge of it alone. But how and by what sort of gods the other nations are governed he has said not a word - unless indeed one should concede that he did assign to them the sun and moon... It is fair to ask ... Why G-d if he was not G-d of the Jews alone but also of the gentiles, sent the blessed gift of prophecy to the Jews in abundance and gave them Moses and the oil of anointing and the prophets and the law... But unto us no prophet, no oil of anointing, no teacher, no herald to announce his love for mankind ... Nay he looked on for myriads of years while men in extreme ignorance served idols [2]

His reference to the assignment of sun and moon to the nations suggests that he got the idea from Deuteronomy 4:19. That verse reads: “Lest you lift your eyes skywards and seeing the sun, the moon and the stars you are led on to bow down to them and worship them which Hashem your G-d assigned to all the peoples under heaven”. It is not difficult to see how this ‘assigning’ (especially if taken in conjunction with Dt 29:25) could have persuaded Julian that Moses considered idol worship predestined by G-d for all peoples except Israel. Indeed, some modern scholars concur with Julian’s understanding. For example, Jeffrey Tigay writes “The implication that worship of the heavenly bodies by other nations was ordained by G-d struck many traditional commentators as unlikely, since the prophets teach that one day all nations will abandon false religion and recognize the L-rd alone. ... However ... [t]he view that the nations will someday abandon idolatry and worship the L-rd alone is never expressed in the Torah, and Deuteronomy 4:19 is consistent with this.”[3] Too bad Julian did not consult one of those ‘many traditional commentators’! For as Tigay goes on to explain, those commentators include the sages who paraphrased the last clause of Dt 4:19 thus: “which the L-rd your G-d allotted to other peoples to give light to them”.[4]

But for the rabbis Scripture’s sombre depiction was not the worst news. Scripture portrays what is out there, and attributes everything to the Ultimate Cause. No, not depictions but the reality itself disquiets the rabbis, a reality that ostensibly bespeaks indifference to the spiritual welfare of the overwhelming majority of His creatures on the part of ‘G-d of the spirits of all flesh’. And their disquiet drives the rabbis now to ponder, now to agonize. One answer they came up with was that as a kingdom of priests (Ex 19:6) Israel was entrusted with the spiritual advancement of her fellow humans.

G-d gave Torah to Israel in order that they should bring it to the nations (Tanhuma Dt. 2).[5]
Hillel said: ‘[love your fellow humans] and draw them close to Torah’. This teaches that one breaks into people [’s lives] and causes them to enter under the shekhinah’s wings just as our father Abraham would break into people [’s lives] and cause them to enter under the shekhinah’s wings. Nor was Abraham alone; Sarah did the same as it says [Gen 12:5] ‘... also the souls they made in Haran’. Now even the whole world in joint effort cannot create so much as a single gnat. So what does ‘the souls they made’ signify? It signifies that the holy One blessed be He reckoned it unto them as though they had created [those that they caused to enter under the shekhinah’s wings] (Aboth de R. Nathan A, 12 [p.53]; Cf. Gen. Rab. 39:21). [6]
It says ‘If having knowledge he does not tell he shall bear his sin’ [Lev 5:1]. This means unless you preach me as G-d among the nations of the world, you shall have to bear the brunt (Lev. Rab. 6:5).

With these and similar exhortations the rabbis inculcated a sense of noblesse oblige. The fact that Israel alone had been graced with the precious gifts of prophecy and revelation imposed on her the responsibility to share with others.

The extent of that sharing seems to have been in dispute as witnessed by our citations. The first citations, that speak of bringing Torah to the nations and drawing humanity at large to Torah, would appear to go further than the third that requires only the essentials of the faith to be shared. Obviously the latter is a minimalist approach, and like all minimalism in the moral sphere, it should probably be thought of as less than ideal. The Talmud recognizes two types of ger (= convert). The ger toshav renounces idolatry and accepts the principles of Jewish morality that follow from belief in the One.[7] Then there is the ger sedeq who becomes a full-fledged member of the covenantal community of Israel. This is how the groups referred to as wood-choppers and water drawers were integrated: “You all stand here today before Hashem your G-d your tribal chiefs, elders, officers ... the strangers that are in the midst of your camp, from your wood-choppers to your water-drawers ready to enter into the covenant of Hashem ... that He may constitute you this day as His people” (Dt 29:9-11).[8]

Some have questioned whether conversion existed in biblical times. They seem to forget that Covenant with Hashem is always a religious make-over; hence conversion.[9] Later, when the idea of covenant receded, circumcision took over Scripture’s covenantal lexis or, if you like, circumcision replenished the emptying shell of berith (=covenant) discourse.[10] Thus Achan’s breach of covenant (Jos 7:11), conjures up for the aggadah an epispastic Achan (San. 44a). “They, like adam, they broke a covenant” (Hos 6:7) implies that Adam was guilty of the same delinquency as Achan (San. 38b). In Elijah’s day circumcision was neglected - according to a widely attested aggadah - for Elijah complains “the children of Israel have forsaken your covenant” (1Kgs 19:14).[11] “Were it not for circumcision heaven and earth would have had no abidance as it says [Jer 33:26] If not for my covenant [with] the day and the night, [if] the laws of heaven and of earth I did not establish ...” [12] It is not impossible that the ‘entering into the covenant’ of Dt 29 also came to be read (consciously or otherwise) as a reference to circumcision. But of course there was no need to rely on such tenuous allusions when Ex 12: 48 spells it out:

If a ger sojourns with you and would offer the Passover unto Hashem, every male of his must be circumcised and then let him come forward and offer it for he shall be as a resident of the land; but no uncircumcised one shall partake of it.

Just in case there lingered any doubt about the phrase ‘he shall be as a resident of the land’, one could always fall back on Numbers 15:15-16 - especially Onqelos’ rendering thereof:

O congregation, there shall be one and the same law for you and for the ger that converts; an everlasting law throughout your generations you and the ger shall be alike before Hashem. One Torah and one [system of] justice shall there be for you and for the ger that converts with you.

Thus the rabbis had unassailable authority not only for the acceptance of proselytes, but also for the ritual that sealed a ger sedeq’s transition from gentile to Jew.[13]

Going back to Julian, one gets the feeling that had Julian challenged the rabbis of his day like Tinneius Rufus two centuries earlier, their response might have tempered his bitterness. For Tinneius Rufus put it to R. Aqiba: “‘If your G-d loves the poor why does He not feed them?’ R. Aqiba answered ‘so that the rest of us might come to their aid and thereby escape Gehennah’” (B. B. 10a). As the rabbis see it, then, G-d invites humans to be active partners in bringing nourishment, both physical and spiritual, to those that lack. And in sharing His bounty with others, men and women find favor with G-d who will reward them accordingly. For it was axiomatic to the rabbis that the blessings G-d grants cannot be enjoyed selfishly. Or as Hillel’s apothegm expresses it “If I am for myself what am I?” (Aboth 1:14).

One could fill pages with the rabbis’ acclaim for proselytes and, conversely, their censure of those who were too quick to give up on potential converts. To cite two illustrations of the latter

1) Timna‘ was of royal lineage ... She wished to be converted. So she approached Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but none accepted her. Thereupon she went and became a concubine to Esau’s son Eliphaz, declaring: ‘Better to be a servant in this nation than a mistress in any other’. From her came Amaleq, who was to be Israel’s nemesis. Why so? Because they [the patriarchs] were wrong to turn her away [14] (San. 99b; cited by Tos. at Yeb. 47b s.v. qasheem).[15]

2) R. Yitzhaq said the night that Orpah parted from her mother-in-law she was set upon by hordes [of Philistines] and violated ... Thus it says [of Goliath in 1Sam 17:23] that he came [or was the result] of Philistine profligacy[16] (Ruth Rabbah 2:21; cf. Sot. 42b) [17]

In light of the foregoing, it might seem puzzling when we hear people assert (as they frequently do) that Judaism has reservations about conversion. Indeed many of us have heard conversion spoken of as if it were a concession - akin to divorce or the yefat to’ar law[18] - rather than a recommended or mandatory misvah.[19] And have we not just as often itched to tell our interlocutors that they were mistaken and to show them the adulation heaped by rabbis upon proselytes and the sacred institution of giyyoor? But then a little voice holds us back, admonishing us that it would be devious to show off one half of the picture without the other: the light without the shadows. For cheek by jowl alongside the adulation, the sources preserve traditions that discriminate against proselytes, including bona fide proselytes; and even a few that appear to discount the very premise of outsiders entering the Jewish fold.

Demurral vis-à-vis giyyoor has a long history. One of its earliest manifestations transpires from the polemic of Isaiah 56:3-8: “The foreigner who has attached himself to Hashem must not say Hashem will keep me separate from his people ... As for The foreigners who attach themselves to Hashem to serve Him, to love the name of Hashem, to be His servants, all who keep the sabbath and do not profane it and hold fast to my covenant; them will I bring to my holy mountain... This is the word of Hashem G-d who gathers the dispersed of Israel ‘In addition to its [Israel’s] dispersed I shall gather [others] unto it’”. Evidently, there were people in Isaiah’s society who, while not necessarily spurning conversion outright, saw those who attached themselves[20] to Hashem as not quite on a level with native Israelites. Some converts had apparently bought the myth of their own inferiority, until Isaiah was sent to disabuse them. Whether Isaiah succeeded in his own generation we are not told. What is certain is that qualms about converts and conversion persisted, notably among the Jerusalem priesthood of the Second Commonwealth. Although not all the sources displaying antipathy to gereem/gerooth can be pinned onto priests, nevertheless, the priestly belief that a person’s worth is like a thoroughbred’s, determined by seed and bloodline, fuels the anti-ger ethos.

Ezra chides Jewish men “who have married foreign wives thereby causing the holy seed to become intermixed with the peoples of the land” (Ezra 9:2). His indignation sparks off the zealotry of Shecaniah, spokesman for the chastened exogamists: “We pledge ourselves in covenant to our G-d to send away all these women and those born from them ...” (ibid. 10:3).[21] Had Ezra believed in conversion he might have modified Shecaniah’s plan of indiscriminately bundling off not merely the foreign wives but also their children. For surely not all these women and children living under the roof of a Jewish paterfamilias would have been diehard heathens. The fact that Ezra does not bother to ascertain the individuals’ loyalties, suggests that in his book, once a gentile always a gentile.[22] One scholar to reach the same conclusion as to Ezra’s probable motivation, is Daniel R. Schwartz. In his analysis of a certain Simon, whom Josephus mentions as a critic of King Agrippa,[23] this is what Schwartz has to say.

Examination of his [Simon’s] criticism of Agrippa will lead us further. For it is clear that his position is a priestly one ... it was predicated on a genealogical argument, on the assumption that there is an absolute link between descent and access to holiness... a typically priestly point of view, for priests... are, in Judaism, determined by their descent. He who is not (believed to be) a descendant of Aaron cannot be a priest, no matter how dedicated to piety and sanctity he may be. But if the question “who is a priest?” is answered necessarily and sufficiently by descent ... it is natural to apply it to the question “who is a Jew?” as well, with the result that a gentile cannot become a Jew ... Note, for example, that when Ezra - as priestly as one could possibly be (Ezra 7:1-5!) - heard of the pollution of the “sacred seed” via intermarriage (Ezra 9:2), he apparently gave no thought to the possibility of conversion. but rather moved to destroy all the families involved. [24]

Schwartz hits the nail on the head. The Aaronide priests’ attitude to conversion was hardly fortuitous. Rather does it appear to have been a corollary of their fixation on pedigree and their literal, somatic understanding of ‘holy seed’. Both their preoccupation with lineage as well as their skepticism of conversion are widely attested. We believe these two tendencies to be intimately connected. Moreover, we strongly suspect that besides Ezra, most talmudic discrimination against gereem reflects the priestly legacy that, after the loss of the Temple, entered mainstream rabbinic discourse. This theory is supported by the fact that a predominance of the ‘discriminatory’ material pertains to priestly affairs, as we are about to see.

LINEAGE

Of the priests, the sons of Habaiah, the sons of Hakkoz, the sons of Barzillai ... these searched for their genealogical records[25] but they could not be found, so they were ousted from the priesthood. (Ez 2:61-62; Neh 7:62-63).

[A priest] who wishes to marry a woman of priestly family must check ... her mother, her mother’s mother, her paternal and maternal grandmothers, the mothers and grandmothers of both her paternal and maternal grandmothers. If the woman is of Levitical or [lay] Israelite family he must go back an additional generation (M. Qid. 4:4).

The chamber of Hewn Stone was where Israel’s great Sanhedrin sat and judged the priesthood. A priest whose genealogy failed the test would put on black [robes], wrap himself in black and go hence and depart ... (M. Mid. 5:4).

SKEPTICISM TOWARDS GEREEM/GEROOTH[26]

Tobias the physician as well as his son and his manumitted slave [i.e. a convert] all saw the new moon in Jerusalem. The priests accepted him and his son but rejected his slave (M. Rosh Hashanah 1:7).

[Even] after the Temple was destroyed priests comported themselves with haughtiness and refrained from marrying daughters of proselytes (Qid. 78b).

If the supreme court issued a ruling but one of its members knew his colleagues were in error and told them so; or if the court reached its decision in the absence of the court president; or if one of its members was a proselyte, a bastard, a Gibeonite or an old man who had never fathered a child - in all these cases the court is not liable [to bring the sacrifice prescribed at Lev 4:14]. Because here [Lev 4:13] it says edah and there [Num 35:24] it says edah. Just as that edah’s members must all be eligible to issue rulings so too this edah’s (M. Hor. 1:4).

It was taught in a baraitha A court of three who are as literate as [accredited] judges shall serve for halisah. R. Yehudah requires five ... How do we know that actual accredited judges are not needed? Because it says ‘in Israel’ implying that rank-and-file Israelites suffice [for halisah] ... But R. Samuel bar Yehudah said ‘in Israel’ comes to teach something else namely, that halisah must be performed in a beth din of Israelites not a beth din of gereem ... When R. Yehudah invited R. Samuel bar Yehudah to be one of the five members of a halisah beth din, he declined saying: ‘We have learnt that ‘in Israel’ means a beth din of Israelites and not a beth din of gereem - and I am a ger ... Rava said a proselyte is allowed by the Torah to judge his fellow proselyte as it says [Dt 17:15] ‘You shall appoint over you a king whom Hashem your G-d chooses; from among your brethren shall you appoint over you a king’. Only ‘over you’ do we require that he be ‘from among your brethren’, but there is no objection to a proselyte judging his fellow proselyte ... (Yeb. 101a-102a).

On exiting the Temple, the high priest was escorted by a throng who, on spotting Shema‘iah and Avtalyon, drifted away from him [the high priest] and followed Shema‘iah and Avtalyon.[27] When the latter came to take leave of the high priest he greeted them with ‘May the sons of nations[28] come in peace’... (Yom. 71b).

Aqabyah son of Mahalal’el[29] asserted four things ... that the bitter water ordeal is not administered to a proselytess or to a freed woman. The sages disagreed. They said to him ‘Karkemeet was a freed woman in Jerusalem and she was given to drink the bitter waters by Shema‘iah and Avtalyon’. He replied ‘the likes of her gave her to drink ...’ (M. Edu. 5:6).[30]

It was taught in a baraitha: What is the definition of a zonah [that Lev 21:7 forbids a priest to marry]? R. Eliezer says the epithet zonah is self explanatory.[31] R. Aqiba says a zonah is one who lives promiscuously.[32] ... R.Yehudah says a zonah is a woman incapable of child bearing. But the [other] sages say a zonah is none but a proselytess, a manumitted female slave and a woman who had been in a forbidden relationship[33] (Yeb. 61b).[34]

Undeniably, the first two zonah definitions attributed to the [other] sages rob conversion of its essential transformatory character. Prior to their conversion, proselytes will no doubt have contravened Mosaic and possibly Noahide Torah in all sorts of ways. But no other law, Mosaic or Noahide, that a person may have transgressed prior to conversion trails the convert into Israelitehood. Why the exception for fornication - nay, the mere suspicion of fornication?[35] The answer can be found only in the priestly scheme where body dominates and spirit languishes. In that system a convert’s soul, permeated as it may once have been with idolatry, is capable of living down its idolatrous past. But the body once tainted is irremediable. The approximation of the giyyoreth-zonah equation to priestly concepts is sometimes explained as rabbis having resigned themselves to the priests’ de facto avoidance of proselyte spouses. If that is so, the citation of Lev 21:7 as prooftext will have been a rabbinic flourish.[36] For the priests’ eschewal owed nothing to Lev 21:7, but, as noted above, was another aspect of their entrenchment in genealogy and ethnic ‘holiness of seed’. Alternatively, the anonymous giyyoreth definition of zonah represents an autonomous strand within rabbinic Judaism (perhaps with Shammaite leanings) that, in stark contrast to the (Hillelite) love for converts, tended to misprize them (see infra).

But whatever its history, the superstitious belief in an inherent disparity between a biological and an adoptive Jew, consolidated; thanks largely to the allure such self-congratulatory myths have among the disenfranchised. Still, allure notwithstanding, the Hillelite tradition was never abandoned. Every rabbinic expression of reluctance towards gereem/gerooth, is matched, if not outweighed, by affirmatory pronouncements. Take the giyyoreth-zonah example just surveyed. For starters, neither R. Eliezer nor R. Aqiba subscribed to it.[37] Moreover:

It was taught in a baraitha: R. Shim‘on b. Yohai said a female proselyte who converted below the age of three years and a day may marry into the priesthood as it says [Num 31:18] ‘but every female minor who has not known man carnally spare for yourselves’ - and [the priest] Phineas was with them. But the sages say ‘spare for yourselves’ means take them [not in matrimony] but as slaves. Now all opinions [on marriage of priests to proselytes and to offspring of proselytes] are midrashically derived from a single verse [viz. Ezek.44:22] ‘A widow and a divorcee they [priests] shall not take to themselves as wives; but only virgins of the seed of the house of Israel’.... (Qid. 78a).

As the gemara at Qiddushin 78 proceeds to explain, those who forbid all female proselytes emphasize the phrase ‘Israelite seed’. R. Shim‘on, on the other hand, downplays ‘seed’ (or takes it less than literally). The word R. Shim‘on highlights is ‘virgins’, thereby arriving at the meaning: ‘those who attain their virginity in Israel’.[38] Thus according to this alternative tradition, priests’ avoidance of proselyte spouses has nothing to do with the stigma of zenooth. The presence of these two distinct traditions (Yeb.61 versus Qid. 78) within the Babylonian Talmud has occasioned lively and ultimately irresolvable debate, notably between Rambam and Ra’vad (Issure Bi’ah 18:3) and their respective followers. So much for the Bavli. The Yerushalmi preserves a third tradition: “It says ‘none but a virgin from among his people shall he [the high priest] marry’ [Lev 21:14] which implies that to marry a giyyoreth [not being from among his people] would be to transgress a positive command since a law inferred from one positive command is also positive” (Y. Yeb. 8:2 [9c], Qid. 4:6 [66a]). Another source not to recognize a giyyoreth as a woman forbidden to a priest under the terms of Lev 21 occurs at Sanhedrin 82a. A Hasmonean beth din is said to have decreed that a man cohabiting with a non-Jewess shall be reckoned guilty of violating four prohibitions. Two amora’im, R. Dimi and Rabin, agree as to the identity of the first three prohibitions but dispute the fourth. Rabin claims that the fourth involved a prohibition peculiar to priests viz., a priest who had relations with a gentile would be liable for consorting with a zonah.[39] R. Dimi, however, declares that gentile women cannot be presumed zonot ‘because their women are not so immoral’.[40] R. Dimi obviously rejects the giyyoreth-zonah equation. But as the 12th century Tosafist R. Moses of Pontoise points out,[41] even Rabin did not consider a gentile woman’s presumptive zenooth anything more than a Hasmonean innovation. And if a gentile’s zonah classification was merely Hasmonean and unscriptural, a fortiori a giyyoreth’s.

