“I waited for some answers to many theological questions but answers not as abstract as in a theological treatise, just on that border between the intellect and our imagination, a border so rarely explored today in religious thinking.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           —C. Milosz, in a letter to Thomas Merton

I.   Introduction: Religious Sensibility

Abraham Joshua Heschel sits comfortably between philosophy and poetry. His classic, God in Search of Man, provides lyrical perception and insight, religious and philosophic, not to be forgotten. A critic, skeptical of Heschel’s preference for poetry over theology, remarked, “You think it’s all just poetry?!” He responded (roughly), “Just poetry? What could be more elevated.”

Some years back, having returned to religious life in part inspired by Heschel, I was attending some lectures on Maimonides at UCLA. The contrast between Heschel and Maimonides, a philosopher’s philosopher, was stark. With Heschel I was exploring themes in Midrash, its parables and imaginative flights, some by way of biblical interpretation, some by way of reflection on religious life, religious ideas. For the midrashic imagination, God is anthropomorphically conceived: He nurtures, bestows gifts of love, He forgives, He judges righteously…. On the darker side, He is subject to anger, sometimes rage, to jealousy (for example, in Hosea, directed at Israel and her lovers). These lists can of course be lengthened.

Heschel’s view of prophecy is especially pertinent to the contrast with Maimonides. The prophet is, for Heschel, in a unique position vis-à-vis God and humanity. The prophet “gets” us; he knows from inside, as it were, what it’s like for us, what we think, what and how we feel. But, unlike the rest of us, he also gets God (much better than we do); the prophet understands, empathizes with, the divine pathos. The costs of such dual empathy are substantial. The prophet lives in painful elevation; despite his blessings he is appreciated by few, resented by many.

I’m not sure it’s accurate to report Maimonides as taking such views of God and prophecy to be heretical. But it’s not off by much. Maimonides is an Aristotelean; he takes Aristotle’s God and the Jewish God to be one and the same, surely not subject to any such human ways. Maimonides’ anti-anthropomorphism is as strict as it can be, on a par with that of the modern arch-naturalist Spinoza. The comparison with goes deep. Maimonides’s great philosophic work, Guide of the Perplexed, is in part a translation manual, one that reveals the anthropomorphic biblical imagery to be nothing more than what Bishop Berkeley called “speaking with the vulgar,” (all the while “thinking with the learned”).[1]

The Maimonides lectures at UCLA were given by Rabbi David Hartman, z’l. Hartman painted a vivid picture: The religious outlook of the Guide rejects the idea of God as caring, loving, forgiving, or angry, vengeful, and the rest. God was beyond all that, a Perfect Being, remote rather than available, for example, for interaction. God’s remoteness was not that of someone hiding (the Bible speaks of God hiding His face). God’s remoteness was more like that of a mathematical equation. Perhaps impersonal would be more to the point.

How in the world, I wanted to know, might these two conceptions reside in the same religious tradition? How could Maimonides fail to engage in a more human way, a less reductive way, with the powerful anthropomorphic text of Tanakh, not to speak of the sometimes hyper-anthropomorphic Midrash, the rabbinic religious imagination? Seeing God as loving, as caring about us, about justice—these are no throwaways; they seem central to Jewish tradition, and more generally to religious life.[2]

Hartman responded that Maimonides and the midrashic imagination represent different “religious sensibilities.” The phrase, not common currency in my experience, seized my imagination. The idea increasingly took on importance. One might pray—in the same pew—with one who inhabits a very different religious sensibility. One might experience the world through the biblical religious imagination; one’s fellow might eschew anthropomorphism. Or, one might see the divine in terms of the metaphysically supernatural and the other’s approach might be more naturalistic. At the same time, one’s religious sensibility might well be shared by another in a very different religious tradition. Religious sensibility seemed to me, and still does, important, and relatively underexplored.

Religious sensibility, as I conceive it, is analogous to musical sensibility.[3] “Sensibility” is related of course to “sense” (think: sense organs, but also “my sense of him”) and “sensation.” It’s something like a way of sensing or a taste/preference in the realm of sense, as with musical sensibility. There is some resonance here of the bodily, something I appreciate in connection with my thinking of faith as a stance, an attitude (in an almost nautical sense) of the whole person, this as opposed to a matter of cognitive assent to a proposition. As William James suggests, religion is largely a matter of the gut, surely not purely of the head.

II.Rabbinic Sensibility and the Rabbinic Project

Maimonides’s religious sensibility, at least as suggested in the Guide, is grounded in a philosophic outlook. It’s from philosophy, thinks Maimonides, that we know that God could not really be human-like, as described in Tanakh and Midrash. Maimonides suggests at the end of the Guide that the moment of solitary philosophic contemplation is the religious moment. This is striking; the contrast is with thinking of paradigm religious moments as standing before God in prayer—often communal prayer— or deeply engaged with talmudic issues.

The Rabbis of the talmud, skeptical about philosophy, inhabited a different sensibility, one to which Heschel’s outlook is closer. Max Kadushin, in The Rabbinic Mind, presents a compelling sketch: The Rabbis did not begin with a concept of God. In a way, they had no such concept, certainly not a philosophically well-developed one. What they had was their experience of God (of course against the background of the tradition and the biblical text). And that experience was of a God who loves, who provides, who cares, who is sometimes remote—at a great distance—and sometimes almost immediate, who may be angry and inscrutable; in short, the God of biblical imagination. But—and here’s the rub—that same experience yielded the sense that somehow God was altogether beyond all of this, that He could not be so like us.

Their touchstone experience thus yields two incompatible ideas. How does one live with such paradox? Is there a resolution in the offing? And what does such paradoxical experience yield by way of religious sensibility?

There is a wonderful scene in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters in which a Jewish mother responds to her son’s question of where God was during the Holocaust with this remark: “Max, you tell him.” Max’s response: “How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can opener works!” It goes deep in our tradition that our understanding of God’s ways is severely limited, that seeing God’s back—perhaps in a rear-view mirror—is about as close as anyone gets. Buber perhaps exaggerates when he writes that while everyone can speak to God, none can speak (coherently) about Him. In in important sense, we don’t know of what we speak. Accordingly, the Rabbis did not presume to resolve the paradox; nor even to address it. They had no pretensions of being theorists of God—the word is “theologian.” They appear to have had little patience for (what they knew of) philosophy. They were more akin to craftsmen or artists. They lived in the throes of the paradox.

The Rabbis were developing what we now know as Jewish religious practice. After the destruction of the Temple, their task was to find a way to reclaim Jewish religious life in the absence of its former central modes of worship. They were also practitioners of that life. They were thus craftspeople/artists in two senses: first, constructing and embellishing forms of worship, and second, creatively engaging in the practices. Their faith played a vital role in both of these modes. In the first, developing the practices, their ear, their sense of what it is to serve/worship/love/stand in awe of God, was foundational. In the second, the creative engagement with the practices, they were not unlike us, their descendants, seeing the life as a vocation and attending to it in that spirit.

To see the life as a vocation is to bring to bear great focus, imagination, and energy, to engage with it with the seriousness one (ideally) brings to one’s intimate relationships. No one loves quite the way anyone else does, but each (again ideally) brings himself to it with care, nuance, and focus. No one is a mother or father in quite the way others are. Parents, at their best times, do it creatively, with great attention to detail, with art one might say.

Needless to say, any such creativity—as craft or as art—requires solid grounding in the basics. In the case of actual art, say painting, one needs to know a great deal: about paint and its properties, the history of the art, and lots more. Much of the day to day, minute to minute, work tends toward the mundane. And so too with religious life. It’s at the odd moment that insight hits; insight, creativity, powerful realization and the like.[4]

I believe that the analogy with artistic endeavor goes deep. My teacher, Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, used to speak of a virtue of deep engagement with Talmud: One learns to navigate life in terms of God’s categories.[5] A great artist like Cezanne tries with all his soul to capture a vision. Looking back on his work he may point to various paintings, some coming closer, others not as close. Hazal, steeped in the tradition, were trying to capture the taste, the feel, the spirit of the Torah they inherited. 

I’ve been describing a religious sensibility that is suggested by much in rabbinic tradition. Unlike Maimonides’s way, it is not attendant to, almost a consequence of, a philosophic outlook. Rather it takes its leave from religious life and experience. From this perspective, the medieval philosophical turn will seem paradigmatic of what Wittgenstein takes to be an occupational hazard of philosophy: the attempt to illuminate by reinterpreting the subject matter in terms we are equipped to handle. Faith then gives way to belief: cognitive assent to propositions. Mystery, the sense that we are over our heads in theorizing about God, gives way to doctrine.[6]^{, [7]}

III.Truth

The dominant conception of truth among philosophers is “truth as correspondence.” The idea is that a thought or a sentence is true just in case it corresponds to, matches the facts. The sentence “John is seven feet tall” (or the thought it expresses) is true just in case the person in question, John, is actually that height. Nothing mysterious here; it’s very intuitive and understandable. The question is whether such an idea of truth can apply to a religious position. And if it can’t, where does that leave us? We certainly want to think of our religious ways as capturing the truth.

Paramount here is what appears to be the unresolvable paradox: God’s anthropomorphic properties and His being beyond any such human-like properties. Logically speaking, you can’t have it both ways. But which is it? If Maimonides had his way, and our God became the God beyond anthropomorphism, we would have resolved the paradox. But then we lose the God who cares, forgives, with whom we live and share intimacy. Might we go the other way? Might we deny God’s radical otherness, His being beyond human ways? We would still have the anthropomorphic God to whom we relate. But in denying this far side of God, as it were, we sacrifice another aspect of our relationship with God, our standing in awe in the presence of mystery.[8] God’s transcendence is not any more optional than is his closeness. This is not a paradox to be resolved! Each of God’s incompatible aspects is absolutely essential to religious life. Giving either of them up, or reducing one to the other, no matter the intellectual attractiveness of resolving paradox, would cripple religious life. So the intellectual puzzle persists, thank God, one might say. But how then might our outlook be seen as a candidate for truth? The reality that is God cannot both have and lack anthropomorphic properties.

Perhaps the concept of truth does not always function in just the way the philosopher’s correspondence idea suggests.[9] When we speak of the truth of our vision of God, perhaps we are coming at truth in a different way. We speak, after all, of a “true friend,” and “true” there has nothing to do with correspondence; we mean a genuine friend. And it’s said that our concept of truth derives originally from expressions like “true saw” and “true North.” The root notion may be something like straight ahead, or one-to-be-trusted, or without distortion. (“Yashar” in Hebrew works here.) If we give pride of place to that idea, we might see a true thought as one that is to be trusted, one that does not distort. Still, in many contexts the idea of correspondence works well. But for the general case, there is no such simple formula.  

This way of approaching truth is perhaps on the road to something satisfactory, but more needs to be said. As Maimonides and friends will be happy to point out, we are still living with paradox. But the situation vis-à-vis truth is even more dire. If Maimonides’s theological view were seen as canonical in Jewish tradition, if it were seen as the only legitimate Jewish outlook, then paradox would evaporate. The cost would be the loss of anthropomorphism. I can’t myself fathom it, but Maimonides seems fine with it in the Guide. However, Maimonides’s philosophical view never did become canonical in our tradition. Jewish tradition is rich in diverse religious sensibilities and their attendant theological directions. There is no felt need to have a canonical theology, something that seems to go deep in the tradition’s sense of itself.[10] That is not to say that advocates of particular theological ways necessarily see themselves as advancing an optional outlook. I’m certain that Maimonides did not see his own view in that light. But still there are a multiplicity of ways to proceed and in the end, they are all available for purchase, so to speak. It’s as if the tradition overrules any claim to exclusivity.

The extent of theological diversity is almost astounding. I’ve spoken of Maimonides and the contrast with Hazal. But there are also the approaches of the Kabbalists, their elaborate theologies. And then there are lots of views that cut across these already mentioned differences, like the contrast between the Hassidim (a number of approaches there) and the Mitnagdim. And the view of Rabbi S. R. Hirsch, those deriving from the Mussar movement, and the existentialism/phenomenology of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik, not to mention the various trends in modern Sephardic thought.

Jewish tradition has an intriguing way with unresolvable halakhic differences of opinion. In the face of fierce reasoned opposition about the correct outcome of a legal dispute—where each seeks the truth and may oppose his opponents view as simply wrong—the tradition in its overview of the situation has it that both are “the words of the living God.”[11] It’s perhaps even more intriguing to contemplate the application of that idea to the philosophic/theological disputes in question. While none of these theological approaches is taken by the larger historical religious community as the correct one, each reflects something that itself approaches a vocation, a kind of calling, something to which its adherents pour their energies, l’shem shamayim, to come to grips with God and religion. Each represents a distinctive inflection of religious life, each with its own insights. Each is a reflection of the living God, in the sense that when one fully lives the tradition, one brings to it one’s own imagination, emotional life, and distinctive intelligence, this in the context of the contingencies of one’s family, one’s education, and prior influences.

If I am on the right track here, then the problem about truth reappears in a more general way. The paradox about God’s anthropomorphic properties made it difficult to apply the notion of truth, what I called “correspondence truth.” But now, even putting aside the paradox, given the multiplicity of legitimate theological orientations, how might truth apply? If each represents “the word of the living God,” where can the truth lie?

It’s tempting to suppose that what’s really true is what they all have in common, basic theological doctrines like the thesis of monotheism. If we were to go in that direction, this would apply as well to the paradox discussed above: While the paradoxical overall outlook cannot be true (in the sense of correspondence truth), it shares with all these theological orientations the basic thesis of monotheism. But here things get even more complicated. First, this approach—what the various views have in common—does not rescue the truth of a full-blooded religious outlook but rather a thin slice of such an outlook, like the idea of monotheism. In this way, it is reminiscent of people who say, “I’m not an adherent of a religion but I do believe in a God.”[12] Second, perhaps more significant, do these divergent outlooks really mean or think the same thing when they say that God exists and is unique? For example, Aristotle’s God—the Active Intellect, with which Maimonides identifies the God of Jewish tradition—may well not be that of Yehuda HaLevi. And the Lurianic Kabbalists seem to go in quite another direction.

At this point, I am not sure how to proceed. One might say that even if their conceptions of God differ, it’s the same God of whom they speak, the unique God about whom they offer different conceptions. Or in philosophic parlance, their concepts may differ but the intended divine referent is the same. Maybe. But the matter seems less than clear.

My inclination is to think about truth in another key, one suggested above in my discussion of Hazal. When we think of our religious outlook as capturing truth, we gesture toward something very large, something toward which we  can only gesture: toward how deep the religious vision goes, how it underscores, alerts us, sensitizes us, to features of reality that are as significant as they are elusive; how it can play a key role in constructing a life characterized by genuineness, yashrut. This is not truth as correspondence, but a way of thinking about truth that connects it more closely with the way literature and the arts capture truth.

If this is correct, we give up on the claim that our theology is true, that we have the true theory in this domain. But wasn’t it always part and parcel of our outlook that God is beyond our ken, that our privilege extends only to seeing his back, as it were? Why then suppose that we can get any closer than one or another of these attempts, l’shem shamayim, to bring to bear the best of our thinking and feeling on the subject. Nor can we get beyond the by-now well-rehearsed paradox, thank God.[13]

President Donald Trump and Congress are in the midst of discussions to legislatively address the status of DACA recipients. These are 800,000 young people who had arrived in the U.S. ten or more years ago at age 16 or younger. If Congress fails to restore the terms of DACA, a vast number of young people may face deportation, even though they have lived most of their lives in the United States. They are students, workers, dreamers who have hoped for better lives as constructive members of American society. Every society must have rule of law, and the US must have and must enforce its immigration laws. At the same time, every good society practices compassion and wisdom in dealing with complicated issues.

Below is an article I wrote some time ago, relating to our responsibility to “the stranger.”

 “Do not afflict or oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:20)

“Do not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9)

“When a stranger lives with you in your land, do not afflict him. As one of your citizens, the stranger who lives with you shall be to you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt, I am the Lord your God.”   ( Lev. 19:33-34)

These and other verses in the Torah underscore our responsibility to not only be sympathetic to, but to identify with, those who are “strangers.” The Talmud (Bava Metsia 59b) posits that oppressing a stranger violates 36—and some say 46—Torah prohibitions.

The Torah obviously is teaching us to be compassionate and charitable. But in delineating the obligation to care for the stranger, it uses surprising language. The Torah could have said: have mercy on the oppressed, because you were oppressed in Egypt; or have compassion on slaves because you were slaves in Egypt.  But it does not say these things. Rather, it invokes our experience in Egypt as an impetus for us to identify with and help the stranger.

Who is a stranger? In the biblical times, this was a non-Israelite who lived among Israelites. (In later rabbinic thought, the stranger was identified as a proselyte.) In our days, it applies to a person of different nationality—an immigrant.

What is the nature of being a stranger?  The stranger is an “outsider,” someone not of our kin or clan, someone from another culture or religion, someone who is not “one of us.” We might naturally feel responsibility for our own group: but why should we be concerned with strangers?

The Torah—remarkably—commands us to love the stranger as ourselves.  The Torah justifies this commandment: “for you know the soul of the stranger.”  Because of our early experience as strangers in Egypt, we know first-hand what it means to be considered an alien. We not only suffered physical abuse as slaves in Egypt; we suffered psychological abuse. We were considered as lesser human beings; we were thought to be unworthy of basic human rights. We know deep in our own soul what it’s like to be a stranger; we are uniquely qualified to understand “the soul of the stranger.”

This lesson from antiquity has had ongoing meaning for Jews throughout our history. During the modern era, there have been dramatic demographic changes in the world. Most of the Jews today are living in countries different from those in which our ancestors of 150 years ago were living. Indeed, a huge percentage of Jews are themselves immigrants, children or grandchildren of immigrants.  We know the “soul of the stranger” because our families have been strangers. They have migrated to new lands to escape persecution or to find a better life for themselves and their children. They have made aliyah to Israel in fulfillment of Zionist dreams. They have had to learn new languages, adapt to new cultures. Our immigrant forebears often came to new lands with little money…but with great hope. They had to face physical hardships; and they had to cope with psychological sufferings.

Because we have been immigrants, we “know the soul” of immigrants. We have an inherent understanding of the challenges they face. We recognize the importance of helping them adapt to their new lands and to enable them to overcome the psychological stigma of being outsiders.

If the Torah needed to issue 36 commandments about caring for strangers, it means that we have a strong tendency not to be concerned for them. Indeed, there are many voices in contemporary society that take a dim view toward receiving immigrants. After all, these “outsiders” may be criminals or terrorists. They will cost us a lot of money in order to provide them social, educational and health services. They may take away jobs from native-born citizens. They can change the nature of our society if they come in excessively large numbers.

The Talmud (Sanhedrin 109a) suggests that the wicked city of Sodom was characterized by a policy that excluded immigrants. The Sodomites reasoned: why should we share our blessings with outsiders? Why should we make sacrifices for foreigners? It was this attitude that resulted in God’s punishment of Sodom for its iniquity.

As a rule, people do not become immigrants unless there are compelling reasons for them to leave their own lands. They are fleeing wars, violence, or terrorism. They are fleeing from oppressive governments. They are escaping desperate poverty. They seek a better life for themselves and their families.  Our instinctive response must be to lend a helping hand. We “know the soul of strangers” because we and our forebears were strangers.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shemuel Reggio, a 19^th century Italian Torah commentator, commented on the verse in Leviticus (19:18) commanding us to love our neighbor as ourselves. He pointed out that the verse should be understood to be saying: love your neighbor, because your neighbor is like yourself. Your neighbor is also created in the image of God.

The same comment applies to the commandment to love the stranger as ourselves. All human beings have a unique kinship. Instead of seeing others as “outsiders,” we need to see them as sharing a universal humanity based on all of us having been created by the Almighty.

The Torah knows that it is difficult to achieve this high level of understanding. That’s why it has underscored the obligation to care for the stranger 36 times. But it also knows that we are capable of achieving this level of understanding. And when we do, we not only fulfill God’s commandments; we fulfill our own humanity.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 His kind of faith is a gift.

It’s like an ear for music or the talent to draw.

— Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen

I. Introduction: Proofs, Old and New

Occasionally one meets or reads about people who were, as we say, born at the wrong time or place. Their gifts, tendencies, and ways, awkward in the context of their lives, would have seemed natural at some other time or place. The classical proofs for the existence of God suffer a different fate. Born at precisely the right time and place, they now seem out of context, no longer compelling in the way they must have been. At least they seem that way to many of us.

The natural habitat of the proofs was the medieval philosophical world, an intellectual culture in which philosophical justification of the religious fundamentals was just what was needed.[1] If one moves back some centuries to ancient Israel and its Jewish and arguably early Christian aftermath rational justification of religion is not on the horizon. To defend belief in God’s existence would have seemed bizarre, like defending belief in the existence of the weather.

Indeed, strange as this seems to our ears, belief itself is never mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. There is talk of believing in God, i.e. trusting, relying upon God. But no talk of believing doctrines, believing that something is the case;[2] no commandment¾no explicit one at least¾to believe anything.[3] However, by the early middle ages in Jewish religious culture¾earlier in Christianity¾beliefs, thoughts, and the like become very much the center of attention and there is a felt need to justify religious belief.[4]

The medieval attitude to belief’s centrality has become the norm. We identify the belief that God exists as a sine qua non of religious commitment. The Hebrew Bible’s interest is rather in one’s overall stance, the essential components of which are rather affective and behavioral, most importantly awe/fear and love of God as realized in lived experience.

But while belief has become central, the proofs of the medievals¾the classic philosophic defenses of that belief¾have lost their punch. The considerations to which they appeal¾like the order and beauty of the universe¾have by no means lost their suggestiveness, their relevance to and significance for religious thought and feeling. But proof is another thing.[5]

My aim here is to reflect on a relatively new style of proof¾a distant relative of the classical arguments¾current throughout the twentieth century and in recent decades even more vital, the argument from individual religious experience. Here too, or so I will argue, we should distinguish the alleged proof’s cogency from the religious significance of the considerations to which the proof appeals.

The focus on individual religious experience brings to mind the Protestant religious orientation. Not that individual religious experience is a mere afterthought in the other monotheisms. Indeed the proof’s advocates appeal to religious experiences in a variety of traditions. Likewise advocates of the argument include philosophers as diverse as William Alston and Richard Swinburne on the Protestant side, Gary Gutting, a Catholic, and Jewish thinker Jerome Gellman.[6] For the most part, however, contemporary discussions of proofs of God’s existence in the Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim traditions¾as I say, they are hardly the central topic nowadays¾are of the classical arguments.

My aim here is to explore the fundamental ideas of the argument, this as opposed to the numerous sophisticated variations that have emerged. I begin with William James, early in the twentieth century. Whatever the specifics of his religious views, James emerges from the American Protestant world and gives such proofs a great deal of respect. It’s good to begin with James, moreover, since he has a gift for raising fundamental questions in an intuitive, technically unencumbered way. In this way he is like later philosophers P. F. Strawson and Harry Frankfurt; penetrating minds whose insights give rise to rather technical literatures.

II. Gifts to the Spirit

James characterizes experiences that purport to be of God¾he includes them in the category of mystical experiences¾as “gifts to our spirit.” “No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these … forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”

Such experiences for James bespeak quite literally another form of consciousness. It is an open question, he supposes, as to whether such forms reveal worlds, as it were, that are ordinarily beyond our reach. It’s difficult to know what to do with James’s seemingly extravagant notion of forms of consciousness. This raises issues of the paranormal; James was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1885.

Whatever one thinks about the paranormal, James’s remarks about “gifts to the spirit” are themselves gifts. Here James evinces an appreciation of religion that is nowadays lost to many. John Dewey, a similarly sympathetic critic of religion,[7] writes:

A writer says: “I broke down from overwork and soon came to the verge of nervous prostration. One morning after a long and sleepless night…I resolved to stop drawing upon myself so continuously and begin drawing upon God. I determined to set apart a quiet time every day in which I could relate my life to its ultimate source, regain the consciousness that in God I live, move and have my being. That was thirty years ago. Since then I have had literally not one hour of darkness or despair.”

This [life story constitutes] an impressive record. I do not doubt its authenticity nor that of the experience related. It illustrates a religious aspect of experience. But it illustrates also the use of that quality to carry a superimposed load of a particular religion. For having been brought up in the Christian religion, its subject interprets it in the terms of the personal God characteristic of that religion.[8]

Dewey’s expression, “a religious aspect of experience” is no throwaway; he emphasizes the reality and significance of such aspects. In this passage he suggests—and in the sequel he greatly expands upon—the power of religion and its potential for influencing positively the course of life. At the same time he much more clearly and forcefully than James rejects the supernaturalist metaphysics associated with traditional religion. Nevertheless I suspect that James’s phrase “gifts to the spirit” would sit well for Dewey.[9]

Speaking for myself, I very much like James’s characterization. This is in part because I think with Dewey that such peak moments, and religious life more generally, can have a beneficial influence, including one’s psychological balance, ability to negotiate life’s challenges, the significance one accords to one’s life, and the dignity one assigns to others.[10] But there is another and perhaps deeper reason, albeit one that I find difficult to express.

