National Scholar Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brothers and Strangers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-Ethnic Recognition Failure: The Denial of Shared Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History Lessons: Ashkenazi/Sephardi Relations in Historical Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet there is something critical missing here: morality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louis Kronenberger notes that

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Alfred North Whitehead,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Basically, it is defensive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Steiner expressed this well when he wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Weiss Halivni writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God has relocated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pace of technology grows so dizzyingday by day that it’s likely we’re now living more in the future than we are in the present.What were once mere imaginings of science fiction films -- the “futuristic” landscapes of Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis,the flame-belching towers of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and the gravity-defying dream scapes of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, to name but a famous few-- have proven, in fact, to be visionary. They have become our actual homes, our daily workplaces, our shopping malls and amusement parks. Stepping out of the subway into the digital blitz of Times Square after dark, for example, we might feel much as though we werehurtling headlong into cyberspace itself. Doubtless, we already inhabit a world where, as one modern author has observed, “technology is visceral…pervasive…Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.” Standing herein the midst of this brilliant, hypnotic, infinitely distracting (and, one might argue, ultimately illusionary)21st century atmosphere, would any of us notice the unadorned glow of a Hanukkiyah, Hanukkah lamp?

I raise the question to make a simple point. As human beings, we are eminently fallible, always distractable. Rabbi Moses Isserles (the “Rema”),in a gloss on the Laws of Prayer (Hilchot Tefillah 101:1),clearly suggests as much when he questions whether we ought to repeat a section of the Shemoneh Esrei if our attention wandered when we recited it the first time.The Rema’sargument is straightforward.What’s to prevent us from being similarly distracted the second time around? Still,though as physical beings we are all of us prone to distraction, as spiritual beings we try to transcend. As Jews in particular, we try to develop a capacity to hone in on a more truthful spiritual realm beyond the often-illusory realm of distractions in the material world. And that is the metaphorical significance of the question about Hanukkah lights in Times Square.

As thinking Jews,with an abiding allegiance to Jewish ideas and ideals,we try to see beyond the big lights of the big city in order to discover a more permanent, a more honest beacon that shines true, no matter how hidden, no matter how small. As thoughtful beings, we come to recognize true worth in the quality of our experience not in its quantity. Perhaps that, too, is what the Rema above is getting at, cautioning us against mere repetition of a blessing without a concomitant unclouded concentration and a meaningful change in spiritual perspective.

In his essay“Maamar al ha’Emunah,”Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman wonders how the great Greek philosopher Aristotle – to whom the Rambam attributed genius just below the level of ru’ach ha’kodesh and nevuah, divine spirit and prophecy – could somehow, despite his great intellect, fail to see past the illusions of the material world. Rav Wasserman concludes that Aristotle’s failing was an overriding attraction to the very physical olam ha’zeh and a consequent reluctance to turn away from its many seductive attractions.

Among the many heirs to Aristotle,committed to the continued transmission of Greek thought and practices known as Hellenism, were the Seleucid Syrians, whose kingdom was established from a slice of the divided empire of Alexander the Great, himself a world conqueror tutored first-hand by Aristotle. It is against these Seleucid Greeks that the warrior Maccabees fought long and hard, their ultimate spiritual victory coalescing into the very essence of the Hanukkah holiday. If we examine the decrees issued against the Jews of the Seleucid Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes – as traditionally described in the discussion of Hanukkah by the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch (139:1) – we find the inevitable battle lines of Hellenism versus Judaism being drawn. Unsurprisingly, Antiochus sought to annul the Covenant between Israel and its Lord, “And Antiochus decreed prohibitions against the Jews, forbidding them to study and practice their Torah Laws.” The ancient extra-canonical Scroll of Antiochus, Megillat Antiochus,specifies (in verse 11) three gezerot, prohibitions, in particular. The enemy king’s designs were to uproot and eradicate the practice of a) Shabbat, b) Rosh Chodesh, and c) Brit Milah.

What makes this precise choice of prohibitions so pointed, in light of the above discussion, is the symbolic spiritual value they possess. First, the light of the Shabbat candles is analogous to the light of the Temple Menorah rededicated by the Maccabees; indeed, the Talmud itself (Shabbat 21a) introduces this analogy between Shabbat and Hanukkah candles in launching its locus classicus discussion of the Hanukkah holiday. Next, the so-to-speak “rekindled” light of the moon at Rosh Chodeshi s analogous to the renewal of the Menorah’s light after a period of spiritual darkness.Finally, the eight days of Brit Milah are analogous to the Talmud’s description of a tiny cruse of pure oil that, nonetheless, burned by divine miracle for eight days, exemplifying the transcendence of quality over quantity.