As for the high priest’s slur on Shema‘iah and Avtalyon, it comes as no surprise. The only question is whether in calling them gentiles he meant quite literally to repudiate gerooth; or, as seems likelier, to convey the ingrained priestly position that gereem were unequal Jews. Today we have confirmation of such condescension towards gereem in circles associated with the sacerdotal clan. To quote once again Daniel Schwartz:

[In] conjunction with the usual rabbinic notion that the Torah “equates the proselyte to the native-born with regard to all laws of the Torah,” it follows that proselytes may enter [the Temple] along with born Israelites. But three pieces of earlier evidence, all from priestly circles, say otherwise. First of all, the inscriptions on the Temple mount which warned Gentiles not to enter referred to them as allogenes (“of foreign birth”) .... Already Clermont-Ganneau, who first published the inscription found intact [in 1872] noted that, if taken literally, it would exclude converts as well. Second, a Qumran text (Q4 Florilegium 1, 3-4) looks forward to the future Temple which ... will not be polluted by the entry of “the Ammonite, nor the Moabite, nor half-breed [sic], nor the foreigner, nor the proselyte (ger) ... our third witness: the Temple Scroll ... makes clear that the status of proselytes, at least with regard to entry into the Temple, is lower than that of born Israelites.[42]

Horayot 1:4 (item b cited above) implies that gereem were disbarred from the higher judiciary. Perhaps this disbarment of gereem went back to the days when the priesthood was in charge of the Temple. Since the Temple was where the supreme court convened, it would have been off-limits to gereem. Not that the Mishnah offers this etiology, or any other for that matter. Indeed, the Mishnah appears to take as given the proselyte’s inadmissibility to the Sanhedrin. But the Mishnah’s reticence is compensated by the gemara, especially the Yerushalmi (Hor. 1:4 [46a]) that offers the following explanation. “It is written [Num 11:16] ‘let them stand there with you’. Just as you [Moses] are neither a ger,[43] a Gibeonite nor a bastard,[44] so also shall they be neither gereem, Gibeonites nor bastards ...”.

Now Torah is quite forthright in itemizing its judiciary’s requisite qualifications. These include fortitude, fear of G-d, trustworthiness, having contempt for lucre (Ex 18:21); experience, being imbued with the spirit (Num 11:16-17); wisdom, discernment and understanding (Dt. 1:13). But absolutely nowhere does Torah so much as hint at DNA tests for judges or their progenitors. Only in the cultic realm does heredity reign (see Num 17:5), or to paraphrase Daniel Schwartz: the question ‘who is a priest?’ is answered necessarily and sufficiently by descent. In light of the scriptural evidence, perhaps we should understand the Yerushalmi’s patently forced derash[45] to be tongue in cheek, as if to say: if you can believe that Moses’ value resided in his pedigree, then believe also that pedigree determined the selection of his deputies. But needless to say, that is not the conventional reading. Instead, Horayot’s disbarring of gereem came to be viewed as normative halakhah, so much so that Shema‘iah and Avtalyon were felt to be an embarrassment. At that point, this pair of sages, described elsewhere in the Mishnah (Hag. 2:2) as president and vice-president of the supreme court, had to be transmogrified from gereem into descendants of gereem - conveniently forgetting that when they want, the sources know how to designate descendants. Moreover, if the ger status of one’s ancestors is the thorn in the side of the world’s Aqabiahs and high priestly purists, where’s their protest at other scions of converts, such as R. Aqiba[46] and those prophets descended from the proselytess Rahab (Meg.14b) who like R. Aqiba presided over bate din.[47]

But even if we grant that Horayot meant to deny the Sanhedrin the benefit of appointees such as an Obadiah[48] or a Yithra,[49] a Shema‘iah or an Avtalyon[50] - its denial was not necessarily the last word. As noted earlier, wellnigh every instance of ger-wariness is offset by its converse. The converse of Horayot 1:4 may be discovered at Sanhedrin 4:2. “Anybody can qualify to try monetary cases, but to try capital cases none qualify except priests, Levites and Israelites whose daughters would be allowed to marry priests.” Now we have seen a range of sources that prohibit matrimony between a priest and a convert - albeit each source invoking its own very distinct authority for the prohibition. The fact that these sources name specifically a giyyoreth, must surely imply that a born Jewess who happened to be parented by a proselyte would be above reproach.

So can a priest marry a ger’s daughter? Well, it depends whom you ask.

The daughter of a male halal[51] is unfit to [marry into] the priesthood for ever ... R. Yehudah says the daughter of a male proselyte is like the daughter of a male halal. R. Eliezer b. Ya‘akov says if a [native] Israelite marries a giyyoreth, their daughter is fit to [marry into] the priesthood; similarly the daughter of a proselyte father and a [native] Israelite mother. But if both parents were proselytes she is unfit to [marry into] the priesthood ... R. Yose says even if both parents were proselytes she is fit to [marry into] the priesthood (M. Qid. 4:6-7).

Thus R. Yehudah would disbar proselytes from the Sanhedrin for capital cases because a proselyte is a Jew whose daughter he deems unfit to marry a priest. R. Eliezer b. Ya‘akov and R. Yose, on the other hand, in declaring the daughter of a proselyte father eligible to marry a priest, ipso facto qualify that father to try capital cases.[52]

Lastly, we must confront the painful teaching of R. Samuel bar Yehudah - which brings us full circle. As if no Isaiah had spoken, this proselyte sage dredges up the old ‘racist’ bias that the prophet had contested all those centuries before. More amazing still, Rava appears to endorse R. Samuel’s prejudice and to broaden it. The only court from which R. Samuel debarred proselytes was a halisah court because of a unique exclusionary phrase Torah employs in connection with halisah. Rava, however, would seem to extend the debarment of proselytes by narrowing the scope of Torah’s ‘you’ (as in “over you”) to exclude adoptive Jews.[53] In other words, Torah’s use of ‘you’ in addressing Israel yields ‘you who were born Israelite’.[54]

Such corporeal definitions of Israel strike most of us as extremely baffling, as well they should. For they drive an ethnic wedge between Jew and Jew, which would seem to run counter to declared fundamentals of rabbinic gerooth:

R. Yose taught A proselyte once converted is like a newborn babe (Yeb. 48b; see also Yeb. 22a, 62a, 97b, Ket. 61b, Bekh. 47a).
Once he has immersed himself and emerged [from the water] behold he is like an Israelite in every respect (hare hu ke-yisrael le-khol debarav Yeb. 47b).

PRO AND CON IN THE AGGADAH

Arguably the most familiar aggadic comment on gerooth is R. Helbo’s quip:

Proselytes are hard[55] for Israel as [the dermatological condition that Lev 13-14 calls] sappahat (var. is on the skin). For it is written [Isa 14:1] ‘The ger shall join them and become attached[56] to the House of Jacob’ (Yeb.47b, cf. 109b).

In his magnum opus The Sages, Ephraim E. Urbach reminds us that R. Helbo’s own disciple R. Berakhyah distanced himself from his master’s interpretation of Isa 14:1.

Job said ‘no ger shall spend the night outdoors’ (Job 31:32). G-d rejects none of His human creatures but accepts them all; the gates are always open so that everyone that wishes may enter. Therefore, ‘no ger shall spend the night outdoors’ can be applied to the Holy One blessed be He ... R. Berakhyah asked: to whom does ‘no ger shall spend the night outdoors’ apply? It applies to gereem who shall one day be priests serving in the temple as it says ‘The ger shall join them and become attached to the House of Jacob’ - and the root SPH connotes priesthood as it says [1Sam 2:36] ‘attach me (= sephaheni), I pray thee, to one of the priestly orders’. [57]
But let us not be unfair to R. Helbo. He was not disavowing (heaven forfend) Isaiah’s prophecy that gereem would be attached to the house of Jacob; he was merely warning that for Israel their absorption would not be without difficulty. Thus R. Helbo makes it perfectly clear that he is speaking from a national standpoint. For Israel’s composure gereem might be a bane (albeit integumentary - no danger to vital organs) and an inconvenience.[58] But then many misvot are at times inconvenient, and the path of avodat hashem is often strewn with trials and tribulations. In any event, whatever R. Helbo’s original purport, later amoraim declared that in acquainting the gerooth-candidate with the lofty responsibilities Judaism lays upon a person, R. Helbo would be satisfied. How so? Because frivolous candidates will be deterred by so burdensome a prospect (see Yeb. 47b). This shows that these later amoraim took R. Helbo’s words as an admonition to bate din to be on their toes. So long as a system was in place for weeding out the irresolute and gormless, R. Helbo asked no more.

Another aggadic passage often understood as cynical of gereem and their motives, occurs at Yebamot 24b: “Proselytes are not accepted in the Messianic era. Likewise, they were not accepted in the days of David and Solomon. R. El‘azar provided scriptural support. It is written [Isa 54:15] ‘the one that sojourns with you will fall upon you’ meaning to say, whoever joins you in your affliction shall abide with you in the days of your tranquility”. To the extent we are able to fathom this cryptic pronouncement, its equilibrator may be located at Tos. Ber. 6:4.[59]

On seeing a place from which idolatry has been uprooted one says: ‘Blessed be He who has uprooted idolatry from our land; just as it has been uprooted from this place so may it be uprooted from all places of Israel and may you turn the hearts of the idolaters to your worship’. This last clause ‘may you turn the hearts of the idolaters to your worship’ need not be recited outside the land [of Israel] because there a majority of the population is gentile. R. Shim‘on [var. R. Shim‘on b. El‘azar] says also outside the land one must say it because they are going to convert as it says [Zeph 3:9] Then will I give the nations pure lips so that all may invoke Hashem’s name and serve Him with one accord.

Thus R. Shim‘on does not look forward to a moratorium on gerooth in the Messianic era, but quite the contrary.[60]

Even more distrustful of gerooth, is an aggadah domesticated by Rashi through his comments to Ex 32 vv. 4 & 7. At verse 4 he writes “The worshippers of the golden calf exclaimed ‘These are your gods o Israel’. They did not say our gods but your gods. From this we learn it was the mixed multitude [mentioned at Ex 12:38] ... who mobbed Aaron; they were also the ones that made it and then led Israel astray”. At verse 7 the words ‘your people has acted corruptly’ elicits the following from Rashi: “G-d does not tell Moses The people has acted corruptly but rather ‘your people’; ‘your’ denoting the mixed multitude that you [Moses] accepted and converted on your own initiative and without consulting me. You said ‘it is good that gereem cleave to the shekhinah [i.e. to G-d]’. Now it is they who have acted corruptly and corrupted [others].”[61]

One can scarcely imagine a damper more crushing to gerooth. If our master Moses is to be faulted for making converts without explicit divine concurrence, how far ought lesser mortals to run from conversion? Rashi, however, cannot be held solely responsible for the influence this aggadah has enjoyed. Maimonides outpaces Rashi by using it as underpinning for one of his more creative gerooth rulings. After codifying the ruling in question, Rambam continues “This is the reason the sages said ‘proselytes are hard for Israel as an affliction of leprosy’ because most of them have ulterior motives and mislead Israel. Yet, it is hard to separate from them once they have converted. Look at what happened in the wilderness in the incident of the golden calf and again at Kibroth-hattaavah. Indeed, the asafsoof[62] were in the vanguard of most of the [ten] ‘testings’[63]" (Issure Bi’ah 13:18).

Some have argued that the point of the mixed multitude aggadah was to warn against mass conversions; and no doubt, a sudden deluge of newcomers has the potential to saturate, or even disorient, a host community. Others bring up John Hyrcanus’ conversion of the Idumeans[64] to illustrate the mixed blessing of overambitious giyyoor. However, we must not discount the possibility that in John Hyrcanus’ day the atmosphere had already been infected with an aloofness towards gereem that got in the way of the Idumeans’ integration. Why, even King Agrippa was still being impugned on account of his Idumean extraction, at least in certain quarters. Earlier we had occasion to meet the erudite Simon, immortalized by Josephus for his gripe against Agrippa. As we saw, what bugged Simon was the king’s lineage, precisely the issue surrounding Agrippa in the Talmud’s recollection.

The high priest hands the Torah scroll to the king and the king stands to receive it but reads sitting down. King Agrippa, however, both received and read standing and was applauded by the sages. When he reached the verse ‘You shall not appoint over you a man who is a foreigner’ [Dt 17:15] he was seen shedding tears. From the crowd rose thereupon the cry ‘Agrippa do not fear, you are our brother. You are our brother. You are our brother’ (M. Sot. 7:8).
This story pulls back the curtains on a rare scene of the giyyoor polemic in full throttle. First to heave into sight is Agrippa reverencing the Torah and earning, in turn, the sages’ approbation. In the next tableau the king is weeping - whether genuine or crocodile tears or a mixture is left moot. But what brings on the tears is not in doubt. As his Torah reading progresses, Agrippa reaches Dt 17:15, the verse on whose strength his (priestly?) foes would dethrone him as a man who did not satisfy the verse’s miqqereb ahekhah stipulation. At which juncture the hoi polloi voices its (Pharisaic?) understanding of Torah brotherhood whereby the pious, Torah-committed Agrippa is hailed a true brother. So much for the Mishnah and its memory of the conflicting appraisals of Agrippa’s zygotic Jewishness among divers factions.

As noted earlier, priestly notions increasingly seep into rabbinic deliberations. In the process, Agrippa’s endorsement by his contemporaries, both scholar and commoner alike, is cynically written off as humbug. The Bavli records a source that lambastes the crowd as toadies sucking up to an imposter, while the Yerushalmi credits the flattery with deadly consequences. These sources take it for granted that his lineage disqualified Agrippa for an office limited to ‘brothers’ by Dt 17:15. In so doing, they align themselves with the position attributed to Rava (Yeb. 102a) that also treats as axiomatic the inter-fraternity of none but native Jews. Let it be noted, withal, how none of these sources feels the need to cite Holy Writ. Dt 17:15’s kingship law is unambiguous: no nokhri (= foreigner) shall be appointed king but only a man miqqereb ahekhah (= from among your brethren). Thus Deuteronomy sets the dividing line between ineligible foreigner and eligible brother. Being a brother among brethren, the ger must surely find himself, by definition, on this side of the divide. Or does he? Incredibly, for these sources a ger would appear to fall on yonder side, placed there not at Scripture’s behest but ‘because he pullulated from a tippah pesulah (=an unfit droplet)’.[65] But if droplets determine who is and who is not miqqereb ahekhah, then what of prophets?

Sifre (Dt. 157) construes the phrase ‘your brethren’ of Dt 17:15 to exclude gentiles. Gentiles - not gereem.[66] Dt 18:18 stipulates that Israel’s prophets shall arise miqqirbekha me-aheka. Again, the way Sifre (Dt 175) deciphers the phrase, the only people excluded under the miqqirbekha me-ahekha provision are gentiles. Even Yehudah Halevi (d. c. 1140), whose racist theory of Israel's singularity notoriously correlates prophecy with pedigree,[67] never cites Dt 18:18. That is not to preclude the role the ger-versus-brother dichotomy may have played in shaping Yehudah Halevi’s thinking. All the same, he could not invoke Dt 18:18 because neither that verse nor any other Torah verse allows for gere sdeq to be classified as a distinct sub-division of Jews. No, it is not Torah that yields racism, but primeval instincts, primitive and feral, lurking just beneath man’s consciousness. The priests exploited those subliminal proclivities to rationalize an hereditary priesthood. Eventually the rationalization took off and was accepted as self-evident. That explains why those who view the ger as a breed apart never feel constrained to provide scriptural authority. Chickens develop from eggs; butterflies from caterpillars; and the ger from a mysterious, undefined entity called tippah pesulah.

To recapitulate. Many of the texts reviewed so far, grade people according to the putative circumstances of their siring. This kind of scale, that takes embryonic purity more seriously than individual personality, smacks of a priestly provenance. You see, priestly purity-cum-holiness and defilement though firmly rooted in physicality, were possessed of metaphysical potency. Everything was either pure and therefore metaphysically sound or it was neither. Jewish seed Ezra had declared holy; other seed who knows? Consequently, priests had little use for conversion. If outside priestly purlieus converts were welcome, the priests for their part would regard them as second-class Jews. But we have also seen the vitality of a less carnal school that conceives of ‘entering under the shekhinah’s wings’ as a total transformation - the ger retroactively standing upon Sinai and ‘shedding the scum implanted by the serpent’.[68] The school that abnegates priestly taxonomies, declaring “all Israel eligible for kingship” (Hor.13a), and requiring a misbegotten Torah scholar to take precedence over a high-born but churlish priest.[69]

Amidst these cross-currents of the Talmudic ocean, we find post-Talmudic sources struggling to navigate a path. The overall tendency of these sources is to err on the side of caution. Let us consider the following rather typical example. The Talmud rules that pukka giyyoor requires a beth din of three (Yeb. 46b). The requirement is treated as scriptural, and as such the judges would have to be accredited (mumheen). For the number three is derived from the same Scripture that mandates accreditation (San. 2b et al.). Now the Talmud (San. ibid.) registers an exception to the mumheen requirement.

As for the mumheen requirement it is waived in line with R. Haninah’s teaching. For R. Haninah said Torah law requires a single standard of cross-examination in all cases whether capital or civil as it says [Lev 24:22] ‘A single [standard of] justice shall you have’. Why then have they [the rabbis] suspended it for [certain] civil cases? So that the door will not be shut in the face of borrowers (San. 2b-3a).

Thus the scripturally mandated grilling of witnesses was set aside for cases involving loans in order to keep creditors lending; creditors that might otherwise be afraid of losing their money should the testimony break down under rigorous questioning. Likewise, insistence on mumheen posed an obstacle to borrowing. What about mumheen for giyyoor? Tosafot answers that question. “You may wonder how we [not being mumheen] can accept gereem. We would have to say that just as they worried about the door being shut on borrowers so too did they worry about the door being shut on gereem” (Yeb. 46b-47a s.v. mishpat). For Tosafot to extrapolate from the misvah of lending[70] to giyoor proves that in their eyes, giyyoor is a misvah of comparable standing. No doubt, Tosafot also took stock of the words Sifre places in Moses’ mouth. “[Moses] said to him, ‘pray, do not leave us [Num 10:31] ... Perchance you think [by leaving us] to increase the honor of Maqom whereas in reality you will lessen it. Think how many gereem and slaves you can cause to enter under the wings of the shekhinah. Therefore, be our guide [i.e. stay on] so as not to shut the door on gereem who [in the event of your departing] will reason: if Jethro threw in the towel what chance is there for us?’” (Sifre Num. 80 p.76).

A moment ago we referred to erring on the side of caution. In the context of giyoor it would entail giving candidates who are not blatantly bogus the benefit of the doubt. No judge hearing a giyyoor application, or any other business for that matter, is ever sure of a verdict’s repercussions down the road. Prognosticating forms no part of a judiciary’s halakhic warrant which is, instead, meticulously sifting information and critically examining their own integrity. For this is the halakhahic formula for judges: “a judge has nothing but what his eyes discern” (en lo la-dayyan ella ma she-‘enav ro’ot).[71] Provided no stone is left unturned in the pursuit of truth, and no recess of the soul unscoured for extraneous agendas and prejudices, the rest is up to Providence. Hillel will have followed the same course when deciding to receive gereem;[72] even the oddballs that his colleague Shammai had turned down. Although the Talmud avers that Hillel was no clairvoyant nor formally endowed with the holy spirit (San. 11a), he was obviously blessed with deep faith and compassion and the insightfulness that flows from them. Taking that first step of coming in search of conversion seems to have counted with Hillel, because Hillel starts out with the assumption that giyyoor is, in principle, pleasing in the sight of Hashem. Hillel preached “love your fellow humans and draw them close to Torah” (Aboth 1:12). It was also what he practiced. So how about Shammai? you ask. How did Shammai justify the short shrift he gave the gerooth-seekers knocking on his door?