What makes “gifts to the spirit” so difficult to explicate is “spirit.” I could explain James’s idea if I could explain the concept of the spirit, and related idea of the spiritual. There is significantly more to these ideas than the largely psychological dimension that Dewey emphasizes¾the various beneficial effects mentioned above as well as “the unification of the self” of which Dewey speaks.

The quotation from Crimes and Misdemeanors at the head of this article suggests that an affinity for things of the spirit is grounded in a natural gift, a human capacity, analogous to, in the aesthetic domain, having an ear for music or the talent to draw. I’ll begin with the latter and return to religion shortly. As we will see, there is more to mine here than a mere analogy. The aesthetic dimension has its own ties to matters of the spirit.

One obstacle to establishing the link I am after is that “aesthetic” is often heard in a reductive way; ascriptions of beauty, for example, are sometimes thought of, dismissed as, merely subjective. This is a function, I believe, of thinking too abstractly about this sphere. Consider by contrast actual aesthetic gifts, like musical talent or even having an ear for music. These abilities are far along the continuum from subjective toward objective, which is not to suggest that this distinction is either sharp or clear. Surely musical talent, an ear for music, and the like are no less aspects of the world than other abilities¾including those in the domain of athletics¾ to perform, to discern and appreciate, etc. The “tone deaf” idiom suggests that one, otherwise sound in auditory capacities, can systematically miss something important.

One who is musically advanced may hear the same performance as the rest of us but may alone penetrate to profound levels of appreciation. Similarly, one advanced in the appreciation of the visual arts may bring something very different to, and take something very different from, a painting, or indeed a natural scene, for example a landscape with its play of light, shadow, color, and the like.

Profound aesthetic experiences, no less than the religious experiences of which James wrote, deserve to be thought of as gifts to the spirit. They may engender a sense of awe and mystery, and of the sublime; they may provoke a feeling of being privileged and so of gratitude. The experience may be at once elevating and humbling. These represent important points of contact with religious moments.

The points of contact are not limited to such reactions. Artistic and religious virtuosity both involve, even begin with, natural aptitude, as noted in the quotation from Crimes and Misdemeanors. Some are more given to these things than others. And in both domains, hard work, genuine focus¾at times single-minded¾is essential if one is to approach one’s potential. We are less apt to think this way about the religious domain than the artistic. But a religious giant, a Mozart of the spirit, is a rare find; she is (certainly typically) one who has labored strenuously in pursuit of excellence.[11] And just as one who is tone-deaf can appreciate the musically gifted as responding to something of substance, one who is less able than another in matters of the spirit can recognize the latter’s accomplishment. Needless to say, being tone-deaf is a rare condition in either domain. Ordinarily people occupy an intermediate position within a wide spectrum of which being tone-deaf is at one extreme.

I’ve been emphasizing the analogies between the two domains, and the quasi-religious character of profound aesthetic experience. Now consider one who has undergone considerable development in both domains. A religious orientation¾bringing God into the picture¾may heighten and deepen one’s reactions to beauty. Explaining this is another matter, and not a trivial one. There may be no single story. God may play the role of an object of gratefulness, someone as it were on whom one bestows one’s gratitude. Sometimes the presence of God in the picture links experiences that would otherwise feel discrete; one comes to see an array in place of discrete dots. The points in the array seem to accrue added significance; aesthetic experience can thus partake of something analogous to what is sometimes called intertextuality.[12] Sometimes it may be God’s role as a partner and, as it were, a friend with whom to share the wonder. There are no doubt other dimensions, and the experience of several of these at once adds considerable power. One shares the wonders with their source, takes pleasure in their array.

Consideration of the aesthetic domain may be illuminating. Still, in much religious experience the aesthetic dimension is marginal or not present. All sorts of things can stimulate religious reflection and feeling: another’s death, or the prospect of death¾one’s own or that of others, various sorts of horrors or extreme ugliness, witnessing simple acts of particularly touching human kindness, childbirth, the intellectual and/or moral growth of one’s child or simply of another person, to name a few. It seems too much of a stretch to assimilate the religious reactions that may be prompted to reactions in the aesthetic domain.

And finally, there are James’s favorite examples of gifts of the spirit, quasi-perceptual experiences of God’s presence. There is no reason to assimilate these¾certainly not all of them¾to the aesthetic. They represent a spiritual achievement, the sense of being in God’s presence. Of course, many experiences can provoke a sense of the divine presence, for example, some of the aesthetic ones discussed above. But the quasi-perceptual experiences are quite another thing, face to face with God, as James puts it.[13]

To approach religious sensibility with James is to bring to center stage the experiential side of the religious orientation. But what of religious belief? James, while he writes that religion is fundamentally a phenomenon of the gut rather than of the head, argues forcefully that the experiential aspect has important implications for the doxastic side of religion.

III. What If Anything Do Religious Experiences Prove?

James and many of the more recent advocates of the argument from religious experience treat such experiences on the model of perception; James calls them, “face to face presentations.” They are, he says, “absolutely authoritative.”

Our own more “rational” beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us.[14]

This powerful “warrant for truth” does not, however, extend to those who have not themselves had such experiences. Testimony about religious experiences, according to James, is vitiated by what would seem to be a very powerful consideration, the great variety of such reports of experiences, testifying as it were to many different gods, non-gods, various metaphysical realities, and the like.[15] Here James sounds a bit like Hume, who famously denies that claims to miraculous experiences have epistemic value for those who merely hear testimony about them. By contrast, some more recent advocates maintain that such “perceptual” experiences constitute objective evidence, evidence for all of us, not only for participants.

By way of reaction to James’s “absolutely authoritative” claim, it seems important that the experiences in question are not phenomenally like ordinary sense perception. Consider one of James’s examples.

God is more real to me than any thought of thing or person. I feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine and rain; and awe mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful. He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear must have carried the tone, but generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and care for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school matters, social problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste. (p. 81)

For the most part the people James quotes are not claiming literally to see or hear God. Their sense is that they are experiencing God¾in some way that is difficult for us (and them) to define. The experiences are to be sure various, ranging from ones that involve a deeply felt sense of God’s presence, God’s love, etc. to quasi-sensual “almost seeings, almost hearings,” and the like. In the quotation just given, there is only one reference to actual hearing, and it may well be that the writer is speaking of an as-if hearing. The closer to claims of actual perceptual experience, the more likely we are to take them to be a bit crazy. Interestingly, St. Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century mystic, suggests, according to Rowan Williams,[16] that as a rule of thumb “the closer such perception is to … actually supposing the object of vision to be present to the senses… the less likely it is to be genuinely of God.”

The differences with ordinary perception are not limited to the phenomenal aspects. The religious experiences in question are for most of the subjects once (or at most several) in a lifetime experiences. There are those mystics who more regularly enjoy such privileges but it would be surprising in the extreme if they could call them up at will. Ordinary, everyday perception, by contrast, is reliably repeatable. One can return to a room and typically see exactly what one expects to see.

In addition to the matter of repeatability, there is the question of whether what one perceives¾and indeed one’s perceiving it¾is available to other normal perceivers. The question is not only whether others can have similar experiences, but also whether what one takes in on a particular occasion is open to others’ perception. In the example above, the person talks with God and receives answers¾in the special “as-if perception” mode. Whatever else one thinks about the give and take, no one takes the interaction to be available to others.

These differences do not themselves imply that anything short of veridical perception is occurring. But they do strain the analogy with ordinary sense perception. While it is less than clear that James’s is exactly an argument from analogy, it’s worth keeping our eyes upon these differences.

Perhaps more important, though, is James’s Hume-like point about testimony, what we might call “the many-gods problem.” Indeed it’s difficult to understand why James supposes that the agent’s “warrant for truth” survives the agent’s own knowledge of the many-gods problem. After all, if one were having a notoriously unreliable sort of sense perception one would do well, despite the appearances, to question what one seems to be seeing. In the case of religious experience, the Jamesian agent would not trust another’s testimony. Why then should she not apply this lesson to her own case?

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, these religious experiences do not involve any sensory apparatus. This seems to me¾but evidently not to James and his followers¾perhaps the most important point of all, one that puts the other points mentioned into proper perspective. I will linger a bit on it.

The accumulated experience of humankind gives much weight to the senses as yielding more or less reliable information about the environment. However this is to be rationalized, understood, theorized, all but the most strident skeptic is on board here. Indeed the rough outline of how this all works is well known. One doesn’t need contemporary neuroscience; Locke had something like the basic idea.

So sense perception has for us a privileged epistemic status. But this has everything to do with the idea that our senses are trained on aspects of the environment. There are other experiences that are in a wider sense “perceptual,” experiences like the religious ones we are considering, but also mental images, hallucinations, dreams. These are phenomenally more like perception than like, for example, conceptual thinking. But they do not therefore somehow automatically inherit the epistemic credentials of sense perception.

James’s contrary contention, apparently, is roughly that any sufficiently vivid (if that’s the right word) presentation has as much claim as any other to being veridical, the disclosure of an independent reality. But why should vividness, pace Hume, or the sense that one is making genuine perceptual contact, bridge the gap between actual perception of the environment and these other sorts of “perceptual” experiences?

It is as if, under the influence of the Cartesian tradition, one were working from the inside. Sufficiently vivid perceptual states are on a par unless one can find grounds to distinguish them. And from such a perspective, working one’s way from inside to outside¾finding such grounds ¾is the major undertaking. But this is not the only way to approach these matters. It is plausible that as human beings in perceptual touch with our surroundings, we are already outside. We begin, as Quine says, with ordinary things.[17] But such perception of the environment is a very different business than perceptual experience of the wider variety, including quasi-perceptual religious experience.

Accordingly, a reflective person, privileged to have an intense religious moment of the sort in question, might bracket the epistemology of the experience. It means ever so much, she might well say, but it proves little. My own certainly fit this pattern. They were at once powerfully significant¾even if relatively tame¾and epistemically inert. The question of what the experience verified never so much as arose.

Here I am not alone. Rowan Williams writes:

[for Teresa] the mysticism is demystified, and mystical experience as such is accorded no particular authority. Its authority…has to be displayed in the shape of the vocation of which it is part. [Still, …] there is good reason for intensified phenomenological interest in the varieties of preternatural or paranormal occurrence in prayer, especially when (as in Teresa’s case) these are to some extent organized as an ascending series. Teresa herself is fascinated by her experiences…. (Williams, p. 148)

Teresa and her contemporaries would have found this [the idea of trying to validate doctrine] in light of such mystical experiences surprising. For all Teresa’s interest in the visionary and paranormal, she is not disposed to use it as evidence for the way the universe is. “Do mystical states establish the truth [of religious claims]?,” asks William James in the course of a discussion of Teresa. Teresa herself would never have imagined that “mystical states” could do such a job… . [that they] had any part whatever to play in doctrinal discussion. So far from “mystical states” being a sort of paradigm of certainty, they have authority only within a frame of reference which is believed in on quite other grounds, and are therefore properly to be tested according to their consistency with this. (p. 149)

St. Teresa, then, brackets her experiences in epistemological terms. This does not, in her view, however, militate against their being religiously significant. Indeed she seems to measure spiritual progress, at least of one significant variety, by something like the intensity and perhaps frequency of the experiences.

Such epistemological neutrality does not entail metaphysical neutrality. I’m sure that St. Teresa believed she was making contact with God that in mystical experience. Unlike a Jamesian, however, she didn’t presume that one could, from reflecting on the perceptual character of the experience, rationally conclude that it really was contact with God.

Imagine now another grade of removal from the Jamesian picture. One undergoes a powerful religious experience but is less than sure about, even skeptical about, any sort of real contact with the supernatural. “I know,” he might say, “that this experience reflects my deep religious involvement, but whether I’ve actually achieved contact with God is hard to say.” Another example is provided by the advocate of a perfect being theology and some associated anti-anthropomorphism. Divinity, on such a view, might be taken to be beyond our perceptual (or even conceptual) reach. But such a theological position historically has not led to giving up prayer.[18] And such a person might indeed be subject to various sorts of religious experiences. Whatever these experiences are, she might reflect, they are powerful, elevating, and humbling; their intensity and regularity a measure of one’s spiritual situation. In short, one who departs from metaphysical/epistemological claims about the experiences might still adopt St. Teresa’s Jamesian attitude about their religious value.

IV. Interlude: Epistemic Legalism

James’s treatment of these phenomena¾and even more so later advocates of the argument from religious experience¾exhibits what I will call “epistemic legalism.” What I have in mind here is analogous to what Bernard Williams and others have called “scientism,” roughly the misapplication to philosophy of modes of explanation that have their home in scientific theorizing.

In Charles Griswold’s recent book, Forgiveness,[19] he speaks frequently of warranted and unwarranted resentment, of the obligation to forgive, to forswear unjustified resentment, of the question of who has standing to forgive. In remarks on Griswold’s book in a 2008 Pacific APA symposium,[20] I called attention to what seemed to me like an invasion of legal terminology/conceptualization into the ethical domain. The legalism, or so I argued, does not do justice to our experience of forgiving and being forgiven.

Of course the whole matter is controversial; for deontologists the legalistic terminology is apt. But that it is apt does not go without saying, and it is worth noting that it does not. Here too, in discussions of the epistemology of religion by James and his followers, notions like justification, warrant, and obligation are central. Since we are in the domain of epistemology, perhaps you will think that all this indeed goes without saying, that these are inevitably the pivotal notions. But perhaps not.

I spent my college years increasingly engaged with and committed to Orthodox Judaism. Religious practice and the sense of spiritual/intellectual community were extremely compelling. At the same time part and parcel of the life were beliefs: that a supernatural God exists, that God revealed the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and the like. Given that one could not be sure of such things was there something like evidence or a good reason to think that these things were actually true? Doesn’t intellectual responsibility require more than just the powerful feeling that attends to the life? Such were my pangs of intellectual conscience.

One could no doubt put these questions in terms of justification, warrant, intellectual duty/obligation and the like. And surely at the time I was not making distinctions between theoretical approaches in epistemology. But the description in terms of virtues like intellectual honesty, integrity, and responsibility seems more in line with my thinking.

Some years ago I was speaking with my then Notre Dame colleague, Fred Freddoso. We were discussing the attempt by our colleague Alvin Plantinga to show that belief in God was rational. Plantinga once commented there were many good arguments for the existence of God, 32 if I remember correctly. (I quipped that I knew the five famous ones and they didn’t do it.) I believe that Plantinga was thinking of a good argument in a different way than I. When he spoke and wrote about the rationality of belief in God, he meant something quite refined, something like¾ if I have him right¾one way one might proceed without irrationality. To establish that belief in God was rational was something like establishing that one had no epistemic duty to reject it. In discussing this, Freddoso, an Aquinas scholar, commented that in St. Thomas’s treatment, such a sophisticated (and legalistic) conception of rationality is not at issue. What St. Thomas asks is (something like) “Is belief in God dumb?” The force of that question I can feel.

Thinking in terms of intellectual honesty, integrity, and responsibility may lead in a direction very different from that of the epistemic legalism that’s been in vogue for so long.[21] As with other issues in philosophy, switching vocabulary is no guarantee of a substantially different approach. It depends of course on what one makes of the virtue talk. And of course this is a large topic at which I’m merely glancing here.

Justification is the concept from the legalistic framework that I’m most concerned with at present. Justification often has a defensive flavor, in philosophy and more generally.[22] In philosophy it’s as if a Pyrrhonian homunculus were perched on one’s shoulder, repeatedly whispering in one’s ear, “How do you know; are you certain?” And providing a non-question-begging answer is a very difficult business even for the most pedestrian beliefs; witness Descartes. This is of course not to say that one can’t theorize about justification without the skeptic in mind. But there is often the scent of skepticism in the air, perhaps especially in discussions of justifying religious belief.[23]

V. Swinburne et al.

I propose that we characterize the religious experiences we have been exploring, neutrally as possible (with respect to what they indicate about God’s existence), as experiences “as of God.” This lacks poetry; but not to worry, it won’t come up much in conversation. Richard Swinburne, also in search of a non-question-begging description, proposes that we speak of them as “epistemic seemings.”[24] For Swinburne, apparently following Chisholm, “seems epistemically that x is present” means roughly that the agent believes (or is inclined to believe) that x is present on the basis of the experience.

There is one respect in which Swinburne’s terminology seemingly fails to achieve the non-question begging character he seeks. For it presupposes that to have such an experience is to believe (or be inclined to believe) that God exists on the basis of the experience. But as we have seen, on St. Teresa’s approach the experience fails to provide a ground for the belief. The agent’s belief is grounded elsewhere. And on the alternative I mentioned above¾a further grade of removal from James¾the agent can take the experience to be religiously momentous without believing that he is making perceptual contact with God. Again, the experience will hardly provide a ground for his belief.

Still, surely some people do experience such “epistemic seemings,” religious experiences on the basis of which they ground their religious beliefs. Swinburne, a super-Jamesian, attempts to extend their justification to the rest of us: given the religious experiences of some people, rationality requires that we all believe that God exists.[25] The following “principle of credulity”[26] is at the heart of his argument:

It is a principle of rationality that (in the absence of special considerations) if it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present, then probably x is present; what one seems to perceive is probably so. (p. 254)

Swinburne argues for this principle on grounds that denying it would “land one in a skeptical bog” about ordinary perception. Here we have not just the scent of skepticism, detected in the emphasis on justification. Skepticism constitutes a crucial link in the argument.

            Swinburne’s approach to the epistemology of individual religious experience represents an important trend in twentieth-century Christian philosophy. Respect for skepticism is one important aspect of the trend, but it’s not the only one or the deepest.[27] That honor belongs to an idea to which I now turn.

My first encounter with the idea was as a college freshman, overhearing a conversation in a coffee shop. “We all have premises,” offered a defender of religion. “These are mine.” I didn’t know a lot of philosophy at the time, but even then this sort of defense had very little appeal for me. Surely, I thought, we want more than that from philosophy. In such a fashion, one could defend just about anything one felt strongly enough about.

There is another way to take this sort of defense of religious belief. Perhaps the idea is that religious belief does not stand in need of philosophical justification; that religious belief is something with which one comes to philosophy. I myself, while I do not so approach religious belief (at least as it’s usually construed¾see later), I very much do so approach other matters, for example, our common sense beliefs about the world: that my dog is lying at my feet as I write these words, that he is a dog and I’m human, and the like. As I’ve said, we start with ordinary things; we start out in and with the world.

To maintain that religious belief is something that one brings to philosophy is to give religious belief the status of common sense. But this is to deny a striking intuitive gap between ordinary and religious beliefs; between on one hand the belief that I’m a human being and on the other that a supernatural God exists outside of time and space. With respect to the former, it takes some sort of philosophical skepticism to generate concern. Not so for the latter. A normally reflective person, religious or not, will recognize that there is an issue here. Or so we often suppose.

The denial of the intuitive gap is at the heart of the trend represented by Swinburne’s approach. It is the meeting ground for James and his contemporary followers. Various philosophic strategies have been utilized to eliminate the gap. The freshman¾post-Philosophy 1¾comment above was one way. Closely related is the idea that religious belief is in effect (or can have the status of) common sense. Then there is James’s: to grant the special “as of God” experiences the epistemic status of sense perception. Still another way to eliminate the gap is by way of skepticism.

Here the idea is to place great weight on the skeptic’s claims. One begins with the idea that some ordinary belief is in epistemological trouble given the weight of the skeptic’s claims. Early along Alvin Plantinga emphasized belief in other minds.[28] Swinburne, in the work cited, speaks more generally of beliefs based on ordinary sense perception. How are we to deal with the skeptic? How might we, in the face of the skeptic’s good questions, account for our everyday knowledge? Only by adopting a very strong epistemic principle—for example Swinburne’s principle of credulity. But then, strong epistemic principle in hand, religious belief is no worse off than the most ordinary, pedestrian beliefs. Skepticism levels the playing field.

To the extent that one is moved by the skeptical starting point one will want to scrutinize the idea that something like the principle of credulity is the only way to rescue ordinary beliefs. From my perspective, while I worry about my beliefs being responsible, as discussed above, that constitutes no problem for ordinary beliefs and remains an issue for the religious beliefs in question.

I have explored a number of attempts to eliminate the intuitive epistemic gap I’ve been discussing. And of course one needs to have a look at each such proposal in detail. But something seems questionable with the general idea, with the very attempt to eliminate the gap.

Philosophy is notorious for solutions the brilliance of which outshines their contact with good sense. Russell reminded us to maintain our sense of reality “even in the most abstract studies.” The intuitive gap I’ve been discussing is one that presents itself to many religious and non-religious people. Some of our forbears who produced elaborate rational proofs for the existence of God were presumably moved to do so by the sense that their passionately held convictions were indeed controversial, and not only in the sense that some people believed otherwise. Surely a reasonable defense would reveal good reasons to believe without suggesting that the gap was illusory.

VI. Conclusion: Making Sense of Religion

Our modern sensibilities distance us from the ancients for whom God, like the weather, was hardly optional. We have well known options. And even if one’s own way is to take God for granted almost like the weather, the question of whether this makes sense almost inevitably arises at some point in one’s life, certainly in the lives of those around one. In what follows I’ll sketch an alternative to the approach taken in so much twentieth and twenty-first century work, by defenders of religion as well as by critics.

One thing that is striking¾and new¾in the Jamesian arguments we have been exploring is the idea that the experiential side of religion can serve as the foundation, specifically the epistemic foundation, of religious belief. At the same time, James is hardly interested in religious experience only for its epistemic implications. James’s called his book The Varieties of Religious Experience and the varieties and their meanings¾meanings in the broadest sense¾are its main focus.

To thus emphasize the experiential side is to make contact with the mystical tradition, and to diverge from the spirit of medieval rationalist theology.[29] It is also to converge with the approach of the Hebrew Bible with its emphasis on what Buber calls faith, a matter of living a life characterized by an intimacy with God.[30]

The ancients lived their faith without the help of our concept of belief. But this is not to say that there is something illegitimate about the use of our notion to characterize them, although it does require a certain delicacy. Surely there were things in the religious domain that they took to be true: the historical events described in the Bible for example, with God’s role in them, as well as that God is good, forgiving, at times angry, and the like.[31] There is no harm in the cautious ascription of belief here.

Here’s one reason for caution: The language in which many of these beliefs are expressed is poetically infused, the way of the Bible. And where not poetic, the language is often anthropomorphic, and so problematic as to its ultimate import. We may speak of belief here, but we are quite far from the philosophers’ conception of assent to a well-defined propositional content. Max Kadushin, reflecting on such belief, refers to it as “uncrystallized,” an arresting image.[32]

Religious belief can engender philosophical pique from another direction as well, the not inconsiderable inconsistency in the biblical characterization of God, an inconsistency that reflects our own sense of these things. To focus on our own case, we believe passionately in how much He cares¾we feel or almost feel His touch¾and then, turning a corner, we feel His absence acutely, sometimes almost a sense of cruelty. Or for another dimension of inconsistency, our experience of God, as just described, essentially involves God’s feelings, thoughts, and the like. At the same time, we experience God as somehow beyond all that.[33]

The lack of clarity, the anthropomorphism, the inconsistency, these are things that while smoothly accommodated within religious life drive the philosophic mind to drink. Or to purify. When Greek philosophy enters into contact with the Israelite religious tradition there ensues a rationalizing of these earlier modes of religious thought. The literary rendering, so apt for the religious life as it was (and largely still is) lived, is seen as inadequate, as in need of translation into a non-poetic idiom, as in need of a metaphysical foundation and attendant epistemological support. And making sense of religious life comes to be seen as defending the religious metaphysics, in part by supplying a supporting epistemology. Which brings us to proofs of the existence of a God.

What, though, if we maintain our focus on lived experience rather than on any allegedly necessary metaphysical underpinning? Without a religious metaphysics and epistemology we may well be accused of not knowing of what we speak. But is it not a genuinely religious intuition that with respect to understanding God we are over our heads, that central to religious life is an intimacy, the other party to which is as it were seen through a glass darkly?

Making sense of one’s commitment to a religious life is not and should not be a trivial matter. But there is a world of difference between defending supernaturalist metaphysics and making sense of the form of life. That the life genuinely speaks to one is, for example, germane to the latter project. An aspect of this, stronger for some participants than others, is a sense of God’s presence. And one may reflect that one has more confidence in the wisdom of the life than in any philosophical interpretation of what it all comes to.

The effect of my approach is to reduce substantially the gap between ordinary and religious belief. The gap upon which I’ve insisted earlier, the gap that we ordinarily feel, is the product of a philosophical interpretation of religion, a metaphysics that we have come to think of as at the heart of a religious orientation. But this is not to suggest that there is no gap, that religious belief is somehow just common sense.

