Dr. Daniel Sperber’s monumental studies on minhagim (Minhagei Yisrael: Mekorot veToledot), have received wide and justified acclaim. He has painstakingly analyzed the sources of many customs and traditions, and has traced their development over the centuries. He has demonstrated how and why customs arose as they did, for example, due to variant readings and interpretations of texts, specific religious outlooks, societal realities, and so forth.

            One profound truth that underlies his research is that minhagim arose as an expression of piety. Jewish communities adopted various customs because they thought these practices enhanced their religious observance and brought them closer to the Divinity. Another profound truth underlying his research is that minhagim reflect a lively diversity within Jewish religious life. While minhagim are intended to relate all Jews to our One God, they do so through a variety of channels, allowing for significant diversity of practice.

            Once minhagim have taken root, adherents have become emotionally attached to them and consider them as essential aspects of their religious devotion. They come to feel that minhag is on par with—or even more important than—halakha, and that minhag ties us not only to our God but also to our ancestors. “Minhag avoteinu be-yadeinu” is a phrase that evokes powerful feelings of loyalty to the traditions adopted by our forebears. Each of us observes Judaism through the prism of the halakhot and minhagim that we have inherited from our parents and grandparents, or that we have adopted by becoming part of a particular community.

            Because our religious experience is so intertwined with our minhagim, we may find it jarring to come into contact with other—quite religious—Jews who observe minhagim different from ours. We don’t feel entirely “at home” with them; we may think that their practices are quaint, or odd, or just plain wrong.

Rabbi Eliezer Papo, in his classic Pele Yoetz, describes the feelings of an Ashkenazic Jew who finds himself among Sephardim, or a Sephardic Jew who finds himself among Ashkenazim.

When the Torah speaks of compassion for strangers, it refers not only to proselytes, but also to any friendless person far from home whose spirits are low and whose heart is broken….This mitzvah applies to helping an Ashkenazi who finds himself among Sephardim, or a Sephardi among Ashkenazim.[1]

            While Rabbi Papo referred generally to the gulf between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, there are vast differences of custom within the Sephardic/Middle Eastern Jewish world, just as there are vast differences within the Ashkenazic/Eastern European world. While Jews of many languages and many lands worship the same God, they do so with diverse traditions, worldviews, and social contexts.

In the pre-modern world, Jews tended to have little interaction with coreligionists of different backgrounds and traditions. They came to think that their particular practices represented normative Judaism. If they found themselves among Jews with other cultural/religious characteristics, they may well have felt themselves to be “strangers.”

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began a period of kibutz galuyot, when significant numbers of Jews of various backgrounds came together and had to deal with each other on an ongoing basis. The mass migration of Jews to the United States brought in hundreds of thousands of Yiddish-speaking Jews, and as many as 50,000 Jews whose native tongues were Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, or Judeo-Greek. The Jewish demography of the land of Israel was also to undergo dramatic change. The old Yishuv’s historic Sephardic communities, as well as the traditional Ashkenazic communities, were engulfed by the influx of largely non-Orthodox Ashkenazic Zionists and Halutzim. During the 1930s and 1940s, refugees from Nazi Europe found their ways to Israel; in the early years of Israel’s statehood, hundreds of thousands of Jews from Muslim lands in Asia and North Africa came to live in Israel. The diversity of Jewish Israelis was enhanced by the arrival of Jews from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Western Europe, North and South America, South Africa, India, Australia, and so forth. In short, the intermingling of Jews of different cultural and religious traditions became a new reality. A question for the religiously-observant community was: How shall we respond to this incredible diversity?

Since the large majority of the world’s Jews was Ashkenazic, primarily of Yiddish-speaking background, this group naturally tended to see Judaism through its own eyes. Those of other backgrounds were either ignored or viewed as being quaint or exotic. The prevailing assumption among religiously observant Ashkenazim seems to have been that these “deviant” groups of Jews would/should assimilate into the normative Ashkenazic mainstream. Jewish cooking meant Ashkenazic cooking; Jewish names meant Ashkenazic names; Jewish language meant Yiddish; Jewish Torah learning meant Ashkenazic yeshivot; Jewish customs meant Ashkenazic customs.

Dr. Aviva Ben-Ur, in her study of the American Sephardic experience, describes a phenomenon which she calls “coethnic recognition failure,” the denial of a fellow group member’s common ethnicity.[2] Thus, while Ashkenazim and Sephardim are fellow Jews, coethnic recognition failure occurs when members of these groups do not recognize their shared ethnicity. Since the Ashkenazic establishment was largely in control of Jewish institutional life, non-Ashkenazim tended to be the victims of coethnic recognition failure. Dr. Ben-Ur writes:

Levantine Jews, with their unfamiliar physiognomy, Mediterranean tongues, and distinct religious and social customs baffled their Ashkenazic brethren. In the words of a contemporary satirist, “how could you be a Jew when you looked like an Italian, spoke Spanish, and never saw a matsah ball in your life?”…The denial of shared ethnicity and religion was the most painful and frustrating reaction that Eastern Sephardim encountered in their dealings with Ashkenazim….[3]

The negative ramifications of coethnic recognition failure have been profound. The victims have had to struggle with deep issues of identity and self-confidence; their culture, traditions, and religious worldview have been marginalized. Many have felt the need to shed vestiges of their “oriental” identities in order to blend in with the majority group. In the process, the Jewish people as a whole has lost vital and vibrant elements of diversity.

The painful feelings of being ignored and rejected have been articulated in such books as The Other Jews: Sephardim Today by Daniel Elazar and We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands by Rachel Shabi.[4] But the issue goes beyond a negation of the value of non-Ashkenazic civilizations—these negative attitudes have led—and still lead—to overt discriminatory practices and policies.[5]

It is beyond the scope of this article to enter into a full discussion of the sociological, psychological, religious, and moral dimensions of coethnic recognition failure. Isaiah Berlin has noted that victims of “oppressed classes or nationalities” simply want to be recognized

as an independent source of human activity, as an entity with a will of its own…and not to be ruled, educated, guided, with however light a hand, as being not quite fully human, and therefore not quite fully free…. Paternalism is despotic…because it is an insult to my conception of myself as a human being, determined to make my own life in accordance with my own…purposes, and above, all, entitled to be recognized as such by others. For if I am not so recognized, then I may fail to recognize, I may doubt, my own claim to be a fully independent human being.[6]

How is a non-Ashkenazic Jew supposed to maintain this essential feeling of being a “fully independent human being,” when he/she functions in a Jewish world that ignores or belittles his/her culture, or treats him/her paternalistically? One response is a militant rejection of the dominant group. The opposite response is to adapt and to assimilate—to the extent possible—into the culture of the majority. Most non-Ashkenazim find themselves somewhere between these two poles.

Those who are part of the “majority culture” do not always understand how their attitudes and words impact on those of the “minority culture.” Sometimes things that seem quite trivial can, in fact, have serious consequences.

In this article, I want to share my experience of four minhagim, and how coethnic recognition failure caused me much grief. This is not to be construed as a lament or complaint—but as a means of explaining to the “majority group” what we in the “minority group” have had to confront. The experiences I describe can be multiplied many times over by other non-Ashkenazim.[7] The hope is that through greater awareness and empathy, we will function as a stronger, happier, and more diverse Jewish community. We are not calling for paternalistic condescension or tolerance. What is needed is a genuine recognition that in our various searches for Divinity, different Jewish communities have followed diverse—perfectly halakhic and proper—roads.

I was born and raised in the Sephardic community of Seattle, Washington. My paternal grandparents came to Seattle from the Island of Rhodes early in the twentieth century. My maternal grandparents arrived at about the same time from towns in Turkey. Both of my parents were born in Seattle. The language of the immigrant and first generation American-born Sephardim of Seattle was Judeo-Spanish. The customs and traditions were those that had prevailed in the old Ottoman Empire for centuries. The melodies and rituals of our synagogues were in keeping with those of the Jews of Turkey and Rhodes. I was blessed to be raised among pious, sturdy Jews, who had a profound sense of dignity and honor. For us, the Jewish way of life was not only normal and natural; it was happy, optimistic, and lively.

Seattle’s Hebrew Day School, where I attended through eighth grade, may have had 25 to 30 percent of its students from Sephardic homes. No one would have known this from the manner in which Jewish studies were taught.[8] We learned that Jews eat latkes on Hanukkah—but we Sephardim didn’t eat latkes, or even know what latkes were! We ate bourmuelos on Hanukkah! We learned that Jews pray with certain melodies—but in our synagogues, we had entirely different melodies. We learned that “our” grandparents in the shtetls maintained an intense Jewish life. But our grandparents never lived in those shtetls. We learned the musical notations for reading Torah and haftarah—even though these were not the melodies we chanted in our synagogues. In short, there was a profound dissonance between what we learned Judaism was—and what we Sephardim actually did. There was little or no attempt to acknowledge diverse customs and melodies, legitimate differences of opinion in halakha and minhag. The teachers taught “real, normative Judaism”—and we Sephardim simply weren’t part of the story. Even Jewish history—to the extent that it was taught at all—had no references to Jewish life in Turkey or Rhodes, or North Africa, or the Middle East: Jewish history equaled Ashkenazic history, the experience of European—basically Eastern European—Jews. Discussions of the Shoah—as limited as they were—never mentioned the many thousands of Sephardic victims who perished alongside their Ashkenazic brothers and sisters.

Thankfully, I grew up in a family that had a strong Sephardic way of life, and this helped offset the things I was learning—and not learning—in school. But doubts lingered. Were we really Jews? Did our traditions have genuine value?

My first Shabbat at Yeshiva University in the autumn of 1963 was a moment of culture shock for me. That was the first time in my life I had ever seen chopped liver, or cholent, or kugel, or matsah ball soup. My classmates thought I was joking when I asked what these things were. Are you Jewish? they asked with feigned humor. I soon had to adjust to Ashkenazic “davening.” Eventually, I even needed to learn enough Yiddish to follow the shiurim of my Yiddish-speaking Talmud teachers. I observed what my classmates did, and I wanted to fit in. Although everyone knew I was Sephardic—and very outspoken about this—they seemed to expect that I would somehow conform to the prevailing patterns and blend in. The unspoken assumption was that Yeshiva represents normative Judaism, and the rabbis there teach us normative Judaism; therefore, our search for Divinity must preclude genuine diversity. A quaint custom here and there is fine, as long as it does not threaten the rock-solid assumption that the “establishment” has the real Judaism and does things the really correct way.

Barukh Hu uVarukh Shemo

            During my first year at Yeshiva, I learned that one is not allowed to respond “barukh hu uVarukh shemo” when wishing to fulfill one’s obligation through the blessing of another person. Thus, for example, when family members hear Kiddush, they should only respond Amen. If they also say “barukh hu uVarukh shemo,” this is considered to be a “hefsek,” an interruption that invalidates their fulfillment of the mitzvah.

            When I told my teacher that our custom was for family members to respond “barukh hu uvarukh shemo” when my father or grandfather recited Kiddush, he answered quickly and confidently: “Your family is doing it incorrectly. Your family members are not fulfilling the mitzvah.”

            Although this seems like such a minor issue, it had a powerful impact on me. My teacher was saying—without the slightest hesitation or doubt—that my family’s traditions were not reliable, that I could not trust my father or grandfather any longer. If they were wrong on this practice, they might well be wrong on so many other things.[9]

            When I returned to Seattle for Pessah in 1964, I told my father what I had learned, and asked that we change our incorrect practice. We should no longer be responding with “barukh hu uVarukh shemo.” My father was astounded and pained by my request. He said: We have always had this practice. Even in Rhodes and Turkey, where they had great Hakhamim, they had this practice. It cannot be wrong. My response to my father was: You are paying a lot of money to send me to Yeshiva, and this is what I learned from my teachers there.

            Our family stopped responding “barukh hu uVarukh shemo.” Now, finally, we could fulfill the mitzvah of Kiddush properly, after so many years (generations!) of incorrect practice.

            In 1992, a year after my father’s death, I bought a set of books in a Jerusalem book store: Minhagei haHida. The book is a compilation of minhagim as found in the writings of Rabbi Hayyim Yosef David Azulai (1724–1806), along with a commentary by Rabbi Reuven Amar.

            In Siman 21:3 in the section dealing with customs relating to blessings, I read:

Minhag ha-olam la-anot “barukh hu uVarukh shemo” ke-she-shom’in azkarat Hashem, gam bivrakha she-yotse’im bah yedei hovatam, kegon Kiddush, havdalah, shofar umegillah, ukhyotsei bahem, ve-ein limhot bahem.

The universal custom is to respond “Blessed be He and Blessed be His Name” when God's name is mentioned, also in a blessing where they fulfill their obligation [by listening and responding to someone else recite the blessing], such as Kiddush, havdalah, shofar, and Megilla, and other similar situations, and one should not prevent them from doing so.[10]

Although the widespread custom is to respond with barukh hu uVarukh shemo, the text goes on to say that it is nevertheless appropriate to refrain from saying this phrase when wishing to fulfill one’s obligation through the blessing of another person.

            Our family, then, had been following minhag ha-olam, the universal custom, and the Hida said ein limhot beyadam—people should be allowed to continue with this practice. Rabbi Amar’s commentary on this passage cites a number of Sephardic sages who not only tolerated, but taught positively that one should respond with barukh hu uVarukh shemo. For example, in his commentary on the Haggadah, the great nineteenth-century sage of Izmir Rabbi Hayyim Palache specifically instructed the head of the household to remind his family and guests to respond barukh hu uVarukh shemo and Amen to each of the blessings he recited on their behalf. Rabbi Israel Abuhatseira, known popularly as Baba Sali, insisted that people respond barukh hu uVarukh shemo when he recited Kiddush. Rabbi Amar concludes that the custom to respond barukh hu uVarukh shemo was established by sages; it is a holy custom with strong foundations.

And this custom is widespread among all Sephardic communities east and west; as we have seen that it was customary in Italy, Greece, and Turkey, and all the countries of North Africa; and also in the Holy Land many have followed this practice.[11]

            When my teacher at Yeshiva told me that my family’s custom was incorrect, it was he who was wrong. He simply did not know that there were alternative traditions on this issue. Nor was he interested in looking into the matter. As far as he was concerned, he knew normative Jewish practice; anything that deviated from his knowledge was discarded. As a student, I deferred to my teacher’s knowledge; I did not learn that his knowledge was deficient until many years later. Because of his teaching, he caused me to uproot a perfectly valid custom of our community, to upset my father and our family, and to cause me to doubt the validity of other of our customs and traditions.

            There is, of course, a halakhic basis for considering barukh hu uVarukh shemo to be an interruption. According to this view, the listener must concentrate on the words of the person reciting the blessing so as to be able to fulfill the obligation by saying Amen. Any extraneous words can break the concentration, and can be construed as an interruption.

            However, the widespread Sephardic custom also has a solid basis. After all, how can words blessing God and His name be construed as an interruption? On the contrary, saying barukh hu uVarukh shemo actually increases the attentiveness of listeners. Since these words are not extraneous but are germane to the blessing, they do not constitute an invalidating interruption.

            It would have been so much better if my teacher had been knowledgeable about and sensitive to different minhagim. Instead of declaring our family’s custom to be incorrect, he could have said: “There are differences in practice between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. I don’t know the source of your custom, but I will try to learn more about it. Why don’t you also try to find out more about your custom and why your family has this practice?” It would have been so nice if he had taught the class—Ashkenazim and Sephardim alike—the importance of appreciating variations in custom within the diverse communities of Jews.

Standing for the Ten Commandments

            In our Sephardic congregations in Seattle, it was customary to remain seated during the Torah reading. This was true also when the Torah reading included the Ten Commandments.

            When I attended Yeshiva, I soon noticed that some fellow students sat and others remained standing during the Torah reading. When it came to Parashat Yitro, though, all the students stood for the chanting of the Ten Commandments. I also stood, out of respect for the prevailing custom.

            After services, I inquired of friends about the custom of standing for the Ten Commandments. They were incredulous that I had grown up in a synagogue where the congregation remained seated. Was I Orthodox?