Shammai’s strategy parallels Hillel’s inasmuch as it too plays safe when in doubt. Their major difference is the angle from which they view the world. Hillel, the devoted disciple of Shema‘iah and Avtalyon,[73] was convinced that conversion was G-d’s will as revealed in Torah. Had Shammai viewed giyyoor as a Torah desideratum he would not have sent his visitors packing. No. Shammai evidently had at least one foot in the priestly camp, treating conversion almost as a mirror image of divorce which though recognized by Torah, is restricted for use only in the event of flagrancy.[74] Once gerooth is classified as a misvah in reserve, to be taken out only on state occasions, Shammai’s behavior falls into place. Conversion is all well and good for that paragon of propriety and submissiveness who comes dispirited and devoid of ego, not for smart alecs of the type Shammai dismisses (Shab. 31a). Besides, if there is no great virtue in spreading Hashem’s faith, playing safe would presumably translate into sparing the existing Jewish community the effort of accommodating neophytes. If on top of that the ger is a Jew-not-quite (as some sources imply), then it is Hobson’s choice to reject all but the worthiest, i.e. the least obtrusive.

This ambivalence to gerooth may not be entirely unrelated to the Shammaite belief that Jewish survival was best served by isolationism and by closing ranks. Although the immediate impetus for the so-called Eighteen Decrees is thought to have been political, there is no escaping the Decrees’ xenophobic underpinning.[75] Survival mattered to Hillelites just as much, but their opposition to the Decrees stemmed from their alternative perception of the Torah’s call. By means fair or foul, the Shammaites managed to muster the votes and the Decrees passed into law.[76] But the triumph was short-lived. Perhaps the Shammaites had overplayed their hand. In any case, the Hillelite school rebounded, and the later rabbis came to believe that Hillell’s Halakhah, not Shammai’s, met with divine approval.[77]

That is not to say Shammaite Halakhah ceased overnight. In their personal observance, individual rabbis continued to practice it. R. Tarphon, for instance, adopted the Shammaite recumbent posture when reciting the evening shema‘,[78] while R. Gamliel in his own home followed Beth Shammai in three halakhot pertaining to the festivals.[79] But when it comes to gerooth, which is hardly a question of private piety, there is no recorded lapse to Shammaism. At least not until the 19th century when gerooth can be said to have entered a new phase. Prior to the enlightenment - culminating for many minority communities with Napoleon and his emancipatory initiatives - proseletyzing had been forbidden and was a risky undertaking for both the convert and his/her Jewish sponsors. As freedom of religion began to displace medievalism on the European continent, conversion to Judaism gained momentum. Another feature of the emancipatory stirrings, was the rise of modernist reforms within Judaism. Then, amidst the controversies between the emerging factions of what were to crystallize as orthodox, ultra-orthodox, liberal and arch-liberal strands of European Jewry, there recrudesces a Shammaite defensiveness towards gerooth. Or rather ostensibly Shammaite. For now gerooth itself was not the issue, but had become a mere pawn in a larger denominational struggle. It is understandable that Orthodoxy, which was an ideology in the making at the time, should try to demarcate its boundaries, especially vis-à-vis the progressives who were the irritant that had produced the orthodox pearl, so to speak. As with any demarcation strategy, each faction tended to illegitimate its rivals in the process of forging self-identity. In order to sharpen their respective identities each stressed the misvot the other downplayed. Because the progressives put the ethics of Torah above its ritual, Orthodoxy that came into being as a reaction, reversed its priorities, laying particular emphasis on praxis that suited a separatist agenda. But as noted, the separatism went hand in hand with an aggressive invalidation of all other Jews, not merely the card-holding Reformists, but any that remained outside the ever-narrowing confines of the orthodox fortress.

This is not the forum to rehearse the birth of European Jewish denominationalism. For one thing, the story has been covered in many serious studies.[80] Moreover, our sole interest in the 19th century is to discover how gerooth fared in the face of all the turmoil. To some degree it fell victim to the brawls. If non-Orthodox Judaism was inauthentic, then so were gentiles who adopted that brand of Judaism. Authentic Jews were exclusively the adherents of Orthodoxy, and for converts to reckon as Jews they would have to convert under Orthodox auspices.

From here on the story will be taken up by the manifestos[81] of R. Akiva Joseph Schlesinger (d.1922) a man who set much of the tone for an important branch of segregationist European Orthodoxy, and who later exported it to the Holy Land. When reading the manifestos let us remember that gerooth is not the butt of their animus so much as are rival groups who were admitting gereem on their own terms. The writing is also fueled by a palpable militancy born of fear; that insidious, gut fear of the unfamiliar and the alien. Even as we cringe at the author’s special pleading, it is only meet to try and visualize the unenviable predicament that beset Jewry in his place and time. However, no amount of sympathy for Rabbi Schlesinger can justify reliance upon arguments such as his (for he was not a lone voice merely the most articulate, and some might say, candid). With the benefit of hindsight we may understand his siege mentality and its pretexts - pretexts that afford us no fig-leaf of cover in today’s vastly different circumstances.

1) Selections from the General Introduction to Lev ha-‘Ivri[82]

By divine plan humanity was predestined from the beginning to be divided into four species (or classes) each with its distinct mission. ... The first was given the seven Noahide laws ... and above all the misvah (or duty) to make the earth habitable through diligent study of nature, putting that knowledge to use for the benefit of the world. Never may they shirk this misvah even if they mean to exchange it for another misvah as it was taught [San. 58b] ‘A gentile who observes the Sabbath deserves death’... Later, the holy One blessed be He separated the second species that He chose to be unto Him a kingdom of priests. From them He withdrew the misvah (or duty) of making the earth habitable. G-d’s Torah alone was to be their care; and their life’s purpose to carry out the 613 commandments, the written Torah and the oral ... The third species is the priestly that must be completely removed from all things mundane ... The fourth consists of the high priest of whom it is written [Lev 21:12 ] ‘out of the sanctuary he shall not go’. Furthermore, the Cause of all causes established and fixed each of these [classes] in accordance with their respective souls and the quarry whence each was extracted so that each may attain the goal divinely willed for it. G-d also ordered that they shall endure for ever at their allocated posts and in their appointed positions, never interchanging from one to another and never trespassing or moving outside their boundaries. Thus, the Torah given at Sinai, being an inheritance of the congregation of Jacob, none of the other nations is allowed to delve into Israel’s Torah - especially the oral - because the Torah has decreed that a gentile who occupies himself with Torah deserves death. Conversely, the Torah decrees that Israelites, whose sole enterprise must be Torah, any one of them who gets involved with the learning of the nations, likewise, deserves death. For anyone transgressing the words of the sages is worthy of death (Erub.21b) and is called a renegade (Nid. 12a) ...
And even though the holy One blessed be He granted permission to a Noahide to transfer from his patrimony by converting and entering the Israelite collective, nevertheless it is not a preferential (or glorious) misvah to accept proselytes as indicated in tractate Yebamoth: Proselytes will not be accepted in the time to come when the prophecy ‘The whole earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the L-rd’ is realized. Because even then every nation shall still maintain its immutable position ... May the Merciful One speedily bring to pass [the promise of‘ Zeph 3:9] ‘Then will I give the nations pure lips so that all may invoke Hashem’s name and serve Him with one accord’ - Noahides according to their duty, Israelites according to their statutes, priests on their watch and the high priest in his sacred office ...[83]

2) Remarks on the Acceptance of Proselytes that is on the Rise in our Generation[84]

‘The heart of a king [and of princes] is in the hand of Hashem’ (Prv 21:1) and it is from His hand that this thing has come upon us - this recent movement towards eliminating religious divisions and hatreds. Like wild beasts, they envy the Jew no more. Instead, people go their own ways following their hearts’ promptings ... Ever since the declaration of liberty (also called freedom of religion) for all inhabitants of the land, it is no secret that the number of those attaching themselves to the House of Jacob has been increasing from day to day. But as for you, my brethren, what you need, is to know Hashem’s will in His Torah and to keep His statute.
To be sure, our Rabbis say ‘The holy One blessed be He, exiled Israel only in order that proselytes may join them’ (Pes. 87b). On the other hand, they tell us ‘Proselytes are hard for Israel as sappahat’ (Yeb.47b) which hardship Rashi and Tosafot understand to inhere in the failure of proselytes to observe misvot punctiliously which, in turn, sets a bad example in Israel. These two statements would appear to contradict each other, and one must reconcile the contradiction. As it turns out, there is a third text that does just that. The text occurs at Yebamot 24b: ‘Proselytes are not accepted in the Messianic era. Likewise, they were not accepted in the days of David and Solomon. R. El‘azar provided scriptural support. It is written [Isa 54:15] the one that sojourns with you will fall upon you - meaning to say, whoever joins you in your affliction shall abide with you in the days of your tranquility’. Thus we see that the acceptable proselytes were those that suffered and risked their lives to enter under the Shekhinah’s wings. For that kind of convert was Israel exiled. But those who come on a whim, let alone for their own satisfaction, they are unto Israel hard as sappahat. Of their ilk were the children of converts, or rather children of a mixed multitude, that were accepted in the days of Moses. From among them and their likes have emerged our tormentors: sappahat and [that other dermatological condition called] baheret Sadducees and heretics. But as birds of a feather flock together, so these, whose actions demonstrate that they are not of the children of Israel, exult to make converts in their own likeness. As the Rabbis predicted (ibid.) When many gentiles attach themselves you have sappahat and baheret.
And what is the exultation all about? Far better had they remained in their gentileness! Both for them and for us it would have been expedient because Sadducees and heretics are worse than idolaters as stated in our pure Shulhan Arukh (Hoshen Mishpat 34:22). We do not seek to swell our ranks. O that the nations would take away some of ours; those among us who crave their ways, their tongue and their ideas, in their thousands and tens of thousands. Then Jacob might well rejoice [and] Israel be happy that our dross and dregs have been removed. Hashem has said ‘You are few’ (Dt 7:7). Then shall the redemption come without delay, as the Rabbis teach ‘Proselytes [and those who marry underage wives] delay the Messiah’ (Nid. 13b).
And please do not raise an objection either from the Talmud’s description of Hillel’s lenient acceptance of converts or from the analogous story at Menahot 44a. For as explained in the writings of the ARI [R. Isaac Luria d. 1572] of blessed memory, They [i.e. Hillel etc.] recognized the source of [peoples’] souls. But we need not dabble in the esoteric; a thoroughly exoteric source says virtually the same thing. Tosafot (Yeb. 24; s.v. lo) accounts for [Hillel’s leniency] as follows: ‘Hillel was confident that [the people he converted] would eventually come round to doing it for the sake of Heaven’. Hillel, then, was acting upon ‘Hashem’s secrets revealed to those who fear Him’ [Ps. 25:14, cf. Sot. 4b].[85] Moreover, the Talmud rules that halakhah is not to be inferred from ma‘aseh (B.B. 130b).[86] Thus for us there is nothing outside the words of the Torah that are written in our pure Shulhan Arukh: ‘When a proselyte comes to convert, they must say to him ‘Are you not aware that Israel at the present time are despised and downtrodden?’etc.’ (Yore De‘ah 268:2). The ShaK (R. Shabbetai ha-Kohen) comments on this text that they must also be daunted (or intimidated)[87] perchance (or in the hope) they will withdraw because ‘Proselytes are hard for Israel as sappahat’. Now it is true that Beth Yosef (in his commentary to Tur Yore De‘ah 268) writes that even if the daunting was omitted the conversion is still valid. However, in his [later work] Shulhan Arukh he does not mention this, which suggests that he changed his mind. And in any case [R. Moses Isserles in his] Darke Moshe disagrees with Beth Yosef and states quite explicitly that without intimidation the conversion is invalid (see also Rambam Issure Bi’ah end of Chapter 13, where explanation is called for).[88]
In our present situation, so it appears to me, everybody would agree that the intimidation is indispensable and that, if anything, it ought to be redoubled. For today we are not exactly downtrodden and despised, thank G-d. Therefore one must be even more exacting upon them with regard to the stringencies of the misvot. These are the words of Rambam (Issure Bi’ah 13; also Shulhan Arukh Yore De‘ah 268:12): “When a proselyte comes to convert they check to see lest the motive be money or marriage etc. If no such ulterior motive is found, then the proselyte must be apprised of the heaviness of the yoke of Torah and the effort involved in observing it so that they might withdraw” etc. Rambam continues: ‘Anyone that gives up idolatry for the sake of a worldly vanity, is no righteous proselyte’. Moreover, in Hilkhot Melakhim (8:11) he writes “only if he accepts them as being commanded by the holy One blessed be He, and as being made known to us through our teacher Moses. But if he observes them because his mind dictates it, then he is neither a toshab proselyte nor yet a righteous gentile”. And further on (Melakhim 10:9) he writes: ‘This is the general rule. They must not be allowed to invent a religion or their own man-made misvot. Their only choice is to become a righteous proselyte or else to stick with their own [Noahide] Torah. They shall neither add nor subtract’. Mark these words!
As for those who jump at the chance to multiply converts and apostates, it is upon them that the Rabbis pronounced their malediction ‘Misfortune upon misfortune shall visit those who accept proselytes’ (Yeb. 109b). They also say (Bek. 30b): nokhri habba le-hitgayyer afillu me-qabbel alav kol ha-torah hootz diqdooq ehad middibre sofreem en me-qableem oto (A non-Jew who comes to be converted even if he takes upon himself the entire Torah except for a single nicety of the Scribes’ Words, he shall not be accepted). [89]
Make sure, once the checks, searches and intimidations are done, that they take it upon themselves to be of the number of the downtrodden Jews, recognizable by their distinctive names, speech and attire; and where applicable, by sisith, sidelocks and beard. So beware that you bring them into Judaism rather than into Sadduceanism, heaven forfend. So now you know!
These two texts bristle with Shammaism. First of all they divest Hillel’s example of its ability to serve as precedent by kicking it upstairs. The inference: Shammai must have lacked Hillel’s supernatural discernment or else chose not to avail himself of it when conducting interviews. Either way, because it was allegedly miracle-free, Shammai’s modus operandi need not be marginalized. Above all it should be noted how these texts give pride of place to the Bekhorot 30b prescript that, according to Rashi, actuated Shammai and molded his giyyoor policy.

[Shammai] shooed him away because it is taught in a baraitha ‘A person who comes to accept the things pertaining to haberuth except for one thing and similarly a ger who comes to be converted and accepts upon himself the words [or things] of Torah except for one word [or thing] he is not accepted’ (Rashi at Shab. 31 a s. v. hosi’o binzifah). [90]
Hillel, Rashi goes on to inform us, was also aware of the Bekhorot 30b baraitha but, unlike Shammai, chose to interpret it less rigidly (Rashi ibid.).[91] The editors of the Talmud were not content to simply record the stories reflecting Shammai and Hillel’s contrasting approaches to wayward petitioners - and then sit on the fence. Rather did they see fit to add a postscript vindicating Hillel’s approach and by more than implication decrying Shammai’s. “In the course of time the three proselytes [rebuffed by Shammai but later received by Hillel] met. They said ‘Shammai’s punctiliousness[92] sought to drive us from the world; Hillel’s meekness[93] brought us close under the wings of the Shekhinah” (Shab. ibid.).[94]

[1] “The rabbis speak of ‘The proselyte who comes to convert' even though at the time of coming the person is actually a gentile. The reason for this usage is that it would be offensive to refer to a person who has since converted by the epithet ‘gentile’” (Ritva to Ket. 11a).

[2] Against the Galilaeans translated by Wilmer F. C. Wright, Loeb Classical Library, The Works of the Emperor Julian vol. 3 pp. 341-343.

[3] JPS Commentary to Dt, excursus 7 p.435.

[4] See Meg. 9b; Y. Meg. 1: 8 [71d]; Mekhilta Bo 14 (p. 51); Tanhuma Ex. (Shemot 22); Sofrim 1:8; Sifre Dt 148.

[5] Buber edition Dt p. 2; Midrash Tanhuma Hamfo’ar vol. 2, Jerusalem 5754 p. 250; cf. Testament of Levi 14:4.

[6] The same aggadic understanding of Gen 12:5 is presupposed by the Talmud. “It was taught in the school of Elijah ‘The world has 6,000 years [of which] 2,000 are void, 2,000 Torah and 2,000 the days of the messiah’... When did the 2,000 of Torah begin? ... from ‘the souls they made in Haran’” (A. Z. 9a).

[7] See A. Z. 64b.

[8] See Rashi to Dt 29:10 and his source in Tanhuma. Also Shab. 146a; Yeb. 79a.

[9] Conversion rituals are, of course, quite another matter.

[10] The original idea of covenantal community being the antithesis of ethnic solidarity, it is understandable that where genealogy prevails covenant survives merely as a form, eviscerated of its definitional status. As Mendenhall notes (of an age long before the rabbinic) “...the basis of solidarity was no longer the covenant, but the myth of descent from a common ancestor” (The Tenth Generation pp.16-17). The rabbis made no attempt to revitalize the covenantal idea, but instead invested biblical references to covenant with the force of circumcision, the only berith in their experience. See Shaye J. D. Cohen’s “Your Covenant that You Have Sealed in our Flesh: Women, Covenant and Circumcision” in Studies in Josephus and the Varieties of Ancient Judaism, Louis H. Feldman Jubilee Volume (Leiden 2007, pp. 29-42).

[11] This Elijah aggadah climaxes in Pirqe R. Eliezer chapter 29.

[12] Ned. 32a; cf. M. Ned. 3:11; Shab. 137b.

[13] At any rate, a male proselyte’s. The female proselyte’s ritual was to be tevilah (=immersion) - adduced from Ex 19:10 that mandates ablutions preparatory to the Sinaitic covenant. Since the rabbis saw every conversion as a continuation of Sinai, they modelled conversion rites on Sinai. Accordingly: “Ribbi (R. Judah the Patriarch fl. c. 220) says ‘...your ancestors’ entry into the covenant was [solemnized] with circumcision [for the men], immersion [for all] ... So too shall they [future proselytes] enter the covenant in the same manner’” (Ker. 9a). Of course, this still leaves a discrepancy between the single rite for one gender and two for the other. Which leads to the hoary question: Why would a rite of passage be chosen that pertains exclusively to men? This conundrum has piqued writers from as far back as Philo (see Philo Supplement 1, Questions and Answers on Genesis, translated from the ancient Armenian version of the original Greek by Ralph Marcus, London 1953 pp. 241-242). To situate Philo among other ancients who considered circumcision’s gender implications, see “Why Aren’t Women Circumcised?” by Shaye D. J. Cohen (in Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean, Maria Wyke ed., Oxford 1998 pp.136-154).

[14] Rashi adds: “[They were wrong to] turn her away from entering under the wings of the Shekhinah; they should have converted her”.

[15] Tosafot juxtapose the Timna‘ aggadah to qasheem for the express purpose of mitigating the qasheem stricture (to be encountered anon) and cutting it down to size.

[16] Although the Keri is mi-ma‘arkhot pelishteem (= the Philistine ranks), the derash exploits the Ketib: mi-ma‘arot pelishteem.

[17] This example was brought to my attention by Rabbi Benjamin Z. Schmeltz, z.l.

[18] Dt 21:10-14; Qid. 21b et al.

[19] To which category accepting gereem belongs as demonstrated by - among others - R. Shim‘on ben Semah Duran (d. 1444). “... accepting gereem is a misvah that devolves upon the religious courts to receive and not to turn them away. It is clearly implied by the statement in tractate Yebamot (47b) ‘[once his wholehearted commitment has been ascertained the male convert] shall be circumcised immediately because we have a rule that a misvah may not be postponed without good reason’. The same rule is invoked by the Talmud with regard to levirate marriage. In the event that the oldest surviving brother is abroad but a younger brother is to hand, although the senior brother normally takes precedence, so as not to postpone the misvah, the junior shall perform the levirate duty. Thus we see that accepting gereem is a misvah on a par [with yibboom] ... Moreover, in tractate Ketuboth it says that when the applicant for gerooth is a minor, the underage ger is immersed [i.e. undergoes the attendant rites of giyyoor] with the consent of the religious court. Why so? Because of the misvah that obligates us to accept gereem” (Sefer Zohar Ha-raqiy‘a, p.37).