To proceed in this direction is to dethrone philosophy as the provider of foundations in this domain. This is not, however, to deny philosophy the exploration of fundamentals. Here religion provides a rich field. To provide one example, I spoke above of the ancients’ (and our) religious beliefs that, I said, drive a philosopher to drink. At the same time, the religious utility of such uncrystallized beliefs is enormous; in that regard we couldn’t ask any more of them. Uncrystallized belief is an idea that cries out for philosophical clarification.[34]

We are not the ancients and philosophy has made its mark on us, one that we don’t wish to eschew. But it is one thing to see religious life as riding on a metaphysical picture, quite another to view the life as fundamental and the doctrinal side of one’s tradition as more like the furniture in the living room, importantly expressive of the specifics of the tradition’s sensibility, rather than the foundations of the edifice.[35]^{, [36]}

Just over sixty years ago, the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists was founded to resolve “the apparent points of conflict between scientific theory and Orthodox Judaism.”[1] [DEA1] The claims of paleontology, cosmology, and especially evolutionary biology exposed contradictions with traditional beliefs that were hard to overcome—so hard, indeed, that Alvin Radkowsky (an eminent nuclear physicist and leading member of the association) described the challenge as “a test of faith comparable to that faced by the biblical Abraham.”[2]

Today, evolution is no longer a hot topic amongst Modern Orthodox Jews. Few feel anxiety, let alone an impending Akeidah, at the challenge evolution poses—and even fewer would follow the advice of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and tear the offending pages out of schoolbooks. Even in the Hareidi community, rejection of evolution is no longer universal. When a ban was issued against the books of the “zoo rabbi” Nosson Slifkin for questioning the scientific judgments of the Talmud, opposition was intense—yet several prominent rabbis rallied to his defense.

Judaism’s ability to make peace with and absorb emerging scientific ideas is not new. Nine centuries ago, Maimonides declared the anthropomorphisms of the Torah to be allegorical. Dibrah torah bil’shon benei adam—the Torah speaks in human language—Maimonides tells us, stretching the talmudic saying well beyond its original intent to imply that words need not have their literal meaning. Nahmanides read the creation narrative as a spiritual lesson, and pointed out its non sequiturs if interpreted literally. And although integrating the Torah with science was of paramount importance to some, other exegetes were less enthusiastic and preferred to put the scientific issues aside. Ibn Ezra, in introducing his Torah commentary, excoriates commentators (including Saadiah Gaon) who bring lengthy astronomical explanations to bear on the text. And Rashi, quoting a midrash, famously poses a stunning question on the very first verse of Bereshith, asking why the Torah should start with a discussion of creation at all when it might instead have started with the first mitzvah. This suggests a different strategy: reconciling science and Torah not by bringing them together into a coherent whole, but by recognizing that their concerns are largely disjointed.

Science itself has increasingly moved in this direction, attenuating its conflict with religion. The medievals made no clear distinction between the sciences and humanities, or between scientific and religious knowledge. The development of scientific theories was therefore constrained by religious beliefs. Although Copernicus revolutionized astronomy by rejecting the geocentric view of the universe, he was not prepared to consider an elliptical path for planetary motion, so his theory required “epicycles” to preserve the divine perfection of the circular orbit. Isaac Newton, famously characterized by John Maynard Keynes as a “Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides” sought an integration of his religious beliefs and scientific theories, and wrote in an unpublished manuscript that “God is known from his works.”[3] Over time, however, science separated itself from religion, and scientific theories no longer relied on, or made, metaphysical claims. The great theories of modern physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, take this to an extreme: Science is no longer even about what exists, but only about what can be observed.

And thus we arrive today at the widely held view that science and religion have no inherent conflict, each in its pristine form being emptied of any claims about the other. As the biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it, science and religion represent “non-overlapping magisteria.” Science addresses the composition of the universe and how it works; religion examines questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. As Gould puts it cleverly: “These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry. Science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how we go to heaven.” [4] Gould, who described himself as a Jewish agnostic, suspected that the soul did not exist, but hoped he was wrong and saw value in both endeavors: “The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains—for a great book tells us that the truth can make us free and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.”[4]

Harder Questions

Although the challenges presented by the natural sciences have receded, fresh challenges have taken their place and seem to pose much harder and more far-reaching questions. The field of biblical criticism has unearthed a mass of evidence that the Torah is a composite document that reflects the prevailing ideas of other cultures contemporaneous with ancient Israel. How, in the light of such claims, can one adhere to the belief, required by Maimonides in his eighth principle of faith, that the Torah we have in our hands today is the very same Torah that was handed down by Moses, and that it is all of divine origin? Moses, according to Maimonides, acted like a scribe taking down a dictation; consequently, he insists, there is no difference in holiness or authority between verses such as, “And the sons of Ham were Cush and Mizraim, Phut and Canaan” and verses such as, “I am the Lord thy God” or “Hear, O Israel.” Nahmanides maintained that the very letters of the Torah encode secrets revealed to Moses—hence the reason that omission of even a single letter renders a Torah scroll invalid.

To be sure, not all Orthodox Jews accept these rather extreme formulations of Torah min haShamayim. Evidence of small differences between the Masoretic text and earlier manuscripts makes it hard to sustain confidence in the perfect reliability of the Torah’s transmission. When we raise the Torah in synagogue and declare veZot haTorah asher sam Mosheh—this is the Torah that Moses placed before the children of Israel—few of us feel a need to defend the assertion in its most literal sense. Moreover, the view of Moses as copyist of the entire Torah was challenged long before modern biblical criticism; Ibn Ezra’s cryptic comment about the secret of the final twelve verses of the Torah is usually assumed to be an allusion to his belief that Moses did not record the events of his own death. Many Orthodox Jews have absorbed the sensibilities of source criticism, even while rejecting its broader claims, and are skeptical of theories with origins whose historicity is dubious. They treat traditional attributions of authorship—that David wrote the psalms, or that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes—as rhetorical, no different from the Gemara’s statement that Moses himself instituted the first paragraph of Birkat haMazon.[5]

But these finer points of criticism, however important they may be for scholars, have little practical impact. Their theological impact is minor too, because few Jews build the foundations of their belief and religious commitment on such fragile assumptions. Moreover, contemporary assertions of the most extreme positions keep company with other intellectual positions of questionable rationality. Thus the advocates of “Bible codes,” for example, in which hidden messages are inferred from the exact placement of letters in the text of the Torah, seem to rely either on the dubious assertion that the Masoretic text was the version given to Moses, or on the strange belief that God should have chosen to reveal his message to the world only following the Masoretic redaction and not before. But the very notion of Bible codes is implausible, since any suitable text of comparable length will furnish “prophecies” that are just as convincing (as Michael Jackson has demonstrated, by writing a computer program that produced similar results when applied to Milton’s Paradise Lost [6]). At least the Bible code enthusiasts have heeded Mark Twain’s advice that “the art of prophecy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future,” and have limited their efforts to prophecies of events that have already occurred.

The larger questions of authorship of the Torah, on the other hand, have enormous consequence. In its literal sense, the Torah conflicts with contemporary morality in many areas: in its acquiescence to slavery, its apparent advocacy of genocide (e.g., in the context of the Canaanite ban), and its prescription of the death penalty for many offences (including witchcraft, breaking Shabbat, and homosexuality). If the Torah is not divine in its entirety, rather than approaching these issues apologetically, contextualizing them, or regarding their plain meaning as superseded by more palatable rabbinic interpretations, we might instead see them as evidence of a human element –  not to be justified, but on the contrary to be deemphasized and maybe even repudiated. On the other hand, if the Torah is entirely divine, we should presumably see our own moral qualms as reflections of our inadequate understanding, and adjust them accordingly (although, as we shall see, such a conclusion is not in fact necessary).

It is the confluence of these nagging moral questions and the doubts seeded by biblical criticism that present such a formidable challenge to many Orthodox Jews today. The rise of feminism has greatly exacerbated the dilemma. As Tamar Ross puts it: “What makes the feminist analysis unique is that the ultimate question it raises does not concern any particular difficulty in the contents of the Torah (be it moral, scientific, or theological). Nor does it concern the accuracy of the historical account of its literary genesis. Highlighting an all-pervasive male bias in the Torah seems to display a more general skepticism regarding divine revelation that is much more profound.” [7]

In response to this dilemma, a reactionary will say that we have here nothing more than a clash of value systems, and that, for a believer, the Torah must prevail. The claims of biblical criticism do not meet scientific standards, its arguments are rife with qualifications and disagreements, and the evidence of multiple authorship is a figment of the critic’s imagination. But however mightily we might struggle, like former Chief Rabbi Hertz in his commentary to the Humash, to undercut the positions of the critics by exposing their mutual inconsistencies, the fact remains that in the scholarly world there is broad consensus on the basic premises of source criticism, and the ongoing accumulation of evidence over the last century has made its findings hard to reject out of hand.

From a scientific perspective, a religious position that rejects the claims of biblical criticism is not irrational because it views those claims as untrue; after all, biblical criticism is not a scientific discipline whose claims can be evaluated in repeatable experiments. Rather, rejecting the claims outright is irrational because it denies even the possibility that they might be true. To be unwilling to even consider that the Torah might be a composite document is no different in principle from holding firm to the belief that the Earth is stationary and that the sun revolves around it. In this sense, attempting to sustain a belief in traditional notions of divine authorship brings science and religion into full conflict. For Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate physicist, the very essence of the scientific mind is its capacity for doubt: “It is our responsibility as scientist, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance… to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.” From this perspective, if we ignore the dilemma or compartmentalize our religious lives, we are shirking our scientific responsibilities, attempting to preserve our religious integrity at the cost of our intellectual integrity.

The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs

Richard Feynman was not a philosopher, and despite writing with extraordinary clarity and elegance on many topics, criticizes religion in a way that will strike most religious readers as unsophisticated and unconvincing. (In one of his books, in a chapter entitled Is Electricity Fire?, he reports a conversation with some students at a university Hillel about Shabbat observance, and ridicules the notion of melakhah [9]. At least he admitted the limits of his expertise: “A scientist looking at nonscientific problems,” he said, “is just as dumb as the next guy.”[8])

Likewise, the recent spate of anti-religious books, such as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion or Christopher Hitchen’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, might warm the hearts of atheists—but are unlikely to sway any believers. Their tone is angry and dismissive, and the religious views that they put down are for the most part crude strawmen. And their attitudes to Jews and Judaism are unlikely to win them much sympathy. Dawkins has called for an academic boycott of Israel, and his description of the Jewish lobby (as a model for a possible atheist lobby) was criticized for implying that all supporters of Israel are religious Jews. Hitchens described Hannuka [DJ2] in an article in Slate as “childish stuff” and cast the Hasmoneans as fundamentalist anti-Hellenists, whose success was a triumph of “bloody-minded faith over enlightenment and reason” that retarded “the development of the whole of humanity.”[10] (According to Shaye Cohen, Hitchens has his facts wrong: The goal of the Hasmoneans was to find a way to live with Hellenism. Many of their practices show its influence—such as the election of the high priest, and even the institution of Hanukka itself, as a festival declared by popular acclaim [11]).

A book published last year by Sol Schimmel[12], a professor of education and psychology at Hebrew College in Boston, is harder to dismiss. Schimmel is himself a traditionally observant Jew, grew up in an Orthodox household and was educated in right-wing yeshivot. He has an extensive familiarity with rabbinic literature, confesses “deep religious emotions” when singing songs such as Yedid Nefesh, and asserts that even scriptural fundamentalisms have “many positive ethical, psychological, spiritual, and social consequences.”

Nevertheless, his book, The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth is ruthless in its critique of Modern Orthodoxy. The book originated in his attempt to understand why, from a psychological perspective, Modern Orthodox Jews cling to a notion of Torah min haShamayim (TMS, as he abbreviates it) that is so at variance with overwhelming evidence and logical reasoning. His studies took him beyond Judaism to both Christianity and Islam; Jewish readers may take some solace in his descriptions of the fundamentalisms of these other religions, which seem to have had far more demonstrably negative consequences, and are tied to literal readings of the Bible and Koran that are less flexible than the rabbinic reading of the Torah. The chapter on Modern Orthodoxy, however, will make many readers squirm.

What is unusual about Schimmel’s book is that his principal argument is not philosophical. Rather, through a series of narratives and discussions of expressed opinions, he offers a psychological critique. In short, Orthodox Jews adhere to irrational beliefs because of the high emotional cost of giving them up, and they create a series of justifications and selective interpretations to bolster positions that, in their heart of hearts, they know to be false. They also employ “selective attention,” avoiding the conflict that arises from considering hard questions, even professing a lack of interest in the historical and literary analysis of a book for which in other respects they have boundless fascination. Schimmel notes that sometimes believers will even articulate the social, religious and psychological consequences of skepticism as explicit reason for maintaining belief. Concern that not believing in Torah min haShamayim might undermine observance of mitzvot is a strange justification for making empirical claims.

In some of his arguments, Schimmel brings Modern Orthodox thinkers to help argue his case. In his critique of the Artscroll Humash and its expression of a simplistic rejection of modern thought with a professed humility that “masks the arrogance of the fundamentalist who is certain of the truth… and that all who disagree with him are wrong, misguided, or heretics who have no share in the world to come,” Schimmel is joined by scholars such as Barry Levy for whom the Artscroll commentaries “misrepresent the sacred literature of normative Judaism.” Schimmel spares Modern Orthodoxy no criticism, however. Widespread capitulation of synagogues and rabbinical organizations to Artscroll signals a coalescing between Modern Orthodoxy and right-wing Orthodoxy, and many of the more independent-thinking scholars have been left on the periphery of a movement that was once more liberal, and that has largely “abandoned its original commitment to a serious and honest engagement with modernity.”

Schimmel makes no secret of his agenda: to deprogram the Modern Orthodox (among others). Indeed, his last chapter is entitled “On Defundamentalizing Fundamentalists.” His book is valuable for the hard questions that it asks, and for the light it shines on strange beliefs and their contrived justifications. For this reason alone, it deserves a wide readership in the Modern Orthodox community. But while it diagnoses the disease, it offers no cure.

Finding a Path

How can we address this challenge, and create a philosophy of Modern Orthodoxy that respects our tradition, reaffirms our commitments to Torah and deeply held moral convictions, and that at the same time preserves our rationality?

Returning to Radkowsky’s choice of the Akeidah as the metaphor for our contemporary challenge in reconciling science and Torah, we might ask: Is this challenge really a test of faith? If so, is it a test we pass only by sacrificing our intellectual honesty on the altar of religious conviction? I sometimes wonder whether some scientists might not justify to themselves, emotionally if not intellectually, the surrender of part of their critical faculty as a small sacrifice, an act of piety made all the more potent by the value they attach to it

Better then, to view this as a test of intellect rather than a test of faith: to find a way to reconcile the compelling evidence of the late, composite authorship of the Torah with a commitment to halakha[DJ3] ; to navigate a path through this rocky terrain that requires neither leaving one’s rationality behind nor disturbing the foundation of traditional Judaism so greatly that the entire edifice begins to crumble.

Many thinkers have mapped out such a path. Some take more turns away from traditional conceptions than others, and their ending points are often very different. Maybe none offers a journey that suits us personally. To some, a path will seem to veer too far from tradition; to others, a path may seem too apologetic, too ready to contrive a complex and implausible theology in defense of the indefensible. Together, however, these paths at least give us a better sense of the terrain as a whole, and make it easier for us to find out own way through.

The first modern proponents of the critical approach to reading the Bible were Protestants who used their scholarly studies in support of their view that Judaism was morally inferior to Christianity. So it was not unreasonable for Solomon Schechter to describe the Higher Criticism of Julius Wellhausen, who had likened Judaism to a dead tree, as the “Higher Anti-semitism.” But after 130 years of scholarship, the field has changed, and many of its leading exponents are Jewish. Amongst these is a cohort of traditionally observant Jews who have articulated their own theories for reconciling their private observances with their public scholarship—often as introductions or codas to their scholarly books.

Marc Brettler, closes his How to Read the Bible[13] with an afterword entitled “Reading the Bible as a Committed Jew.” The Bible, he explains, is a ‘sourcebook that I—within my community—make into a textbook… by selecting, revaluing, and interpreting the texts I call sacred.” A textbook offers a monolithic perspective and a prescriptive guide; a sourcebook, in contrast, brings together multiple, and often conflicting perspectives. In describing the Bible as a sourcebook, he makes the point often noted by its scholars (but harder for those to appreciate who have read the Bible only through rabbinic eyes), that the Bible itself does not even claim to be a monolithic book—or even a book at all. For Brettler, ‘selection” means choosing one of the Bible’s perspectives over another, in a manner no different, he argues from, for example, how Divrei haYamim chose the cooking method of the korban pesah to be boiling (according to Devarim) rather than roasting (according to Shemoth). Revaluing the text involves recognizing that, as an ancient text, the Torah has not “always aged well,” and finding new meaning that is more consonant with modern sensibilities. Brettler realizes that this is “extremely difficult to do with integrity,” but his willingness to reinterpret the text personally will place him, for many Orthodox Jews, beyond the bounds of the halakhic community.

Mordechai Breuer, like Brettler, acknowledges the problems raised by biblical criticism. He recognizes that the “power of these inferences, based on solid argument and internally consistent premises, will not be denied by intellectually honest persons.” [14] Unlike Brettler, however, Breuer wants to retain the principle of the divinity of the Torah in its entirety, and therefore draws very different conclusions. He sees divine purpose in the structuring of the Torah as a document with multiple, often conflicting strands—providing multiple meanings, and speaking to different generations in different voices. Remarkably, Breuer seems to adhere to Maimonides’ formulation, believing that this multi-stranded Torah was dictated to Moses, going further even than classical rabbinic sources that were willing to recognize contributions to the text of the Torah both later and earlier in origin than the Sinaitic revelation. The ingenuity of this approach is evident, but it will strike some as too contrived. As Schimmel notes, it is reminiscent of the view held by many (including the Lubavitcher Rebbe) that God created fossils ready-formed. Louis Jacobs noted that such a view is logical in the narrow sense, but the logical gain may be outweighed by the theological loss. In his early work, We Have Reason to Believe, Jacobs complained that such arguments lead to a conception of a God who intentionally tricks us, planting false clues to lead us astray. In his later work, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, his critique softened; he concedes that the Lubavitcher Rebbe was too sophisticated a theologian to suggest that God placed fossils there as a test of faith “to see whether men would be sufficiently steadfast in their faith in Genesis to resist the blandishments of science.” But, he notes, such positions still require us to believe that God has given us the power to reason, and the ability to uncover compelling evidence, but nevertheless expects us to resist the obvious conclusions.

If Breuer and Brettler represent ends of the spectrum, James Kugel sits somewhere between the two. Like Brettler, he is prepared to concede that the Torah was not given in any literal sense to Moses on Sinai, and that it is likely a much later document comprised of multiple sources. Like Breuer, however, Kugel sees a divine hand in this process. He confesses ignorance about how or why this process happened. But although Kugel accepts the premises and methods of biblical criticism, he wholeheartedly rejects what he views as its central agenda. From the start, biblical criticism has attempted to wind the clock back, allowing us to view the Bible not through the lens of the rabbis but through the perspective of the civilization that gave birth to it, thus revealing the “real Bible,” in contrast to the very different Bible created by rabbinic readings. Kugel maintains that no such “real Bible” ever existed, that interpretation did not follow canonization, disrupting accepted meanings, but that, on the contrary, the Bible was interpreted from the outset, before it was even complete. A “spindly sapling of texts” was able to grow into a “the great date palm of Scripture” only because of the interpretive soil in which it was planted. “The mission on which modern biblical criticism set out, then, without quite understanding it, was to uproot Scripture from that soil the better to study the whole plant and the plant alone.”[17] Paradoxically, then, Kugel’s view of interpretation is remarkably close to the traditional conception of a Torah SheBe’al Peh that was revealed contemporaneously with the written Torah.

While seeing a divine hand in the development of the Torah, however, Kugel does not see a need to defend the divinity of every word. “How,” he asks, “can you distinguish the word of God from other, ordinary human words in Scripture?”[18] Kugel is not willing to answer this question. “I suppose I have my suspicions about this verse or that one, but I really do not believe it is my business to try to second-guess the text’s divine inspiration.” In the same way, he explains, that he desists from walking on the Temple Mount—traditionally forbidden for fear that one would tread in the area of the Kodesh haKodashim—despite having his own ideas about where it once stood, respecting the sacred integrity of the area as a whole, he is likewise content to recognize the sacred integrity of the Bible. The modesty here is compelling, and it allows Kugel to maintain a traditional reverence for the Torah. Indeed, Kugel has opposed the teaching of biblical criticism in Jewish high schools, and has deep reservations about the value of his field, sometimes talking as if it is a curiosity for specialists alone.

Some, however, will see Kugel’s modesty as disingenuous. After all, to most Jews, where exactly the Bet haMikdash was situated has little contemporary significance. But the question of whether the Torah’s proscription of homosexuality, or its advocacy of the death penalty, or its acquiescence of slavery, are divine in origin is no small matter.

Louis Jacobs, like Kugel, sees divine significance in the development of rabbinic Judaism, but he is more ready to identify human elements in the Torah. As a distinguished British talmudist, Jacobs sought to demonstrate the flexibility of halakha, and the extent to which it has been influenced by external pressures. The Torah is indeed “from Heaven,” according to Jacobs, but the word “from” must be interpreted in a non-fundamentalist way[16]. A committed but non-fundamentalist Jew, for example, will refrain from smoking on Shabbat, accepting the standard halakhic formulation of observance. But he will find it hard to accept the notion that violation of this mitzvah should incur the death penalty, and is relieved that no Sanhedrin any longer exists to enforce it.

Jacobs was a student of the prominent mussar scholar Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, and served as an Orthodox rabbi in Manchester and then London for many years. In 1961, he was expected to become the principal of Jews’ College, but his appointment was blocked by the then Chief Rabbi, Israel Brodie, on account of the views Jacobs had expressed in his book We Have Reason to Believe. He was subsequently denied his pulpit, and a number of his congregants left to form a new synagogue. Later he founded the Masoreti movement in Britain, and he regarded himself as closer to (but nevertheless distinct from) the Conservative movement in the United States than to Orthodoxy. Not surprisingly, his views have been regarded as heretical within the Orthodox community, eliciting vehement opposition. After he was denied an aliya at an Orthodox synagogue prior to his granddaughter’s wedding, on his 83rd birthday, the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the Av Bet Din Chanoch Ehrentreu justified the decision on the grounds that reciting the blessing ­asher natan lanu torat emet—“who gave us the Torah of truth”—would be a false statement coming from his lips.[19]

I suspect that many Orthodox readers share Jacobs’ relief that the death penalty is no longer applied, even if they are unwilling to state such a position in public. Although they are likely to disagree with his theological views on the divinity of the Torah, they might find even more discomfiting his characterization of the halakhic imperative. For Jacobs, Shabbat observance is “mandatory,” and a Jew recites the Shema in “obedience to a divine command.” But in deciding how strictly to be bound by halakha, he may “choose which Sabbath and other observances awaken a response in him.”[16]

Tamar Ross, a philosopher at Bar Ilan University, takes a more Orthodox attitude. Unlike Jacobs, she is willing to bow to the judgment of posekim even when they seem to be motivated by a worldview at variance with hers. Like Jacobs, however, she is candid in her recognition of the incompatibility of the statements of the Torah with modern sensibilities. As a feminist, she is disturbed by what she sees as a pervasive patriarchal bias in the Torah, and she is not shy to point out the many respects in which the statements of the Torah are in conflict with her own moral convictions. To Ross, however, these concerns need not undermine the divinity of the Torah. By a divine scheme, the Torah delivered a message that was ideal for the time of its initial revelation. Even its patriarchy, she claims, must have had a purpose—for example, in strengthening the tribe or family. The changing meaning of the Torah brought about by its interpreters ensured that, as time passed, its message was attuned to each new generation. Drawing on the philosophy of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Ross sees revelation as ongoing and cumulative; feminism, itself, she contends is part of God’s message, which God chose to reveal only in our time.

This of course raises the question of how we are to distinguish between latter-day revelations that should be absorbed into our concept of Torah and those that should be rejected as alien. Here, Ross turns to the theories of textual interpretation of Hans Gadamer and Stanley Fish. Roughly speaking, they treat texts, in postmodern fashion, as lacking any fixed meaning. The interpretation of a text is subjective, arising from the reader’s beliefs and opinions. These are indeed biases, but they are biases that are borne not of anarchy and the whim of the individual, but are nurtured by the community in which the reader belongs. This is how Ross saves herself from lapsing into relativism, by situating herself and her personal interpretations in the community of the halakhically committed.

How then does change come about? It cannot, Ross contends, always be “bloodless”; it will be necessary for those committed to change to act “disruptively” in “unruly moments” that will result in a slow evolution of Jewish practice [7]. As a feminist, Ross is sympathetic to Rabbi Mendel Shapiro’s halakhic analysis [20] that minyanim such as Shirah Hadashah (and now a host of others) have relied upon to justify allowing women to read from the Torah and receive aliyot in the company of men. But at the same time she is respectful of the response of Rabbi Yehuda Henkin [21], who was able to find no fault in Shapiro’s case, but argued nevertheless that the practice was unacceptable because it lay beyond the bounds of community consensus. Ross notes with approval that Henkin leaves room for the practice in private settings, and she is willing to go ahead on this basis: not advocating a change for the entire community, but nevertheless hoping that, from a small start, the larger change will ultimately come about.

