National Scholar Updates

Some of My Best Friends
A Journey through Twenty-First Century Anti-Semitism
By Ben Cohen
Edition Critic, 2014, 215 pages

Ben Cohen is a specialist on Jewish and international affairs and has written articles for the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Haaretz, Tablet, and many other publications. He collected seventy of these articles and published them in this volume. He distinguishes “bierkeller” from the new “bistro” anti-Semitism. The first, which is best-known, is the crude variety that was shouted by Nazis as they guzzled beer and by red-necks in our own country today while they mimic this egregious behavior. But “bistro” anti-Semitism is polite, quiet-mannered, seemingly reasonable, pseudo-sophisticated, expressed mostly, according to Cohen, by members of the far left. These anti-Semites hide their animus by critiquing Zionism, not Jews. Cohen gives multiple examples of this behavior that add up to an insidious indictment that reaches even the highest levels of friendly governments.

Cohen’s articles fall into six categories: The UK, Jews, and Israel; The Middle East and Israel in context; Anti-Zionism in action; Anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism; The US and Israel; and On Israel and Iran.

Among much else, Cohen highlights that “whereas once the Jewish question (or problem) was viewed through the prism of economics, now it belongs to the realm of politics.” Jews are seen as heading, aiding, and maintaining American world leadership for their own interest: “Jewish national consciousness is, a priori, reactionary, supremacist, and politically aligned with imperialism.”

Cohen sees that the far left is fixated with the Palestinians and it is in their statements about the Palestinians “that we find the brashest expressions of anti-Semitism…. Fringe neo-Nazi groups notwithstanding, significant anti-Semitism is now exclusively a left-wing rather than a right-wing phenomenon.” The term Zionism has become a “code word for the forces of reaction in general, Zionism has assumed a global importance for the contemporary Left that even Marx and Lenin could not have foreseen.” This new anti-Semitism is “generally dated back to September 2000, when the second Palestinian intifada began.” As a result, “the extreme left in western societies not only denigrates Israel and Zionism in a systematic manner, but its irrational hostility frequently spills over into contempt towards Jews and Judaism.”

The new anti-Semites claim that their “views are not offensive, not anti-Semitic.” They are only standing up for the rational and moral view, the view with which every reasonable person would agree. It “is the opinion of those who object to the views that should be considered beyond the pale.” When Jews call them anti-Semites, they are being unreasonable.

This subtle anti-Semites, for example, would not deny that the Nazis killed Jews, but they redistribute much of the blame for their deaths upon the victims. Boycotting Israeli goods is not being anti-Jewish it is only an attempt to make Israel realize its mistakes and to see reason.

Cohen discusses the alleged distinction between moderate and radical Muslims, which hopefully places Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, in the first grouping. Yet, Rouhani dismissed Israel as a “miserable regional country.”

Cohen explains how the new anti-Semitism plays out in various countries, including the US where Jewish-oriented programs are curtailed, England, Iran, and others. In Turkey, for example, the ruling Justice and Development Party is called moderate by many people, but “this seems to me less like logic, and more like prayer.” The leadership is promoting Islamic practices such as Islamic dress codes, it demands that married couples have at least three children, prohibits alcohol, abortion, and smooching in public, and clamps down on freedom of speech. Turkey’s leaders “fulminate against shadowy plots hatched by Marxists, Kurdish separatists, and – most of all – Jews.” These are not the acts of moderates.

Cohen’s book ends with a thought-provoking article on the view of the prior United Kingdom Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, who argued that the British system of multiculturalism, where every “every ethnic group and religious group becomes a pressure group, putting our people’s interest instead of the national interest.” Individuals have rights, but they should seek to aid the goals of the nation in which they live, as Jews have always done. “The norm was for Muslims to live under a Muslim jurisdiction and the norm, since the destruction of the first Temple, was for Jews to live under a non-Jewish jurisdiction.” There is, Cohen concludes, “the historic unwillingness within Islam to accept that there are situations in which Muslims will be a minority,” and this refusal is corroding England.

In short, Cohen’s book contains many analyses of situations around the world which explain the subtleties behind what is happening and why, and which highlight problems that people and nations with rose-colored glasses prefer to ignore, but must be addressed.

Identification and Dislocation:
the Breakdown of Worshipful Expression

by Michael Haruni

One of the dilemmas we faced during the preparation of the Nehalel siddur was over the instructions, or “rubric”. For on the one hand there is, undoubtably, tremendous value in the detailed instructions appearing in the major contemporary English-language siddurim on how and where to bow in Amidah, where to kiss tzitziyot during and after Keriyat Shema, how to wave the lulav, and so forth. Baaley teshuvah especially have, since the advent of the ArtScroll siddur, found themselves able as never before to participate competently and confidently in shul procedures. The frum-from-birth users have benefited too, it must be said, filling in finer details previously eluding them.

On the other hand, however, we also sensed that detailed performance instructions induce not a heartfelt act of worship but a sort of robotics, leaving out the real mental and spiritual requisites of prayer. The motions we perform when we pray should ideally function, surely, as expressions of the stirrings of our hearts, as elements in our acts of telling God of our love and awe of Him, of our thanks for the good in our lives, and of our needs. Indeed, the performance of mitzvot generally should be driven to the outside from within; whereas I suspect that by synthesizing such motions from detailed choreographic instructions, we create an act that goes no deeper than its outward features. (I confess that, with Nehalel beShabbat, we too rather often fell in with the contemporary standard of providing mind-control instructions.)

This focus on the formal synthesis of practice is symptomatic of the larger malaise compellingly observed by Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: that in mainstream Orthodoxy, shul-going, tefilah, and Halachah generally have, for many of us, ceased to act as instruments of genuine worship—as the language by which we express our love of God in response to His overarching, quite straightforward demand, le’ahava et Adoshem Elokecha.

We have replaced God with prayers, no longer realizing to Whom we are praying. We even use Halachah as an escape from experiencing Him. We are so busy with creating halachic 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… We must realize that the purpose of Halachah is to have an encounter with Him, not just with the Halachah. Halachah is the channel through which we can reach Him, not just laws to live by. (Present volume, p…..)

The remarks that follow are my attempt to understand this communicative role of Halachah—as well as the apparent breakdown of this role. What really can we expect of Halachah in this respect? Is there really substance to this idea of communicating with God through Halachah? In particular, when we say that Halachah can work as a means of communication, or of expression, are we merely invoking a metaphor—albeit a highly potent one—or can we attribute to this idea some philosophical and even psychological reality?

I’ll begin by mentioning the observations made by Rabbi Haym Soloveitchik concerning the role of mimicry in the acquisition of halachic practice. For I want to suggest that Halachah does have a real expressive force, which is strongly connected to this role of mimicry—much in the way that the expressive force of language is connected to the role of mimicry in the acquisition of language. (Indeed I suspect that the idea of the transmission of meaning from each generation to the next, loaded tacitly in R. Soloveitchik’s concept of a mimetic tradition of Halachah but not made explicit in his discussion, is part of what makes that concept so alluring.) Our lesser regard now for Halachah as an instrument of communication is tied, I shall then suggest, to the shift away from mimicry as the source of halachic practice.

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In his seminal article, “Rupture and reconstruction: the transformation of contemporary Orthodoxy” (Tradition, Vol. 28, no. 4, 1994; my page references are from its reprint in R. Rosenberg & C. I. Waxman, eds., Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader, 1999), R. H. Soloveitchik describes the move that began in the 1950s in Orthodox circles, especially in the US, UK and Israel, towards a religious practice constructed from halachic texts, and away from what had previously functioned to transmit halachic practice through generations, namely, the mimicry of observed practice. Halachic practice had always gained its currency in each generation of orthodox Jews by their seeing and hearing the practice of their parents, teachers and rabbis as well of others in their communities, and emulating this.

Halakhah is a sweepingly comprehensive regula of daily life...it constitutes a way of life. And a way of life is not learned but rather absorbed. Its transmission is mimetic, imbibed from parents and friends, and patterned on conduct regularly observed in home and street, synagogue and school. (p. 321)

But various factors, R. H. Soloveitchik explains, particularly the ruptures created by mass emigration from the Old World and most especially by the Holocaust, led us to seek out the bases for our practices, less in the visible conduct of our model figures, more in halachic texts. The compulsion to faithfully reproduce that halachic life no longer visible to us—the form of life we attribute in our imagination to those vanished worlds—has pressed us to explore incessantly deeper into the texts for minutiae of Halachah lost, we fear, from erstwhile practice. “A tireless quest for absolute accuracy, for ‘perfect fit’—faultless congruence between conception and performance—is the hallmark of contemporary religiosity.” (p. 328) Powered by this clamor for ever greater accuracy, an explosion of Halachic literature and readership has mushroomed, and obscure practices that may never have actually had any significant role in religious life, now newly sourced in texts, have become germane to the new Orthodoxy.

R. H. Soloveitchik is clearly not suggesting that the mass of halachic text now dominating Orthodox life is in any way extraneous to Torah miSinai (and nor, for what it’s worth, am I). Only that (in my fallible understanding), the reality of religious practice—the reality which must act, surely, as the defining paradigm of what religious Judaism eternally is—has never in actuality embodied the multitude of minute requirements that are now being deciphered out of the textual tradition and introduced into mainstream practice. Whereas if we want to get a closer idea of what real Orthodox Judaism is, what really identifies it, we must look back at what our ancestors of a few generations ago and before were actually doing. And to use one of R. H. Soloveitchik’s examples, they did indeed sort bones from the fish they ate on Shabbat, despite the applicability, theoretically, of the issur livror, which has only more recently been brought into focus.

Now what might this imply about the possibility of genuine worship? I fear that the text-based construction of worshipful conduct, characteristic of our time, leaves something vital out of our performance of mitzvot. For as long as what fed our religious practical proficiency was the connective of mimicry, this, as I shall now try to clarify, must have brought a certain crucial kind of response into play. Watching and emulating a person with whom we identify, as they lay tefilin, or wave a lulav, we not only reproduce the practice enriched with those subtleties which a written description—inevitably an abstraction to some degree—leaves out. This identification with our model, I shall argue, also imparts a certain inner element that turns the practice into a means for genuine human worshipful expression—and missing from it when our worshipful conduct is synthesized out of text.

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Think of what happens when we observe and imitate a human being. What was at work when, as a child, I watched my father wearing tefilin and praying—saw a human heart throbbing in powerful devotion to God—and then, identifying with him, began to pray and later lay tefilin in imitation of him?

The most striking accomplishment of the human facility to imitate—and the principal phenomenon with which I shall compare halachic practice—is language. But I’ll first dwell momentarily on mime artists and their artful impersonations of human beings. This illustrative model will, I hope, help us understand certain elements when we look, first at language, and then at the halachic case.

Mime artists do not merely reproduce the external, visible features of their subject. They show us these by way of showing us the attitude of the subject—the joy, despondence, meekness, haughtiness and so on which they see in their subjects. The mimic looks empathically into the mind of the subject, sees this person’s mental state and reproduces it through the mannerisms and gestures which express that mental state. Indeed it is by focusing on that state of mind of the subject and then finding it in themselves—“becoming” the subject internally—that mime artists replicate those external expressions. And though we see directly only those external features shown us by the mime artist, we also see through them to the joy or the haughtiness and so forth—we are looking, that is, at a person in that mental state.

Something like this goes on in the acquisition of language. Infants hear the sounds of words and in due course replicate these. But these sound-productions become speech only insofar as infants match them with the meanings these sounds express. Hearing their parents say “apple” and discovering that their parents use this word when they want to say something about an apple, the infants too become able to use the word to mean apple. They must have, in other words, like the mime artist, seen into the minds of their parents and detected this desire to refer to an apple. Astonishing though this human facility is, it is not something magical: it will have been preceded by a natural process in which their parents, or other models, have some number of times done things like said “apple” as they hold or point to an apple. (According to some contemporary views, this is enabled by an innately endowed conceptual scheme which this process merely fills with content; but for our purposes this makes no difference, as the relevant end result of the process is the same.) The infant becomes able in this way to recognize the meaning the model intends when using the term—aware, that is, of the mental act which a use of the term expresses. And it is this match which the infant then reproduces: finding in her or himself the desire to say something about an apple (such as that she or he is hungry for an apple), the infant is able to express this desire by using the word “apple”.

It is thus by imitation of our parents as well as our siblings, extended family, teachers, community and so on, as they use the terms of the language in appropriate contexts, that we learn to use these terms, paired systematically with the world of meanings, ultimately making up the complex whole of our language.

The infant does not of course pursue this imitative achievement consciously or deliberately (unlike the mime artist). Yet nearly all of us are, quite evidently, innately endowed with the ability involved here (not with the language itself, but with the ability to acquire the language by imitation). It is, moreover, our innate impulse to press ahead with this process: we are innately urged to empathically see what people have in mind and thus learn how, upon discovering those states of mind in ourselves, to give them expression with our own corresponding linguistic behavior.

In just this way we also acquire a panoply of more elementary, non-linguistic gestures and mannerisms, such as head-shaking, shrugging, frowning and ululating. We detect in others a meaning, see that it is matched with a certain kind of physical expression, and so become able to express this meaning, when we find it in ourselves, by reproducing the same physical expressions (though some matchings might also have come to us innately, such as a smile with happiness). Indeed the universal human facility and urge to imitate is, in this way, central to the transmission of gestures and characteristics that are, like language, largely nationally and culturally specific (indeed it is often striking how much of the mimetically acquired characteristics of a child’s facial expressions and mannerisms are family-specific).

Once our language and other terms of expression are acquired, there is nothing artificial or constructed about our use of them. They become, rather, the natural, instinctive instruments for expressing our thoughts about the world and our yearnings. It is with these we give unmediated expression to our most intimate and overwhelming emotions. They are what reveal, in the most powerful and essential way, our very humanity.

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So it is, I suggest, when by emulating our parents, siblings, teachers and rabbis, we learn to pray, to lay tefilin, to create the world of Shabbat, and so on. We acquire in just this way a language for speaking to God. For as we watch them, we are aware not just of the physical aspects of their actions: we also have an urge—I am extrapolating here from what is hugely evident in the case of language and gesture acquisition—to empathically identify the mental states of which these physical aspects are expression; to discover, that is, the mental states motivating their worshipful behavior; and thus we become able, when we find this worshipful mental state within ourselves, to give it expression by exhibiting the same worshipful behavior. What we emulate is, in other words, not just the outward behavior, but the pairing of these inner and outer components of the act of worship. Through these pairings, thus acquired, our halachic practice becomes the means for expressing our own worshipful mental states. In this way, Halachah as a whole becomes our natural idiom for expressing to God our own inner stirrings.

Here, again, I am not imputing to the halachic novice any magical, mind-reading powers. How then do our halachic novices determine what the inner states of their models are? How do they know whether this is their model’s love of God, or awe of God, or perhaps the model’s lasting passion to blindly obey a teacher from childhood, or possibly even—for all the novice can tell—eagerness for money offered to the model in exchange for performing the mitzvah?

It is possible, for all I know, that in some instances at least, the novice is able to distinguish, just from the subtleties of the model’s performance, that it is an expression of love of God, or perhaps that it is an expression of blind obedience to a teacher. That said, I don’t assume every Jew on the way to independent halachic observance has sufficient perceptive powers, even if some do. Different novices will vary in this respect; so will their models vary as to how much their performances show their inner states. But I’d surmise that, more usually, other contextual indications play a role here, too. One novice may know her father as a man gushing with love who, as she knows also from conversation with him, directs much of this love to God; and this will probably tilt her interpretation of her father’s behavior. Likewise if she knows that a Kaddish-sayer in shul is providing someone a service in exchange for payment. Moreover, a novice’s interpretation could be erroneous—nothing assures he sees the model’s soul accurately. Or possibly the novice identifies the mental state less specifically—perhaps as some indeterminate attitude somewhere between love and awe. But whatever attitude or emotion the novice ascribes to her model—truthfully or falsely—this, I suggest, will be part of the mental state-with-expression match which she emulates in her own performance of the mitzvah.

The context influencing the novice’s interpretation could include, for sure, the learning and discussion he or she brings to bare. His having learned about ahavat haShem, for instance, may prejudice—correctly or otherwise—how he now understands the performance he observes. But I doubt this learning can stand on its own in the cultivation of the worshipping self. For it is the process of observing, interpreting and emulating human beings that furnishes the novice with this warm instrument of human expression. The language-like, expressive force of halachic practice—its capacity to reveal our inner stirrings in this immediate, instinctive way—derives from this imitative process, and not, in most of us at least, from theoretical study.

There is also another feature of this imitative process that significantly empowers halachic practice as a means for showing God our souls. Our identification with our parents, family, teachers and community not only invests halachic practice with the capacity to express our worshipful feelings: in addition, much in the way that my first language is itself inseparable from my sense of who I am, the language of religious practice itself becomes part of my identity. It comes with this sense of being intimately mine. When I pray, I am speaking a message to God which draws, in the fullest possible way, from my very being—free of posturing or alien fabrication, essential in both content and form to the person I am.

I must at this point offer a reality check. What is this relation actually like between performance of a mitzvah and the mental state it expresses? Is this something we could really recognize in our lives? I think the answer is yes, but to prevent us looking for the wrong thing, I must mention a few features which an expressive halachic act need not have. Firstly, as I shall clarify, a halachic act can be expressive of love, or of awe, without this being any kind of overwhelming, trance-like state of consciousness; indeed it need not be any kind of conscious episode. Secondly, the idea that love of God impels us to perform a mitzvah does not mean we should expect this love to sometimes impel us to act in any involuntary or unconsidered way (it will not, for instance, sometimes shake us helplessly out of bed at 2 am to lay tefilin). More positively, our love will show through action that is clear-headedly attentive to time and circumstances.

Compare an act of love for another person, such as when, pressed by love, I buy a present for my wife. This is a highly complex action, lasting over a period, comprising an indefinite sequence of sub-actions, each waiting for the right moment. I may first conceive the idea on Sunday, then check when I can shop for it, and only on Tuesday get in the car, turn the ignition, drive down to Emek Refa’im, search for parking, look in at a few stores, wait my turn at one of them and discuss options with the salesperson, finally choose something, take out a credit card, and so on. The deliberate and time-phased nature of the scheme takes nothing away from its being motivated the whole way by love, from it being manifestation of this ongoing condition of my person. I am not transported through it by any trance-like state of consciousness. Conscious episodes of love may occur in me from time to time, though I doubt these are essential to love being the motive. (This is not the space for a theory of love, but I’ll just retell the familiar wisdom that what does testify to its being love is a much larger narrative—years of marriage, shared understanding and lots more.) Nor has this love taken hold of me and forced me to act in any involuntary way: it is, rather, integrated rationally into the matrix of my intentions and understanding regarding the world generally. It is true that some acts of love are less time-bound, more spontaneous, such as a kiss given just on a whim. But these, too, are typically executed not in an involuntary transport but with at least some attention to circumstances, and with ensuing restraint (e.g., not in front of certain witnesses).

It is to this same extent plausible that my performing of a mitzvah is an expression of love, even if it is not produced involuntarily by a spontaneous burst of passion. For so it is with love: it can be my ongoing love of God that presses me to lay tefilin, say Birkat Hamazon, make Kiddush at the Shabbat table, though I do each just when it is appropriately occasioned, at which moment I enact a complex and deliberate scheme (carry my tefilin to shul, go to my seat and so forth). Nor does the possible absence of any conscious episode of loving Him, as I perform the mitzvah, cast doubt on the existence of this love, or on its being at play as my motive. The love may at some moments enter consciousness, but its doing so is not essential to its being my motive. It will be, rather, this ongoing condition of my person which, just in appropriate circumstances—such as it being time for Shacharit, or when I finish a meal, or when we come to the Friday night table—manifests in my considered performance of the mitzvah. (If mitzvot shehazman lo geraman differ at all relevantly in this respect from the more time-bound mitzvot I’ve used as examples, it is in their being potentially more spontaneous; so that, kal vechomer, there can be even less suspicion that they fail to demonstrate love.)

I must stress also that none of what I’ve said comes to deny that halachic texts play a role in the cultivation of expression through halachic practice—of course they do. A practice we have acquired through imitation and then refine further by consulting texts retains its identity as an instrument of personal expression. In contrast, however, a practice constructed in the first place from text alone, and deployed in an attempt to express through it (say) love of God, will lack this immediate and instinctive communicative force. Nor will it truly come from me.

Where, it must be asked, does this place ba’aley teshuvah or for that matter converts? Bereft of a parental model, are they unable to secure the intimate expressiveness of Halachah which I argue is yielded by mimetic transmission? Are they not bound to relying on instructional text? Not at all. Newcomers to Orthodoxy will acquire this identification with practice by attaching themselves to, and identifying with, a community, empathically watching what their fellow shul-goers and perhaps teachers do, and emulating them. In the course of time they, like anyone else there, will have made the language of worship their own. As much as the rest of us, they will acquire the patterns of prayer, tefilin, kashrut, the dos and don’ts making for the glow of Shabbat, and so on, until these shape, for them too, the form of life that is, potentially, our unmediated expression of love of God. They too become participants in this vital, human, forward-moving project of intimately worshipping God, a flux that began at Sinai, has been carried forward from generation to generation, and is now propelled onwards by us.

Family and community have been the artery within which Torat Moshe has coursed through our history. In just the way each generation of a nation inherits its language, we’ve inherited halachic practice, loaded at each moment with its signifying force—and always with the sense that this is the language our ancestors have used, since Matan Torah, to express their love of God. To be sure, each generation imparts its admixture to this organically developing tradition—partly in the form of evolving minhag, partly through scholarly refinement; just as each generation of a nation imparts colloquialisms and sometimes scholarly correctives to its national language that are soon incorporated into its mainstream. Yet it is with this entire continuous emerging tradition that we identify; it is with the inner dimension of worship running through it that we empathize. In this ongoing human project we’ve found our place, and in so doing have become genuinely able to participate in worship.

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But a breach now in the sequence, with the new shift to the authority of text, places it in danger. For the project of synthesizing halachic practice from text gives us no more than this behavioral facility; it contains no mechanism providing us with a means for expressing our inner stirrings to God, such as is furnished by imitation. The shift from mimicry to the authority of text thus brings with it, I suspect, not just the change of quantity and emphasis in halachic practice accounted for by R. H. Soloveitchik—the move to a Judaism of chumrot—but also a qualitative change: it is failing to cast Halachah in the spiritual and psychological role it has traditionally fulfilled.

I must, however, step back a moment and ask, is this harsh conclusion born out by reality? Is it really true that a halachic practice incorporated into our lives after we discover it in a text, instead of by emulation, is less likely to function as expressive of our love of God? Let me flesh out the situation with an example. Suppose in a shiur on Mishnah Berurah, I learn that Chanukah lights must be in a window less than 10 tephachot (slightly less than one yard) above ground level, if one has such a window (if one doesn’t have one, then higher is okay; cf. 671:27); and suppose that, in ignorance of this, it has been our family practice to place them in a window above 10 tephachot, even though we do have a window below this height. I can imagine ourselves engaging in some family debate, then switching to the lower window, and yes, with the feeling that we are only now fulfilling the mitzvah properly. But I doubt anything about doing this switch, motivated just by our concern to conform with the written ordinance, will make it in any sense an act expressing our love of God. It will feel, rather, like an alien imposition, even a disruption of the particular form of life by which we’ve celebrated the relation God has had with Am Yisrael and through which we’ve shown Him our reciprocal love.