[20] The Hebrew is ha-nilvah; most likely a quasi-technical term for conversion (cf. “ve-nilvah ha-ger” at Isa 14:1).

[21] Cf. Neh 13:23-28.

[22] Proselytes are listed in M. Qid. 4:1 among the ten ranks (or rather castes) that removed from Babylon. Presumably this refers to the first wave of returnees under Zerubbabel, although the name of Ezra is associated with the ten castes in the course of the gemara (Qid. 69b). However, Ezra’s mention may be due to the Talmud’s telescoping of the two waves.

[23] Ant. XIX 7:4.

[24] Agrippa I, King of Judaea, Tübingen 1990 pp. 126-127.

[25] The Hebrew original translated ‘genealogical’ is ha-mithyahaseem - hithyahes deriving from the root YHS. All 20 biblical attestations of this word (mostly in the hithpa‘l as here) are confined to the post-Exilic books of Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles. It is highly telling that neither the word nor the idea (by any other name) occurs in demonstrably pre-Exilic books (but see Onqelos and other targums to Num 1:18).

[26] Schwartz lists the most egregious examples (op. cit. p. 129 n. 89).

[27] Named in the chain of Torah transmitters as teachers of Hillel and Shammai (Aboth 1: 10-12).

[28] This is a literal rendering of the Aramaic original ‘bene amameen’. However, there is no doubt that bene amameen (sing. mostly bar amameen) denotes gentile[s], and in Targum it is more or less the standard equivalent of biblical bene nekhar or nokhri (e.g. Lev 22:25; Dt 14:21, 29:21 et al.).

[29] Aqabyah is never identified as a priest. Yet the laws he champions at Eduyot 5:6 - leprosy, ritual purity, shearings of the firstborn of the flock and the water ordeal - all belong to the priestly domain. At Neg. 1:4 Aqabyah figures as one of three tannaim who dispute the consensus regarding another aspect of leprosy law. One of the two tannaim is definitely a priest namely R. Hananiah Segan Ha-kohaneem. Is expertise in leprosy law a priestly trait? Be that as it may, in his scorn for Shema‘iah and Avtalyon qua proselytes, Aqabyah showed himself to be a chip off the block of the high priest we met at Yoma 71b. Finally, in Aqabyah’s anthropology man has his beginning neither in the dust as per Gen 2:7, nor in the womb or the bowels of the earth (Ps 139:13-15) nor in a mould (Job 10:10) nor in any biblically located site. Aqabyah’s focus is tippah seruhah (Aboth 3:1). Without putting too fine a point on it, in whose mind but a priest’s (and a laboratory biologist’s) would the thought of human incipiency conjure up tippah (= a droplet)?

[30] Like Karkemeet, Shema‘iah and Avtalyon were not Jews-from-birth. They were proselytes (Ber. 19a, Rashi and Tosafot ibid.; Tosafot Hashalem: Commentary on the Bible, Jacob Gellis edition vol. 8 p.143; Y. Mo‘ed Qatan 2:1; Rambam, introduction to Mishneh Torah and comment on Edu. 1:3; Bertinoro on Edu. 5:6 & Aboth 1:10). However, in the 17th century there was a move to deprive Shema‘iah and Avtalyon of their proselyte status for the sake of harmonizing, as we shall see.

[31] I.e. it is to be understood in its commonly attested sense of a wife who is unfaithful to her husband (Rashi).

[32] Even though she is single (Rashi).

[33] E. g. she had been in an incestuous relationship; alternatively, an Israelite woman who had been married to [or in a relationship with] a Gibeonite or a bastard (Rashi ).

[34] The Mishnah’s parallel reads: “R.Yehudah says even if he [a rank and file priest] has a wife and children he may not marry a woman incapable of child bearing for she is the zonah spoken of in the Torah. But the [other] sages say zonah refers to none but a proselytess, a manumitted female slave and a woman who had been in a forbidden relationship” (Yeb. 6:5).

[35] “A proselytess [is reckoned a zonah] because she was surely married (or was in a relationship) when still a gentile ... and since gentiles do not have qiddusheen, her marriage (or relationship) renders her unfit” (Rashi Yeb. 61b s.v. ella giyyoreth). The idea of presumption is even more clearly articulated by Rashi at Yeb. 60b s.v. kesherah likh-hunnah & Qid. 74b top, s.v. hakhee qa-amar.

[36] Some appeal to the Yerushalmi’s ke-zonah formulation (giyyoret ke-zonah hee esel ha-kehunnah - Y. Qid. 4:1 [65b]) to show that priests’ avoidance of giyyoret spouses was never understood to have scriptural warrant. But we must beware of forced harmonizations, especially as the convert definition in Yebamot nestles amidst a list of alternatives (as we have seen) that all appear to be serious attempts at defining zonah of Lev 21.

[37] Nor, as far we can tell, did the amoraim who held that Torah forbids a zonah not merely to priests but to all Israel (Yeb. 56b). To be sure, under the relaxation deduced from Num 5:13 the only zonah lay Israelites must avoid is a zonah by choice (whereas for priests even a coerced zonah is unlawful). In any case, the entire discussion presupposes that zonah of Lev 21: 7 (see Rashi Yeb. ibid. s. v. ba‘lah loqeh) denotes a woman involved in some degree of infidelity and totally precludes the zonah=proselytess definition.

[38] Obviously two traditions are being conflated. According to the first R. Shim‘on’s source was Num 31:18, while here it is given as Ezek 44:22.

[39] See Rashi ibid.

[40] Cf. zo haita bikhlal shimmoor attributed to R. Ele‘azar b. Zadok (Hor. 13a).

[41] Quoted in Tosafot San. 82a s.v. ve-iddakh and A. Z. 36b s.v. mi-shoom.

[42] King Agrippa, pp. 127-128.

[43] This statement appears to conflict with Ribbi. “Ribbi says ‘...your ancestors’ entry into the covenant was [solemnized] with circumcision [for men], immersion and [a] blood [sacrifice offered] for acceptance. So too shall they [future proselytes] enter the covenant in the same manner’” (Ker. 9a; see n. 13 above). Cf. Rashi San. 82a “It was prior to Sinai that Moses had married Jethro’s daughter, all at that time having the status of Noahides. When the Torah was given they all, she [Jethro’s daughter] as well as proselytes of the mixed multitude included, entered into full misvah-hood”.

[44] One cannot help sense the irony: “Amram married his father’s sister Jochebed and she bore him Aaron and Moses” (Ex 6:20). At least according to some tannaim, such incest was forbidden even to Noahides (San.58b but see Rambam, Melakhim 9:5).

[45] Significantly, the Bavli rejects the Yerushalmi’s derivation. Firstly, it informs us that Numbers 11’s ‘let them stand there with you’ teaches that Moses presided in person over the 70 elders bringing their total to 71. R. Yehudah disputes Moses’ participation in his court’s proceedings - which leads him to the conclusion that a Sanhedrin’s quorum is exactly 70 - not 71 (San. 16b-17a). Secondly, at San. 36b (in a discussion cognate, though not identical, with Horayot) Num 11:16 is declared inadequate authority for disbarring gereem and other ‘genealogically impaired’ Jews from the Sanhedrin. Instead, the Bavli proposes Ex 18:22’s ‘let them bear with you’. (Again, how ironic that these words are spoken by Jethro, a man who served for the rabbis as the paradigmatic ger-sedeq!)

[46] In the introduction to his Mishneh Torah, Rambam identifies as a ger R. Aqiba’s father Joseph.

[47] R. Aqiba headed the Bene Beraq beth din (San. 32b). For R. Aqiba’s calendrical activity see Ber. 63a; M. Yeb. 16:7; for the prophets’: Y. San. 1:3 [19a] et al.

[48] The prophet Obadiah was a ger according to the Talmud (San. 39b).

[49] Yithra (also Yether) is portrayed as a ger who formed an important link in the transmission-chain of Oral Torah and played a major role in establishing halakhah (Yerushalmi Yeb. 8:3 [9c]).

[50] Bene Bathyra appear to have shunned Shema‘iah and Avtalyon. When Hillel arrives on the scene, he upbraids the old Bathyra guard for spiting their own faces in failing to take advantage of the two sages. As for the ‘sloth’ to which the Bavli (but not the Yerushalmi) attributes Bathyra’s ‘underutilization’ of Shema‘iah and Avtalyon, it is in all likelihood a euphemism for something far more deliberate (Pes. 66a).

[51] Literally ‘a profaned person’. Dealing with ordinary priests, Lev 21:7 says: “a woman who is a zonah and profaned they shall not marry and a woman divorced from her husband they shall not marry ... ”. Further on, at Lev 21:14 it says of the high priest: “A widow and a divorcee and a profaned zonah none of these shall he marry ...”. Even though the phrase ‘a zonah and profaned’ of verse 7 cannot be mistaken for anything but hendiadys (not to mention adjectival ‘profaned’ of verse 14) nevertheless, rabbinic midrash coaxed out of these adjectives an additional category of unfit wife that they called halalah. A halal was a son born from the disapproved union between a priest and a halalah.

[52] At Sifre Numbers 78 we meet tannaim in apparent agreement with R. Eliezer b. Ya‘akov and R. Yose. “What was the reward of Yonadav’s kin [who were Kenite converts]? ... [they were assured that] their progeny would continue to stand before Hashem. R. Yehoshua (var. lect. R. Yonathan) expostulated ‘[How could they stand before Hashem which connotes ministering within the sacred precincts] - surely gereem do not enter the hekhal [= the temple adytum] for no lay Israelite enters the hekhal! Rather did they sit on the Sanhedrin and deliver Torah rulings. According to an alternative opinion, their daughters married priests and consequently grandsons of theirs offered sacrifices upon the altar.”

[53] At least from the Sanhedrin, including the lesser Sanhedrin of 23 (Rashi Qid. 76b s. v. kol mesimot). Rambam, on the other hand, stretches Rava’s disbarment of gereem and applies it even to courts of three that try monetary cases. Rava thus appears at odds with all those talmudic statements that explicitly qualify a ger for monetary cases (San. 36b; Nid. 49b et al.). Evidently Rambam did not relish the idea of his Rava (as distinct from Rashi’s Rava) in disagreement with an array of sources. So he set about to diffuse the situation by positing that the ger qualified for monetary cases refers only to the ger who has a Jewish mother (Yad, Hilkhot Sanhedrin 11:11).

[54] The difficulty comprehending Rava’s derash (also cited in the name of ‘a master’ at Yeb. 45b and by R. Yoseph at Qid. 76b) is only amplified when we consult Sifre. There (Sifre Dt. 157) the phrase ‘your brethren’ of Dt 17:15 is said to exclude gentiles - not gereem; and then only from kingship, not judgeship. Even B.Q (88a) that does elicit a disqualification of gereem from Dt 17:15, it is still the crown alone that is denied a ger, not the bench. The same is true of the ger’s disqualification acknowledged in tractate B.B. (3b, end). Moreover, if the purpose of Rava’s derash is to disbar gereem, would it not create a glut of such derashot? As we have seen, Yerushalmi derives the ger’s disbarment from Num 11:16 and Bavli from Ex 18:22. Harmonizations that manage to improvise discrete uses for each derashah, cannot disguise their strain. If all that were not enough, the leap of faith Rava invites us to make seems beyond our capabilities, insofar as his derash (Yeb. 102a cited above) would have us extrapolate from monarchy to judicature. Yet in the Torah’s legislation, king and judge are distinct all round, including the lexis denoting their respective appointings. The king’s is designated SUM ‘AL, a term never uttered by Moses apropos judges. To be sure, at Ex 18:21 Jethro counsels Moses “ve-samta ‘alehem”. But significantly (in the midrashic world crucially so), verse 23 that reports the actualization of Jethro’s plan, substitutes va-yitten ... ‘al (from the root NTN) for Jethro’s SUM ‘AL. Even in Dt 1:13,15 Moses refers to his appointment of judges by the verbal phrases va-’asimem be- and va-etten ‘alekhem - as if studiously avoiding SUM ‘AL.

[55] Hebrew: ‘qasheen’ - plural of qashe whose primary meaning is hard. As long as sappahat remains an unknown quantity (does it cause itching? soreness? unsightliness? all of these? or some other disagreeable sensation?) we have no choice but to render it by non-committal ‘hard’.

[56] In Hebrew: ve-nispehu - hence sappahat.

[57] Ex. Rab. 19:4 cited in The Sages (Heb.) Jerusalem 1978 p. 491. It is also worth noting that Rashi in his commentary to Isa 14:1 chose to side with R. Berakhyah inasmuch as he classifies ve-nispehu with sephaheni (1Sam 2:36) and me-histapeah (1Sam 26:19) while altogether omitting sappahat.

[58] Wherein the hardship inheres is a matter of debate. Rashi and Tosafot between them come up with no fewer than seven proposals (See Tos. Yeb 47b s.v.qasheem; Qid. 70b s.v. qasheem). Some modern scholars have speculated that the ‘hardship’ R. Helbo feared was not from the gereem themselves but from the Roman authorities who, from the Antonines on, all but outlawed conversion to Judaism. Representative of this understanding is the following comment of Alfredo Mordechai Rabello: “We cannot exclude the possibility that many of these discussions took place in reaction to the Roman legislation regarding circumcision and proselytism" (“The Attitude of Rome towards Conversions to Judaism" part XIV in The Jews in the Roman Empire: Legal Problems from Herod to Justinian, Aldershot, Hampshire 2000, p.43).

[59] Also Ber. 57b.

[60] Recognizing the tension between these Messianic visions, the Talmud (A. Z. 3b) attempts to harmonize by positing two types of conversion. The type that will cease is conversion effected by bate din. However, so-called gereem gerureem i.e. converts who adopt Judaism outside the official channels (see Rashi A. Z. 24a s.v. gerureem; and cf. the case of the convert - albeit, not dubbed garoor - who converted ‘among the gentiles’ [Shab. 68a-b]) will flourish in the future just as they did in the days of David and Solomon (when Jesse preached and Yithra responded Y. Yeb. 8:3 [9c] and when bate din were allegedly being unreceptive but 150,000 converted nonetheless Yeb. 79a). In a different context, the Talmud limits the Davidic-Messianic-age ban on beth din sponsored giyyoor. Even in good times, such as the Davidic and Messianic, it is only gereem whose motives for conversion are suspect that are turned away by the beth din. Pharaoh’s daughter, for example, would have been accepted, since someone of her station is unlikely to be lured by Israel’s material prosperity (see Yeb. 76a-b). Finally, it should be noted that neither ger garoor nor giyyoreth gerurah is attested; it is invariably in the plural gereem gerureem and refers to group conversions. Is it conceivable that for such groups a special giyyoor process had once obtained?

[61] For fuller versions of this aggadah see Ex. Rab. 42:6; Lev. Rab. 27:8.

[62] The word asafsoof is a hapax legomenon occurring at Num 11:4. Tannaim disputed its meaning. “The asafsoof in their midst were gereem gathered out of many places (Sifre Zuta ascribes this view to R. Shim‘on b. Menasia). R. Shim‘on b. Menasia says they were the elders of whom it is written [Num 11:16] ‘gather for me (esfa lee) seventy elders’ (Sifre Zuta ascribes this view to R. Shim‘on).” (Sifre Num. 86 Horovitz ed. 1917 pp. 86 & 268). Rambam obviously opts for Sifre’s anonymous definition (= R. Shim‘on b. Menasia’s of Sifre Zuta) and furthermore, lumps the mixed multitude together with the asafsoof - as does Rashi at Num 11:4. However, at Ps 78:31 Rashi defines asafsoof as “the elders of whom it is written ‘gather for me’”.

[63] An allusion to Num 14:22 “Ten times they have tested me and not listened to my voice” and to Aboth 5:4.

[64] Josephus Ant. XIII 9:1.

[65] San. 36b, Nid. 49b et al; see n. 29 supra.

[66] See n. 54 supra.

[67] Kuzari 1:95, 115.

[68] See Shab. 146a, Yeb. 103b, A.Z. 22b.

[69] Hor. ibid.

[70] Lending to the indigent is an obligation (see Mekh. to Ex 22:24 and its reliance on Dt 15:8). It was this same conviction of the duty to lend and the sinfulness of withholding loans from the needy that prompted Hillel to institute that other famous ‘reform’ - perozbol. “Hillel the elder saw that [from fear of forfeiting their loans to shemittah] the people were holding back from lending and thereby transgressing that which is written in the Torah [Dt 15:9] ‘Beware lest your heart wickedly whisper to you ‘the seventh year, the year of release is approaching’ and you then begrudge your needy brother and lend him not’ etc. So Hillel rose up and instituted perozbol” Git.36a).

[71] San. 6b end (and Rashi ibid.), B.B. 131a, Nid. 20b.

[72] As confirmed by R. Joseph Karo. “Regarding the man who came to Hillel and said ‘convert me so that I may aspire to the high-priesthood’, Tosafot explain that Hillel, like Ribbi in the case recorded in Hatekhelet [Men. 44a], was confident he [the convert] would eventually come round to doing it for the sake of Heaven. From here we learn that it is all up to the beth din’s discernment (de-hakkol lefee re’ot ‘ene beth din)” (Beth Yosef, Yore De‘ah 268 near end).

[73] A devotion so touchingly epitomized at Edu. 1:3.

[74] For the Shammaite position on divorce see M. Git. 9:10.

[75] The precise makeup of the 18 remains hazy, and varies from list to list even within sources (i.e. Tosefta, Bavli, Yerushalmi). Common to all lists, however, is the disproportionate number of separatist measures. See “Les Dix-huites mesures” by Solomon Zeitlin, REJ 68 (1914) pp. 22-36; Kovets Shneur Zalman Zeitlin [Heb.] Bitzaron 25:3 NY 1964 esp. p.6.

[76] See Shab. 17a-b; Y. Shab. 1:4 [3c].

[77] See M. Ber. 1:3; Erub. 13b; Yeb. 14a et al.

[78] M. Ber. 1:3.

[79] M. Bez. 2:6.

[80] E.g. Jacob Katz’s Masoret u-Mashber [Heb.] 1958; Tradition and Crisis 1993 and elsewhere in his oeuvre; Emanuel Etkes’s introduction to Ha-hadash Asur min Ha-torah by Moshe Samet (Heb.) Jerusalem 2005.

[81] Manifestos rather than halakhic directives - which they do not purport to be (whatever influence they may arguably have exerted on certain halakhic decisors).

[82] Vol. 1, Ungvar 1864. “Lev ha-‘Ivri. .. which appeared in two parts in 1864 and 1868, became an instant bestseller, quickly running through five editions. And it achieved considerable fame not only in Hungary but throughout central and eastern Europe. A few years later the Russian maskil Eliezer Sevi Zweifel could write from far-off Zhitomir, ‘I have never seen any book published in our time which has been greeted by the Jewish public with such great honor and tremendous jubilation as the book Lev ha-‘Ivri’.” Michael K. Silber “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, Jack Wertheimer ed. NY 1999 p.38.

[83] In this our author contradicts the Talmud’s asseveration that Noahaism has no future in the Messianic age when ‘all will worship Him in one accord’ (A.Z. 24a, Rashi s.v. shekhem ehad).

[84] Lev ha-Ivri, from Kithbe R. Akiva Yosef Schlesinger, Jerusalem 1989 vol. 2 pp. 291-292.

[85] And accordingly his leniency cannot serve as precedent for those not divinely briefed. So what does our author propose in the absence of supernal input? Presumably, the uninitiated must willy nilly convert all lest genuine applicants be lost. For surely it is preferable to take on board a rotten apple, nay a hundred rotten apples, than risk shutting out a single righteous soul. Or is it?