This theme of quality versus quantityi s reflected again in the Hanukkah “Al haNissim” prayer, which speaks of“the strong defeated by the assumed-to-be-weak,the many defeated by anacknowledged few.” The small burning “wicks” of Judaism outshone the bright lights of the imperial force of the Syrian army, the spiritual light of the Temple Menorah here dispelled the illusory darkness of the physical, earthbound Seleucid empire indebted in so many ways to Aristotle and Alexander. Despite the variety of traditional and ethnic culinary delights that have come to be associated with the “feast of lights,” there is no chiyuv of seudat mitzvah attached to Hanukkah, no obligatory festive spread. In celebrating the holiday, we acknowledge Israel’s rescue from spiritual annihilation. By contrast, because of the threat of physical annihilation that faced the Jews at the first Purim,we indeed rejoice n that holiday with the mitzvah of a substantive physical meal.

By publicizing the true meaning of Hanukkah, by placing the Hanukkiyah in the public eye – even in Times Square – we appeal to all humankind, Jew and non-Jew alike, to come and share, as an agudah achat,in the spiritual insights the Hanukkah lights afford us. The Talmud itself (Shabbat 21b) affirms this.Beit Shammai, the School of Shammai,maintains that we kindle the Hanukkah lights “keneged pri ha’chag.” The suggestion is that the lights correspond to the mussaf sacrifices of Sukkot that were brought specifically in consideration of the seventy gentile nations, meant to beseech Divine protection of the shivim umot ha’olam as our colleagues and compeers on this earth.

Rabbeinu Bachya ben Asher quotes a midrashic parable on the Torah portion of Beha’alotcha. A king once asked a beloved subject to prepare his home for a royal visit. Rather than flushing with pride, the poor fellow grew mortified. How could he host in his humble cottage a king accustomed to glorious gifts, golden goblets, and bountiful banquets at court?When the king arrived, resplendent in his retinue, the subject nervously fumbled to hide in shame the simple meal he had prepared. Yet, the king declared, “For love of you, my humble servant, I prefer this simple, heartfelt offering to all the artificial trappings my palace provides.”

The lights of Hanukkah are the Jewish nation’s simple offering for all the world to wonder at and reflect upon. They are a gift to God from the heart and soul of the People of Israel. Is it any wonder that the Master of the Universe, Who created at will the blazing sun, the bright moon, the luminous stars and galaxies, nonetheless, like the king in Rabbeinu Bahya’s parable,prefers our tiny, flickering lights of the Hanukkiyah which continue to outshine, from the time of the Maccabees to this very day, the brightest lights and biggest cities of history’s greatest empires.

There is probably no sentiment as fundamental to Judaism as recognizing the good that others do for us and expressing our gratitude to them (in Hebrew, “hakarat ha-tov”). God is reputed to have created the world in a burst of loving-kindness for which humanity and all living creatures should intuitively praise Him, and the Jewish people’s special relationship with God is predicated on His kindness in having redeemed the Jews from Egypt. The very word for Jew in Hebrew, Yehudi, comes from the verb le-hodot, to thank, and hearkens back to our foremother Leah thanking God for giving birth to her fourth son. Therefore, I was not surprised to recently come upon a poster in Har Nof (a largely Haredi, Jerusalem suburb) proclaiming that this Jewish calendar year is the year of Hakarat Ha-tov.

Doubtless, we have many things to be thankful for—continued good health, a strong economy, some respite from our enemies--but this poster did not mention any of these issues. It loudly proclaimed that all and sundry should go to the grave of the illustrious Rabbi Yitzhak Ze’ev Soloveitchik (R. Velvel) and ask his forgiveness for not having stringently followed his halakhic ruling that one must recite the guest’s blessing for his host during Grace After Meals. Failure to do so, so the poster claimed, is clearly a lack of gratitude. Furthermore, the poster advised everyone to seek halakhic guidance to determine whether they need to request forgiveness for not having said the host’s blessing at the wedding of a friend or at their yeshiva (with the intent of thanking the donors). In particular, the poster stressed that one should ask forgiveness of one’s parents for not having recited the blessing on their behalf, as even six year old children eating their sandwiches at school should recite the host’s blessing for their parents. Technically speaking, their parents, who are kind enough to feed them and/or pay their tuition, are their hosts (Ketubot 65b). (Indeed, the poster adds, even a husband should thank his wife and a wife her husband—the more gratitude expressed the better in these tough economic times.)

At first I was astounded that this was the hakarat ha-tov the poster was talking about. While the process of mending our ways must begin with the small things that are more likely to touch us personally, effect our psyches, take root, and blossom, making this blessing the sole focus of Hakarat Ha-tov seemed to miss the bigger picture. However, when I re-read the poster, I realized that the crime committed by not reciting this blessing was not merely one of poor manners or of lax moral standards, it was actually a form of theft! R. Velvel, ztz”l, declared that his students should “demand (titba) of them that they recite the host’s blessing” because not doing so actually incurs a monetary loss. The author of the poster deduces this from the fact that the word “demand,” in Hebrew, implies that the host may actually sue the guest in court, and this would only be true if he caused a significant monetary loss by failing to recite the blessing.

The reason for this loss is the fact that the blessing includes a prayer that the host’s “property” or business dealings be successful; the poster explains that failure to make this request causes the host financial loss. In fact, the failure to say Grace in a group of ten men—thus, increasing the power of the prayer as “when the community prays, God does not reject their prayers” (bAvodah Zarah 4b, author’s source)—probably requires a special request for forgiveness for undermining the financial well-being of the yeshiva where one said Grace. Undermining another Jews’ livelihood is certainly a serious crime, so R. Velvel’s ruling makes sense.

However, what is lost in this attention to detail and the laws of damages is the simple matter of saying thank you. As R. Bahya Ibn Paquda writes at the beginning of Duties of the Heart being thankful is a religious duty and desideratum. We do not thank God for creating the world because we owe Him something or because, heaven forbid, He needs us to. We thank God because it is the right thing to do, because we intuitively sense that someone who bestows a kindness on us should be thanked. This is even true of a slave expressing gratitude to his master or a child to a parent, where clearly the giver’s beneficence is not without self-interest. How much more should we thank God or other human beings whose giving is truly selfless or close to it.

This having been said, the true irony of this poster is that the difficult economic times mentioned in this poster as an especially good reason for saying this blessing are the result of the Israeli government cutting back on subsidies and welfare benefits to, among others, the Haredi community. These “economic decrees”—treated by the Haredim like those of the Russian Czars’ of yesteryear—are partially a result of balancing the budget and partially a result of the secular state’s being fed up with sectors of society (particularly, the ultra-Orthodox) that do not produce economically, consume vast resources, and do not even say “thank you.”

When a secular Israeli tax payer who serves in the army looks at Haredi society, he sees a parasitic growth that produces nothing, contributes nothing tangible, and complains about not getting enough subsidies or welfare benefits to prop up its enormous families and enable its men to sit and learn comfortably without having to work. While the Haredim may argue that they have built up many not-for-profit organizations that benefit the entire population and that their learning protects the country, as much if not more than the army does, these arguments do not really hold water, since the secular and religious Zionist sectors of the population, generally speaking, work, serve in the army, study Torah (especially, the religious Zionist), and build up not-for-profits too. Furthermore, the very claim that learning Torah is comparable to giving up one’s life to protect fellow Jews is both inherently absurd and possibly inconsistent with Torah values, as the Talmud itself says, “Why do you think your blood is redder than mine?”

Ultimately, the poster makes sense. The Haredim should declare a year devoted to giving thanks. As a sector of society, they have been consistently unwilling to thank the rest of Israeli society for protecting and supporting them. Furthermore, as a group they have been unwilling to recognize that God has created a (secular) Jewish state that supports more yeshivot and Torah learners than have ever existed before in the world at one time! (Indeed, for this very reason the late R. Ovadiah Yosef ruled—unlike most Haredi rabbinic decisors—that it was permissible to say Hallel on Israeli Independence Day in order to thank God for the creation of the state). Most recently Haredim have been attacking the government for having the audacity to lower their welfare payments and have even been physically attacking other Haredim who have joined the army to protect them! Even R. Ovadiah’s Shas Party has recently attacked the state for attempting to destroy the Yeshiva world by considering drafting yeshiva students into the army. Since the government has explicitly stated that it is not attempting to destroy the Yeshiva world, the deliberate use of inflammatory rhetoric to misrepresent the government’s plans is the height of ingratitude. It is definitely time for Haredi society to read this poster and say thank you to those at whose table they dine.

I would suggest that this Hakarat Ha-tov campaign begins by instituting R. Shlomo Goren’s ruling regarding the host’s blessing. R. Goren (the first Chief Rabbi of the Israel Defence Forces and the third Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel) ruled decades ago that a blessing for the Israel Defense Force and the State of Israel should be recited in Grace After Meals at the place where the host is thanked. As he wrote, we are all supping at the table of the IDF and the State of Israel, (for if not for the government and the army we would be annihilated man, women, and child by our enemies and the country would be in a constant state of chaos). [Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren’s Passover Haggadah, Am Oved, 1974, p. 58] The Haredim would do well not to forget this.

It’s painful to have one’s rabbinic credentials challenged by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. But that’s exactly what’s happened to me. In truth, it’s much more hurtful to the many people I’ve been honored to serve over the years.

In recent days, I have been informed that letters I’ve written attesting to the Jewishness and personal status of congregants have been rejected by the office of the Chief Rabbinate. I’m not the only Orthodox rabbi to have his letters rejected – there are others.

I have chosen to go public because the issue is not about me, it’s about a Chief Rabbinate whose power has gone to its head. As Israel’s appointed rabbinate, it is accountable to no one but itself.

Nor could the Chief Rabbinate have denied letters from me or other rabbis without input from select rabbis here in America who, I believe, are whispering into the Chief Rabbinate’s ears. For me, they’ll whisper one thing, for another they will find some other reason to cast aspersions.

This is an intolerable situation. It not only undercuts the authority of local rabbis who are in the best position to attest to the religious identity of those living in their community, but wreaks havoc for constituents whom these rabbis serve.

Penning these harsh words about Israel’s Chief Rabbinate is not easy for me. I grew up in a home that venerated the Chief Rabbinate. After my parents made aliya, my father served as rabbi of Shikun Vatikin in the outskirts of Netanya, Israel. There he worked with Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, then Chief Rabbi of Netanya who went on to become Israeli’s Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi. Over the years I’ve met with many chief rabbis. I found them individually to be not only learned but caring.

But for some time, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Chief Rabbinate as an institution just doesn’t work. Built into the very fabric of the institution is the principle of kefiyah, rabbis overlording the citizenry, forcing their religious dictates down their throats. Indeed, the Chief Rabbinate has become a subject of scorn amongst the grassroots public in Israel.

Spiritual striving and religious growth can only be nourished in a spirit of openness. For this reason, Israel as a state should give equal opportunities to the Conservative and Reform movements. Their rabbis should be able to conduct weddings and conversions. For that matter, civil weddings should also be recognized by the State. As in America, it should be left to the general public – if they wish, in consultation with their local rabbis – to decide whether to accept or reject these conversions and wedding ceremonies.

Such an open attitude is not only important for non-Orthodox Jewry, but for Orthodoxy as well. When Orthodoxy is presented as the only option, when it’s forced upon people, it turns people off. A spirit of openness will make Orthodoxy more attractive.

A related reason that the Chief Rabbinate does not work is that it involves centralization of rabbinic power, that is, rabbinic power left in the hands of a select few who dictate religious policy throughout the country.

When the Chief Rabbinate years back questioned American Orthodox conversions, an Orthodox rabbinic organization, the Rabbinical Council of America, (RCA), rather than challenge the Chief Rabbinate and say clearly we have faith and trust in our rabbis in the field, capitulated to the Chief Rabbinate, and imported Israel’s failed rabbinic centralized format to the US.

And so they established a system where only a select, relatively few rabbis are permitted to sit on conversion courts, undermining the authority of local community rabbis, and placing unnecessary stumbling blocks before serious potential converts. In a piece I co-authored over five years ago, I strongly criticized this policy.

I predicted then that this would be but the first step towards further centralization. That it would not be long before a centralized rabbinic body fully usurps the authority of local rabbis, deciding which select few can do marriages. And only this body will be able to sign off on letters attesting to the Jewishness or the personal status of individuals from across the country. Is this the type of religious authority we want here in America?

The time has come for the government of Israel – its Prime Minister and Knesset – to pronounce in clear terms that the Chief Rabbinate will no longer have a monopoly on religious dictates of the State. This will present challenges. But these challenges pale in comparison to a coercive and centralized system which is vulnerable to abuse. As the motto goes, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It’s only in the spirit of openness that Israel as a Jewish democracy will thrive. It’s in that framework that Israel’s citizenry will be able to reach higher heights – spiritually and religiously.
–

RCA deal hurts rabbis, converts
By Rabbi Marc Angel And Rabbi Avraham Weiss, JTA, March 10, 2008

(Rabbi Marc Angel is Director of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, the rabbi emeritus of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York and past president of the Rabbinical Council of America. Rabbi Avraham (Avi) Weiss is the senior rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat.)

NEW YORK (JTA) – The Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Rabbinical Council of America have concluded an agreement related to conversion that will allow the two groups to work together. This solves a problem that reached its peak when Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, announced in April 2006 that he would no longer automatically recognize conversions performed by rabbis belonging to the RCA, the main union of Orthodox rabbis in America.

According to the terms of the agreement, the Chief Rabbinate approved a list of about 15 RCA rabbinic courts and approximately 40 rabbinic judges whose conversions will be accepted. From this point on, only conversions done by these rabbis or tribunals will be recognized. Any rabbi who wishes to be added to that list needs the approval of two leading Yeshiva University rabbis representing the RCA and one from the Chief Rabbinate. The RCA and the Chief Rabbinate also agreed that all conversions previously performed by rabbis, other than the 40, are subject to re-evaluation by the head of the RCA’s Beth Din of America.

This agreement is deeply disturbing on many levels. What is most troubling is that conversions, done years ago with the informal backing of the RCA, are now being scrutinized. This, we believe, strikes at the very ethical fabric of halacha. Over the years, thousands of people have been halachically converted and now they and their children, and for that matter, their marriages, will all be questioned. The pain that this will cause the convert, a person whom the Torah commands to love, will be unbearable.

Indeed, the RCA’s capitulation to the demand of the Chief Rabbinate to scrutinize past conversions done by its members raises the strong possibility that down the line the bar may be raised even higher. Already, the Israeli institution no longer represents the centrist, religious Zionist ideology, but is, in effect, made up of religious appointees of the haredi world. Years from now a new, more extreme Chief Rabbinate may very well pressure the RCA to question “sanctioned” conversions being done now.

Not only is the convert’s status questioned here, but the respected position of the local rabbi is also at stake. The policy sends a clear message that rabbis who have Orthodox ordination and are not among the chosen 40 do not have sufficient knowledge, judgment and wisdom to perform conversions – and they never have.

There is an irony here in that, from a certain perspective, congregational rabbis have a greater understanding of the issues surrounding conversion than those who are primarily situated in the Beit Midrash. These synagogue rabbis who are “in the trenches” with the potential converts have a unique understanding of the situations and conditions that affect their respective constituents. As is displayed on their ordination documents (smicha klaf), these rabbis are sent to spread Torah to their communities and have been invested with the trust, power and weight of our Torah to help shape the Jewish world. This decision undermines their mission.

If this agreement was meant to develop a mechanism of oversight, there are other ways in which this could have been accomplished. One proposal could have been that junior rabbis in their first three years do conversions under the guidance of senior rabbis. Additionally, the RCA could have questioned individual rabbis whom they suspected were doing conversions improperly.

We are not the first to raise concerns about the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. Over the last few years, there have been legitimate and important Orthodox voices in Israel that have expressed opposition to its rightward trend and its hard-line position concerning conversions in Israel. Now, through its deal with the RCA, the Chief Rabbinate is dictating its specific conversion standards to those living thousands of miles away in the United States.

Rather than extend the Chief Rabbinate’s reach to the Diaspora, the RCA should display confidence in its loyal members by declaring that their conversions are valid and acceptable in the eyes of God and halacha. This should be our posture as we move forward together with like-minded voices in Israel.

This was a moment of truth. The criteria on conversion as drafted by the RCA/Chief Rabbinate are the most stringent and do not reflect the range of legitimate halachic opinions. The approach insists, for example, that parents converting an adopted child commit to 12 years of yeshiva education. But suppose parents are only prepared to make an eight-year commitment; suppose they are committed to sending their child to a community day school; suppose, as is a growing trend in our Jewish world, they simply cannot afford tuition; and suppose their child has a learning disability and must be sent to a secular school?

We have received reports that such potential converts have already been turned away. What is next? Will past conversions, such as these, now be nullified retroactively?
If these standards become the criteria for who is a Jew, it means there will be only one voice – enforced by just two rabbis – speaking for Modern Orthodoxy in America.

The first issue is the question of who is overseeing the overseers: What are the criteria for appointment? What makes these 40 judges competent and hundreds of others not? What communities do they represent? Are the appointments based on merit? On politics? On being dedicated students of particular rabbis?

To consolidate so much power in the hands of so few rabbis – whether left, center or right – is a frightening step. Making matters worse, the RCA has chosen as its representatives two Yeshiva University rabbis who speak only for the right-wing of Modern Orthodoxy – effectively abandoning the organization’s trademark commitment to providing a home for both right- and left-wing voices. With its cowering to outside dictates, the RCA appears to have opted to reflect the haredi-controlled voice of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, instead of insisting that the broad spectrum of Modern Orthodox positions be part of the solution.

What makes this chapter especially sad is that the new arrangement not only undermines the power of the local rabbi as teacher and spiritual guide, but even worse, puts fear into the hearts and minds of many wonderful converts who are upstanding Torah-observant and God-fearing Jewish souls.