I must also very forcefully stress here that I do not for a moment mean to suggest, God forbid, that a failure of the communicative role of a mitzvah could be reason not to perform it. I am, to start with, most certainly not qualified to suggest to anyone what they are halachically bound to do or not do. And more importantly: even if I am correct in saying that a mitzvah we’ve discovered in a text lacks the expressive force that would have been given it by imitation, some other solid reason may nevertheless exist to perform this mitzvah. What our reasons are for performing mitzvot is a huge question of hashkafah, far beyond the scope of the present discussion; but expressiveness is certainly not an exclusive answer. Suffice it to mention here the plausible view that we must perform the mitzvah simply lishmah—as a self-sufficient, intrinsically valuable act; or the view that we must perform it just because God has told us to; or that it is for the sake of some human utility, known or unknown to us, which God wishes us to introduce into the world; or because by doing it repeatedly we eventually do come to express by it our love of God. Deeply disconcerted though some of us may be if the expressive potential of a mitzvah has fallen into some dereliction, it would be outrageous to suppose this could be reason to stop performing it. My conclusion does not extend beyond pointing to this breakdown of expressiveness.

But even this limited statement may seem overly alarming. For in reality we still mostly identify with parents and a community whose practices of Shabbat, tefilin, kashrut and Chanukah lights, for instance, are our primary encounter with and source of mitzvot. Insofar as we are prompted into our own performing of a given mitzvah by identification and emulation, so too does this action retain its expressive power. There admittedly are contemporary practices of which I doubt this can be said—in some circles, for instance, the gebrokts apron, preventing matzo crumbs from landing on moisture, has become de rigueur accoutrement at the seder table—but these remain the minority of our practices. Surely, then, the tradition is still principally transmitted by imitation.

That may be true, yet I fear the evaluative shift towards a religiosity based on the authority of text nevertheless brings with it a more pervasive erosion. For it devalues in a general way the possibility of communicating through Halachah with God. One way of putting this is that a different motivation for performing mitzvot has begun to captivate us, namely, to cultivate a practice whose formal features match the requirements of texts; so that, correspondingly, we have become less driven by the motive to show God our love. The whole enterprise of performing mitzvot in order to express our inner devotion—always its vital human core—is moving towards obsoleteness.

Actually, though, I think the situation is more complex. It is not that we have ceased to inherit halachic practice through mimicry. Mimetic transmission largely continues: we still observe parents, teachers and others performing mitzvot, and we are still driven to interpret their motives and to emulate the halachic practice that becomes, in ourselves too, expressive of those motives. But we are now gripped by an ideology that focuses just on the formal match between behavior and text. Our new premise, that achieving this match is the true reason for performing mitzvot, now guides our interpretation of halachic practice—is now what guides the novice’s interpretation of her model—so that the novice is much likelier than before to interpret halachic practice as motivated just by the concern to achieve this formal match. She may even be misinterpreting that practice—a real, active love of God might be concealed from her by the new premise—nonetheless, a formal match will in turn become her own motive for performing mitzvot. The motivational turn widely infecting us in this way is what is prompting the novel preoccupation, described by R. H. Soloveitchik, with elevating ever more details from the halachic literature into common practice. Moreover, given the authority of text, even the imitative identification with our forbears could, with time, become superfluous altogether.

Halachah is potentially the language in which we tell God we love Him. We learn it by observing others speaking it, empathizing with their motives and emulating them. But we are losing sight of this communicative purpose of Halachah. It is as if we are becoming obsessed with learning some natural language, not in order to communicate in it with others, but just for the purpose of producing syntactically perfect sentences, without the ability to use these sentences for conveying our thoughts: at first we go about this by observing its native speakers—listening only for the formal properties of their speech, indifferently to the meanings they express through it; then in due course we turn for our authoritative source to an instruction manual of syntax, renowned for its accuracy, which teaches us to produce excellent sentences but leaves out their meanings. We are moving, it may be said, towards a condition of halachic aphasia.

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All is not lost. We can counter the trend with education—as parents by telling our children, as teachers by telling our students and, I humbly submit, as rabbis our congregants, that our reason for performing mitzvot is ahavat haShem. This principle, disseminated widely enough, stands a chance of prejudicing accordingly the next generation’s interpretation of halachic practice. But as their models, we shall need to be sincere: our own examples need to convincingly demonstrate this love. If we are visibly phony, no one will inherit it from us.

On this coming Rosh HaShana the Shmita (Sabbatical) year (5775 – 2014-15) will begin. According to its laws, routine agricultural activities are prohibited and its produce is ownerless, free to be taken by all. At the end of the year, Shmitat Kesafim (the remission of debts) also takes effect. If we look at this also in the context of the (currently inapplicable) Yovel (Jubilee) year, which in addition to the Shmita laws also frees the slaves and includes massive agrarian reform as all land that had been bought and sold in the previous fifty years reverts to its original owners, we witness a massive societal change with utopian overtones. Before returning to this topic I would like to present two inverse parallel stories of utopian redemption, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s “The Master of Prayer” and Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” . Their tales are surprisingly similar in structure and yet opposites in the values that they promote and in their respective visions of society, redemption and utopia.

Rebbe Nachman (1772-1810) witnessed the beginnings of modernization, the industrial revolution, capitalism and the enlightenment. He saw these trends as posing a grave threat to people of religion and struggled to empower his followers and readers with tools to maintain their faith and values. He told the story "The Master of Prayer" to his followers on Saturday night, January 6, 1810, less than a year before his untimely death from tuberculosis. This story which is based upon Kabbalistic motifs regarding the process of the future redemption, focuses primarily on the charismatic and revolutionary Master of Prayer (perhaps alluding to Rebbe Nachman himself), who leads a secret counter culture group that lives on the edge of a general society that is increasingly alienated from spiritual values. This group was dedicated to the worship of God and was based upon a clear set of values and goals: “He would explain that the only true goal was to serve God all the days of one’s life, spending one’s time praying to God and singing His praise” (280). This spiritual goal stands in stark contrast to the materialistic values of the rest of society, which are clearly seen as mistaken: “Wealth is not the goal of life at all…the only goal is the Creator, may His name be blessed” (297). In Rebbe Nachman’s tale, the society at large is that of extreme capitalism, whereas the revolutionary counter culture group is spiritual. It is not clear whether the group was run as a collectivist commune or not, but we shall shortly be exposed to their position regarding the accumulation of wealth.

The Master is not content to merely minister to his flock. He and his followers actively engage in recruiting members of the general society to run away and join their secret band. “It was the custom of [the Master of Prayer] to visit inhabited areas, convincing people to emulate him, serving God and constantly praying. Whenever people wanted to join him, he would take them to his place away from civilization, where their only activities would be praying, singing praise to God, confession, self-mortification, repentance, and similar occupations…Eventually his teachings began to make an impression, and his activities became well known. People would suddenly vanish without a trace; no one know where they were…people began to realize that all of this was due to the Master of Prayer, who was attracting people to serve God” (281-282). He is well-known and highly feared by the society at large, who could not succeed in capturing him due to his ability to cleverly disguise himself: “It was impossible to recognize or capture him, since he would always appear in a different disguise. He would appear to one person as a merchant, and to another as a pauper” (292).

What exactly was the nature of the society that the Master of Prayer was trying to overthrow? While there were actually several different lands that he was undermining, it is clear in the story that the most misguided and most difficult of all to fight against was “the Land of Wealth”. In this super capitalistic society men are judged solely upon the amount of wealth that they own and are assigned hierarchical status based upon their financial worth alone, with the richest individuals proclaimed as “gods” and the poorest as “animals”. The result is a never ending spiral of fierce competition for one’s life literally depended upon moving up the societal ladder. According to their religion there were even “animal” (human) sacrifices to the “gods” and not surprisingly theft and murder abounded. Not only that, but “Charity was a very great sin. They believed that if a person gave charity, it would diminish the influx of wealth that God had given him…It was therefore forbidden in the strongest terms to give charity” (289-290). This society, which strongly reminds us of Sodom, the biblical town of horrors, is the greatest challenge for the Master of Prayer. Not only is the society rampant with violence and idolatry (including human sacrifice), but the belief in wealth also constituted the most difficult theological error to combat, for: “it was possible to get a person out of any desire except for the desire for wealth” (337). This topic of the desire for wealth and its inherent spiritual dangers was addressed by Rebbe Nachman in numerous places in his writings and he must have seen its rampant negative effects all around him. The rectification for this disorder was only possible if the person were to be brought to a special place (“the path of the sword”) where he would be miraculously cured from his desire for wealth: “In that place money is the greatest shame. If someone wants to insult another, he says that the other has money. Money is so great a shame, that the more money a person has, the greater his shame…Now it was revealed that wealth is the main thing of which to be ashamed” (349-350). In the end the Land of Wealth falls as its inhabitants repent their evil ways and spirituality replaces material values as the essential definition of human activity. The entire world is redeemed and the eschatological utopia is ushered in.

A century and a half after Rebbe Nachman told the tale of the Master of Prayer, a remarkably similar tale with the opposite message was published, “Atlas Shrugged”, the magnum opus of the American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982). Born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum to a fairly assimilated bourgeois Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Rand and her family suffered greatly during the Communist revolution and in its aftermath. Arriving in the United States in 1926 she developed an extreme capitalist and libertine philosophy that she called “objectivism” and used the heroes in her books as her ideology’s mouthpieces. She also promoted an atheistic and rationalistic world view portraying her socialist anti-heroes as “mystics”. She considered herself a writer of the “Romantic Realist” school.

Her self-identification with her positive characters was nearly total, as she wrote in “About the Author” at the end of "Atlas Shrugged": “I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books – and it has worked for me, as it works for my characters”. Atlas Shrugged represented the pinnacle of her literary career. Simply stated, in a mere 1168 pages she had managed to state her philosophy in its most highly developed form and it would seem that from then on it was all downhill in both her literary career and her personal life.

Like the Master of Prayer in Rebbe Nachman’s tale, "Atlas Shrugged" is also about a mysterious revolutionary figure living on the edge of society. John Galt is a brilliant individualistic inventor who has disappeared from the oppressive socialistic society that America has become and he strikes fear into the hearts of that society, whose slang refrain to almost anything is “who is John Galt?”. He too lures people from the general society to his secret utopian hideaway. However, the scenes are completely reversed, as the general society is an oppressive America ruled by socialist dictators who trample individual and economic rights. Galt steals away the leading minds of the country. Rugged individualists like himself, these elite "industrialists" join him in “going on strike” against a society that takes advantage of their brains and productivity in order to serve one of mediocrity and passivity. Galt and his friends know that eventually America will implode (and they also help it along the way here and there) and then they will take over, and their capitalist utopia will again rule America and the world, and people will once again have the ultimate freedom – to produce and to make money.

As stated above Rand’s heroes are all great orators who expound her beliefs to her readers. We are thus treated to such gems as: “When I die I hope to go to heaven…I want to be able to afford the price of admission… to claim the greatest virtue of all – that I was a man who made money” (96). “To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America…If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose…the fact that they were the people to create the phrase ‘to make money.’…The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality” (414). “I am rich and I am proud of every penny that I own…I refuse to apologize for my money” (480). (emphasis in original).

Moving on to Galt’s secret utopian society we find that even the most rugged individualists must live by some rules. So when railroad magnate Miss Dagny Taggart accidently arrives on her first visit Galt explains: “We have no laws in this valley, no rules, no formal organization of any kind…But we have certain customs, which we all observe…So I’ll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word ‘give’” (714). Inscribed above the building that houses the revolutionary motor that Galt has invented to power the village is the following motto: “I swear by my life and my love for it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (731). While it is true that the group members work hard and live relatively modestly, their long-term vision obviously extends way beyond their temporary mountain hideout.

What would be an appropriate symbol for such a society? Dagny receives the answer upon her arrival: “But close before her, rising on a slender granite column from a ledge below to the level of her eyes, blinding her by its glare, dimming the rest, stood a dollar sign three feet tall, made of solid gold. It hung in space above the town, as its coat-of-arms, its trademark, its beacon – and it caught the sunrays, like some transmitter of energy that sent them in shining blessing to stretch horizontally through the air above the roofs” (706). The dollar sign also appears upon their locally produced cigarettes and was used by Dagny when she finally leaves her railroad terminal for the last time: “she glanced at the statue of [her grandfather] Nathaniel Taggert…she took the lipstick from her bag and, smiling…drew a large sign of the dollar on the pedestal under his feet” (1138).

If in the "Master of Prayer" the redemption was signaled when the inhabitants of the Land of Wealth became disgusted by money, Atlas Shrugged ends with the following messianic vision: “’The road is cleared,’ said Galt. ‘We are going back to the world.’ He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar” (1168). We should not be surprised that at Rand’s funeral her friends placed a six foot high floral bouquet on her grave – in the shape of a dollar sign.

In summation, if we compare the utopian visions of our two authors, it is clear that for Rand state socialism (and spirituality that she rather strangely connects it with) undermine all that is good and noble in humanity, destroying human motivation, individuality and freedom, and ultimately, society itself. The solution is in absolute Laissez-faire capitalism and the freedom to invent, produce, trade and most importantly - to make money.

In Rebbe Nachman’s view it is faithless capitalism that leads to idolatry and violence. The solution is faith, and it would seem that ultimately the nature of the particular economic system is secondary as the emphasis is upon Divine service combined with a great deal of compassion. It suffices us to note again in Rand’s utopia even the use of the word “give” is prohibited, whereas one of the greatest signs of corruption in Rebbe Nachman’s despicable Sodom-like Land of Wealth is the prohibition on charity.

Did Ayn Rand model her hero John Galt (gelt?) upon the Master of Prayer? It is possible that she had read Martin Buber's 1906 German translation of the story, but it seems unlikely and at the end of the day, it isn't really so significant. The question that interests me is what does Judaism, via the mitzva of Shmita, have to teach us about utopian beliefs?

Historically it can be argued that the modern state of Israel began with a heavy-handed socialist economic model which led to bureaucracy, inefficiency and corruption. We later moved to a capitalist free market model, based on individualism which led to both economic growth and a massive gap between the wealthiest and poorest members of our society. Some say it is the largest in the Western world. We also suffer from a situation in which a significant percentage of our population lives below the poverty line. It seems clear that there is a need for balance. Alexander Dub?ek said in the Prague Spring of 1968 that Czechoslovakia was in need of "socialism with a human face" and perhaps Israel in 2014 is in need of "capitalism with a human face". The social-economic model of Shmita, seen in its broader context including Shmitat Kesafim and Yovel can provide us with the proper model. Let us briefly examine some of the explanations given by the classic commentators to this mitzva and their relevance to our question. While it is clear from their words that Shmita contains multiple elements including personal and national spiritual growth and renewal (such as providing the opportunity for a year of Torah study) as well as addressing ecological and agricultural concerns, I will focus primarily on those perspectives which pertain to social and economic issues.

Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed (3:39), writes as follows: "This [mitzva] expresses mercy and compassion for human beings as it says “and the poor of your people will eat”…and it also strengthens the land and increases the harvest by allowing the land to rest". We see here an emphasis on social justice as the poor now have equal access to food supplies. It may be that the agricultural aspect is not to be seen only in light of increasing future profits for the landowner, but as part of a plan to maximize food production in the Land of Israel for the ultimate benefit of all of the inhabitants.

In addition to additional “religious” messages the Sefer HaChinuch (Mishpatim, mitzva 84) teaches: "There is an advantage to this, for us to acquire the trait of forgoing. One should also remember that the land which gives him fruit…doesn’t produce through its own power, but there is a Master over it and over its masters”. Here it is apparent that one cannot clearly distinguish between the ritual and the interpersonal aspects of Shmita. For if it comes to instill within us the character trait of forgoing one’s property and financial rights for the good of society, this must be coupled with an increase in ones faith that ultimately it is God Himself who rules over the land and provides for our needs. One who internalizes this spiritual message will find it easier to share his wealth with others while learning to take his own losses in stride.

Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalisher (Sefer HaBrit, Behar s.v. Derech HaSheni, U’Sefarta Lecha) explains that "the wealthy man will learn not to look down upon the poor man, for the Torah said that in the seventh year everyone is equal, both rich and poor have permission to enter gardens and fields and eat”. An additional reason is “so that he will not always be burdened with physical pursuits…and when he throws off the yoke of labor he will engage in [the study of] Torah and wisdom. And those who don't know how to study will build houses and buildings so that the Land of Israel will not be lacking them either…for the need and perfection of the world". Rabbi Kalisher, the great 19th century proto-Zionist, openly stresses the equality of rich and poor during the Sabbatical year, both in terms of economic opportunity and in terms of consciousness. While he stresses that the rich will cease to look down on the poor there will no doubt be an additional benefit – that for a change the poor will be endowed with dignity and self-respect. This new consciousness, especially when combined with the reforms of the remittance of debts and the freeing of the slaves and returning of property in the Jubilee year will serve to level the socio-economic playing field as we shall discuss shortly. Even his caveat that those farmers not suited to a year of Torah study will engage in construction work for the good of society is part of a harmonious and utopian vision of a righteous society predicated upon spiritual values, physical labor and equality. It is of little wonder that elsewhere in his commentary he quotes an opinion to the effect that the Shmita year is meant to recreate the reality of the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve sinned. This is of course, a well-known vision in Jewish eschatology.

Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, writing in the introduction to his classic exposition on the laws of Shmita (Shabbat HaAretz), explains that "The individual shakes off his profane existence often, on every Shabbat…the same effect that Shabbat has on the individual, Shmita has on the entire nation…whose inner Divine light is occasionally revealed in its entire splendor, which cannot be annulled by ongoing social life…by rage and competition". What is of interest to us here is not Rabbi Kook’s beautiful description of the well-known comparison between Shmita and Shabbat, but rather his characterization of the atmosphere that characterizes the workweek and non-Shmita reality as one of “rage and competition”. The endless fight to get ahead financially at the expense of one’s “competitors” must occasionally give way to the atmosphere of compassion and equality that we have seen above.

Rabbi Yaacov Ariel, the chief rabbi of the Israeli city of Ramat-Gan explains as follows (Zeh Dvar HaShmita): "The mitzva of Shmita is built upon two foundations: the public and the private…the mitzva’s central idea is to remove one from his egocentric perspective and develop his feelings for his fellow man, public responsibility and a “majestic” perspective". While the end of Rabbi Ariel’s words here hint at certain aspects of Halachic debate and public policy regarding the proper observance of Shmita’s legal aspects, his first comment is crucial. We are dealing with a law which is to have a very specific moral and psychological impact on us. If Rabbi Kalisher spoke of the cessation of the superiority complex of the wealthy, Rabbi Ariel broadens it to include a general cleansing from our usual egocentricity in favor of a much broader perspective that centers upon our concern for the individual other and for society as a whole. I recall that during the previous Shmita year of 2007-8 I heard him quip that whereas in general the Torah leans towards capitalism, during the Shmita year it is decidedly communistic!

In the fall of 2001, just as the Shmita year was ending and the remission of debts was about to take effect, I was privileged to study the topic of Shmita Kesafim with my late teacher Rav Shagar (Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg zt”l). He too stressed that with the overall package of Shmita, Shmitat Kesafim and Yovel the Torah was presenting us with clear socio-economic imperatives. In his view what we see here is a periodic attempt to reset economic reality and level the playing field. Debts are cancelled, land is returned and slaves are emancipated. He pointed out that in ancient time one of the main reasons why a person would become a “Hebrew slave” (what we would call an “indentured servant”), was his inability to pay off his debts. Thus the combination of the economic measures listed above together with the availability of free produce during an entire year would be sufficient to return society, at least temporarily, to a harmonious balance. This, when combined with a heightened consciousness of faith in God’s providence as the true provider, the cessation of the usual competitiveness and the arrogance built into the economic system, would provide us with a taste of the revolutionary changes in store for the world when the true messianic utopia comes to pass. I can only hope that our proper observance of the Shmita year in all of its aspects will hasten that great day.

Rabbi Zvi Leshem was ordained by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and holds a PhD in Jewish Philosophy from Bar-Ilan University. He served for several decades in senior educational and rabbinic positions before assuming his current role directing the Gershom Scholem Collection for Kabbalah Research at the National Library of Israel. He is the author of "Redemptions: Contemporary Chassidic Essays on the Parsha and the Festivals".

The prophet Amos warns the Jewish people, "Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, and I will send a famine in the land, not a hunger for bread nor a thirst for water, but to hear the word of God... and they will run about to seek the word of the Lord and shall not find it" (Amos, 8:11,12). Rav Shimon Bar Yohai commented: "Heaven forbid that Torah will ever be forgotten from Israel." If so, then what is the meaning of the above verse? It means that a time will come when Halakha will not be monolithic. There will be no definitive Halakha. There will be diversity (Shabbat 38b-39a).

The Maharal of Prague makes the following incisive comment: "Israel and Torah are one. Each impacts the other. The status of Israel - the Jewish people - is reflected in the status of Torah. Just as Jews are not physically united but scattered throughout the world, so too is Torah not monolithic. It too is not unified. (Tiferet Yisrael, Chapter 56, see also Pahad Yitzhak Purim, No. 31). As such, Galut - the exile - has a spiritual component. As long as Jews are not physically united in Israel, diversity is a normal feature of the halakhic process. As long as the Galut exists, so too does diversity.

The Talmud records that Honi HaMe'agel was a Jewish Rip Van Winkle. After his legendary sleep, he visited the Beit Hamidrash and heard the scholars bemoan his death, contending that Honi had the ability to clearly resolve halakhic problems: "Ah, if only Honi were alive!", they sighed. Honi approached them and identified himself, but the rabbis disbelieved him and he departed dispirited (Taanit 23a). Rav Hayyim Schmuelevitch, Dean of the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem, made the following poignant remarks: What is a Toran sage? Is he not one who has mastered Torah knowledge? Accordingly, Honi should have requested the rabbis to pose halakhic questions to him. Honi's ability to resolve difficult Torah problems would have verified his status. Perhaps, suggests R. Hayyim, certain problems cannot be resolved by sages of previous generations. Each scholar, in each era, must rule on the problems of the day. There must be a charismatic relationship between master and disciple. For this reason Pirkei Avot delineates the chain of tradition. Moshe, having received the Torah at Sinai, transferred it to Yehoshua, Yehoshua to the Elders, they to the Prophets, and they to the men of the Great Assembly. No era relied totally on the leadership of the previous generation. Each had its own leadership (Sihot Musar, 5731, p 19). Accordingly, differences may emerge due to different personalities and concerns of each era.

It should be noted that halakhic diversity is not synonymous with deviance. The latter is aberrant behavior outside the perimeter of halakhic guidelines. Of interest is the halakhic reaction to institutionalized deviant worship. The Talmud notes that in Alexandria, Egypt, contrary to halakhic rules prohibiting animal sacrifice outside the Temple in Jerusalem, the kohanim practiced the ritual. The Mishnah cites Scriptures to prohibit those kohanim who ministered in the House of Onias from ministering in the Holy Temple. (Menahot 109a) The implication is that such kohanim, though deviant, were devout Jews otherwise qualified to minister in Jerusalem. They were outlawed from serving in the Holy Temple The congregants, or worshippers in the House of Onias, were not ostracized. The position seems to be the model for traditional rabbinic reactions to non-halakhic Jewish clergy; their rabbis are not deemed rabbinic leaders, their services are ruled deviant, but the ordinary people (the worshippers) are not excluded nor condemned. The door is constantly open to all Jews to pray together and observe mitzvot.

Of major concern, therefore, is a question that goes to the root of religious power and influence, -- namely, who has the authority to establish halakha? This question has two major components.

Who has the right to go through the intellectual process of creatively providing the research, precedent and logic to formulate halakha on specific issues?
Who has the authority to establish policy?

To set policy requires a concern not only for the legal religious issues, but also for the ramifications of the decision upon the community. Indeed, should a particular ruling be viewed as generating a negative impact upon the sphere of Torah, the observance of mitzvoth or the future status of the people - many rabbinic authorities would refrain from establishing a halakhic practice. This suggests that an issue or practice that may be even legally (halakhically) permissible - may be prohibited as a policy. Thus it is evident that the formulators of halakhic policy influence the contours of religious life. Who are these people? We know that they are rabbis. But, what type of rabbis? This suggests a brief analysis of the Galut rabbinate and, in particular, the pulpit rabbinate; namely, those Rabbis who serve as leaders of congregations.