[86] The noun ma‘aseh denotes ‘an event’, ‘a tale’ or ‘a precedent’. The Talmud ubiquitously invokes tales from the lives of its heroes for establishing halakhic precedent. R. Schlesinger seems to be suggesting that such use of precedent is proscribed at B. B. 130b.

[87] Le-ayyem which is Schlesinger’s term, not his source’s.

[88] One that would presumably have to neutralize Rambam’s ruling: “A ger who was not checked out or not apprised of the misvot and their penalties, but underwent circumcision and/or immersion in the presence of three lay judges, such a person is a ger”.

[89] When we open our gemara at Bekh. 30b we search in vain for Schlesinger’s quote. Instead we find “A non-Jew that comes to receive words of Torah except for one thing he shall not be accepted. R. Yose son of R. Yehudah says even a single nicety of the Scribes’ Words”. This reading is corroborated by numerous witnesses. However, Rashi’s gemara may have approximated Mekhilta of R. Shim‘on b. Yohai “A ger who takes upon himself” etc. (see Mekh. of RaSBY to Ex 12:49; Rashi Suk. 28a s.v. diqduqe sofreem; but cf. Rashi Shab. 31a “A ger who comes to convert”; also next note). T. Demai 2:5 in standard printed editions has: “A ger that takes upon himself all the words of the Torah except for one thing he shall not be accepted. R. Yose son of R. Yehudah says even a small detail of the Scribes’ niceties” (for T. variants see Lieberman’s Tosephta Ki-fshuta Zera‘im Jerusalem 1992, vol. 1 p. 212). Common to all variants, then, is the attribution of the view - that rejection of diqduqe sofreem impedes giyyoor - to a solitary tanna, namely R. Yose son of R. Yehudah. Schlesinger allows for the impression that R. Yose’s stringency belongs to the stam (= the anonymous plurality).

[90] Thus according to Rashi, (who reads: “A ger who comes to convert” at Bekh. 30b) it was Shammai’s blind obedience to a literal understanding of that baraitha that locked him into his all-or-nothing position. On the other hand, those who read “A non-Jew that comes to receive words of Torah” would not necessarily connect the Bekh. 30b passage with gerooth. As noted above (f. n. 1), the stereotypical formula for referring to the seeker after conversion is ‘a ger who comes’ not a ‘non-Jew’. Hence, unless one has Rashi’s variant, one is going to be extremely circumspect about applying a ‘non-Jew’ or ‘gentile’ text to a ger. Commentators have suggested that this may be why Rambam codifies the all-or-nothing dictum of Bekh. 30b only in respect of ger toshav (Issure Bi’ah 14:8) but not in respect of a ger sedeq. Tur and Shulhan Arukh, that omit ger toshav laws, also omit all reference to Bekh. 30b. Incidentally, it is quite curious that a self-declared devotee of Shulhan Arukh such as our author should brandish a text Shulhan Arukh evidently considered extraneous to gerooth.

[91] If not for Rashi, one might have surmized that Hillel disagreed with the ger proviso of Bekh. 30b or considered it analogous to its companion provisos that deal with the priest, haber etc. Haberuth - whose central praxis was treating quotidian meals as if they were consecrated - owed nothing to Torah, written or oral. Of non-sacrificial meals Sifre has this to say: “‘The clean [person] shall eat it together with the unclean’ [Dt 12:22] Scripture is telling you that both eat of the same dish.” As for priests being catechized, this too has no support elsewhere. The oath that was administered to the high priest on the eve of Kippoor (M. Yom. 1:5) assured conformity to right practice. However, as far as commitment was concerned, the Sadducean priests, even while desisting from acting upon their errors, persisted in them as the gemara apprises us (Yom. 19b). Moreover, even priests that had worshipped at idolatrous shrines, once they repented of their apostacy were not denied their sacred emoluments (M. Men. 13:10). In short, it is far from self-evident that the Bekh. 30b baraitha represents the concensus.

[92] Or: ‘Shammai the stickler’.

[93] Or: ‘Hillel the meek’.

[94] Another version has one of Shammai’s rejects confiding to Hillel after the latter had converted him: ‘If you Hillel were like Shammai I would never have entered the congregation of Israel’ (Aboth de R. Nathan A, 15).

This striking finding, which was championed by the Christian right, fascinated the writers of this article. We were well aware of the religious literature promoting taharat haMishpahah as a way of renewing sexual interest.[v] Our basic question became: “How do women who are faithful to the tradition of taharat haMishpahah experience intimate marital life?” On the one hand, we speculated that based on the Laumann et al. study’s findings, married observant Jewish women might be even more sexually satisfied than married women in the general population. On the other hand, our extensive clinical experience made us keenly aware of sexual difficulty in many observant marriages. We considered the possibility that the lack of available information and discussion about sexuality in the observant Jewish community might contribute to reduced marital sexual satisfaction than in the Laumann et al. married sample. As scientists and clinicians we were well aware of the limitations of anecdotal vignettes and of impressions from our personal experiences. Thus, we set out to investigate the sexual experience of observant Jewish women from a sophisticated, methodologically rigorous research perspective.

 Our team constructed a survey, similar to that used by Laumann et al., that included questions specific to observant Jewish practice. These items would allow us to determine whether, and to what extent, education about and adherence to the laws of taharat haMishpahah are associated with sexual satisfaction for women. Using many of the same questions as Laumann et al. allowed us to compare aspects of sexual behavior and dysfunction in observant women with that of the general population.  Although Laumann et al. looked at the experiences of both men and women, we focused our efforts on observant women only. Certainly a comparable study of men would add a great deal to the understanding of observant marriages.

Because our objective in this article is to highlight certain issues for the observant community, we will not give a comprehensive presentation of all of our findings. Rather, we focus on areas that might be particularly relevant to the general community, rabbis, mental health professionals, medical personnel, and educators. This last group, educators, includes school teachers of all levels as well as those serving in the unique institution of hattan and kallah teachers, that is, men and women who instruct soon-to-be grooms and brides in the laws of taharat haMishpahah. An emerging new group of religious advisors/educators is that of the yoatsot halakha, women who are highly learned in taharat haMishpahah as well as well versed in gynecology and marital dynamics. All of these religious, medical, and lay people have potential involvement in the intimate lives of observant Jewish couples. Increased knowledge and sensitivity on the part of rabbis, health workers, and educators is likely to enhance intimacy and strengthen attitudes toward observance, thereby improving marriages in the observant community.

III. STUDY DESIGN

            The study by Laumann et al. obtained data based on face-to-face interviews. Since observant women generally value modesty and privacy, our project was designed as a written questionnaire that was completed anonymously and mailed back to us. We tried to replicate as closely as possible the Laumann et al. scales of marital satisfaction, emotional and sexual happiness, and sexual function and dysfunction for both women and their husbands. Many of the questions asked for the same information—basic demographics, physical and mental health, sexual education, sexual history, and current sexual practices. Women were included in our study if they were currently married, pre-menopausal, and regularly used the mikvah as prescribed by religious law.

            Mindful that the regular observance of mikvah might span across the denominational spectrum of observant religious life, we asked women to rate their religious affiliation and gave them choices of “Modern Orthodox,” “Yeshiva/Agudah,” or “Hassidic.” The latter two categories describe a level of Orthodoxy that is sometimes referred to as “ultra-Orthodox.” This subdivision reflects a debate within the Orthodox Jewish community. Unlike Modern Orthodox Jews, who actively participate in the general culture, Hareidi Jews, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, embrace a theologically conservative outlook that advocates substantial separation from secular culture. (Hareidi literally means “one who trembles before God.”)[vi] We also gave women choices to denote their religious/cultural affiliation as “Sephardic” or “Ashkenazic.”

No assumptions were made about women’s sexual past or present lives. We asked detailed questions about early sexual life, including auto-eroticism and premarital activity. Knowing about the impact of sexual abuse on later sexual life,[vii] we included questions regarding history of molestation as well as current sexual abuse.  At the same time, we added new questions that addressed the unique experience of women who observe taharat haMishpahah. These questions related to respondents’ subjective perceptions about going to the mikvah and adhering to laws of family purity. We also inquired about pre- or post-marital sexual education, such as whether they attended a kallah class and if so, whether useful information about sexual relations was provided. Women were asked how they dealt with questions they may have had concerning the permissibility of specific sexual activities, and to whom they turned when sexual problems arose in their marriages.

Certain questions were deliberately omitted so as to not offend potential study participants. These referred to same-sex activity, abortion, infidelity, and substance abuse. In retrospect, this stance may have been too conservative, as some women did respond on the open-ended questions that they had struggled with these issues.

            Participation in our study was voluntary. Women received no financial or other material reward. Our goal was to sample a cross-section of observant women based on religious affiliation and socio-demographic information. As the chief entry criterion was regular use of the mikvah, the most obvious, impartial venue for data collection would have been mikvaot. Although several rabbis overseeing individual mikvaot were consulted prior to the implementation of the study, none granted explicit permission to distribute questionnaires at any community mikvah. Instead we recruited women via other sampling methods, such as relying on medical professionals whose practices included large numbers of observant Jewish women (e.g., obstetrician/gynecologists, nurses, midwives, and pediatricians) to distribute the surveys. We also spoke at broad-based Jewish women’s organizations where we asked audiences to fill out the survey. In addition, we posted the questionnaire, which had only an English version, on the Internet and directed it to large listservs of observant communities in Israel. To determine the representative nature of the sample, demographic results from respondents of our study were compared to those obtained in the 2000 census sponsored by the United Jewish Communities.[viii]

IV. OUR FINDINGS

1. Demographics

We analyzed 380 returned questionnaires. Our average respondent was 36 years old. More than three-quarters of our respondents were born in the United States, and nearly half were daughters of two American-born parents. Almost two thirds of women and their husbands were brought up in an observant home. The remaining third were ba‘alot teshuva, meaning that they grew up in non-observant homes and chose to become observant on their own, usually around age 20 or 21. Among women who were ba’alot teshuva, only 6 percent of them had become observant after marriage. With respect to affiliation, 55 percent of women identified themselves as Modern Orthodox, 35 percent as Yeshiva/Agudah and 10 percent as Hassidic. Women who responded to the survey were typically well educated; many had graduate-level degrees. Most women held jobs outside the home and had not been married before. Our typical respondent had married at age 23 and had four children.

B.        Sexual Education/History

Respondents reported receiving sexual education from a variety of sources. Most commonly, they learned about sex from friends, written material, and media (movies and television) followed by family members, kallah classes or high school classes, and experimentation. Less than 10 percent cited health professionals as being a source of sex education. It should be mentioned that although Jewish women turned to printed materials for information about sex, the material they read was written by secular or non-Jewish writers and purchased at mass-market bookstores. Until recently, there have been very few works available that specifically discuss sexual matters for observant Jewish consumers.[ix] Only one book dealing with sexuality from the Jewish perspective provides explicit information as to the basics of sexual anatomy or physiology.[x] Bookstores catering to religious clientele do not typically carry such books for fear of violating propriety and alienating their customer base. How do women obtain these materials? Our respondents indicated that they had to make special requests for these books or go to a mass-market bookstore in a different community. One woman wrote of her reaction to the book most commonly cited by respondents to our survey, John Gray’s Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, “Why did I have to learn about sex from an ex-priest?”

Before they were married, two-thirds of participants knew the details involved in sexual intercourse, and a similar number had discussed sexual feelings with their husband. Less than a quarter of respondents reported no physical or sexual contact prior to marrying their current spouse. They did not hold hands, hug, kiss, pet, or engage in any more intimate sexual behavior. This also means that despite the emphasis on premarital chastity, over 75 percent of women who participated in our survey had some degree of intimate contact with their current spouse. There were differences with respect to premarital sexual behavior between those raised religious and those who became observant before marriage. Nearly one-third of women raised observant reported abstaining from any premarital physical contact with their husbands compared with 7 percent of women who became observant on their own. This suggests that while almost all women who become observant do so before marriage, they are more likely to have been involved in physical and sexual relationships with men before marriage than women raised observant. We did not ask women to indicate whether their premarital relationships were with their husbands or other partners.

 Almost all respondents studied laws of niddah with an outside (kallah) teacher before marriage. However, most women did not feel the kallah classes were helpful in preparing them for married sexual life and their wedding night in particular. The prevailing emphasis of kallah classes seemed to be ensuring that women not commit halakhic errors. Few teachers apparently covered other topics such as the permissibility of various sexual acts, and more importantly, how to prepare to engage in sexual acts that culminate in intercourse. Although half of the kallah teachers indicated their availability for follow-up discussion after the wedding, they were rarely consulted.

A handful of women praised their kallah teacher for providing instruction beyond halakhic issues. For example, one woman wrote

 My kallah teacher covered halakhot (legal rulings), sex positions, and shalom bayit (family harmony). Everything was explained clearly until I felt very comfortable. Barukh HaShem (Thank God), I have a beautiful marriage. I strongly believe that a kallah teacher has a big responsibility to convey physical and emotional matters in a clear and concise manner.

 Women who felt well prepared by their kallah class wrote statements such as, “I knew as much as I could, the rest had to be from experience.”

However, more than a third of respondents were disappointed on their wedding night and only 15 percent stated that their wedding night was better than expected. Almost half of the respondants, stated that they could have been better prepared for married sexual life. Despite the fact that almost 90 percent of the women in our sample studied with a kallah teacher prior to marriage, only 50 percent of them learned about sexual matters from this source. In light of this discrepancy, it was not surprising that many women wrote in suggestions of topics they wished had been discussed with their kallah teachers prior to marriage.

            We present excerpts from the suggestions made by women that they felt would improve preparation for sexual life in marriage. In general, there were three types of responses to our open-ended question: “What should your kallah teacher have covered?” The most common response was about basic sexual education. Women wished they had learned more about “women’s body parts, women’s sensitivities, orgasm, different positions,” “what a man’s body looks like, what to expect” and “how to actually consummate the marriage.” Many women voiced shock at their first sexual intercourse. They wished they had known practical information, such as how awkward the position of sex would feel, how to be satisfied or achieve climax, that sex might be painful the first time, that it would be messy, and so forth. The awkwardness of sudden transition from celibate single life to fully sexual marital experience was echoed by many respondents who wrote in that it was hard to “turn off” their notions of being a “good girl.” As one woman, herself a kallah teacher, wrote, “The difficulty we have in communicating needs verbally I feel is a result of the ’modesty‘ and inhibitions we were shown as examples.” Another woman elaborated extensively on this point:

Orthodox attitudes that affected me negatively are not inherently negative— but they have potential to cause problems depending on the person. I think part of the problem is that a lot of the Orthodox community feels like the laws of taharat haMishpahah and the restrictions on premarital sex or touching are a foolproof system that makes sex more wonderful for everyone. The extreme privacy within the Orthodox community, while promoted as modest, beautiful, and virtuous, also causes/supports feelings of shame regarding sex. The laws of tseni’ut (modesty) on a more subconscious level, supports (not necessarily causes) shameful feelings about one’s body. The constant praise of how wonderful and holy sex is because it’s saved for after marriage and only at certain times of the month sets up unrealistic expectations and avoids entirely the physical aspect of sex. Again… tseni’ut and negiah (no touching before marriage) are promoted as being beneficial for women because otherwise men would only look at you sexually. This view makes men out to be uncontrollable purely sexual beings to whom women are powerless. Then you get married and you are supposed to trust that your husband wants to have sex with you because he truly loves you. It’s hard to change that pattern of thought. For 20 years one is told to do things so men don’t look at you sexually, and then poof! One day you’re supposed to feel totally comfortable letting go completely and you’re suddenly supposed to be a sexual being[YR1]  too[MF2] !

I’m not sure these things are unique to religious Judaism —probably other religions as well. And the attitudes might be more reflection of Orthodox society and not the Torah.

Many women also wished the kallah teacher would have educated them more on the relationship between sex and Jewish life. They suggested the following topics be covered: “The place of sex and pleasure in Torah life;” “sex and emotion…shalom bayit (family harmony) topics;” “[Jewish views on] a woman’s right to pleasure;” “that sex is not only permissible, but essential to your and your husband’s happiness to have a full, exciting sexual life.” Some commented on the impact of religious upbringing on sexual lives, and suggested these topics were important to discuss in the context of premarital education: “Growing up religious, you are taught to feel that girls should not be forward… it’s OK to be more forward and guide my husband to please me. Giving me an orgasm is not a ‘favor’ to me, rather it is my right as a married woman.”

Our respondents raised many issues that had caused them concern and discomfort: “What if you and your husband are too embarrassed to ask the rabbi a question?” “What if your sex life isn’t a beautiful thing? What if it doesn’t enhance your marriage?” Others indicated “I didn’t realize it was so common for a couple to be unable to consummate the marriage right away;” and some wished they had learned “What should you do if sex does not work like the ’textbook‘ case?” Others wondered, “What constitutes abusive behavior and what is not ‘normal’ behavior?” To summarize, in the concise statement of one woman, “I wish someone told me point blank everything instead of assuming I knew it.”

C.        Attitudes about Mikvah

Two-thirds of our respondents indicated that the experience of ritual immersion in a mikvah was religiously enhancing. These women were asked to elaborate on how this experience was enhancing. The following quotations are illustrative. One woman wrote, “I love going. I always pray in the mikvah and feel very pure after. Spiritually, I feel renewed, closer to God and to my husband.” Another commented, “I feel a rebirth. The mikvah is especially helpful to lift me out of depression I feel about my infertility. It always fills me with hope.” Another respondent stated “I feel that going to the mikvah introduced holiness into our marriage… also, it is simply the halakha that has been done by Jewish women for generations.”  Related to this, one woman wrote: “I feel mystically connected to something very primitive and deep.” Comments such as: “The mikvah experience makes sex spiritual and not animal-like” were made by several respondents.

Almost a quarter of respondents indicated that going to the mikvah could be an unpleasant experience. These women described finding the preparation and process of going tedious and annoying. Concerns about modesty dictate that women keep timing of mikvah use private and that visits to the ritual bath be made only after nightfall. Some of our respondents reported disliking having to make excuses to their children for their absence from the home. Some  felt critical of mikvah facilities and personnel. The majority of negative comments relating to the mikvah's physical facilities came from women living in Israel. The following quotations are a sample of negative feelings: “I don’t feel comfortable naked in front of anyone;” “I don’t like all the superstitions that are attached to mikvah;” “I try not to think about how unhygienic the water is after who knows how many women have been in before me.” More extreme responses are exemplified by the following respondents who wrote, “I hate it,” “(I) Find it degrading,” “I hate being examined like a cow,” “Mikvah is such a turn-off that I come back irritated, annoyed, angry and am mean to my husband, subconsciously, of course,” and finally, “I feel it is almost abusive.”

            With respect to whether sexual or emotional life is enhanced by the observance of taharat haMishpahah, we noted that more than three-quarters of our sample believed that their sexual life is improved by following these laws. The following quotations represent women’s experiences. “When you know you only have two weeks each month, you tend to make more of an effort;” and “I really feel that sex would have become too routine and boring without the rest period that the mikvah provides.” Also representative was the following remark: “It certainly helps. Even though our sexual relations are less than satisfying on the whole, having a break because of niddah does help the sexual relations become a little bit more satisfying; it’s ‘fresher.’”

            One of the interesting observations was the contrast between the high percentage of women who believed taharat haMishpahah enhanced their sex lives with the much smaller segment who felt that their emotional life with their husband was enhanced by taharat haMishpahah.  In fact some women who claim sexual benefits of believed that the niddah period impacted negatively on their emotional lives. One woman stated:

I believe that following the laws of niddah and the mikvah does enhance my sexual life. While I love my husband, after some time sex does get boring. The laws of niddah force a break and renewal. Right after going to the mikvah any physical contact is exciting and invigorating. My problem with the whole process is how my husband and I interact during the time of niddah. It seems like we take a complete emotional break from each other, as well as a physical break. I can’t understand why my husband can’t show me his emotions and feelings about me without sex.