            I asked teachers, and was told that “the” custom is to stand for the Ten Commandments, as a re-enactment of the Revelation at Mount Sinai. When I was in my synagogue in Seattle during the summer, I stood up during the recitation of the Ten Commandments in Parashat Va-et-hanan. I felt odd being the only one to stand while the entire congregation was seated; but I had learned the truth in Yeshiva, and I had to do that which is right in the eyes of the Lord. Following services, I discussed the custom with our rabbi—who was of Ashkenazic background—and he told me that it was indeed correct to stand for the Ten Commandments, but he did not want to create a stir by asking congregants to change their accustomed practice. This served to underscore how wrong our traditions really were.

            Years later, I learned that the custom to remain seated during the reading of the Torah has a venerable history, and that the Ari haKadosh remained seated during the Torah reading. I also learned that the custom to remain seated during the Ten Commandments was a longstanding and valid tradition.[12] It was based on the notion that all the Torah—from beginning to end—is holy. To stand only for the Ten Commandments would give fuel to the belief of the minim that only the Ten Commandments were given by God. We remain seated to demonstrate the equal holiness of every word of Torah. (The sages did not require us to stand for all Torah readings, since this would be a terrible imposition on the public; and since the Ari himself did not stand.)

            When I was working on my doctoral dissertation at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University, I researched the history of the Jews of the Island of Rhodes. I came across a responsum of the eighteenth-century Rabbi Eliyahu Israel, who was born and raised in Rhodes and went on to become rabbi in Alexandria, Egypt.[13]

            The question was: May a person be stringent with himself and stand for the Ten Commandments in a congregation where the custom was to remain seated? Rabbi Israel responded:

It is obvious that one is not permitted to do so because it appears presumptuous [mehzei ke-yuhara]….Moreover someone who does so [stands] in the presence of Talmidei Hakhamim greater than he, is deserving of excommunication [nidui].

If a self-righteous person stands while others are seated, this gives the impression that only he is truly scrupulous about honoring the Torah, while the rest of the congregation are not properly honoring the Torah.

            I had now come full circle. First I learned that our custom was wrong. Then I willfully violated my synagogue custom so that I would be in conformity with the “correct” custom that I had learned in Yeshiva. Then I learned that our custom had a proper basis after all. Then I learned from the responsum of Rabbi Eliyahu Israel that I was guilty of nidui for having stood up for the Ten Commandments in our synagogue where the custom was to be seated! Each step in this process caused much stress and inner turmoil. If only I had learned from the outset that Sephardim and Ashkenazim had different customs in this matter, and that both customs are worthy and respectable.

Wearing Tzitzith Outside One’s Pants

            When I attended Yeshiva, some students wore their tzitzith hanging outside their pants, while many others did not. With the passage of time, though, an increasing number of students—especially the more devout ones—put their tzitzith outside their pants.

            In one of our study sessions, we read the Shulhan Arukh (O.H. 8:11) who ruled that the mitzvah of the Tallit Katan entails wearing the tzitzith “on one’s clothes” so that one will always see them and remember God’s commandments. We then read the Mishnah Berurah on this passage (no. 26):

Those men who place their tzitzith within their pants, not only are they hiding their eyes from what is written [in the Torah], “and you shall see them and remember etc.,” but moreover they are disgracing [mevazin] a commandment of God; in the future they will have to stand in judgment for this.

Thus, not only may one wear the tzitzith on the outside; one must do so, or face the consequences in the next world for having abused one of God’s mitzvoth. It could not be clearer.

            The only problem was that I wore my tzitzith inside my pants. I had never seen anyone in my community—even the most pious—who wore their tzitzith outside the pants. So I assumed that we were wrong yet again. We just were not as religiously correct as the Ashkenazim.

            After reading the Mishnah Berurah, how could I possibly keep my tzitzith inside my pants? So I pulled them out.

            As long as I was in Yeshiva, this was fine. But when I returned home with my tzitzith out, family members and friends were surprised—even upset. Was I becoming a fanatic? I read them the Shulhan Arukh and the Mishnah Berurah, much to their consternation. One of my uncles, who was born and raised in Turkey, replied: This isn’t how we do it. We wear tzitzith in our pants, never on the outside. I smugly showed him the texts, and let him know that we had always been doing it incorrectly.

            What I experienced was similar to what thousands of Sephardic yeshiva boys have experienced when attending Ashkenazic yeshivot. The mainstream is Ashkenazic. The laws and customs are Ashkenazic. If one has different customs and traditions, they simply do not count. The teachers seldom if ever acknowledge diverse customs (except perhaps within the Ashkenazic world itself). The students listen to their teachers. The environment fosters uniformity.

            Rabbi Haim David Halevy, late Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, dealt with the issue of how to wear one’s tzitzith. He indicated that although the Shulhan Arukh called for wearing the tzitzith so that they can be seen, the Ari haKadosh held otherwise, teaching that according to the kabbala, tzitzith must not be worn outside one’s pants. Virtually all Sephardic posekim have followed the opinion of the Ari, not that of the Shulhan Arukh. Rabbi Halevy notes:

In truth, we have never seen even one of the Sephardic hakhamim and rabbis who has removed the tzitzith outside the pants; certainly they took into consideration the opinion of the kabbalists, and the ruling of the Hida whose rulings we have accepted.[14]

Rabbi Halevy indicated, though, that if a Sephardic student felt a great need to wear his tzitzith outside his pants, he was allowed to do so.

            Rabbi Ovadia Yosef also explained the sources for the Sephardic custom to wear the tzitzith of the Tallit Katan inside one’s garments. He took issue with the Mishnah Berurah, noting that those who wear their tzitzith inside do so on principle (based on kabbala), not from fear of ridicule from non-Jews. He concluded that it is right and proper for Sephardic students in Ashkenazic yeshivot to wear their tzitzith inside.[15] They should not change their custom.[16]

            When I was in Yeshiva, I had worn the tzitzith outside for a year or so; then, somehow I decided to return to my original practice of wearing them inside. I had not known at that time of the rulings of Rabbis Halevy and Yosef, but was happy later to read their writings confirming my intuitive decision. I tucked in my tzitzith because I came to feel that it was pretentious [yuhara] to wear them hanging outside my pants.

Family Names

            To Ashkenazic ears, Sephardic names often do not sound “Jewish.” My grandfather, Marco Romey, used to tell us how he and fellow Sephardic immigrants were not recognized as Jews by Ashkenazim in Seattle. After all, how could names like Alhadeff, Policar, De Leon, or Calvo be Jewish?

            Yet, names are vital components in a person’s identity. I found it (and still find it) annoying when fellow Jews display perplexity about the Jewishness of my name, Angel. Actually, Angel is a good Jewish name going back to medieval Spain. Many illustrious Jewish Angels lived in Salonika, Rhodes, Alexandria, Sofia, Damascus, and throughout the Ottoman Empire. Yet, as a student in Yeshiva, my Yiddish-speaking Rebbes invariably called me “Engel”—even after I corrected them many times. To them, Engel was “Jewish;” Angel was not. I’ve grown accustomed to the question: What was your real name before it was changed to Angel? The questioners do not even imagine that Angel was the original, Jewish name.[17]

            Anyone familiar with Sephardic civilization knows how important family names are to Sephardim. They are badges of pride and honor. Most Sephardic communities have the custom of calling a man for an aliya to the Torah by his full name, including his family name. A Ladino proverb has it that basta mi nombre ke es Abravanel; my name is enough, it is Abravanel, i.e., if I have a distinguished family name, this gives me a sense of importance and self-worth.

            About 40 years ago, a classmate at Yeshiva asked me to be a witness on the ketubah for his wedding. The Mesader Kiddushin was his Rosh Yeshiva, an elderly sage who had been born and raised in Eastern Europe. A large crowd, including many of our mutual friends, gathered in the room for the signing of the ketubah. The Rosh Yeshiva asked me to sign on a blank piece of paper before signing the ketubah. I complied and wrote my name on the paper: Mordecai ben Hayyim Angel. The Rosh Yeshiva asked me: “What is that last word in your signature?” I answered, “That is my family name, Angel.” The Rosh Yeshiva answered with perfect coethnic recognition failure: “Jews do not have last names.” I replied: “I am a Sephardic Jew, and Sephardim do have last names. We sign with our last names.” The Rosh Yeshiva stared at me and repeated: “Jews do not have last names.” He motioned me to the side, declaring me to be an invalid witness. In the presence of numerous guests, including so many of my friends and classmates, the Rosh Yeshiva had found me unfit to sign a ketubah. I wasn’t Jewish, since Jews don’t have last names! I was so shocked and humiliated by this horrifying rejection, that I felt I was going to faint. My friend, the bridegroom, tried to console me. But there was no consolation. I was publicly repudiated by a venerated Rosh Yeshiva. My name and reputation as an upstanding Jew were negated in the presence of numerous guests. Even after 40 years, I still feel the burning shame and anger I felt on that occasion.

            The next day, I went to top officials of Yeshiva to complain about the injustice perpetrated against me by that Rosh Yeshiva. All gave me the same basic answer: “He is an elderly Rebbe; he meant no harm; let it go.” Not one of the officials of the Yeshiva suggested that the Rebbe ought to be rebuked for his behavior, or that he even owed me an apology. (He never did apologize.)

            There is a long tradition of Sephardic and Italian Jews signing ketubot using their family names, going back into the medieval period.[18] Great rabbis approved of this practice, and indeed followed this practice. Yet, the Rosh Yeshiva—unaware of a legitimate Jewishness outside his own framework—declared that “Jews do not have last names.”

            I discussed this experience with Professor Daniel Sperber, in a telephone conversation on March 15, 2010. Dr. Sperber indicated that it is now fairly common practice in Israel for Ashkenazim as well as Sephardim to sign ketubot using their family names. This is not merely a matter of family pride, but is a more accurate way of identifying the signatory. The Rosh Yeshiva who long ago had humiliated me, would be surprised to learn that Jews—including Ashkenazic Jews—do indeed have last names.

Conclusion

            It is not realistic to expect members of any group of Jews to be fully familiar with customs and traditions of all other groups of Jews. But it is imperative for members of all groups of Jews to recognize that other Jews also have proper customs and traditions. Instead of ignoring or sneering at or disqualifying traditions unfamiliar to us, we need the humility and intellectual openness to be sensitive to the legitimate diversity within halakhic Judaism.

            A broader and deeper understanding of halakha and minhagim should increase our appreciation of the magnificent corpus of Jewish religious traditions; should diminish the evil of coethnic recognition failure; should give rightful status to the Jewish “minorities;” should enhance the Jewishness of the Jewish “majority.”

In our universal quest to serve the Divinity, we must appreciate the unique value and power of our Jewish diversity.

On Thursday, May 20, President Joe Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which had been passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress. The act was a forceful response to the disgraceful attacks on Asian-Americans by bigots who blamed them for the Covid-19 pandemic, which had originated in China. In passing the act, members of both parties in the House and Senate demonstrated that they can do the right thing, at least once in a while.

Nothing of the sort appears to be contemplated in response to the attacks by Palestinian sympathizers on Jewish-American persons, synagogues, and restaurants during and after the latest Israel-Hamas conflict. In Los Angeles, pro-Palestinian attackers threw punches and bottles at diners at a kosher sushi restaurant. In New York’s heavily Jewish Diamond District, Palestinian supporters threw fireworks at Jews from a car amid a violent street altercation. Hamas supporters also beat a Jewish man in New York’s Times Square sending him to hospital with severe injuries. They threatened Jewish residents in a heavily Jewish Miami neighborhood. Video surveillance at Chicago’s Persian Hebrew Congregation, which was defaced by attackers, captured two people, one carrying a stick and another holding a sign that read “Freedom for Palestine.”

In each of these cases, and others elsewhere in the United States, the pro-Palestinian attackers had no idea whether their Jewish targets were supporters of Israel. Indeed, polls have shown that a majority of Jewish Americans support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. No matter. Those who support the Palestinian cause attacked their victims merely because they were Jews. In so doing, they confirmed that their hatred of Israel extends to all Jews everywhere, as indeed, Hamas has made clear in its own charter.

All told, the Anti-Defamation League has reported at least 200 possible anti-Semitic incidents in the United States since the onset of the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Nevertheless, despite the ongoing upsurge in attacks on Jews, especially against so-called visible Jews—that is bearded Jews who dress in black suits, or merely Jews who will sport a small yarmulke or wear a star of David necklace—the leadership of the Democratic-controlled Congress has done little more than issue sympathetic tweets. As a body, Congress has done virtually nothing to condemn the attacks, much less legislate against them.

One reason for Congressional inaction is that the pro-Palestinian attackers have the support of the so-called progressive Democratic Left. Democrats in the House have a five-seat majority, while the ultra-Left “squad,” which is blatantly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, now boasts six members. While Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at least has tweeted her condemnation of anti-Jewish attacks, several of her squad colleagues have not even gone that far. Not surprisingly, therefore, Speaker Nancy Pelosi cannot afford to alienate these progressives by pressing for legislation that would bring into sharper focus attacks on Jews by Palestinian sympathizers.

Another reason for Congressional inaction is that Democrats are reluctant to criticize some of their own progressive legislators, even when the likes of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar issue blatantly anti-Semitic tweets. Indeed, in the aftermath of one such tweet, the House actually did consider a draft measure to condemn anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, under pressure from progressives, the Democratic House leadership watered the measure down so that in its final form it included not only anti-Semitism but also Islamophobia and discrimination against Latinos, Asian Americans, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community. That the resolution had been rendered entirely meaningless is evidenced by the fact that despite its having included Asian Americans, Congress recognized the need for separate—and meaningful—legislation that solely was geared to anti-Asian bigotry and hate crimes.

Democrats are fond of pointing out the cowardice of those of their Republican colleagues, who slavishly support Donald Trump and all that he stands for. They are right to do so. On the other hand, it is high time that Democrats showed some courage of their own. They should put an end to their own cowardly appeasement of an increasingly belligerent Left, and finally pass legislation, similar to that for Asian Americans, that would severely punish those who would verbally and physically abuse their fellow Americans simply because they happen to be Jewish.

Today, both religious Zionism as a whole and the Mizrachi movement in particular are strongly associated with the philosophy of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook and his followers. Like other early religious Zionists, R. Kook saw the cultivation and settlement of the Land of Israel as an early stage in the messianic redemption. But more than any of his contemporaries, R. Kook created a theological framework that saw the secular Zionist movement as God’s holy tool for hastening the coming of the long awaited redeemer. According to R. Kook, cooperation with secular and even anti-religious Jews could be sanctioned because their awakening to Zionism stemmed from a religious spark in their souls. In fact, they were actors in a great cosmic drama that would ultimately bring about their return to traditional Judaism.[1]

But Mizrachi’s beginnings were different. Mizrachi was established as a party within Theodor Herzl’s Zionist Congress in 1902 by Rabbi Yitzhak Yaakov Reines (1839–1915), a man driven by a spirit unlike that of R. Kook. Whereas R. Kook was a dreamer, poet, and an idealist, R. Reines was a realist, activist, and pragmatist. It was primarily the pernicious, unrelenting nature of anti-Semitism, not messianic idealism, that brought R. Reines into the Zionist camp.

R. Reines was a brilliant Torah scholar, and he studied briefly in the famed Yeshiva of Volozhin.[2] For much of his career, he was the Chief Rabbi of Lida, a mid-sized city near Vilna. He published many works on a variety of topics, and even more of his writing sadly remains only in manuscript. Although R. Reines’ prose is at times repetitive and disorganized, he was a creative and underappreciated thinker. For example, in 1880, he published Hoteim Tokhnit, a book that ambitiously sought to systematize halakha by uncovering the logical principles by which the Oral Torah had been derived from the Written Torah. Even though this work is incomplete and not always convincing, his attempt to create a near-scientific taxonomy of broader halakhic principles and the particulars that flowed from them remains fascinating.[3]

R. Reines was also a courageous and outspoken activist on issues concerning Eastern European Jewry aside from Zionism. In 1905, with the backing of Mizrachi, R. Reines achieved a goal he had worked at for many years: the establishment of what was essentially the first yeshiva in Eastern Europe to teach secular subjects and the Hebrew language alongside the traditional Talmud curriculum.[4] Although the yeshiva, named Torah vaDa’at for its merger of Torah and worldly culture, closed in 1915 upon R. Reines’ death, it was a path-breaking institution. Rabbi Shlomo Polachek, the Rosh Yeshiva appointed by R. Reines, went on to teach at Yeshiva University. And the well-known American yeshiva in Brooklyn, Torah Vodaath, was founded initially by students of R. Reines and named after his yeshiva.[5]

R. Reines, however, saw himself as more of a pragmatist than an idealist. In his writings, he often speaks of the exigencies that drove him to innovate. Hoteim Tokhnit was in part a response to German Reform scholars who denied the divinity of the Oral Torah.[6] Similarly, he introduced limited secular studies in his yeshiva to ensure that young men could get the training they needed to support themselves financially while remaining within the traditional religious community, among other pragmatic reasons.[7] R. Reines did not ascribe to Torah uMadda or a similar ideology; he saw no inherent value in secular education. Rather, it was the immediate needs of the nation that drove R. Reines.