The Galut pulpit Rabbi is not controlled by any formal hierarchical structure. There is no regional or national Rabbinic supervisor to impact his freedom of action. Theoretically his authority to formulate halakha is inherent in his position as a Jewish leader. He is equal to anyone. Yet, from a pragmatic viewpoint, the pulpit Rabbi (especially in the U.S.A.) until recently has been perceived as the lowest figure of authority for the establishment of halakhic policy. He may implement or execute halakha, but was not deemed the proper vehicle to set policy itself. It was generally assumed that halakhic policy was simply beyond the scope of such rabbis.

A popular maxim from Pirke Avot (1:2) will help clarify the issue. It is reported that Shimon Hatzadik frequently said: "The world stands (or is based) upon three principles: Torah, Avodah, U'gemilut Hasadim. Torah is self understood; Avodah is religious, pious service or prayer and Gemilut Hasadim - is loving kindness. It should be noted that Jewish life has developed institutions to carry out (and, in a way, serve as the specialists of) each of the three endeavors.

1. The Yeshiva serves as the bastion of Torah learning. It is in the Yeshiva where one finds the greatest concentration of Torah scholarship and creative Torah excitement. As such, the Rosh HaYeshiva - the head of the Yeshiva, logically should serve as the final decisor for Torah questions. He simply is the greatest reservoir of Torah knowledge. The head teacher of Torah and Rabbis is assumed to know more than others.
Accordingly, halakhic policy has legitimacy when it emanates from such a source.

2. The Hassidic Shtibel generally serves as an example for the manifestation of fervent pious prayer. The Hassidic Rebbe need not necessarily be the greatest Torah scholar, but certainly he excels in praying. He is considered a holy Jew. He is, perhaps, a specialist in Avodah - religious service. Service to God has legitimacy, therefore, where it emanates from such specialists in piety.

3. Hesed and Tzedakah - Charity. In the Diaspora, synagogues are a major religious source for the collection and disbursement of charity. The rabbis serve as leaders of congregations of which a number among their midst may be philanthropists. Thus, pulpit rabbis are courted by Roshei Yeshivot and Hassidic Rebbes not because of the fact that such rabbis are great Torahs scholars, but - because of the potential influence such pulpit rabbis may have over directing lay leaders to support specific Torah or Hassidic institutions.

To the extent that the normal functions of synagogue life do not, by their very nature, require their rabbis to be great Torah scholars, the pulpit rabbis were by general understanding deemed not the proper legitimate source for formulating halakha. As such, a new dimension was added to halakhic policy.

The quality of research or the scintillating creativity of logic was of no paramount issue. The major question was the source of a halakhic ruling. Who said it? The name of the Rabbi who proclaimed policy was essential to engender acceptance.

Concomitant to this was the emergence of a "yardstick" to measure the validity or legitimacy of halakhic decisions. Is is called "Daat Torah". This principle projects the concept that a group of rabbinic sages imbued with the sanctity of Torah are the sole, authentic interpreters of our religion and spokesmen for daily decisions. Accordingly, all decisions require the imprimatur of great scholars. No one else has the Torah authority for halakhic policy. Thus, a decision which several great rabbis in unison promulgate has validity even if sources are not delineated. As long as a group is recognized as "Daat Torah", all decisions must be abided regardless of rationale or scholarship.

The underlying energizing legitimate aspect of this concept is the perception that "Daat Torah" is not solely the viewpoint of one or but a few of our great rabbis, but rather, the consensus position of a goodly number of rabbinic sages. If a practice appears to project the position of the world of scholarship and piety it becomes the "in and approved" rabbinic concern.

Though, in theory, such a position appears to have great merit, pragmatically, it generated a number of dysfunctional manifestations.

1. Torah Judaism is based on scholarship. Pronouncements and policies are traditionally rooted inTalmudic and halakhic expertise. Yet, in the era of "Daat Torah", the source or quality of scholarly research became secondary to the name of the person and position of the Rav who formulated it. This permeated within the rabbinic community a tendency to dismiss the findings of scholarship. It was necessary to acquire a "Gadol" - a sage who would back a specific policy. Such a position, moreover, would have respect regardless of the quality of the scholarship serving as the pinions for such a ruling. Torah discourse became exercises in futility, for nothing would become policy until a proper "Gadol" sanctioned it. This crystallized the approach of scurrying around for a "Gadol" to approve halakhic policies.

2. The concept "Daat Torah" gives the impression that it is a consensus position of numerous sages. Its dysfunction is that the process of seeking consensus generally tends to promote "humrot" or extreme orientations. It is generally easier for those who seek lenient rulings to agree to stringent positions than for extremists to accept lenient rulings. Accordingly, lenient positions do not emanate from a "Daat Torah" philosophy. It simply does not take place. There appears to be, moreover, a built-in negative response to any creative moderation or "loophole", even if such is halakhically correct. This generates public denunciation and scathing criticism of innovative halakhic rulings. Thus independent, objective halakhic inquiry is stifled by political pressure. Most scholars are simply not at all interested in incurring criticism or controversy and generally favor discretion over valor.

This projects the image that Torah policy is basically a movement to cater to right wing ideology. As "Daat Torah" became more popular, it became evident that no one was serving as the halakhic leaders for the vast numbers of Orthodox laymen in modern Orthodox synagogues. No one was the spokesman for the moderates. Indeed, it became necessary for Rabbis of congregations who deal daily with major problems to once again assume responsibility for establishing halakhic policy. Chaucer once wrote, "Truth will out." So too with halakha. It is not and cannot be the esoteric domain of a few select leaders. All Jews must be aware of its methodology and principles. Its logical system must be tested in the open sphere of dialogue and debate. Halakhic policy is the result of positions finely honed through Torah scholarship. That is the way it used to be. That is the way it should be again. Rabbis should have the ability to openly develop halakhic policy whether or not it is innovative or stringent or lenient or not part of a consensus - the issue is and should be - is it halakhically sound? And if it is sound, will the rabbinate implement the position?

There are changes in the pulpit rabbinate, changes that alter the role of pulpit rabbis and their ability to formulate halakha.

As a result of the phenomenal growth of Torah and Yeshiva education in America, most major congregations have large numbers of former Yeshiva students as part of their membership. These individuals are demanding that pulpit rabbis manifest Torah scholarship and erudition. As such, a new breed of scholars is occupying the leadership of pulpits. No longer may they be dismissed for lack of Torah standing.

In addition, many Rabbis of pulpits and Rashei Yeshiva are more or less around the same age level. This generates a new, mutual respect. When the Rabbis were aged in their twenties and thirties and the Rashei Yeshiva were venerable sages in their seventies, eighties or above - the pulpit rabbis would subordinate themselves to others. But, when the rabbis in the major congregations are more or less the same age or older than the Rashei Yeshiva - a different relationship applies. Indeed, many pulpit Rabbis even recall learning together as equals or peers with a number of Rashei Yeshiva while both were students.

Accordingly, both groups feel a sense of kinship and do not simply defer to the opinions of others.
Some time ago a noted Israeli Rosh Yeshiva and Member of Knesset visited with me. In an attempt to asses his character and religious hierarchical orientations, I asked him, "Who is your Rebbe? Who's your Rabbi for serious ideological problems?" His response was simple, matter of fact, yet quite astute. "You know, Reb Simcha, that those of us over forty years of age have no living Rebbe. We, sadly, are our own Rebbe." He's right. As a result of all of the above noted dynamic factors: namely, the concern for Halakhic policy to represent the needs of congregations - the desire to re-assert the stature and role of the pulpit rabbi - the concern that stringency is not necessarily the raison d'etre of halakha- the distaste for vilification of alternate policies - the simple lack of any commanding imposing giant to coalesce action - the concern for a moderate view - all these issues generated a support system for pulpit Rabbis to reassert their role in formulating halakhic policy.

A professor of mine, Albert Salamon, a noted scholar at the Graduate faculty of the NewSchool for Social Research, once said, "The image of the King topples before his throne." So too with halakhic policy. The dysfunctions in the current system supported a need for change. Congregations wished that Torah leadership should reflect the consensus views of Torah layman. This view may not be heeded by the Yeshiva or Hassidic worlds of influence. Such spheres of thought may seek out their own decisors of Jewish law. That is their right. The modern Orthodox have the right to seek out rabbinic scholars to espouse their viewpoint. Hopefully, halakhic policy will be the result of creative scholarship finely honed through the corridors of halakhic discourse - where ideas and Talmudic and halakhic guidelines are the issues - not personalities or political machinations. In fact, that's what Torah is all about.
 

In Pirkei Avot, it is written (chapter 1:2)
"Shimon Hatzadik was one of the last survivors of the Men of the Great Assembly." He lived with greatness and grandeur. He was a member of the Great Assembly. Thus he personally knew the top leaders of a previous generation, among whom were numbered several prophets who spoke in the name of God. He was a Kohen Gadol. Legend has it that he influenced Alexander the Great, and the Abarbanel writes that he communicated with Aristotle. What a pedigree! Yet, after his death, the leadership of Torah passed to Antigonos Ish Soho. He was not a High Priest; not a man of Jerusalem. He was a new leader who came out of the woodwork to become the singular spokesman for religion and the emissary to pass on the tradition to yet another generation. This teaches us again the old maxim that "Torah Tsiva Lanu Moshe, Morasha Kehilat Yaakov. The Torah that Moses commanded us is an inheritance to the children of Jacob." (Deut. 33:4)
Torah is not the sole repository of any one group. It belongs to all. All Jews are to learn Torah. Every Jew is a potential Hillel or Beruria. Pirke Avot delineates the transmission of Torah from one generation to another. Moshe and Yehoshua each served as the ultimate leader for their generations. Yet, afterward, no one person emerged to be so acclaimed by the Jewish people. There was a group called the "Elders" (wise men). Torah leadership was transformed from a single Master to a group of scholars; each lacking the ability to represent the totality of Kelal Yisrael - Maybe that is what will now take place again.

What is the most significant thing that ever happened to you, and what did it teach you?

It doesn't work that way, because there are moments when one thing is significant and moments when something else is significant. For a man to be present at the birth of a child is an overwhelming thing. I've been present at the birth of my children, and it's really amazing. I think that's the greatest, deepest miracle because all other things have their space . . . Yet when I look back, every once in a while I make a list of high moments and start saying, "There were moments of love; there were moments of insight; there were moments of prayer." There were even moments of terror, almost like facing death, which made me say, "Aha! Now I understand what it's all about." But I'm still learning about spiritual and holy eldering. Most people don't know how to live the holy life after retirement. You see, popes have remained in the saddle and rabbis have remained in the saddle until they die. I would like to learn how to withdraw gradually from the active life and to spend the last years furthering my solitude with God. That's what I feel life has to teach me. I'm learning to let go of things that are not in my hands to change, learning to live with what, otherwise, would be increasing frustration when I get older.

Life is my teacher. Artificial intelligence is trying to do what natural intelligence is doing. Natural intelligence means that a naturally intelligent organism continues to learn throughout life. Each situation provides a deeper learning, greater learning, a more profound learning. We're all going through a learning, so if I had to pick out one learning as the most significant, I'd say, "I can't; it's constant. The learning that is happening in life is constant because life is a teaching machine." From whom did I learn about life? I learned from life about life, by living life.

Socialized Meditation

Meditation is usually a solitary task. At times one feels that it may only be a solipsistic preoccupation. Much growth happens when meditation is socialized.

We learn from teachers. Here is an example from the Hassidic master, Reb Moshe Kobriner in a little town in Lithuania. People would come to him from all sides asking all sorts of questions. One day he was having his breakfast and all he has is some kasha (buckwheat cereal), and another man comes in and says, "Master, I have so many troubles."

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord, King of the Universe Who has made everything by Thy Word," said Reb Moshe Kobriner (and this was the proper blessing to make before one eats kasha.)

And the man said, "Master, didn't you hear me? I have so many troubles."
And Reb Moshe said, "You know, your father once came to me with the same situation, and he heard me give this blessing that everything comes by His Word and he stopped complaining. Don't you hear?”

Not only with teachers can one enter into such shared meditation. When Buber taught us of the I- -Thou relationship, he spoke of healing through meeting. From my experiences in “socialized meditation” I am convinced that we need to move beyond transpersonal psychology to transpersonal sociology.

All of our conflict resolution efforts not yet managed to turn a recalcitrant person into a collaborating member of global society. The research in this area is vital to our survival. Look at the extremely sophisticated teamwork in technology that can produce a stealth bomber—and compare this to the primitive state of correcting societal dysfunction.

Cycles and Cycles

Prior to this cycle of world creation, there were other cycles of world creation. Holy sparks from those other cycles of world creation, when they were broken, lodged here. Our task is to find those sparks, gather them and bring them together, and restore the balance in the cosmos—to enthrone God again. The Divine Crown, as it were, has gems missing, and in each physical act, we pick up a spark here, a spark there, and bring them together. When all sparks have been gathered, our tradition speaks about the coming of the Messiah. To me, this means something like global oneness, peace, and harmony.

When we become more conscious of the physical and at the same time aware of the highest spirituality, we'll have what I would call the Resurrection of the Dead. This resurrection happens together on a physical and spiritual level. The physical plane is our plane of observation, though everything that happens on a physical plane is not open to our observing. We don’t see with our eyes what is happening between atoms, but if we were on the atomic level we would say, "Ah, this oxygen atom got married to two hydrogen atoms, and they made a water molecule!" We don't operate on that level of awareness. When I put a pot of water on the stove to cook, a lot of weddings take place between the oxygen from the air and the hydrogen that's in the gas, so water gets created. That's a level of observation, the sub-molecular level,that we don't see.

Now in our personal drama, on another level of observation, higher things are happening. Ultimately it takes a meditative leap into other dimensions to be able to see. There is a Latin phrase sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity. It means to look down, to see what is happening in the temporal realm. Then we begin to see what Earth is about, what the planet is about, and what history is about from a much higher level. I believe we are just learning the beginnings of the holy psychotechnology, a spiritual psychotechnology that will allow us to get to such places as observing fine moments-or larger ones. Some people have had the larger experiences. Geniuses have had profound mountaintop experiences. I would say, "If they can see the Infinite, they can see the infinitesimal also, because awareness is up and down the scale." By and large, people haven't bothered to look at the infinitesimal. Now, with nanotechnologies becoming important, people are beginning to concentrate on those things.

Care Packages to Eternity

If you see yourself bound by your skin, then you would ask, "How would something I do help the deceased?" When you recognize that half of your chromosomes are your father's, half are your mother's, and a quarter of them are your grandfather's, you realize that your grandfather is still alive in you, in a quarter of your chromosomes. So if you say a prayer, it is almost as if a portion of him is still available to help that other part of him that is beyond. That's why the disciples of a Master get together at the anniversary of his death to celebrate. There is a feeling that there is so much more of the Master available at that moment.

How does one attain the ideal relationship of body and soul?

First of all, just simply be "you." Feel the earth beneath you; feel the chair; feel how gravity upholds you. Gravity is the way earth loves us and attracts us. We should allow ourselves to be supported by that. Second, do one thing at a time; be totally in that thing you're doing. That's a way to be grounded! The next way to be grounded is to realize that there is stuff above that the groundedness has to support. The point isn't just to be flat on the ground. The point is to be firm enough on the ground so that the rest of you can go up.

What is the greatest obstacle to obtaining new levels?

"The sin that is the hardest to atone for is habit." That is the biggest obstacle to reaching new levels, as one rabbi put it. The more we're in a habitual state, the more unlikely it is that we'll go beyond. We won't be in the moment; we won't be in the here and now. We will hear the routine rather than the challenge that comes at this moment.

Will people eventually reach this ideal?

I believe that all people will reach what they have to reach. I'm a universalist, in that sense. That they will reach the same state is not likely. It is enough for a toe to be the toe of a realized person. If I could be the toe, as it were, of realized humanity, that's fine. Not everybody is going to be the brain cell that fires off a great realization. Still, we'll all be organically connected with that, and the organic connection is what fires, just as an organism has a connection with the toe. So the final enlightenment will have a connection with that concept. It's not likely that there is going to be a final enlightenment. I don't like the word “final”, either, because enlightenment continues to the next level and the next level, and it's infinite in God. We no longer have the Temple in Jerusalem, but when it existed, the holiest person on the holiest day at the holiest time in the holiest place would pronounce the holiest word. There would be a kind of implosion of all the Onenesses. That name is a connection, and each year on Yom Kippur, the old connection goes away and the new connection starts coming in. Sins interfere, spoil, and ruin the old connection.

You can’t attune to what you merely read.

When we learn how to pray, we learn not just how to recite words, but how to open the heart. It's like biofeedback: When we are with a person who is opening the heart, we can feel attuned to it. "Ah, now it feels right in my heart!" But if somebody says, "Open your heart," and you've never had that "thing," how do you know you've done it correctly? If you're in a larger group where all the people are doing this, and there is a liturgy being celebrated, you get to feel at one with the people who are in this elated place. That's how you attune to it.

Total realization can happen anywhere. It can happen spontaneously, and it can happen under direction. Very often, even that which is under direction requires the moment of grace, of spontaneity. But there are people who can achieve attunement in synagogue but not in the marketplace, for instance.

What are the greatest problems in life?

The main problems in life are making a living, making a loving, and making a dying. Making a living is a big problem for many, many people. When that's together, then there's the question of making a loving—how to have good relationships and to receive and to give love. People who don't have that can have all the money in the world, but it's no good! For people who've had a good life and a good loving and a good living, when the time comes to leave that life, the problem is how to do that gently and gratefully.

Why is there suffering in the world?

That's a question that gets us into trouble! One could say that the greatest education we get is through suffering. Consciousness is being raised through deprivation. I will never know what it means to give people food when they're hungry unless I have experienced hunger myself. I will not know how to help somebody who is in pain unless I have experienced pain myself. One could say suffering is the school for empathy. It creates that, but that's only one element of suffering.

Sometimes suffering exists in order to bring us to our senses. Sometimes suffering exists in order to show us that there are tragedies we can't overcome with our childish omnipotence in the world. We begin to see that every choice we make has its consequences. Suffering is the way in which we learn, after the fact, the consequences of our moves.

Then there are some people who suffer and can't identify this reason or that reason. It's just one of those things. "Why do bad things happen to good people?" is the question behind all that, and I haven't yet found a convincing answer. Sometimes no matter what we do, we get clobbered! On a lower level of preparation and understanding we would say, "If we do only the good and the true all the time, we're going to be okay." On a higher level being good doesn't help. The biggest ethical questions are based on just that point.

From Religion to Spirituality

Despite the pessimistic outlook on the whole, there are here and there signs of positive breakthroughs. Meditation is embraced by many people who have no other religious commitment. It has now gone beyond the mere “relaxation response” that meditation can provide. It has led people to greater spiritual growth and awareness. While it seems that religion is “out” for many, spirituality is “in.” People want to learn how to experience the sacred not just talk about it. There is real interest in how adepts do what they do. This interest is not mere curiosity. It is an inquiry into the how that allows for emulation. We have entered into what I have called the dialogue of devoutness. There is a great comparing of notes, of insight and understanding to be shared by those who reverence the name of God and love Him. God listens, hears, and records these things (Mal. 3:16). Such dialogue concerns souls, their journey to God, the difficulties they encounter on the path.

Dialogue of this sort is between the soul and her God. A person who is too busy to live in a state of vulnerability vis-à-vis God has no way to enter into this dialogue. Such a person can say “I believe this” or “I believe that”—and still be spiritually inactive. Religion to such persons is only the things they give verbal assent to, not the things they experience, not the way they face God. They are registered as a Jew or a Protestant or a Catholic like they register as a Republican or Democrat. The function of a creed is to give people a program for life, not just a list of things to be asserted.

What about death and what happens after death?

I do believe that death is only part of the connection between the physical and the inner. It's like pulling the plug. Most people know enough to get their inner out of the way. Let's say you drive in your car and it's rattling; it's in bad shape. Finally, it's all over. You drive it to the junkyard. You get out of the car, and then a crusher comes and crushes it down. You'd be a fool to sit in it after the car is dead. I have the same attitude toward the body. Bodies wear out, and it's a wonderful thing that they wear out. They get recycled, which gives the passenger a chance to get out and pick another car, another vehicle…or to decide not to walk the earth for awhile.

Our tradition teaches that a whole series of things happens after death. A soul has to go through purification because of the contamination of being on this level and the habits that are acquired on this level. After purification come other things that are delightful, ecstatic, and marvelous. Some of them have to do with the realm of feeling. That is one Heaven. Others have to do with the realm of knowing. That's another Heaven. Then there is the Heaven in which we know intuitively and are known by God.

What is most important to you?

I can't say. It varies and changes. If I can't take a breath of air, then the most important thing is to take another breath of air. Imagine: I'm diving underwater and can't get to the surface. How important a breath of air is then! When I have the breath of air, then what's important is how I reach the shore. I don't believe these things are static. There is a dynamic element that's always before us. Right now what I want is to finish the week. Then, to come to a Sabbath rest is the most important thing. It will keep changing all the time.

I do what I do out of concern. My sense is that the more life, the better education, and the more tools that are made available for people to manage their physical and spiritual life, the better off the planet is going to be. And that's what I'm most concerned about.

What is the highest ideal a person can reach?

There is no general statement one can make, because if I say "X or Y is the highest ideal," then we think everybody has to achieve that. But if you achieve what I have to achieve and I achieve what you have to achieve, then I haven't gotten my realization and you haven't gotten your realization. There are individual differences. The Universe is made up of so many individual bits. Each one has to achieve what it is meant to achieve. For someone who is a dancer, the ideal may be the ideal leap. For another person, it may be the ideal meditation. For another, the ideal act of love, kindness, or charity. You have to specialize in your own thing. One Hassidic Master said it very beautifully: "I'm not afraid that God will ask me, 'Zusha, why have you not become an Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob?' But I am afraid that God will ask me, 'Zusha, why have you not become what Zusha was intended to be?'"

What makes you happy? sad? angry?

I'm happy when I have contentment and moments of no conflict. I'm happy when I feel love coming and going from my heart to those who are around me, when I feel integrated with the Universe and at peace with God. The opposite makes me sad. To see people suffering and not to be able to help makes me sad. The child has an earache, and there's nothing at this point that can be done. I can hold a child, but it's not going to make the earache go away. To be powerless over pain that others experience is sad. What makes me angry is willful malicious obstruction of the common good.

If you could meet anyone throughout history, whom would you want to meet and what would you ask that person?

I would like to meet myself at the moment after enlightenment . Then I would like to ask, "How did you do it?" All the other people would just satisfy a kind of curiosity, but it wouldn't help me in my stuff, so I wouldn't want to go into the past so much as into the future. But you want me to name somebody in the past I would want to connect with. There are many Hassidic Masters, but I would like to go to the founder of the Hassidic movement, Ba'al Shem Tov, and just be with him and not ask him any questions. I would want to look at him, to have him look at me, and then to pray in such a way that I could learn something from him. I would want to attune to his spirituality. That's all. It's not words I would want .

Book tours are common—authors travel from one place to another to do readings and talks to promote their new books. But story tours? I realize that’s what I’ve been doing, giving readings of a story which I wrote in Ladino and translated into English, “Pasha: Ruminations of David Aroughetti.” The story, published in Midstream in English in 2005, and in Sephardic Horizons in Ladino in 2011, is about a Turkish Jew in the early 1900s in the fast-deteriorating Ottoman Empire and then in New York. When we meet him, this character has virtually nothing. Yet ironically he’s adopted the mindset of a harsh arrogant pasha—the Turkish word means a high-ranking public official, or someone who acts like one. In the spring of 2014, I did eight readings of the story in six weeks on a variety of CUNY campuses; before that, over the years, I’d done ten similar events in California, Massachusetts, and New York.