This sentiment was expressed repeatedly: “My husband feels he has to become numb and he withdraws from me;” “My husband and I both have a huge problem with the suddenness of the switch between ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ and the accompanying feeling on the mikvah night that we ‘have to’ because the clock has started ticking again. The pressure kind of kills the desire and it ends up feeling very non-spontaneous;” “We fight more when I am in niddah. I feel rejected by not passing objects. It is rude—like I am untouchable. Even though I understand the reason, I still feel rejected.” “I am a very touchy, feely person and suffer terribly not being able to snuggle with my husband. Being a nursing mother now, I do miss the initial excitement of coming home from mikvah, but I would not give up my status of taharah (non-niddah) for that.” “We learned how to have sex properly when I was pregnant [and therefore had nine months of non-niddah time together]. We never found there was enough time to learn and experiment in between niddah sessions.”

            A representative quotation from the much smaller sample of women who wrote that niddah did enhance their emotional life is illustrative: “Sometimes, for example, if a crisis situation arises during niddah, you’re able to resolve it without touching; it brings you emotionally closer.”

Survey questions were designed to assess the number of women who report feeling relief upon becoming a niddah, as well as how many postpone immersion.  Almost two-thirds of our respondents reported that they sometimes felt relief at being in niddah (about a third of these respondents reported feeling relieved nearly every month).  More than a quarter of our respondents reported postponing going to the mikvah, almost all for emotional reasons. Only a tiny fraction reported postponing mikvah as a form of birth control (trying to miss ovulation).

D.        Asking for Rabbinical Counsel

 Traditional Jewish practice encourages people to seek rabbinic advice when faced with challenging questions. As all aspects of life, from the mundane to the lofty, are imbued with religious significance, observant Jews regularly pose questions to rabbis. Queries concerning  pillars of observant life, kashruth, Shabbat, and taharat haMishpahah are routine. Our data, however, revealed a significant skew regarding questions posed to rabbinic counsel—namely, that women in our study were less likely to inquire about matters relating to sexuality.  This is illustrated by the fact that over 90 percent of women indicated that they have asked a rabbi questions about kashruth or about laws pertaining to the Sabbath. Only 76 percent, however, have asked about an aspect of niddah, and most of these questions were directed to technical concerns about menstrual staining. Just over one-third of women had ever asked a question pertaining to permissibility of a particular sexual practice. Mindful that our respondents are highly adherent to the laws of family purity, we assumed that they would naturally have questions about the religious permissibility of various sexual activities in marriage. We knew from their comments about their kallah (bridal preparation) classes that frank issues such as sexual desires and practices were rarely discussed by those teachers. We wondered, therefore, how couples align their sexual desires and their religious sensibilities.

Fully half of all women answering our survey have wondered whether performing certain sexual acts, during the course of their observant, married life, might constitute a violation of Jewish law. Oral sex was the activity of most concern followed by the use of fantasy during relations. Of this 50 percent who acknowledged halakhic concerns, only a small portion (12 percent) asked a rabbi for guidance. Of the remaining 88 percent who did not seek religious consultation, almost half refrained from the religiously questionable sex, while the rest enacted their desire without permission.

A related area is the use of contraception. Observant Jews take the biblical commandment “be fruitful and multiply” seriously and generally give birth to and raise families larger than those of their secular peers. We wondered how observant women access family planning. Our findings revealed that although nearly 90 percent of our sample reported using birth control at some time in their marriage, only half of these women consulted a rabbi about that decision. Once again, our data suggest that many religiously committed Jews do not bring questions about their sexual or reproductive lives to the scrutiny of their rabbis with the same frequency that they bring questions about equally serious but less bodily intimate matters.

Respondents to our survey were strictly compliant with the laws of family purity. Ba‘alot teshuva (women who became observant on their own) were as rigorous in their observance as women raised observant. Women from both backgrounds who were virgins at marriage were more likely to ask a rabbi questions about niddah laws, about sexual life not directly related to laws of niddah, and were also less likely to postpone going to mikvah. This was true regardless of religious affiliation.

E.         Physical and Emotional Health

Although the vast majority of participants in our survey described their health as good, almost half reported that their physical health interfered with sex at least some of the time. Treatment for medical conditions affecting sexual function, such as chronic pelvic pain, endometriosis, and venereal disease were extremely rare, although vaginitis was reported by a quarter of respondents.

Almost a third of respondents reported that infertility had been an issue in their marriages. A quarter reported they had trouble conceiving, but they also reported that they eventually had children. Only 4 percent of the women indicated that they had no children as a result of problems conceiving.

Emotional health seems to have more impact on sexual dysfunction than physical health. The vast majority of respondents indicated experiencing interference with sex due to emotional issues. When asked about whether they had ever been treated by a mental health professional, about half of the sample reported having been in some kind of psychotherapy. The problems they brought to these treatments included marital problems, depression, and anxiety. We were intrigued by the high utilization of mental health services by our respondents. Some critics of this study allege that the large number of women accessing mental health treatment indicates a sample bias toward more distressed women. An alternative interpretation would be that women who allow themselves professional mental health services are more comfortable with themselves and thus willing to participate in a study about intimate life experience.

F.         Sexual Abuse

More complete analyses of our data are also presented elsewhere,[xi] but for the purpose of this discussion it is essential to point out that this is the first anonymous survey of married observant Jewish women in which direct and detailed questions were asked about sexual abuse and where objective data was collected. One quarter of our sample answered “yes” to the question: “When you were a child or teenager, did anyone ever touch you sexually in a way that made you uncomfortable (molest you)?” These figures are comparable to those reported by Laumann et al. in their survey of married American women and are consistent with estimates of sexual abuse in the general population.

Two divergent points, which we discuss in greater depth in the above referenced paper, deserve mention here. On the one hand, women who became observant reported significantly more childhood sexual abuse than those raised religious. On the other hand, more ultra-Orthodox Jewish women reported abuse than their Modern Orthodox peers.[xii] We conjecture that women who experience sexual abuse in their younger years may be motivated to seek out a more structured and sexually restricted adult life. As has been established in previous studies, history of sexual abuse is associated with higher rates of mental health treatment in adult life.

Regarding current abuse, domestic violence was reported by 5 percent of our respondents. Two-and-a-half percent alleged that they had been raped by their husbands.

G.        Sexual Life

            Women were asked to respond to the same set of questions about sexual frequency and satisfaction as appeared in the study of sexual practices in the United States published by Laumann et al. The pattern of sexual frequency among the sample was different from that of monogamous, married women in the Laumann et al. study. In that study, half of the women reported having intercourse one to two times per week, as compared to 40 percent of our sample. Thirty-five percent of the married observant women in our study reported sexual intercourse three to six times per week as compared to half that number (17 percent) of the Laumann married women. We surmise that this is due to observant couples concentrating their physical intimacy into the two weeks available when a woman would not be in niddah. At the same time, a greater number of women reported sexual intercourse once a month or less.

            Observant women in our study had significantly different experiences with respect to orgasm as compared to the Laumann et al. married, monogamous sample. High frequency of orgasm was much lower in our sample, and reports of never experiencing an orgasm during sex were higher (9 percent as compared to 1 percent). Regarding auto-eroticism almost two-thirds of participants in our study reported doing so at frequencies ranging from several times per week to every few months during the past year.

Like Laumann et al., we inquired about various components regarding satisfaction with marital sex. When participants in our survey rated their physical satisfaction, 75 percent of them rated feeling very satisfied. When asked about emotional satisfaction from sex, generally understood as sense of closeness with their husband, 70 percent rated feeling very satisfied. One question on the survey asked how sex made women feel. Feeling loved and wanted ranked highest, followed by feeling excited, doing wifely duty, and being taken care of. Fewer women endorsed feeling more “negative” feelings such as anxiety, sadness, fear, and guilt.

Communication about sex proved to be an important feature in satisfying marital relations. Women with more satisfying sexual lives described better communication and vice versa. Of women who enjoyed orgasm, over three-quarters said that their husband knew how to bring them to satisfaction and that they could tell their husband what gives them pleasure. On the other side of the communication spectrum, women who have problems with sexual life also have difficulty talking directly to their husbands about this.

H.        Sexual Problems

            We asked respondents to our study to rate their experience with six specific areas of sexual dysfunction identified by Laumann et al.: 1) frequent lack of interest in sex, 2) lack of ability to climax, 3) pain during intercourse, 4) not finding sex pleasurable, 5) anxiety about their performance and 6) trouble lubricating during sex. One-third of women in our study indicated experiencing the first difficulty (frequent lack of interest in sex) followed by smaller numbers with the other five categories. Nearly half of our sample cited such difficulties as causing them to avoid sex altogether. It should be noted that the rates of sexual difficulties in our sample were significantly greater than that reported by Laumann et al.

            We also queried women about sexual difficulties experienced by their husbands. According to their wives, a third of husbands experienced premature ejaculation, over 25 percent had difficulty maintaining an erection, and a similar percentage lacked interest in sex. Fewer women reported husbands being anxious about their performance, having difficulty with climax, and not finding sex pleasurable. Some of husbands avoided sex because of these problems.

             Couples experiencing sexual dysfunction had trouble talking about this. Despite the rather high frequency of both male and female dysfunction, as mentioned earlier, few women had talked to their husbands about sexual problems. Additionally, few women sought outside guidance in relation to their sexual problems. Less than 10 percent of the women had asked a rabbi or observant teacher for information, and less than 4 percent asked a kallah teacher for help.

IV.       ASSOCIATIONS AND PREDICTORS

We used sophisticated statistical procedures to analyze the enormous data gleaned from the questionnaires. One goal of this study was to understand more fully the variety of factors that are associated with sexual practice, sexual satisfaction, sexual dysfunction, and the relationship between these variables and religious observances. We will not present here all the associations we discovered but only those that strike us as particularly significant or surprising. We remind our readers that associations do not necessarily imply causation.

A.        Background Information

            Physical satisfaction was found to be associated with higher income, the husband providing the financial support, and more modern religious affiliation. In other words, lower-income women and women who affiliated as either Agudah or Hassidic reported significantly less physical satisfaction than did Modern Orthodox women in dual-income families.

Emotional satisfaction was associated with similar demographic variables, and also with age group. Sex was more frequent in younger respondents, and also in respondents who were younger when they got married. Younger women reported higher emotional satisfaction compared to older women. Women who provided sole financial support were less satisfied than women who had other support. Emotional satisfaction was lowest for Hassidic women. Older age and not completing college were associated with painful sex and avoidance of sex. Women who were raised observant were twice as likely to have difficulty achieving climax than women who reported themselves as ba’alot teshuva; however they were less likely to report painful sex and less likely to avoid sex.

B.        Mikvah and Niddah

            Greater physical satisfaction was significantly more likely in women who demonstrated less conflict about niddah and mikvah. These women never postponed mikvah and also did not report feeling relieved when they became a niddah. A different pattern was observed with respect to the influence of postponing mikvah and emotional satisfaction. Women who never postponed the mikvah for any reason showed significantly lower emotional satisfaction than women who did. But women who were often relieved to be a niddah were also less emotionally satisfied. This was also true for those who did not feel that niddah enhanced their sex lives as well as for women who felt that they could have been better prepared for marital life. Interestingly, adherence to niddah was associated with better emotional (but not physical) satisfaction.

C.        Sexual Education and History

            In general, physical and emotional satisfaction and frequency of sex were not related to sexual education and history. Women who were virgins at marriage reported greater frequency of orgasms and less difficulty achieving orgasm during marital sex as compared to those women who were not virgins when they married. Conversely, women who had experimented with sex short of intercourse premaritally (i.e., they were technically virgins) reported greater physical satisfaction, greater frequency of orgasm, and less difficulty achieving orgasm than virgins who had minimal (holding hands) or no sexual experience at the time they married.

D.        Husbands’ Sexual Dysfunction

            Although physical satisfaction and frequency of orgasm were not significantly related to husbands’ sexual dysfunction, frequency of sex was. Difficulties such as lack of interest, premature ejaculation, performance anxiety, erectile dysfunction, and avoiding sex were associated with less frequent sex. Husbands’ problems achieving orgasm were associated with less emotional satisfaction in the relationship. Furthermore, husbands’ sexual dysfunction correlated with reports of sexual dysfunction by the wife. Greater lack of interest and lack of pleasure as well as anxiety about and avoidance of sex were more often reported by women when similar sexual difficulties were reported for the husband.

E.         Communication Patterns

            Communication patterns about how sex was initiated were significantly related to physical and emotional satisfaction as well as to sexual frequency. A significant predictor of good sex was whether both husband and wife expressed interest in initiating relations. A woman’s participation in initiation of sex, independently or mutually, was associated with greater physical and emotional satisfaction, regardless of how she communicated her interest, such as by physical gesture or in words. Sexual difficulty, particularly lack of interest and lack of pleasure, was associated with less involvement in initiation of sex by the wife and more frequent initiation by the husband. Avoiding sex because of sexual problems was similarly related to initiation patterns.

F.         Sexual Abuse and Mental Health

            Women who reported a history of sexual abuse, regardless of when the abuse took place, were less emotionally satisfied. Type of abuse or perpetrator was not significantly related to any of the other variables we examined related to sexual satisfaction. Sexual abuse history was related to current sexual difficulties. Women who reported a history of sexual abuse were more likely to report no interest or pleasure in sex, anxiety about sex, and consequent avoidance of sex. When the perpetrator was a relative, women reported less interest in sex.

            Mental health was significantly related to physical and emotional satisfaction as well as frequency of sex. Women with a history of depression, but not anxiety, reported lower physical and emotional satisfaction as well as less interest in and lower frequency of sex.

G.        Religious Background

            We were also interested in examining the impact of religious background (i.e., being raised observant vs. being a ba’alat teshuva) on predictors of characteristics of sexual satisfaction. These analyses revealed significant differences between women who were raised in observant homes and those who became observant later in life.  For those women who were raised observant, lower physical satisfaction was associated with feelings they could have been better prepared for sex before marriage, frequently postponing going to mikvah, low emotional satisfaction, not learning about sex by experimentation, not feeling that niddah enhanced emotional life. None of these relationships was observed in women who became observant later in life. It is worthwhile to note that despite having significantly more past sexual abuse than their peers who were raised observant, ba’alot teshuva experienced greater overall sexual satisfaction in marriage.

V.        DISCUSSION

            The research goal of this pioneer study was to better understand how married Jewish women who adhere to taharat haMishpahah experience sexual life. Our project included designing a suitable questionnaire, distributing that questionnaire as broadly as possible, and then analyzing the data obtained. We intended our findings to be helpful for the observant lay community as well as the broad spectrum of rabbinic, educational, and health professionals who serve religious communities. Our findings demonstrate something we intuitively know, that sexual and emotional intimacy are complex and nuanced experiences. We hope that subsequent research carries our beginning explorations further.

      As our questionnaire was modeled on the Laumann et al. study, we report the overall comparison that women who participated in our study reported significantly less physical and emotional satisfaction as compared to married  women from the Laumann et al. study. Our respondents also reported greater sexual dysfunction on many of the comparable variables. We speculate that lack of education about sexuality in the observant community might account for these findings. Discussion about sex rarely occurs in homes and schools and is absent even in many kallah classes. Lack of communication skills between husbands and wives regarding sexual life is also a likely contributor to physical and emotional dissatisfaction among observant women.

A number of factors contribute to the reticence regarding sex in observant Jewish culture. Traditional religious communities are reluctant to openly discuss or develop educational curricula for schools regarding sexuality. Reverence for modesty as a value, coupled with dismay regarding the hypersexualized aspects of contemporary secular society, leads to caution. Although there are several limitations of the current study, including the representativeness of the sample, the findings underscore the importance of education about sex within the context of marital relationships. This might occur in the context of standardization of the curriculum of teachers responsible for the preparation of brides and grooms in the area of taharat haMishpahah. Mikvah attendants are another group deserving in-service education. As the actual gatekeepers to immersion, women who work in the mikvah are in a privileged position to observe obvious distress and to direct women to appropriate resources.

One domain in which observant women and secular American women did not differ was in the prevalence of sexual abuse. It is imperative to not minimize the prevalence of such experiences within the observant community in light of their impact on both mental-health-related issues and married life.

Another important conclusion concerns the relatively few differences that could be attributed to adult religious affiliation. Though this may not be very evident in everyday observant life, the data suggest that Modern Orthodox, Yeshiva/Agudah and Hassidic women were far more similar to each other than not when it comes to sexual life. We conjecture that traditional attitudes expressed during girls’ formative years about modesty and gender role exert powerful influence across observant denominations.

We were impressed with the contrast in marital sexual life between women born religious and those who chose to become religious. As compared to their ba’alot teshuva peers, those raised observant experience more sexual distress. We noted a puzzling contradiction between the higher rates of sexual abuse among ba’alot teshuva and their greater sexual satisfaction once observant and married. We also noted that these women, once married, observe laws of family purity as strictly as their religious from birth peers. However, in their younger pre-religious years, ba’alot teshuva enaged in more premarital sexual experimentation. In addition, they were sexually expressive with their husbands even before marriage. We hypothesize that ba’alot teshuva import early, more positive attitudes toward sexuality into their adult marital lives. Greater awareness of sexual feelings and confidence may even offset such trauma as sexual abuse.

We respect that traditional Jewish life advocates premarital chastity and values modesty throughout all of life. We do not recommend that observant Jews advocate premarital sexual experimentation. Our work, however, highlights the need to encourage healthy sexual attitudes and communication skills in the observant Jewish community. This is a broad educational goal to be shared by parents and institutions such as schools and camps. Whatever their differences, lay and religious leaders across the denominations would serve their communities well by focusing on abuse awareness, prevention, and treatment, as well as positive attitudes toward human sexuality.

Finally, it may be important that observant Jewish women who have serious religious questions about sexual matters currently do not turn to religious personnel (rabbis or kallah teachers) for advice or counsel in this critical area of religious life. At the time of this writing, the advent of yoatsot halakha was too recent to have significantly impacted our respondents. Certainly this cadre of religious teachers/advisors  in taharat haMishpahah  are uniquely placed to serve observant women in the area of marital sexual life. Just as we advise implementing relationship and sexuality education in established school systems and establishing standards for those who prepare brides and grooms, rabbis would benefit from receiving training in sexual and emotional issues. Those who are in a position to counsel and educate couples both before and after marriage should carefully consider the significance of these observations.

We thank all those who shared their ideas on how to make Orthodox synagogues more meaningful. We've chosen SEVEN winners. Their suggestions can help our synagogues and communities be stronger, more creative, more engaging. The winning essays are from Pam Ehrenkranz (Stamford, Connecticut); Yael Kassorla (Atlanta, Georgia); Dr. Alan Krinsky (Providence, Rhode Island); Rabbi Arnold Samlan (West Hempstead, New York); Barbara Mendes (Los Angeles, California); Leonard Stein (Beer Sheva, Israel); and Hinda Bramnick (Boca Raton, Florida).

We hope that you discuss these suggestions among friends and congregants.

Let us work together for an intellectually vibrant, compassionate and inclusive Orthodox Judaism.

Enhancing the Role of Women

By

Pam Ehrenkranz (Stamford, Connecticut)

I keep asking Orthodox rabbis, “How would Shabbat morning services be any different if every woman in the community stayed home?” Interestingly, the responses are uniform: “We would feel bad, but in practice, nothing would change.”

Being told that your presence is irrelevant will ultimately have an effect. It did on me. I began to wonder: If I am not necessary, and I can pray alone, and many rabbis believe that I have no obligation to be at communal prayer, why go? Why get dressed, walk in the freezing cold or the unbearable heat, to a place, where, for all intents and purposes, my presence is superfluous?

To be clear, I am observant and respectful of traditional approaches to halacha. I am also respectful of innovative, as well as simple, ways to be more inclusive, to make women relevant, without crossing the boundaries of halacha. Some of those ways are already being implemented in minyanim around the world and the Modern Orthodox world needs to broaden the discussion about women and the synagogue.