On the surface at least, R. Reines’ Zionism was much the same. He came to the movement because he concluded that the Jews needed a safe haven—a homeland—where they would be free from oppression and persecution. In Kol miTziyon, a letter to Mizrachi constituents, he passionately painted a dire picture:

The blood of our brothers is now being spilled more and more like water everywhere, the hatred for our nation is increasing in all the lands, pushing the Jews more and more from [a normal] life and bringing them to poverty, famine, sickness, suffering, and submission of the spirit. … Our sons and daughters are being sold to another nation. … Judaism is being pushed aside more and more for other cultures and the name of Israel is being erased from the face of the earth. [8]

A Jewish homeland in Israel, he believed, was the way to solve the problem.

Zionism was unpopular among many traditional Jewish leaders, who maintained that making a concerted effort to settle in Israel before the proper time ordained by God violated a prohibition against hastening the messianic redemption.[9] The story goes that the saintly Hafetz Hayyim himself came to visit R. Reines to plead with him not to ally himself with the Zionist cause.[10] R. Reines responded to his detractors by arguing that pure political Zionism was acceptable because it had no connection to the Messiah. In Sha’arei Orah veSimhah he wrote:

And in all their [the Zionists] actions and efforts there is also no hint or mention of the final redemption. Their entire intention is only to improve Israel’s [the Jews’] situation and ennoble it with dignity … so that Israel should know that it has a safe place. … It is only an effort for the improvement of the nation’s physical situation. [11]

In stark contrast to the position taken by R. Kook or even the position of other religious Zionists of his time such as the Hovevei Tziyon, R. Reines believed that Zionist efforts had no connection to the ultimate redemption at the end of days. Rather, Zionism was a political movement necessary to save the Jewish people from danger in the here and now.

In this respect, R. Reines’ ideology was similar to that of the founder of the Zionist Congress, Theodor Herzl. Disillusioned by the growing anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe despite the emancipation of the Jews, Herzl gathered the Congress in 1897 to obtain a homeland for the Jews that would guarantee their security. His political Zionist party and R. Reines’ Mizrachi movement were natural allies in the Zionist Congress. R. Reines even dedicated his 1902 defense of Zionism, Or Hadash al Tziyon, to Herzl.[12]

R. Reines and his allies also established Mizrachi in part to oppose the Democratic Faction, a cultural Zionist party headed by Chaim Weizmann and Asher Hirsch Ginsberg, the writer known by his pen name Ahad Ha-Am. Weizmann and Ha-Am saw Zionism first and foremost as a secular Jewish renewal movement. They wanted to appeal to discontented Jewish youth by encouraging a new cadre of intellectuals to create a synthesis between Jewish culture and Western intellectualism, and revive Hebrew language, literature, art, and music. Some even called Ha-Am the “Agnostic Rabbi.” R. Reines and the Mizrachi—at least at first—attempted to mitigate the Democratic Faction’s influence by advocating the need to keep cultural activities out of the Zionist platform, which they believed should instead focus solely on the search for a Jewish homeland.[13] The opposite was true as well: R. Reines, ever the pragmatist, kept the finances of his Yeshiva in Lida separate from the Mizrachi treasury to avoid embroiling the school in the contentious debates over Zionism’s legitimacy.[14]

One of R. Reines’ strongest affirmations of political Zionism was his support of the Uganda Proposal. Although the Zionists desired a homeland in Palestine, the Ottoman Turks, under whose jurisdiction it lay, rebuffed Herzl’s proposals. Therefore, in 1903, Herzl proposed an alternative based on an offer from the British: an autonomous Jewish state in the African nation of Uganda. Understandably, this famous proposal precipitated enormous controversy within the ranks of the Zionist Congress. Although the plan was eventually dropped after two years, R. Reines endorsed it. In a letter to Herzl he wrote:

We agreed to the African proposal because we paid attention to the needs of the nation that is dearer to us than the Land [of Israel]—and the needs of the nation that is deteriorating both physically and spiritually requires a secure refuge wherever it may be. [15]

R. Reines had a deep religious attachment to the land of Israel. Nonetheless, in light of his pragmatic approach to solving the Jewish problem of his time, his support for the Uganda Proposal is unsurprising.[16]

A practical approach to Zionism is also what, in R. Reines’ eyes, ameliorated the concern so many traditional Jews had about working together with the non-religious. He wrote in Or Hadash al Tziyon:

There are those who claim that since they [the non-observant] are involved in the Zionist movement there is reason to be concerned that it will result in ruinous breaches in religion. … I clearly demonstrated that there is no concern at all that it will affect religion because, essentially, it is an idea whose fundamental principle is to improve our physical situation and to obtain for our brothers of the house of Israel who are oppressed and pursued without respite a place of secure refuge in our Holy Land. This has nothing to do with spiritual or religious matters. [17]

These words would have been an anathema to someone like R. Kook, for whom Zionism and religion were deeply entwined.

And yet, it’s also hard to take R. Reines’ words here at face value. It is likely they are somewhat polemical, designed to assuage the concerns of the traditional community. For in fact, throughout his writings, R. Reines saw the yearning for Zion expressed by the Zionist enterprise as an expression of deep religious identification. The return of secular Jews to their Jewish national roots was, for R. Reines, the kindling of a dormant spark of spirituality latent in every Jew. As he wrote elsewhere in Or Hadash al Tziyon, “The awakening of the non-observant to the Zionist idea is not at all because of an irreligious [nature] but because of their rejection of an irreligious [lifestyle].”[18] There are echoes of R. Kook’s approach here. R. Reines even drew the title of the book, Or Hadash al Tziyon, from the fervently messianic close of the blessing recited before the Shema entreating God to shine a new light on Zion in which all will partake.[19]

In a letter to the poet Yehuda Leib Levin, R. Reines further explained that Zionism had a great ethical potential, particularly for the Jewish youth, as it would “turn their hearts away from the delights of the larger world to gaze upon the light of Judaism and to see the radiance of their nation and its splendor.”[20] Indeed, in Kol miTziyon, R. Reines proclaimed with euphoric conviction Zionism’s ability to unite the Jewish people in a national renaissance:

Zionism powerfully raises the flag of Zion and rallies around it all the dispersed and unites them as one. It calls out from the heights the name of Israel, it goes out to fight bravely against the tendency towards assimilation and self-disparagement. … It calls out to the nation to stand up for itself and not to give up anything. It brings national pride to the hearts of many. [21]

Thus, despite his pragmatic refrains, R. Reines did not see Zionism as devoid of religious value. To the contrary, it was a movement of teshuvah, of return. R. Reines the realist knew that Mizrachi must remain a political arm of the Zionist movement. Nonetheless, he still believed that at its core, Zionism was a spiritual awakening.

This more nuanced understanding of R. Reines’ Zionism suggests that R. Kook and R. Reines were not quite as far apart as some have supposed.[22] Both thinkers cast Zionism in a profoundly religious light. Both saw it as a movement of rebirth and return, a spark of holiness in an age of secularism, and as a sign of Jewish national distinctiveness and unity in a time of rampant assimilation. And with this philosophy, both built bridges to non-religious Jews, confident that the shared project of settling the Land of Israel would ultimately bring Jews together. Still, it’s crucial to note that they differed on whether the Zionist enterprise was part of the messianic redemption. R. Reines was also more political than R. Kook, and worked from within the Zionist Congress.

But, within a few short years, as Mizrachi grew and its center of gravity and leadership shifted toward Austria-Hungary and points further west, R. Reines lost a great deal of influence in the movement he had founded. And although R. Reines had initially championed keeping Zionist activities aimed at creating a Jewish homeland separate from measures to enhance religious education, Mizrachi soon went in a different direction. In 1911, the Zionist Congress decided to support non-religious Jewish cultural activities and schools. Further, Mizrachi’s new Western European leaders were particularly concerned about rising assimilation; perhaps they even saw religious education as more important than getting to Israel itself. In truth, Mizrachi members had been divided from the get-go about whether strengthening religious education should be part of the party’s Zionist platform. For all of these reasons, Mizrachi soon abandoned pure political Zionism and dedicated itself to Jewish education and religious revival.[23]

There are many reasons why R. Reines’ more pragmatic Zionism has been largely forgotten in religious circles. For one, pragmatism rarely captures the imagination as well as grand notions of religious destiny and visions of the end of days. Indeed, when the State of Israel became a reality and its miraculous existence was affirmed again and again—such as after the Six Day War and the capture of the Temple Mount—it grew harder for many religious Zionists to see anything but the stirrings of the ultimate redemption. Some, following the teaching of R. Kook’s son R. Zvi Yehuda, turned to greater activism and even to extremism to make their dreams of a greater Israel a reality. For R. Zvi Yehuda, once the redemptive process had begun, there was no turning back.[24] And to be fair, even if R. Reines would never have gone so far, he himself sometimes couched Zionism in language that bordered on the messianic.

Yet there was another twentieth-century thinker who reaffirmed R. Reines’ merger of pragmatism and religious meaning, finding a practical and spiritual call to action in the sheer improbability of the story of the State of Israel. In Kol Dodi Dofek, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik movingly argued that the fact so many displaced Holocaust survivors and other Jews had found refuge in the newly established State of Israel was one of “six knocks” of Divine Providence designed to wake up the Jewish nation to rally in support of the new country.[25] Like R. Reines, R. Soloveitchik stressed the importance of the land of Israel as a refuge for those who had nowhere else to go. Still—and again like R. Reines—R. Soloveitchik also found deep religious meaning in Israel’s creation, explaining that the imperative to support the State stemmed from a “covenant of fate” that binds all Jews, religious and secular, to work together to ensure the nation’s survival.[26] Speaking with passion and urgency, R. Soloveitchik unpacked the Song of Songs and its theme of missed opportunity: “Can we not hear, in our own concern for the peace and security of the land of Israel today, the knocking of the Beloved pleading with His love that she let him enter? . . . It is eight years now that He has been knocking. Would that we not miss the moment!”[27] To R. Soloveitchik, the State of Israel’s religious centrality was unquestionable and yet in no way dependent on whether its creation meant that the Messiah was stirring. That God had willed Israel into being was enough.[28]

As I reflect upon Israel today, I cannot help but wonder what R. Reines would think of the contemporary situation. Even 72 years after its founding, whether Israel represents the first flowering of our redemption remains elusively difficult to predict. Yet it is clear that the modern miracle of Jewish sovereignty in its ancestral homeland has birthed a political and spiritual renaissance. Jewish pride has increased worldwide, and exiles who were dispersed to all four corners of the globe have found respite, rejuvenation, and a new life in modern Israel. In these respects, Zionist efforts have exceeded R. Reines’ most ambitious predictions.

But R. Reines also stressed the importance of national unity. He saw the Zionist movement as a way to bring all Jews, religious and secular, under the common banner of renewal and return. The political divisiveness and religious polarization in our times would disappoint this visionary. I worry too that he would not countenance the more militant messianism of some contemporary religious groups, which often further divides the country.[29] In the spirit of R. Reines, can we yet learn to minimize our differences and celebrate our shared heritage, making Israel a home of peace and prosperity for all who dwell in it?

Notes

Should a lawyer defend someone in court whom he thinks is guilty?  What if the man is truly despicable (e.g., a child killer)?

Each attorney needs to make his or her own decision. This entails a moral balancing act.

On the one hand, an attorney is paid to represent the client; even a reprehensible individual has a right to legal representation. On the other hand, an attorney’s conscience may veto representing a client felt or known to be guilty.

One of the great barristers of fiction, Horace Rumpole, described his role as being like a taxi available for hire…even to passengers he did not like. Thus, he often defended criminals. But Rumpole dreaded a client who admitted guilt; even Rumpole wouldn’t be able to defend a client he absolutely knew to be guilty.

The goal of a trial is to achieve justice. If a clever attorney can gain acquittal for a criminal, this is not justice. If a client is convicted because of lack of a proper defense attorney, this also is not justice.

Before taking on a client, an attorney needs to remember the Torah’s demand: tsedek tsedek tirdof, you shall surely pursue justice. Your ultimate responsibility is not just to the client, but also to the legal system and society as a whole. And you want to be able to sleep at night! 

In looking up a pasuk online, the first result one gets is usually the King James translation or another Christian translation.  Can one use this translation if the pasuk isn't Isaiah 53:5 or something similar?

I generally prefer to provide my own translations. When I do use existing translations, I prefer the Jerusalem Bible translation of Koren Publishers, or the Bible translation of the Jewish Publication Society of America.

I think it is fine to draw on the King James translation (or other Christian translations) as long as the verses are not translated using Christological interpretations.

Rabbi Hayyim Angel has written about an interesting observation of a 12^th century sage, Rabbi Yosef ibn Aknin. In his commentary to Shir haShirim, he noted several rabbinic precedents for utilizing Christian and Muslim writings. He quoted a story related by Shemuel haNagid: R. Mazliah b. Albazek the rabbinic judge of Saklia told [Shemuel HaNagid] when he came from Baghdad…that one day in [R. Hai Gaon’s] yeshivah they studied the verse, “let my head not refuse such choice oil” (Psalms 141:5), and those present debated its meaning.  R. Hai of blessed memory told R. Mazliah to go to the Catholic Patriarch and ask him what he knew about this verse, and this upset [R. Mazliah].  When [R. Hai] saw that R. Mazliah was upset, he rebuked him: “Our saintly predecessors who are our guides solicited information on language and interpretation from many religious communities—and even of shepherds, as is well known!”

When offering translations of Biblical verses, we should draw on those sources that provide the best understanding of the text.

Is it appropriate to discuss politics at the Shabbos table?

The Shulhan Arukh (O. H. 307:1) codifies the Talmudic teaching that one’s speech on Shabbat should not be like one’s speech on week days. We ought to avoid conversations about mundane matters, but rather should speak about ideas and ideals of Torah value.

In principle, then, discussions/arguments about politics are not in the proper spirit of Shabbat. If those at the Shabbat table have strong opposing opinions, the conversation could become heated and unpleasant.

Yet, political discussions sometimes relate to moral issues that affect us and our society…and the well-being of the State of Israel. Those around the Shabbat table may be deeply concerned about these issues and feel the need to discuss them with others. As long as such conversations are “leshem Shamayim” and genuinely seek moral clarity, I believe they are within permitted limits for Shabbat conversation. But if they entail lashon hara or antagonistic comments, they should certainly be avoided—even on weekdays!

Shabbat offers us an opportunity to rise above our mundane lives at least one day a week. This does not mean that we become oblivious to our everyday concerns, only that we try to set those concerns aside to the extent possible. The goal of our Shabbat conversations should be to elevate our thoughts and our words…and to set a standard for our thoughts and words during the weekdays as well.

Should one take sides in a family fight?  If yes, under what circumstances?

The Torah presents us with a remarkable challenge: to walk in God’s ways (Devarim 28:9). Rabbi Hayyim Palachi, a sage of 19th century Izmir, pointed out that to “walk in His ways” entails positive action. It is not enough to feel righteous; you must “walk” and actively pursue opportunities to help others.

One of Hashem’s names is Shalom…peace. In seeking to walk in Hashem’s ways, it isn’t enough to have nice thoughts about peace. One must act to bring peace.

Family feuds might be on trivial matters that can be resolved with moderate goodwill and compromise. But some feuds are very intense. How can we “walk” in Hashem’s ways if we ourselves are involved in the feuds and have strong views on who is right and who is wrong?