My CUNY readings were part of my project, “Spanish, Mizrahi, and Black Jews: Diversity and the Jews,” supported by a Diversity Fund grant that allowed me time away from an intensive teaching schedule. I went to Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens, and it was exhilarating being welcomed on campuses in New York all nicely reachable by subway or bus. At Brooklyn College, for instance, I read at a symposium co-sponsored by fourteen departments including Judaic Studies, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Modern Languages and Literatures, Women and Gender Studies, and the office of the President.

At City College I performed for a theatre history course; at Baruch for a course on the Ottoman Empire; at Queensborough for the Liberal Arts Academy and Creative Writing Club; at Bronx Community at the CUNY Language Immersion Program; at City Tech (my campus) for two writing courses; and at the Americas Society for the Latin American Jewish Studies Association /CUNY Academy of the Humanities conference, where I read in Ladino.

The goal of my project was to counter the assumption that ethnic or racial groups are monolithic. People forget that a group with a particular label is actually highly diverse. Asians, for instance, may be Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, or Japanese; or Hispanics, Puerto Rican, Ecuadorian, Dominican or Filipino. Similarly, Jews are not always white, nor do they all have names like Bloomberg or Goldstein; individuals named Rodquigue, Aghassi, Aroughetti, Sulieman, Gourgey, Papo and Abravaya may also be Jews.

One might ask, however, why encourage a multi-ethnic awareness through the lens of Judaism? For one thing, Jewish diversity is a metaphor for diversity at large. But also, CUNY students today don’t know much about Jews, yet are curious about them. Although, for instance, Jewish students were once a large majority at City College, today Jews are a small minority of the nearly half million students at CUNY, and reading a short story about a Spanish-Turkish-American Jew opens students to fresh experience they haven’t encountered before. The Sephardic experience happens to be one with a wide demographic reference. In this case, it’s Turkish, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, Jewish, immigrant and thoroughly American, a mix of the old country and the modern world with juxtapositions of the cosmopolitan and the provincial, the underdog and the power-monger. And in that mix, as everywhere, a good story is about being desperate for dignity.

CUNY students themselves represent so many ethnicities and are from so many countries all over the world that they are eager for new ways of viewing their own histories. In general, I find, people are eager for breaking down the doors of cultural boundaries. I should add that as a teacher of writing and literature, I’m interested in the way awareness of ethnicity crossing unexpected cultural boundaries encourages readers to think in new ways about family dynamics, identity, gender patterns, and even music. Hearing my story, students of diverse backgrounds see their own families in a larger context and model the power of such discovery for their own thinking and writing.

The Hispanic elements of my fiction, especially the fact of my writing this story originally in Judeo-Spanish, has made my project particularly attractive to a category of colleges such as City Tech and Bronx Community College that are known as Hispanic-Serving Institutions because of their high percentage of Latino/a students. For Hispanic students in general, the story of the Spanish Jews, who kept speaking Spanish in Turkey and elsewhere for five hundred years after their expulsion from Spain, opens new doors for listeners to understand their own Spanish backgrounds. Most of my readings have been in English, but I generally read excerpts in Ladino for the shock of recognition students have when they understand it.

“Pasha” essentially is a story about manhood in the face of harsh prohibitions. How does a young man in Turkey survive—with basically nothing, no money or education—when he’s a second son prohibited from even touching the violin his older brother will inherit along with the prospect of becoming a musician? David Aroughetti’s prospects in Turkey are especially bad because his own father can barely scrape together a living, and his whole community is struggling with poverty. Then too, after he emigrates, as he asserts himself and assimilates to early twentieth-century New York City, selling cigarettes on the streets, for instance, what are the personal and emotional costs and losses? People from all countries face similar pressures, continually calculating the costs of moving ahead, and the strains in relationships between men and women, and parents and children, that accompany a reordering of the past and a dash to the future. Perhaps nowhere are these questions muddled through, avoided, or confronted more than on the campuses of City University, where students from over two hundred different countries study together to promote their future. The questions remain for all immigrants and migrants trying to make their peace with traditional backgrounds and the open question of the future; they need to find not only an identity, but the relationships and community that allow them the dignity that every human being craves.

My CUNY readings were exhilarating because of the array of differences in the way the audiences of students and faculty responded, and the pleasure of the unexpected. A common reaction was, “I’ve never heard of Jews that speak Spanish.” An unusual one was when a young woman, having listened, wanted to talk about her family’s life in Sarayevo. A Latino student in a white button down shirt thoughtfully asked, “Did you notice that despite who this character is, and what we expect from him, he finds a way to rebel in America”? A handsome tall dark-skinned student said “I have to tell you that the Pasha story describes exactly how things are today in Ivory Coast.”

A stylish young Jamaican woman, who grew up in a poor Kingston neighborhood in a zinc hut right where a gully flooded regularly during storms, wrote, “I think you hit it dead on. All we are searching for is ‘identity’ to find who we are in the world and what we are meant to do. It really is a journey. There’s a huge misconception that you are born knowing who you are and what you want to do and that is completely false. Life is about discovering who you are in this chaos of a world.” A student named Remy said about the tense and aggressive main character, “I wished he could smile, enjoy life a little.” Another student said her father is Russian, her mother Chinese, and the story reminded her of how she likes to listen to Chinese music with her mother. In the course on Ottoman history a student asked if the main character’s arrogant pasha personality was an emblem of the whole problem of the Ottoman Empire at that time. A student in a writing class brought up Venezuela to say, “Some political leaders adopt pasha approaches to governing.”

Kimberly La Force, a former student of mine from St. Lucia, currently in a philosophy course for her graduate program at Columbia University, brought up an illuminating point after the reading she attended. She wrote me that the main character’s aggressive assumption that he is superior to others should be considered with an eye to the error of “dichotomous thinking.” Quoting the contemporary feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, Kimberly said the problem with thinking in dichotomies like male/female, or mind/body, is that it “hierarchizes polarized terms” making one “the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart.” Indeed, by the end, the story restores the subordinated essence to its proper value, in a way our pasha does not expect.

I’m reminded of how students in Professor Carole Harris’s literature course last year talked about the dynamics of power in the way individuals treat each other. After reading the story, students considered “Pasha” characters in the short stories of the Southern American writer Flannery O’Connor, the Dominican writer Junot Díaz, and the Irish writer James Joyce, and noted the way literature written “inside a community” encourages discussion of difficulties in the very cultural groups that set up harsh dichotomies as social codes.

I’m a writer, a person who likes to stand to tell a story. We live in a world where the sight of text has often prompted the rejoinder “tl;dr”— too long, didn’t read. Perhaps the oral telling of a story can slow us down in the right way, and as we agree to be there for that thirty minutes or hour, we re-orient our sense of time. In the classroom at the top of the stairs in the Bronx, when I handed a copy of my story to a student who wanted to read along, I heard a groan because it looked long. When I said it will take me just thirty minutes to read it aloud, we were suddenly okay. Oh, half an hour. Literature builds bridges, takes down walls.

Listening to stories is worth something. The very sound of a story being told takes hold in the body. Peter Elbow, a well-known inspiring writing teacher whom I met at a recent Modern Language Association national convention, has said that language resides in the mouth and the ear, and meaning resides in the body. We need stories, music—that violin that the second son was not allowed to touch. I think the Diversity Fund should sponsor fiction-readings all over CUNY for writers of all backgrounds.

In May I began the second part of my Diversity project; I’m doing oral history interviews of Jews from different countries and neighborhoods of the world, for instance, Tunisia, Morocco, African-American Harlem, Bulgaria, Iraq, Israel, Turkey, India, China, Yemen. After that, to be continued.

Notes:

Jane Mushabac’s short story appeared in her English translation, “Pasha: Ruminations of David Aroughetti,” under the pen name S. Manot in Midstream LI.4 Yiddish/Ladino issue (July/Aug. 2005): 41-44; and in her original Ladino, “Pasha: Pensamientos de David Aroughetti,” under the pen name Shalach Manot in Sephardic Horizons online journal 1.4 [http://www.sephardichorizons.org/Volume1/Issue4/Pasha.html] (Fall, 2011).

City Tech is New York City College of Technology, a college of the City University of New York located in Downtown Brooklyn.

As a child, in my formative years, I grew up on New York’s Lower East Side. I attended Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem and was privileged to know Rav Moshe Feinstein. My grandfather was the b’al koreh at the Yeshiva and a close friend of Rav Moshe, so I was blessed to have visited the Feinstein home on numerous occasions. Rav Moshe had a great influence on me. It was he who taught me how to interact with Jews of a wide range of observance, especially in the way he modeled Torah as an expression of love, patience, tolerance, and universal respect (b’sever panim yafot).

I used to watch Rav Moshe daven, for he sat just a few rows ahead of me in shul. His discipline was amazing. Between each aliya of the Keriat haTorah, he would lift a book of mishnayot and go through the text, not wasting a moment’s time to study. While this strict discipline was regular practice for Rav Moshe, he would override it and interrupt his study when the virtue of kindness was necessary. His spontaneous hessed was strikingly incorporated within his discipline, so it was evident that this hessed was a well thought out, integrated trait that came from his perception that this is what Torah required, and this surpassed everything else.

I vividly remember when on one Shabbat morning, during Keriat haTorah, an elderly woman with a handbag and purse barged into the shul’s Bet haMidrash men’s section, and cried out, “I must speak to Rav Moshe.” The kehillah was in a bit of a shock, and several men rose up to escort the lady out of the synagogue. But before they could do so, Rav Moshe ran over to her and asked what was wrong. She said that her husband was on his death bed in the hospital, and he wanted to speak to him before he died. Without a moment’s hesitation, Rav Moshe threw on his coat and ran out of shul with the lady. From all appearances she was not an observant Jew; she was carrying a purse on Shabbat, and ignoring the prohibition of entering the men’s section and breaching the mehitsa. Rav Moshe’s essence was hessed, and being interrupted even in Torah study, or not fulfilling the obligation of hearing the Torah reading was secondary to an act of kindness and respect toward this woman. It did not matter in the least whether she was observant or not. This was his Torah mandate.

Another vivid memory was the way he interacted with the young children in the Synagogue. My friends and I were a bit rude and rowdy during Keriat haTorah. Many of the congregants unsuccessfully tried to silence us during the Torah reading, but our passion to discuss the baseball scores outweighed our desire to hear every word of the Torah reading. Rav Moshe never chastised us, and often smiled warmly at me. Reflecting on it now, I realize that he understood how strongly disposed to sports fifth-grade students were, more keenly felt by us than our obligation to keep decorum, not to disturb others and listen to the Torah reading. I was always embarrassed about the noise level, but the far greater imprint was the impression that I culled that treating others with love and respect was Judaism’s supreme value.

As I grew older, I was drawn to the many teachings in our tradition that supported my earliest experience with this Gadol haDor. I was instantly drawn to the teachings in the Gemara and Midrash that emphasized the notion of Imitatio Dei, “Just as God is loving and patient, so must we act with these qualities in this world.” As Ben Azzai says (J.T. Nedarim 9:4), the most important verse in the Torah is that every human being is created in the image of God (Bereishith 5:1), and thus must be treated thusly, as the Mishna in Sanhedrin (4:5) affirms. (A human being is created alone, to teach us that every human being has absolute value, embodies uniqueness, and thus deserves to be treated with equality and respect as befitting one who is created in the image of God.) This was a continuation of what we began learning as children about the laws of damages/nezikin in our earliest exposure to Gemara; the main emphasis was always on how we were to treat other human beings and their property, which included even the property of our enemies.

Later on I discovered the Mussar movement, and R. Yisrael Salanter who said, “The Torah came to create a Mensch; the more human you are, the more Jewish you are.” He captured a most profound dictum that always stayed with me, “Rather than worry about another person’s spiritual level and your own physical needs, worry about your own spiritual level and another person’s physical needs.” (Dov Katz, T’nuat Hamussar, p. 304). This is exactly what I observed in Rav Moshe. As I listened to Mussar lectures and learned Torah, I became convinced in my heart that the prime teaching of the Torah is “olam hessed yibaneh,” the world was created for the sake of the kindness we are able to bestow upon others. As the quaint Hassidic teaching captures it, the Torah begins with a bet and ends with a lamed; lamed bet spells lev, heart, and thus the whole Torah is a heart book, opening our hearts to be kind to others, who are created in the image of God.

These teachings were supported by a whole slew of Torah teachings from various sources. Famously, we learn that among the reasons for the destruction of the Second Temple, the Talmud states, that the Jews did not know how to rebuke each other lovingly, nor did they know how to accept rebuke (Vayikra 19:17–18); moreover, the Talmud (Yoma 9b) teaches that the destruction of the second Bet haMikdash was due to baseless hatred of one Jew toward another. Rav Abraham Isaac Kook says that the third Temple will be built only through the antidote, “baseless love toward our fellow Jew.” Rav Moshe added an important principle in our interaction with those whom we perceive “as in error,” for he placed those in our contemporary generation who do not observe the mitzvoth in the category of tinok sheNishba—they simply have not been educated religiously; they are not willful “sinners.” Thus, the antidote is to educate them with a welcoming presence, and with passion for the beauty of Torah. As the Talmud says, we are to “hate the sin, but not the sinner” (Berakhot 10a).

The Hafetz Hayyim urges us not to say anything bad about our fellow Jew, to be flowing with loving words toward others. That would even apply to governments and political discussions, where we tend to demonize the other. This is not the way of Torat Hessed. Furthermore, it is taught that the Jewish people were worthy to receive the Torah at Mt. Sinai because they were in a state of harmony, “And they encamped as one in front of the mountain” (Shemoth 19:2). It is only when a spirit of love emanates from us that we are worthy of the highest blessing, and it is in this spirit that we truly carry out the mandate of the Torah. The Maharsha, at the end of Yebamoth, similarly states that any halakha that does not lead to peace and harmony is questionable in its veracity, quoting the verse: “Its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace” (Mishlei 3:17).

The Kabbalists suggest that it is incumbent to include sinners as well as the righteous in our communities in order for Kelal Yisrael to reach its Messianic destiny of growth and wholeness. For it is only in the encounter with darkness that we grow fully; only when we face the darkness within and without do we have a chance to overcome obstacles and complacency which inhibit growth. Any closed system that attempts to remain insulated and pure reaches a state of entropy, self-righteousness, and blindness to its own inner failings. It took a Yitro, an outsider, to awaken Moshe to some flaws within his community and the way in which he was leading it. A closed community reaches a state of entropy, and misses the opportunity for growth that an open system, which welcomes outsiders, experiences.

Thus the Kabbalists explain why the ketoret (incense) offering includes a putrid smelling spice, called helbena, with all the other sweet-smelling spices. The letter het of the helbena symbolizes hoshekh (darkness), and het (sinfulness) that is necessary in a holistic community promoting growth, and the mystics urge us to remember that the letter het includes the important concept that “hasdei Hashem kee lo tamnu,” the kindness of the Lord never ceases, and includes the kindness to sinners and those who are in the “dark.” Moreover, each of us needs to face the shadow, the darkness within ourselves as well as in the other, the outsider, in order to achieve full growth, the fulfillment of our destiny, and the actualization of wholeness.

The Talmud suggests the same idea when it states that any minyan that does not include a sinner is not a successful prayer gathering. It is lacking in loving-kindness through its insulation, and cannot reach the heights of a group that is engaged in the potentially transformative struggle with its shadow. We learn this intimately from King David, who repents from his sins and is lauded for his growth. As the Gemara states, “A perfect tsadik cannot measure up to one who has done teshuvah” (Berakhot 34b). And the very term for a member of the Jewish people, an Israelite, is one who struggles, who wrestles with God. Remember, it is always easier to love one who is like you; but the challenge is to also learn to love difference. Hence, it is Ben Azzai’s view, suggesting a universal verse that is the most important verse in the Torah and is even preferable to Rabbi Akiva’s more limited view that “Loving your neighbor as yourself” (which suggests only your neighbor) is the most important. Of course, this does not obviate the importance of loving those who are like us, a particularistic demand; we must always begin with ourselves. However, the goal is to build on that and reach out to those who are different from us as well. Indeed, this is the “messianic consciousness” found throughout the tradition where we reach the perception that all of us are children of God, all distinct aspects of the total unity, and our task is to act to bring this about, by acting with hessed and the 13 attributes of God. But the journey toward the messianic era necessitates the facing of dualities along the way, in order to achieve a conscious unity. As the Sefat Emet says at the end of Vayhi, our world is not a world of unity and truth, but a world of duality that necessitates faith; in a world where we journey toward truth, facing the darkness and extracting the light, we strengthen our faith in the face of uncertainty, until we reach our dying days and enter the world of truth. At that point there is no more growth, there is certainty.

Growth comes about in facing the darkness that develops and necessitates faith along the journey.

So, armed with the blessed example of Rav Moshe, and the inspirational teachings of the Torah, I felt within that part of my challenge and destiny in life would be to engage with peers and contemporaries who had not had the same exposure to Torah that I did. And my first experience with working with Jews of other denominations was when I worked with Jacob Birnbaum and others for SSSJ (Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry). This cause involved the plight of thousands of Soviet Jews, and the success of its efforts depended on our ability to engage as large a group of student activists possible. That meant their denominational affiliations were irrelevant. Even though for me, SSSJ started out in the dorms of Yeshiva University with Jacob’s prophetic visits and exhortations, it soon began to involve students from the Jewish Theological Seminary and other schools. United by a common cause, we each gained greater respect for, as well as greater understanding of both the differences and the similarities in our Jewish practice. The common goal for us all was a cause that was important to the Jewish people. Also at that time, Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik allowed YU students to March in protest for the cause of those suffering in Biafra. This permitted us to do our work with the confidence that we were in no way compromising any halakhic dicta; on the contrary, we were participating in activities that promoted peace among Jews, and contributed to the elevation of justice in the world.

Some time after that, when I was in the semikha program at YU, students from JTS called our dorm and asked if some students would be interested in co-creating a strategic plan with them. The primary goal was to influence the Jewish Federation to alter its budget prioritization in a way that would include more funds for Soviet Jewry and Jewish education. They asked for a student representative to participate in regular meetings, with the intent of being present at the annual General Assembly meeting in Boston. The vision was for us to mix with the delegates and explain to them that the current Federation budgetary allocations neglected the dire crisis prevalent in the life of Soviet Jews, and also ignored the escalating cost of Jewish education that needed to be supported in a greater way by the Jewish community’s largest resource.

What we learned from our experience at the G.A. was that funds were raised through local Federations which then bestowed them upon their local communities; so we needed to go back to New York, and convince the New York Federation to reprioritize. So a group of students from various rabbinical schools in New York began meeting on a bi-monthly basis to initiate a dialogue with Federation. This led to a planned protest at the Federation building, because our dialogue did not lead to the results that we had sought. In the process, I learned to understand the sincerity and the idealistic principles of fellow Jews who came from different backgrounds than I did, who held different philosophical beliefs than my own, exquisite fellow Jews who cared about the future of the Jewish people and were willing to sacrifice many days and nights to improve the educational quality of the Jewish community, to take risks in order to ameliorate the plight of Soviet Jews robbed of their heritage in the Soviet Union. Here I was touched by the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe, “Any way can be a way, as long as you MAKE it a way.”

When I graduated the semikha program at YU and received an MSW from YU’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work, my first job was as Hillel Director at MIT. The task of the Hillel Director was (and still is) to engage with the wide variety of Jewish students and faculty who make up the university community. The challenge was to bring tolerance and respect to the various members and unique practices of different communities of Jews, while maintaining one’s own principles, convictions, and practices. As long as one respects oneself, has a desire to share what she or he knows in Torah, and is willing to be respectfully open to the beliefs and practices of others, a natural interaction takes place where people are learning from each other, and stereotypes and fears are attenuated. It is a wonderful opportunity to promote unity within the Jewish people while acknowledging the diversity of our multi-faceted community. Just as the 12 tribes lived under their own flags, but were committed to the welfare of the entire community and the glory of God, Hillel honors the very different backgrounds of the groups of students attending the university while providing them with Jewish education and communal ritual services throughout their stay at the university.

There are, of course, many challenges facing an observant Jew who engages with modern, humanistic, and secular Jewish students. The main requirement for successful connection, though, is the ability to truly listen, to understand the other’s doubts, and to respect and honor each person and group with whom one is interacting. As a Hillel Director and an ordained Orthodox rabbi, I attempted to serve and unite a Jewish community by promoting respect among the different groups and members while honoring the different practices of each tradition. One major obstacle for non-Orthodox students entering an Orthodox setting (if they chose to daven with an Orthodox minyan) is the lack of familiarity with traditional practices and customs, and also with the Hebrew language, all of which makes newcomers feel like inadequate beginners.

Fortunately, most of my students had strong memories and a loving connection to the way of worship with which they were raised. This early path was their sincere and connective way to relating to God and Jewish practice and their earliest memories made a deep imprint on their souls. At that point, I could either attempt to encourage them to stick with and try to master this new form of service, which was alien to them, or encourage their sincere, powerful experience in their familiar prayer mode, and appreciate the depth of their service. I chose the latter, without judgment (following the dictums of R. Yisrael Salanter and the Kotzker) and expanded my appreciation of the depth of the different traditions within Judaism. I found that once they had the choice to say “no” to something they were not comfortable with and did not feel coerced in any way, they were more comfortable in choosing a new form of prayer service if they wanted to. Thus each of the denominational services was given utmost respect, without any attempt to make any group or individual fit into the proscribed halakhic norm.

Another major challenge was engaging with students who did not accept the traditional belief in Divine Providence, as a result of having experienced in their own lives, and in recent history, the “eclipse of God” (Hester Panim), and they could not overcome this authentic feeling. The contemporary experience of the prevalence of evil and injustice in the world, not only between human beings, but also in the natural world of natural disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, famines, tornadoes, and so forth, made them wonder about the lack of God’s intervention in the world. Moreover, they saw no apparent distinction in this world being made between people who kept the commandments and behaved ethically and those who did not.

In this area, I made philosophical attempts to expose students to the Jewish classical interpreters and some modern theologians. For example, ideas such as those contained in Paul Tillich’s “Faith and Doubt,” the teaching of the Sefat Emet to proceed even with doubt, because doubt is inherent in encountering the “Great Mystery” from a rational perspective, and Isaiah Leibowitz’s approach to just do the mitzvah without having to understand the intellectual meaning of the deed, for through the deed itself comes the connection. Although the Rambam requires 13 certain categories of belief in order to be acceptable within the boundaries of tradition, and although the Vilna Gaon asserts that people sin only after they wish to follow their impulses and then rationalize their behavior, I found, on the contrary, that many students genuinely struggled with belief and faith as an obstacle to taking on a traditional lifestyle. They had sincere intellectual doubts and could not take the “leap of faith.” But they were not opposed to participating in the communal experience, engaging in the rituals comfortably, and feeling some spark of connection to their soul as a result.

Despite this approach, the battle was a losing one; some students were won over by intellectual persuasion and contact, but the majority remained skeptical of the traditional worldview found in mainstream Orthodoxy. The most effective way of engaging with all students was to embrace them with love and acceptance, acknowledging their doubts, and inviting them in for practical celebratory rituals such as holy days and Shabbat. Having them experience the warmth of each particular denominational community allowed them to become more accustomed to its practices, despite their reservations about its belief system. But the impact of the “spread of Amalek,” how evil triumphs in the world, was a very powerful catalyst to their doubts. In gematria, Amalek (240) equals Safek (doubt, also 240), and when evil triumphs in the world, the glory of God is reduced, and faith impaired.