Granted, many women are quite happy to be shul spectators;& o are many men. Yet everything an organization does speaks about its values, right down to how the phone is answered. As of now, we are not only signaling that women do not count in a minyan, but that they don’t count at all. So here are some thoughts about what we might institute as a way of saying that women are very much counted in the community; that their scholarship is admired; that their presence is critical. None of these concepts are new in the marketplace of ideas; they have been talked and written about in so many places that I cannot credit them to anyone in particular, only to a growing climate of opinion:

1. Don’t start davening until 10 men and at least 2 women are present. At partnership minyanim, it is often the case that the group waits for both ten men and ten women. For our purposes, it is not the critical mass that is at issue—it is the message that without women, we do not constitute a Kehillah.

2. Invite women scholars to deliver divreitorah from the bimah and to be scholars in residence. Thanks to places like Drisha, Nishmat, Matan, Pardes, and Yeshiva University’s graduate programs for women, we have a dynamic group of women who are inspirational, knowledgeable and worthy of our attention.

3. Have a woman read the prayer for the Agunah. The agunah issue needs to be on the minds of the congregation and this is an appropriate way to accomplish that.

4. Offer equal education for boys and girls. In places where the boys are learning separately, the girls’ curriculum should be the same. There is no danger in teaching girls to leyn. Hopefully, they will be able to join women’s tefillah groups if they want to, or help their children in the future, when they learn for their own bar and bat mitzvahs. To borrow a slogan, educated Jews are our best customers. They come back, they engage, they lead and they are the future.

5. Eliminate the language of "women's" and "men's" learning. It's adult learning and like wine and a good meal, it is better when it's shared.

6. Encourage women to fill leadership roles in the synagogue. As women are no longer illiterate, they can no longer be lumped into the category of slave or minor when it comes to education, status and ability. It is no longer reasonable to bar them from the boardroom. It would seem to reason that if a woman can make decisions as president of an Ivy League university, a judge, or a surgeon, she can handle the synagogue board meetings.

7. Invite new moms to recite BirkatHagomel in their own voices.

8. Welcome and promote women’s tefillah groups. Many have been meeting for over thirty years, some inside and some outside of synagogues. It not only promotes Jewish literacy, it helps find a way to include young girls and women actively in the service.

So to the rabbis who have the power to make changes in their shuls, I say, it is not enough to just feel bad about women staying home from shul. Take a step and welcome women in.

Using New Technologies for Teaching and Learning Torah

By

Yael Kassorla (Atlanta, Georgia)

There are two conflicting pressures for the religious Jew in today’s society: the need to deeply connect with Hashem, and the lack of time to do so.

Although most of the emphasis has been on getting people through the door for Minyanim and other synagogue-centric events, I think it is also important to connect with members through electronic means as well.

I know how important a religious Jewish discussion group was to me when I needed to more deeply understand the parasha or some issue of halacha; but unfortunately, those discussion groups are not usually synagogue affiliated. Instead, they are loose affiliations of every type of observance level and minhag, which can become both frustrating and confusing. We need to contain this enthusiasm for learning within our own Kehillah.

Our rabbis and lay-people need to stop using the internet as a podium, and start using it as a point of discussion, bringing the probing questions of the study-hall to everyone with access to a computer or smart phone.

Through the use of a moderated Facebook page, for example, or a Diigo<http://www.diigo.com>&nbsp; group (which affords the ability to not only bookmark websites, but highlight and comment upon them) synagogue-affiliated rabbis can conduct asynchronous discussion weekly with groups of synagogue members who find themselves unable to attend the usual lunch-and-learn or study sessions with the rabbi, but who hunger for intellectual stimulation and deeper understanding of Torah and Talmud.

Then, instead of technology working to alienate our membership, technology can, instead, cement them. Those who feel disconnected can reconnect and, when they do get back through those synagogue doors, they can feel like they haven’t really been away.

It’s time to stop ignoring the internet and start embracing it. Our rabbis must be educated in this new medium in order to reach, especially, our youth and young adults.

Synagogue Citizenship

by

Alan Krinsky (Providence, Rhode Island)

A common lament heard during the last decade or two draws attention to the commoditization of virtually all aspects of our lives. This process has infiltrated education and healthcare, despite the fact that knowledge and health are, in some regards, priceless values. And such consumerism has even reached religion.

Following the example of “Cafeteria Catholicism,” many people now view their religious lives from a consumer perspective: I purchase what meets my needs and discard the rest. This trend has even impacted Modern Orthodox synagogues, where commitment to minyan and behavior in synagogue can be lax.

We require a different model—not consumerism, but rather something akin to citizenship. We ought to reconceptualize our very notion of synagogue membership. Members should not be seen as consumers, whose needs and desires must be satisfied. Instead, as with citizenship, membership should be experienced as a privilege with important responsibilities, with the synagogue community as a sort of polity in which members have a stake.

In many Hareidi synagogues, meaningfulness is evident. Yet it is the meaningfulness neither of consumers nor citizens, but rather of subjects. And although the Modern Orthodox too recognize that, ultimately, we are servants of the Holy One, this need not be reflected in an apparent conformity and obeisance to an unchallengeable Daat Torah reminiscent of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility.

By contrast, we ought to build places of meaning with a more engaged, activist bent, where new people are given citizenship — not membership — applications and welcomed as citizens, not merely members. If we cater to and treat our members as consumers because we fear them leaving, then we will get consumers; but if we raise our expectations and ask our members to be committed citizens, we will find such citizens and together build attractive and meaningful institutions.

Rethinking the Modern Orthodox Synagogue Model

by

Rabbi Arnold Samlan (West Hempstead, New York)

·Rabbinic Leadership – Rabbis must move from being sole authorities to being facilitators, connecting pods of knowledge and knowledge holders.

·Women’s Contributions - Orthodox synagogues that do not allow women to lead or speak publicly lose out on their knowledge, leadership and insights. Orthodox synagogues must fully benefit from the potential contributions of women. The commitment, through concrete actions, must permeate Orthodox Jewish communities everywhere.

·Relevance - Orthodox synagogues’ values must integrate into the real lives of their members. The synagogue must communicate the values that add to the broader society in which its members live, and empower its members to bring those values to bear on a multi-cultural, democratic society.

·Increasing meaningful access - It's time for every Orthodox synagogues to be fully handicapped accessible (including the bima). Synagogues need new siddurim that have modern translations, do away with inexplicable Kabbalistic ramblings, and challenge pray-ers to explore prayers’ meanings rather than spoon feeding pre-digested answers. Rabbis and those who teach Torah have to be honest and open to the fluidity of traditional practice and beliefs that has been true throughout Jewish history, and allow openness to acceptable alternatives in so many areas of halacha and practice.

·Language - Orthodox synagogues must stop, and encourage members to stop, using the word "religious" to equal "traditionally observant" or "Orthodox." I have friends in each Jewish movement (as well as those outside of movements) who are deeply religious. Spiritual superiority complexes do not have a place today

·Expand chesed –Orthodox synagogues should lead in bringing chesed to the world. Synagogues should work in food kitchens, volunteer in homeless shelters, run blood drives.

·Move towards spirituality - Synagogues need to help Jews to recognize the connection between the practice, services, and broader spiritual goals.

Orthodox Synagogues Need Leaders of Women

by

Barbara Mendes (Los Angeles, California)

Women are half the Jewish people. In today's congregations, the women in attendance may be wage-earners in need of blessings for success . Today's full-time Moms are educated and sophisticated members of society. Women function on the highest levels of the global society in which we live. Can't we harness more of their power by making the synagogue a place that stimulates and inspires them without insulting their sense of worth?

Women who are intellectually and spiritually engaged in prayer services enrich a congregation with power and spirit.

I suggest creating a post called Rosh ha Nashim, or Eim ha Nashim, or some Hebrew title designating the Leader of Women. It should be a post of honor. The Leader of Women would be available to guide newcomers who need help, and would inspire and strengthen all the women.  The Leader of Women would know which women need special blessings. She would know which members of the congregation need special help. How would she know? Women communicate with one another, and become aware of issues in a natural way.

Modern women can fall in love with our beautiful prayer services. Devotion and attention to prayer is one of the great powers of Judaism; I believe the women of today's world have as much need for these magical prayers as do men. Having a leader of their own will inspire and guide women to be more engaged in communal prayer, putting mystic rewards in their reach. I am the first to see that women don't need the communal prayers the way men do, but this call was for ways to strengthen the Orthodox Synagogue, so I am addressing the prayer services held in that setting.

Ha KadoshBarukh Hu looks and sits on both sides of the mehitzah. The Holy One sees the power and passion on the women's side. Only Ha KadoshBarukh Hu could have created the human trajectory which led to the powerful women of today's world.

I believe Orthodox women would be empowered, strengthened, educated, and inspired by having a leader of their own. I believe that inspired women strengthen and inspire the congregation, even if they are not counted in the minyan. The very fact that it's not an endless obligation for them can add zest and excitement to women's participation in formal prayer services.

Let us join forces to call out to God. Let a Leader of Women be appointed to focus and harness the spiritual strength of women, which in turn will strengthen the entire congregation.

Making Synagogue Real

By

Leonard Stein (Beer Sheva, Israel)

If the creative voice of the Jewish people flourishes, Orthodox synagogues will become more meaningful and attractive.

Here's a simple method to avoid prayer as a heavy burden: slow down. A prayer leader whoraces through an Amidah does not allow the community to reach out to their Creator. Fast praying is a developed habit. If the synagogue changes the rate of words spoken to even a normal speaking pace, the community will strengthen. Creativity in prayer occurs not only when finding ourselves praying the Amidah honestly, but when we are given the room to provide our own supplications. It doesn't have to take an hour in the fashion of the early sages; even 10 minutes of prayer with a personal supplication will affect the meaning of the synagogue.

Furthermore, a synagogue should hear their members' voices. Allow anyone, including women, the opportunity to give a devarTorah on Friday night. People who give divrei Torah know how enriching it feels to study the parashah, struggle through contradictions, and search the soul for a personal ?idush. Why not give this opportunity to the folk? Signing up for this week's 5 minute devar Torah, which necessitates learning and public speaking, will awaken everyone. A synagogue should sign people up to read a portion of the week's parashah. What was once common practice has been relegated to the hazan. Those who haven't learned or forgot the ta’amim (trop) can learn from volunteers, and Torah will literally flow from the mouths of the people each week.

Offer creative learning opportunities that break stereotypes. How about learning piyutim on Tuesdays or learning agricultural halakhot through planting the synagogue's organic garden? Tying the passions of this generation with tradition has always strengthened a community.

When such creative outlets open, more people will love going to synagogue.

Making Orthodox Synagogues More Meaningful

By

Hinda Bramnick (Boca Raton, Florida)

Many people perceive that Orthodoxy is turning to the right. Those on the right feel that staying right of center is only way that traditional Judaism will survive.  Jews in the center or left of center are becoming demoralized.

The question of how to make Orthodox shuls more meaningful can be answered by examining how things are done in Boca Raton, Florida. The Boca Raton Synagogue has employed very ordinary tactics to get to where it currently is.

There are three basic components that make a synagogue the kind of place that congregants want to attend. They are diversity, expansion, and pride.

Boca Raton Synagogue (BRS) has been consistently growing its membership for over 20 years. Our rabbi proposed that Orthodox ideologies and practices could be expanded to meet the needs of the community.  His motto was “today’s drivers are tomorrow’s walkers”.  That forethought not only opened the doors to prospective congregants, but it succeeded in changing the mentality of the frum community.

Diversity became apparent when smaller groups within the congregation asked for their own minyan, and it was granted to them. Women asked for inclusiveness in education and religious rites.  Some were permitted immediately, such as Hakafot. Educational opportunities for women to learn and teach were also embraced.  We have not yet arrived at full access for women in religious life, but it is a work in progress.

Expansion of our membership became the bi-product of our diversity. We became a multi-cultural shul.  We were encouraged from the pulpit to welcome our fellow Jews who had not experienced a spiritual way of life. It had the effect of making us more tolerant of each other.

We became a proud congregation.  When a new rabbi was appointed, we knew that his big tent philosophy would continue to benefit us.

We are an evolving congregation, ever in a state of change. If we dialogue with our rabbis and express our wishes for a more vibrant Jewish experience we can affect the shifts we would like to see in our synagogues.  

The mid-nineteenth century was a heady era for Reform Judaism in America, with a strong influx of German Jewish immigrants for whom the modernity of Classical Reform resonated. By the middle of the twentieth century, the whole world seemed to be moving toward Conservative Judaism—certainly Orthodox Judaism was the odd man out, or so it appeared. The Jewish community fully embraced suburbanization, and whether in the city or in the suburb, new synagogues being built were almost entirely without mehitsot (partitions between men and women) and with large parking lots. In fact, in many parts of America in the 1950s and 1960s there was no question about the survival of mainstream Orthodoxy as a force—that was easily dismissed out of hand. The question was whether the Traditional movement, a type of “advanced” Orthodoxy where men and women could sit together and hear a hazzan with a microphone and a state-of-the-art speaker system would be able to compete long term with the Conservative movement.

On the one hand, Conservative and Reform proved to be far more resilient than the short lived Traditional, quasi-Orthodox movement. On the other hand, over the past four decades, Orthodoxy has come roaring back, and, at least according to the newest Jewish population survey in the New York area, is returning to a demographic dominance it might have not had since the millions of Eastern European Jews came to America at the turn of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the Orthodox Jews who are increasing their share of the Jewish pie today, are not just Orthodox in name, but they are observant and seem to be passing observant Judaism down to the next generation. By any measure, the Orthodox community—from its most Modern and Open elements to its most Hareidi sectors—should feel confident that it is growing in influence and stature within the established Jewish world and even within the powerful corridors of American power. Whereas in the past we could look to senators and members of the Cabinet who were merely Jewish, now many of them are outright Orthodox—Treasury secretary Jack Lew, Senator Lieberman, Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, just to start.

While the other movements are engaged in soul-searching on how to deal with dwindling and aging membership in synagogues, the challenges to Orthodoxy are how to deal with its burgeoning numbers: how to cost-effectively educate the hordes of children the Orthodox are having, how to expand ever-growing synagogues, and where to establish new communities where housing costs—for large homes—are low. But from college campuses, to urban communities of singles and young couples, to suburban communities with families and empty nesters—the numbers all show that Orthodoxy is an attractive type of Judaism, one that is easily replacing any fall-off, and is actually expanding through a relatively high birthrate and an expanding professional outreach movement.
It would stand to reason that Orthodoxy’s greatest challenge—in America, Israel, and around the world—would be having too much self-confidence and sense of triumphalism.

If there is any competition between the denominations, and there certainly is, then Orthodoxy would be expected to feel a sense of pride and smugness after having made an incredible comeback in the past 50 years. However, although the world Orthodox community does have a sense of zeal for its principles, and a loyalty to its leaders and its religious goals, it is stunning that in most sectors, it retains the same fear of destruction and unraveling that it had 50 years ago. Orthodoxy feels vulnerable and susceptible to challenges from feminism, liberalism, foreign influences, and temptation from the worst of American culture. The same fears of legitimating Reform or Conservative rabbis, or women wearing tefillin, or people whose conversions might not be as pure as others pervade the Orthodox community.

Think about it: Why should the huge Hareidi community fear a few women—on the women’s side of the Kotel wearing a tallit and singing and dancing once a month for an hour? Do they really think that all women will start wearing tallitot and tefillin and will start coming to the Kotel all the time and daven all the time? Do they see a revolution on the part of Hareidi women about to take off? All the fears on women’s and gender issues on the part of many in the Orthodox community point to a general fear that the slope is slippery, and the Orthodox world in general is on the verge of slipping off that cliff to religious anarchy. In fact, one Rosh Yeshiva at a prominent rabbinical school was quoted by his student that allowing for same sex civil marriage was the beginning of the end of heterosexual society as we know it! If we legitimize two men or two women starting a family together, why will anyone want to start a heterosexual family? Similarly, when in my own neighborhood I tried to team up with a Conservative rabbi to give a joint kosher supervision—an attempt that failed for other reasons—I faced tremendous opposition from the Orthodox establishment who were mainly afraid of the Conservative world taking over supervision. What is the basis of this fear, when every single national kosher supervision—even the ones that are not entirely reliable—are in the hands of Orthodox rabbis and organizations? It is stunning that with all the measurable, incontestable successes of the Orthodox community—and with all the momentum that the numbers show into the next generation—the Orthodox community is still scared and lacks the self-confidence necessary to take on the role it now has as a dominant force in American Jewish life.

As a Modern and Open Orthodox Jew, I realize that one of my most important tasks is to help give the Orthodox community as much self-confidence as possible. Self-awareness is critical to self-fulfillment—and for the Orthodox community to assume the responsibilities it should take on in its position, it needs to realize that it is strong and successful. In fact, I think the Modern and Open segments of the Orthodox community, along with the many people in the Hareidi world engaged in outreach, have a unique role in bolstering the self-confidence of our brothers and sisters in the Centrist and Hareidi communities. The more open to contemporary concepts and the more aware of contemporary realities and trends that we are, the more we have to bond with those who are not part of Orthodoxy to assure them that they are no threat to traditional Jewish values: women clergy, gay members in shul, women wearing tefillin, Jews who may not be halakhically Jewish but are part of our community, and even interfaith work are all not going to cause our mesorah and our Torah—the pillars that Orthodox Judaism is built on—to come crashing down. Over a decade ago, Rav Yehuda Amital, zt”l, said that Reform and Conservative Judaism were no longer threats to the Orthodox community, but, rather, they had become gateways to people to get closer to Judaism and the Jewish community. In a recent article in Commentary, Professor Jack Wertheimer quotes Hareidi outreach professionals saying the same thing. These people get it—they understand how powerful Orthodoxy is today, and that thinking that the other movements are a threat to Orthodoxy is from a by-gone era. In fact, Rabbi Ilan Feldman wrote a powerful article in Cross Currents, a Hareidi publication, where he calls on the frum Orthodox community to not focus on the fear of the “other” coming in and contaminating our communities, but, rather, to model the community upon the home of Abraham and Sarah, which was open and welcoming to everyone, convert or idolator. It is the responsibility of those in the outreach community and the pluralistic Orthodox community, who are comfortable counting Conservative, Reform, or Renewal rabbis as mentors and teachers, to find a way to show other Orthodox Jews that pluralism is only going to strengthen an already strong Orthodoxy, not destroy it.

How successful the Modern and Open Orthodox community will be at convincing the rest of Orthodoxy to be more confident and less scared, I’m not sure. I do know that it will only happen if we are able to create a big-tent Orthodoxy, which is based more and more on a desire to include, based on self-confidence, and less on a fear to exclude. The more Modern and Open elements of the Orthodox community need to be the advocates and architects of that big tent because they are the ones who feel most comfortable bringing in more and more elements into the tent. The Modern and Open Orthodox parts of the Orthodox community do feel less fear of the world around them, and fit in well with the American environment. But even though that sense of ease has all the advantages of avoiding harmful fear, it presents its own challenges:

Easier to be Religious: Need to have more rigor, not less!

Just three months ago, a fantastic kosher (CRC supervision—the best!) BBQ restaurant and bar opened smack in the middle of Lakeview, a trendy urban neighborhood in Chicago with a 400 family Modern Orthodox synagogue. Suddenly there was no excuse for people to eat in non-kosher restaurants; Milt’s BBQ for the Perplexed even has an impressive vegetarian menu. Jews and non-Jews have poured into the restaurant: Hareidim from Peterson Park along with local Modern Orthodox Jews are eating within inches of men and women from the heavily gay and hipster community. Everyone loves it. As a frum, Orthodox Jew in America you can have it all: great eating options, eruvs to carry on Shabbat and build community, kosher cruises, kosher bed and breakfasts in Maine, etc. Most people have no problem at all getting off early on Friday afternoons for Shabbat, or taking off the Holidays, or getting their co-workers to either order in kosher or have the office lunch at a kosher restaurant downtown. The synagogue has an early quickie Shabbat minyan, a slower regular minyan, five groups for the kids every Shabbat, and free ice-cream sponsored by the shul in the local ice-cream shop almost every Shabbat. It is easier than ever in America to be fully observant and fully successful—fully Orthodox and fully American.