Conclusion

Perhaps one day the challenge of biblical criticism will seem as unremarkable to contemporary Jews as the historical controversy over anthropomorphism seems to us today. In the meantime, in our struggle to find a notion of Torah min haShamayim consistent with both our commitment to rationality and to our deeply held religious convictions, we might do well to bear in mind that problems of this complexity rarely have neat solutions. A pristine philosophical theory that resolves all contradictions is unlikely to be convincing; rather, we must learn to live with doubt—not merely to tolerate it, but to embrace it as an expression of our seriousness in our quest for truth.

We tend to think of our religious commitments as built on a foundation of belief, as the rooms of a house are built on a concrete foundation beneath. Every perceived crack in the foundation raises a fear that the entire edifice might collapse. Perhaps it would be better to view our religious commitments as a boat, held aloft by the surging waters of a river that are continually rising and falling, made up of currents that are fluid and complex, sometimes flowing together, and sometimes against each other, but always, in aggregate, carrying the boat forward, downstream toward the sea.

References

[1]      Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists. Mission statement. Available at: http://www.aojs.org.

[2]      Ira Robinson. “’Practically, I Am a Fundamentalist’: Twentieth-Century Orthodox Jews Contend with Evolution and Its Implications.” In: Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz. University of Chicago Press, 2006.

[3]      Stephen David Snobelen. ”Isaac Newton.” In Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, MacMillan, 2003.

[4]      Stephen Jay Gould. ”Nonoverlapping Magisteria.” Natural History 106 (March 1997): pp.16–22.

[5]      Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 48b.

[6]      Michael Jackson. ”Aish and the Torah Codes.” The Sephardi Bulletin of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation of London, 25 September 2008.

[7]      Tamar Ross. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Brandeis University Press, 2004.

[8]      Richard Feynman. ”The Value of Science.” In The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman. Basic Books, 2000, pp. 141–149.

[9]      Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton (contributor), Edward Hutchings (editor). Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character. W.W. Norton, 1985.

[10]    Christopher Hitchens. ”Bah, Hanukkah: The holiday celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness.” Slate, December 3, 2007.

[11]    Shaye J. D. Cohen. ”Hasmoneans, Hellenism and Us.” Forward, December 11, 2008.

[12]    Solomon Schimmel. The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth. Oxford University Press, 2008.

[13]    Marc Zvi Brettler. How to Read the Bible. Jewish Publication Society of America, 2005.

[14]    Mordechai Breuer. ‘The Study of Bible and the Primacy of the Fear of Heaven: Compatibility or Contradiction?’ In: Modern Scholarship in the Study of the Torah, p.161. (quoted in [7])

[15]    Louis Jacobs. We Have Reason to Believe. Vallentine, Mitchell; first edition 1957.

[16]    Louis Jacobs. Beyond Reasonable Doubt. Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004.

[17]    James Kugel. The Bible As It Was. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.

[18]    James Kugel. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. Free Press, 2007.

[19]    Obituary, Rabbi Louis Jacobs. Daily Telegraph, July 7, 2006.

[20]    Mendel Shapiro. ‘Qeri’at ha-Torah by Women: A Halakhic Analysis’. Edah Journal, 1:2, Sivan 5761.

[21]    Yehuda Herzl Henkin. ‘Qeri’at ha-Torah by Women: Where We Stand Today’. Edah Journal, 1:2, Sivan 5761.

The Midrash describes the Torah as black fire on white fire (Midrash Tanhuma, Bereishith 1).  On its simplest level, the black fire represents the letters of the Torah, while the white fire is the space between the letters. On a deeper level, the black fire may be compared to the halakha, the formal, clear-cut law that emerges from the Torah. Parallel to the halakha is the white fire, which may represent the spiritual element of the law. Spirituality is to halakha as heaven is to earth; as soul is to body—giving that which is anchored the ability to soar.

This is not always the case. Halakha is a complex system of law that can sometimes become a barrier rather than a conduit to feeling God’s presence. Our essential teaching is that halakha ought to interface with spirituality.

This essay is an abridged version of part of a chapter of my upcoming book, Spiritual Encounters: Searching for Meaning in Prayer, scheduled to be published by Toby press in the spring of 2011. Our goal here will be to define spirituality and then show how it forms an integral part of the halakhic system. The particular ways in which spirituality interfaces with tefillah (prayer), particularly with kavanah (proper concentration) is left for a larger discussion in the book.

In Life

My working definition of spirituality is rather simple. Spirituality means encountering the moment, being conscious of the moment, while recognizing God’s role in that moment.

Consciousness of Moment

One of the most important concepts of the Torah is found at the end of Devarim, when God declares: “I call heaven and earth as witnesses today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that you may live, you and your seed” (Devarim, 30:19).

For other faith communities, this is a radical idea. In these belief systems, death is venerated. The goal in this world is to limit physical pleasure, to limit living life so that one can merit true life, life in the next world. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik makes this point in his Ish haHalakhah when describing the homo religiosus, the universal religious person.

Judaism declares—no. What counts most is this world is life as we know it. The next world is one of eternal reward. This world is one of doing, acting, fixing, repairing, redeeming; it is one of choosing life. For Rabbi Soloveitchik, this is the credo of “halakhic man.”

The sentence from Devarim that implores us to choose life includes the mandate that we do so haYom—today. The portion in which the word haYom appears in this sentence is generally read on the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Indeed, on the High Holy Days, we end the service with the prayer haYom, repeating that refrain over and over. On these awesome days, we remind ourselves that the challenge of life is to live haYom, every day—fully—to be conscious of every moment being experienced.

We live in a world of memory and anticipation. So absorbed are human beings in remembering the past and being concerned about the future that the moment is fleeting and rarely experienced. We sing about “Yesterday” and “Tomorrow” but rarely about “Today.” Even when we are experiencing important events, we are often too excited or worried about what is yet to happen; in the process of waiting for the next moment we fail to experience the power of what is before us in the very present.

The importance of today is underscored in the Talmud which records Alexander the Great asking the sages of Israel the following question: “What should a person do to live?” The sages respond: “Let him mortify himself [i.e., “kill himself” with study and hard work]” (Tamid 32a). On a deeper level, Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik suggests Alexander Macedon was asking “What shall a person do to live,” i.e., what is the secret to life? The sages respond: “Let every individual imagine that death is imminent,” that the moment being experienced is one’s last. Such thinking, the sages believe, will inspire people to live life more fully.

It is nothing less than the story of the rabbi who turns to one of his students who has strayed and says, “Fear not. If you repent, even at the last moment of life, all is forgiven.” The student was at first relieved. After thinking about it, however, he became alarmed, and asked his teacher, “But how do you know which moment is the last you will live?” “That’s my point” the rabbi said. “Live every moment as if it’s your last.” Here, the rabbi’s intent is not that his student be burdened with fear of death; rather it was a teaching to inspire his student to live every moment in a qualitative way—never taking life for granted. To paraphrase Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra: “A person is concerned about the loss of money and not the loss of days. Money can be replenished; days cannot.”

The idea that spirituality is attained by living every moment, every instant of life is hinted in the very first question God asked Adam. Adam had just disobeyed God and eaten from the forbidden tree. God appears and asks, ayeka—“Where are you?” (Bereishith 3:9).

It has been noted that God obviously knew where Adam was. Ayeka, however, may be an existential question, one that God is constantly asking not only Adam but all of his descendants. “Where are you,” God asks all of us. Have you done your share in fixing and perfecting and making this world a better one?

Perhaps even more, ayeka is a kind of mystical question, in which God encourages all of humankind to be aware of their surroundings, to be fully appreciative of all that we are experiencing, to be absolutely immersed in every nuance of life.

Thus, the first step in spirituality is choosing life in all its minutiae. It is becoming fully conscious of the I, and, by extension, the moment the I is experiencing. Yes, there are many who believe spirituality is the escape from the real world. But for Judaism, spirituality emerges from fully encountering and being completely involved in the moment.

Judaism is not unique in this formulation of spirituality. In some eastern religions, for example, the moment being experienced is so overpowering, one feels a sense of nothingness, a negation of being. Total consciousness of moment can yield a sense of worthlessness in the face of all that is unfolding.

The opposite feeling can also take place. Consciousness of moment can elevate one to feel a sense of self-importance, to be totally self-absorbed. Spirituality from this perspective yields an approach to life which is anthropocentric, narcissistic, revolving completely around the human being.

In Judaism, we find echoes of these positions, from Chabad’s bitul haYesh—nullification of self—to Slobodka’s vaTehasreihu me’at meElohim—the human being is just a little less than angels (Psalms 8:6). However, our critical contribution is that consciousness of moment can be a synthesis of these positions. It is the dialectic of humility and self-confidence; of the two notes carried by Reb Simcha Bunim of Peshischa. One read veAnohi afar v’efer—“I am but dust and ashes.” The other read, bishvili nivra haOlam—“the world was created for me.”

Recognizing God’s Role

Most important, spirituality is inextricably linked with God and God’s role in the moment being experienced. In the Torah framework, consciousness of moment should lead to an encounter with God—i.e., an awareness of the presence of God and God’s role in bringing about, nurturing, and giving meaning to the particular experience.

Awareness of God is a central element of the Jewish concept of kedushah—commonly translated as holiness. While most faiths see holiness as an out-of-body experience, distinct and apart from the physical every day, Judaism sees holiness as an in-body experience where the everyday is sanctified by being open to God.

The biblical source for kedushah is found in vaYikra where God mandates the human being to be holy (19:2). One wonders why there needs to be a specific command to be holy. Shouldn’t the sum total of observance of the whole of the Torah by definition lead one to a holy life?

It is here that Nachmanides puts forth a startling concept. He suggests that one can, in fact, keep the minutia of Torah law, and at the same time live an unholy life. One could keep the details of the law, and yet, in Nachmanides’ words, still “be an abomination with the permission of the Torah.” (Nachmanides, vaYikra 19:2).

For this reason, the Torah says: be holy. Kedushah teaches the critical importance of infusing the letter of the law with the spirit of the law—with meaning, with purpose, with holiness, with kedushah, yes—with Godliness.

Could it be that the word (k-d-sh) kadosh is a compound of k and d-sh. The k, which begins the word, represents the Name of God. In fact, the very word kadosh is an abbreviated form of God’s name, the Holy One, Blessed Be He. D-sh means to thresh. Kadosh therefore means to bring God into everything, to have God as a threshing force, omnipresent in all that we do.

Martin Buber in Hasidism and Modern Man approaches kedushah in this way.

“God dwells where man lets Him in!” The hallowing of man means this “letting in.” Basically the holy in our world is what is open to God, as the profane is what is closed off from Him, and hallowing is the event of opening out…

In this spirit, the students of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak haCohen Kook have quoted their teacher as saying, “There is no such thing as the unholy. There is only the holy and the not yet holy.” For Rabbi Kook, the way one eats, engages in business, or makes love is no less holy than fasting, meditation, or prayer. Every act of life has the potential to be suffused with kedushah —with Godly spirituality.

A story: A Hassid living in Minsk decided to seek the heavenly world, which he had been told was in Pinsk. Overnight, he slept in an open field, having carefully left his shoes pointed in the direction of Pinsk. As he slept, a scoundrel came by and turned his shoes around. The next morning, the Hassid continued on in the direction that he found his shoes to be pointing. When he reached his destination, he noticed landscape, streets, homes and people that all seemed familiar. He was puzzled, but delighted to have found heavenly bliss. Heaven on earth.

Kedushah is finding spirituality in earthliness. In a broader sense, it is the bringing of God into the world. Hence, my definition: Spirituality means being conscious of the moment while recognizing God’s role in that moment.

In Ritual

Rituals, especially rituals associated with life’s rites of passage, are examples of how spirituality can be experienced by encountering and taking cognizance of the moment while feeling God’s nearness. A good idea is to have those directly involved, together with family and friends, offer personal reflections about what this experience means to them. Although the ritual is a rite of passage, the challenge is to have time stand still, to ponder the religious significance and spiritual power of the moment.

Consider the ritual on our most joyous and mournful occasions—marriage and death. Some may find it spiritually uplifting to read under the huppah (wedding canopy) words of blessing that bride and groom have written to each other. The rabbi can then ask for a moment of introspection wherein all present offer their blessings to bride and groom.  Or, during shiva and especially as it ends, it can be meaningful for the mourner to offer a personal reflection about the deceased. Such moments of personal introspection are similarly meaningful when concluding the month or year of mourning, or when reciting the last kaddish or during a memorial service.

It is here that spirituality faces a formidable challenge. The idea that the foundation of spirituality involves living in the moment makes many people uncomfortable. We are, by and large, not happy coming face to face with who we are: our physical beings, our emotions, our relationships, our inner essence. When challenged to encounter our inner “I,” we often feel vulnerable; it is a place at which we often do not want to be.

For example, a wedding of spiritual meaning, where aspects of love are touched upon, may conjure up for many in attendance matters related to the inadequacies of their own marriages. Or personal reflections from a mourner can stir deep feelings, positive or negative, within the mourner or among those in attendance about their own relationships.

Virtually nothing of meaning comes easily. Because spirituality is potentially exhilarating, it is equally daunting. All we can do is be sensitive to the challenges of consciousness of moment while carefully forging ahead.

In fact, halakha may show the way by introducing laws that encourage and sometimes compel one to fully experience the moment. For example, the Mishnah which declares that a groom should not recite Shema on his wedding night is based on the principle of haOsek beMitzvah patur min haMitzvah. Bride and groom should be so immersed in the moment that even if they could find time to say Shema, they should not. (The normative halakha today does not follow this Mishnah.) The Mishnah is insisting that bride and groom not be distracted from full concentration on each other. Similarly, during shiva, the mourner may be prohibited from learning Torah so that he or she fully feels the emotions of shiva and does not escape into deep Torah study.

Not coincidentally, the ritual at both ends of the spectrum—the exhilaration of marriage and emotional pain of mourning—is suffused with symbols and words that mirror the constant presence of God.

The huppah can be viewed as a covering symbolizing the heavens, the abode of God. It is suspended over the heads of bride and groom much like the imagery of God hovering over His people like a mother bird gently protecting its fledglings (Devarim 32:11). God hovers but doesn’t press down, giving a sense of infinite care while allowing bride and groom the space to be themselves.

And at the shiva, visitors (according to Ashkenazic practice) recite the words, “May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” The Hebrew term for God used here is unusual—haMakom. But haMakom literally means “the Place,” in this case referring to God’s omnipresence. In other words, even in a house of mourning, where the bereaved may feel God has abandoned them—even there, God is present.

As taught by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik,

The Name…haMakom, the Omnipresent, suggests that God is indeed everywhere, even in those places and at those times when we may not readily sense His presence.

We thus find, for example, that a mourner, who certainly feels as though God has turned away from him, is to be consoled with a phrase that uses this Name, May the Omnipresent console you…). (See Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Yom Kippur Mahzor)

Thus, the halakha serves as a foundation for spirituality. Often, it is seen as constricting, limiting one’s spirituality; we become so involved in the minutiae of halakha that it blocks our connection to God. It should not be this way. Halakha is the base, giving wings to the spiritual moment, helping us encounter God Himself.

Being Sephardic is one of the most central aspects of my Jewish identity. While there is certainly the ethnic component with family history that goes back to places such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Macedonia, there are the equally important dimensions that are philosophical and spiritual. These include a relentless optimism and an ability to look outward and be engaged in the world while also having a deep interiority in matters of the spirit. 

Strangely, though, my Sephardic identity was largely dormant for half of my life. When my Jewish identity was ignited in my late teenage years, it would still be some time before having a robust exposure to the cultural and ideological wealth of Sephardic Judaism that would make it the dynamic force in my life that it has been ever since. Part of the reason for that is because Sephardic Judaism, beyond its external ethnic trappings, has yet to fully emerge into what one might call “Jewish cultural literacy.” In looking at the curriculum of Jewish life and thought that is dominant in America, one gets the impression that there have been no significant developments in the Sephardic world since Maimonides and R. Yosef Karo. In synagogue and university classes I attended, there were no discussions of enlightenment thinkers such as Isaac Cardoso, David Nieto, or Grace Aguilar alongside Mendelssohn; nor assigned readings in modern rabbis such as Rabbis Benzion Uziel, Hayyim David Halevy or Yitzhak Dayyan to consider together with luminaries such as R. Heschel and R. Soloveitchik. Yet, the Sephardic figures I just mentioned, among many others, represent remarkable strands of Jewish thought in realms such as ethics, political philosophy, theology, spirituality, and Jewish law.

And so, in my initial Jewish education, the ether was full of many extraordinary thinkers (which I do not by any means seek to disparage) but was largely lacking Sephardic tropes. Thankfully, I was blessed to meet Sephardic mentors who were able to transmit much of this remarkable heritage and fill in this lacuna. It is important to emphasize, however, that Sephardim do not have a special sensitivity that makes Sephardic thinkers compelling to us, any more than Ashkenazim have a special cultural sensitivity that makes R. Soloveitchik or R. Heschel great. Their greatness, along with lesser-known Sephardic thinkers, is inherent to the religious genius they embodied. Nevertheless, what Sephardim do have is a cultural appreciation and literacy to access Sephardic thinkers. In essence, this comes back to the notion of cultural literacy previously mentioned, and it brings us to the world of Jewish education.

The energetic debate around the virtues and vices of cultural literacy is not new. Proponents argue that cultural literacy, a common cultural vocabulary of historical figures, ideas, stories, and mythologies, is essential for the health of a nation as well as to ensure that there is greater social equality by giving all students in schools equal access to this vocabulary. Detractors criticize that too often these cultural reference points are monolithic in their European whiteness and maleness, offering a very narrow perspective about who and what is worthy of attention in our society. A parallel debate exists in Jewish education but has yet to emerge into a powerful discussion about the appropriateness of its cultural canon. Regarding the American cultural literacy debate, Eric Liu, president of Citizen University and former policy adviser to the Clinton administration, convincingly argues that “The more serious challenge, for Americans new and old, is to make a common culture that’s greater than the sum of our increasingly diverse parts.”[1]

Like the American people, the Jewish community is diverse, with elements from every part of the globe, and our sense of cultural literacy should reflect that. If implemented successfully, a new Jewish cultural literacy can accomplish two critical goals. First, Jewish education can empower those whose cultural history has hitherto been under-represented. Second, it can create a sense of shared culture that draws from a truer, more diverse Jewish world that belongs to all of us, giving many more access points to students who may find their vibrant Jewish connection in a voice that is simply not being presented at this time. The presence of Sephardic perspectives in this endeavor is central. Said eloquently by Rabbi Dr. Herbert C. Dobrinsky, “...for those who seek a better appreciation for the ‘unity in diversity’ which has always been a hallmark of Judaism, the enlarged understanding of Sephardic Jewry’s contributions to the preservation of our religious heritage is essential.”[2]

In my own practice as an educator, I have laid out a personal goal of introducing my students to major thinkers and figures from the modern Sephardic world. Not only does this resonate with my students with family roots in places like Greece, Italy, and Iraq, but the perspectives offered by these presentations also serve as fresh insight for which other students demonstrate a profound appreciation.

This begs the question as to best practices regarding the project of bringing greater diversity into the cultural literacy we teach in our schools. There are three major areas into which we can introduce such practices—and all are necessary if we are going to accomplish a genuine paradigm shift. The first is in teacher preparation. After all, we teach, draw resources from, and are passionate about, what we know. Next is in the realm of generating literacy lists, which must be done by a group of individuals in a school that reflect an exposure to the diversity that is being sought. Last is the realm of translation, which has a unique role given that a significant obstacle to bringing Sephardic thinkers into larger Jewish cultural literacy is the lack of available English translations of key works. In looking at these three areas and the daunting feeling that emerges upon doing so, I call to all our minds two of our classic teachings, “In every bit of toil there is some gain”[3] and “it is not upon you to finish the work but neither are you free to absent yourself from it.”[4] In other words, any progress we can make in this arena will be very beneficial, a substantial improvement from where we currently are. It is incumbent upon us to move things forward in the ways we can.

Additionally, we have a chance in such a project as this to lay out not only the particular result we seek to achieve (in this case about Sephardic voices) but also to establish a model to ensure that Jewish Studies curricula continue to strive to be a reflection of the diversity that is a truer representation of the Jewish people.

Teacher preparation is at the base of the three aforementioned areas since it allows for a greater presence of Sephardic thinkers in classroom curricula, allows teachers to become representatives for currently under-represented thinkers or traditions, and requires some de facto translation work. The most organic way for a teacher to prepare in a way that allows her or him to bring Sephardic voices into the curriculum can take at least two forms. Both begin with choosing a particular thinker to become versed in. I recommend using works like Rabbi Marc Angel’s Voices in Exile and Professor Zvi Zohar’s Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East. These books, written with remarkable style and clarity, present a world of Sephardic thinkers in a way that makes their relevance immediately perceivable. A teacher can then delve deeper into a thinker that resonates with her through the bibliographies provided in each of these books. For those comfortable with Hebrew resources, the organization Mizrach Shemesh has developed classroom resources organized topically. From any of these points of departure, teachers can either present their thinker of choice in lessons centering around them as part of a series of major figures in Jewish thought or bring a thinker’s perspective to bear on a theme-based unit. For instance, during a unit that teaches Mendelssohn and the emphasis on the universal ethic of Judaism, equal time can and should be given to Rabbi Yitzhak Dayyan of Aleppo, Syria, whose articulation of the universal dimensions of Judaism’s theology, practice, and mission is an invaluable voice. Alternatively, a teacher could, in the midst of a unit on Judaism and Civil Rights, take his class on a journey through the writings and activism of American Sephardic Rabbi Sabato Morais on behalf of immigrants and his moral charges denouncing slavery and the economic habits that encouraged it during the course of the American Civil War in addition to a lesson on Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writings and activism with Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. In essence, Sephardic thinkers need to become a part of teachers’ toolkits if they are to be become a significant dimension of their teaching, both because of the intrinsically valuable presentation of Jewish cultural diversity, as well as the fact that these thinkers represent unique approaches in areas to which they speak.

With the presence of teachers in receipt of this culturally diverse toolkit, they can play a role in another essential aspect of developing a more representative cultural literacy, namely, literacy lists. The idea of a cultural literacy list, as well as the term itself, were made popular by the educational theorist E. D. Hirsch in 1987. We have seen echoes of these types of lists in works such as Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s Jewish Literacy and George Robinson’s Essential Judaism. Many Jewish Studies’ staffs also develop some type of list that contain items that “a graduate of a Jewish Day School must know.” Such lists can be very helpful as organizing ideas for curricula and as significant touch points for curriculum spirals; however, they can also fall into the trap of becoming a force for cultural hegemony. For that reason, lists should be developed by groups with diverse exposure, and it is teachers with significant knowledge of the Sephardic world who can help ensure that diversity. Furthermore, cultural diversity should be a stated goal of the list.

But what represents an adequately diverse cultural literacy list? There is not a single answer for all situations; however, an important guide comes from a parallel process to cultural literacy known as critical literacy. Critical literacy recognizes that the act of learning should not be viewed as “encoding and decoding meaning” and that “we need to understand that the messages of authors and the interpretations of the readers are bound by cultural, historical, and political lenses.”[5]

Additionally, critical literacy pushes us to ask, “What is this text trying to do to me as a reader? Who is the intended audience of the text? Whose voice is included in the text, and who is left out?” In looking at lists generated by any Jewish Studies department, these are precisely the questions teachers should ask. Additionally, they should think about what answers their students would have to these questions, or even better, share potential lists with students to see what their responses are. Upon doing so, departments can then reflect about whether the answers to these questions are satisfactory and reshape the list based upon this process. It is important to remember, however, that the teacher preparation described above is a necessary prerequisite to this endeavor, since a person who has never encountered Rabbi Benzion Uziel, for example, will not be in a position to be aware that his or his tradition’s voice is absent. Upon completion of that preparation, however, both the clear statement of cultural diversity in literacy as a goal, as well as the meta questions provided by critical literacy help set Jewish Studies departments on an appropriate path to a more representative Jewish cultural literacy.

            Last, those teachers in a position to do so must take upon themselves to engage in the work of translating the Sephardic works that they bring to bear in their planning. As previously stated, the lack of materials available in English has been a significant factor in its absence in American Jewish schools. Works in Modern Spanish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, French, and above all, Hebrew, must be made readily available to teachers to weave into their curricula. Similar to the case of teacher preparation, a teacher who feels capable of this type of work can select a single larger text to translate or even major selections that help encapsulate a particular thinker’s voice. With multiple committed individuals engaging in this, much progress can be made toward making these works available.

The requisite impact, however, necessitates a central repository for these translations from which educators can draw. Discussions have begun about possibilities for such a repository at the Sephardic Educational Center in Los Angeles, while the University of Washington has already done remarkable work creating a digital library of Sephardic works, particularly those from the Ladino-speaking tradition. Sefaria.org has also mainstreamed the open source approach for translations and perhaps developing a relationship with them to upload Sephardic texts of interest can be helpful. What is clear is that we can no longer wait for someone to translate these texts; any who are able to do so must decide that they are the ones to bring the Sephardic to a wider readership.

            For the purposes of this article I have focused on thinkers, but the model can be applied to customs, music, liturgy, and more. What is essential is the vision of a Jewish cultural literacy that more truly represents the Jewish people. One day, a Jewish student, regardless of his or her individual ethnic background, will see Syria and Poland as equal chapters in the Jewish story. Jewish schools will present voices from Lithuania and Turkey in beautiful harmony. “Jewish Heritage” will be a term that holds Morocco and Algeria as comfortably as Germany or Hungary, and each will be experienced as essentially Jewish as the other.

*For Anthony Polimeni, on assuming the Vice Presidency

 of Touro College.

1. The Native

            If by chance, a curious stranger were possibly permitted to enter David Mamet’s private study, he would suddenly find himself facing, among an assortment of general works, copies of his host’s many publications, all reflecting his catholic interests and tastes. Those publications consist of 36 plays and five collections of them; six screenplays; three novels; 13 prose works; three children’s books; 15 film scripts; 21 critical and biographical studies of his life; and, undoubtedly, the current and past issues of the Mamet Quarterly, which dealt critically with his life and works.

removed himself from his historic inheritance to become a menace to himself and his people.

            But before tracing that Wicked Son’s estrangement from his inheritance, as Mamet perceives it, the reader might be interested to learn, briefly, some of the story of our author’s family life, as well as his relationship with his own past. His mother’s family came from Warsaw, his father’s from the town of Hrubezow, in Poland, who on arriving on American shores during the early years of the last century, would “rehearse the rituals, perform the rites of their faith,” but generally did so not “without some embarrassment . . . the religious part of their Jewishness was hollowed out.” Of course, they “shared Jewish food, language, and jokes, which consoled them in their strange new land, but never with a conviction of their old religion.” In fact, we learn that his paternal grandfather “divorced his wife before he reached American shores, leaving her to arrive later, alone, with his child.” What they all wished, ultimately, to achieve on these shores was to move into the mainstream of American life by “modifying, omitting, suppressing, and acting their old faith.” Or, in Mamet’s own summation: “assimilation, apparently, was their ultimate goal.”

            Small wonder, therefore, that it became Mamet’s lot to live with that ambiguity: to deny what he was, and to live a life of hypocrisy for much of his youth. Consider this confessional:

It pleased me to think that I was putting myself over in myself . . . living in Vermont and doing things that it seemed were not acceptable behavior for a nice Jewish boy, whose family had the gene of liberalism—spending a lot of time gambling, hunting, fishing, etc. while hanging out in poolrooms, and I enjoyed life there.

Of some other memories of his youth he speaks with uncommon bitterness. Of his bar mitzvah, for instance, he has only this to say: “It seemed to me a watercolor of Jewishness, American good citizenship . . . with a sense of unfortunately Asiatic overtones.” And of his own Reform Jewish parents, he confesses, “they were determined to be so stalwart, so American, so non-Jewish,” that they overwhelmed him. To which he adds, not without some vitriol directed at his own parents: “Reform Judaism allowed faith to become a lifestyle”—including his own parents—“a mere modification of some central cultural truth out of supposedly secular but patent Christian culture.

            A good number of years later, however, something occurred in Mamet’s life that, among other experiences, “shook the foundations of my being.” He attended the bat mitzvah of his niece in apparently a traditional house of worship. While there, it suddenly occurred to him that he “hadn’t attended a synagogue service for some thirty years.” He was chagrined and shocked to find that it had something to do with a sense not only of assimilation, but also of self-hatred that was nobody’s fulfillment but his own. “And I thought I could remedy that.” In fact, in some three of his pays, he actually attempts to accomplish just that: Homicide, The Old Neighborhood, and The Old Religion. And in Some Freaks, another play, he has one of his characters exclaim: “God bless those in all generations who have embraced Jewishness . . . we are a beautiful people and a good people.”

            Obviously, therefore, it is with such people—his people—that Mamet now wishes to belong. So that during a television broadcast with Charlie Rose, he proclaimed: “To deny who you are, to deny what you want, is to live the life of hypocrisy, which leads to self-loathing.” Whether one belongs to the stage, or the movie set, or any other hermetic group, he finds “filial piety—a responsibility to learn and to instruct the heritage of one’s people—of primal significance.”

            And for Mamet, what better place to begin that search of his heritage than the ancient story of the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt, as described in the Passover Haggadah, with its famous “Four Questions” and “Four Sons”—especially the “Wicked One,” who also becomes for Mamet a metaphor for all that ails American Jewry. He learned all that during the Seder, the “longest continuing ceremony in the history of the world.”

2. The Wicked Sons

            “Modern Epicureanism” as we know it broke out in the “Wild Sixties.” American and world youth, of whatever faith and tradition, and in surprisingly vast numbers, began to assert that the long-trusted beliefs and observances of their respected faiths and practices limited an individual’s freedom. Look instead, their argument ran, to all traditions and practices, since there is much to learn from all of them. The time has surely come, their cry rang out, when we must discard the “old” and adopt the “new,” forgetting, along the way, that such an act of submission to the new has long been known as “DeClarembault’s Syndrome,” usually described “as a condition of individuals and society, characterized by a breakdown or absence of social norms and values, as in the case of an uprooted people.”

            To better understand this condition of modern Jewry, Mamet chose the infamous “Wicked Son” of the Passover Haggadah, who, questioning and rejecting the tradition, rituals, and practices of his people, is moved to “purge the Jew in himself in order, eventually, to identify the Jews as others.” Or, as often proclaimed by these newfound Epicureans: “I’m not observant but my parents were . . . .” Yet, despite all or such similar declarations, “that Son suffers from a self-loathing, never wishing to admit that he is a Jew, that the world is not fond of Jews, and his only choice of safety lies with the Jews.” In his panic to escape his alienated condition of abandoning his Jewish heritage, the Wicked Son “prefers the irrationality of some new faith imported to the danger of his psyche of the truth.”

            In order to clarify how the Wicked Son, without anchor, suffers from, among other sicknesses, DeClarembault’s Syndrome, Mamet proceeds to present him as masquerading in three guises in certain unaccustomed roles, and in a delusional flight from his common past. They are “Apostate,” “Apikores” (or heretic), and “Assimilationist.”

The Apostate

Unlike the “Conversos” of Spain in the fourteenth century, who escaped the Inquisition by identifying themselves as Roman Catholic in public while practicing Judaism in the privacy of their homes, the Apostate  remains Jewish only by identification (“I’m not observant but my parents were . . .) in order to be accepted on life’s stage by the Christian community. Ignorant of all aspects of his religion, the Apostate will argue that because “my ancestors suffered persecution and prevailed, I will renounce their struggle and call my ingratitude enlightenment.”

            Now freed to enjoy an ongoing doctrine of lassitude and privilege by the same fathers whose religion he currently discards, the Apostate begins to believe that “ignorance and his supercilious superiority to its practices is a licensed diversion.” After transferring his fealty to those he considers the stronger group, accepting their authority and many practices, he forgets entirely, Mamet claims, “that his Christian friends and neighbors will never accept him. As a result, he is left with a certain anomie of restlessness, of purposelessness, in order to adopt the views of his enemies, the anti-Semites, so as to be accepted by them.”

            The Apostate may indeed convert, and often does, but he must still “guard himself against the inevitable scorn of those to whom he proclaims his freedom from his despised heritage.” To lessen that threat, he may one day seek his fellow Jews to no avail, for “the world,” Mamet wisely reminds the reader, “hates a turncoat.” Furthermore, in his hasty flight from his roots, the Apostate may one day adopt a new faith, and often does, but his “rejection of the old becomes anomie, a degradation of his self-image. And since the Christian may never accept him, he has adopted a new religion which offers him no peace.”

            And however much the Apostate might think of himself as superior to the members of his tribe because of his detachment, is he not aware, Mamet wonders bitterly, that a significant number of Arab and Hamas leaders, jihadists, and others of their ilk, often declare publicly—and multitudes privately—their plans to annihilate the State of Israel and its people? And that, sad to record, some 65 years after the Holocaust? To individuate himself, if ever, among his own people, “the Apostate must,” Mamet argues, “first deal with the trauma of human savagery. Only then will he be equipped to return to the ranks of his people.”

The Apikoros

In his glossary at the very end of this book, Mamet defines the term apikoros, derived from the name of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, “as a heretic learned in Judaism but rejects it.” Truthfully, however, one is moved to remind Mamet that his definition of this term is entirely different from the one used in classic Jewish sources, with which he may be only marginally acquainted. For the definition found in the Talmud and summarized definitively by Maimonides, among others, in his Book of Repentance 3:8, reads as follows: an Apikoros is anyone who “denies the concept of prophecy, which reaches from God to the heart of man, or, anyone who denies the prophetic powers of Moses; or anyone who denies God’s knowledge of man’s actions, deeds, or works.” Obviously, then, one need not be a “learned person” to be called an Apikoros: It is enough that he dismisses any of the fundamental principles of the Torah.

            One of those principles—the ritual of circumcision—first established by Abraham, the biblical father of Jews and Judaism, has often been declared, by liberal fanatics and their cohorts, as nothing more than a “savage mutilation . . . irrational and ludicrous, an empty ceremony, which is not the continuation of Judaism but may also be some sort of ritual ceremony by a secret society.” But this particular ritual has literally been central to the survival of the Jewish people. Anyone denying its validity and historical relevance Mamet calls an Apikoros, who will inevitably find himself immortalized into nothingness.

            In that world of nothingness, the modern Apikoros commits, in addition, the most heinous of all sins, summarized in biblical terms, as the worship of the “golden calf.” If “modern man cannot control the gods,” his argument runs, “they do not exist . . . how then may I control them, through gold . . . I will therefore worship gold.” The “gold” in that argument, surprisingly, is in Mamet’s considered view the current bar and bat mitzvah celebration. It is standard practice, for the wealthy parents of the young celebrant, aided and directed by a professional “party manager,” to plan the most ostentatious of all such celebrations. And whoever has attended such a Saturday night affair will immediately recall that, on entering the vast ballroom, two blazing orchestras are in full swing, the endless platters of hors d’oeuvres are served by gracious waitresses, the seven- or eight-course dinner, the after dinner refreshments, the dancing girls, the singers, crooners, comedians, the stacked bars every few feet, and even a professional clown for the entertainment of the little ones in attendance. All ends with the rising sun the next morning.

            After that night of revelry, the previous morning’s prayer service, the Torah reading, the confirmant’s speech, the sermon, have long been forgotten in this consuming worship of the “golden calf.” All of which results in Mamet’s bitter reaction to such “idolatry,” with a warning that such celebrations are “not the continuation but the death of Judaism . . . for even if parents mime their devotion, the children are aware of the sham; they will endure as they must, but most will be reluctant to impose that tax on their offspring, which the next generation may likely turn against all things Jewish.”

            To prevent that next generation from renouncing all forms of Jewish life, except perhaps the acknowledgment of their birth, Mamet seriously suggests that all such worshippers of this “golden calf” return to the ancient doctrine of teshuva, or repentance. In fact, Mamet actually devotes a chapter in this work, entitled “Lies or Teshuva” heralding the need for a total transformation of this Apikoros’ personality from his alienated status as a Jew only by a quirk of heredity, who “refers to his forbearer, much as a wealthy man might allude to an ancestor as a horse thief.”

            Repentance for this wicked son must begin, Mamet insists, not in, say, a Temple, where the “members of the spiritually inert may praise each other’s monetary contributions as true Judaism, and still remain an unaligned Jew.” Should this Apikoros truly search for authenticity, he must begin, Mamet strongly recommends, in a “classic shul, or synagogue, without any gilding: no golden pews, gymnasia, organ music, abbreviated services, or mixed choirs.” This Apikoros might even begin his transformation, argues Mamet, in an old-fashioned shtiebel, or small, sometimes even unkempt room, or hall, where wealth is pointless. To be sure, “wealthy support would surely be welcome, but wealth is definitely not worshipped.” Such services are often led by a pious rabbi, who owns a sound knowledge of Bible, Talmud, Midrash, and their commentaries, as well as “a strong sympathetic concern for the underprivileged, the depressed, the forlorn, and the poor.” Were this idol-worshipping Apikoros to avail himself regularly of such an environment, he “might find himself radically transformed into a Jew again, with no false gods, no idols,” and, of course, no mixing of milk and meat.

The Assimilationist

            The “Assimilationist Jew,” as Mamet depicts him is basically a “winter Jew.” Torn between the conflicting claims of the solstice holidays—Hanukka and Christmas—the Assimilationist will argue that we dare never deprive our children of a “deserved treat” by denying them the pleasure of celebrating Christmas, “while posturing themselves before the waning sun, singing heartily a wide variety of carols,” thereby confirming that “Jewish guilt” and “Jewish anxiety” are not necessarily Jewish at all but “rather a universal desire to revert to paganism.” For that hurtful “abandonment of his own race and culture, the Assimilationist will suffer the pangs of his treason. For the trimming of a ‘Hanukka bush’ is really a desire of man to revert to paganism.”

            But religion came into being, Mamet argues, to supplant the anomie and excess of paganism. Humans, individually, and all religions, generally, have always been caught in a “dynamic struggle between reverting or deciding to supersede the pagan.” Hence the answer for the Christian should naturally be Christianity and for the Jew, Judaism. But because the modern Jew, in the main, is less aware of his own religion and “its opportunities for the fundamental,” he may suppose that the “errors he finds in his own religion can only be cured by the embrace of another,” resulting, of course, in a vast increase of current Assimilationsts.

            Of all the many Assimilationists roaming our present American Jewish world, Mamet chose for a healthy share of opprobrium none other than Noam Chomsky, the famous, or is it infamous, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Displaying a special dislike of him, Mamet derides this disaffected Jew, who declares consistently, among other things, that “Zionism is criminal,” and nothing more than a late twentieth-century affirmation that all Jews are “business cheats.” And though Chomsky may argue that “to endorse a vendetta against the innocent based on religion is obscene criminality,” he still sees fit “to understand such vendettas, as long as they are carried out against the Jews generally, and Israel in particular.” Hence, our distinguished academic refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, referring to it only as a “phantom state with no right to exist.”

            Furthermore, though Chomsky would argue that Jews in France, for example, have “a right to live unmolested lives” but that “Israel has no right to protect its citizens.”

Small wonder, therefore, that those who follow Chomsky repeat constantly this jarring assertion: “My parents were Jewish but I do not consider myself Jewish . . . .” To such disoriented negativists, Mamet raises this inevitable question: “Are over four thousand years of cultural, genetic, and religious affirmatives now to be abrogated by the hearty embrace of secularity?” To which Mamet replies: “Should Chomsky and his variety of assimilationists ever find themselves in trouble in either the Arab, French, or in any other country across the globe they so lovingly admire, they should forever know that “Israel would offer them a home under the ‘Right of Return.’”

            Taken together these three “brotherly” representatives of the Wicked Son, seeking to acculturate or assimilate into American life, have willfully separated themselves from the faith of their fathers. The religious past of their Jewishness was, obviously, also hollowed out. How thin and fragile, therefore, their grasp of the old world they left behind and the new world they swiftly adopted. Moving rapidly into the mainstream of American life, they apparently persuaded themselves to modify, omit, or suppress the traditions of their own people.

            This de-emphasis of their heritage, cultural identity, and religious observance actually mirrors, in good part, Mamet’s own life. For he too recognizes that his early disassociation with his people was the “result not only of assimilation but even of self-hatred, something that was no one’s fault but his own.” As indicated above, it took an attendance at the bat mitzvah services for his niece, among some other such experiences, to connect him with his race, people, Israel, his own history, and the wisdom and solace of his own tradition.

            In addition to tradition, one is motivated to ask, is there possibly a cure for the Wicked Sons of our day? Chief among the cures, Mamet frequently suggests, is the element of “belonging.” In fact, he devotes a chapter in this work to the absolute need for the same, entitled “Belonging.” “To me,” he begins with this glowing assertion, “life consists in belonging . . . because the opposite of tribal life is a life of anxiety, loneliness, and loss.” And for him, the ultimate virtue of “belonging,” of course, is the theater, movies, and the arts. Of all the hermetic groups he has ever joined in his life, the theater remains most impressive and consistent because it revolves around “filial piety.” While working there, he constantly experienced its “human language, responsibility to learn, to instruct, and its sense of timelessness and history.” Lessons, too, of how to control “anger, sloth, lust on the one hand, and on the other, acts of kindness, helpfulness forbearance, or even silence,” all of which came naturally to him while on the set.

            Needless to say, however, not everyone could be as fortunate as Mamet. Others can experience similar virtues by joining any of a host of organizations dealing with poverty, health care, senior citizens, orphans, and so forth, all of which confirms Mamet’s own view that the “Jew is not only made and instructed but also commanded to live in the world and enjoy those things God has permitted him.”

            But we also know that, lest we continue raising additional generations of “Wicked Sons,” the Jew is instructed, first and foremost, as mentioned above, to become a Jew. It begins simply, as Mamet agrees, with daily prayer, to be followed ideally with an hour or two of study of some classic Judaic texts, fully translated and annotated, of Bible, Talmud, Midrash, Jewish history, ethics—alone or with friends. And, lest we dare forget—the Passover Haggadah.

            And if Mamet boasts that he never walked through a “stage door or onto a movie set without the thrill of belonging,” he was fortunate in experiencing that thrill while attending, and participating, in the celebration of the Passover Seder. He proudly records that experience for the common reader: “This love of community, this love of knowledge, this joy of immersion in history, this thirst for group approval, for moral perfection, this endless variety of vertical and horizontal connection, these are all open to the Jew as both his right and his responsibility.”

3. Anti-Semitism

            Whatever their present or future orientation on the American and/or world scene, these “Four Sons” will inevitably face a condition that has plagued world Jewry for four millennia, or ever since the birth of the biblical brothers Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau. And that, of course, is the question of anti-Semitism, in all its raging and grisly forms ever since then, up to our very own day. For throughout the history of mankind, anti-Semitism “has been inevitable, at times waxing or waning, but always inevitable.” What troubles Mamet most, however, is that it has become so rampant in our own day, especially since the establishment of the State of Israel, some 60 years ago, that it has “morphed into the rhetoric of reason.”

            In fact, Mamet actually categorizes the general arguments of our average Christian neighbors, past and present, in these terms: a) I have nothing against the Jews per se, I am merely speaking against Israel; b) I am merely stating the obvious, for I mean no harm to individual Jews or the Jewish people, but it is a fact that Jews control . . . . I do not say this is good or bad, only that it is so; c) Jews killed the Christian god. I do not say this should influence our contemporary thinking but there it is in the Gospels.” And in the Arab world, Israel is denounced as a modern instance of the “blood libel,” with Muslim replacing Christian blood. And Israel’s response to the constant bombings of its innocent citizens is listed by them as “reprisals and retaliation,” when, in fact, they are made by Israel only in self-defense, or in its unending struggle for survival.

            All of which is not to say that Mamet has in this, and other recent works, suddenly awakened to the ravages of anti-Semitism everywhere in the world, especially in or about Israel. It is the result, in good measure, to the recent awakening of the Jew inside himself, in addition to the continued ferment in his mind of the condition of world Jewry. For, outside the theater and movie set, he has searched his own beginnings to find not only what may be missing in his life but also the life of his fellow Jews in America. For how else explain his extended critique of American Jewry in this work—and under what authority? But when one truly cares, authority may not always be necessary. And Mamet cares.

            Cares enough, in fact, that some 12 years ago, in another volume of short essays, Make-Believe Town, he reasoned more powerfully—for this reader, at least—than in The Wicked Son the shallowness of our general reasoning of the causes of anti-Semitism. It demands a careful reading:

Jew hating is not caused by Jews. It does not even arise out of a misconception. It does not even arise of a need to hate Jews. It arises from a need to hate. We Jews are not the cause of anti-Semitism, nothing we have done caused it. We are just its approved victim . . . . we cannot cure it, and it is not only folly but self-destructive to try. We can only defend ourselves against it. Explanation, reason, and, importantly, tolerance in response to anti-Semitism are disastrous forces . . . . It is not that anti-Semites will make the problem worse, but they will distract us from the danger of defenselessness. Reason is not a defense against anti-Semitism. The least appearance of race hatred is a questioning whose end is murder . . . . anti-Semitism is not ignorance, it is insanity—human rage against a target deemed both allowed and unprotected. It is caused by the victim.

To all that genuine reasoning, the common reader would say “Amen.”

            Mamet, in his sympathetic mood, adds this postscript: “Should the Wise Son ever ask: ‘Why the Holocaust?’ he is expressing a wish that this generation should be spared.”

4. The Exogamist as Wicked Son

            Of all the fascinating titles Mamet assigned to each of the 37 short chapters of this work, none is more intriguing than the one he chose for the thirty-third: “Judaism: the House that Ruth Built.” It moves the reader to wonder at once: What do Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Babe Ruth have in common with Judaism? Obviously, one realizes immediately: really nothing. For Mamet’s clever reference here is rather to the biblical Ruth, who, after much personal suffering, built a “Ruthian” home of historical and future royalty in Bethlehem, millennia ago. For Mamet, apparently, the biblical Ruth became the paradigm for “exogamy,” or “marriage outside of a specific tribe, or a similar social unit.”

            Deciding to employ this clever metaphor to his promotion of exogamy as a possible solution to some of Jewry’s problems of survival, he apparently forgot to study a little more carefully the Book of Ruth, itself a “little epic and idyllic whole,” with some of its classical commentaries. Had he done so, he would have learned the historical significance of two unforgettable statements Ruth uttered when Naomi, her destitute mother-in-law, suggested sadly that Ruth, in her own widowhood, return to her Moabite people and their past. Ruth refused—utterly! She intoned, instead, her two heartrending replies, after insisting on cleaving to Naomi: “Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.” By which she obviously meant to convey, of course, her unalterable commitment to His laws given at Sinai, including, as Rashi adds, “all the various punishments for their transgressions.” In other words: no compromises!

            And, if destiny should decide one day that Ruth would marry the “kinsman” who would “redeem” her, he too would be required to observe the laws and customs appertaining to exogamy, as defined in chapter four of her Book. All of which Boaz, her “kinsman,” performed unconditionally, of course, in front of a group of Judges and an assembly of scholarly witnesses.

            What puzzles this reader, however, is why Mamet, lecturing the multitude of “fallen away” Jews on the issue of their Jewish survival, did not first cite those famous earlier lines, uttered by his own favorite biblical figure, the patriarch Abraham, the father of his people? Seriously concerned about his son’s marital life, we need only recall, Abraham uttered his unforgettably restrictive words to his senior servant, before sending him on his way, to search for the appropriate wife for his son. “And Abraham said: I will make you swear by the Lord . . . that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I dwell, but will go to the land of my birth and get a wife for my son Isaac . . . . The Lord . . . will send his angel before you and you will get a wife for my son from there” (Gen. 24:1–6).

            And Rebecca, in turn, thinking of her son Jacob’s future married life, cried, in her angst, to Isaac: “I am disgusted with my life because of the Hittite women. If Jacob marries a Hittite woman . . . what good would my life be to me?” (Gen. 27:46).

            So Isaac sent for Jacob and blessed him. He instructed him, saying: “You shall not take a wife from the Canaanite women. Go to Padden-Aram to the house of Bethuel, your mother’s father, and take a wife from the daughters of Laban, your mother’s brother . . . . Jacob obeyed his father and mother and had gone to Paddan-Aram” (Gen. 28:1–6).

            And even Esau, the incarnation of the “Wicked Son,” realizing his parents’ objection to exogamy, followed suit and went to Ishmael, and took a wife in addition to those he already had: Mahalath, the daughter of Ishmael, son of Abraham, sister of Nabaioth . . . .” (Gen. 28:1–7).

            Lest one conclude that the Jewish denunciation of exogamy remained forever buried in ancient biblical times, we are repeatedly reminded that what Abraham rigorously championed filtered down steadily through the ages till all the laws prohibiting exogamy were clearly enumerated at Sinai, as recorded formally in the Talmud and later incorporated in Maimonides and the Codes of Civil Law. And thereafter discussed endlessly, in all of its legal, social, and communal intricacies in the vast responsa literature written and published since then to our very day. What happened in Bethlehem merely reaffirmed what was previously formulated at Sinai and practiced faithfully since then in all instances.

            Nevertheless, Mamet persists in believing that “Ruthian homes,” built on “modern exogamy,” should be spread across America. So that he opens this chapter with a little story he had often heard about a “fallen away Jew,” who when asked “Why did you give it up?” (it meaning Judaism), replies: “I had a bad experience with a rabbi.” And he defends himself further with a tautology: “I left because rabbis are bad; rabbis are bad because Judaism is bad; I know this because I met a bad rabbi.” If “bad rabbis” cause that continuing “falling away of so many Jews,” why then does Mamet continue to quote, approvingly, a formal statement by a large contingent of rabbis, who promote exogamy, to save the many “fallen away Jews,” who continue “to give it up?”

            Here, then, is that statement:

Many contemporary rabbis have written most positively about the benefits of modern intermarriage. It is not, they point out, the non-Jews who dilute and threaten the community with so many ‘fallen away Jews.’ We have seen frequent examples of the non-Jewish partners bringing his or her spouse back to Judaism.

One is tempted to inquire immediately whether one of these “nameless rabbis” may have been responsible for denying him a meaningful bar mitzvah celebration he laments so bitterly. Or maybe one or two of them, or more, ratified his personal experiences with exogamy? And how many of these rabbis may have added, sadly, to the countless “fallen away Jews” who now constitute some 48 to 51 percent of American Jewry and have left the fold permanently? Or, were they motivated to spread exogamy to fill some of their own diminishing membership files?

            And even if, as Mamet argues further, exogamy might encourage the non-Jewish partner to persuade his or her spouse to attend Sabbath services, neither one knows or understands the barest meaning of the prayer book, its traditions, or practices. Even the most modern translation of that book hardly ever results in any greater religious practice, unless one is first taught by competent instructors, or highly educated and concerned teachers of whatever rank the classic meaning of prayers. Otherwise, confusion and uninterest follow. “Belonging” alone, despite Mamet’s advocacy of it, shall not, as indicated above, accomplish any significant change in the exogamist. As everyone should know, the laws, practices, and traditions or any other aspect of Judaism demands consistent study, reading, practice, and meaningful experience.

            Truthfully, need one really have to remind Mamet that even in the House that Ruth built in the Bronx, or in any other of such “Ruthian houses” across America, there exist any number of works—the most current being Official Rules Book of Major League Baseball of some 224-page length—without which nothing could proceed successfully on, or off, the playing field? And woe unto the umpire or baseball executive who, failing to recall consistently—especially umpires—any of those rules during a challenged play or other crisis, would then find themselves threatened, or verbally assaulted, by players and fans, or worse, demoted to the minor leagues, or even to the amateur little leagues. True of baseball, it is no less true—even more so, in fact—of the house that “Ruth” built in Bethlehem. All of which moves this sympathetic reader to conclude that, lest infatuation trump judgment, Mamet, in chapter 27 of this engaging book, finds himself striking out.

            Before returning this book to the shelves of Mamet’s “self-authored” library, this reader was moved to recall, interestingly, Clem Yeobright, the native in Thomas Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native. For Clem, “inwoven” with the heath of his boyhood, severed his relations, with his roots by, of all things, working for a jeweler in Paris, a “place and occupation at the opposite pole from the heath.” In returning to the “heath,” Clem “unconsciously wishes to recover the organic connections with his roots.” But, having acquired radical ideas in Paris, he genuinely aims to educate and modernize the “heath” folk, without realizing that he would, by making them self-consciously critical, destroy the organic community he wishes to rejoin.

            In some ways Mamet, too, left his people to gain national and international acclaim as one of America’s leading playwrights and movie producers. Having acquired some new and radical ideas in Hollywood, theaters, and movies across the country, including “exogamy,” he now wishes to modernize the “heath” folk of his own past with some new ideas, such as advanced in this book, by promoting “Ruthian homes” across the country. All of which would certainly have a deleterious effect on the American Jewish community. The return of this native’s ideas would surely create chaos, a chaos that would sadly rob the Jew of his identity.

            And yet, it becomes abundantly clear to any Mamet enthusiast, if asked to which “House” does our renowned playwright belong, the House in the Bronx, or the House in Bethlehem, should direct the questioner to the following passage in this work: “Judaism as a spiritual, ethical, or social practice has at its core a mystery so deep that not only is its existence hidden from the uninitiated, but its practices are hated, scorned, reviled, and murdered as necromancers. What is the fear the Jew engenders that manifests itself as hatred? Perhaps it is caused by his historical absolute, terrifying with certainty, that there is a God.”

     There is little question that Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s decision to maintain a coeducational framework at the Maimonides School in Boston has been repercussive.  Rabbi Soloveitchik, or “The Rav” as he was known to his students, was a towering intellectual figure of American Orthodoxy in the twentieth century; and thus, his opinions and approaches carried and still carry significant weight in contemporary Jewish practice and thought.  It is not surprising, therefore, that the Rav’s approach has been the subject of much debate, particularly as Orthodoxy has gained a greater foothold in American Jewish life, and as conservative ideologies which accentuate traditional roles (and who insist upon a maximalist position regarding gender separation) have gained greater currency.[i]  Although the historical record demonstrates that Rabbi Soloveitchik had addressed his opinion regarding girls studying alongside boys, and we now can read his response with clarity, questions still remain regarding the application of his ideas to contemporary Jewish life.

     In the last decade, new material has emerged regarding Rabbi Soloveitchik’s position on this critical dimension of Jewish education.  Nati Helfgot published two letters from Rabbi Soloveitchik addressed to Rabbi Leonard Rosenfeld, the then director of the Education Committee of the Hebrew Institute of Long Island (HILI), whose principal at the time was Rabbi Harold Leiman.  These letters make a strong case for coeducation in the context that I described in my book about Maimonides School.

     This essay publishes for the first time, two of the letters written by Rabbi Rosenfeld to Rabbi Soloveitchik, which facilitated the response of Rabbi Soloveitchik (published by Helfgot).  These letters illuminate Rabbi Soloveitchik’s attitude and provide vital context to Rabbi Soloveitchik’s letters regarding Torah education for girls.

Background[ii]

     More than thirty years ago, the prominent Israeli educator Mordechai Bar Lev visited the Maimonides School in Boston and was shocked by what he saw: “For an Israeli visitor like myself,” he wrote, “the phenomenon of coeducation through all grades was striking.”[iii]  The fact that Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, an Orthodox scholar from a decidedly yeshiva oriented family, was the founder of the Maimonides School and continued to serve as the spiritual force behind its educational philosophy, certainly puzzled Bar Lev.

In fact, the question of coeducation at Maimonides has plagued scholars and educators for years, given that coeducation is generally not associated with the Orthodox community. One of the most prominent students of Rabbi Soloveitchik, Rabbi Hershel Schachter, expressed one point of view:

When a religious high school opened in a large North American city, and it was mentioned to our rabbi [Soloveitchik] that the classes were mixed and that boys and girls studied together based on the model of yeshivat Rambam in Boston, our rabbi was amazed.  He said: “But in that city there were always separate schools for boys and girls, and what circumstance forced them to open a new mixed school?  In Boston [Rabbi Soloveitchik] was forced to behave this way for he only had two options: to be guilty of limiting education for girls or to be guilty of opening a coeducational school.  He was forced into choosing the lesser of two evils, and he reasoned that given the contemporary circumstances, this decision was less problematic.  But in other times in other places, where there are already schools that separate boys and girls and there is no need to act as such, it is certainly completely incorrect to do so.[iv]

According to Rabbi Schachter, Rabbi Soloveitchik was forced into organizing a coeducational school because of pressing circumstances.  Coeducation, in Rabbi Schachter’s view, was the lesser of two evils, the alternative being no schooling for girls at all.  Rabbi Schachter does not deny that the school was coeducational or that coeducation was an innovation.  Instead, he suggests that given the considerations of the time, coeducation was the best alternative for Rabbi Soloveitchik.  Rabbi Schachter’s evaluation of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s innovation implies that the primary motivation for creating a coeducational school was based on practical and pragmatic considerations, not on educational or halakhic ones.[v] Striking in Rabbi Schachter’s formulation is the testimony regarding the applicability of the Maimonides School model around America, without the knowledge of Rabbi Soloveitchik, and apparently –according to Rabbi Schachter – against Rabbi Soloveitchik’s will.

             A second group of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s students asserted that coeducation was perceived by Rabbi Soloveitchik as an educational ideal or at least an educational issue.  This perspective was advanced by Benny Brama, a former teacher at the Maimonides School, in an interview with the International Bnei Akiva movement.  Brama suggested that Rabbi Soloveitchik anticipated the value of mixed education and that he deliberately and consciously created a school that implemented this belief.

Coeducation causes less sexual and social tension and brings, both within and without the yeshiva or school, a richer and healthier social life.  Particularly in light of the sexual impropriety and the looseness that may be found all over America, Rabbi Soloveitchik’s educational approach in the Rambam Yeshiva in Boston stands out positively, ([for] all the classes in the yeshiva are mixed, and the boys and girls are required to conform to the daily schedule that includes shacharit and mincha).

Only a great thinker and halakhist like him, who understands that one should confront rather than flee from contemporary realities, could have established a yeshiva with this educational approach.[vi]

Another student of Rabbi Soloveitchik also wrote about Rabbi Soloveitchik and coeducation.

The co-educational nature of Maimonides School leaves many, even avowed disciples of the Rav, uncomfortable.  Contrary to reasons offered in certain circles, I understood that the Rav viewed co-education not as a halakhic issue, but rather as an educational question, one to be examined through the prism of sound educational philosophy and tested in the laboratory of life.[vii]

Brama’s argument suggests that the decision to implement coeducation at Maimonides should be understood as part of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s broader interest in integrating Jewish and modern culture.

A third group of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s students did not attempt to justify the innovations as did Rabbi Schachter, or represent them as an educational ideal, as Meier and Brama did, but rather, denied that such an innovation ever obtained. Rabbi Leon Mozeson, a teacher at the school in the 1960s wrote that Meier’s statements were “simply not true” and that Rabbi Soloveitchik had instructed him to separate boys and girls in his classroom.[viii]  Rabbi Mozeson’s testimony as to his personal classroom conduct cannot be disputed but it is clear that most of the faculty at the school did not adopt his rigorous conservative posture.  When Rabbi Soloveitchik visited classrooms, he was well aware that students were intermingled and sat and studied together.

     When I last addressed this issue in writing, I wrote that Rabbi Soloveitchik left no written testimony that might explain the ideology behind coeducation. However, subsequent to the publication of my book, two letters were published by Nati Helfgot that illustrate Rabbi Soloveitchik’s attitude towards coeducation in the contemporary context. It is to these letters that we now turn our attention.

The Rosenfeld Letters

     In the introductory paragraph to Rabbi Soloveitchik’s letters on girls studying Talmud, Helfgot writes that

Rabbi Leonard Rosenfeld…wrote the Rav with a series of questions regarding the teaching of Talmud to elementary and high school age girls….The Rav… soon replied indicating that he would not answer these questions directly until he was assured that the education committee would agree to strictly abide by his rulings and guidelines.

The full text of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s letter, as published by Helfgot reads

Dear Rabbi Rosenfeld,

I acknowledge receipt of your letter. In my answer to your previous inquiry concerning the permissibility of instruction of girls in Talmud I stressed that unless I am assured in advance by the school administration that my recommendations will be followed I would not take the trouble to investigate the matter. Since such an official assurance has been withheld (your letter did not contain any such commitment) I must decline to consider the controversial problem.  The reason for my reluctance to engage in this controversial issue is the unique stand taken by many of our Jews on matters of Law and tradition. We have reached a stage at which party lines and political ideologies influence our halakhic thinking to the extent that people cannot rise above partisan issue to the level of Halakhah-objectivity.  Some are in a perennial quest for “liberalization” of the Law and its subordination to the majority opinion of a political legislative body, while others would like to see the Halakhah fossilized and completely shut out of life. I am not inclined to give any of these factions an opportunity for nonsensical debates. [ix]

This letter is suggestive on three fronts. First of all, it indicates that the letter was not the first time that Rabbi Rosenfeld and Rabbi Soloveitchik had discussed this issue.  In fact, the response of Rabbi Soloveitchik (or perhaps more accurately, his unwillingness to respond) was precipitated by the inability to receive guarantees that his position would be adhered to.  Secondly, Rabbi Soloveitchik suggests that he needed to investigate the matter.  It is unclear whether he means that what had been taking place at Maimonides School (for at least six years prior to these letters) was not investigated, or that the model of Maimonides would be irrelevant to the school in Long Island.  But most importantly, this letter makes it abundantly clear that the Rav was well aware of the political hot-potato that girls studying Talmud represented (as well as the issue of coeducation as will become clear below) and that he was cognizant of the fact that this issue was not only controversial but also repercussive. Unlike Rabbi Schachter’s assertion, Rabbi Soloveitchik seems in this letter to be writing decisively and consciously. 

     Rabbi Soloveitchik’s engagement in the issue of women studying Talmud and coeducation becomes illuminated by the letter which yielded the response above.

On January 12, 1953, Rabbi Rosenfeld wrote that the issue of girls studying Talmud at HILI (and ostensibly, coeducation as well) had been the subject of discussions and letters between Rabbi Rosenfeld and Rabbi Soloveitchik Before addressing a set of questions to Rabbi Soloveitchik, Rabbi Rosenfeld’s letter begins:

A while back I contacted your honor orally and in writing regarding the teaching of Torah She B’al Peh to girls in elementary yeshivot (and in high schools) in general, and in the Yeshiva of Far Rockaway specifically. In your answer, you set forth conditions upon which you would investigate the matter and the details of the Halakhot connected to them. I am pleased to report that I passed on your words to the education committee of the yeshiva, and we concluded that we would be very grateful if you would consider investigating this question and we certainly from our side, will accept all the conditions.  [x]

From the letter it is clear that Rabbi Soloveitchik’s response, particularly the words “investigate the matter”, were drawn from Rosenfeld’s letter.  But while Rabbi Soloveitchik adopted the terminology, he added the words “controversial” leaving no doubt that Rabbi Soloveitchik was aware of the consequences of what he would ultimately write. 

     The questions of the Educational Committee were, as cited in the letter from Rabbi Rosenfeld to Rabbi Soloveitchik:

1. Is it desirable to teach the Oral law to girls?
2. Is it permitted to teach the Oral law to girls?
3. Is there a halakhic difference between Talmud, Mishna, Aggada, and Halakha Psuka?
4. Is there a halakhic difference between surface study and in depth study?

As the above cited letter indicates, Rabbi Soloveitchik initially refused to respond.  However four days later, Rabbi Rosenfeld issued a clarification.  In a letter (this time, typed in English rather than handwritten in Hebrew, not  printed on school stationery, and addressed curiously to Dr. Joseph Soloveitchik), dated January 27, 1953, Rabbi Rosenfeld again turned to the Rav. He wrote:

I am terribly sorry if my letter outlining the question was not as clear as I thought it was.

The matter was thoroughly discussed in the committee as well as the entire Board. It was moved, adopted and so recorded in the minutes that we shall be bound by your decision on the matter. There is thus a binding commitment on our part that this is halakha l’maaseh and not just derush ve-kabel s’khar.

I, therefore, hope that since this condition has now been fulfilled that you will favor us with your responsum.

This question is framed in halakhic terminology. But more importantly, it illustrates the extent to which the topic of girls’ education was discussed on multiple levels within the Long Island Orthodox community of the 1950s.  Clearly Rabbi Soloveitchik understood, at least at this point, that whatever answers he provided would be taken seriously, both as halakhic decisions, and as policy. 

     It took Rabbi Soloveitchik more than four months to respond. In the interim, it appears that Rabbi Rosenfeld sent Rabbi Soloveitchik a number of additional letters as well.  On May 27^th, 1953, Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote a letter to Rabbi Rosenfeld through the offices of Rabbi Leo Jung. 

Dear Rabbi Rosenfeld:

Please accept my apologies for not answering your letters sooner. The delay was due to my overcrowded schedule.  As to your question with regard to a curriculum in a coeducational school, I expressed my opinion to you long ago that it would be a very regrettable oversight on our part if we were to arrange separate Hebrew courses for girls. Not only is the teaching of Torah she-be-al peh to girls permissible but it is nowadays an absolute imperative. This policy of discrimination between the sexes as to subject matter and method of instruction which is still advocated by certain groups within our Orthodox community has contributed greatly to the deterioration and downfall of traditional Judaism.  Boys and girls alike should be introduced to the inner halls of Torah she-be-al peh.

I hope to prepare in the near future a halakhic brief on the same problem which will exhaust the various aspects of the same. In the meantime I heartily endorse a uniform program for the entire student body.

     To be sure, this letter makes it very clear that Rabbi Soloveitchik was disdainful of a model of Torah education that discriminated against girls. Moreover, he ascribes to unequal education a desiccating quality that he feels partly rendered Orthodoxy irrelevant on the contemporary scene. His lashing out against the ultra-Orthodox, who at the time were only a small percentage of American Orthodoxy, is remarkable, given his Lithuanian Orthodox background.

     Rabbi Soloveitchik’s response does not frontally address the issue of coeducation as a halakhic desideratum.  Rather, it takes for granted that, in the case that was presented to him, coeducation is a norm. Nonetheless, he is careful to note that having separate Hebrew courses for boys and girls is ultimately problematic for a resilient Orthodoxy, at least as long as the girls will not be treated as seriously as the boys.

     It is always tempting to seek to apply one response, given in one set of circumstances, to a wider set of circumstances.  Rabbi Soloveitchik, in fact, did not support coeducation in the Yeshiva College campus,[xi] even though he was probably aware that at the time, the women of Stern College would not receive the same Torah education as the men of Yeshiva College.

     Nonetheless, each situation must be viewed within and through the local prism.  It is conceivable that two locales might share Orthodox ideologies, but emerge with two radically different schools, depending on whether the instructors are capable and willing to provide equal education for boys and girls. Within contemporary Jewish life, this situation can vary from community to community.

     In the two letters cited above, Rabbi Soloveitchik affirms, in remarkably stark terminology, that equal (and qualitative) Torah education for boys and girls is a necessary component of a vibrant and dynamic contemporary Jewish life. Since the Rav was aware of the opposition to his approach within the ultra-Orthodox community, he had planned to write a more detailed paper. One can only speculate whether he meant for such a detailed brief to serve as a road map for contemporary Orthodox girls’ education, since no such paper has, as of yet, been published.

Conclusion

     Rabbi Soloveitchik’s affirmation of coeducation as a legitimate educational alternative continues to be repercussive, often in ironic ways.  In her striking defense of single sex education, Elana Maryles Sztokman recently wrote

    “This topic is of particular interest in the Jewish world, in which single sex education is often seen as "old" while coed is seen as more progressive. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, for example, promoted the Maimonides coed Orthodox day school in the 1950s, as a "modern" answer to single-sex education. In practice, however, just because
boys and girls are in the same building, and possibly even learning the same texts, they are not experiencing the same educational experiences and opportunities. The problems that exist in coed classes in public schools - boys dominating math and science, boys interrupting and harassing girls, boys dominating teacher attention - undoubtedly exist in Jewish schools as well. They may even be bigger problems in Jewish schools. We would not know because the subject of gender in the Jewish day school system has not been adequately researched.” [xii]

     The stationery of the Hebrew Institute of Long Island carries the motto “To carry on the golden tradition of Jewish learning in a progressive American school.”  HILI, Maimonides, and many other Orthodox day schools have continued the practice of coeducation since the 1960s, even though its progressive character might today be questioned. The fact that coeducation in the general Orthodox community has not been adopted,[xiii] should not deter the Jewish community from stating what the evidence demonstrates: Rabbi Soloveitchik understood that the only way to ensure equal education was to provide a coeducational environment.  In many communities that was true in the 1950s. And in many communities, that remains true today.

“The seal of the Blessed Holy One is Truth.” As a Modern Orthodox pulpit rabbi, truth— a regular feature of scripture and of daily liturgy, an important benchmark for interpretations of Torah, philosophical truth, scientific truth, psychological truth, a description of the Torah itself— plays an outsized role. Indeed, recent controversies relating to the issue of conversion to Judaism have often hinged on the ability of would-be righteous converts to accept axiomatic truth claims held to be required by the particular court. Converts are often required to affirm the truth of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles, or to affirm truth claims regarding the age of the universe, evolution, and other issues of perceived tension between religion and science. Simultaneously, the theology and personal beliefs of rabbinic colleagues have been scrutinized by others in the rabbinic community, searching for evidence of insufficient belief in that which our religion presumably holds to be true. In particular, academic study of biblical texts has prompted energetic enforcement of Orthodoxy’s supposed boundaries. Mainly, these uses of the term, “truth” seem to refer to an objective, Platonic sort of truth. They are not dependent on the person or situation, and are held to be either the basis of our faith, or a requirement of its observers, imposed from the outside. In this essay, I aim to describe the role that a very different kind of “truth” has played in my personal faith, and one that I believe deserves more attention and support in observant communities.

Selective Spiritual Autobiography

I grew up in North Bellmore, a small Long Island suburb. The houses on my block were all the same, and the stated life-goals of teachers, guidance counselors, parents, and friends alike remained, to me, monochromatic. What does Hashem, your God, ask of you, but to excel academically, participate in a well-rounded variety of extracurricular activities, gain entry into an elite college, and earn a high salary to pay for your progeny to do the same? Neighbors would casually remark about the importance of earning more money than your parents. Older immigrants would recall how they gave up so much for the sake of economic opportunity. During a regional high school science competition, one teacher encouraged the female students to “show more skin if you need to” in order to subtly influence the predominantly male pool of judges in the hope of earning better results. Proposals to bus in minority students from poorer neighborhoods to our public schools met with widespread protest about the character of the “neighborhood.” Often, status was cemented by public displays of wealth, cars, houses, clothes, and handbags. The plights of the environment, the needy, etc. were merely pro forma features of our discourse. While it might have looked wholesome from the outside, and indeed the cogs in the wheel were almost always earnest and admirable individuals, Long Island seemed to me a modernized version of society in the Great Gatsby.

Religiously, my family belonged to a Conservative synagogue, Temple Beth El of North Bellmore, with a wise spiritual leader, Rabbi Harvey Goldscheider. He was a student of Rabbi Heschel, who often fought against the materialists’ status quo, while warmly modeling the depth of Judaism, practiced sincerely and with a Hassidic-style comfort. I recall fondly his brave critiques of opulent semahot and his love for tradition, text, and the State of Israel. We attended synagogue on the holidays and for celebratory occasions, but not otherwise, gradually increasing family observance from a mainly secular lifestyle to a marginally more observant one by the time I was about to celebrate my bar mitzvah. As one of the rare children who enjoyed and excelled in the Temple’s Hebrew School, I had taken a strong interest in tradition as a source of meaning and connection in a world that seemed too vain; the rabbi learned Talmud privately with me and a few others. He would regularly invite folks for Shabbat meals (always full of songs), lectures of interest, or small study sessions.

Most of my close friends were Jewish. Yet for almost all of them, Jewish practice was peripheral at best, done for the sake of nostalgia, habit, guilt, a requirement of the Hebrew School, or to satisfy grandparents. However, bar and bat mitzvah celebrations were serious business. Regularly costing tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes even more!), children would quietly compete to have the more expensive simha. I still recall a friend approaching me and saying, “[m]y parents said that your bar mitzvah only cost x dollars; mine was twice that!” Presumptively, money was the benchmark for the quality of the affair. With a late September birthday, I attended the celebrations of dozens of peers before celebrating my own, affording me the opportunity to gain some perspective. Almost none had kosher receptions, and most occurred with DJ’s and scantily clad dancers on the Sabbath day itself. The religious ceremony, as it was called, was mocked and derided by peers and parents alike.

Artificially truncated error-filled renditions of small selections of haftaroth were celebrated as monumental accomplishments. I can still hear the generic exaggerated praises, innocently and sweetly proffered by loving parents, permanently colored by my judgmental teenage mind with a cocktail of sarcasm, scorn, and anger. “David, your accomplishments today demonstrate that anything is possible when you put your mind to it. We’re so proud of you and the man you’ve become!” “Susie, that was the most beautiful haftarah reading. You’ve grown up into the proud Jewish woman we knew you could be.” Apparently, the parents had not listened to the same three butchered lines of chanted reading from the prophets, the same prophets who happened to shun materialism and rail against insincere religious practice. To me, the lavish excess of celebration was an end in itself, or perhaps a measure of promoting or maintaining societal status. How else can we explain the loans taken out and the homes refinanced for a party in celebration of a Judaism that remained unknown and unexplorable to the celebrants, in ceremonies filled with more shrimp in the cocktails than words in the divrei Torah.

I found myself approaching my 13^th birthday in a state of dire distress. I was deeply saddened by the monotony of the lifestyle for which I was being implicitly groomed. At each turn its combined lack of self-awareness and purposeful intention left me hopeless. It seemed impossible to me that life was granted for this to be its end, and I knew I wanted something totally other. Increasingly, I turned toward a mix of social action, increased Jewish observance, and the study of the Jewish prophets as avenues of meaning. In my hometown, homophobic attacks on school staff and students led to the adoption of a piloted version of the Anti-Defamation League’s World of Difference curriculum. I participated in training and bonding with other students and faculty on a retreat where we learned and practiced educational tools for tolerance that we later brought back to the entire district. In fact, the techniques learned had demonstrable and obvious positive impact, raising awareness and alleviating the insults and violence that minorities, especially LGBTQ students and staff, were all-to-frequently subjected to. This experience has served me as a regular reminder of how the Divine Spirit urges us to the edge of our own comfort, to listen, to bond, and to serve with love. I also found, for the first time really, a bit of personal authenticity and resonance, pairing a concrete task of empathy with the God of the prophets. Yet the more I reached out to try to discern the boundaries of my life and explore other possibilities, societal cages became surprisingly suffocating. Disapproval and rejection came sweeping in with the volume and subtle force of an ocean at high tide. Attempts at increased Jewish observance and engagement, in particular, were either shunned as being old fashioned, or derided for their interference with those extracurriculars, so important for getting into an Ivy League college.