There were certain areas that became very stressful for students and faculty to accept when they read the Torah literally, without the inclusion of Oral traditions and commentaries. One prevalent difficulty for them was the literal description of God’s behavior, especially God’s jealousy and retaliation for the Israelites’ not keeping the commandments. They also had challenges with biblical criticism, differentiations between the rights of men and women, attitudes and statements toward gentiles and homosexuals, and so forth. The basic perception of the modern world as evil did not fit into their psychic framework either, having been raised in a post-enlightenment open society and having imbibed the cultural values of humanism, the lure of freedom and choice, materialism, hedonism, and secularism. They sometimes perceived Orthodox Judaism as a cult—tribal, fundamentalist, insular, and not welcoming to outsiders.

I think that this was partially a result of a lack of confidence on their part, not feeling competent because of their ignorance of tradition, so they projected some of their feelings of inadequacy in a hostile fashion toward outsiders. They believed they were being devalued, when in actuality it was their own feeling of inferiority that was creating anxiety, and they dealt with it by blaming those around them who were more learned.

So the antidote to this reaction was to lovingly educate in the depth and beauty of Torah, to respond non-judgmentally to their doubts, and to transparently reveal that I as an authority figure had questions as well (the question is often more important than the answer and can lead to greater depth, according to the Kotzker). But most important of all, it was the working to make our community welcoming, respectful, and warm toward those less religiously educated that drew people in—those individuals from all denominations as well as those not affiliated with Jewish life at home. Furthermore, we worked to make sure that our whole educational staff was comfortable in accepting that beliefs and doubts of others are part of the human condition in the modern world, and to allow for their honesty, to accept and not judge. The dictum of allowing God to be the Judge, and the staff to be welcomers and educators, was our prime guiding principle.
Some of our luminaries, such as the Mei Hashiloah (“The Ishbitzer”) have utilized the concept of “eit la’asot lashem, heifeiru et toratekha” (Psalm 119:126), to expand boundaries in certain areas so as to create openings for those who cannot make full commitments to an observant, Orthodox way of life, and to allow for different philosophical beliefs, even while adhering to many traditions. Following this path our entire Hillel staff attempted to translate the elevated values of Judaism into a modern context, showing how Judaism fits into many of the best values of Western society, and yet rejects some of the excesses that a narcissistic and materialistic culture embodies. An example would be clarifying for some students the misperception that Judaism considers wealth itself to be inherently evil, and articulating how Judaism actually teaches that it is how you utilize your blessing of wealth in a just and generous way that matters. A helpful idea to some students who noticed attitudes in tradition that were at odds with their beliefs was Rav Kook’s statement that along our journey through history as a result of oppression and hostility from others, Jews became reactive and fearful at times, and attitudes crept into the tradition, “jagged cliffs,” that would be removed as we approach the messianic era, but they were not inherent to the core of Judaism. It was thinkers such as R. Emanuel Rackman, R. Eliezer Berkovitz, R. David Hartman, R. Yitz Greenberg, R. Shlomo Riskin, R. Saul Berman, Rav Kook, Martin Buber, and A.J. Heschel, to name a few, that appealed to their modern consciousness.

Although both study and practice were essential, I found that the experiential dimension of Shabbat and the holy days left a far greater imprint than learning about them as “concepts.” Even if students began to take on practices for social reasons, they began to slowly develop an appreciation of the deep spiritual foundation of Judaism.

After some years at MIT Hillel and a year at Princeton Hillel, then completing my studies in the doctoral program at Columbia University School of Social Work, my family moved to Los Angeles so that I could accept a teaching position at USC School of Social Work. In 2000, I received a PhD from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Depth Psychology/Mythology.
At that time a new Rabbinical/Chaplaincy/Cantorial school called the Academy for Jewish Religion, California was being established in Los Angeles. I was asked to join the endeavor, and take on a leadership role. The pioneering concept of this seminary was not to identify with one specific denomination, but to form a faculty with clergy and academicians from Orthodox and non-Orthodox backgrounds. The school would teach Judaic courses found in the denominational seminaries, and add some courses in Hassidut, Mussar, and Pastoral Counseling, with the goal of promoting psycho/spiritual growth in the students. AJRCA’s founders felt that allegiance to the denominations had become more important than the welfare of the Jewish people as a whole; it was becoming widely known that the majority of the Jewish community was not affiliated with any of the denominations. There was a strong desire on the part of mature rabbinical students at existing seminaries for greater cultivation of spirituality to be partnered with an academic curriculum. The charge in establishing AJRCA was to integrate a group of disparate students, honor their individuality, and unite them in a common vision of Jewish peoplehood, love of Torah, and the depth and breadth of great rabbinic teachers throughout the generations. The challenges: Could the halakhic needs of the Orthodox students be satisfied in a mixed group of individuals from different backgrounds with different levels of education and practices? Would the non-Orthodox students feel comfortable with more traditional students? We felt it would be possible for the classes to succeed, but the major challenge was for the form of the prayer services. We settled on a formula, that there would be different styles of services, and that Orthodox students would pray privately or with a traditional minyan, if they so chose, and the non-Orthodox students would pray in mixed services, and everyone would respect the needs and integrity of those who had different practices. Quite miraculously, through this idealistic vision, a faculty of Orthodox and non-Orthodox teachers emerged who respected each other, got along with each other, and were moved in their souls to educate and train a group of idealistic students to the knowledge that touched their souls. The school attracted more students than we could have imagined, and within just 10 years (a remarkably swift achievement) was granted accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), which attested to the quality education that the students received. As the Mishna states: “Every assembly that is dedicated to the sake of heaven will have an enduring effect”(Avot 4:11).

Of course, at first, different segments of each of the denominations directed strong criticism toward this “transdenominational” endeavor. These objections manifested fears on the part of each side that are rarely dealt with. The Orthodox worried that contact with the other, or knowledge of the other, might create flexibility within, which could lead to too great a compromise and loss of tradition. The non-Orthodox worried that contact might expose insecurities and anxieties about legitimacy. It became clear that part of the problem was that when groups only talk to themselves, and exclude the other, prejudices and stereotypes grow rather than diminish. Although each side preached love of the other, the behavior of each side did not always reach this ideal. Part of the challenge became how to disagree with the other and still see him or her as human.

The rigidity that was manifest on each side stemmed from fear, from a feeling of weakness rather than strength. I suggested that if each side would look at its own failings, rather than blaming the other, the other side would be disarmed and a fruitful dialogue could begin. There would evolve an appreciation of the positive contributions of each of the different communities. Of course, this would mean some legitimization of the other, a step heretofore opposed by some, but each side would have to yield something, without compromising integrity, or bear the brunt of the continuing schism that is certainly harmful to Kelal Yisrael. I felt that if we had courage, and proceeded carefully, we would find the way with God’s help. As the Mishna in Avot states, “It is not for us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from beginning it”(Avot 2:16). So we began this endeavor, and every year since then, thank God, AJRCA has graduated rabbis, cantors, and chaplains who have influenced many communities and educated many Jews who would not have otherwise been reached. What has made this possible is the deep feeling of responsibility for fellow Jews these students carried, embodied in their incredible gifts of relational hessed, the school’s emphasis on values of respect for each human being created in the image of God, and the students’ confidence in the truth and beauty of Torah.

This experience of respecting difference while maintaining one’s own values, and working together on projects that affect the welfare and unity of the Jewish people, while promoting the elevation of peace and justice in the world, led AJRCA to join in a new project in 2011 that would expand our graduates’ potential to be effective clergy leaders in the twenty-first century. We joined in the founding of Claremont Lincoln University, the first graduate program to offer courses to students in different seminaries interested in studying world religions, in addition to their own, so they could be better prepared to understand other religions, rather than living with stereotypes, or relying on the limited perspectives that journalistic expositions promote. The idea was that each seminary, Jewish (AJRCA), Christian (Claremont School of Theology), and Islamic (Islamic Center of Southern California), would train its students in their own religious traditions within their full curricula, but that students would have the additional opportunity to take courses in other religions as well, leading to a master’s degree in Interfaith Studies. There would also be some social action projects as part of the curriculum, and students and faculty would have the opportunity to develop trust and friendships with others who were interested in the same ideal of promoting peace and justice in the outer society, and knowledge of the other, so they would feel more comfortable in their desire to engage in interfaith work that is meaningful and that fits into the value framework of their traditions. The program started out with the three Abrahamic religions, and has now expanded to include courses in Eastern and Dharmic religions as well.

Since the world has become so interdependent in the twenty-first century, it seems necessary to educate ourselves to world religions, that may have different cultural and historical frameworks, different forms of worship, but agree on the fundamental teaching of all religions, the golden rule, to treat others with respect and kindness, just as they would like to be treated.

All these institutions and projects, Hillel, AJRCA, and Claremont Lincoln University (CLU), continue to grow as they meet an important need in a new world of intercommunication and encounters with others. If we each remain true to our principles, while remaining respectful of the unique, distinctive practices of others all aiming toward the same goal of a peaceful, just, “messianic” era, we will all be the better for it, and the spirit of God will become manifest palpably as our Sages predict at the “end of the days.” May that day come soon, as we continue to build bridges across the divide.

Introduction [1]

The quest to craft a traditional Judaism that is also engaged with modernity and the wholesome elements of non-Jewish civilization is not new and has been given many names. Some sound odd to today’s Orthodox ears: Traditional Judaism, Positive Historical Judaism, Progressive Conservatism, as well as the more familiar Modern Orthodoxy, Centrist Orthodoxy, and, most recently, Open Orthodoxy.[2] A paradigm for this enterprise was developed in Germany, where Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch, Esriel Hildesheimer, and others developed Neo-Orthodoxy, which Mordechai Breuer described as an attempt to “appropriate the positive values and acceptable norms of European culture and society.” According to Breuer, Neo-Orthodoxy “was not only concerned with somehow coming to terms with modernity and possibly averting its dangers but also with internalizing modernity and putting it in the service of traditional Judaism when this seemed beneficial.” [3]

In late-nineteenth-century America, Sabato Morais adopted the slogan “Enlightened Orthodoxy” as he searched for support to help found the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS).[4] Arthur Kiron has distilled Morais’ vision of Enlightened Orthodoxy as “a harmonious model that combined openness to general cultural trends— poetry, science, and reason, as well as to universal social justice—with devout adherence to particular revealed religious doctrines and practices.”[5] From the 1940s onward, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and his students developed a brand known as Modern or Centrist Judaism.[6] The sociologist Samuel Heilman called its advocates “syncretists” and characterised this post-War form as believing that “much in popular culture and contemporary society was not a source of defilement, but rather a fertile environment for bringing ancient Jewish traditions and values into engagement with modernity…all the while maintaining fidelity to Jewish law and observance.” [7]

However, there is a missing link between Enlightened Orthodoxy and Modern Orthodoxy, which if not entirely forgotten is certainly overlooked. In its first phase under Morais, the JTS promoted Enlightened Orthodoxy, but Solomon Schechter’s appointment as President in 1902 began the process that led to the emergence of a distinct Conservative Judaism.[8] The baton of Enlightened Orthodoxy had to be picked up by others. They have been called proponents of “American Orthodoxy,” but the sources and themes of their outlook went beyond American ideas and needs. It might be called “Positive Orthodoxy” because of the central planks of their approach was an outgoing and confident attitude toward the possibilities for Orthodoxy. They made a bold assertion of their faith, adopted an open-minded if not unlimited approach to scholarly endeavour, and were institutional builders. The champions of this Positive Orthodoxy included scholars and educators such as Rabbis Eliezer Berkowitz, Dov Revel, and Samuel Belkin, and their role in raising disciples deserves, and is receiving, attention. I want to concentrate on four Manhattan pulpit rabbis who drove forward their vision as communal spiritual leaders: Rabbis David de Sola Pool, Leo Jung, Joseph H. Lookstein, and Herbert S. Goldstein.

Context

Before we turn to these representatives of Positive Orthodoxy, we should look briefly at their context; the state of Orthodox Judaism in America in first half of the twentieth century.[9] Rabbi Leo Jung used to say that in this period “Orthodoxy in America was a bad joke,” and although this may have been an exaggeration, it was not without foundation.[10] Most American Jews who attended a synagogue before the Second World War went to an Orthodox synagogue. However, this did not reflect deeper Orthodox practice. On the eve of the First World War, three quarters of immigrant American Jews worked on the Sabbath and 60 percent of Jewish shops were open. Many of those who did not work still did not observe the Sabbath fully and would attend the theater. In a disturbing sign for the future, younger Jews were less observant than their parents. In 1935 it was found that only 10 percent of young Jewish men had been to a synagogue the week before the survey was taken, and in 1940 72 percent had not been to synagogue for a year.

Although by 1937 the Orthodox Union could claim that Orthodoxy was the largest Jewish religious group in America, not only was synagogue turnout poor, in order to maintain what allegiance they could, the Orthodox leaders were forced to make significant compromises including mixed seating of the sexes and late Friday night services to accommodate those who worked into the Sabbath. Orthodoxy seemed to be in terminal decline, doomed to extinction once the immigrant founders of Yiddish-speaking congregations died out. It was the Judaism of the Old World, not the New. By contrast, the Reform movement was strong, and the Conservative movement was growing rapidly (from 22 congregation in 1913 to 229 by 1929). Existing Orthodox leaders and methods seemed to provide no answer to the crisis facing their denomination.

This was the scene into which the proponents of Positive Orthodoxy stepped. They set themselves the task of stemming the tide. They were the founders of a movement that achieved something remarkable. In their time as leading figures, from the 1920s until the 1970s, Orthodoxy in America was transformed. It remained smaller than Conservative or Reform Judaism, but it ceased to be in danger of disappearing, and it regained confidence in its own principles. Between 1955 and 1965, 30 synagogues in the Orthodox Union installed a mehitsa (barrier between men and women in the sanctuary), returning to a more traditional seating arrangement.[11] In 1928, Yeshiva University was established as an Orthodox liberal arts college for men, alongside an existing rabbinical school. In 1956, it expanded to open Stern College for Women.[12] The sociologist Marshal Sklare said in 1971, “Orthodoxy has transformed its image from that of a dying movement to one whose strength and opinions must be reckoned with in any realistic appraisal of the Jewish community.”[13] Unquestionably, this revival owed a great deal to Soloveitchik and his followers, but as Aaron Rakefett Rothkof has remarked, his heroes, and the heroes of his fellow rabbinical students at Yeshiva University in the 1940s and 1950s were men such as Lookstein and Goldstein. They demonstrated that it was possible to make Orthodoxy attractive and successful in the American arena in the twentieth century.

Relevance
Why turn to these Positive Orthodox figures now? What relevance do they have to the Modern Orthodox community today? At the core of the syncretist project in Orthodoxy is the idea that traditional Judaism must be reconciled with the intellectual and cultural conditions of every period. Hirsch found a way for traditional Judaism to co-exist fruitfully with German Romanticism, Hildesheimer with the then-new academic discipline of history and textual study. Later Soloveitchik created an Orthodoxy that spoke in an age of existentialism and epistemological uncertainty. Each generation needs leaders who can do this work, but there is a shortage of leadership in American Modern Orthodoxy. Soloveitchik retired in the mid-1980s and died in 1993. Many of his leading disciples are retiring or are toward the end of their careers. There are some emerging figures, whether Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik at the traditional end of the spectrum or Rabbi Dov Linzer at the liberal end. However, the syncretist endeavour needs a constant new blood. We can encourage new leaders to emerge by reflecting on the importance of leadership itself. The four figures I will discuss were proponents of a positive, broad minded, unashamed, intellectually vibrant Orthodoxy. The task of this paper is to show what Orthodox leaders can achieve, intellectually and practically, when they adopt these attitudes. [14]

Four Figures

This study will examine four synagogue rabbis whose ideas were molded before the Second World War. Each was immensely active and made contributions in numerous areas of Jewish life; however, each had a specific interest. I will examine their approach to their particular concern as a series of case studies. Our quartet comprises David de Sola Pool (1885–1970), Leo Jung (1892–1987), Joseph Lookstein (1902–1979), and Herbert S. Goldstein (1890–1970), who each concentrated on a particular sphere: faith, study, prayer, and community.

David de Sola Pool was the only Sephardic rabbi in this group. In 1907, he was invited by his cousin, Henry Pereira Mendes, to become his assistant at Shearith Israel. He became Senior Minister in 1921 and served the congregation until his death in 1970. There he preached a warm and nourishing faith. Leo Jung was the best educated of the four, in both Jewish and general terms. Jung studied at traditionalist Hungarian yeshivot and the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. He pursued secular studies to doctoral level at several universities. He served the Jewish Center in Manhattan from 1922 until his death in 1987. Jung sought to demonstrate that Jewish learning was sensible, intelligent, and relevant.[15] Joseph Lookstein was born in Russia but came to New York as a small child. He attended traditionalist schools on the Lower East Side and then the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, City College, and Columbia University.[16] He went became assistant to Rabbi Moses Zevulun Margolies (Ramaz) at Kehillath Jeshurun and inherited the pulpit in 1929. He was convinced that the key to revival was to create a synagogue service that the most acculturated American Jew could respect without losing without sacrificing loyalty to halakha. Herbert S. Goldstein was the only one of our four to be born in the United States.[17] Like Lookstein, he saw security for the future of Orthodoxy in the role of the synagogue, but his vision went far beyond the sanctuary. He wanted to place the synagogue at the center of a total community serving all its members’ religious, social, and educational needs.

David de Sola Pool—A Fulfilling Faith

David de Sola Pool was born in London in 1885 into an observant Sephardic family with a history of learning and communal service.[18] Pool grew up three miles from Bevis Marks, so his family worshipped at a branch with room for 120 worshippers, run as a labor of love by his father. There was no official clergy, so Pool heard few sermons growing up and was often called upon to lead services. Even when he was not serving as hazzan, he sang in the choir. The Judaism of Pool’s childhood was warm, uncomplicated, happy, and fulfilling. Shabbat was full of “spiritual uplift and religious joy” and “except on the New Year and Day of Atonement, my religion did not stress that I was the victim of sin.”[19]

Pool’s adolescence disrupted this simple and sunny picture. He hints in his spiritual autobiography to “sturm und drang” days, and his “questioning soul;” however, this never developed into outright religious rebellion.[20] Instead, as he matured, Pool’s general studies brought him awareness of the unity of the world and pointed him to an intellectual faith in a single God. Years later he would expand on this theme, writing of the Jewish Deity:

He is not the God of chaos, of tohu vabohu and darkness, but the God of the marvellous order revealed in nature. Is not this the teaching of the whole Bible, from its opening keynote chapter, the first chapter of Genesis with its poetic, symbolic description of an ordered creation, responding to God’s cosmic law? The law and order or nature revealed to the ancient Jews of the Bible, as they reveal to the modern mathematician-astronomer, the cosmic God. [21]

The intellectual aspect of Pool’s faith was supplemented, or sustained, by the spiritual sustenance he received from nature and from music, even music of Christian origin. Pool described how music spoke to him “in universal accents with transcended sectarian theologies.” [22]

As a young adult, Pool came under the influence of Michael Friedlander (1833–1910), the Principal of Jews’ College.[23] Friedlander was both personally pious and a modern critical scholar, who saw no contradiction between that and his faith. Pool supplemented his studies at Jews’ College with additional instruction in Talmud in the traditionalist community in the east end of London, where he was exposed to its vibrant religious life. He moved to Berlin to further his studies, at the university and the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary, founded by R. Esriel Hildesheimer and led by R. David Tsevi Hoffman. There, Friedlander’s model of faith and scholarship was reinforced. Pool also studied briefly at the Rabbinical College in Florence, Italy, where a similar ideology carried the more Sephardic flavor of tolerance, open-mindedness, and a broad religious humanism.

As a pious, well-educated, English-speaking Western Sephardic Jew, Pool was a rare commodity. After graduating from Berlin, Pool was invited by his cousin, Henry Pereira Mendes, to become his assistant at Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York. He arrived in 1907, became Senior Minister in 1921, and served the congregation until his death in 1970, with a break from 1919 to 1921 when he worked on post-War reconstruction in Palestine. He was a leading figure in the Union of Orthodox Congregations but showed his non-sectarian leanings through his involvement with the cross-denominational New York Board of Jewish Ministers and his acceptance of an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1942. He was a prolific author, writing on American Jewish history, Jewish thought, and social problems, and publishing a series of prayer books with English translations.[24] Like Joseph Soloveitchik, Pool should be read as an existentialist religious thinker, who expressed his own experience in the hope that others would recognize it and respond to it. However, Pool’s experience was very different to Soloveitchik’s. It was not a place of angst and loneliness, but warmth and joy.

Pool’s faith was based on the consciousness of the existence and presence of God and accepting the privilege of serving Him. He told Shearith Israel in his inaugural sermon in 1907:

When he looks again in awe to Heaven he is filled with a strengthening faith that every aspiration to God begets and inspiration from God, that every religious thought and word born from the love of the all-merciful Father returns not empty of blessing to the source of infinite love from which it sprang. [25]

Pool thought that the way to achieve this consciousness of God was not theological speculation but human relationships:

We must keep our souls sensitive to the goodness that is in man, and to aspire to that ideal which we recognize as divine. Then when our spirit is moved with the stirring uplift of beauty, with the thrill of gentleness, with the glory of love, with the moving whisper of the still small voice speaking to us through the conscience and through our ideals, then we shall feel ourselves in the very presence of God. [26]

For Pool, faith had to have content. He identified certain non-negotiable creedal elements of traditional Judaism and defined the “quintessence of Judaism” not as good works but in the declaration of faith contained in the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” Pool regarded the Thirteen Principles of Faith of Maimonides as just one attempt, which never became universally accepted and did “not constitute an official authoritative canon of Jewish belief,” yet, he recognized that they had become the dominant expression and he spent some effort expounding and explaining them.[27] Yet this creedal element did not overwhelm the human and communal, and Pool denied that a Jew must subscribe to a catechism in order to join a synagogue. It was sufficient for members to accept traditional standards in public and official contexts.

Whatever the private views and lifestyle of some members, Shearith Israel had remained traditional in its ritual. Pool condemned as destructive, attempts to depart from traditional Judaism, and saw in them no future:

Therefore, when the voice of criticism is raised and we are told of the supposititious need of reform, we in this synagogue do not even discuss these theoretical claims…We call attention to…the sterility of congregations which have gone from one reform to another. Liberal Jewish congregations may have a seemingly prosperous present but they have cut themselves off from the past and have cut themselves off from the future.[28]

Pool’s emphasis here, and elsewhere, was that faith could not be free-standing; it had to exist alongside action, indeed it was the engine of action. However, the relationship between the two was complicated. Theoretical belief did not automatically lead to upright behavior. It was Judaism’s special contribution to insist on prescribed action, rather that trusting the religious impulse to lead naturally to right behavior:

It is easier to attain a spiritual mood by carrying out a concrete observance than to achieve action through first attaining an abstract spiritual mood. Lo hamidrash haikkar ella hamaaseh-—not theory but practice is essential. [29]

As we would expect this was most manifest in Jewish religious practice. According to Pool, the strictly ritual laws such as tefillin, tsitsith, and kashruth created a life of discipline, which led ultimately to “moral and religious strength…they infuse the routine of life with a sense of divine consecration and bring him closer to God.”[30]

For Pool, therefore, faith in general and Jewish faith in particular was natural, positive and fruitful. It was the result of a childhood of happy piety, based on role models who integrated their faith with their lives. It was fostered by an intellectual comprehension of the nature of the universe and an emotional appreciation of beauty and goodness. It led Jews to a spiritually fulfilling life and encouraged them to help others and improve the world. It was primarily universalistic and inclusive, although certain stands of principle had to be made. This occasionally made Pool critical of other Jewish movements but never exclusive of other Jews. The life of faith was not without effort, but it was a wholesome and enjoyable life.

Leo Jung and the Breadth of Jewish Study

Of our four figures, Leo Jung was the most accomplished scholar, in traditional and modern Jewish modes, and in general studies. He was born in Ungarish-Brod, in Moravia, in 1892.[31] He was the son of the town’s rabbi, Meir Tsevi Jung, who was a follower of Samson Raphael Hirsch and an adherent of Torah Im Derekh Erets. In 1912 Meir became the Senior Minister of the Federation of Synagogues in London. The Federation had been founded to enable the acculturation of new immigrants without forcing them into the highly Anglicized atmosphere of the United Synagogue. There he organized lecture meetings on Sabbath afternoons and created the Sinai League to promote the Hirschian ideology amongst the young. [32]

Leo worshipped his father and was brought up in his ideological and rabbinic mold. He was sent to study at yeshivot in Slovakia and proceeded to the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. Eventually, he held four rabbinic ordinations, and in London, he received a further endorsement from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. He pursued secular studies at the universities of Vienna, Berlin, Marburg, and London, and received doctorates from the universities of Geissen and Cambridge. In 1920 he went to the United States, which boasted few Orthodox rabbis with advanced Jewish and general education. He took his first pulpit in Cleveland, Ohio, but with his profile and abilities he did not remain there long. The Jewish Center in Manhattan had been founded to promote acculturated Orthodoxy. The first attempt, under Mordecai M. Kaplan, had failed as Kaplan became more openly radical. When Jung was called from Cleveland in 1922, it marked a new beginning. He remained there as either Rabbi or Emeritus Rabbi until his death in 1987, making it one of the leading Modern Orthodox synagogues in America.

Jung was a prolific scholar, writer, and editor. He taught Jewish Ethics at Yeshiva University, translated Tractate Yoma for the Soncino Talmud, and revised his graduate work into a book: Fallen Angles in Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan Literature. In a more popular vein, he published volumes of sermons. However, the bulk of his work to spread Jewish study came through the series he edited for over 50 years, The Jewish Library. The first volume appeared in 1928, the last in 1980, and comprised 18 volumes (some revisions of earlier volumes) in total. Jung was a contributor as well as an editor, and we can infer Jung’s vision for Jewish study from his own writings and those he chose to include in the Library. [33]

In his preface to the first volume of the Library, Jung set out his agenda:

Culture is the unfolding of the divine element in human life, the progressive revelation of God above man through God in man. Judaism essentially is a culture, as rich and as broad as life. Hence, The Jewish Library, devised to bring home the thousand and one life messages of Judaism, will partake of all the shades and contours of that great canvas. The volumes of The Jewish Library, endeavoring to represent Judaism and Jewish life as a whole, will reflect in their content the dreams of the Jew, his urges and ambitions, his romantic march through the ages, the contemplative atmosphere of the Beth ha-Midrash, the rapture of the Kabbalist, the heroic scorn of the prophet—the complete panorama of Israel.[34]

Jung’s definition of “the complete panorama of Israel” was rather narrower than it might sound, and was firmly restricted to expressions of Orthodox Judaism. For Jung this was no contradiction, because he regarded Orthodoxy as the only form of Judaism:

To us Jews the Torah is the book of God, revealed to Israel and through Israel to all me. We believe implicitly in its divine origin, we accept it as the standard of our life. We obey its commandments. The meaning of the overwhelming majority of them is clear to us. Some are beyond our reason, but none strike us as incompatible with sound common sense. We have found also that observance of them has brought unlimited blessings to our people. [35]

This was a sharply polemical statement in the context of the United States, where Orthodoxy was not only in the minority but was widely regarded as outdated and doomed. It was also subtly different from Samson Raphael Hirsch’s approach. Hirsch identified non-Orthodoxy as the enemy. Jung implied that it did not exist. Within the parameters of the legitimate which he set out, Jung had an expansive understanding of valid approaches to Judaism, and he used The Jewish Library to promote this whole range. It is in this regard that his approach to Jewish study becomes significant, because his objective, and achievement, was to place before the Jewish public a wide range of original scholarship that demonstrated the breadth that Jung believed was possible within the boundaries of Orthodoxy.

Jung’s fullest statement of his approach to Jewish study is found in his essay “The Rabbis and Freedom of Interpretation,” which appeared in 1958.[36] Jung began by asserting two principles he regarded as untouchable: the revelation at Sinai and the binding authority of halakha. The acceptance of those two commitments, one theological and the other practical, left the rest of the Jewish corpus open to a wide (if not absolute) freedom of interpretation. Jung regarded this effort as “not merely lawful, not merely tolerated as an undeniable privilege…but encouraged and hailed as indications of religious loyalty…and unfailing source of intellectual and spiritual enrichment.” [37]

Jung quoted the well-known idea that there are 70 faces to the Torah and argued that it was this variety of perspectives that gave the Torah its power. Only through successive reinterpretation could the Torah remain lively and compelling:

[J]ust as the Halakhah is never finished but grows vertically and horizontally through the loving devotion of its authoritative scholars, so is the Agadah or the non-preceptive part of the Torah, eternally subject to search, investigative, comparison, elucidation, an on going enterprise—a complimentary progressive revelation of the message from Sinai— through Moses, Isaiah, Hillel, Saadia, Rambam, Ramban, Ralbag, Arama, Hirsch, Rab Kuk, to the dedicated students in all lands and cultures. [38]

Jung was unconcerned that stories in the aggadah might contradict each other or be fantastical because “although stimulating, instructive, often inspiring, they have no authority, they form no part of Jewish religious belief. Nor may they be taken literally: it is always the ideas, the lesson and not the story which is important.”[39] Jung quoted a wide range of examples of differing or contradictory aggadot, which prove that there can be no single authoritative view, whether regarding the behavior of the patriarchs, the nature of the messianic age, or anything else.

Jung was keen to demonstrate the pedigree of his ideas. He cited the early post-talmudic authorities Rav Hai Gaon, Rav Sherira Gaon, Rav Saadia Gaon, R. Shmuel ben Hofni, and R. Shmuel HaNagid as supporting this view. He added R. Abraham ben HaRambam (thirteenth century), who regarded statements on scientific or other general subjects made in the Talmud as non-binding, a view with which the leading halakhist in Jewish history, R. Yosef Caro (sixteenth century), seemed to agree. Jung defended allegorical interpretations of biblical passages, for example, interpreting the story of Balaam’s ass and the angelic visitors to Abraham as having good precedent in the Talmud and in the Midrashim, as well as the writings of the Rambam (twelfth century), R. David Kimche (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), and others. Jung was at pains to distinguish incorrect opinions from heresy. In his view, the fact that a view was incorrect did not, by itself, render it unacceptable.

The essays featured in The Jewish Library put these principles into practice. On the foundation of basic shared commitments Jung assembled thinkers who proposed new ways to understand Judaism and make its meaning and message relevant to moderns. This included the reasons for the mitzvoth, reconciling Torah and science while validating both. Jung sought to demonstrate how Jewish ideas could solve contemporary problems such as marital difficulties, labor relations or international law. The series examined music and the arts, Zionism and the re-establishment of a Jewish state. Jewish sources, if properly and sometimes newly analyzed, were shown to have something important and relevant to say. This was part of Jung’s effort to transform the image of Orthodox Judaism from a backward and obscurantist theology into a movement fitted for the present day, which was not only worthy of survival but had to continue because it could contain all that was valuable in Jewish life and thought.

Jung was believed in the importance of role models, and three of the volumes in The Jewish Library were dedicated to biography. Some of these were of highly traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rabbis, such as R. Akiva Eiger, the Hatam Sofer, and R. Hayyim of Volozhin. However, the range of figures is interesting. Two women featured: Sara Bayla and Sara Schenierer, the founder of the Beis Yaakov schools for girls, in its day a revolutionary development. Also included are Hassidic rebbes, such as R. Menahem Mendel of Kotzk and proto-Zionists and Zionists, including Rabbis Isaac Jacob Reines, Tsevi Hirsch Kalischer, and Moshe Avigdor Amiel. He included both his father’s role model, S. R. Hirsch, who promoted Orthodox separatism, and his opponents, Rabbis Seligman Baer Bamburger and Marcus Horowitz, who remained part of pluralistic communities. Jung was particularly keen to celebrate the Orthodox proponents of Wissenschaft, including his own teacher, David Hoffman, but recording the lives of many others, mostly now forgotten such as Rabbis Joseph Duenner of Amsterdam and Joseph Carelbach of Hamburg. They were exemplars of the type of Jewish study Jung was trying to promote: they were pious, observant, believing Jews who nevertheless engaged in Jewish scholarship which departed from traditional conclusions in interesting ways without touching on fundamentals of the faith.

This became Jung’s distinguishing contribution to the effort to maintain and revive Orthodoxy in America. It was widely welcomed in its time, but the views that he espoused have become rather more controversial in recent years. Even within Modern Orthodoxy, there has been a narrowing. Orthodox Wissenschaft is now out of favor, although it still has exponents in Bar Ilan University in Israel, the Bernard Revel Graduate School at Yeshiva University, and among individual scholars elsewhere. Among Orthodox leaders, there is little embrace of the breadth of approaches so enthusiastically promoted by Jung, and there is often outright hostility. This narrowing excludes and delegitimizes, and if we accept Jung’s approach, it does so without any religious necessity. A richer Judaism, Jung’s Judaism, deserves renewed attention.

Joseph Lookstein—Traditional Prayer in an American Sanctuary

Joseph Lookstein was born in Russia in 1902, and after coming to New York at the age of seven, he attended the Jacob Joseph School, City College, and Columbia University.[40] He received his rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University in 1926. While still a student, in 1923, he was recommended by the President of Yeshiva University (YU), Bernard Revel, to Ramaz to be his assistant at Kehilath Jeshurun (KJ). It was then a distinguished but declining congregation in need of revitalization. Some years earlier, modernizing forces had secured the appointment of a JTS graduate, Mordecai M. Kaplan, to run the religion school and deliver an English sermon, as Margolies only spoke Yiddish in public.[41] After Kaplan left, the role of an English preacher was maintained, leading eventually to Lookstein’s appointment. Lookstein excelled in the pulpit and became recognised as a star preacher. In due course, Lookstein married Margolies’ granddaughter. As a member of the family, a graduate of YU rather than the JTS and an experienced member of the KJ clergy, Lookstein duly became Senior Rabbi on Margolies’ death in 1936 and served until his own in 1979. In 1937 he founded the Ramaz School, named after his grandfather-in-law; by the time he died it had a roll of 800 students. However, the center of his rabbinate, indeed his life, remained KJ.

Lookstein possessed an absolute confidence in Orthodoxy. He believed that it had a future and the potential to provide a relevant and attractive religious life to contemporary Americans. He told a meeting organized by Young Israel in 1930:

We are now safe in expecting them [young people] to come back to us, and having come back to find their true happiness and their real self-fulfillment through closer identification and through greater intimacy with Traditional Judaism. [42]

In 1930, this was far from clear, but it was a vision, and it was guided in particular by an attitude toward the practice of prayer. Lookstein fashioned a service that he hoped would make Orthodoxy the denomination of choice. By the end of his career he believed he had achieved it. As he wrote to his son and successor Haskel in 1968:

We made Conservatism or Reform unnecessary and undesirable to a substantial number of families in the neighborhood…Some of them would have joined Conservative or Reform temples in their area but found their way to us and would not go elsewhere…[they] have changed their homes to kosher and their entire home to greater Jewishness. Some of these people sent their children to Ramaz and, because of that, these people and their homes will never be the same…All this we were able to do because…our intention was to conduct the kind of public worship that would be as dignified as the most Reform and as pious as worship in a “shteibbel”…we have never violated in our public worship policy, the Jewish law. [43]

Lookstein’s aim was to create a halakhically conforming service, which combined an Americanized aesthetic with traditional religious feeling. In effect Lookstein sought to create an institutional version of himself: Orthodox, halakhic, but as comfortable in the modern world as the rabbi of any other denomination. Lookstein saw himself and his approach as a way, perhaps in modern America, the way, of drawing as wide a group as possible into an Orthodox setting, with the hope that this would have an impact on their wider religious lives. He wrote in a private note “a well conducted service is in itself the best inducement to attendance.” [44]

Lookstein’s achievement depended on a remarkable attention to detail, meticulous planning, and careful reflection. A record was kept of each person called up to the Torah. The running order of the annual communal Seder for the first night of Passover was set out in advance to the utmost precision. To give a few specific examples: In 1954 he determined that the seating of children during the reading of the Book of Esther on Purim was problematic, and therefore “all children should be made to sit in the section reserved for the children. In no circumstances should children be permitted to sit near their parents; experience has demonstrated that in such cases it is impossible to control them and, therefore, there is noise and commotion in the neighborhood where they sit.” Lookstein was prepared to impose tight control on his staff to achieve the outcome he wanted. In 1953, he pronounced that “the cantor must be made to realize that he is the precentor, the leader of a service not the star of a musical performance indulging in recitatives and cantorial obligatos [who] becomes irritating to those who come to pray and is religiously distracting.”

Every year after the High Holiday services, he would circulate a memorandum that identified what had gone well, what badly, and what ought to be changed. In 1953, he wrote three long notes on changes to the weekday, Sabbath, and High Holiday services in order to increase their appeal. The weekday morning service was not to last more than 45 minutes, if need be by eliminating, shorting, or replacing with English readings some less essential sections, such as the scriptural references to sacrifices in the early part of the service and the supplications (tahanun) after the Amida. The evening service was to be read earlier than nightfall for the convenience of members. The timings of each section of the Sabbath service were set out, so that the entire service lasted no longer than three hours. Responsive and communal reading was introduced to maintain participation. Lookstein ruled that there should never be more than seven men called to the Torah to prevent the reading being extended. He decided that “the opening of the KN [Kol Nidre] service should have a dramatic touch…Perhaps some sort of procession ought to open the service.” Over the course of the High Holiday services there were to be fewer openings of the Ark, to avoid constant standing up and sitting down on the part of the worshippers.[45] Lookstein’s care was minute, extending to the cleanliness of the bathrooms, the shine of the brass fittings, and the condition of the prayer books.

Lookstein’s vision was strikingly similar to the policy of the religious leaders of centrist Orthodoxy in Europe. The presence of figures such as Moses Hyamson from London, serving at the nearby Orach Chayim, and Leo Jung and David de Sola Pool on the other side of Central Park brought these ideas from Britain to New York, and provided a model. Special services, for example, had long played a part in Anglo-Jewish life, to mark coronations, national days of prayer, and the like. KJ instituted services for the Sabbaths before Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day. In common with Shearith Israel, KJ marked Thanksgiving with a special liturgy, delivered by cantor and choir and featuring a guest speaker. This was prayer with a purpose. As a congregational writer explained, “the service on that occasion offers us an opportunity for the integration of Judaism and Americanism and enables us to give to a national holiday a religious flavor and significance.” [46]

Lookstein’s approach worked. When he arrived at KJ, the Upper East Side community was suffering from an exodus to the West Side. The problems were exacerbated by the Great Depression, which reduced membership and other contributions. By the early 1930s, the budget had fallen by two thirds and the congregation was forced to take out a mortgage. Lookstein rebuilt the congregation from this low ebb. From around 1940, the community began to grow again, and by 1946, there were 250 member families and 700 seat-holding families.[47] Lookstein remained obsessed with numbers and kept a weekly tally of attendance.[48] Most remarkably Lookstein was able to attract this strong following even though he refused to bend on the issue of mixed seating, which many Orthodox synagogues introduced because they came to belief it was essential to their survival. Lookstein showed it was not.[49] By the late 1960s, this vision was under attack in the world of New York Orthodox Judaism, which Haym Soloveitchik documented in his important article, “Rupture and Reconstruction.” [50] As Ferziger has noted, Lookstein wrote the 1968 memorandum to his son because he feared that his concept was in danger of being overturned by a growing tendency toward religious extremism, what is now called the “swing to the right.” Toward the end of his career, Lookstein was attempting to defend his achievement from that threat, which he viewed as endangering both a vision of Orthodoxy and a successful strategy for KJ.

Joseph Lookstein’s contribution to the stabilizing and early revival of Orthodoxy in an American setting was to take the central practice of a synagogue, prayer, and find a way to combine the essentials of tradition with an attractive form. This was not Lookstein’s invention. He had Western European models to work from, some in New York, and he had like-minded colleagues, but he was one of the most active and important proponents in America of this approach. Lookstein believed that public worship which engaged with modern tastes and wider society could be a powerful draw for Orthodoxy, and in the case of KJ, he succeeded. Each place and time calls for a different type of engagement, but the underlying principle remains Lookstein’s.

Herbert S. Goldstein—Religious Community

Herbert S. Goldstein was born in New York in 1890. [51] He was raised in an observant household keen to become Americanized, and unlike many others of his generation, he was always more comfortable in English than Yiddish. He attended Etz Chaim Yeshiva and public school before entering Columbia University with a view to becoming a lawyer. However, he was inspired by Joseph Mayer Asher, the Enlightened Orthodox rabbi of Orach Chaim on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to enter the rabbinate. Asher was also the professor of homiletics at the JTS and one of its few remaining ties to Orthodoxy. Goldstein was caught on the cusp of two emerging movements: American Conservative Judaism and American Modern Orthodox Judaism. However, there was still no American alternative to the Seminary for a broadly traditional but Westernized rabbinical training. Goldstein entered the JTS 1910 but was never entirely at home. He clashed with Solomon Schechter and the increasingly radical professor of homiletics, Mordecai M. Kaplan. Goldstein supplemented his studies at the JTS with private tuition and received ordination from both the Seminary and a Lower East Side Orthodox rabbi, Rabbi Shalom Elchanan Jaffe.

Goldstein became the first Orthodox rabbi to be ordained in America and took his first job after graduation as Rabbi Margulies' Assistant Rabbi at Kehilath Jeshurun, but his ambitions were wider. As one of the small number of committed Orthodox Jews from an immigrant background who was also thoroughly Americanized, Goldstein was able to diagnose the problem Orthodoxy faced in America. It was largely Yiddish speaking and based around small synagogues in the Eastern European style. The new, American-born generation rejected such Judaism as foreign. If they were to remain committed to Judaism, they had to be given a way to do so consistent with their American identity. Reform and Conservative Judaism provided that, and Goldstein set himself the task of doing the same for Orthodoxy. Indeed with his JTS background, Goldstein was acutely aware of the challenge from the emergent Conservative Judaism, and was determined to combat it, as he told the Orthodox Union in 1927, “there has crept in a new group, guilty of breaking up the Jewish people into further disunity. They flirt with Reform in practice, and prate about Conservatism on paper…these self-styled Conservatives—these misnomers, the disguised radicals and reformers have not the courage to describe themselves as they are.” [52]

Goldstein believed that had to be a new generation of leaders and a new vision to end the decline of Orthodoxy. As Goldstein told the Orthodox Union in 1933: “Our synagogues and schools are in a woeful condition… the soul of the Jew is being starved. Synagogues have become devoid of their religious leader and whole communities are simply drifting into despair…Our religious and educational plight is a lamentable one.” [53] Goldstein prosecuted his agenda through a variety of means, but his main contribution was establishing a new type of synagogue. Unlike Lookstein who was prepared to work within established institutions, Goldstein wanted to break out of existing structures and found not only a new synagogue but a new type of synagogue.

As early as 1916, Goldstein was agitating for a new synagogue model. It was a type that would emerge in several forms, for example, in the Jewish Center in its first iteration under Mordecai Kaplan. [54] Kaplan wanted to bring the religious, educational, and social together to provide a total Jewish experience in one place, but stated candidly that although they would be under the same roof, he did not propose integration of the religious and the social. Kaplan’s Jewish Center was designed to allow Jews to worship and study, and then to socialize, but without attempting to create a symbiosis between the two.[55] Kaplan was interested in fostering Jewish peoplehood, of which the religious (in the traditional sense) was just one element. By contrast, Goldstein explicitly framed his model as an engine for Orthodoxy, in which young Jews who came for social and cultural purposes would be exposed to a form of Orthodox Judaism that appealed and to which they could commit.

Goldstein envisaged a single institution that would combine the functions of the traditional synagogue, the Hebrew school, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA), which ran the sort of social and cultural events Goldstein wanted to serve as the major attraction for his new synagogue. The inclusion of the YMHA was the most radical move. Such associations were not committed to particular ritual practice and often distanced themselves from Orthodoxy, but Goldstein argued that Jewish continuity depended not only on an attractive synagogue and appealing Hebrew classes but on making the synagogue a “place where men and women can come after plying their daily cares and spend a social hour in an Orthodox environment and in a truly Jewish atmosphere.”[56] Goldstein’s aim was to make this expanded synagogue the center of the social lives of young Jews as a means to religious revival. He claimed that his model would “religionize the whole of social life” and would thereby “bear a generation of knowing Jews and Jewesses, who will be imbued with the ideals and practices of their people, and who will ever strive to make the future of Israel as glorious as its past.” [57] This was a new model, but like other self-conscious advocate of “Orthodoxy” Goldstein presented his approach as a return to the past: “This institution would be a revival of the historic synagogue. The synagogue of old was the center for prayer, study and the social life of the community, all in one. The restoration of this type of synagogue would spell the salvation of Judaism.” [58]

The result was the creation in 1917 of the first establishment of its type, the Institutional Synagogue (IS). Its constitution set out Goldstein’s vision of a comprehensive institution: “The objects and purpose of the corporation shall be to…to maintain a building and equipment for religious, educational, social, civic and physical Jewish activities.”[59] Goldstein left Kehilath Jeshurun to be its rabbi, led membership and fundraising campaigns, and was soon able to spend over $300,000 renovating a building and equipping it with a gymnasium, swimming pool, and locker rooms, as well as the more predicable sanctuary and classrooms. Some of the financial support came from men such as Jacob Schiff, himself a Reform Jew, but one always eager to support initiatives to Americanize immigrants who would never feel comfortable with Reform. He was a major beneficiary of the JTS for just this reason and he gave Goldstein $50,000 for his new building.[60] Although Goldstein wanted to make Americans Orthodox, he was able to exploit Schiff’s desire to make the Orthodox American.

Although Goldstein’s principal insight was the need to create a vibrant communal center, connected to but outside the sanctuary, like others he understood that religious services had to change in order to attract the young. He struck a much less formal note than Jung and Lookstein. The service was decorous but not stuffy; it was run by young men; the cantor was tuneful but not operatic; and sermons were reduced to ten minutes with regular guest speakers to interest the crowd. [61] Social groups were at the core of Goldstein’s vision. In addition to the usual Sisterhood, a Brotherhood was formed. It met for dinner every Monday night to create a real feeling of camaraderie. There were popular Bible classes, visits to the gym, and baseball games in which Goldstein would take part, developing his image as “one of the boys” rather than a distant source of authority. [62]

Goldstein was an executive rabbi. He was not a member of the Board of the synagogue, but he attended and participated in most meetings. The congregation’s cantor described him as “the power on the throne and the power behind the throne.”[63] However Goldstein managed to make members feel actively involved in the life of the synagogue by encouraging congregants to form clubs under the IS umbrella. Any 15 members could form a club and at their height, there were 67 such clubs. The clubs developed leadership and organization skills among the youth and adults, and Goldstein himself modeled the role by leading some clubs, hosting others in his home, and visiting each one from time to time. The clubs reinforced the values of the synagogue through the requirement that each meeting open with a Bible study.[64] As with many other acculturated synagogues at the time, the IS hosted dances. They raised funds, encouraged marriage within the faith and within the synagogue, and attracted new members. Whatever qualms Goldstein may have had about the strict religious propriety of mixed dances he understood their practical value. Mrs. Goldstein was clear that her objective was “to keep Jewish boys dancing with Jewish girls.”[65]

After only a decade in existence, the IS found its Harlem neighborhood emptying out of Jews. In 1926, a branch was established on the West Side and 400 people attended its first High Holiday services. It became clear that the future for the IS lay further south, and by 1929, members of the branch were contributing four times as much financial support as the Harlem members. For a while Goldstein divided his time before transferring his work to the West Side Institutional Synagogue full time. He was uninterested in sentiment. He set out what he wanted to achieve and was determined to accomplish it, even if this upset some members of the Harlem synagogue.[66] He demonstrated that Orthodoxy could be innovative, encourage a broad range of interests, provide an attractive social setting, while still promoting traditional Jewish life. It was bold to turn the synagogue into a complete social, cultural, and health center, and bold, too, to try to infuse religious values into each of those activities.

Conclusions

Pool, Jung, Lookstein, and Goldstein came from different backgrounds, and they had different personal styles and interests. However, they all made a choice to serve Orthodox Judaism in a time and a place in which Orthodoxy seemed doomed. They each believed they could reverse the trend. By the end of their careers in the 1970s, Orthodoxy was recovering in confidence, and its numbers were holding steady. They were not solely responsible for this change, but their careers marked a turning point. Religious leaders need a full range of tools to address whatever problems come before them, and the inter-War figures we have examined developed approaches that could be of use. They advocated an Orthodoxy without fear, but one of wide vision and confidence. They shared an attitude, a persuasion, and they found success.
David de Sola Pool demonstrated the power of a warm and positive faith. Intellectual sophistication has sometimes been equated with angst and suffering. Pool rejected that approach. He saw wholesomeness in the committed Jewish life. By no means was his Judaism empty of content, however his religious message did not depend on sophisticated analysis; it spoke about the inner religious life of the personal experience of the love of God. In an age when Chabad and other Hareidi outreach organizations attract followers through the simplicity of their message, an over-analyzed and anxious Modern Orthodoxy will struggle. A return to the immediacy and joy of Pool’s message may help address that deficiency.
Leo Jung began as an original scholar and although he continued to write essays and articles, he soon found his calling as an editor, presenting the work of others to a wide audience. The Jewish Library was a demonstration that Orthodoxy could be as sophisticated in thought as any other denomination. By recruiting leading scholars and scientists of the Orthodox present and by drawing attention to the brilliant minds of the Orthodox past, Jung impressed the men and women who would comprise the Orthodox future. For those who seek a subtle and nuanced approach to Judaism, Jung’s approach is still a model. There were those who search now as they sought in Jung’s time, and if Modern Orthodoxy is to fulfill its purpose and reach its natural constituency it might do well to emulate Jung.
Joseph Lookstein was known for his brilliance as a speaker, and although he took tremendous pains over his sermons, his greatest efforts were spent in turning Kehilath Jeshurun into a sanctuary that attracted Americanized Jews. Through judicious changes to the service that were consistent with halakha, he turned a declining community into a flagship synagogue. His achievement was based on the belief that Orthodoxy could be made attractive, and once it was modern Jews would find their natural home. His confidence in his vision of a halakhic but sophisticated prayer service was vindicated by his finding a following even without introducing mixed seating. Few Jews today are attracted to a service like the highly formal one Lookstein developed at KJ, although it still has a constituency. But contemporary Jews they can be engaged by the same spirit that animated Lookstein—a willingness to be creative within halakhic parameters for the sake of a larger goal, the success and continuity of Orthodoxy.
The most iconoclastic of the four figures is the last, Herbert Goldstein. He was the first to establish a synagogue on a new model, where every aspect of a Jew’s religious, educational, and social life could be addressed. This is not because he regarded athletics and drama as ends in themselves, but because they provided a way to reach the many young Jews who had dismissed Orthodoxy as an outdated relic of their parents’ generation. By making the synagogue the place where they wanted to go, at first for social and recreational activities but then for study and prayer, Goldstein eventually reached 3,000 people per week. He showed that Orthodoxy thrived on innovation and that it is possible to harness modern techniques for traditionalist purposes. There is currently an impatience with inherited structures. To give just one example, the success of the independent minyan movement has to be reckoned with. These are generally not Orthodox, but Orthodox leaders with Goldstein’s boldness could adapt their form, or develop an equaling compelling one of their own and seek to replicate not only Goldstein’s technique but also his success.
This study is neither an exercise in counterfactuals nor in hagiography. It is not intended to show that our quartet, or any other figure from the past could have negotiated successfully the challenges of today, or that they were uniquely able and effective. What I hope I have demonstrated is that they were significant figures whom contemporary Modern Orthodox leaders should take seriously. They operated in particularly difficult circumstances and their achievements were substantial. They also show the powerful potential of visionary leadership and the crucial role leaders can play. The challenges of Modern Orthodoxy today are different but in some ways equally grave. Other figures, from both before and after their have much to contribute. However, it is also right to make space at the table for Pool, Jung, Lookstein, and Goldstein, and more importantly for new leaders in their mold.

[1] I am grateful to the Tikvah Fund for supporting the research, writing, and publication of this article, and to the Fellows and staff, in particular Neal Kozodoy, for their comments on earlier versions.
[2] See my discussion of the problems of denominational labels in Benjamin J. Elton, Britain’s Chief Rabbis and the Religious Character of Anglo-Jewry 1880–1970 (Manchester 2009), 17.
[3] M. Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition, (New York, 1992) 22.
[4] American Hebrew, December 19, 1884, 84.
[5] Arthur Kiron, “Varieties of Haskalah: Sabato Morais’s Program of Sephardi Rabbinic Humanism in Victorian America” in Ross Brann and Adam Sutcliffe (eds.), Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture: From Al-Andalus to the Haskalah (Philadelphia 2004), 136.
[6] There has been a volume of important work on this issue, see for example Samuel Heilman, “Constructing Orthodoxy” in T. Robbins and D. Anthony (eds.) In Gods We Trust (New Brunswick, 1981) 150–151; “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy, Part 1” Modern Judaism (2:1 February 1982), 23–52; and “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy, Part 2” Modern Judaism (2:2 May 1982), 171–198.
[7] Samuel Heilman, “How did fundamentalism manage to infiltrate contemporary orthodoxy,” Contemporary Jewry (2005, 25), 261–262.
[8] On the evolution of the JTS, see Jack Wertheimer (ed.) Tradition Renewed (New York, 1997), volume 1, chapters 2–5, 28–30.
[9] For the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century context, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective (Hoboken, NJ, 1996); “Resisters and Accommodators: Varieties of Orthodox Rabbis in America, 1886–1983,” in The American Rabbinate: A Century of Continuity and Change, 1883–1983 (New York, 1985), 10–97; “Twentieth-Century American Orthodoxy’s Era of Non-Observance, 1900–1960,” The Torah u-Madda Journal IX (2000), 87–107; “American Judaism between the Two World Wars;” Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America, Marc Lee Raphael, ed. (New York 2008), 93–113; and his Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington 2009), especially chapters 4 and 5; Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews (Bloomington 1990).
[10] Jacob J. Schacter, “Words of Tribute” in Jacob J. Schacter (ed.), Reverence, Righteousness and Rahamanut, (Northvale NJ 1992), 2.
[11] Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington, 2009) 208.
[12] Ibid., 211.
[13] Marshal Sklare, America’s Jews (New York, 1971), 4.
[14] I am grateful to Jonathan Silver for referring me to Irving Kristol’s The Neoconservative Persuasion (Gertrude Himmelfarb ed.) (Philadelphia, 2011), which models the role of a persuasion (as distinct from a specific manifesto or doctrine) in approaching issues and problems.
[15] In addition to the sixteen volumes (some revisions of earlier volumes) published in the two series of the Jewish Library between 1928 and 1980, see his collections of sermons, which include Living Judaism (New York, 1927); Toward Sinai (1929); Crumbs and Character (New York 1942).
[16] See Adam S. Ferziger, “The Lookstein Legacy: An American Orthodox Rabbinical Dynasty?,” Jewish History, 13:1 (Spring, 1999), 127–14,; Norman Lamm, “Eulogy for Rabi Joseph H. Lookstein” in Leo Landman (ed.) Joseph H.Lookstein Memorial Memorial Volume (Hoboken, NJ, 1980), 7–14.
[17] See Aaron I. Reichel, The Maverick Rabbi—Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein and the Institutional Synagogue, (New York, 1984).
[18] See David de Sola Pool, “David de Sola Pool” in Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies Louis Finklestein (ed.) (New York, 1953), 201–217; An Old Faith in the New World (New York, 1955), 202–208 ; Nima Adlerblum, “Reflections on the Life and Work of Rabbi David de Sola Pool” Tradition 30:1 (Fall 1995), 7–16.
[19] David de Sola Pool, “David de Sola Pool” in Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies Louis Finklestein (ed.) (New York 1953), 204–205.
[20] David de Sola Pool, “David de Sola Pool” in Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies Louis Finklestein (ed.) (New York 1953), 206.
[21] Rabbi David de Sola Pool: Selections from Six Decades of Sermons, Addresses and Writings, Marc D. Angel (ed.) (New York, 1980), 59.
[22] David de Sola Pool, “David de Sola Pool” in Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies Louis Finklestein (ed.) (New York, 1953), 207–208.
[23] David de Sola Pool, “David de Sola Pool” in Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies Louis Finklestein (ed.) (New York, 1953), 207.
[24] Major works by Pool include “The Place of God in Modern Life” Columbia University Quarterly (24, June 1932), 194–205; Why I Am A Jew (New York, 1957); Is There An Answer? (New York, 1966); Rabbi David de Sola Pool: Selections from Six Decades of Sermons, Addresses and Writings, Marc D. Angel (ed.) (New York, 1980).
[25] Rabbi David de Sola Pool: Selections from Six Decades of Sermons, Addresses and Writings, Marc D. Angel (ed.) (New York, 1980), 18.
[26] Ibid., 82.
[27] See David de Sola Pool, Why I Am A Jew (New York, 1957), 75–80.
[28] Ibid., 41.
[29] Ibid., 83–84.
[30] Ibid., 89.
[31] See Nima H. Adlerblum, “Loe Jung” in The Leo Jung Jubilee Volume Menahem M. Kasher, Norman Lamm, Leonard Rosenfeld (eds.), (New York, 1962), 1–40; Marc Lee Raphael, “Rabbi Leo Jung and the Americanization of Orthodox Judaism” in Schacter (ed.), Reverence, Righteousness and Rahamanut, 21–91; Maxine Jacobson, Trends in Modern Orthodoxy as Reflected in the Career of Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, Unpublished doctoral dissertation (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2004); Leo Jung, Path of a Pioneer (New York, 1980), although the reader should be aware that it is not always reliable.
[32] On Meir Tsevi Jung see Gershon Bader and Moses Jung, “Meir Tsevi Jung” in Leo Jung (ed.) Jewish Leaders (Jerusalem, 1953), 297–316.
[33] Fallen Angles in Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan Literature (Philadelphia 1926); Yoma in Isidore Epstein (ed.) The Babylonian Talmud (London 1938). Jung’s collections of sermons include Living Judaism (New York, 1927); Toward Sinai (1929); Crumbs and Character (New York, 1942). See the bibliography in Raphael, “Rabbi Leo Jung,” especially 79–80 and 88–91.
[34] L. Jung (ed.) The Jewish Library First Series ( New York, second edition revised 1943), vii.
[35] Ibid., 7–8.
[36] Leo Jung , “The Rabbis and Freedom of Interpretation” in Guardians of our Heritage, Leo Jung (ed), New York 1958, 5–30.
[37] Ibid., 6.
[38] Ibid., 8–9.
[39] Ibid., 12.
[40] See Adam S. Ferziger, “The Lookstein Legacy: An American Orthodox Rabbinical Dynasty?,” Jewish History, 13:1 (Spring, 1999), 127–214,; Norman Lamm, “Eulogy for Rabi Joseph H. Lookstein” in Leo Landman (ed.) Joseph H. Lookstein Memorial Memorial Volume (Hoboken, NJ 1980), 7–14.
[41] Jenna Weissman Joselit, “The Middle-Class American Jewish Woman” in Jack Wetheimer (ed.) The American Synagogue, a Sanctuary Transformed (Cambridge, 1987), 219–220.
[42] Joseph H. Lookstein papers, Yeshiva University Library, box 45.
[43] Quoted in Ferziger, “The Lookstein Legacy,” 130–131.
[44] Joselit, “The Middle-Class American Jewish Woman,” 220.
[45] Joseph H. Lookstein papers, Yeshiva University Library, box 41.
[46] Schlang (ed.), Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, 93–94.
[47] Joseph H. Lookstein, “Seventy Five Yesteryears,” in Schlang (ed.), Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, 31–32.
[48] Ferziger, “The Lookstein Legacy,” 135.
[49] See Jonathan Sarna, “The Debate over Mixed Seating in the American Synagogue” in Jack Werthiemer (ed.), The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (New York 1987), 363–394.
[50] Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy” Tradition 28:4 (Summer 1994), 64–130.
[51] See Aaron I. Reichel, The Maverick Rabbi—Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein and the Institutional Synagogue, (New York 1984).
[52] Herbert S. Goldstein papers, Yeshiva University Library, box 8.
[53] Herbert S. Goldstein papers, Yeshiva University Library, box 8.
[54] For more on the idea of a Jewish center see David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool (Hanover, NH, 1999).
[55] Aaron I. Reichel, The Maverick Rabbi—Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein and the Institutional Synagogue, (New York, 1984), 96.
[56] Aaron I. Reichel, The Maverick Rabbi—Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein and the Institutional Synagogue, (New York, 1984), 92.
[57] Ibid., 94.
[58] Ibid., 92.
[59] Herbert S. Goldstein papers, Yeshiva University Library, box 1.
[60] Aaron I. Reichel, The Maverick Rabbi—Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein and the Institutional Synagogue, (New York, 1984), 173–174.
[61] Ibid., 186–191.
[62] Ibid., 224–240.
[63] Ibid., 236.
[64] Ibid., 255–270.
[65] Ibid., 249–254.
[66] Ibid., 305–322.

The October 2013 Pew Report underscored the fragility of the Jewish future in North America and has led to anguished discussions and debates regarding "continuity", i.e., how to reduce the number of Jews relinquishing Judaism and Jewish identification in favor of other options.

But given the nature of the American religious scene, as I will present below, it is simply impossible to assure Jewish continuity by such a strategy alone. Rather, only if a strategy of easing the path of conversion is joined with current educational efforts and programs do we stand a chance of achieving continuity.

Such a strategy is of course at odds with the notion that conversion should be discouraged and difficult. However, that notion itself was not the primordial position of our tradition but rather historically conditioned. Encouragement of would-be converts and the intentional application of the more lenient positions found in our sources can be fully justified from within the halakhic tradition -- particularly in times of crisis such as ours.

Stating the Problem Honestly

Even if 100 percent of all children born to Jews in the United States were to remain Jewish, the Jewish population would decline significantly over time, because of the simple fact reported by Pew that Jewish adults aged 40-59 have an average of 1.9 children– while 2.1 children in a family represents the minimum fertility replacement level, that is, the level at which births equal deaths in a society with good health services. Although I am Orthodox, the fact that Orthodox Jewish families have an average of 4.1 children is no consolation to me. My concern is for the future of the entire community and not for any particular sub-group alone. Indeed, I believe that religiously and morally, such horizons of concern are befitting all Jews – and especially the Orthodox.

But even if Jewish fertility in the U.S. were to rise and become on par with that of the general public – 2.2 children per family – Jewish continuity would not be ensured. The reason is that many persons born as Jews do not currently regard themselves as such. The Pew report is based on interviews with 3,475 Jews (of whom 20 percent identified themselves as “Jews of no religion”). In order to reach those 3,475 Jews – a total needed for statistically significant findings – the Pew surveyors conducted more than 70,000 screening interviews. By the time they had located 3,475 individuals who said they were Jewish, they had come across 1,190 persons who stated that they had been Jews – but were currently not Jewish in any way.

In other words, of 4,665 persons born Jewish, only 75 percent regarded themselves as Jewish in any way, while 25 percent regarded themselves as totally non-Jewish. Thus, even if the Jewish fertility rate were to reach 2.2, with this outflow of 25 percent, the effective Jewish fertility rate would be 1.65 – well below the fertility replacement level. As it now stands, the effective fertility rate is 1.425 percent. Because younger age cohorts are increasingly less affiliated and more intermarried, it stands to reason that the actual fertility rate is dropping even lower.

But why are 25 percent leaving us? Surely, something must be wrong with our schools, our synagogues, our community, for so many born Jews to choose to totally opt out? Not necessarily. While nothing in this world is perfect, it seems to me, as an Israeli, that the schools, synagogues, and communal activities of American Jewry are admirable and dynamic institutions, staffed by caring professionals sincerely committed to preserving Jewish continuity.

Indeed, the 25 percent attrition rate of born Jews is significantly below that of the American public in general – as emerges from another report of the Pew foundation. In 2008, Pew published its landmark "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey." A key finding relating to our topic was:

More than one-quarter of American adults (28 percent) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44 percent of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

Note that the 25 percent of born Jews who now say they are not Jewish at all is below the national average of 28 percent of those who have left the faith in which they were raised. Even if we add to those 25 percent the additional 15 percent of born Jews who say that they are Jewish but not at all religious, this is less than the national average of 44 percent cited above.

The fact that Jews have a retention rate better than the national average indicates that there is a significant return on the tremendous efforts of our schools, synagogues and community centers to encourage born Jews to remain within the fold. While this may be comforting on one level, on another level the comparison with general overall trends in the U.S. religious landscape leads us to realize just how serious the challenge to Jewish continuity is. This is because the 2008 Pew survey enables us to realize the tremendous flux of all religions in the contemporary United States.

Indeed, one might ask: if not only Jews but all religions are losing such a high percentage of those raised in the faith, how is it that any religious group continues to exist? The answer to this is found in what I regard to be the most crucial finding of that survey for our current discussion. In a paragraph titled, "A Very Competitive Religious Marketplace," the authors of the 2008 survey wrote:

The survey finds that constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace, as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents. Those that are growing as a result of religious change are simply gaining new members at a faster rate than they are losing members. Conversely, those that are declining in number because of religious change simply are not attracting enough new members to offset the number of adherents who are leaving those particular faiths.

It may well be the case that other countries in the world are not characterized by such “constant movement” among religions. For a variety of reasons, such movement is certainly not characteristic of Israel. In Israel, it is almost universally acknowledged that Jewishness is first and foremost identification with and a sense of belonging to an extended kinship group, with some of the kin being more attached to the group's religion and some less so.

Such a sense of Jewish peoplehood was characteristic of Jews in Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and many other countries where Jews resided; it was also characteristic of most of the first-generation Jewish immigrants to the United States. However, with the passage of time and the deepening Americanization of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those immigrants, the “given-ness” of peoplehood has receded.

American Jews have now become a “religious group”– not only in the eyes of the general public and analysts of the Pew foundation, but in the eyes of Jews themselves. This is well reflected in the similarity of “constant movement” characteristic of the affiliates of Judaism and other American religious groups. Comprehension of this constant is crucial to any strategic discussion of Jewish continuity in the United States.

Maimonides (Guide of the Perplexed 1:71, citing Themistius) stated that opinions must be grounded not in wishful thinking but in empirical reality. If Jews are now involved as actors in the field of American religious groups, they must comprehend the reality of that field. Specifically, they must realize that, wishful thinking to the contrary:

1. In the American religious landscape, despite all efforts to the contrary, a significant percentage of born Jews (25 percent at least) will choose to opt out of being Jewish.
2. There is no way in which that loss will be offset by internal fertility.

If Jewish continuity is predicated only upon those born as Jews, then a dramatic and continuous numerical contraction of American Jewry is the clear prognosis.However,for a religious group to predicate its future only upon those born into it is to blithely ignore a central characteristic of the U.S. religious landscape, in which "every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents." The future of any specific religious group is contingent upon gaining at least as many adherents as it loses. This is true for all religious groups in America – and therefore also for the Jews. Yet from a comparative perspective, the Jews – such a talented community in many ways – have seemingly been outstandingly inept in this regard. We have lost many more adherents than we have gained.

Of course, as all Jews know, we have not really been inept at gaining converts. We have been intentionally adverse to receiving converts – not from time immemorial but since the ascent of Christianity and Islam. In medieval and early modern times, this policy was adopted in order to ensure our survival: the authorities of the dominant faiths reacted violently to members of their group opting for another religion, taking vengeance both upon the convert and those who accepted him.

Currently, however, the exact opposite is true: Jewish continuity is crucially contingent upon gaining many more adherents. Continuing to maintain the classic aversion toward accepting converts, or even following a more neutral or lukewarm policy toward persons seeking to become Jewish, is – in the current religious reality of the United States – a sure way to undermine and act against Jewish continuity.

Our only hope lies in a combination of two strategies: doing our utmost to maintain (as we have until now) a high retention rate of those born into our religious group, and simultaneously doing our utmost to be extremely warm and encouraging toward those seekers who, unhappy with their current affiliation, indicate interest in joining us.

However, coming as I do from the halakhic tradition, I know that it is not enough to argue on the basis of exigency alone. Rather, one must ask: is it halakhically possible, from within the tradition, to support and justify action that seems to be called for by a sober assessment of reality? Specifically:

Is it possible within traditional halakha to justify a policy under which rabbis will warmly encourage converts and follow the most lenient possible halakhic opinions, in a manner that will be most conducive to widespread giyyur (conversion)?

Answering the Question Honestly

In order to answer in the affirmative, we do not need to seek unanimity – for halakha is characterized by a wide range of legitimate views. Rather, we must see if we can find within halakhic sources strong voices stating that in matters of conversion broad policy considerations must determine the choice of formal halakhic requirements. If such voices exist, then, even if they are numerically in the minority they should be followed in a time of crisis (she'at ha-dehaq). If the reader does not think that the recent Pew report reveals we are in a time of crisis, she can stop reading here.

In fact, ever since the time of the great scholar Hillel in late antiquity, quite a few rabbis have advocated that in matters of conversion, policy should guide which converts to accept and what to require of them. I would like to briefly give voice to three great twentieth century halakhic scholars – each no less learned than Rabbi Moshe Feinstein of blessed memory –who strongly advocated such a policy-guided strategy: Rabbi Ben-Zion Uzziel (1880-1953), Rabbi Joseph Mesas (1892-1974) and Rabbi Hayyim David HaLevi (1924-1998).

Rabbi Ben-Zion Uzziel, the first Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, received a request in 1951 for halakhic guidance from Rabbi Judah Leon Khalfon, head of the rabbinic court of Tetuan (Spanish Morocco):Is it permissible, he was asked,to convert the children and wives of completely non-observant Jewish men, as they would presumably also be non-observant Jews?

Rabbi Uzziel’s response (published in responsa MishpeteiUzziel7:20)addressed both whether it is possible to convert someone who will subsequently not be religiously observant, and why rabbis should want to convert such persons.

With regard to the first question, Rabbi Uzziel was aware that certain East European rabbis had claimed that the halakhic requirement of “reception and acceptance of commandments” meant that the convert was required to sincerely promise observance of mitzvot; on that view, a person whom we think will not be observant could not be converted. Rabbi Uzziel pointed out that, to the contrary, no classic halakhic text – including the Shulhan Arukh-- specifically required such a promise. Indeed, this was not a chance omission, for if conversion were to be made contingent upon an inherently indeterminate future observance,"then no converts would ever be accepted in Israel. For who can guarantee that this non-Jew will be faithful to all of the Torah's commandments?”After undergoing conversion, all converts – whatever the degree of their religious observance – will be no less Jewish than a born Jew leading a similar lifestyle.

With regard to the second issue,Rabbi Uzziel’s response is of even greater relevance to us today. He points out that classic rabbinic texts teach us that God loves converts. Indeed, the Talmud (BT Pesahim 87b) teaches that God dispersed the Jews throughout the world so that non-Jews would have the opportunity to become acquainted with them and choose to convert! Therefore, it is a positive commandment to warmly accept proselytes, whenever this is possible.

Over and above the general positive attitude cited above, Rabbi Uzziel added that special reasons exist in modern times to accept candidates for conversion in cases linked to intermarriage:

And in our generation we bear special and heavy responsibility, because if we lock the door before converts we are thereby opening wide the gates of exit, pushing Jewish men and women to change their religion and to leave Judaism entirely or to assimilate among the gentiles…. (rabbis have special responsibility to accept such converts so as to promote the Jewishness of their children).Even if they are the children of a non-Jewish mother -- they are Seed of Israel. And they are therefore “lost sheep.” And I fear that if we push them away completely by not accepting their parents for conversion we will be accused (by God) and it will be said of us: "neither have ye brought back the strays, nor have ye sought those which were lost" (Ezekiel 34:4).

Rabbi Uzziel stated that avoidance of such Divine rebuke should clearly outweigh the concern of receiving unworthy proselytes.

In 1965, Rabbi Joseph Mesas, then Chief Rabbi of Haifa, stated that in matters of conversion, the general policy to be followed is that of the rabbis of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia – who accepted all persons seeking to convert (responsa Mayyim Hayyim, vol. 2, #108). Rejection of persons seeking to become Jewish achieves no positive results, and frequently leads to unhappiness, resentment and bitterness, both of the candidate himself and of individual Jews, families and communities affected by that rejection, he said. He noted that if the rejected candidate really wants to become a Jew, s/he would simply turn to another rabbi, and ultimately be accepted. What then has the first court achieved, except to cause anguish and hatred?

Indeed, the notion that the rabbis have control over the consequences generated by rejecting converts is an illusion. To illustrate this, Rabbi Mesas related a case (one of several that he personally knew of) in which rabbis refused to convert a woman who then proceeded to move with her Jewish husband to another location where they “passed” as Jews. Fifty years later, it was discovered that the family's matriarch was not Jewish; ipso facto, neither were her daughters or their children – although all of them had grown up thinking they were Jews. Several members of the family agreed to convert, while others were so upset and distraught that they left Judaism entirely.

Rabbi Mesas did not blame the matriarch. He said that the rabbis who rejected her were responsible for the tragic outcome, because they lacked the foresight or the will to comprehend the cost to present and future generations of their rejectionist policy. Indeed, he said, under contemporary conditions, rejecting candidates for conversion was not a sign of true religious commitment but rather a manifestation of a sanctimonious pseudo-piety.

Because rabbis have a responsibility to further the well-being of the entire Jewish community, they should follow the halakhic policy that leads to the most positive overall results:“When a conversion to Judaism takes place, then a light shines in the darkness and everything is forgotten and joy dwells in their home.”

Rabbi Hayyim David HaLevi (Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv 1973- 1998) cited with great approval the position on conversion policy expressed by the great Rabbi Israel Joshua Trunk (1820-1893) of Kutno. Rabbi Trunk had been told that in the early Middle Ages the King of Kiev negotiated with the leaders of Israel in his generation.He wanted to convert and to convert all of his people with him, but he proposed just one condition – and because of this condition the agreement fell through and did not take place.He wanted them [the rabbis] to waive circumcision of the elderly; that they should convert by immersion only, and die uncircumcised.And the newborns would be circumcised.And this way in the next generation they would all be fully Jewish. The rabbis refused to agree to this condition [and the King and his nation did not convert].

Rabbi Yehoshele(Trunk)criticized them, saying that it was wrong of them to reject a populous great nation and to prevent them from joining the Lord's estate… the Talmud (Nedarim 32b) says:

"Why was our Father Abraham punished and his children doomed to Egyptian servitude for two hundred and ten years? Rabbi Johanan said: Because he prevented people from entering beneath the wings of the Shekhina, as it is written (Genesis 14:21), "Give me the persons, and take the goods to thyself"[…]
Allies are crucial!

Rabbi Trunk regarded the rabbis' refusal as a strategic mistake of the highest degree: the long-term positive implications of the king's proposal for the Jewish future were so momentous that they could (and should) have ruled according to the minority opinion of Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah, who held that conversion without circumcision is valid (BT Yevamot 46a). The idea that numbers are of no significance for the Jews is absolutely misguided: "Allies are crucial!", declared Rabbi Trunk.

In this context, Rabbi Trunk cited Rabbi Johanan, who held that the reason for Israel's fate in Egypt may be found in a close reading of Genesis 14:21. As related earlier in that chapter, the populace of Sodom had been captured as prisoners of war, and Abraham had overcome their captors. The king of Sodom proposed that Abraham keep the booty, and return the populace to his (the king's) rule. But implicit in that very request was the king's acknowledgement that the people of Sodom were at that point in time legitimately under Abraham's domain. Abraham (notes Rabbi Johanan) could (and should) have retained them and converted them, i.e., brought them into Abraham's covenant with God.Abraham's failure to seize this opportunity to dramatically expand God's flock was a strategic blunder – and the ultimate cause of Israel's servitude in Egypt. So too, declared Rabbi Trunk, with regard to the rabbis who rejected the king of Kiev's proposal: had they accepted it, the Russian people would all have become adherents of Judaism – and how different would have been the fate of Jews in Eastern Europe in medieval and early modern times!

Rabbi HaLevi explained that Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah, who Rabbi Trunk thought should have been followed in the Kiev case, was himself articulating halakhic policy in response to the conditions prevailing in his own times (the first century C.E.):

An extremely widespread movement of conversion developed towards the end of the Second Temple period.At the time there were about a million Jews in Egypt, about a million and a half in Syria and Asia Minor, about a million in Europe and North Africa, and about a million in Babylonia.These numbers did not stem from emigration, as at the time there were not so many Jews in the land of Israel itself.According to historical experts, these numbers reflect a broad movement of conversion…. This was the era in which idolatry lost its appeal, and Judaism captured the hearts of many… [but most converts were women]; It seems apparent that the obstacle that kept many men from joining the house of Israel was circumcision.

It could be, that we hear in the Talmud a faint echo of this severe problem … the Talmud states: "all [i.e., Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Eliezer] agree, that immersion without circumcision is effective."(Yevamot 46b) It is simple, that the Halakhah is according to the [other] Sages [who required both rites].But it seems that there were indeed proselytes for whom circumcision was an obstacle - who sought to enter under the wings of the Shekhina by immersion only […].And indeed Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua considered their conversion to be valid.

Who today could imagine the possibility of accepting masses of converts without circumcision?Yet this was possible, at least theoretically [also in post-Talmudic times;after quoting Rabbi Trunk's position cited above, Rabbi HaLevi concludes].

From all of the above we can learn the depth and breadth of the halakhic maxim relating to conversion: "Everything can be in accordance with the judge's view." Note this well.

Rabbi Hayyim David HaLevi argued that a serious discussion of giyyur must comprehend halakhic statements in their real-life context. At the outset it must be realized that the basic position of Jewish tradition is very much in favor of accepting converts. This positive attitude, encouraged by the rabbinic leadership in the centuries before and after the beginning of the Common Era, proved extremely successful. However, women were more prone to actually convert than were men – because conversion of a man required circumcision, to which many men were averse. Having established this general background, Rabbi HaLevi proceeded to a contextual reading of the late first century rabbinic debate. Heproposed that those rabbis who were willing to convert without requiring circumcision were able to advocate such a position because they knew well that the Torah affords rabbis a tremendous amount of latitude in deciding what to require of a proselyte – and they also knew that Torah is very much interested in the acceptance of converts.

Rabbi HaLevi further stated that one should not imagine that such leeway was available only to rabbis of ancient times. He pointed out that Rabbi Trunk obviously thought that post-talmudic rabbis also possess such prerogative – and that they should have employed it to facilitate the conversion of the king of Kiev and his nation.

Returning to this issue in 1989 (responsa 'AsehLekhaRav Vol. 9:30). Rabbi HaLevi wrote:

Judaism is not a missionary religion, and it does not relate at all [in a missionary way] to any other religion, including Christianity.[…] But in a broad historical view, Christianity caused tremendous damage to the spread of Judaism.This is because the entire yearning of the idolatrous world for a new faith (after the ancient world became tired of idolatry which was about to disappear from the world) caused many to flock to Judaism – until Christianity appeared and preached an easy religion devoid of any practical commandments.
[At this point, rabbi HaLevi inserts the following footnote:]

It is possible that we find an echo of these matters in the disagreement among the Tannaim … [citing Yevamot 46ab, HaLevi writes]: And perhaps Rabbi Joshua thought to be lenient by accepting proselytes on the basis of immersion alone, because that would open the door to conversion of masses of people and their entry into Judaism, something that circumcision -- which was so difficult for them -- prevented.It goes without saying that it did not cross Rabbi Joshua's mind to nullify the commandment of circumcision among the proselytes.Rather, his intent was only with regard to the older members of the first generation of proselytes. The children who would be born to them would be circumcised in accordance with the law, with the waiver applying only to those who themselves converted. Had Rabbi Joshua's opinion had been accepted in the Beit Hamidrash – the face of history might have looked very different!

Rabbi Joshua's position was not followed. The tidal wave of conversion to Judaism was diverted, and the great masses of non-Jews seeking religious fulfillment in a relationship with the God of Israel chose to do so via Christianity. Over the course of time, rabbis and other Jews forgot that Judaism had ever been interested in attracting adherents. But Rabbi HaLevi was well aware of the path not taken, and of what might have been had those rabbis responded otherwise to the strategic significance of the early Christian challenge: "Had Rabbi Joshua's opinion had been accepted in the Beit Hamidrash – the face of history might have looked very different!"

The competitive religious marketplace of the 21st century United States is significantly analogous to the religious marketplace of late antiquity: tens of millions of people are dissatisfied with the faith into which they were born, are seeking alternatives – and are changing adherences. The 2013 Pew report reveals that born Jews are also part of this landscape, with 25 percent of them having left. But all faith groups are in a similar situation; because Jews are less than 2 percent of the population, that means that for every Jew who opts out, there are 50 non-Jews seeking fulfillment outside of the group into which they were born.

Judaism possesses a rich and diverse religious-cultural tradition, woven together from ancient times to the present by talented and creative individuals and communities. Furthermore, Jews have developed a strong and vibrant sense of togetherness, kinship and family – a resource increasingly valuable in times such as ours. Is it not reasonable to assume that of all the tens of millions of non-Jews seeking fulfillment, many could find meaning and fulfillment in Judaism?

Whatever the Israeli rabbinate's policy on giyyur in Israel may be, this has no relevance for the reality in which United States Jewry exists. If they are indeed (as they see themselves) the true keepers of the halakhic tradition, Orthodox rabbis are especially called upon to acknowledge all of the above, and to respond to the strategic call of responsibility for the future not only of Orthodox Jews, but of all God's flock.

Does halakhic tradition contain the resources that can enable Orthodox rabbis to rise to that call, to warmly encourage converts and to follow the most lenient possible halakhic opinions that will be most conducive to widespread giyyur? Yes, it does.

The halakhic tradition contains many strands and many voices. That same tradition also teaches that in times of urgency (she'at ha-dhaq), the most lenient options should be followed. The Pew reports prove unequivocally how great that urgency is.

The views of the great halakhic scholars cited above are crucial to the contemporary discussion of Jewish continuity. Relying upon earlier sources and applying them in contemporary reality, they teach that within the heart of the halakhic tradition there is a clear voice calling out: At all times, and in all places, God loves converts. Conversion is a mitzvah. Over and above that general rule, there are times in which conversion is crucial to Jewish continuity, and inclusion of non-Jews into God's flock is a strategic imperative.

Ours is such a time. Will future generations look back in regret and say "Had Rabbi Uzziel's, and Rabbi Mesas' and Rabbi HaLevi's opinions been accepted in the Beit Hamidrash, the face of history might have looked very different.” Or will they say: "How great were the Torah leaders of those times, who chose the halakhic path most appropriate to the American religious landscape, and led the entire American Jewish community from seemingly inevitable numerical decline to numerical and spiritual growth."

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?
—Rabbi Nathan Lopez Cordozo

Rabbi Cordozo is correct that unless we, Jewish leaders and institutions, are able to understand and relate to the current culture and weltanschauung of the Jewish people and the society that nurtures them, we will not be able to serve, educate, or engage them in religious community. But we would do well to avoid seeing this situation as one of us and them, the establishment versus the innovators, young versus old. We are one family. It is our job as leaders to know what the Jewish people need as individuals and as a group. This cannot just be a matter of gesturing, or catering to some societal perturbation in order to serve a financial or survival agenda; it must be about how to function as a Jewish community together. It must be genuine and organic.

I believe that no other Jewish institution can serve the role of building strong, encompassing, spiritual community than a shul can. Shuls educate, create community, care for people, guide them on their journey, and can, if navigated with a wide vision, make a difference in our world far beyond their own members. Shuls can be the vehicles that enable us, the Jewish people, to gather in our brethren and be a light unto the nations.

I think I speak for many younger and mid-career rabbis, when I say that although stolidness may seem to be the rule in synagogues, it is by no means ubiquitous or necessary. I will use my own synagogue, Bais Abraham Congregation in St. Louis, Missouri as one example of utilizing creativity and open mindedness in the service of generating a more vibrant community.

Spiritual Tools

It takes a large spiritual tool box to encounter an infinite God, but most of these tools and approaches are not foreign to Judaism; most are not even new to us, but were born within our tradition. For me personally, even innovation itself has its roots in the hareidi yeshivot of my youth where nothing was valued more than hiddush, the truly new idea in Torah. Let me share one example of the ways in which we are utilizing Judaism's plethora of spiritual approaches and tools in invigorating and renewing our community.

When I was a young adult I came across a book on Jewish meditation. This was a foreign concept to me at the time, having grown up Orthodox. I was quite surprised to discover in its pages that the Talmud’s Hassidim haRishonim, Ancient Pious ones, took an hour to prepare for prayer, an hour to pray and an hour to come down from their prayer, and that the Ariza”l and many Hassidic rebbes taught methods of visualization and mantra meditation. I was struck by how none of this sounded like the “chopping of a minha,” that I often witnessed, and was even considered virtuous in some Orthodox circles. Years later I studied Jewish meditation in a more formal capacity. This is one of the many Jewish tools that has fallen by the wayside, and that we are bringing once again to our prayers and religious life. I must stress that it is not difficult to learn meditation but something that anyone with sensitivity and a bit of training can learn well enough in a short time to utilize and teach.

I have actualized this through a weekly meditative service on Shabbat mornings. Many people in shul do not really know what they are saying when they pray and do not really know how to utilize kavvanah, prayerful intent. Each Shabbat morning at the end of the Torah reading, I go to another room in the synagogue to lead a meditative kavvanah-oriented service, really a class about prayer with some guided meditation. About 20 percent of the shul follows me. We take just a few prayers and first read them to understand their meaning, then look at the themes of the prayer, and then I direct a guided meditation to focus us more deeply and personally on those themes. This I think is what we mean by the very traditionally Jewish notion of, “having kavaanah,” deeper intent. Some of these methods might borrow techniques from more Eastern practices but the medium of the meditation and its content is wholly Jewish, indeed it may be indispensable for real traditional tefillah itself.

Creating Community

Many Orthodox shuls are places people come to pray; they need a minyan for daily halakhic reasons or for holidays or a yortzeit. At Bais Abraham, the vast majority of attendees did not grow up Orthodox and so do not always know how to daven; it is rather a desire for community that brings them. And so we put a great deal of effort into community programming. Although davening is very hard for many, most Jews really do want the experience of an embracing community. Shuls today must function a bit like Jewish Community Centers, engaging lay leaders in creating social, intellectual, and educational programming for all ages and demographics.

Shuls must also be wider communal institutions. By communal I do not just mean the Orthodox community, but a vital part of our neighborhoods, cities, and country. Shuls must feel a deep sense of obligation not only to their members but to, as a community, turn outward toward the rest of the Jewish community and the general communities in which a shul finds itself. One important way to do this is as a shul to volunteer in the larger community.

Bais Abraham has an ongoing partnership with one of the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in St. Louis, which is located less than a mile from our shul. Once a month we spend an evening studying about an aspect of hessed from a Jewish point of view. Later that week we put this into practice as a community painting a house, serving food to the elderly, and so forth.

A Culture of Welcoming

Many shuls see themselves as welcoming, but often this is limited. Many are welcoming on their own terms to those who can fit in. I believe that to be truly welcoming, a shul’s culture must be so embracing that it draws almost no boundaries to entry at all. To be welcoming to Jews that one hopes to influence is a very limited way of welcoming, and usually people see it for what it is. Only a narrow range of seekers will come to such a place. In a truly welcoming culture all are welcomed because there is no other way to be.

Rabbi Abraham Magence, my teacher and the rabbi who preceded me in my shul, made the point that when Avraham welcomed the three men walking in the desert, for all Avraham knew, as Rashi points out, they were idol worshipers. It was three idolatrous nomads that Avraham left God’s presence to run to greet and serve. What if we had a culture within Orthodox shuls like Avraham’s? If a homeless person comes in on Shabbat to our synagogue building he or she is welcomed and included fully in the kiddush or seudah shelishith, and welcome to be in the services with us.

I remember a certain non-Jewish homeless man in an electric wheelchair who would come on Shabbat morning, charge his chair and spend the entire day eating at and interacting with people in the shul. We must not just welcome people into shul, but transform our shuls into places in which the culture of welcoming is deeply ingrained, almost without limits. It is only then that the wide array of Jews who do not imagine themselves in shul will feel comfortable.

Alternative Venues

Alternative venues outside of the synagogue are a good way to engage a population of non-Orthodox, younger people who may find it hard to enter the synagogue space. Although an old standby, barbecues outside of the shul building for various holidays such as Lag B’omer, Tu B’Av and Sukkot are always worth doing. They bring a sense of fun and are good ways to bring together shul families with new people who may not be affiliated. Alternative venues also serve to disrupt a congregation's tendency toward monotony and to inject a sense that Judaism and community can suffuse the surrounding environment outside the shul’s walls; that Jewish community extends outside the bounds of the synagogue space.

Years ago, during the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah, I began leading a once-a-year hike in the woods as a way to prepare for the Yamim Noraim, the High Holidays. We typically begin in a circle near the woods, sharing some thoughts about the upcoming work of teshuvah, repentance. I focus the group on the New Year and on teshuvah between us and others and between us and God. Then together we take a silent hike through the woods. No talking is allowed so that though we are together as a community, everyone is at the same time allowed and encouraged to be alone in their thoughts. The hike concludes with another circle in which we reflect upon the time spent in silence, and a sharing of plans for teshuvah.

As a shul, we also use alternative venues for Torah study. We hold a class called “Torah on Tap,” which meets in a bar. It is a discussion that is sometimes a text study, sometimes topical, and sometimes just asking questions. In engaging the wider Jewish people, atmosphere is just as important as content. Many Jews might not know how to pray or might feel they are not “religious enough,” but a bar has very few barriers to entry. This not only brings Judaism to the people who are hesitant to enter the shul, but it brings the community outward, facilitating a strong feeling that we are more than a shul; we are a community within the world. This makes for much stronger communal bonds because people are not living one identity outside of shul and another inside, rather the two sometimes bifurcated worlds begin to merge.

Several years ago, we spent the year creating an emphasis on seeing Judaism through art. Among the many classes, hands-on art explorations, and Orthodox rabbinic scholars-in-residence who were exploring Rav Kook’s and others ideas about art, we spent an interesting day at the local art museum taking a tour that I guided along with one of the docents at the museum who was also an Orthodox Jew. I focused the tour on the many paintings that drew on the Torah for their subject matter. We looked not only at each painting against its biblical background but also at the painting or work as a work of art in itself. What did the colors the artist used, and the emotive quality of the painting in turn, teach us about the biblical story from which it had emerged? This was a good example of opening our eyes to the cultural resources around us outside of our shul that can help to expand what we do to a wider audience and a wider Torah vision.

Flexibility

In this age of online shopping and instant messaging, synagogues must be flexible enough to meet the varied needs of the Jewish people with quality and speed, even if it involves creating services and products to which we are unaccustomed. Several years ago a secular Israeli family approached us with an observation. There were a growing number of secular Israelis in St. Louis whose children attend secular public schools and have no Jewish education. These children speak some Hebrew, which they learned at home but cannot read or write Hebrew. Secular Israelis who move outside of Israel quickly find themselves without the Jewish influence of Israeli society upon which they relied for connection to Jewish holidays, culture, and even religious moments. They find themselves in a larger society that is largely under Christian influence, and feel disoriented and bereft of their Jewish identity. Their children have no knowledge at all of the Jewish people and its land, its religion, its language, or its culture.

With the guidance of one or two Israeli families, we immediately took steps to establish a weekly Hebrew school that would focus on reading and writing Hebrew, thus serving the needs of this population on their own terms. Our goal was ultimately not just to teach Hebrew but primarily to teach Judaism in a way that would be acceptable to these families and ultimately to engage them in the Jewish community. Three years later, 15 families attend this Hebrew school, have a strong connection to the Bais Abraham community, and are even asking for additional religious instruction for their children. Had Bais Abraham been a place of much bureaucratic procedure I doubt it would have been able to be flexible enough, quickly enough, to engage a new population with such specific needs so unexpectedly.

Innovation

If Jews are not fully connecting to the prevalent model of community, then we must be willing, within the bounds of halakha and with its sage guidance, to tweak the model. Tradition and the status quo are important values with great benefits, but they must be weighed against their costs. I am not recommending that we compromise halakha, but I am saying that within halakha we should be willing to perhaps go against parts of prevalent Orthodox culture. As the talmudic statement often quoted by halakhic decisors goes: Lo ra’inu ayno ra’ayah: Just because we have not seen something before, does not mean it is automatically forbidden.

One example that comes to mind today is the increase of female Orthodox religious leadership within Orthodox synagogues. Programs at Yeshiva University, Drisha Institute, Nishmat, and Yeshivat Maharat are training Orthodox women to be guides, teachers, and halakhic decisors within Orthodox communities. This has fallen under some attack of late often with the caveat I have heard over and over: “It is not halakhically forbidden, but we should not do it.”

This fear of change even when something is halakhically permitted and increasingly practiced in centrist Orthodox communities stops us from being flexible enough to speak to the needs of the moment. This does not mean the halakhic answer is always yes, nor does it mean we should not sacrifice for halakha, or keep the halakha even when it flies in the face of current notions of morality. However, there is a limit to unduly sanctifying the status quo and the current Orthodox culture. The color of one’s clothes or hat or the language one uses should not necessarily be seen as holy or required just because they are the Orthodox culture of the moment.

Thus, Bais Abraham has this year hired a soon-to-graduate student of Yeshivat Maharat. We do not call her rabbi since she is not one, nor would it be a good idea to push her into a rabbinic box. I believe that Orthodox women today in positions of leadership will help to define this role as a new one within the long list of Jewish female historical leadership typologies. The shofetet, the neviah, the song leader, all of these roles were held by famous Jewish women in other eras and I think that the Jewish Orthodox women leaders of today are on the verge of helping to define a new and much needed leadership role for the Jewish people which will help Jewish Orthodox life, values, and Torah to speak more clearly to the current Jewish community with a more vibrant and innovative shul makeup.

If we are willing, within the bounds of halakha, to open ourselves and our communities to embrace a wider and more varied range of Jewish ideas, Jewish spiritual tools and Jewish people, our synagogues will quickly become the beverage of choice, once again, for even the younger generation of Jews who are so thirsty for the word of God.