The challenge is, will this ease make us more complacent and numb, or make us more rigorous and passionate Jews? In Los Angeles, where it is even easier to be Orthodox than Chicago, there is the Happy Minyan. Yes, those attending are living the happy American life. However, they channel the ease in a healthy way: they push themselves to be more rigorous, more passionate, more elevated on Shabbat—they don’t take the easy way out. Likewise, do we allow the easy, ready make Passover experiences in bungalows in Florida to make us forget about the homeless and the poor even more, or do we use the ease and joy in being Orthodox in America to push us to be at the forefront of advocating and working with the homeless and the underprivileged? Will people take advantage of kosher food to commit to eating strictly kosher and to inviting more strangers over to their homes for Shabbat? Or will they let the consumer culture of America drag them away from the values of thoughtfulness and care in our food that kashrut is all about? In the past people kashered their own meat in the bathtub (removing the blood), or at least went to the butcher to get the right cut. Now that it is all done for us, are we going to spend more time learning the laws of kashrut, saying the blessings before and after eating, or donating to food drives and food pantries—both Jewish and non-Jewish? We have an incredible opportunity to enable our children to get involved more in civics, or to take time off before or after college to work or study in Israel: will we take this God-given opportunity to find more rigor and passion in Judaism and the Jewish community, or will we be lulled to sleep by the ease and success that we have achieved? Will we become leaders and pilots of a new and exciting, reinvigorated Orthodoxy—pushing issues that we believe in—or will we go on auto-pilot and ignore the opportunities that we have been blessed with?

Finding the Passion—and the Difficulty Finding a Way of Relating to It

Actually, the Orthodox community does have a lot of passion and commitment, but it is usually coming from the right-wing groups, and frequently the more modern, centrist Jews (of, let’s say, Teaneck, Scarsdale and the Upper West Side) see that passion as either misplaced of foreign. The passion of the Hareidi world is admirable, but it gets mixed up with protesting women at the Kotel, or avoiding army duty, or asking the government of Israel—or of the United States—to pay for things that the Modern and Centrist Orthodox communities believe individual families should pay for themselves.

This disconnect—between the beauty of self-sacrifice and the ugliness of the politics behind it—is tragic: those who have perhaps the most serious sense of self-sacrifice are not able to impart its beauty to the community that needs to adopt it in their lives because they are challenged by Jewish life becoming too easy and to convenient. One group is enjoying kosher meals at Disney World, while the other group is rejecting any form of secular education for their children so that they are not corrupted by the world around them. Moreover, it is specifically the Hareidim of Israel, those who are even more extreme in their avoiding the Western world and Western education who are the most profound example of self-sacrifice. It is true that a typical middle class Modern Orthodox family is sacrificing tens of thousands of dollars—at least—every year on their children’s education; but as difficult as that is, it is not necessarily instilling passion, or a sense of sacrifice for Torah, in the life of the family. My wife tells the story of her parents taking out a home equity loan in order to make a substantial donation to the day school’s capital campaign because their rabbi asked them to: how often do we see that today in the Open, Modern or Centrist Jewish community? Perhaps not even in the American Hareidi community.

So we have passion in some parts of Orthodoxy, and we have the ability to integrate Orthodox observance with the Western world, American life, in other parts of the Orthodox community. The challenge is to bring the two together. To succeed, I believe the Modern and Open Orthodox community has to make an effort to understand the Hareidi community better. Not by compromising values such as pluralism, gender sensitivity, openness to the entire world—Jewish and not-Jewish—and prioritizing inclusion, but, rather, by reaching out and making the first steps for our students and children to meet with Hareidi families, for our rabbinical students to meet with Hareidi rabbinical students, and for the leaders of all the communities to make more of an effort to come together on issues that concern all of us—education, caring for the poor, Israel, and other important issues.

Are We Truly an Open Tent?

Earlier I mentioned Rabbi Ilan Feldman’s critique of the Orthodox community for stressing preservation of the community over reaching out and welcoming outsiders. He is correct that the fear of the “other”—ideas, people, cultures—which we also discussed earlier, has the more right wing members of the Orthodox community circling the wagons in preservationist mode rather than open up the tents in “modeling” mode as Feldman calls it. However, the other side of the Orthodox community, the more Modern and Centrist, is also not opening up their homes, and not even their shuls as much as they should, because of the complacency and easy living that we discussed earlier. Why should they bother to take in a guest who is not a friend or a relative? Why should they bother speaking to someone they don’t know at kiddush? Why should they make their shuls comfortable for people who know less than they do? Even in Israel this is an issue, and I have heard of congregants who complain to the rabbi for announcing pages—the most basic of welcoming acts—because it bothers them—suddenly they feel the shul as catering to the outsider! Orthodoxy, then, as strong as it is, is facing the perfect storm in not doing its work in opening up the tent: fear of the outside meets up with disdain for the work necessary to welcome the outsider, and, together, this united front of Orthodoxy is not reaching out to thousands, if not millions, who would love to be exposed to the gifts that Orthodoxy has to offer. If we didn’t have the model of Abraham and Sarah, maybe we wouldn’t think this kind of Open Tent Orthodoxy was important; we know better.

It is worth noting that there are small signs of changes in the Hareidi community regarding opening up: first there is a growing professional group of Hareidi kiruv (outreach) rabbis and families who do see it as their responsibility to connect with the rest of the Jewish community—as Chabad has been doing for decades. But even more significant, I have been told that regular Hareidi families are requesting these professionals to send non-observant Jews to their Shabbat dinners and lunches. This is not true pluralism in the Hareidi world; the families don’t necessarily want to learn about Kant or feminism from their guests, but they do what to connect with them, and it is an encouraging first step towards the openness of Abraham and Sarah’s tent.

Rav Avi Weiss has pushed the Open Orthodox community, and the students of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, to specifically seek out ways of connecting, as Orthodox rabbis and Orthodox lay people, to the broader Jewish community, on college campuses, in hospitals and especially in Orthodox synagogues that are frontier and outreach synagogues, where many of the members are not Orthodox but are open to learning and growing. My own synagogue, Anshe Sholom, in Chicago has been made up of many members of all ages who would not classify themselves as Orthodox, but they choose an Orthodox synagogue to a great extent because of the efforts my wife and I make to reach out and connect with them and make sure synagogue regulars are connecting with the new people and guests. Orthodox communities are uniquely positioned to reach out and welcome and connect outsiders to insiders and create community—just like Abraham and Sarah—but only if Orthodoxy is not afraid and not complacent will it make the effort and take the seeming risks (which are more imagined than real) to make it happen.

It may be that Open Orthodoxy’s niche, and the important role of the hundreds of future ordainees of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, the Modern and Open Orthodox yeshiva in Riverdale, New York, will be not only to open the tents of Orthodoxy to anyone interested—and in a sense of mutuality, learning from each other—but to go beyond welcoming to actually making the journey to where our fellow Jews are. Both Hareidi and Chabad outreach welcome all Jews to come to Orthodox homes, Orthodox Shabbat tables and Orthodox places of prayer—and that is admirable connecting. A confident, self-assured Orthodox community will be able to go even further and connect with students, young adults and families where they are. This means learning together with Reform, Reconstructionist, and renewal teachers and students; it means being willing to be on panels even with other rabbis or leaders who will be saying things that are not consistent with Orthodoxy; it means being willing to have Orthodox students spend time with non-Orthodox students, and then Orthodox families find ways of going to the non-Orthodox homes for Shabbat. All without compromising the beliefs or the practices of Orthodoxy! Beit Hillel in Israel produced a brochure outlining how religious Jews could “safely” go over for dinner with more secular Jews—on the one hand this was not a revolution in halakha, but on the other hand, how many Orthodox Jews in American synagogues are doing that? Either we don’t feel safe or we are lazy. Shabbat, Holidays, kashrut, Torah: all these pillars of Orthodox Judaism are strong, and we have to have the confidence that they can all survive—nay, thrive!—when experienced with less observant, non-Orthodox Jews. This might be the frontier which Open and Modern Orthodoxy can move to, and, by so doing, inspire the rest of Orthodoxy to follow suit.

Orthodoxy is reaching a golden age in America, and all the statistics suggest that it will continue to gain strength and prominence. This era should be offering Orthodoxy great opportunities to make a difference and fulfill its destiny, which is really the destiny of the entire Jewish people begun with Abraham and Sarah. But Abraham and Sarah, when they were true to form, displayed self-confidence and passion—loyalty to a difficult life, but joy in knowing it was the will of God. My hope is that Orthodoxy in America, and throughout the world, can follow their model of understanding how strong we are, but using that strength go make us more rigorous, more passionate, more Open and welcoming and filled with the courage and confidence to go that extra mile to connect with our fellow Jews and with a world that needs us and the entire Jewish people so much.

Storied Jewish Lives around the World, by Hillel Goldberg

Feldheim Publishers, 2013, 228 pages

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, an award winning author who has published inspiring Jewish stories for over 45 years, and has authored five previous books, has now given us three dozen well-crafted, easy-to-read, inspiring tales of people who we will admire, people we should emulate.

“There is greatness,” Rabbi Goldberg writes, “not only in well known leaders. ‘There is no person who does not have his hour.’ I have known this person too – the ‘simple Jew,’ the poshuteh Yid – shining in his moment of distinction. I have tried to capture” the greatness of these Jews, and their contribution to those around them.

The rabbi succeeds. His stories are interesting, inspiring, and very moving. He tells of people who lived normal lives, but unexpectedly became angels of God.

Among many others, Rabbi Goldberg tells about Professor Frank Talmage who died at age fifty. Despite being very ill, he devoted himself to what became a classic work on the Bible commentator David Kimchi (1160-1235). Although at times quite ill, he continued to teach and inspire students.

He tells us about Daniel Kravitz who because of kindness to a skinhead neo-Nazi, he was able to persuade him to reconnect with his parents and abandon his neo-Nazi group.

There are also stories of an eighteenth century Polish nobleman who converted to Judaism and surrendered his life for his new religion; a holocaust survivor who died years
after the holocaust with the same pious behavior as his grandfather when he died; and the tale of Werner and Lucie who despite numerous difficulties, including the horrors of
the holocaust, difficulties created by the British when they administered Palestine, and a separation of seven years, were able to remain true to each other, reunite, and marry.

In short, this is an inspiring book that readers will enjoy because the stories are fascinating and because of the positive feelings they will produce when they are read.

We have all heard the famous story of Esav returning from the field and seeing his twin brother, Jacob, sitting with a delicious bowl of soup in front of him. Esav decides that he needs to eat the soup and he is willing to go so far as to sell his birthright for it.
Later on in the story when Esav runs in from the field to receive the blessing from his father; upon realizing that he no longer had this option (as the blessing went to Jacob), he exclaims that this is the second time he has been tricked by Jacob (referring to selling the birthright as the first time). Obviously Esav is still bitter about the entire episode with him selling the birthright. This begs a very basic question: why would Esav sell his birthright for a simple bowl of soup? At first one might say that Esav himself gives us an answer when he states that he is “dying” of hunger but this seems to be the same type of exaggeration we are used to using on a daily basis. I think that the answer here is much deeper and has a connection to why we have come to known Esav as the typical Rasha.

The Talmud speaks about a concept called a “davar shelo bah leolam” or something that doesn’t exist yet. For many things in business some sort of “kinyan” or transaction needs to take place. The Talmud decides that one cannot do business with something that does not yet exist. For example one cannot marry a girl (something that needs a transaction to take place) with next year’s crops which have yet to grow. It seems that when something doesn’t exist yet, even though both people know that it will come, it isn’t considered like is something of value. We can relate this Halacha to human psychology in what is known as the need for instant gratification. People want to see results and benefits immediately or else they will try something else. This seemed to be Esav’s problem; although he may have known that the bechor was technically worth more than a bowl of soup, he wanted the instant gratification. When one is overcome by his desire for instant gratification he is at risk to throw away things worth much more in value. It is no coincidence that our Rabbis state that desire is able to remove a man from this world. This need for instant gratification is such a bad character trait that one who is overcome with it would be denoted by Chazal as the protype of the Rasha.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Jacob. Already from a young age he is described as a simple man, but this story with the soup is really the first time we see him in action. Just as Esav was ready to through away the Bechor for some soup, Jacob was willing to give his soup away. He probably went hungry that night but he had more important things to worry about; he had a vision.

When Jacob has to run away from his parent’s house he finds himself in the house of Lavan. He sees that his daughter, Rachel, is an amazing women and he sets out to marry her. He works 7 years straight just to marry her and in the end he is tricked! The 7 years here isn’t random, the 7 years represents an entire cycle of time or agricultural cycle (as we see with Shmitah). Jacob is able to work the entire first set of 7 years and it seemed very short in his eyes because of the passion and his ability to see the goal at the end of the road. Even after getting tricked he is able to pick himself back up and work another 7 years for his goal. Jacob internalized the fact that to acquire something of value one has to work hard and it doesn’t come instantly.

As current college students, it pains us to see how quickly Jews are becoming assimilated and distant from the Torah. People think that the Torah is an outdated book that holds little value in today’s practical world. We wish to show that Torah is a dynamic and interactive guidebook that provides us with the tools to build this world within the context of Hashem’s word and desires. We strive to show that Torah, in all its depth and beauty, is not something outdated and irrelevant, but clearly pertinent and timeless. Throughout or time here at UCLA, we have learned that being a Jew not only means that we must make these Torah lessons relevant to ourselves, but to wear our Jewish persona ‘on our sleeves’ and make sure to present ourselves as the advocates and representatives of God and his mission statement. We realize that being part of the secular world and studying history, recognizing other nations’ scientific contributions, and reading about other philosophies, does not detract from our mission—rather it augments the understanding that we should be involved in this world in order to make Torah relevant to any and every Jew whom may have a different approach in living his/her life. Thus, our goal is to work one day and one student at a time to try to fix this phenomenon. No one event and no one single conversation will be able to save the current situation in the Jewish community, it is the constant accumulation of such events and conversations that will ultimately help the Jewish future. With events such as a biweekly Mishmar, challah baking and learning, and just being there to talk to people about anything that is on their mind, we hope to change the Jewish people one student on one college campus at a time.

History was made on Sunday, November 30, when for the first time in the annals of the state, official recognition was given to Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran.

The event, hosted by President Reuven Rivlin at his official residence, was the continuum of legislation that was passed by the Knesset in June of this year designating November 30 as the national day of commemoration of the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran. The date was significant in that it commemorates the day after the anniversary of the November 29, 1947 United Nations resolution on the partition of Palestine, which led to an immediate flare up of anti-Zionist action and policy among Arab states, resulting in the killing, persecution, humiliation, oppression and expulsion of Jews, the sequestration of Jewish property and a war against the nascent State of Israel.

In 1948 close to a million Jews lived in Arab lands. Some were massacred in pogroms. Most fled or were expelled between 1948 and 1967. In 1948 there were 260,000 Jews in Morocco. Today there are less than 3,000. In the same time frame, the Jewish population of Algeria declined from 135,000 to zero, in Tunisia from 90,000 to a thousand, in Libya from 40,000 to zero, in Egypt from 75,000 to less than one hundred, in Iraq from 125,000 to zero, in Yemen from 45,000 to approximately 200, in Syria from 27,000 to 100, and in Lebanon from 10,000 in the 1950s to less than 100.

Although various attempts were made over the years by leaders of these communities in Israel and academics stemming from these communities to secure the same kind of recognition for the suffering of Jews in Arab lands as is accorded to the Jews of Europe, nothing of major substance was done until the bill proposed by MKs Shimon Ohayon of Yisrael Beiteinu and Nissim Zeev of Shas was placed on the national agenda.

The intention behind the bill said Ohayon on Sunday night, was to ensure that the stories of what happened to Jews in and from Arab lands and Iran should be part of the school curriculum, because most Israeli children are entirely ignorant of these chapters in the diverse aspects of Jewish heritage. Just as they learn about the history and fate of the Jews of Europe, they should also learn the history of the Jews of the region, he said. He placed great significance on national recognition, saying that this would lead to international acknowledgement so that Jews who left everything they owned behind, could be compensated. There were no words to describe his excitement that this day had come said Ohayon, but he was simultaneously pained that the Tel Aviv Cinematheque had chosen at this time to show films of the Arab Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948, while overlooking documentaries and feature films about the suffering of Jews from Arab lands and Iran. He related the story of a woman who had told him that her son, a university student, knows all about Nakba, but not about the travails endured by his grandfather before he came to Israel.

Zeev, the Jerusalem born son of Iraqi parents concurred with Ohayon and emphasized how important it was for the world to know about the tragedy that befell so many hundreds of thousands of people. Of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran, 650,000 came to Israel, he said, and the rest went mostly to Europe and America.

But before they became refugees, they and their forebears made great contributions to Jewish culture and to the cultures and economies of their host countries, and these must be acknowledged, he said

Meir Kahlon, chairman of the joint Associations of Jews from Arab Lands and Iran, noted that the world has long been talking about Arab refugees, but has ignored Jewish refugees from Arab lands. He also reminded those present that the Holocaust was not solely a European tragedy, but had spread to this part of the world. His mother had been killed in the Holocaust in Libya when he was only five months old.

Rivlin, who is a seventh generation Jerusalemite, does not know what it means to be expelled from one’s homeland, said Kahlon. Like Ohayon and Zeev, he questioned the lacuna in the Israeli curricula. As refugees, the Jews from Arab lands and Iran understand the plight of Palestinian refugees and will not allow their problems to be swept under the carpet said Kahlon, adding that the Palestinians must understand that this land also belongs to the Jews who yearned for it during centuries of exile. In this context, he quoted from Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept as we remembered Zion…”

He recommended that the compensation initiative for both sides proposed by former US President Bill Clinton be adopted and that a fund be set up to compensate and rehabilitate all the Palestinians living in refugee camps and all the Jews and their heirs who had been displaced from Arab lands and Iran. “We don’t seek war with anyone. We hold out our hand in peace,” he said.

Moderator Yossi Alfi, who is known for his marathon story telling festivals in which personalities from every immigrant group in Israel have the opportunity to share their stories with live audiences, radio listeners and television viewers, declared: “We are all excited today. It is indeed a holiday for us and others celebrating elsewhere. This day in Jerusalem is an important date in the story of the exodus of Jews from Arab Lands and Iran.”

Alfi, born in Basra Iraq, came to Israel in 1949 as a 3 year old refugee without his parents. Now, at age 69, he said he still feels the weight of what was left behind.

November 30 signifies not only the expulsion he said, but also the right to reparations. “It is also a day of love for Israel and for Zionism.”

Despite all that happened to them, these Jews who were expelled did not allow themselves to become dispirited, he said. “They did not forget where they came from, but they knew where they were going. Hardships not withstanding, they were able to maintain the heritage of a glorious past.”

Admitting that Jews from Arab lands and Iran had been subjected to a great injustice, and whose story had been pushed to the sidelines of the Zionist narrative, Rivlin commented that the designation of November 30 as a national day came too late and on too small a scale to impact on public consciousness, but declared that it was nevertheless important to correct this injustice “which should not be underestimated.”

The healing process, he said, begins with acknowledging the mistakes that were made, and for this reason he was proud as president of the state to host the inaugural November 30 commemoration. When his own ancestors came to the country from Lithuania in 1809, there were already immigrants from Yemen living here as well as Spanish families with ancient traditions. After the creation of the state when the refugees began arriving, their suffering was not taken into account and they were sent far away from the corridors of power to peripheral communities such as Dimona, Afikim, Beit She'an and Hatzor Haglilit where they developed cities out of nothing to be protective buffer zones for Israel’s borders, said Rivlin. It took a long time before these immigrants could give voice to their frustrations. Rivlin cited a list of writers and entertainment artists who paved the way for others to make their stories and their feelings known.