Transformative Spiritual Experience

I share this background to help explain the foreground for one of the most powerful moments of my life. My turning bar mitzvah was to be celebrated on the first Sabbath after the holiday cycle, my Hebrew birthday falling on erev Sukkot. Yom Kippur began on the eve of September 29, 1998, which happened also to be my Gregorian birthdate. Despite the threat of scattered thunderstorms, I decided to up my observance by walking home from synagogue rather than riding in a car following the Kol Nidrei services. This prompted rather strong criticism from several synagogue-goers, noting that I lived too far (approximately two miles) and that I might get soaked in the rain. I retorted, with sarcasm, that I was unlikely to melt. The criticism didn’t stop, and developed into a full-scale argument. Upset, I stormed off toward home. While clearly of minor importance, this Yom Kippur argument in the lobby of Temple Beth El got my mind racing and stoked a latent teenage anger. “These people spend so much time telling us about the importance of Jewish continuity yet won’t let me observe the laws on Yom Kippur by simply walking home after services. Why do they care what I do anyway? It’s all for show and appearance. Perhaps I make them feel guilty. It’s easier for them to convince themselves that it’s not safe or prudent to walk.” Harsh, judgmental, and self-righteous as they were, these were the thoughts that filled my mind that Yom Kippur eve.

The exertion, solitude, and fresh air on the walk home provided an opportunity to calm down. Feeling guilty about my self-serving harsh thoughts about others, I retreated to my room. I had to make a decision. My soul cried out for a meaningful expression of a connected, purpose-driven life, in stark contrast to the systemic materialism and egoism I often perceived as immanent all around me. Yet even many of the people at the synagogue, let alone in other walks of my life, were actively and forcefully holding me back. I wanted badly to talk to a friend who would understand, but a mix of shyness, the privacy of faith, and a generalized embarrassment prevented me from doing so. Who would understand, anyway? And so I engaged in the first genuine act of prayer in my life. Emotionally in despair, I started to cry and began to mumble to God Himself. On dramatic cue, thunderstorms rolled in, and the flashes of lightning and rolling rumbles of thunder provided a sense of background comfort.

But then my body was seized. Frozen. Unable to move. Physically palpable, with an electricity that pulsed and tingled, I felt present, absolutely, in a way I never had before. Background noise and sensation faded suddenly to the fore, and the gaze of my mind focused intently, as if quickly adjusting binoculars into clear focus after frustrating blurriness. Still visually observing the wood panel of my bedroom wall, my mind moved beyond the sights to another place, a primordial place, brimming with an infinitely deep-seeming sense of sacred life, shrouded in mystery and permeating all things. Oscillating repeatedly between prominent feelings of intense attraction and dread that made me physically shaky and weak, I knew then as never before the awesome power and comforting touch of the Blessed Holy One. With curiosity and horror, I did not want the experience to end. Moments of indescribable clarity ensued from a non-verbal communication that was clearer than anything I’ve ever been told. Grasping on to the feelings, as if clutching the ankles of someone running away, this presence lifted away just as a powerful tornado ascends into the sky, leaving a misleading calm in its wake. I sat at the foot of my bed, staring out the window, noticing the odd combination of previously unnoticed rapid breathing, yet also a sense of sublime calm. I cried profusely, moved by the intense beauty of the moment, perhaps all moments, pained and stabbed by the tragedy of human existence and inescapable suffering too.

On that night, my life changed. I now had the courage to pursue a purpose-driven life; I could do no other. Change was now easier than stasis and required less bravery. All decisions seemed transformed by the desire to serve a greater Whole, to build bridges or connections, or dismantle old ones for the purpose of rebuilding in a different moment in a more suitable way. Nothing was the same for me, and never would be again. It’s hard (likely impossible) to explain, but I still know it as the truest thing I have ever experienced.

Spiritual Experience as a Primary Source of Truth in Orthodox Communities

Rav Kook, in the second chapter of Orot haTeshuva, describes two types of return to the Blessed Creator: gradual return (teshuva hadragit) and sudden return (teshuva pit’omit). When I read his description, I recognized my own experience:

Sudden return comes about as a result of a certain spiritual flash that enters the soul. At once, the person senses all the evil and ugliness of sin and he is converted into a new being; already he experiences inside himself a complete transformation for the better. This form of return dawns on a person through the grace of some inner spiritual force, whose traces point to the depths of the mysterious. . . . The higher expression of penitence comes about as a result of a flash of illumination of the all-good, the divine, the light of Him who abides in eternity. The universal soul, the spiritual essence, is revealed to us in all its majesty and holiness, to the extent that the human heart can absorb it. Indeed, is not the all of existence so good and so noble, and is not the good and the nobility in ourselves but an expression of our relatedness to the all? How then can we allow ourselves to become severed from the all, a strange fragment, detached like tiny grains of sand that are of no value? As a result of this perception, which is truly a divinely inspired perception, comes about return out of love, in the life of the individual and the life of society.[1]

There are a few takeaways worth highlighting in this context. Rav Kook promotes the importance of a thoroughly transformative spiritual experience as a desirable and divinely sanctioned meeting with the divine, through the inner depths of the soul. By delving into the recesses of our souls, we encounter the place where all souls meet, points of increased unity, the divine. Rav Kook also notes that authentic spiritual experience is not primarily isolating but must stem from and ultimately serve at its limit a sense of profound connection. Reading his words provided validation for me through shared experience, and helped me shed some of the insecurity I experienced around admitting, even to myself, that I had been touched by a soul-awakening experience.

My personal experience, though, touches on a deeper problem for me in the “life of the community.” In the Modern Orthodox communities I have tended to call home for approximately 15 years, spiritual experiences are generally viewed with deep skepticism or shunned altogether. Personal spiritual experiences are entirely subjective, and cannot easily be vetted for veracity, either experientially or morally. They tend to reinforce anti-nomian tendencies in a community that prizes strict observance of a comprehensive legal system. “Rabbi Hiyya bar Ami said in the name of Ulla: Since the day the Temple was destroyed, the Blessed Holy One has only one place in His world, the four cubits of halakha (Jewish law).”[2] Spiritual experiences promote questing and exploring, often raising difficult and agonizing questions for mainstream communities with conservative tendencies. Moreover, sudden and transformative spiritual experiences are unpredictable and relatively rare, making them a challenging source of authority and a difficult technology of religious education. Perhaps most importantly, in communities that prize rational deliberation, words like soul and spiritual are anathema and even embarrassing.  

But the times are indeed changing, and for good reasons too. Yes, there are pragmatic reasons for renewed acceptance of spiritual experience as a source of personal truth. Niche communities can ill-afford attrition, and Modern Orthodox communities have experienced the flight of those searching for contemplative and spiritual experience. Since the 1960s and 1970s. Hindu, Buddhist, and other eastern retreat centers across the United States are full of highly educated Jewish participants and teachers. Often, the teachers on silent retreats are all members of the tribe! Last spring, I had the opportunity to give a talk at the Vedanta Society of Providence, a Hindu Temple, on Jewish approaches to spiritual practice, as part of a panel that included a Sufi mystic and a Christian theologian. To my surprise, there were dozens if not hundreds of Jews who populated the audience, singing along to the Bhagavad Gita with knowledge and passion.

Additionally, we live in a society of skyrocketing anxiety, pressure, and insecurity. We have yet to seriously grapple or resolve core questions surrounding the role of an exponentially expansive technological revolution. We are witnessing a dramatic shift in the paradigm that places career and profession as the main or sole source of value for an increasing number of men and women. Many are concerned that humanity doesn’t provide a reasonable response to our own self-destructive environmental time-bomb. Whether we can listen, collaborate, and cooperate with serious effect, even if our own existence might depend on it, is in reasonable doubt.

Against this backdrop, enlightenment notions of Truth are being supplanted by the notion of socially or linguistically agreed upon truths, determined by context and subjective individual and communal experience. Modernism was broadly defined by reason and was ruled by Descartes’ notion of individual thought. What is commonly called postmodernism, while loosely defined, has served as a corrective to very real excesses. Rational thought as the primary feature of human living tends to ignore questions of meaning and spirituality that are deeply ingrained human needs. Rationalism exudes a confidence that turns to hubris, ignoring the limitations of rational and critical modes of thinking. Our ability to determine truth based on rationalism alone has been undermined. There is a change in the way we view truth, from objective to subjective; this is a major shift that must be noted and accommodated in Modern Orthodox communities.

Truths have all too often turned out to be influenced by the people and classes of people who impose their authority. They have failed to bring promised riches, be they material or spiritual, in ways that rightfully accommodate principles of justice, fairness, and responsibility to large sections of the populace. In Orthodox communities of all stripes, a daily litany of sexual, financial, and moral scandals have plagued lay and religious leaders of our most venerated institutions. Reality has increasingly confirmed the postmodernist thesis that altruism is often self-serving, and Truth often just a disguise. Once we admit that the identity of the people that make the rules affect, in intrinsic ways, the nature of those rules, feminist and other critiques grow stronger. If women have been excluded from the class of those with agency to design our system of Jewish praxis, halakha is lacking in a fundamental way. Thus, it is no surprise that the inclusion of female clergy has become the issue with generational ground support and the change with the most traction on the ground.

These changes often started as challenges from the laity, but have ascended and gained a compassionate hearing among many leaders, leading to shifts on a variety of planes. No longer is autonomy vested in the hands of the few, and institutions such as Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, JOFA, the International Rabbinic Fellowship, and the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals have served as a communal counterweight. Explicitly, they have stressed the importance of inclusion, particularly of women, and local autonomy, re-offering local autonomy of diverse Jewish communities.

This shift has been much discussed. But there is an equally important spiritual shift occurring right under our noses. Just as classical models of diversity and local autonomy are advocated for, prior models of spiritual experience and truth are resurfacing. Mussar,,[3] the nineteenth-century movement to rigorously apply Jewish ethics in a lived way, has become pervasively popular, mixed with a tinge of positive psychology and other modern psychological teachings. Hassidut[4] and its profound exploration of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs of Jews going through difficult and anxious change resonates once more. Of course, focus has shifted, and certain offensive or untrue elements have been de-emphasized or dropped. Both move out of the head, emphasizing the body, heart, lived experience, and ultimate unity of all things, and are reflections of new senses of human need and of truth.

In an oft-quoted teaching, the Maggid of Mezeritch commented on the talmudic notion of truth. “The seal of the Blessed Holy One is truth. The letters that comprise this word consist of the first, middle, and last letters of the alphabet, alluding to the fact that Blessed Holy One surrounds all worlds, fills all worlds from within, and provides space for all worlds, thus there is no place devoid of his presence.”[5] Yes, this teaching provides support for the notion of transcendent Truth from his perspective. But it also provides the foundation for the immanent truth of the soul. Rav Kook’s notion of sudden spiritual enlightenment is rooted not in reaching above but rather in a deep dive to the depths of the soul, a meeting place of divinity inside each of us, and one that connects us profoundly to all things. This, for him, is the primary way of actually accessing truth. Accessible immanence is only possible if God is immanent. Now, the degree to which the Maggid’s teaching is subversive comes into focus. Truth, often thought of as transcendent and absolute, is brought into our world through immanence and subjectivity; it is inherent in the very spelling of the word!

In the United States, the vast majority of those in positions of Orthodox leadership have chosen, to date, to double down, rejecting and critiquing postmodern notions of truth, usually in unserious and mocking ways. Most often, the critiques have been personal ad hominem attacks, rather than substantive discussions. Rabbi Shagar, by contrast, grappled thoughtfully and intentionally with these issues, paving the way for fair and open-minded responses that are not instinctively defensive or dismissive, albeit in an Israeli religious Zionist context. Describing his own faith, he wrote:

Wittgenstein asserted that “it is not how things are in the world that are mystical, but that it exists.” It is my understanding that his statement refers not to the physical-scientific world, but to a different one. Mysticism is the apprehension of a transcendent reality; it is faith . . . Human consciousness, with its dualism of subject and object, opens up a chasm between the world of belief and the outside world. Hence my assertion that faith is presence, activity . . . And truly, my faith is mystical; it is a wordless, letterless faith. It is my lot to believe without telling others (in this context, I am an Other) that I believe, much as the kabbalists cleaved to the Almighty with ovanta deliba, “the understanding of the heart.” This psychological technique or practice precedes language and grants it its vitality. In its second phase, belief manifests as a life of faith. It is compelled to function in a world of duality and if I overlook its origins in the Real (for instance, by trying to demonstrate its objective truth), I destroy it.[6]

Rabbi Shagar’s description evokes the techniques of mindfulness in his use of the terms “real” and “pre-linguistic.”

Modern techniques of mindfulness train the practitioner to compassionately observe the present moment with awareness, rather than through thoughts, emotions, moods. In mindfulness practice, one does not fight with or ignore thoughts, emotions, and the like when they arise. Rather, the practice is to take note, to turn towards what is, and return, again and again, to compassionate awareness of the present moment. Most frequently, the breath (in sitting meditation) or the physical sensations of the body (in walking meditation) are used as objects of intention, as a pragmatic proxy for returning to the present moment with awareness. As Rabbi Jonathan Slater describes:

This is mindfulness: the capacity to see clearly, with calm and awakened heart, the truth of each moment of our lives . . . When I see my life with the greatest clarity, I experience the presence of God in each moment, even in pain and failure. I feel joy in being an expression of God’s intent in creation. Mindful attention to all life has helped me to know great compassion for other people, for their suffering, and also an expansive love for other people, for their dogged will to make a meaningful life.[7]

In a Jewish context, awareness of the present moment rests its authority in notions of divine immanence central to kabbalastic and Hassidic thought, and to practical notions of spiritual practice prized in the writings of the Maggid of Mezeritch, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and of Rabbi Kook (as seen above).

Conclusion

For me, a renewed practice of mindfulness meditation and a more meditative prayer practice have become the consistent daily practices to remind me, through experience, of the deep spiritual awareness that once froze my body and transformed my life. I try to live the rest of my life, Jewishly and otherwise, however imperfectly, with this at the core. When I find myself drifting from lived awareness with the capacity for compassion, this practice—one of immanence—is the one best suited to change my reaction, in the short-term and long-term, and to help me live with knowledge and meaning.

As Rabbi Shagar noted, “[p]hilosophies and outlooks are, in this context, nothing but rationalizations—apologetics even—whose sole role is to justify what has been arrived at, and which must thus be regarded with a certain wariness. They are not the substance of faith but explanations for it, thus they are ancillary to it and always involve a degree of duality.”[8] True faith, then, is a transformed life that stems from cultivated experiences of awe. It dives not toward isolation but toward unity at the core; it connects people and things in the most real of ways. It is responsive to each moment, latent with divinity, and holds as its motto that which Moses proclaimed to Pharaoh. “Our own livestock, too, shall go along with us—not a hoof shall remain behind: for we must select from it for the worship of our God, and we shall not know with what we are to worship God until we arrive there.”[9]

It is incumbent upon the Modern Orthodox community to consider whether or how it can become a postmodern Orthodox community. Failure to do so will result in divergence from both current mada (academic thinking) and amkha (the expressed needs of so many individuals). Let this essay serve as a vote for spiritual experience as a source of soul-truth, and let us not only welcome but seek to cultivate and share what it means to live these truths together.

“But We Are Guilty for Our Daughters”: Lessons Learned from the History of Jewish Girls’ Education in Germany and Eastern Europe in the Nineteenth Century

by Laura Shaw Frank

(Laura Shaw Frank is a doctoral student in Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland, College Park.  She is also on the Judaics and Jewish History Faculties at the Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community High School in Baltimore, Maryland.  A former corporate litigator, Laura holds degrees from Columbia College and Columbia University School of Law.) 

            The nineteenth century witnessed radical transformation in the area of girls’ education. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, formal education for Jewish girls, whether in Jewish religious studies or secular studies, was virtually non-existent in both Germany and Eastern Europe. Over the following century, the situation saw major changes in both locales. By the mid-nineteenth century, formal education—both secular and religious—for Jewish girls was nearly universal in Germany. By the dawn of the twentieth century, significant numbers of Jewish girls in Eastern Europe were enrolled in modern schools and receiving secular, but not religious, educations. The process of transformation that occurred throughout the nineteenth century with respect to girls’ education was similar in certain ways in Central and Eastern Europe, but in other ways it was profoundly different. Although both German and Eastern European Jews began educating their daughters during this time, the point of time at which they began to do so, their reasons for doing so, the type of education they chose to give the girls, and the Jewish communal reaction to, and involvement with, their schooling differed significantly.  These differences are important, not simply as lessons in Jewish history, but as models that continue to play out in the way the Orthodox Jewish community addresses the changing status of girls and women in their surrounding societies. 

In Germany, where Jews were more accepted into German society and consequently adopted certain values and norms of that society, the Jewish communal attitude toward both reform of Judaism and gender roles in society led to the earlier development of Jewish education for girls. However, in Eastern Europe, where Jews were less integrated into society, and where the external society remained less modernized than that of Germany, Jews largely viewed religious Judaism as an alternative to modernity, not a system that could itself engage in a process of modernization. Due to this societal structure, girls’ education remained an enterprise focused almost entirely on secular studies, leaving Eastern European Jewish women largely lacking in Jewish knowledge. It was not until the era of the First World War that significant numbers of Eastern European Jewish girls began receiving a formal Jewish education.

            In the pre-modern era, the only type of formal education received by Jewish children throughout Europe was Jewish education. As Jews lived in corporate Jewish communities, virtually cut off from the societies that surrounded them, there was no need for secular studies.  Furthermore, the only children who received that education were male children. A prominent opinion in the Talmud stated that teaching a woman Torah was equivalent to teaching her tiflut, licentiousness. Thus, girls’ education consisted of learning at their mothers’ skirts the knowledge they needed to run a Jewish household. Boys, on the other hand, attended heder beginning at age three, and many continued on to study in yeshiva until their teenage years. The beginnings of the lifting of Jewish legal infirmities and the advent of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment in Germany, changed this reality.

Girls’ Education in Germany

            In response to the seventeenth-century secular Enlightenment, which brought values of reason, rationalism, and secularization to Western Europe, the Jewish community of Western Europe engaged in its own enlightenment, called the Haskalah.[1] The movement, born in the late seventeenth century, advocated integration with, and acculturation to, the surrounding gentile society, as well as the injection of rationalism and intellectualism to the Jewish religion. The father of the Haskalah, Moses Mendelssohn, believed that Judaism was a faith of reason, containing eternal truths. It should not be coercive and was not monolithic. Mendelssohn strongly identified with German culture and language. At the same time, he remained a loyal Jew who believed in the binding nature of Jewish law. The writings of Mendelssohn and other German maskilim, or proponents of Enlightenment ideas, set the stage in the German Jewish community for the religious reform movements of the nineteenth century by opening the philosophical possibility for change and modernization within the Jewish religion.

            Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the German states engaged in various degrees of emancipation of their Jewish populations. This improvement in the legal status of Jews led to their greater integration into surrounding society and a move away from traditional Jewish communal authority. Until this time, the authority of the rabbinate was hegemonic in the Jewish community. In a non-integrated Jewish community, the rabbinate controlled all legal decisions—both religious and secular—for the members of the Jewish community. Jewish religious courts issued rulings that were controlling in their communities. However, once emancipation took place, secular governments wanted secular state-run courts to dictate the law to all citizens of the state. The power of religious courts dropped dramatically and the rabbinate lost its ability to exert its authority over all members of the Jewish community. Rabbinic rulings were no longer binding on all Jews, but only on those Jews who chose to be bound by them. This drop in traditional rabbinic authority opened the door for religious reform.

            Hand-in-hand with emancipation and the weakening of Jewish communal bonds came assimilation and secularization of the Jewish population in Germany. Jews integrated into the surrounding society economically, culturally, and even socially. A drastic move away from traditional observance of Jewish law occurred.

            At the same time, the German states began engaging in varying degrees of oversight of the rabbinic profession. An 1812 Prussian law required rabbis to prove that they finished a three-year course in the study of philosophy. Rabbis were required to undergo examination to prove competency in philosophy. Yeshivot that would not comply with this requirement of secular study were forced to close. This change in rabbinic education, albeit imposed externally by the state, began a process of modernization of the rabbinate that continued throughout the nineteenth century. This oversight went together with a meteoric rise in the importance of university education in Germany. Humanistic liberal education, a result of the secular Enlightenment, had a powerful effect on the Jewish community, and Jews increasingly wanted their rabbinic leadership to have extensive secular education in addition to Jewish knowledge.

            The combination of these societal and political forces with Haskalah philosophy led to efforts toward religious reform in the Jewish community. Initial religious reforms were aesthetic and related to decorum, not ideological in nature. Reformers wanted to make Judaism more appealing to the assimilating masses, so they sought to make Jewish prayer services more dignified and formal to resemble the current fashions in German Protestant churches. The most common reforms included the introduction of sermons given in German on moral rather than legalistic topics, choirs to sing during synagogue services, requirements of formal attire for both clergy and congregants in synagogue, and the advent of confirmation ceremonies either replacing, or in addition to, bar mitzvah ceremonies. These religious reforms had an enormous impact on the development of Jewish girls’ religious education in Germany.

            As noted above, formal education for Jewish girls, whether secular or religious, was virtually non-existent in Germany prior to the late eighteenth century. As Mordechai Eliav describes in his seminal work on Jewish education in Germany in the era of Haskalah and Emancipation,[2] there is a record of a handful of hederim, or traditional Jewish schools, that admitted girls as well as a handful of hederim that were solely for girls, but these were few and far between. Such hederim taught Hebrew reading, how to pray, reading and translating of the Pentateuch into the vernacular and knowledge of key Jewish laws. A greater number of Jewish girls, albeit only those from wealthier backgrounds, received at least a rudimentary secular education beginning in the seventeenth century. Wealthy German Jews hired private tutors to teach their daughters languages, mathematics, and music, recognizing that such subjects would be important for the girls’ future role as mistresses of the home. Such education was even supported by some in the rabbinical establishment. Rabbi Yonah Lendsofer from Prague, for example, wrote that girls should be taught to read in German and that fathers should aim to marry their sons to women who were literate in German. At the same time, rabbis continued to object to the teaching of Torah to girls. Rabbi Y. Watzler, for example, instructed his followers not to teach girls Hebrew and Bible, but only to give them enough Jewish education so that they could read the prayerbook. He gave this ruling although he knew that girls were being taught German and foreign languages such as French.[3]

            Over the course of the eighteenth century, traditional Jewish education for girls, minimal to begin with, continued to diminish. With the advent of the Haskalah, the tendency of wealthy Jews to hire tutors to give their daughters a secular education grew in response to similar practices in the general society. Maskilim were supportive of the practice of giving girls a good secular education. Moses Mendelssohn’s daughters studied French and music. Initially, the maskilim did not recognize the danger of educating girls only in secular subjects. In 1786, certain maskilim even mentioned with special pride that Jewish girls could speak fluent and elegant German but did not know Hebrew. However, within a short number of years, the results of the maskilic emphasis on German and not Jewish education for girls became clear. Girls had little to no Jewish knowledge. They could not read the prayer book and were ignorant of their role in Judaism. As one maskil wrote in the pages of the Haskalah journal haMeasef, “Instead of dedicating their souls on Sabbaths and festivals to the words of a Living God, they read worthless books and salacious love stories in foreign languages which arouse their desires and corrupt their souls.”[4]

It was at this time, during the late eighteenth century, that discussion regarding the need for educational reform in the German Jewish community began. Education reform had been a topic of discussion in general German society since the mid-eighteenth century. The professionalization of teaching and the beginning of a theory of pedagogy influenced the development of a modernized schooling system, which included classes divided by age, standardized school books, and a demand to teach girls like boys. In response to changes in education in the surrounding society as well as dissatisfaction among Jewish youth with their education, maskilim argued that Jewish studies needed to be conveyed differently than they had traditionally been. They felt that, rather than the intensive Bible and Talmudic studies taking place in boys hederim and yeshivot, and rather than the solely secular studies enjoyed by only wealthy Jewish girls, Jewish children needed a modern Jewish education that would address the needs of the times. Such an education would be based upon a catechism-style curriculum, the way Christian children were taught. In addition, they recommended that Jewish education culminate in a confirmation ceremony similar to that used in Protestant churches.

In the last years of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century, schools began to be established by maskilim and reformers for the purpose of giving poor children in the Jewish community both a secular and a Jewish education.[5] One example of such a school was the consistorial school founded in Cassel in 1809. The consistory intended that the school, serving poor Jewish boys, provide a model for other elementary schools to be established throughout Westphalia. The Jewish education received by these boys was meant to transmit the “principles and obligations” of Judaism rather than to concentrate on text-based study.[6]

During this same period, confirmation ceremonies took hold and became accepted in the reform-minded sector of the Jewish community. The first known confirmation ceremony, which was only for boys, took place in 1803 in Dessau. The first confirmation ceremony to include girls took place in 1814 in Berlin.[7] From this point forward, confirmation ceremonies became more and more widespread in the Reform Jewish community of Germany. Such ceremonies more often than not included girls, and the classes in preparation for them thus also had to include girls. Thus, the adoption of the confirmation ceremony led to an increase in girls’ education in the German Jewish community.

Part and parcel of the discussion of the maskilim regarding educational reform was a discussion specifically about education for girls. One Berlin maskil, David Friedlander, described at length the neglect of religious or moral education for girls. He emphasized that in addition to the study of the German language, girls needed to have religious instruction in order to help prepare them for their responsibilities “as the not less important half of the human race.”[8] Maskilim began to establish schools to educate Jewish girls. Initially, as it was with boys, these schools were aimed at poor Jewish girls whose parents could not afford private tutoring in the home. The hope of the maskilim was that ultimately such schools would serve the daughters of the wealthy as well, but in most cases, the schools were unable to shake their reputation of being schools for the poor, so wealthy girls stayed away. The first such school was established in 1797 in Breslau. The girls in the school studied an integrated Jewish and secular curriculum, including catechism-style religious studies, Hebrew and German.

In the next twenty-five years, other similar girls’ schools were established in many German cities, including Hamburg, Dessau, Berlin, Koenigsberg, and Frankfurt. The curriculum of each of these schools varied slightly, but for the most part, they all included religious instruction in the catechism style, reading and writing in German, a small amount of Hebrew, mathematics, literature, and fine handiwork. Some of the schools included additional subjects as part of their curriculum, among which were Yiddish writing, prayer, Jewish history, and Bible. Schools that catered more to poorer girls had more of a focus on vocational training, while those that catered to the wealthy emphasized the arts and foreign languages, knowledge of which would be expected of an upper-class German young woman.

By the 1830s, it was widely accepted throughout the maskilic and Reform Jewish community in Germany that Jewish girls attended school, whether single-sex or coeducational. Girls’ education was not seen as significantly less important than that of boys. By the mid-nineteenth century, education for girls from this sector of the Jewish community was virtually universal in Germany. Most girls were enrolled in Jewish community schools that gave them a basic, if somewhat rudimentary Jewish education in addition to a secular education.[9] However, a significant sector of the German Jewish community still had not grappled with the issue of girls’ education—the Orthodox community.

Orthodox Judaism did not exist as a movement prior to the birth of Reform. Due to the widespread changes brought upon the Jewish community by Reform thinkers, traditional-minded Jews felt that the traditional observance of Judaism was threatened. They reacted to this threat by engaging in several innovations, including leaving the unified Jewish community to create separate Orthodox institutions and adopting the strictest standards with respect to religious commandments and customs. These innovations were meant to create an environment that existed separate and apart from the Reform Jewish community and the surrounding society in order to keep modernity at bay and tradition vibrant. A key innovation embraced by the Orthodox community in terms of impact on girls’ education was its heightened suspicion of modern culture, including secular education and schooling for girls. Orthodox girls did not participate in the Reformers’ Jewish schools that were common in Germany by the mid-nineteenth century. Rather, they continued to be tutored at home, if they received any education at all.

Even Orthodoxy, however, was not monolithic in its beliefs and practices. A reform-minded stream of Orthodoxy later called Neo-Orthodoxy was founded by Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch in the mid-nineteenth century. Hirsch, the rabbi of the Orthodox community of Frankfurt am Main, espoused a philosophy of Torah im derekh erets, Torah study together with participation in the modern world.  One of Hirsch’s most significant legacies was his influence on girls’ education within the Orthodox sphere. Indeed, as Mordechai Breuer, a scholar of the Orthodox movement in Germany wrote, “The most significant and far-reaching success of Orthodox education proved to be the complete reorganization of education for girls.”[10]

Girls’ education was a charged topic for Orthodox Jews. As reformers built a system of elementary and secondary schools for girls that taught both Judaic and secular studies, Orthodox Jews were fearful. Reform leaders had made it clear that the reasoning behind such schools was not only the education of women, but also women’s social equality and the eradication of the denial of their rights under Jewish law. These concepts were dangerous to the Orthodox mindset. However, opposing girls’ religious education, Orthodox leaders realized, was potentially even more dangerous. They noticed that the lack of Jewish education led girls to immerse themselves in the secular world and its general education and culture. This led to their resenting Judaism and possibly assimilating out of the Jewish community. Thus, Orthodoxy had to create a rubric for Jewish girls’ education in order to keep their girls Jewishly affiliated. Without being given answers to their existential questions about Judaism, simple adherence to the faith of their parents would fall by the wayside. At the same time, changes in Orthodox synagogue practices in response to Reform also heightened the need for girls’ education. The sermon in the vernacular that became widespread in Neo-Orthodox synagogues at this time led to increased synagogue attendance on the part of women. Once they were able to understand and enjoy what the rabbi spoke about, they wanted the education to fill out their knowledge.

Thus, rather than opposing girls’ education, German Orthodox Jews embraced it, but reshaped it to suit their specific needs. Orthodox thinkers quickly began to portray girls’ education as having “intrinsic religious value,” and as being critical to the transmission of tradition to the next generation.[11] Adopting from the surrounding society’s bourgeois cult of domesticity, Hirsch argued that women were the more moral sex, and had a critical position as mistress of the home, responsible for their children’s loyalty to Jewish tradition.[12] Der Israelit, the Orthodox community’s newspaper, cried out that “Our mothers have to save Judaism as in biblical times.” Even the developing world of Orthodox fiction addressed the issue of girls’ education. Sara Hirsch Guggenheim, the daughter of Samson Rafael Hirsch, published a number of stories in the Orthodox journal Jeschurun, in which a woman’s lack of Jewish education led to her downfall.[13] Such a widespread philosophy led to significant improvement in Orthodox girls’ education.

Hirsch’s first foray into creating a modern school for the education of Orthodox Jewish girls came with the founding of his elementary school in Frankfurt in 1853. Not meant only for poor children, this school was meant to compete with the prestigious Philanthropin School. Hirsch wanted to put the ideology of education and culture into a school that would also have a strong Jewish component. The school admitted girls from the beginning, albeit in separate classes from the boys. Hirsch’s son, Mendel Hirsch went on to create a Hirschian secondary school in Frankfurt. Mendel Hirsch believed that religious instruction should be as similar as possible for boys and girls. He theorized that “doing” was more important than “knowing” with respect to both sexes’ relationship to Judaism. He thus focused the curriculum in his secondary school on education regarding religious duties. This led to greater equality of education between the sexes by lessening the Talmud instruction received by the boys, and increasing the Bible instruction received by the girls.[14] At the founding of this school, there were not sufficient pupils to hold separate sex classes, so boys and girls studied in a coeducational environment, a particularly unusual circumstance for Orthodox society of the time. However, as soon as the student body was sufficiently large, the boys and girls were separated.[15]

Other Orthodox schools for girls were established in Hamburg and Mainz in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Additionally, supplementary educational models were created in certain places to provide both boys and girls with a Jewish education separate and apart from their general schooling. One such school was founded by the Neo-Orthodox rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer in Berlin in 1869. Hildesheimer found that 25 percent of Jewish children in Berlin were not receiving any Jewish education whatsoever. He began a co-ed supplementary school in his synagogue, Congregation Adass-Isroel, with separate classes for boys and girls. Hildesheimer felt very strongly about girls’ education, stating that the prevailing notion that superficial religious knowledge was sufficient for Jewish girls was wrong and unacceptable. Like Hirsch, he also believed that the Jewish woman was the central figure in the Jewish home, and she thus needed a deep knowledge of Judaism in order to fulfill her role. The girls’ curriculum in Hildesheimer’s school took into account differences in women’s and men’s roles and responsibilities in Orthodox Jewish society. Girls had added responsibilities that boys did not, including helping out with chores at home and attending to their music and arts education. Thus, girls only had two-thirds of the weekly study hours of boys. However, even in their more limited curricular time, girls studied Hebrew language, Bible, and Jewish law and customs. Beginning in the 1870–1871 academic year, they also studied Ethics of the Fathers, which was a portion of the Oral Law—an area of Jewish study generally forbidden to women. Like the Hirsches, Hildesheimer’s objectives were to prepare girls for occupying a central position in the Jewish household and for imbuing their homes with a “true religious spirit.”[16]

Orthodox education of girls in Germany had enormous impact on the Orthodox community. Female graduates of Hirschian-style schools were well-educated both secularly and Jewishly, and because of their knowledge of Judaism, were often stricter in religious observance than their own mothers. The German Orthodox community was proud of its accomplishments with respect to girls’ education, especially when those accomplishments were laid side-by-side with the situation of girls’ education in Eastern Europe. “As superior as the average Eastern European Jewish man was to his Western European Jewish acquaintance in the knowledge of Torah, so the Orthodox woman, educated in Germany, often outdid her acquaintance from Eastern Europe.”[17]

Girls’ Education in Eastern Europe

            The structure of the Eastern European Jewish community and the way the community interacted with the surrounding gentile society had a deep impact on the way girls’ education developed there. Unlike Western Europe, Eastern Europe did not emancipate its Jews until the twentieth century. The greater legal and political disabilities suffered by the Jewish community of Eastern Europe led to its being more separate and traditional in nature than its counterpart in Germany. Although individual Jews could, and often did, assimilate into secular society, the community as a whole remained wedded to traditional observance. As historian Paula Hyman points out, “In the Russian Empire of the late nineteenth century, the process of assimilation can best be described as secularization that avoided both denationalization and religious reform.”[18]

The option for religious reform did not exist to any significant degree in the Eastern European context due to a confluence of circumstances. Since the Jewish community was not integrated into the general surrounding society, the external society was unable to significantly influence Jewish religious practices as occurred in Germany. Additionally, since the external society itself did not engage in religious reform, whatever impact it might have had on the Jewish community did not occur. As Hyman argues, whereas Jews in Western Europe assimilated just as Jews in Eastern Europe did, “the importance assigned religious sentiment in the dominant bourgeois cultures of Western societies encouraged the fashioning of modern versions of Judaism that officially submerged Jewish ethnicity.” In Eastern Europe, there was no pressure as there was in Western Europe “to reform their religion and assert an identity based upon it alone.”[19] Thus, when the Haskalah occurred in Eastern Europe, decades later than it did in Germany, it did not initiate a process of religious reform; rather, it encouraged a process of Jewish assimilation.[20]

Without religious reform, the education of Jewish girls ended up in a strange position. The Eastern European Jewish community continued to abide by traditional prohibitions against teaching girls Torah, thus leaving them almost entirely without Jewish education. On the other hand, the influence of secular society on individual Jews led to increased secular education for Jewish girls. The dichotomy of the secularly well-educated and Jewishly ignorant woman proved to be a difficult one for both the women and the Jewish community to integrate.

            It is important to note at the outset, that as historian Shaul Stampfer has argued, there is a widely held misconception that Eastern European Jewish women were entirely lacking in Jewish knowledge. Although widespread formal schooling in Jewish subjects did not exist for girls in Eastern Europe until the twentieth century, Stampfer cogently points out that many girls did receive some Jewish education through a variety of means. First of all, hederim for girls did exist in small numbers. One such heder was located in Tyszowce and the girls were taught by an elderly widow called “Binele the rebetzin.” The girls in the Tyszowce girls’ heder studied the siddur, reading and writing Yiddish, arithmetic, writing addresses in Russian (useful for the girls’ future role as breadwinners for their families), and sewing. Additionally, some girls, usually those from a wealthier background, were taught at home, either by their mothers or by a learned woman tutor. Sometimes, girls would attend a boys’ heder, although once basic reading skills were mastered, boys moved on to higher Jewish education and girls dropped out. Some girls learned to read Yiddish on their own and obtained Jewish knowledge through the reading of Yiddish religious texts such as Tzeina U’Reina, a Yiddish collection of Bible stories and commentary for women.[21]

            Stampfer acknowledges that both men’s method of learning (in a communally sanctioned school setting) and the content of what they learned (Jewish religious texts in Hebrew) were more prestigious in Eastern European Jewish culture than how and what women learned. He argues, however, that this system was actually appropriate for the realities of this society. Eastern European Jewish women typically worked outside the home in addition to having a high birthrate and a correspondingly high amount of housework. If they were expected by societal norms to engage in study of difficult Hebrew texts, the situation would have simply maximized frustration for them. As Stampfer argues, “Lack of ‘school education’ was part of a system that functioned to condition women to accept their role in the family and society with a minimum of conflict—just as the fact that most men were unlearned (and knew it!) was one of the ways that led them to accept communal authority.”[22]

            Historian Iris Parush, in her groundbreaking work “Reading Jewish Women,” is critical of Stampfer’s conclusions. She points out that Stampfer proposes what she calls a “functionalist and harmonicist” account to explain the differences in education of boys and girls in Eastern Europe that allowed women to “identify with their gender roles and reconcile themselves to their marginality.” Parush argues that this argument is problematic because there are many ways that a society could structure itself to keep frustration among its members low. Stampfer’s argument, albeit unintentionally, allows justification of an educational structure that was discriminatory toward and exclusionary of women. Additionally, Parush argues that Stampfer attributes “paternalistic motives” to those who created and upheld the educational system that evidence concern about women’s welfare and frustration levels. “In a roundabout way,” she argues, such an argument “shuts out consideration of other possibilities, less harmonistic or generous, which may have been behind the discrimination of women in the educational system.” Lastly, Parush points out that many women remained illiterate in Eastern European Jewish society. Had societal leaders really wanted to prevent women’s frustration, they would have ensured that all Jewish girls were minimally literate in Yiddish so as to enable them to read Tzeina U’Reina and other such texts. Moreover, even if all women had been literate in Yiddish, this would not have solved the inherent contradiction in their lives—that they were expected to negotiate the public sphere in their work lives, but excluded from the public sphere in their religious lives.[23]

            Although there is significant dissent regarding the degree of Jewish education obtained by girls in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, historians do agree that improvement in Eastern European Jewish girls’ education occurred during this period. Daughters of wealthy Jews studied foreign languages in their homes with nannies or private tutors. Girls of lesser means began to attend secular schools such as those founded in Warsaw in 1818 and Wilno in 1826. By the 1860s increasing numbers of girls were studying in modern schools, both public and private, that were founded across Eastern Europe, especially in large cities. Furthermore, rising marriage ages left wealthy girls with idle time in teenage years to devote to education and the surrounding society’s increasing commitment to girls’ education influenced higher numbers of Jewish girls to pursue schooling. By the end of the nineteenth century, the number of girls enrolled in formal modern schools was still small, but it was significant. An 1899 survey of such schools in the Tsarist Empire found 193 girls’ schools, 68 coeducational schools (most of which had separate classes for boys and girls) and 383 boys’ schools. There were a total of 50,773 students enrolled in these schools according to the study, and approximately one-third of those students were female. However, although girls were finally receiving formal education in significant numbers, the education they were receiving was entirely secular. The curriculum in these modern schools was devoid of Jewish content; girls were educated in Russian and French as well as in the arts and music. Indeed, although boys’ modern schools were supervised by the Jewish community and rabbinical establishment and had to allocate hours of classroom time each week to Jewish studies, girls’ schools were totally secular and unsupervised by Jewish communal authorities.[24]

            Parush argues that the absence of Jewish education for girls in Eastern Europe was due to a marginalization of women in a male-dominant society. The rabbinical establishment cared about two things: first, that boys receive a good Torah education, and second, that girls be prevented from receiving any Torah education. Thus, as long as girls were not transgressing the prohibition against their study of Torah, their education was of no interest to the rabbis. They could pursue high levels of secular studies without approbation or even concern. Parush concludes:

Whereas men’s education reflected the manifest efforts of the rabbinical leaders to exercise absolute controls and hermetically seal the society from foreign influences, the education of women transpired through gaps in this system of controls, in the region left abandoned by the oversight apparatus in consequence of women’s inferiority.[25]

This policy of neglect of the content of girls’ education had significant ramifications both for the girls themselves and for Jewish society in Eastern Europe. Certainly, all historians agree that the lack of formal Jewish education placed side-by-side with increasingly intense secular education led to a secularizing of Jewish girls. Historians differ as to how this process of secularization affected the Jewish community. Parush argues that it led to Jewish women bringing enlightened ideas into the Jewish community and thus acting as the conduits for Haskalah and modern ideals in their world.[26] However, others have a different take. Paula Hyman and Rachel Manekin argue that the secularization of Jewish girls led to a fundamental disconnect between them and their communities—a disconnect that often had devastating consequences for the girls, their families, and the Jewish community as a whole. Some Jewish girls assimilated into the surrounding society and were lost to the Jewish community; many others went so far as to convert to Christianity. Even those girls who remained within the boundaries of the Jewish community could not be counted upon to transmit Jewish tradition effectively to the next generation.[27]

In a few different articles, Manekin explores multiple aspects of the phenomenon of Jewish girls’ conversion to Christianity in Galicia in the nineteenth century and shows the Jewish communal debate that arose over this problem. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a significant number of Jewish women in western Galicia converted to Christianity. Indeed, during one fifteen-year period beginning in 1887, over 300 women converted in Krakow alone, representing 68 percent of the Jewish converts during that time period. Interestingly, almost all of these women converted at the convent of the Felician Sisters.[28]

Because the laws of the Habsburg Empire required that converts submit certain personal data to a municipal clerk, a socio-economic profile exists for many of these converts. According to this data, the vast majority of the converts were Jewish young women between the ages of 15 and 20 who came from families of middle-class merchants and shopkeepers. The women’s signatures on the forms they filled out show that they were familiar with Polish writing. Through analysis of this data in conjunction with historical accounts of individual conversions as well as depictions of such conversions in Jewish literature and the Jewish press, Manekin concludes that the lack of Jewish education for girls coupled with their more extensive secular education played a significant role in the conversion phenomenon:

These young women were not provided with the means by which they could preserve their Jewish identity in their confrontation with Polish society. The dissonance between life at home and in the outside world became greater as they grew older, with the conflicts becoming deeper and more pronounced. The climax would come when the parents expected them to marry a young man from the ‘old world,’ with whom they shared no language.[29]

This moment of facing a life with a man with whom such a young woman had nothing in common except that they were both born Jewish and had parents committed to the continuity of the Jewish people was often the breaking point that led the young woman to escape to the convent to convert.[30]

             The Jewish community of Galicia had some limited recognition of the problems caused by the failure to give its daughters a Jewish education. Indeed, the issue came up quite a bit on the Jewish communal radar screen in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1902, the subject was addressed at length in the pages of the religious newspaper Kol Mahzikei HaDat. In an article entitled “But We Are Guilty for Our Daughters,” a writer bemoaned the seduction of Jewish girls by secular society due to their lack of Jewish education. In a play on words of a famous rabbinic quotation, he wrote, “Ten measures of external education descended upon the daughters of Israel in our land; nine of them were taken by the city of Krakow.”[31] The article discussed the failure of the marriages of such girls to yeshiva boys and the fact that some of them ended up leaving the Jewish community entirely. It was not a coincidence, the author pointed out, that girls from strict Hassidic families would leave their families and convert to Christianity. Hassidic fathers would pay a fine rather than send their sons to secular public schools, but they were willing to send their daughters to Catholic schools. He recommended the institution of Jewish girls’ schools in Galicia to solve this terrible problem. In a harsh moment of reflection, the author noted that girls’ Jewish education in Galicia is the equivalent to what had existed in Germany an entire century before.[32]

            The issue of girls’ Jewish education in Galicia also arose at the Congress of Rabbis in Krakow in 1903. One of the attendees, Rabbi Landau, rose to speak and bemoaned the fact that even among the “God fearing,” girls receive the finest Western education and remain woefully ignorant about Judaism. He spoke of the rash of conversions and noted that even those young women who do not leave the community, “their hearts are not among the Jewish people anymore.” Such girls would not be capable of raising the next generation of Jewish children. Rabbi Landau even spoke of the worst casualties of the failure of Jewish girls’ education in Galicia—those girls who turned to a life of prostitution. The rabbis attending the conference requested that he cease speaking of this painful subject in order to prevent the desecration of the name of the Jewish people.[33]

            Rabbi Landau put aside the issue of white slavery in the Jewish community, but returned during the conference to the issue of repairing girls’ education. He argued that the only solution to the fundamental lack of knowledge and failure to observe commandments among even the most Orthodox of girls was to teach them Torah. When one of the lay leaders present at the conference suggested the establishment of a Talmud Torah school to educate girls in prayer and laws of the Jewish home, one rabbi responded, “God forbid we should educate girls in Torah!” Although other suggestions were presented for the improvement of girls’ Jewish education in Galicia, all were tabled for a later date. This, Manekin argues, was the nail in the coffin for bringing change to Jewish girls’ education in Galicia.[34]

            Ultimately, the solution to the dilemma about girls education in Galicia came from a young woman in Krakow. Sarah Schenirer, with the support of the rebbe of the Hassidic sect of Belz, created the first Bais Yaakov school dedicated to the Jewish education of Orthodox girls in 1917. This school became the model for Orthodox girls’ education and was duplicated throughout the world. Until Sarah Schenirer’s efforts to create Bais Yaakov, however, the idea of girls’ Torah education was an innovation that Eastern European Orthodox society simply could not stomach, even when faced with the devastation that the lack of this education caused. This stands in direct contrast to the German Orthodox model of integration of modern and Jewish ideals resulting in the far earlier and more extensive Jewish education for its girls.

            The radically different development of the Jewish communities of Germany and Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century period of modernization had a powerful impact on girls’ education in each society. German Jewish society, due to more successful integration with external German society, adopted some of the ideologies and practices of that society, which enabled the development of formal Jewish education for girls. Eastern European Jewish society, on the other hand, remained excluded from western bourgeois ideas and was therefore unable to integrate modern philosophies of religion and education into their worldview. German Jews adapted and modernized their Judaism while Eastern European Jews reacted to modernization by either “circling the wagons” in defense of tradition or assimilating to the society around them. The inability of Eastern European Jewish society to engage in a process of religious reform ultimately sounded the death knell for the development of girls’ education, a failure which had lasting consequences for their community. The German Jewish community solved the problem of girls’ education by the third quarter of the eighteenth century; the Eastern European community did not solve it until the First World War. In the intervening decades, numerous Jewish girls were lost to Judaism, as they were prevented from having a stake in the future of the Jewish people due to a rabbinic refusal to educate them.

Conclusions for Today

            The story of the development of Jewish girls’ education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Germany and Eastern Europe has particular resonance for the Modern Orthodox community today. The battle for Jewish education for Orthodox girls is thankfully long over, particularly in the Modern Orthodox community, where women have the opportunity to learn all Jewish texts at the highest of levels. However, unlike their male rabbinic counterparts, up until recently, Orthodox women received no standard and universally accepted title to certify their learning. Such a title is far from mere semantics. For a woman who wishes to devote her life to Jewish communal service, the title of “rabbi” carries along with it communal respect, job opportunities, and significantly higher salaries. Furthermore, in a world in which women are able to access the highest levels of academic and professional credentialing, the absence of a title for Orthodox women leaders was particularly glaring. Despite all of this, when the issue of women’s ordination was raised in Orthodox circles, mainstream rabbinic leadership called it an impossibility and a dangerous break with tradition. Given that women’s achievement at the very highest levels did not yield any professional titles or status, it is unsurprising that many of the brightest and most talented young Orthodox women chose careers outside the Orthodox community.

            But the picture is not all grim. In the past decade, a select few synagogues have appointed women as “congregational interns” or “madrikhot ruhaniot” (spiritual advisors), giving women positions essentially comparable to rabbinical student interns or assistant rabbis in Modern Orthodox synagogues. Such women are able to give sermons, engage in pastoral counseling, and teach Torah in their synagogues. However, no more than a handful of Orthodox synagogues have created such a position. The mainstream centrist Orthodox world continues to view such positions as inappropriate. Furthermore, many critics have pointed out that whereas a “rabbinic intern” is training to become a rabbi, a “congregational intern” is not training for any permanent position at all. Even a madrikha ruhanit could not hope to lead an Orthodox congregation on her own.  

In the Spring of this year, however, a transformation occurred in Modern Orthodoxy, when Rabbi Avi Weiss announced that he planned to establish a school to train Maharats, women leaders in halakhic, spiritual, and Torah issues. Like Rabbi Shimshon Rafael Hirsch in nineteenth century Germany, the rabbinic leadership behind this new initiative understands that we can incorporate certain ideas of modernity without breaking halakha or destroying our traditional values. And, like the German Orthodox leadership of the nineteenth century, this leadership knows that Orthodoxy must make changes in its own way and on its own timetable in order for such changes to take root among both the rabbis and the Orthodox laity. As our history has shown us, the path we now take will have massive consequences both for individual Orthodox Jews and for the very future of Orthodox Judaism.