First: don’t be party to a family dispute. Even if you feel that you are right, don’t persist in arguing. Make your case, state your concerns and then hope the others will do the right thing. If they do, great. If they don’t, let it pass. Even if you “lose” the fight, you have won by keeping your dignity and uprightness.

Second: if the feud doesn’t affect you directly, try speaking with members of both sides of the dispute. Point out ways that they can reach a compromise without engendering ill-will and permanent damage to family solidarity.

Third: remember that your first obligation is to “walk” in Hashem’s ways and be a good and upright person.

Rationalism vs. Mysticism: Schisms in Traditional Jewish Thoughts. Natan Slifkin. The Torah and Nature Foundation. 557 pps. $39.95.

Reviewed by Steve Lipman

     Rabbi Slifkin, who has earned a reputation, depending on your philosophical-theological leanings, as an annoying gadfly, in parts of the Orthodox world, or as a valuable beacon of clear thinking, in other parts, now offers a helpful guide to the widening divide between the dominant segments of Orthodox Judaism.

     The British-born rabbi, whose well-documented expertise in the relationship of natural science to Jewish thought reflects his larger perspective on fundamental Jewish beliefs, now focuses on the philosophical gap between large parts of the Orthodox community.

     "There are two fundamentally different worldviews regarding such things as epistemology (the nature of knowledge and where it comes from) and the relative roles of natural law and the supernatural. These are the rationalist and the (for want of a better word) mystical approaches," Rabbi Slifkin writes. "The rationalist approach has a rich heritage to it ... it was dominant amongst the Rishonim in many ways … but has declined over time to the point that there are great Talmudic scholars of today who do not realize that it even existed."

     The rabbi's definition of the two camps:

     "Rationalists believe that knowledge is legitimately obtained by man via his reasoning and senses, and should be preferably based upon evidence/reason rather than faith, especially for far-fetched claims. Mystics are skeptical of the ability of the human mind to arrive at truths, and prefer to base knowledge on revelation, or -- for those who are not worthy of revelation -- on faith in those who do experience revelation."

     Rabbi Slifkin notes that "mystics often demand belief in the absolute truth of every word in the Talmud, along with the Tannaic and ultimately divine origins of the Zohar, and many other texts. Rationalists, on the other hand, usually dispute the divine origins of the kabbalistic texts, and also maintain that not every part of the Talmud is divinely-inspired wisdom….The gulf between the two approaches is vast and unbridgeable.”

Rabbi Slifkin experienced hareidi rejection firsthand. About two decades ago, several of his groundbreaking books about aspects of natural science were banned by several hareidi rabbis.

     "In many Orthodox Jewish communities today," Rabbi Slifkin writes, "there is simply no place for the rationalist approach… Sages sometimes possessed incorrect beliefs about the natural world; this was widely acknowledged by the Rishonim, and yet this view gradually became less accepted to the extent that today there are some people who are in denial that any rabbinic authority ever subscribed to such a view.”

"On the other hand," he writes, "the rationalist approach is championed in Modern Orthodox communities, where it is considered to be the preferred approach."

     The accepted wisdoms in some mystical circles often bring claims that counter opinions, or citations of hazal that support them, are forgeries, fabrications, the Orthodox form of "fake news." Instead of the honored "70 Faces of Torah," just a single one.

     Often citing the opinions of Maimonides, a pre-eminent advocate of the rationalist path, Rabbi Slifkin mentions "the position of Rambam and many others that the Sages of the Talmud were not infallible in matters of science," whereas, in many hareidi circles,"great Torah scholars are presumed to know much more than merely the texts they have studied."

     Included in Rabbi Slifkin's wide swath of Jewish principles upon which rationalists and mystics part company are gematria, netilat yedayim, the size of a kezayit, prayer and Kaddish, Torah study, the plagues of Egypt, miracles and "wonder" rabbis, angels and demons, the inherent sanctity of the land of Israel and the Jewish people and the Hebrew language, the function of mitzvot, segulot and mezuzot, sun's path at night, and infallibility of the Zohar and aggadata…in other words, nearly everything of a significant hashkafic and halakhic basis in which a believing Jew believes.

A representative sampling of the rabbi's thoughts:

* on yeridat hadorot, which "is often assumed today to be axiomatic and fundamental to Judaism, and supported by the full gamut of classical sources. In fact, the Talmud is ambivalent: there are a number of sources which indicate that certain earlier generations were superior, but there are also a number of sources which state that certain later generations were equal or ever superior."

* on Daat Torah, the notion "that the ultimate guidance on all areas of life -- even social and political decisions with no obvious connections to Torah. The contemporary concept of 'Daat Torah' is very different from traditional ideas about the wisdom and authority of rabbis. There are numerous historical forces involved in the evolution of the contemporary notion of Daat Torah ... while it is a source of wisdom, supplementary knowledge and experience is also useful."

* on ayin hara (the "evil eye."): "In Orthodox circles today, it is widely believed that a 'rational' view of ayin hara is that it means stirring up Divine judgment of others via jealousy, whereas a mystical, non-scientific view is that it involves some form of energy being emitted from the eye."

     Though Rabbi Slifkin makes clear where his sympathies lie, he buttresses his opinions with a wealth of documentation that makes his book weighty in the literal and figurative sense; he express understanding of mystical fears, and does not overtly attack mystical sensibilities;" it is ... important," he writes, "not to undermine treasured beliefs of the community ... each society will have its own approach to which beliefs are a treasured component of their identity….

     The rationalist approach is a Pandora's Box, which can potentially cause more problems than it solves, and which, on a communal level, demonstrates a tendency to weaken zealous passion for Torah observance and sacrifice…The leaders of the hareidi community have decided that, regardless of how many Rishonim and Aharonim espoused the rationalist approach, they do not want it legitimized in their community."

     As Rabbi Slifkin points out, the current battle between forces of rationalism and mysticism are an outgrowth of the trenchant divide between the once-emergent, then-minority hasidic movement and the entrenched and dominant "Litvak" approach to Jewish life and Torah learning, whose austere expression of fealty to Judaism fostered the growth of the more-emotional, less-text-oriented hasidic movement. The latter, of course, emphasized joy in daily life and allegiance to wonder-performing rabbis, rather than a cold connection to strict halakha.

     Philosophically, the rabbi argues, the hasidim won. Their mystical hashkafa is unquestionably and unquestioningly taught now in most hareidi yeshivot, even the proudly Litvish, yeshivish, mitnagdish, "black hat" ones. Even worse, Rabbi Slifkin contends, alternate interpretations of acceptable norms of Jewish behavior or of Jewish belief are rarely taught, suggesting that only one approach exists.

     The rabbi's book, though encyclopedic in its scope, noticeably omits such recent, and current, social issues as abortion, feminism, and approaches to homosexuality. Also absent are references to the year-long divide over reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic; opposition to such measures as protective masks, vaccines and social distancing after the book's writing; Rabbi Slifkin sheds light on the thinking of largely hareidi (i.e., mystical) opponents of life-saving medical practices, whose behavior and high death rate (the worst example were the tragic deaths at the Lag B'Omer celebration at Meron) has given the frum community a collective black eye.

     The book offers limited concrete advice on how to reverse the anti-intellectual trend, but offers a necessary insight into why it is taking place. And he puts the topic into the context of Orthodox thought, which traditionally has not mandated -- beyond Rambam's widely accepted Thirteen Principles -- required beliefs. "Scripture does not list required beliefs ... there is no Code of Beliefs, no Ten Commandments of Belief. …Building up the community does not refer to matters of belief, but rather to practical acts -- the study of Torah, the fulfillment of mitzvot, the loyalty to the halakhic community. Being a Jew is primarily about how one lives, not how one thinks. And that, in turn, is why rationalists and mystics can co-exist….The goal of this book is not to delegitimize the mystical approach ... [it] seeks to give voice to the rationalist approach.”

     Rabbi Slifkin's book is likely to earn wide opprobrium, if not an outright ban, in parts of the hareidi community. But that will be familiar territory for him.

This week, Rabbanit Shira Marili Mirvis made history as the first-ever Israeli woman appointed to be the sole rabbinic leader of an Orthodox synagogue, the Shirat Hatamar congregation in Efrat. I talked to Shira about her fascinating journey to this groundbreaking milestone.

From her earliest childhood years growing up in Jerusalem, Shira fell in love with Torah study. She loved the “sacred books” of Judaism, particularly the Talmud and rabbinic commentaries. These books were traditionally the domain of boys and men, but Shira’s father Yitzhak, a deeply pious Moroccan Jew, always encouraged her to study them.

In fact, he insisted she buy as many sacred books as her heart desired. “Kids today walk around with their parent’s credit cards, but that wasn’t the norm when I was growing up,” said Shira. “Yet I actually had my father’s credit card, not to go shopping in the mall, but in case I chanced upon another sacred book [that] I wanted… My father wanted to be sure that I would never be deprived of buying books that would help advance my knowledge and love of Torah.” Given this week’s announcement, Yitzhak’s  investment in Shira’s book-buying clearly paid off.

In between the celebrations and press interviews surrounding the exciting news of her appointment, Shira took the time to answer my questions, and despite not being with her in person, I could feel the emotions coming through the telephone.

DB: What was it like growing up in Jerusalem as a young girl who loved studying Talmud?

SM: I grew up in a religious home in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem. Both my parents were born and raised in Morocco, and our home was deeply entrenched in Moroccan-Sephardic traditions. Those traditions included a love for Torah and a deep respect for our Torah sages. We prayed in the synagogue of Hakham Mordechai Eliyahu, who became the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel. My love for Torah study was nurtured in my family from childhood.

DB: So your eventual decision to enroll in the five-year Lindenbaum Women’s Program in Talmud and Halakha was not viewed in your family as a rebellion from your traditionally religious Sephardic-Moroccan upbringing?

SM: Quite the contrary. My decision to pursue advanced Talmud study at Lindenbaum is actually a result of my Sephardic-Moroccan upbringing. The love of Torah study was a supreme value in our home, and my decision to study Talmud at the highest level was met with great enthusiasm by both of my parents. In fact, admission to the Lindenbaum program is quite competitive, and the acceptance process lasted one year. I don’t know if I would ever have made it through that year without the constant positive encouragement from my father and mother.

DB: What was your parents’ reaction when you were accepted to the program?

SM: They were both thrilled! Especially as a woman who would now be engaged in the intense study of Talmud and Halakha (Jewish Law), they saw me as a link in the chain of continuity with my ancestors. They viewed it as a privilege that their daughter would take the legacy of the pious Moroccan-Sephardic women of previous generations to the next level.

DB: As you are now about to complete this program, how does your father feel as the one who helped fund your love of sacred books from childhood?

SM: Unfortunately, my father passed away after my first year at Lindenbaum. Throughout that first year in this demanding program, my father was my greatest source of encouragement. He was constantly telling me to study, study and study some more and that whatever would come of it, he was sure I would be able to do great things to advance Torah and Judaism for the Jewish people.

Symbolically… the last Jewish holiday we spent together was Shavuot, the holiday when we celebrate receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. My father died the day after Shavuot, and his words of encouragement accompany me and inspire me to this day.

DB: Your historic appointment as Israel’s first ever female rabbinic leader of an Orthodox synagogue is both exciting and emotional. How did all of this come about?

SM: The synagogue in Efrat where my family prays — Shirat Hatamar — is a relatively new community. For the past few years, perhaps because I was studying at Lindenbaum, people in our synagogue started approaching me with serious halakhic questions… I was also asked by the community to deliver sermons on Shabbat. All of this was unofficial, and I was doing it as an individual, not in any official capacity.

DB: So how did it now become official?

SM: When Shirat Hatamar was established, we adopted Rabbi Shlomo Riskin as our official halakhic advisor and community mentor. Rabbi Riskin is the founder of the Or Torah Stone Institutions, which includes the Lindenbaum Women’s Talmud & Halakha program where I studied these past five years. Rabbi Riskin has done tremendous work in advancing women’s Torah study and leadership, turning the Lindenbaum program into the women’s equivalent of what men study here in Israel for rabbinic ordination from Israel’s Chief Rabbinate.

Knowing that I was functioning as my synagogue’s halakhic authority for the past few years, Rabbi Riskin approached the community a few months ago and said it’s time to make it official, so the process began… The community engaged in an exploratory process, which included many meetings on Zoom and discussions via WhatsApp chat groups. I stepped away from this process to allow the community to make this decision without influencing them. This past week they felt ready to take a vote, and the results were that 83% of the community voted in favor of appointing me as the rabbinic leader of the community.

DB: So, is your title the “rabbi” of the synagogue?

SM: When people address me in an official title, I go by “Rabbanit Shira.” My title in the synagogue is not “Rabbi” or “Rabbanit” but Manhiga Ruchanit Hilkhatit [“Spiritual and Halakhic Leader”].

DB: Does the difference in title alter in anyway your “rabbinic duties”?

SM: My duties in the synagogue are to serve as the sole halakhic authority for our community, teach Torah and rule in halakhic matters, which [were] always the traditional [duties] of a rabbi in halakhic Orthodox communities. I will also counsel families and individuals, deliver sermons and teach Torah classes for our community. There are no other rabbis serving in our synagogue; I will be the sole “rabbinic voice” and “spiritual leader” in all religious matters.

DB: How did your mother react to your historic appointment?

SM: My mother had a challenging year, as she unfortunately was sick with COVID-19. Thank God she is fully recovered and doing well, and upon hearing the news of my appointment, she was beaming with pride and joy. Given her health challenges this past year, she was particularly emotional and thankful to see this day in her daughter’s life. She is very supportive of what I am doing.

DB: Ten years ago, you and your husband Shlomo and your kids came to Los Angeles, where you served as emissaries (shlichim) for the Bnei Akiva Religious Zionist Youth Movement for two years. Did your time in the Los Angeles community have any impact on your journey?

SM: The two years we spent in Los Angeles had a very deep impact on my life. In Israel, synagogues are often just a place to pray. In Los Angeles, I learned how much more a synagogue can be, as I was both witness to and personal beneficiary of the tremendous support system that the synagogue community provides to one another.

We prayed in Beth Jacob, and I remember how the community came together to celebrate joyous occasions and how they supported one another during times of illness or mourning. When my family needed support during some challenging times, I still have vivid memories of every delicious meal lovingly provided to my family from the famous “community meal trains.”

Beth Jacob and the Los Angeles Jewish community exposed me to the power of community life. From the welcoming of guests to teaching us how to shop at Ralphs on Pico, the acts of loving kindness in that community were amazing.

DB: Did you find any support as a woman who loves to study and teach Talmud in the Los Angeles Orthodox community?

SM: I will always have gratitude to Beth Jacob for giving me the opportunity to teach Torah in the synagogue. Their openness helped open this path for me, and I am eternally grateful for that. Additionally, my day job in Los Angeles was as a Torah Studies teacher to Middle School girls at the Maimonides School. That teaching experience will remain with me forever, and the girls I taught were an inspiration to me. The two years we spent in LA were two of the most special years in my life, and everything I did and learned there will most definitely serve me in this position I now officially assume.

DB: As you officially assume this historic position, do you feel like a representative for the women of your generation?

SM: I don’t consider myself a representative of any movement or trend, and I am not waving any particular ideological banner as I assume this position. If God gave me the privilege to study and teach Torah to a new generation of students and congregants, it is only by the merit of the righteous and pious women of previous generations, especially those from my Sephardic-Moroccan ancestry. If I represent anyone at all, it is the women who studied Torah with deep faith and piety, raised their families with love and served their communities.

While I recognize the historic significance of my new title and position, I don’t think the essence of what I am doing in any way differs from the women of my ancestry. I’m doing what they did, only in a different capacity [and] in a modern context and setting. I hope to be blessed with the same level of faith and spiritual strength that they had.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Postscript

During my recent three-month stay in Israel, I was privileged to get to know Rabbanit Shira. In one of our conversations, I asked her if she had any particular women from the past that she considered a role model for her own life? “Rabbanit Farha Sasson,” she said. Farha Sassoon (1859-1936) was a Sephardic Iraqi woman who loved to study Talmud and Halakha. She was widely known in her circles as a female Torah scholar and extensively corresponded with some of the most prominent rabbis of her day on Halachic subjects. With this week’s historic news, Rabbanit Shira Marili Mirvis now continues Rabbanit Sassoon’s legacy.

The requirement that children must follow the minhagim of their father has two well-established exceptions. First, when one moves permanently from one location to another he or she takes on all traditions of his new community, lest there be dissension in the community. Second, when a woman marries, she takes on the minhagim of her husband. Indeed, the second exception is often seen as an application of the first: a woman “moves” from her father’s home to that of her husband’s upon marrying and therefore assumes the latter’s traditions, whether more lenient or stringent than those of the former.[1]

            In one of his responsa,[2] Rabbi Haim David Halevy offers a nuanced understanding of this requirement for an inter-communal “mixed marriage.” Rabbi Halevy (1923–1998) was Chief Rabbi of Rishon leTzion from 1951 to 1973, and then Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv from 1973 until his death. His set of responsa Aseh Lekha Rav covers a wide range of topics with a display of scholarship, a respect for tradition, and an awareness of new cultural challenges.[3] He called for creativity in halakha to solve newly-confronted problems, insisting that anyone who is simply bound to the written positions of previous generations is a “Karaite halakhist” who is attached only to the written letter.[4]

            Rabbi Halevy takes up the case of a secular Ashkenazic man who had married a religious Sephardic woman and had agreed that her family’s traditions be those of their new household. After some time, he became observant and wanted to return to his Ashkenazic roots. The question was whether he may impose his Ashkenazic traditions on his wife and children. In responding, Rabbi Halevy explains how an individual moving into a monolithic community with minhagim different from his own differs from a woman marrying a man with different minhagim. In the first case, the community must maintain its monolithic character; the newcomer, therefore, must adapt completely to the customs of the community. But the underpinning of the rule in an inter-communal marriage is to maintain shelom bayit; therefore, the wife has no need to change her minhag if her actions do not interfere with the family dynamics. Thus, for example, there is no reason for her to change the nusah of the prayers she has been used to saying, or for an Ashkenazic wife of a Sephardic husband to eat rice on Passover as long as she prepares her husband’s meals with rice. In this case at hand, he concludes, the husband may require that his children now adopt his Ashkenazic traditions with him, but may require such a shift for his wife only in those cases that interfere with family harmony.[5]

            In an unpublished later responsum[6] Rabbi Halevy addresses a follow-up question that further nuances his approach: What if after becoming religious, the husband prefers to remain with the Sephardic traditions of his current household? Rabbi Halevy sees no obligation (“vadai she-ein shum hovah”) for him or his children to return to his roots. At first glance, these two responsa seem contradictory. If it is an obligation to return to his Ashkenazic roots that empowers the husband to turn his family’s minhagim upside down, why is the husband in the second case permitted to remain with Sephardic customs? It is not due to the fact that he was not required to adopt the minhagim of his father unless he had personally observed them as an adult. That applies only to family minhagim and not communal customs, which are binding for future generations.[7]

For Rabbi Halevy, both decisions follow naturally from issues of shelom bayit. To understand that, we should appreciate that the concept of moving to a new community has changed in our modern world. Originally, the notions of place and community were generally interchangeable. One’s community was where one lived. Now our sense of community is pretty much divorced from physical locale. There is no “minhag New York” to adopt on moving into New York City; too many competing minhagim coexist in the city. But there is surely a minhag Habad, for example, to be adopted when marrying into a Habad family, whether one lives in Crown Heights or some far-flung location in which the Habad emissaries live. Each Ashkenazic husband in our responsa had “moved” into a Sephardic “place.” The second did it permanently; the first decided to “return home.”

Rather than seeing it as a prescribed ideal, the notion of the wife “moving” to the “place” of the husband may be viewed as a technique for maintaining shelom bayit. It would be a mistake to think that “ideal” families have no disagreements; divergence of opinions is unavoidable. Shelom bayit does not mean always avoiding arguments; it means being able to resolve them and not allowing them to fester. A well-established and agreed-upon plan known to the parties before the marriage helps bring shelom bayit. When couples from different locations are to marry, the Shulhan Arukh[8] sets out the circumstances under which the husband can compel his wife to move to his community. But these rules surely do not prevent the couple from deciding between themselves where they choose to reside, even if it be the husband who moves and adopts the different minhagim of his new community.

 It would be interesting to debate the underlying rationale for the rule that the wife should defer to her husband, be it philosophic, sociological, or whatever. It should not be understood as fulfilling God’s declaration to Eve that “[your husband] will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). That statement is not an obligation, says Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein:

For example, at the beginning of the same verse it is said to Eve, “In pain shall you bear children.” No one questions a woman's right to facilitate limiting her suffering when giving birth, as in taking prenatal courses, an epidural or general anesthesia. We do not encounter a religious moral obligation to give birth in pain to one who is not so interested. Is that to be said in relation to the rest said there?  Does the verse only describes a natural reality with which one may contend, or is any variation from the verse’s description in conflict with God’s will?

This question stands on the interpretive and ideological level. In relation to this specific issue, I follow the Rambam and posit that marriages are partnerships without mixing in concepts of ruler and ruled, ideas that are not at all relevant to our world. In the view of Hazal, the household is built on the husband honoring his wife as himself.[9]

            Seeing a marriage as a partnership of equals opens up another dimension in the discussion of family minhag. Traditionally, marriage has been generally viewed as the woman leaving her parental community and entering that of her husband. But there is another perspective, one described by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik:

The Torah has defined the central commitment of the marital community in an unequivocal manner. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh" (Gen. 2: 24). There is an equation here. The marital community replaces the parental community. Until one’s marriage, the young man or woman belonged to a parental community consisting of three personae: the husband, wife, and child. On the day of their marriage they leave the community into which they were cast by the Almighty and substitute for it a marital community which they enter voluntarily, by free choice.[10]

Marriage is not just a successful partnership, but an existential community. Adam and Eve met and a new metaphysical community, not just a successful partnership, was born.[11]

            When a new community is formed from two groups, its minhagim follow those of the majority group. If we see a marriage as the formation of a community in which neither member is dominant, we might well consider the position of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein that when two equal groups form a community, they may decide to adopt the lenient position on any issue, making it now permissible to all. Since on one issue one community might be lenient and on another issue stringent, the result may well be that the minhag created of the new community will not be identical to either half.[12] Those, then, who see a marriage as a new community formed by two equal components might well create a family minhag that will be an amalgam of the respective minhagim of the husband and wife. (This is not to suggest that Rav Moshe himself feels that a marriage is a new community formed from two equal components, but rather suggests how his principle applies for those who do.)

Rabbi Nachum Eliezer Rabinovitch, late Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Birkat Moshe in Israel,[13] approaches the issue of competing minhagim in new yishuvim (settlements) in Israel from the perspective of this being an age of Kibbutz Galuyot (Ingathering of the Exiles).[14]  He insists that all community members should feel that their minhagim are valued, viewing all as equal in this respect. In the area of public prayer, the shaliah tsibbur should set the nusah for each service. On the Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur, where Ashkenazic and Sephardic services involve significantly different piyutim and melodies, the community should create an amalgamated nusah in which all community members’ traditions are recognized. Halakhic rulings of the yishuv’s rabbi should not decide one way for Ashkenazim and another for Sephardim. The popular notion that Sephardim always follow the Bet Yosef and Ashkenazim the Rama is not halakhically binding according to Rabbi Rabinovitch. The Shulhan Arukh was not accepted as a stand-alone authority, but rather an authority together with its commentaries. Each issue should be investigated independently and thoroughly by the contemporary posek, and the same ruling should apply to all.

R. Rabinovitch concedes that many rabbis require the wife to accept the husband’s minhagim in all matters. But, he says, in this period of Kibbutz Galuyot a wife should retain her minhagim that do not impact on her husband (like nusah tefilah), “but even with regard to minhagim that have impact on her husband, the two of them may agree on a unified minhag as they wish.”[15]

These decisions create a family minhag that obligates their children, until they might move to a different community when they in turn marry.

Notes

You shall do what is right and good in the eyes of the Lord.

—Deut. 6:18

A number of years ago I delivered a lecture in an Orthodox synagogue that I carefully titled, “The Ethics of Receiving but Not Donating Organs.” Before the presentation a goodly number of interested listeners approached me in protest under the mistaken assumption that I deemed this practice to be moral. Their collective declaration to me was, “You must be joking. It is ridiculous to think that this could be ethical.” These people were neither philosophers, nor ethicists, nor experts in any field of abstruse logic, just people with healthy moral instincts.

The lecture came on the heels of a study on the halakhic definition of death published by the Rabbinical Council of America in June 2010.[1] The subject is enormously important because it has, quite literally, life and death consequences. The possibility of successfully transplanting hearts and lungs depends upon the transplant taking place prior to cardiac cessation, and thus saving a recipient’s life depends on the removal of the brain-dead donor’s vital organ while his/her heart is still beating aided by artificial means. While not intended as a formal legal ruling (pesak halakha), the RCA analysis relied on halakhic authorities who employed technical halakhic reasoning in their arguments. No mere theoretical study, the report was intended to influence practicing Orthodox rabbis whose congregants seek guidance from them regarding the halakhic (im)permissibility of donating and receiving transplanted organs.

The RCA study rejected clinically certified brain death as a sufficient condition for halakhic death, leading to the conclusion that extracting a heart of a brain-dead person for the purpose of transplantation constitutes illicit “bloodshed” against the donor. It therefore ruled that a person (or his family) is forbidden to donate such a vital organ. Yet while forbidding donation, the study also concluded that it is permissible to be the recipient of a donated heart. In other words, it ruled that it is right to benefit from another’s benevolence but wrong to provide that same benefit to others, that one may be a taker from others, but not a giver to others.[2]

The audience at the lecture was not alone in their moral judgment: Permitting a person to be a recipient of a vital organ transplant but forbidding him to be a donor (hereafter “RBND”) is widely considered a violation of ethical principles by transplant specialists, the broader medical community, philosophers, professional ethicists, the European Network of Organ Sharing, and nearly all people committed to fairness and equality. Perhaps because of the widespread criticism of RBND, the RCA has not given much prominence to the report after its release, although it is not known if the RCA posekim who supported RBND have since altered their halakhic conclusions in any way.

            The RCA study provided a prime example of halakhic reasoning that appears to be in deep tension with ethical standards and reasoning.[3] There are other halakhic positions that also display this tension, such as the obligation to return the lost object of a Jew but not of a Gentile, the principle of saving a Jewish life on Shabbat but not a Gentile life, the permission to target civilians in war, and the advocacy of harmful therapy for homosexual persons, to name but some. I will address each of these later in this analysis. Should we dismiss as mere chimeras the moral qualms of halakhic Jews regarding these halakhot, or should we better regard this disquiet as real, considering it a call to further religious thinking and action?

I do not wish to explore whether these problematic halakhot are correct qua halakha, but why these halakhic positions pose ethical problems. More generally, I wish to ask, “What values and principles must be part of halakhic reasoning to render it moral?”

The Conceptual Independence of Halakha and Ethics

There is an argument that must be addressed before identifying which values and principles make halakhic arguments moral. Some Jews maintain that halakha defines correct morality (the stronger thesis), while others insist that halakhic decisions by themselves are sufficient grounds for moral correctness (the weaker thesis). According to each of these theses it is impossible for Jewish law and morality to conflict with each other, and one need not consult anything outside of halakha to ensure an ethical conclusion. For these Jews, engaging in such extra-legal inquiry may be not merely superfluous, but perhaps even be dangerous and indicative of flagging religious conviction.

While these dogmatic positions are popular among some Orthodox Jews today, in fact they are new ideas in rabbinic thought[4] that are easily disproven both by logical argument and by rabbinic tradition itself. To my knowledge, no talmudic sage or medieval halakhic authority maintained either of these positions. To the contrary, we shall see that many were convinced of their opposites.

All of us make ethical judgments and use terms like “good” and “right.” But what do we mean by these terms? The twentieth-century British philosopher G. E. Moore devised an elegant proof to show that however we attempt to define “good” by identifying it with any non-moral idea or object, we fail.[5] If we define “good” as some particular natural entity such as pleasure or law (for the sake of discussion let’s call it X), we can always ask the question, “This is X, but is it good?” Even if the answer to the question is yes, the question remains coherent and “open,” i.e., it is at least possible to conceive of the answer being no. This is unlike asking, “He is a bachelor, but is he unmarried?” where it is impossible to think that the answer is no when we understand the meaning of the terms used in the question. The openness of the question about goodness indicates that X is not analytically identical with good. In the halakhic context we can ask, “This action is required by halakha, but is it ethically good? Is it morally right? Is it just?”[6] These questions are non-tautologous and remain open, which indicates that halakha is not identical with our notions of good or right, and hence cannot accurately define moral goodness and ethical rightness.

Moreover, people with no knowledge of halakha or even awareness of the existence of halakha make moral arguments and form moral judgments. If halakha indeed defined morality we would never be able to agree or even disagree about ethical issues with these non-halakhic people, for we would be talking about completely different ideas in our discussions with each other. I could not claim that I am correct in contending that abortion is morally wrong and another is incorrect in his belief that abortion is morally right, since we would not at all have in mind the same thing when we use the term “moral.” Yet obviously we do engage in real moral discussion, agreement, and disagreement with people who have no idea of halakha.

Rabbinic tradition agrees fully with this conceptual independence of halakha and ethics. According to the Sages of the talmudic era (Hazal), “Civility [i.e., patterns of correct behavior] preceded the Torah itself” (“Derekh erets kadmah l’Torah”), which clearly implies that standards for correct behavior existed independently of the formal Torah. Hazal and later authorities go still further: They point to situations where formal halakha not only fails to define ethical action, it falls short of correct moral standards. The classic concept of “lifnim meshurat haDin” (going beyond the strict halakha) illustrates just that truth. Consider the important statement in Babylonian Talmud, Baba Metsi'a 30b:

R. Yohanan said, “Jerusalem was destroyed only because [Jews] judged according to the law (din) of the Torah.” [But] should they have judged according to the laws of tyranny? [No.] Rather say, “They insisted on the law of the Torah and did not act above and beyond the strict requirement of the law (lifnim mishurat haDin).”

            Rabbinic tradition understands the destruction of Jerusalem as the divine punishment for the Jewish people’s violation of its sacred covenant with God. According to R. Yohanan, this violation existed at the very same time that Jews were observing formal halakha impeccably. (“danu bah din Torah”) Yet God called the Jewish people to account and imposed on them the harshest punishment known in Jewish history. Thus according to R. Yohanan, Jews were morally culpable even though they had no legal liability. While there are other talmudic opinions about the cause of the Temple’s destruction, no talmudic opinion challenges the intelligibility of the category of lifnim mishurat haDin or the conceptual presuppositions of Rabbi Yohanan’s statement, i.e., that the highest Torah standards are beyond the boundaries of strict halakha. This is impossible if halakha defines or satisfies all moral requirements. Nor can the concept of lifnim meshurat haDin be understood as formal din without entailing infinite regress and incoherence.

Another passage in the Palestinian Talmud (Baba Metsi'a 2:5; 8c) illustrates even more graphically the ethically unsatisfactory nature of some halakhic rules:

Shimon ben Shetach was in the flax trade. One day his students said to him, “We will buy you a donkey so you won’t have to work so hard.” They bought a donkey for him from a non-Jewish trader, and it happened that a precious gem was hanging from its neck.

The students came to him and said, “From now on, you won’t have to work anymore!” He replied, “Why not?”

They explained, “We bought you a donkey from a Gentile trader, and we found a precious gem hanging from its neck.”

R. Shimon said, “And did its owner know (about the gem)?”

“No,” they replied.

He then said, “Go and return it.”

But his students argued, “Is it not permitted to keep a lost article of an idolater?”

Shimon ben Shetach answered them: “Do you think that Shimon ben Shetach is a barbarian?”

Note that there is no dispute about the halakhic requirements in this case. It is clear that halakha allows Shimon ben Shetach to keep the jewel. Yet he knew that confining his behavior to the halakhic minimum was morally wrong, that as a moral agent he was required to “go beyond the strict line of the law.” He understood the intrinsic value of doing what was ethically right independent of the halakhic standard. His use of the term “barbarian” is shocking, indicating Rabbi Shimon’s moral outrage—and it is important to note that this outrage stands independent of his motive to bring honor to the God of Israel by dint of his exemplary moral behavior.

The talmudic sages were not the only authorities who understood the difference between halakhic requirements and moral norms; medieval rabbinic authorities did also. Nahmanides claimed that a person can be a “scoundrel within the bounds of Torah law,” and therefore there is an independent religious obligation to “do what is right and good” in our interactions with other people, an obligation that requires us to sometimes desist from what is halakhically permitted. Nahmanides understood that there is conceptual continuity between the mitzvah of being holy and living the ethically good life.[7] And no one less than the greatest halakhic authority in the history of the Jewish people, Maimonides, insisted that hewing exclusively to the letter of the halakha can produce behavior that is cruel and that befits only “idolators,” not pious Jews. Rambam stressed that while halakha points in one direction, good Jews must sometimes behave differently.[8] He never saw halakha as more than a floor on which to build a more robust Jewish ethic.[9]

            Modern halakhic authorities also admit that halakha is sometimes insufficient to satisfy the demands of morality. Exclaimed Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, “Who has not found that the fulfillment of explicit halakhic duty could fall well short of exhausting clearly felt moral responsibility? …the full discharge of one’s formal duty as defined by din often appears palpably insufficient.”[10]

            It is clear, then, that morality and the ideas of what is good, right and just extend beyond halakha, even if halakhic behavior and moral behavior frequently overlap.

            Some halakhic authorities contend that the methods of halakhic argumentation and intrinsic halakhic norms are logically independent from the methods of correct moral reasoning and fundamental ethical concepts. The total independence of halakhic axioms, rules of inference, values and method was stressed by Lithuanian analytic talmudic scholars, and it was best described by the Brisker school of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose leading proponents were Rabbi Hayyim Soloveitchik and his grandson, Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Both fiercely insisted on the autonomy and the internal coherence of halakhic thinking. For them halakha was a rigorous “closed” logical system: “To whom may he [the halakhic man] be compared? To a mathematician,” proudly announced the grandson Rav Soloveitchik. In the Brisker understanding, halakha is an ideal system analogous to pure mathematical systems, which represent the archetypes of objective rational inquiry. Halakha is a science that molds and imposes interpretations on empirical reality, rather than being influenced by it.[11] In other words, ideal halakha is abstracted from the flux of human experience—the very meaning of the term “apriori,” which Rav Soloveitchik was so fond of using when describing halakha.

            As an independent and autonomous system, halakha is value-neutral, similar to mathematics, whose sole methodological guides are consistency, coherence, and simplicity. Like differential equations, it is largely removed from human emotions, sensibilities, and desires. And like the autonomous sciences, halakhic logic is amoral—sometimes yielding ethically neutral conclusions (as in ritual law), sometimes yielding conclusions coincident with ethical reasoning, and sometimes yielding rulings contrary to ethical values, rules, and judgments. This is why halakhic geniuses can sometimes arrive at rulings like RBND and other morally problematic conclusions. In Rav Soloveitchik’s words, “the sole authority [of halakha] is logic,”[12] and thus some halakhists simply go wherever their value-neutral logic takes them. This is not to imply that Rav Soloveitchik himself was deaf to the call of ethical values. He most certainly was not.[13]

The Fundamentals of Jewish Ethics

What so disturbed R. Yohanan, Shimon ben Shetach, Ramban, Rambam, and Rav Aharon Lichtenstein that they insisted that religious Jews act beyond the strict letter of halakha—that they behave “lifnim meshurat haDin”? There are two concepts pervading biblical, talmudic, and rabbinic literature that explain the judgments of these rabbinic authorities and so many other halakhic thinkers: justice (tsedek) and compassion (rahamim/hesed).[14] Both are essential to the Torah, cutting to the core of proper Jewish behavior and the formation of the ideal religious Jewish personality.[15]

In Deut. 6:18, the Torah implores Jews to strive after these generic values. They also appear explicitly and implicitly in other forms throughout the Torah, as well as in derivative ethical concepts in the Torah and in rabbinic writings.

The fundamental imperative for Jews to legislate objectively and follow the requirements of justice appears explicitly in Deut. 1:16–17 and Deut. 16:18–20:

…You shall decide justly between an (Israelite) man and his fellow Israelite and between an Israelite and a stranger. You shall not take note of the individual in judgment; (rather) you shall hear a small person the same as you do a great person.

Judges and officers shall you appoint in all your gates, which the Lord your God gives you, throughout your tribes; and they shall judge the people with just judgment. You shall not pervert judgment; you shall not take note of persons, nor take a bribe; for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise, and perverts the words of the righteous. Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live, and inherit the land which the Lord your God gives you. 

Although these imperatives appear in a judicial context, the value of justice for general Jewish behavior is undeniable. Note here the focus on fairness in administering justice, i.e., treating everyone equally and not favoring one person over another.

            Justice as fairness is also an implicit value underlying Lev. 19:18: “You shall love your peer as yourself: I am the Lord.” According to Abraham Ibn Ezra,[16] this equality applies to every human person because all persons are created the same way by God. This is also true of the thrust of Hillel’s talmudic negative formulation of this verse[17] for correct Jewish behavior, i.e., “if you do not want others to do a specific act toward you, you ought not to do it towards others.”

As Ibn Ezra understood, justice and the Jewish moral imperative to act with justice flow directly from two central axioms of Jewish theology: First, that all persons are created in the Image of God (tselem Elokim), and derivatively that human beings are capable—nay obligated—to imitate the Divine (v’halakhta b’derachav, or Imitatio Dei). Because God is exalted, dignified, and worthy of respect, so too all persons endowed with the Divine Image are owed intrinsic dignity and respect. As Rav Soloveitchik incisively observed, respect for every human being (kavod haBeriyot) is merely the rabbinic expression of the Bible’s concept of tselem Elokim.[18] Just as God possesses intrinsic sanctity, so must we treat His children as creatures with intrinsic value, not to be used solely as a means to our own ends or exploited for utilitarian purposes. As such, tselem Elokim is the theological version of the basic principle of rational humanistic ethics.[19]

This application of justice also underlies the talmudic statement, “The entire Torah is for the sake of peace” (BT, Gittin 59b). Peace, i.e., social order, stability, diminution of strife, is a substantive value that every person naturally pursues for himself. If so, each of us has a moral obligation to promote it in the lives of all others. The same logic obtains regarding the Torah value of darkhei noam—ways of pleasantness. If one wishes to pursue a pleasant life in which he or she can flourish, the logic of justice implies that one must extend that opportunity to others and allow them to flourish.

            The second moral pillar, compassion, plays an essential role in the Jewish understanding of God. Hessed is the primary attribute of God and hence is central to our own human religious behavior:

R. Hama son of R. Hanina further said: What is the meaning of the text: Ye shall walk after the Lord your God? Is it possible, then, for a human being to walk after the Shekhinah?...But [the meaning is] to walk after the attributes of the Holy One, blesed be He. As He clothed the naked….so you must clothe the naked. The Holy One, blessed be He, visited the sick…so you shall also visit the sick. The Holy One, blessed be He, comforted mourners…so you shall also comfort mourners. The Holy one, blessed be He, buried the dead…so you must also bury the dead. (BT Sotah 14a)

For Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler also, hessed is a primary attribute of God, and therefore a religious imperative for humans:

The power of giving is a Divine power, one of the traits of the Creator of all things, may He be blessed, Who shows compassion, is beneficent and gives, without receiving anything in exchange.… In this way, God made man, as it is written: “God made humankind in His own image,” so that humans would be able to show compassion, be beneficent, and give.[20]

And empathy toward others is primary in the Torah’s understanding of the covenant and correct Jewish behavior:

You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. (Ex. 23:9)

As Nahmanides explained this verse,

[The Torah] added this reason: For you know what it feels like to be a stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. That is to say, you know that every stranger feels depressed, and is always sighing and crying, and his eyes are always directed toward God, therefore He will have mercy upon him even as He showed mercy to you

The Talmud beautifully illustrates the necessity for empathy and moral imagination when deciding how to treat others:

There were captive women who were brought to Neharde’a by their captors so that the local residents would redeem them [with ransom money]. Shmuel’s father posted guards with them to ensure that they would not enter into seclusion with Gentiles [and be sexually defiled]. Shmuel said to him: Until now who guarded them? If there is concern about their status, it should be with regard to the possibility that they engaged in intercourse while in captivity before they were brought to Neharde’a. He [the father of Shmuel] said to Shmuel: If they were your daughters, would you treat them with such contempt? They are no longer captives and deserve to be treated like any Jewish woman of unflawed lineage. (BT Ketubot 23a)

Shmuel’s father insisted that his son rule with compassion. He brings home his point with the stinging rhetorical question demanding that Shmuel put himself in the position of the captives’ father, i.e., to identify with the captive women, to empathize with their distress, and to treat them as human subjects just as would their fathers and mothers, not merely as objects of halakhic deliberation.

            If the halakhic principle of v’halakhta b’derakhav means anything in Jewish tradition, it is acting toward others with both justice and compassion, since these values are the most prominent attributes of the Divine. The Torah lays this down as the underlying principle of the Jewish people's uniqueness:

Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I have known him, to the end that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord, to do compassionate righteousness [tsedakah] and justice [mishpat] ; to the end that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which He hath spoken of him. (Genesis 18:18–19)

            The prophets Micah and Zachariah focused in on both these moral properties as the essential characteristics of Jewish religious life:

It hath been told to you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: only to act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

This is what the Lord Almighty said: Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. (Zechariah 7: 8–9)

            Jeremiah also understood well that justice and compassion pave the path to the religious ideals both of imitating God and of living the ethically good life:

Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom; neither let the mighty glory in his might; let not the rich man glory in his riches. But let him that glory, glory in this: that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises compassion (hessed), justice (mishpat), and righteousness (tsedakah) in the earth; for in these things I delight, says the Lord. (Jeremiah 9:22–23)[21]

            Jewish tradition denominates the Creator of Heaven and Earth by “Elokim” (the cosmic God of nature and justice) and “Adonai” (the personal God of love and compassion). In other words, just as God is moral by virtue of the divine attributes of justice and compassion, so we too must be moral by acting with tsedek (justice) and hessed (compassion).

            Finally, it is important to note that R. Akiva’s “great principle of the Torah,”veAhavta l’re’akhah kimokhah,” is a fusion of the generalizing principle of justice (kimokhah) with the necessity of positive feeling toward the other (“veAhavta”). This principle, then, is the religious formulation of the ground of good ethical reasoning and behavior.

In the worldview of Torah, tsedek and hessed are natural sensibilities that God implanted in our human consciousness to enable us to be moral agents[22]—and they require no further defense or justification. When Abraham challenges God by asking rhetorically, “Will the Judge of all the earth not act justly?” both Abraham and the Torah assume that if God is the moral ruler of the universe, God must act according to the standards of justice. When the Torah announces “Justice, justice you shall pursue” (Deut. 16:20), the value of justice itself needs no proof. When Maimonides rails against insensitivity to the hardship and suffering of others,[23] it is self-evident that hessed itself is a moral good requiring no further validation.

Tsedek, Hessed, and Moral Reasoning

Philosophers have also identified justice and compassion as the root values of moral experience and ethical logic. That Judaism and general human thought agree on this point should not come as a surprise. As Rambam so often insists, as human beings endowed with Tselem Elokim, Jews and Gentiles share the same rationality.[24] The Torah also tells us this: “…this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, that, when they hear all these statutes, shall say: 'Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people'” (Deut. 4:6). When Jews observe the Torah correctly, the Gentiles will recognize the wisdom of the Jewish people and their laws. This is only possible if Jews and Gentiles share the same fundamental rational and moral sensibilities.[25]

These two fundamental concepts form the basis of all sound moral reasoning. They are the foundations of our moral sense and go to the heart of what we mean by ethics.[26] Morally sensitive people display a commitment (even if sometimes unconscious) to these values, and nearly every good ethical judgment is derived from some variation of these concepts. Certainly we would not consider a person who is indifferent to injustice or one who remains stone-cold to human suffering to be a moral person. Being blind to justice and compassion are the surest indications that such a person is not in our moral universe.[27]

The term Tsedek here connotes fairness and impartiality, as evidenced by its meaning in the when the Torah’s utilizes it in a judicial context (Deut. 1 and Deut. 16:2). In a just social system people are not granted unfair advantage over others and those benefiting from the system’s privileges must also accept its duties. Justice expresses itself in the principles, “treat similar people similarly,” and “do not give one person preferential treatment over others in the same situation.” These generalization rules give ethical judgments their objectivity, enable us to reason from one case to another, and ensure that moral claims are logical principles rather than mere expressions of personal interest.[28]

When I say “you ought to pay your taxes,” the “ought” signifies an ethical principle if I agree that all people like you—including me—ought to pay their taxes too. If I reject this generalization and claim that you ought to pay your taxes, but although I am just like you I am not obligated to pay my taxes, my claim is not a moral principle at all, just a subjective preference. The best way to test the objectivity of a moral judgment and the ethical legitimacy any statement I make about your obligations is to reverse our positions: If I don’t accept that I too have that obligation when I am in your shoes, then it is not really a moral claim. If I claim that “everyone ought to be kind to me when I am in need, but I have no obligation to be kind to others when they are in need,” no clear-thinking person would deem this a legitimate moral position. This generalization test is sometimes referred to as “moral imagination,” since it requires a person to see himself as the other person.

This generalization principle and its reasoning appears in the Torah as “Love your peer as yourself,” (Lev. 19:18) as well as in other formulations, yet it is not a uniquely Jewish idea. It is not only “the great general principle of the Torah,” as Rabbi Akiva claimed (Sifra 2:16:11), but it is also the essential characteristic of justice that is found in the literature, laws, and correct reasoning of all moral religions and ethical societies.[29]

Compassion is the second foundation of morality. There is enormous difference between analytic intelligence—the ability to see logical connections and make deductive inferences—and emotional intelligence, i.e., the capacity to understand the human condition of another and to think about other people as subjects like ourselves, not mere objects of cognitive or halakhic inquiry.

            Compassion is rahamim and hessed—feeling what others feel, empathizing with them when they are in distress, and extending ourselves into the lives of others.[30] Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explained this beautifully, emphasizing its importance for being fully human:

Compassion is the feeling of empathy, in which the pain of one person of itself awakens in another. The higher and more human the beings are, the more keenly attuned are they to re-echo the note of suffering. Like a voice from heaven, it penetrates the heart.[31]

            Compassion is not only the ability to see another person as equal to yourself, but it is to sense how that person feels, what he or she wants and how she/he wants to be treated. When we apply this moral sense we feel the responsibility to accord others dignity and respect (as we ourselves naturally want to be respected), to avoid causing them emotional and physical pain (as we naturally want to avoid pain), and help others flourish (as we ourselves naturally wish to flourish).[32]

            In fact, both these fundamental elements of justice and compassion are often opposite sides of the same moral coin, and when we employ them correctly they frequently yield the same conclusions: Justice as impartiality is moral reasoning’s cognitive dimension, while compassion is the emotive component of a healthy moral sense that moves us to treat others the way we wish for others to treat us. This emotive component is critical to both ethical logic and moral motivation, because a strictly cognitive rule-dominated approach to ethics, be it philosophical or halakhic, proves sometimes cruel and often impotent.[33]

       Examining these two root moral concepts reveals why RBND and some other halakhot are morally problematic. Is it fair to take from others, but not give to them? Is it just to return the lost articles of other Jews, but not of Gentiles—as the simple halakha allows?[34] Is it compassionate to intentionally kill helpless infants and infirm elderly people who pose no direct threat during war—as the commandments to wipe out Amalek and the Canaanite nations require and the halakhic guidelines of milkhemot mitzvah (obligatory wars) allow?[35] Can these latter halakhot be moral and just, particularly when we correctly judge the intentional killing of innocent civilian Jews by Palestinian terrorists to be abhorrent?

            Heart transplants create an ethical symmetry between donor and recipient, and a unique one-to-one causal relationship between them.[36] Because of this relationship, if it is wrong for me to donate my heart because I contend it is murder, it must also be wrong for to me to be a recipient, because in receiving another’s heart I am a substantive causal agent in that donor’s murder. And if it is permissible for me to receive the transplanted heart, then it must be permissible for me to donate my heart to a recipient.[37] Justice rules out the morally untenable position of me having a privileged status over others by receiving another’s heart when the other person could not receive my heart due to my refusal to donate. Because the values of fairness and impartiality are fundamental to our moral thinking, if we assume that heart transplants constitute possible murder, there is no legal technicality or casuistic distinction within halakha that can succeed in justifying permitting a person to receive an organ while he refuses on principle to donate. If I am alive as a potential donor when I am brain-dead then another brain-dead person is equally alive when I need his heart, and it is immoral for me to play a role in his death by participating in the removal of his heart. Such action violates the moral consistency and reversibility tests, asserting that transplants are wrong when I am a donor and someone else is the recipient, but right when I am a recipient and another is the donor. As such, RBND reasoning is morally illogical and ethically unprincipled, and acting on it is morally wrong.

As we will soon see, many rabbinic authorities have noticed that this moral logic is at play regarding returning lost objects. Shimon ben Shetach realized that it is unethical—to the point of barbarism—to expect others to return my lost object, yet not be under any obligation to return the lost objects of others. This is logically akin to demanding that others pay their taxes so I benefit from state services, but permitting myself to evade the corresponding obligation to pay my own taxes. Halakhic authorities also employed comparable moral reasoning in interpreting other morally problematic halakhot.

Interpreting Halakha Morally

Classic rabbinic thinking utilized moral argumentation in determining halakha. Hazal determined the operative interpretation of lex talionis (“an eye for and eye”) based on a moral argument from retributive justice: Because “one person’s eye may not be equal to another person’s eye,” they ruled that these verses should be implemented via fair monetary compensation rather than literally. Halakhic tradition similarly interpreted the biblical laws regarding the idolatrous city (ir haNidahat)[38] and the rebellious son (ben sorer u’moreh)[39] to be only theoretical because of the unjust and overly harsh punishments that literal implementation would entail.

Despite this powerful ethical thrust in biblical, Talmudic, and rabbinic traditions, there remain halakhic rulings that are in deep in tension with ethical standards. Aside from the RBND ruling that violates moral consistency and just standards, the halakhic obligation to return the lost article of a Jew, but not of a Gentile, is another problematic case. This distinction appears to constitute unjust discrimination, as does the distinction between putting the life of a Jew ahead of Shabbat observance but not doing so for a Gentile life.

Halakhists have been troubled by these halakhic claims and have sought to interpret them in ways that are consistent with justice and compassion, i.e., render them ethically correct. Examining these approaches prove instructive for shaping yet other halakhic cases to be in line with moral standards.

A large number of Orthodox rabbis have rejected RBND in the name of halakha. Many announced early on that this position is ethically untenable due to its lack of moral consistency.[40] In addition, the Halakhic Organ Donor Society (HODS) lists over 300 Orthodox rabbis who accept brain death as halakhic death, thus disagreeing with both RBND and the RCA report. (Many of the HODS signatories are members of the RCA.) The Chief Rabbinate of Israel accepts clinically certified brain death as halakhic death and thus also rejects RBND.

Rabbis Menachem Meiri, Moshe Isserless (Ramo), Isser Zalmon Meltzer, and others interpreted the halakha of returning lost objects to conform with proper ethical standards by confining the dispensation to refrain from returning lost Gentile articles to refer only to Gentiles who are immoral pagans having no respect for property and hence would not return lost objects to other people.[41] In their understanding of Jewish law, when Gentiles feel obligated to return lost objects to Jews, Jews are under the obligation to return lost objects to them. In other words, their interpretations reinforce justice and equality based on reciprocity.

Rabbi Baruch Halevi Epstein articulated this position most effectively:

There is no value to such people [those who violate the basic laws of civility]. They destroy the world, imperil society and destroy both civilization and the establishment of governments. Certainly they are not fit to be considered as inhabitants of civilization and thus subject to a legal order. Therefore they have no monetary rights. In contrast, those who observe the seven Noahide commandments—and they are the majority of people today and all enlightened nations—there is no doubt whatsoever that they are treated like Israelites [with respect to this law of returning lost objects]. In my judgment this true and logical.[42]

            Note R. Epstein’s last words: “In my judgment this is true and logical.” The truth referred to is his correct ethical conclusion, and the logic to which he referred is valid moral reasoning based on justice as fairness. He has internalized the moral universe built around these moral values, and hence it is self-evident to him that halakha must be interpreted this way.

            More generally, R. Menachem Meiri argued extensively in his commentary on the Talmud that all halakhic civil discriminations with respect to rights and responsibilities of Gentiles apply only to those Gentiles categorized as “not having religion,” i.e., those who were immoral uncivilized idolaters.[43] In doing so, Meiri was successful in interpreting the halakhot governing Jewish-Gentile relations as reflecting just and fair standards, where justice denotes the elimination of arbitrary inequalities.

            One of the critical distinctions between halakhic treatment of a Jew and a Gentile is the question of whether one may desecrate Shabbat to save someone in danger of dying. The Talmud and normative halakhic tradition ruled that saving the life of a Jew takes precedence over a particular instance of Sabbath observance,[44] whereas saving a Gentile life does not take precedence over a Jew’s Sabbath observance.[45] Thus there is a clear axiological distinction between Jewish life and Gentile life. Rabbinic tradition does grant a Jew the dispensation to violate the Sabbath to save a Gentile’s life in order to prevent Gentile hatred (mishum aivah) and the retaliation against Jews that such hatred might engender. This dispensation, however, is prudential and based on self-interest, not on moral principle, justice, compassion, or the intrinsic value of Gentile life derived from the Divine Image. The disparity between the justifications to save a Jew’s life on the Sabbath and saving a Gentile’s life is, at best, morally problematic.

            Other than Meiri, a number of contemporary posekim have been troubled by the distinction in understanding of this halakha. In the 1960s R. Eliezer Samson Rosenthal, an accomplished halakhic scholar, member of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate halakhic committee, and posek for the Movement for Torah Judaism in Israel, argued that a Jew is obligated to save the life a of a Gentile on the Sabbath as an ideal rooted in the sanctity of the Gentile’s life, rather than from prudential self-referring reasons.[46] Citing support from then Chief Rabbi Unterman, he argued,

We today have no choice but to act in accordance with the principle of equality, considering all persons fully equal even to the point that the Sabbath may be set aside when they face mortal danger, “because of the ways of peace and as a sort of danger to all!” We Jews in particular have tasted the cruel reality of that danger in almost every generation…. When they rose up to destroy us, we stood against them in the dark of night, defending ourselves and crying out: “Are we not your brothers, not the sons of the same father or the same mother—how have we differed from every other nation that you persecute us harshly?” But we were not answered, and nothing was of use. So we cannot believe that the law of the Torah requires us, in our present situation, to abandon any person’s life, even to preserve the sanctity of the Sabbath.

            Note how R. Rosenthal engaged in ethical reasoning by employing Hillel’s principle and moral logic’s reversibility test: We Jews know how immoral it was for Gentiles to refrain from saving us, therefore we are obligated to avoid committing the same wrong by failing to save them.  

            R. Jacob Avigdor in R. Rosenthal’s era argued this also on the basis of moral considerations,[47] as did R. Nahum Rabinovitch in the 1960s. R. Rabinovitch insisted that the Torah itself makes no distinction whatsoever between the obligation to save a Jewish life on the Sabbath and saving the life of any civilized Gentile (ger toshav).[48] He contended that this was Nahmanides’ understanding of the halakhic imperative in Lev. 25:35: "If your brother falls low and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall uphold him; though be he a stranger (ger) or a resident (toshav) he shall live with you."[49] Like R. Rosenthal, R. Rabinovitch understood the Torah to naturally reflect the ethical principle of treating human life equally, which must be honored in the era of universal human rights of all non-threatening civilized persons. This is expressed religiously as the intrinsic sanctity and dignity of all human life derived from the universal endowment of tselem Elokim. As such, the distinction between saving a Jewish life and a Gentile life on Sabbath cannot be made consistent with the basic assumptions of equality and intrinsic dignity of each human life. Other halakhic authorities who argued similarly based on the value of the Gentile life include Rabbis Yehuda Loewe (Maharal), Yehiel Heller, Meir Dan Plotzki, Tsvi Hersch Chajes, Yehuda Gershuni, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Ahron Soloveichik, and Aharon Lichtenstein.[50]

            A number of contemporary posekim seem oblivious to—or explicitly reject—principles of just war and contemporary international standards of military ethics, even though the Israel Defense Forces accepts these ethical principles as their rules of engagement. Contravening the “principle of distinction” that constitutes one of the foundations of the conception of just war, they reject the distinction between enemy soldiers and enemy non-combatants. If so, as it is permitted—even necessary—to target enemy combatants, it is in principle permissible to intentionally kill all civilians in the societies of Israel’s enemies. Such opinions may even represent the consensus of halakhic decisors today.[51] To quote one contemporary Israeli halakhic authority, “According to the worldview of Torah, there is no such thing as an innocent person among a hostile population.”[52]

            The moral illegitimacy and logical inconsistency of this position is clear. Jews (and all right-thinking people) properly condemn as immoral terrorists who attack, kill, and maim Israeli civilians. If the unacceptability of intentional attacks on civilians is a moral principle, then it must be so generally: Both when Palestinians attack Jewish non-combatants, as well as when Israelis (whether in or out of uniform) intentionally attack Palestinian non-combatants. Moral consistency demands that if we condemn the former, we must also condemn the latter. Conversely, permitting the latter puts Jewish fighters on the same immoral level as cruel terrorists who brutally murder Israeli teens innocently eating pizza in Jerusalem, Jews piously celebrating a Seder in Netanya, and Israeli infants riding quietly in their parents’ car.

            Permitting the targeting of non-threatening enemy civilians also blatantly violates the second moral value of compassion. Intentionally killing a Palestinian infant or a non-threatening infirm Arab grandmother is the very opposite of exercising compassion. It can be done only by rejecting empathy, legitimizing cruelty, and considering these targets impersonal objects rather than human subjects.

            Rabbinic tradition has long wrestled with the moral problem of targeting civilians in war—even when such action appears to be mandated by explicit verses of the Torah. The Talmud and later rabbinic authorities deliberated carefully over the rules of engagement when fighting Amalek, the Canaanite tribes, and enemies in a milhemet mitzvah. Aware of the moral problematics of these imperatives, they engaged in creative interpretations that rendered the biblical imperative to kill innocent non-combatants of enemy nations either as purely theoretical laws that must no longer be acted upon or ones that prohibited ab initio intentionally killing innocent non-combatants.[53] In modern times Rabbis Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berliner (Netsiv) and Shlomo Goren restricted targeting the enemy in war to combatants and explicitly forbade targeting non-combatants.[54] R. Goren ruled that according to halakha, contemporary wars must not be fought according to the biblical rules of engagement: “God forbid that those laws are applied to non-biblical wars or wars of our times.”[55]

            There is one more example of a morally problematic halakhic thinking that bears analysis. As mentioned earlier, there has been considerable rabbinic advocacy for reparative (change/conversion) therapy for homosexual persons,[56] no doubt in trying to defend the biblical prohibition against homosexual relations (Lev 18:22). One well known example is the 2011 “Declaration on the Torah Approach to Homosexuality,” which continued supporting change therapy until late 2018. Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Tau, the spiritual leader of the Noam party in Israel and head of Yeshiva Har HaMor, continues to publicly support change therapy on religious grounds. In July 2019, the then Israeli minister of education and disciple of Rabbi Tau, Rabbi Rafi Peretz, also publicly advocated reparative therapy. While Peretz was forced to retract his support because of the loud public outcry, a number of rabbis in Israel and the United States still advocate this approach on religious grounds. Israeli’s religious parties, taking direction from their rabbinic authorities, have continued to support this therapy and fight against a Knesset bill to legally prohibit its practice by Israeli therapists.[57]

            This advocacy has persisted long after the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, numerous other professional medical organizations, and many governmental bodies have concluded that there is no credible evidence indicating that change therapy is effective and, worse still, that this therapy is likely to cause physical and psychological damage to the patient.[58] This is also the consensus opinion of medical professionals in Europe and Israel.[59] Because of conversion therapy’s harmful effects, a growing number of states and municipalities in America have banned this therapy for minors, as have a number of European countries.[60]

            It may well be the rabbis who signed the 2011 Declaration were not sufficiently informed or convinced of the non-efficacy and harmful effects of change therapy, in which case the advocacy did not indicate a lack of compassion or empathy for gay and lesbian persons. However in light of the well-known persuasive public evidence of the potential dangerous effects of change therapy prior to 2018, it was morally irresponsible to continue to advocate this course of treatment. Even if this rabbinic advocacy is no longer the majority opinion today, its original support can illuminate why certain halakhic positions are morally problematic.

            Let us assume that the consensus of medical professionals is correct and that change therapy is both ineffective and harmful. Given these data, would the rabbinic signatories of the declaration have prescribed such therapy to their own sons and daughters, as they did to others? To paraphrase the father of Shmuel in BT Ketubot 23a, “If they were your sons and daughters, would you treat them this way?” Yet this is what the generalization and reversibility rules of ethics demands if such a policy is to be moral. Did the signatories fulfill the biblical imperative to “love your peer like yourself?” According to the medical consensus, change therapy is the equivalent of a drug rejected by the FDA because clinical trials failed to satisfy standard efficacy and safety requirements. Would the declaration’s signatories have given their loved ones such a questionable medication, particularly when knowing that these loved ones have increased incidents of drug use, depression, suicide ideation and suicide attempts, as do homosexuals—and when persons undergoing change therapy exhibit even higher incidences of these life-threatening behaviors than do others?[61] Can advocating this doubtful therapy be accurately described in any way as evincing compassion or empathy? And on strict halakhic grounds, the potential harm to the health of the patient and misuse of his/her assets by ineffective conversion therapy render this therapy highly undesirable, if not explicitly halakhically forbidden, as R. Daniel Sperber argues in a June 2020 responsum.[62]

            Halakhic Jews have a moral responsibility to protect the welfare and equality of all non-threatening persons. Correct ethics require that LGBQT persons be treated by others as full human beings to be understood and treated with compassion, not as problems to be solved. In addition to rejecting scientific judgment, the said rabbinic advocacy of conversion therapy neglected the welfare of individual same-sex oriented persons for the purpose of sustaining a traditional ideology. This is neither just, nor compassionate, nor ethically justifiable.

            Similar to each of the other cases, there are halakhic alternatives to this approach, reflected in different statements by rabbis and religious educators regarding policies toward LGBTQ persons.[63] One such statement, written in 2010 and reinforced in 2016, has garnered over 200 signatures of Orthodox rabbis, Talmud scholars, and communal leaders, including two former presidents of the RCA, demands that homosexuals be treated with full “dignity and respect” and welcomed into Orthodox communities and synagogues.[64] These statements avoid advocating harmful policies, and stress the moral and religious obligations to demonstrate compassion and understanding toward gay, lesbian, and gender fluid persons, similar to all other persons. These approaches recommend non-discriminatory policies toward all persons with same-sex orientations and the religious obligation to treat them in their full humanity—all without violating the biblical proscription against male homosexual relations.

“Gam Hayn Nivr'u B’Tselem”—They Are Also Created in the Divine Image

There is no doubt that ethical thinking based on the concepts of justice and compassion have a universalizing tendency, and this universalism is sometimes in tension with traditional halakha. It also chafes against the current Orthodox trends toward inwardness. The most severe ethical challenges to halakha now and in the future require us to think anew about how to justly treat and promote the full humanity of women, heterodox, secular, and LGBTQ Jews as well as Gentiles—i.e., persons other than the adult religious Jewish males who have dominated halakhic discourse and Jewish leadership. The ongoing project of Jewish ethics entails the continuous expansion of the spheres of justice and compassion to include all human beings. Nor is this progressive growth in moral awareness inimical to the eternal nature of Torah. Quite the contrary, as Rabbi Nahum Rabinovitch has shown: It should be seen as essential to God’s plan for the Torah to apply over all different cultures and the entire sweep of human history.[65]

The concept of tselem Elokim is a rich source for sound ethical reasoning built on justice and compassion.[66] The Torah teaches us that all human beings are endowed with this transcendent quality, and hence the ethics flowing from tselem Elokim dictate that we widen our scope of sensitivity and ethical concern toward all human beings, striving to treat each not merely as a means to another end, but as a subject who has emotions, anxieties, interests, and needs like ours and who has a unique voice worth hearing, just as we wish to be treated, understood and heard. The endowment of tselem Elokim also implies that we must understand that a person’s value, dignity, and right to equality reside in his/her personhood, not in his/her gender, theological orientation, or ethnic identity. This requires a conceptual shift from categorizing persons as members of a group to evaluating and relating to each person as an autonomous individual.[67] This outlook is closely linked to R. Akiva’s great principle of the Torah in Lev 19:18 and to achieve highest levels of morality we must interpret ve’ahavta l’re’akhah kimokhah to require the full consideration of all non-threatening human beings, as did Avraham Ibn Ezra.

            Then-Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, who later became the first Sephardic Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, Rabbi Ben Zion Uziel demonstrated this ethical sensitivity in a 1920 responsum dealing with the question of whether women should be afforded both passive and active suffrage and whether they had a right to represent themselves in political matters.[68] His argument was stunningly simple: Even if for the sake of argument we concede that the Torah does not include women in the formal category of the pubic community (kahal or edah), he queried, “Are they [i.e. women] not creatures created in the Divine Image who are endowed with intelligence? Do they not have interests that will be effected by a representative government?”

            Rabbi Uziel insisted that women have the right to vote and to hold public office because he understood that treating people as creatures endowed with tselem Elokim entails granting them full human dignity, including the right to speak for themselves and to defend their own interests. Ovadia Seforno also understood tselem Elokim to mean that people must be allowed to be free to make their own choices,[69] and therefore each adult has the right to a voice in decisions affecting him or her. As such, tselem Elokim foreshadows the principle of justice and requires that we give all Jews including women, heterodox, secular, and those with different sexual orientations the right to speak for themselves in communal decisions and policies affecting their interests. To exclude them and presume to speak for them, however well-meaning the intent, is a paternalism that does not square with the demands of fairness and human dignity. In halakhic language, it is a violation of kevod haBeriyot.

            This is a particularly vexing moral problem today in Orthodox rabbinic decisions regarding women, who continue to be excluded from decision-making processes about women’s rights as well as communal policies and norms.[70] The logic of justice and compassion moves in the direction of not marginalizing women in voice or decision. And when deciding Jewish policies affecting Gentiles, correct ethics demand that we consider them full human beings equal to Jews in both value and rights.

            Unfortunately Rabbi Uziel’s use of tselem Elokim is an exception in halakhic literature. The general concepts of tsedek, hessed, and tselem Elokim appear relatively infrequently in responsa and amid the technicalities of formal halakhic discourse—as do the general Torah imperatives, “Ve-ahavta l’reikhah kimokhah” “V’asita haYashar v’haTov” and “Kedoshim ti’heyu.” Indeed, while their Jewish authenticity is undeniable, their halakhic status is complex.[71] Pointing toward ethical ideals, these values and imperatives are absent entirely from the halakhic arguments of the cited problematic cases, yet they are precisely what is necessary to ensure the moral stature of halakhic rulings.

            The reasoning of responsa and their resulting halakhic decisions will be moral only to the extent that justice, fairness, and human compassion factor into the halakhic reasoning of any given situation. Responsa on strictly ritual questions usually lack moral dimension and have no need for these values. But questions about interpersonal relations and individual interests do, and hence halakhic rulings regarding human affairs can prove immoral if they are oblivious to these values. When halakhic logic emphasizes formalism at the expense of compassion and empathy, when it is reduced to value-neutral mathematical-type thinking, when “let the law bore through the mountain” becomes the single guiding principle in halachic argumentation, halakha opens itself up to unethical rulings. In the words of one rabbinic sage, “Standing upon strict din entails ruin.”[72]

            Halakha cannot and should not be reduced to ethics alone. Surely there exist other desiderata with valences in the halakhic system, and for halakha to maintain its identity and structural integrity, the justice, compassion and the human sensitivity demanded by tselem Elokim cannot be the only values operative in halakhic reasoning.

            Yet if halakha is to retain moral integrity, it must function within the bounds of tsedek and hessed. To ensure the ethical character of halakhic judgments, halakhic authorities must ask themselves, "Is my legal conclusion just, or does it discriminate unfairly?” “Is my pesak compassionate and empathetic?” “Does my reasoning employ the full meaning of tselem Elokim by treating each person it affects as an end and not merely a means, as a human subject rather than an object of legal inquiry?” “Does my ruling respect the full dignity of the persons involved?” “Does it allow others to flourish as I wish to flourish?”

A Theological Postscript

Not long ago, I discussed the military ethics of Israel Defense Forces with someone who helped write the IDF's code of military engagement. I asked him why the IDF insists on following just war principles even when they entail significant risk to Israeli soldiers, make battlefield decisions more difficult, and are costly in blood and treasure.

He answered that morality is essential to Jewish identity. It is who we are and who we should be. He then added a more prosaic reason: Israeli soldiers must believe in the justice and rightness of their cause. They must be able to look at themselves in the mirror and know that their sacrifices are for a moral purpose. IDF officials realize that if their soldiers lose conviction in the justice of their cause and the ethical integrity of their battlefield behavior, they will not be willing to risk their lives. Many, in fact, will not return to serve when called upon. It is these ethical values that sustain the high morale of the Israeli army.

And so it is with halakha. Should Jewish law lose its ethical moorings, it will devolve into just another set of laws holding no more attraction than any other legal system. As a consequence, halakha will cease to be a rallying point for many Jews, at which point they will deem halakha inferior to more just systems, lose their conviction in it, and walk away from halakhic commitment.[73] Only when halakha manifests a deep passion for justice and human sensitivity will it secure the wide allegiance of Jews today. Moral integrity is, therefore, an existential imperative for contemporary halakha.

No doubt a small number of Jews will choose to disregard moral logic, broader human wisdom, and any considerations not technical or parochial. As one radical halakhic posek claimed: “The morality of Gentile nations cannot understand the essence of Judaism. Therefore Gentiles have nothing to teach us.”[74] No wonder, then, that this posek permits intentionally killing civilians.

It fallacious to interpret this kind of insular thinking with its dismissal of ethics as authentic to halakha or the Torah. On the contrary, dismissing ethics in determining formal halakha represents a severe defect in their understanding of Torah, of which justice and compassion are intrinsic elements. At the dawn of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, God challenged Abraham and his descendants "to act with compassionate righteousness and justice" as the signal characteristics of their covenantal commitment. Moses later commanded the Jewish people to "do what is right and good,” and later still Isaiah challenged the Jewish people in God's name to be "a light for the nations." Thus the ethics of justice and compassion have always been constitutive Torah values and essential to the sacred Jewish covenantal mission.

Contrary to the contemporary rabbinic opinion just cited, the Torah insists that when Jews observe God’s commands correctly, the nations of the world will not be at a loss for understanding. On the contrary, they will conclude about the Jewish people, “Surely this is a wise and discerning people” (Deut. 4:6). The Torah thus proclaims that Jewish ethics is no esoteric enterprise; Torah values, rather, are values all people will appreciate when Jews observe halakha correctly. Justice and compassion are fundamental values to Jewish religious life, but they are also universal. And so the Bible promises that when Jews live properly, their behavior will be exemplary, their wisdom will be understood, and their values will be recognized by all God’s children.

This is true not merely theologically, but also empirically: Nothing falsifies claims to religious truth in human hearts and minds as does unjust and immoral behavior. As Maimonides understood almost 800 years ago, Jews who defy moral logic will cause Jews to be seen only as “a foolish and despicable people,” rather than a wise and discerning one.[75]

Nor is this commonality with general human ethical judgment a threat to the unique nature of Jewish religious commitment. The Torah challenges the Jewish people to be a kingdom of priests and a holy people, and when all Jews are priests it can only be Gentiles who Jews are bidden to bless, influence, and teach. When Jews proclaim “From Zion shall the Torah go forth and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,”[76] we need to be conscious of its context and understand that it is before the Gentile nations that this divine wisdom is meant to be heard and understood. And as Nahmanides taught, our status as a holy people is dependent on our doing what is morally right and good.

That holiness is analytically tied to what is morally right and good, and that there can be no holiness without an abiding commitment to ethics, may be two of the most important teachings in the entire holy Torah.  

Notes

Why Is No One Ensuring That Hasidic Kids Get A Real Education?

Hasidic Jewish teenage boys spend about 12 hours each day learning at religious high schools (known as yeshivas.) And yet, many young men leave Yeshiva with barely any math or science skills, or even the ability to read English beyond an elementary school level. This lack of basic education makes them especially vulnerable to poverty. In fact, about 43% of Hasidic families in New York are poor and another 16% are near poor.

And the situation keeps getting worse. The last decade has seen rapid population growth in ultra-Orthodox communities without any improvements in education, drastically increasing the number of Hasidic Jews who need to rely on public assistance.

These numbers are especially significant because, by 2030 between 23-37% of Brooklyn school age children will be Hasidic. If the issue isn’t resolved soon, these children will enter into adulthood with no English, math, science, or social studies knowledge, resulting in catastrophic consequences for the economic and social well being of this city.

Why is no one addressing this problem?

The reluctance for the public to get involved in issues involving Orthodox children’s education is largely based on misconceptions such as the following:

The misconception: Religious schools are exempt from government regulations

The truth: Private schools, including religious institutions, are required by law to meet specific educational standards

The misconception: Private schools don’t receive public funding.

The truth: Hasidic yeshivas receive tens of millions in both federal and state dollars every year.

The misconception: Ultra-Orthodox Jews are financially successful.

The truth: In the largely Hasidic area of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the median household income in 2011 was $21,502, compared to the overall Brooklyn median of $46,958 and the New York city median of $52,737. The average number of children in a Hasidic family is 8… meaning… the majority of Hasidic families are poor.

The misconception: It’s not our community, not our problem: 

The truth: Just as it would be our responsibility to report if a neighbor’s child were being neglected, it is all of our responsibility to make sure that Hasidic children are receiving a quality education. Not only is allowing these young people to go into the world with no marketable skills neglectful, but the repercussions also ripple out into the rest of society. For instance, without basic science knowledge, ultra- Orthodox communities are more likely to ignore Covid safety regulations, increasing everyone’s risk of transmission.

Why doesn’t the government step in?

Unfortunately, the government is often the biggest obstacle to regulating education in ultra-Orthodox schools. While New York State laws require that non-public schools provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to that provided in the public schools, it’s been an “open secret” that yeshivas are largely ignoring the secular requirements.

As far back as the 1990’s, officials were aware that education in religious schools was not being adequately regulated. In 2000, New York Education Commissioner Richard Mills recommended adopting a proposal for increased accountability for student success in private schools. Yet, over 20 years later, little has been done to regulate religious schools.

Instead, elected officials continue to pander to communities who are blatantly ignoring the law. For instance, New York’s Mayor de Blasio openly praised Oholei Torah, a yeshiva that provides no secular instruction even to its elementary school students, for its “excellence” and its contribution to “well-rounded education.”

Why would the government knowingly allow yeshivas to use public money without following education guidelines? 

The most likely answer is that the state officials are playing politics with children’s education.  The Hasidic community openly encourages community members to vote in large numbers as a “bloc.”  In order to get this substantial “bloc vote” politicians often turn a blind eye when communities break the rules, especially in education.

Unfortunately, the government’s refusal to address the situation combined with the public’s reluctance to get involved has meant that no one has been looking out for these kids.

That’s where Yaffed comes in…

In 2012, frustrated with his own Yeshiva experience, Naftuli Moster reached out to Civil Rights attorney, Michael Sussman. Sussman suggested that Naftuli organize a meeting of 20 yeshiva graduates from different schools to compare notes on their education. 

While the schools were different, their experiences were the same.  Hours and hours of religious study with little to no time spent on math, English, science, or social studies.  None of the young men had the skills or education for anything more than a low paying factory job. Their yeshiva education was not even equivalent to a GED, so, for most, college was out of the question.

From that initial meeting, Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFED) was born. For almost a decade, Naftuli and his colleagues have been fighting tirelessly to make sure Hasidic kids get the education that they are entitled to under state and federal law.

Through community grass roots activism, Yaffed has been pressuring government officials to regulate yeshivas and enforce the laws in place. Their efforts have been met with great opposition, both from the government and within the ultra-Orthodox community.

But, beneath the wall of resistance, tendrils of hope are beginning to emerge. Hasidic parents are quietly reaching out for support, former Yeshiva students are volunteering time and resources, and, most importantly, there’s been a growing awareness of the far-reaching repercussions of denying Hasidic kids an access to basic education.

We know that organized public pressure is the best catalyst for legislative change. In 2017, The New York State Education Department pledged to revise their guidelines to enforce “substantial equivalency” laws in private schools. With enough public support, Yaffed can hold the Education Department to their promise, ensuring that the next generation of Hasidic kids gets the education they deserve.

AS ORTHODOX RABBIS WE SUPPORT THE ISRAELI SUPREME COURT DECISION

Avi Weiss & Marc Angel

We are Orthodox rabbis who have served in Orthodox synagogues and taught in Orthodox schools for five decades. It is precisely because we love Orthodoxy that we speak in support of the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision validating Conservative and Reform conversions done in Israel for Israeli citizenship.  

This move, we believe, will help foster in Israel a less coercive Orthodoxy and worldwide will embrace all of our people as part of Am Yisrael, with a shared past and shared future. 

No doubt, the Chief Rabbinate will disagree with the position we’ve taken as they fiercely want to hold on to power, determined to be the sole arbiters on conversions, leaving no room for Conservative and Reform. 

We know as well from conversations with colleagues that there are Orthodox rabbis who agree with us, but are fearful to say so publicly, concerned that the Chief Rabbinate will refuse to accept any spiritual leader who disagrees with their position. 

Because we support Reform and Conservative conversions for citizenship in Israel doesn’t mean we would accept their conversions as halachically legitimate. As in America, when individuals have come before us with non-Orthodox conversions, if they don’t meet Orthodox standards, we would encourage another conversion. 

Truth be told, the Israeli Supreme Court decision doesn’t change much. Based on the Law of Return, the Israeli Interior Ministry already accepts for citizenship those converted by Conservative and Reform rabbis outside of Israel. The inequity for those in Israel has now been resolved. 

Why accept the Supreme Court decision? Our teacher Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik wrote not only about the Covenant of Sinai, but the Covenant of Egypt, also called the Covenant of Fate. We part company with our Conservative and Reform colleagues on many halachic matters going back to Sinai, but our fate as a people unites us; the enemy makes no distinction between levels of observance or denominations. We survive and thrive as a people together. 

More broadly, we are all part of what can be called the Covenant of Family – that family includes our co-religionists from other denominations. Recognizing their conversions in Israel will deepen the relationship between Israel and the majority of Jews in the Diaspora who are not Orthodox. 

With all our heart and soul, we believe the Supreme Court decision will strengthen Orthodoxy. Most Jews in Israel today have been alienated by the Chief Rabbinate, as they see it as coercive in nature. This kind of Orthodoxy alienates, as spiritual striving and religious coercion are antithetical. With greater choice, people may see Orthodoxy as less oppressive, more inviting. 

If Israeli citizens have a choice of where to go for a conversion, it may catalyze the rabbinate to be more open in their conversion policies, taking into account the whole corpus of Jewish Law which is more flexible than the current extreme Chief Rabbinate’s standards.  Competition is always good as it encourages everyone to do better.  This bill could create a dynamic which would prod the Chief Rabbinate to become less insular and adopt a broader view of Klal Yisrael. 

Notwithstanding our critique of the Chief Rabbinate, our feelings for those who hold its office remain warm. In the past, we were honored to have contact with Chief Rabbis – clearly lovers of Israel and the Jewish people. We have little doubt, too, that the Chief Rabbis today are people of goodwill. But the Chief Rabbinate as an institution no longer works. Whenever power coalesces in the hands of the few, it spells trouble. 

Perhaps the greatest threat to Israel is the lack of unity of our people. The Supreme Court decision has the potential to bring us closer, allowing Jews from all streams to feel part of the destiny of Am Yisrael, talking openly with each other, disagreeing agreeably, recognizing we are not only part of one nation, but one family – hopefully a loving family. 

Rabbi Avi Weiss is the founding rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale – the Bayit in New York. Rabbi Marc Angel is the director of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals.