National Scholar Updates

“Shirts! Shirts!”

The boy was standing in front of the mosque just down the street from his family’s house. Would you call it a street? It was dirt, it was never paved or stone, but as the men came out of the mosque, the boy sang out in a clear, soft voice, “Buy a shirt!”

He had said to his mother, “Zip, zip, you make them so fast, why not make them to sell? One seam here, one seam there, I’ll sell them for you. I’ll go in front of the mosque, and when the men come out I’ll make some money, and bring it home to you.”

It was the Ottoman Empire in 1911, in a port across from Europe—on the Asian side of the Strait of Dardanelles. They were living in a magnificent nowhere-land, with melons in the attic, beehives for honey on the windowsill, his grandfather’s vineyards full of grapes, but with nothing much a man could do. Study the Torah—the Bible—it was the most important thing. The men studied with the boy’s father on Shabbat. But it was not enough. His father had the shop, with kerosene lamps and the dishes and glasses that came in huge wooden crates from Austria, but how many dishes could you sell in Canakkale? His father sat in the shop and read the newspaper. He knew how to read, so he relayed the news to everyone. What was the news? What did it have to do with them? Slowly week by week the newspapers came from Istanbul and raised the same questions day after day. The lid was coming down, you could watch it move slowly, or you could think about it.

The boy’s mother was up at five every morning, sitting at the sewing machine. She sang as she worked, a steady breathing of thought and cloth strategy, her right hand on the wheel. She was like his father standing to pray, but she was seated with a firm hold on the earth, her foot on the treadle. Praying was breathing between here and God, and sewing was breathing between cloth and God, with a voice in Spanish words. The boy sat by her side, the cloth moved into creation while she sang. “Ken me va kerer a mi, ken me va kerer a mi?, Who is going to love me? Knowing that I love you, my love for you is the death of me.” But if cloth could become shirts, sung and sewn into creation, that you could wear on your back, then nowhere could become somewhere and a man could grow up through life like the turning of the events in the Joseph story, until the powerful man wept to see his brothers, and they all wept finally and knew even a boy thrown into a pit could grow up to be a vizier.

A boy could grow to be a man, might grow tall.

First the men took off their shoes, lining them up in pairs. Then with their clay libriks they poured water on their faces and their uplifted forearms, the sky overhead bright as a blue pillow of light, the breezes cool. Inside they prayed on the tiled floors. They did want the shirts, the men as they came out of the mosque. How could you say no, they were cheap. Everyone needed a shirt at this price. Anyone would buy them, and it was the boy’s idea. He had been proven right. Once as a boy you’ve been proven right, thinking for the family, you can keep going, jumping up in the favor of your mother’s eyes, and your own eyes.

***

He was the oldest now. His oldest brother had been sent off to Jaffa to study the new science—agriculture. It was a scholarship from the Alliance Israelite Universelle. The very name of the school was like the bright wild shake of a tambourine to the mother and father, and to the five hundred Jewish families of the town. The boy himself went to the Alliance school in Canakkale. It was different from the ancient Talmud Torah with the children huddled around tables, taught by poor old shrunken men in raggedy beards. At the Alliance, Monsieur Toledano, the director who had studied in Paris, stood up tall and wore a top hat. The boy’s mother had insisted the next brother go along with the eldest to Jaffa, although it tore her heart out to let the two of them go. But the Alliance was right that they had to save themselves from being ground into the earth and had to find the sea of emancipation. The sea was big, the world was wide, although the town was tiny, clustered, and safe like a breeze-blessed paradise at the center of the world. The town was at the Narrows of the Dardanelles, the same straits that were a birth canal for Europe, with the snow cold waters rushing down from the Black Sea through the Bosphorus through the Sea of Marmara to here where the ships of the world went by. His mother’s rich brothers sometimes sat at the tables by the water (she didn’t have the money or, with six children, the time to sit there), drinking tea, watching the ships of the world pass by with their colorful flags. You could see Europe right across the Straits, it was right there.

***

            The boy knew the smell of kashkaval because when he worked at the grocery that year, the owner asked him to carry a whole half wheel of it across town. It was heavy for him, so to brace himself he carried it high on his chest, but his nose could not move away and the cheese was so pungent it stank. That smell he knew well (and eventually he would eat kashkaval years later). What the boy never knew was about Ovid’s Leander, thousands of years before, swimming across the same straits in the terrible rushing current every night from Abydos on the Asian shore, a short walk from Canakkale, to his goddess Hero across the water holding a light up in her tower. And he never knew about a limping rich English poet jokingly trying the same swim in the dark of night about a hundred years before the boy set up his gymnasium of branches and rope in a little garden. The boy did not know either about the nearby city of Troy being attacked by the Achaeans across this same water—the Dardanelles, the Hellespont— and all the tales sung and then written down about those wars, jealousies, wrenching deaths and armor. What the boy knew was that among the Jews of Canakkale, the men sang the Hebrew prayers every day praising the same Ashem the Jews had sung to after Ur, in Egypt, in the desert, in Jerusalem, on the Iberian peninsula, and here where they were welcomed and sent ships for to settle in the Ottoman Empire.

Introduction

            To the popular mind, the Mexican Inquisition conjures up images of torture chambers, prisoners strapped to the rack, their screams echoing throughout the Palacio de la Inquisición, or perhaps autos de fe, with countless numbers of Jews burning at the stake, the stench of their flesh permeating the streets of Mexico City. Did these ghastly events really take place? Certainly, but rarely with the frequency or intensity that many authors would have us believe.

            The perception that the Holy Office of the Inquisition had engaged in the relentless and continuous persecution of crypto-Jews^[1] in New Spain (and throughout the Indies) is largely the function of the Black Legend, anti-Spanish historiography that developed from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, represented principally by Protestant, Northern European scholars, and, later by authors analyzing the Mexican Inquisition from the perspective of Jewish history.^[2] The works produced by this school of historiography placed a heavy emphasis on the role that the Holy Office played in the persecution of crypto-Jews, despite the fact that the Mexican inquisitors concerned themselves far more with such mundane breaches of faith and morality, as blasphemy, bigamy, witchcraft, impersonation of priests, and solicitation of women in the confessional. Moreover, these authors often engaged in the inappropriate imposition of moral value judgments backward in time, ranting against the “moral depravity” of the Inquisition, and its “corrupt,” “unjust” procedures, such as holding “unfair trials,” where “flimsy evidence” was admitted.^[3]  If such outrage were directed at modern contemporary institutions, few would dispute these harsh words of condemnation. The imposition of such twentieth-century judgments backwards to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a decidedly less-enlightened and less ecumenical age, however, runs counter to standards of responsible historical scholarship.^[4]

            It is the thesis of this article that, in contrast to the interpretation outlined above, the policy of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in New Spain toward crypto-Jews was one more of toleration than persecution, relative to the experience between the two entities in Spain. Furthermore, the more distant one found oneself from the metropolis, the less intense and less frequent the attention paid by the inquisitors to the conversos, even within the context of this policy of relative toleration.

Iberian Backgrounds

            The roots of New Spain's crypto-Jewish settlement penetrate deeply into the history of Spain and Mexico. While legend placed Jews in the Iberian peninsula as early as the sixth century bce, more solid accounts trace the origins of the community to the Diaspora that occurred in the Late Roman Empire, when Jews expelled from their ancestral homeland found themselves scattered all across the Mediterranean region. Under the rule of the Visigoths, patterns of economic life began to emerge among Spanish Jews that would change little for centuries to come. Concentrated for the most part in the towns of Cataluña and Andalucía, and in Toledo, they engaged in commerce, both internal and overseas, and administered estates of Christian nobility. Some Jews owned their own land, and farmed it themselves, or utilized slave labor. Relations between Jews and the ruling Visigoths were by no means peaceful. Codes were enacted that severely restricted the opportunity for Jews to hold office, intermarry, and build synagogues. Increasingly through the sixth and seventh centuries, zealous Visigoth kings sought the conversion of Spanish Jews, achieving some moderate success. Those who retained their faith, like their descendants in New Mexico who were also forced to pursue their religious beliefs in a hostile environment, tended to observe such basic rituals as sanctification of the Sabbath and festivals, dietary laws, and circumcision.^[5]

            With the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, Spanish Jews received a reprieve from persecutions and attempts at forced conversions. While the Muslims by no means pursued a policy of total religious freedom, the general atmosphere was one of toleration of non-Muslim religious practices.^[6]  Barriers to social and economic mobility, imposed earlier by the Visigoths, were by and large removed. Jewish communities in areas under Muslim rule, and eventually in Christian areas as well, were allowed a large degree of autonomy in the administration of their affairs. Geographically, Jewish settlement expanded throughout the peninsula, initially to the major cities of Andalucía, such as Córdoba, Seville, Granada, and eventually through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, into the more heavily Christian regions of Castile, León, and Aragón. During this period Jews tended to pursue urban trades, as artisans, craftspeople, and shopkeepers, in addition to serving as tax farmers for Christian nobles. In so doing, they often found themselves the object of scorn and hostility at the hands of their poorer, and relatively more rural Christian neighbors.^[7]            

            This hostility to the Jews of Spain that had been growing among the Christian common people, nurtured by generations of civil wars, taxes, and religious crusades against the infidel, began to manifest itself more clearly through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The church mounted a concentrated campaign to convert the Spanish Jews to Christianity through a combination of both peaceful and violent means. This conversion effort achieved a high degree of success, especially among those wealthier and better educated elements of the Jewish communities. For many of them the transition from Judaism to Christianity was made without a great deal of inner spiritual conflict, for it represented a change of religion in name only. But many conversos and their offspring did not take their new faith seriously.  They continued to participate in the social, political, and religious affairs of their old synagogues. The pain of conversion was further eased by the new and unprecedented opportunities now available to these "New Christians.” Barriers that hitherto prevented them as Jews from rising to economic, social, or political prominence now disappeared, and there came upon the scene instantaneously a new class of nobles, courtiers, municipal office holders, and literary figures, obviously distinguishable from their Old Christian counterparts by their origin, manner, and appearance.^[8]

            The presence of a large and prosperous group of apparently insincere converts became increasingly disturbing to the Old Christian community through the fifteenth century. Anti-converso sentiment, which spread throughout Spain, soon found itself manifested in the official policies of ruling monarchs. The two emerging rulers, Ferdinand of Aragón and Isabel of Castile, capitalized upon this strong emotion in order to unite their subjects and thus solidify control in their dominions. The establishment of the Holy Office of the Inquisition by the Catholic Monarchs in concert with Pope Sixtus IV in 1483 may be seen as a logical institutional manifestation of the deeply-rooted religious feeling against the conversos and also of the royal desire to implement their sovereignty over their newly consolidated realms. Moreover, the Catholic Monarchs, through the Inquisition, sought to break down the economic power of the increasingly influential middle class, largely composed of Jews and conversos.^[9]  

            The ranks of the Spanish conversos were further swelled as a result of the edict issued on March 31, 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabel expelling the Jews from Castile and Aragón. Estimates vary on the number of Jews who opted to leave the Spanish realms, but it seems safe to conclude that of the estimated 200,000 Jews living in Castile and Aragón in 1492, well over half of them fled to safer havens. Of these exiles, most sought refuge across the frontier in Portugal, the others fleeing to France, Italy, and Turkish-controlled regions of the eastern Mediterranean. Those who remained in the Spanish kingdoms submitted to the conversion process and became, at least nominally, cristianos católicos. From this time forward, Catholicism was to be the only legally practiced religion, both in Spain and in the vast empire of the Indies that was about to be uncovered by Christopher Columbus in the very same year of the expulsion.^[10]

            The observance of Jewish rites and customs, now outlawed, was forced underground, to be practiced only in the secrecy of one's home. No longer Jews, those New Christians who chose to continue these observances did so as Christians, in violation of ecclesiastical law, and were often prosecuted for these relapses by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the institution charged with the enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy among Spanish Christians, both Old and New alike. The situation was markedly different for those estimated 60,000 Spanish Jews who migrated westward across the Iberian Peninsula to join the smaller native Jewish population of Portugal. Although they were forced to either convert or leave the country by edict of Manoel I in 1497, conversion was for the most part nominal, and the enforcement of orthodoxy lax. In sharp contrast to the pressure on Spanish conversos to abandon all vestiges of their old faith, the attitude in Portugal was far more tolerant, and Portuguese New Christians tended to continue to observe Judaic laws and rituals discreetly, yet in an atmosphere of relative security. Thus, through the sixteenth century in Portugal there arose a new and distinct group of crypto-Jews, differing from the Spanish conversos by the retention of their old faith and religious practices.^[11]

            The Portuguese conversos distinguished themselves by their vigorous activity in the economic sphere, not only in the Iberian Peninsula, but also in Portugal's overseas colonies in America, Asia, and Africa, where these individuals played a crucial role in organizing and financing the initial commercial enterprises. For a variety of reasons, the last half of the sixteenth century witnessed an intensity of royal and ecclesiastical activity against crypto-Jews in Portugal. As in Spain, New Christians represented a threat by rising middle class, bourgeois elements against the older ruling aristocracy. Furthermore, the Protestant Reformation sparked a new spirit of vigilance among religious elements within the country, and a consequent strengthening of the powers of the Inquisition. Sealing the fate of the Portuguese crypto-Jews was the union of Spain and Portugal under the rule of Philip II, which came about as a result of a crisis of succession in 1581. The resulting increase in the activity of the Portuguese Inquisition against the crypto-Jewish community stimulated a veritable invasion of Portuguese New Christians into the Spanish realms from the 1580s through the early decades of the seventeenth century.^[12]

Crypto-Jewish Settlement in New Spain

            Within a few years, Portuguese crypto-Jews were also finding their way to distant parts of the Spanish Indies, including the viceroyalty of New Spain. The heaviest period of immigration occurred in the 1620s. This was owing to a variety of factors. Undoubtedly many crypto-Jews sought to take advantage of the relaxation in the immigration laws.^[13]  However, it is also clear that an equally strong motive for emigrating was the improvement of their material condition. In addition, New Spain served as a potential haven for crypto-Jews who wished to practice their secret religious rites in an atmosphere of relative security. In contrast to the Iberian Peninsula, where the Holy Office posed a constant threat to New Christians, the Mexican Inquisition was not particularly concerned with the persecution of judaizantes. With two exceptional periods of activity against crypto-Jews, one in the 1580s and 1590s, and the other in the 1640s, the Holy Office focused its attention upon less spectacular breaches of Catholic orthodoxy, such as witchcraft, bigamy, blasphemy, and the solicitation of women by priests. Thus, once the troubled Iberian crypto-Jews left their homeland for New Spain, they would be able to begin new lives, relatively free from the persecution of the past, and pregnant with the expectation of a comfortable material existence.

            Those conversos who arrived from Spain and Portugal in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not find themselves in a completely alien environment. Viable crypto-Jewish communities had flourished in Mexico City and other towns in New Spain since the early 1500s. Mexican crypto-Jews tended to pursue mercantile trades in greater numbers compared with other endeavors. Their careers encompassed a wide variety of trading activities. Some crypto-Jews, stationed for the most part either in Mexico City or Veracruz, engaged in trade across the Atlantic, importing goods from Spain, as well as slaves from Angola, while exporting silver, dyestuffs, and other New Spanish products. Others worked out of Acapulco, and concerned themselves with the Philippines trade. Still others sought to take advantage of the profitable cacao trade with Maracaibo and Caracas, while certain other conversos maintained commercial ties with Peru. Exploiting the sources and markets within the viceroyalty of New Spain, itself, offered opportunities to many more crypto-Jewish merchants, including those who carried goods to remote areas of the far northern frontier of New Spain.^[14]

            As indicated above, Mexican crypto-Jews were able to practice their secret faith in an atmosphere of relative toleration, with the exception of the late 1580s and 1590s, and the 1640s. During these two periods, due to a series of complex factors, the Holy Office of the Inquisition embarked on vigorous campaigns against the conversos. The first of these, which lasted from 1589 to 1601, was initiated in response to the activities of one Luis de Carvajal, el mozo, Portuguese New Christian, and nephew of Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, the governor of Nuevo León.

            The elder Luis de Carvajal was born around 1539 in the small Portuguese mountain town of Mogadouoro to a converso family. He made his first journey to Mexico in 1567, as a merchant carrying a cargo of wine to sell in Veracruz, Mexico City, and Zacatecas.^[15] Recognizing the opportunities for exploiting the agricultural and mineral resources in the far northeastern frontier of New Spain, Carvajal sailed back to Spain in 1578 to submit a proposal to King Philip II. In return for opening up the Nuevo Reino de León for Spanish colonization, Carvajal asked the king for two major concessions: (1) that he be appointed governor; and (2) that no investigations be conducted into the ethnic background of the colonists he recruited to populate the new settlement. Under the terms of the royal cédula issued by King Ferdinand in 1501, it was illegal for anyone of Jewish or Moorish descent to emigrate to the Indies. To be sure, many conversos and their offspring did come over legally, but they came under assumed names or doctored limpiezas de sangre. Philip II agreed to these terms, and by means of a formal capitulación signed on May 31, 1579, Luis de Carvajal received his mandate to initiate his colonization effort.^[16] He immediately began to recruit approximately one hundred people from Spain and Portugal, most of converso origin, and brought them to New Spain, establishing his capital at Cerralvo in Nuevo León.

            The young colony survived the material challenges presented by a hostile environment. In religious matters, as well, it appears that the settlers were left alone to worship as they pleased, as long as they did so quietly. However, this atmosphere of calm was soon to be shattered, when one of the colonists betrayed the standard of discretion. Shortly after his arrival in New Spain, the governor's fourteen-year-old nephew was told of his Jewishness by older relatives. In contrast to the response of his contemporaries, young Luis de Carvajal decided that if he was a Jew, he was going to live openly as a Jew. Not only did he begin to practice his religion in full view, but he also initiated efforts to reconnect other New Christians back to Judaism.^[17] Even in an atmosphere of relative toleration demonstrated by New Spanish society, this behavior could not be endured. The Holy Office of the Inquisition, recently elevated to the status of tribunal, had been watching the growth of the Portuguese converso community in New Spain over the course of the previous few years, and had expressed concern over the potential for the spread of the practice of la ley muerta de Moisén—the Dead Law of Moses.^[18]

            The reaction on the part of the inquisitors in Mexico was strong and swift. Between 1589 and 1596, almost two hundred persons were arrested for the crime of judaizante, focusing on the Carvajal family, and extending to crypto-Jewish activity all over the viceroyalty. Young Luis de Carvajal was arrested in 1589, and was reconciled in the auto de fe of 1590. Undeterred by this castigation, young Carvajal resumed his proselytizing efforts, was re-arrested by the Inquisition, and convicted for relapsing into Judaism. He was burned at the stake in the auto de fe of 1596, along with several members of his family.^[19]          After 1604, the policy on the part of the Holy Office returned to one of relative toleration towards the crypto-Jews of New Spain, with only sporadic arrests in the 1620s and 30s. During the first four decades of the seventeenth century, the converso community grew substantially both in numbers and in commercial influence.^[20]

            The second intense campaign began in 1642, motivated in large measure by events across the ocean. In 1640, a successful revolutionary movement for Portuguese independence from the king of Spain stimulated in New Spain a fierce xenophobic reaction against all those of Portuguese background. It was feared that the Portuguese in Mexico City, Veracruz, and the northern mining areas would rise up in revolt against Spanish authorities, and attempt to deliver the viceroyalty to the new Portuguese king. A newly appointed anti-Portuguese viceroy initiated a comprehensive crackdown against this perceived foreign threat. Included among this target group were the estimated two thousand crypto-Jews in the viceroyalty, most of whom possessed Portuguese roots. By 1649, hundreds of crypto-Jews were arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime of "Observing the Law of Moses.” As in the previous campaign, a few were executed, but most were "reconciled,” and returned to resume their lives and careers.^[21]

            After the mid-seventeenth century, the policy on the part of the Holy Office toward the crypto-Jews of New Spain returned to one of relative toleration. From this point until the death of the Mexican Inquisition with the independence of Mexico from Spain in 1821, the inquisitors had very little interest in prosecuting judaizante cases, concentrating instead on more mundane breaches of heresy as blasphemy, bigamy, witchcraft, and censorship of Enlightenment literature. Many of the descendants of New Spain's crypto-Jews, generation by generation, assimilated and acculturated into mainstream Catholic society, losing all vestiges of Judaism. But others appear to have held on to elements of their ancestral faith, either retaining residual Jewish practices, or even passing along a consciousness of a Jewish heritage.

The Frontier as Refuge

            Before, during, and after the two aberrant periods of inquisitorial persecution against the crypto-Jews in New Spain, it appears that the far northern frontier served as a haven for conversos attempting to avoid arrest by the Holy Office. Solange Alberro, in her ground-breaking 1988 work, Inquisición y sociedad en México, 1571–1700, emphasized this fact in her analysis of seventeenth-century Zacatecas. The second-most important city in the viceroyalty of New Spain, Zacatecas served as an important mining center and mercantile distribution point for the region.^[22]

            Alberro argued that the great distance of Zacatecas from the center of authority in Mexico City, and its geographical isolation from other major communities “facilitated laxity and backsliding, practically assuring exemption from punishment” by the Holy Office.^[23] The permissive atmosphere of this northern mining community fostered an environment where heretical acts lost their character as social transgressions, and, as a consequence, behavior that would not have been tolerated in the capital passed virtually unnoticed in tierra adentro.  The frontier offered two major advantages for crypto-Jews seeking anonymity: remoteness from inquisitorial officials and an ample market for the goods and services provided by converso merchants. Alberro observed that, although several members of this community were denounced before the Mexican tribunal, only a minority of these cases were ever prosecuted.^[24] The testimony provided by inquisition records, however fragmentary, represents a unique window through which the role that these crypto-Jews played in the economy and society of the northern frontier can be viewed better.

            On the basis of this documentation, a clear picture emerges of converso participation in commerce from a variety of perspectives. The trade with the northern mining area was largely controlled by merchants based in Mexico City, who received on consignment such diverse items as wine from Spain, silk from the Philippines, cacao from Venezuela, cloth from obrajes in Tlaxcala, and wax from Campeche and then sold this merchandise on credit to traveling merchants bound for Zacatecas and other mining towns. These individuals comprised a mobile, adventuresome group, seldom remaining in one place for more than a few years at a time. For many, their trading experience in the mining areas was but one of several spheres of mercantile activity in which they had engaged during their lifetime. With few exceptions, these crypto-Jews were immigrants from Portugal and Spain who had come over at a young age to seek their fortunes. Their experiences reflected the needs and the hardships of the environment in which they lived. Some of them participated in the defense of the mining frontier against Indian attacks. Others suffered the loss of their wares along the highway at the hands of robbers. The danger and risk of their enterprises necessitated the development of interdependence and cooperation among the travelers, both crypto-Jews and Old Christians alike. Often, groups of traders undertook journeys together or joined in compañías for mutual aid and protection.^[25]

            Most of the traveling crypto-Jewish merchants tended to transact their business with certain other conversos who stationed themselves in the various communities of the northern mining areas. Most prominent among these individuals was Simón López de Aguarda. López received shipments from his contacts in Mexico City sent to Zacatecas by mule train and exchanged them for silver, which he sent southward. Several crypto-Jewish merchants, based on other towns, also brought their goods to López, depositing them in his store on the plaza pública.

            López performed other important functions in the northern mining community, most significantly in his role as a source of credit. At the time of his arrest in 1642, debts owed to him by residents of the mining region totaled almost ten thousand pesos.^[26]  In addition he served as fiador for several miners, thus enabling them to purchase mercury, a crucial commodity in the processing of silver. Residents of Mexico City also entrusted López to transact business for them in Zacatecas by means of powers of attorney. In the noncommercial area, López served the Spanish mining community with distinction as captain of the presidio of Atotonilco.^[27]

            Religious observance on the part of crypto-Jews of Zacatecas and the surrounding areas tended to follow the same pattern demonstrated in other parts of New Spain. Customs included abstaining from eating pork, porging of animals prior to slaughter, and fasting on Yom Kippur.^[28] Inquisition records even cite the existence of a synagogue in the city from the early seventeenth century.^[29] Moreover, like their coreligionists living elsewhere in the viceroyalty, Zacatecan conversos followed similar patterns of endogamy, taking care to marry within the community.^[30]Despite the formal prohibition of judaizing activity in New Spain, the practice of the Law of Moses in Zacatecas was, according to Alberro, “conscious, coherent, and deliberate,” thus indicating that the northern mining region functioned effectively as a zone of refuge.^[31]

Crypto-Jewish Settlement in New Mexico

            “If Zacatecas constitutes a zone of refuge in comparison with the central region of the viceroyalty,” according to Alberro, “New Mexico is, as [France V.] Scholes states, ‘a heaven for social outcasts from the mining camps of Zacatecas, Santa Bárbara and Parral’…. That is to say, the zone of refuge from the zone of refuge.”^[32] Indeed, it appears that New Mexico, like the mining areas of Zacatecas, also served as a focus of settlement of crypto-Jews seeking to escape persecution from the Mexican Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

            The origins of European exploration of New Mexico date back to 1540, when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led an expedition of over one thousand men and women north and west from Mexico City into what is today the U.S. Southwest.^[33] The Spanish explorers, in search of the mythical, wealthy “Seven Cities of Cíbola,” found little in the way of precious metals. But, perhaps more important, they encountered groups of sedentary Indians, whom they labeled “pueblos,” due to the concentration of the native population in towns. A combination of severe winters, failure to discover the treasures of “Cíbola,” and a debilitating injury to Vázquez, compelled the Spanish to return home to Mexico, thus leaving the colonization of New Mexico for another, more permanent enterprise five decades later.^[34]

            The campaign of the Mexican Holy Office against the crypto-Jews of Nuevo León of the 1580s and 1590s, discussed above, was to have a direct impact on the later exploration and settlement of New Mexico at the end of the sixteenth century. Upon the arrest of Governor Luis de Carvajal by the Inquisition for tolerating the presence of judaizantes under his administration, he left behind in Nuevo León as lieutenant governor of the province a seasoned military leader, Gaspar Castaño de Sosa. Like Carvajal, Castaño was born in Portugal, and was possibly of crypto-Jewish origin.^[35] Soon after receiving word of Governor Carvajal's conviction and appearance in the auto de fe of February 24, 1589,^[36] Castaño rounded up the some one hundred seventy colonists (comprising men, women and children) in Cerralvo and left on an uncharted expedition to the north. This "Colony on the Move," as Matson and Schroeder^[37] referred to it, reached the Río Grande,^[38] traveled upriver to its confluence with the Río Pecos, and trekked up the Pecos, crossing Glorieta Pass into the Río Grande Valley, finally stopping near the pueblo of Santo Domingo, in an attempt to establish the first permanent Spanish colony in New Mexico.

            Under the terms of the Spanish colonial system in the late sixteenth century, however, the Castaño de Sosa entrada of 1590 comprised an illegal expedition. Not only had Castaño failed to secure permission from the viceroy to leave Nuevo León (although his emissaries had made attempts to do so), but he had neglected to inform anyone in authority that he was embarking on such a venture. Moreover, Castaño's was the only expedition into the northern frontier of its day not to include a priest or any member of a religious order.^[39] The close ties maintained by Castaño to Governor Carvajal, the coincidence of the timing of his hasty (and illegal) departure for the north upon hearing of Carvajal's problems with the Inquisition, the absence of a priest on the expedition, and the allegations of his own familial ties to the crypto-Jewish community, all suggest strongly that Castaño might have initiated the dangerous entrada for the purpose of leading other crypto-Jews to a secure haven on the far northern frontier.

            Unfortunately, little is known about the background of the members of the Castaño de Sosa expedition. No muster roll has ever been found, which would provide clues as to the Iberian, or possible crypto-Jewish origins of its participants. While certainly not conclusive, possible links may be established by comparing the colonists’ names with those found in contemporary trial records of the Mexican Inquisition, tried for judaizante, names such as Rodríguez, Nieto, Díaz, Hernández, and Pérez.^[40] The participation of Juan de Vitoria Carvajal

also raises some interesting questions. Certainly the coincidence of his tenure in Nuevo León suggests a familial connection to Governor Luis de Carvajal.^[41] Could Vitoria Carvajal have represented a hitherto unidentified branch of the family attempting to escape to the north?

            Not all of the participants in the Castaño enterprise remain lost to history, however.  One of the members of the Castaño expedition who can definitely be linked to converso origins was Alonso Jaimes. Born in the Canary Islands, Jaimes tried to pass himself off as an Old Christian before immigration officials in an attempt to emigrate to Mexico in 1574. He had convinced Francisco Rodríguez to perjure himself by alleging that Jaimes was “free from all Muslim or Jewish blood.”  Recognizing the attempt to circumvent the prohibition of descendants of Jews to emigrate to the Americas, inquisition officials in the Canaries arrested Jaimes and accused him of being “a descendant of a line of conversos, reconciled by the inquisition.”  Unbeknownst to either Jaimes or Rodríguez, the inquisitors had maintained a dossier on Jaimes’s family, tracing them back five generations to Jews from various parts of Spain and Portugal who, after converting to Catholicism in 1492, had sought refuge in the Canaries. Rodríguez was fined eight ducados for his perjury. And, despite all the attention from the Las Palmas tribunal of the Holy Office, Jaimes apparently was able to emigrate to New Spain within a few years after this unpleasant encounter with inquisition officials.^[42]

            When the viceroy of New Spain was informed of Castaño's departure from Nuevo León, he sent Juan Morlete, a former associate of Castaño's, to arrest him and his entire party, not for practicing Judaism, but for having conducted an illegal expedition. Castaño was convicted of treason and exiled to the Philippine Islands, where he died shortly thereafter.^[43] Many of the survivors of the entrada returned to Nuevo León and participated in the founding of the town of Monterrey in 1596.^[44]  Others remained in central Mexico, fearful, perhaps, of attracting the attention of the Inquisition, now in the throes of its vigorous campaign against the converso community of New Spain.

            By the late 1590s the king had realized the efficacy of establishing a defensive outpost in the far northern frontier of New Mexico. Several candidates placed their names under consideration to lead such an expedition. One enjoyed the support of the Mexican Inquisition, Francisco de Urdiñola. Urdiñola was a comisario of the Holy Office, who, in the eyes of the inquisitors, would be in a position to ensure the purity of blood and orthodoxy of the colonists heading north.^[45] Viceroy don Luis de Velasco, however, had no intention of allowing a competing jurisdiction to interfere in such a secular venture. Charges were proffered against Urdiñola for the murder of his wife and several servants, and in the face of such serious allegations, Velasco simply could not permit the comisario to remain under consideration to lead the entrada to the north. The viceroy declared the mission suspended indefinitely.^[46]

            The next year, Velasco chose don Juan de Oñate, the son of a wealthy and powerful northern miner, and, himself a descendant of converted Jews,^[47] to serve as adelantado, and charged him with the task of establishing a new colony in the distant frontier of New Mexico. Among the people whom Oñate approached to join him in this effort were some of the survivors of the Castaño de Sosa expedition. After all, they had returned from New Mexico just a few years earlier and consequently knew well the route northward, the terrain, and had firsthand knowledge of the Pueblo Indians who inhabited the lands to be conquered and occupied. In short, Oñate must have realized the potential for these survivors of the Castaño expedition to help him establish his new colony on a strong footing.

            For their part, those survivors who did not return to Nuevo León might well have felt themselves somewhat vulnerable to arrest by the Inquisition, which, as has been demonstrated, was in the midst of its heaviest phase of activity against Mexican crypto-Jews. Whether for push or pull factors, at least two members of the Castaño entrada decided to return with Oñate in 1598, Juan de Victoria Carvajal and Juan Rodríguez Nieto. The latter appears to be the same Juan Rodríguez, identified by the Mexican Inquisition as a fugitive the previous year, and who was burned in effigy in the auto de fe of 1601 for practicing Judaism.^[48] Another member of the 1590 expedition, Alonso Jaimes, whose Jewish origins are discussed above, could be found in Oñate's military encampment at Casco in 1596.^[49] Another of Oñate's soldiers, Cristóbal de Herrera, was arrested several years later in Zacatecas, denounced before the Inquisition on suspicion of practicing Judaism.^[50] Alberro, in her discussion on the history of the Inquisition in Zacatecas, referred to Herrera as “un verdadero judaizante,” a true Jew.7^[51] The supplier of the Oñate expedition was a merchant by the name of Balthasar Rodríguez, possibly the same Balthasar Rodríguez, merchant of Nuevo León and brother of Luis de Carvajal, who had eluded attempts by Inquisition agents to arrest him several years earlier.^[52]

            Bartolomé Romero, a soldier accompanying Oñate to New Mexico in 1598, was listed on the muster roll as born in Corral de Almaguer, in the region of Toledo, the son of Bartolomé Romero.^[53] His mother was María de Adeva, possibly a relation of the Benadevas, a prominent Jewish, and later converso, family of Sevilla at the turn of the sixteenth century.^[54] Baptismal records from Corral de Almaguer note that other Romeros from the town either served as godparents of New Christians, or were, themselves, descendants of conversos.^[55] Yet another Romero from Quintanar de la Orden, located about fourteen miles from Corral de Almaguer, was convicted of judaizante by the Inquisition of Cuenca in 1589.^[56]

            Despite the presence of New Christians in New Mexico from the earliest years of Spanish settlement, the Inquisition, represented in the colony by the Franciscan friars, appeared unconcerned about the possibility of the practice of Jewish heresy in its midst. This was due to a variety of factors, including the general disinterest by the Mexican Holy Office in judaizante cases in the early seventeenth century, and the remoteness of New Mexico from the capital. Perhaps most significantly, the Franciscans were preoccupied with the struggle for power with the civil authorities in this far northern frontier outpost.^[57]

            During this period of inattention it appears that several more descendants of conversos emigrated northward along the Camino Real into New Mexico, including Simón de Abendaño, from Ciudad Rodrigo,^[58] along the Spanish-Portuguese border, Diego de Vera, from the Canary Islands,^[59] and the Portuguese Manuel Jorge.^[60] Suspicion of Judaic background extended even to the ranks of the Franciscan order. The investigation into the limpieza de sangre of fray Esteban de Perea, born in Villanueva del Fresno, on the Spanish-Portguese border, nominated to the position of custos in 1629, contained testimony alleging that the nominee’s ancestors had been Jewish.^[61] The Franciscan authorities chose to overlook this potentially damaging evidence, however, and confirmed Perea to the post.

            It was not until 1662 that Inquisition agents in New Mexico began to focus on crypto-Judaism. At 4:00 on the morning of August 27, comisarios of the Holy Office burst into the home of Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal, arresting his wife, Teresa de Aguilera y Roche. Also taken that year were the governor, himself, and Sargento Mayor Francisco Gómez Robledo. All three were charged with secretly practicing Judaism. Arrested on unspecified charges of heresy were Capitán Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán, Sargento Mayor Diego Romero, and Capitán Nicolás de Aguilar.^[62] The documentation generated by these politically-motivated trials of these individuals offers a glimpse into crypto-Jewish activity in New Mexico during the period preceding these arrests, when neither the inquisitors, nor anyone else in the colony appeared to be bothered by such heretical practices.

            Testimony emanating from these trials revealed customs clearly identified as Jewish being practiced by early New Mexican settlers. Several witnesses testifying against Francisco Gómez Robledo insisted that it was common knowledge in the colony that his father, Francisco Gómez, was a Jew.^[63] The elder Gómez, born in Coina, Portugal, came to New Spain in 1604 in the retinue of Juan de Oñate's brother, Alonso, heading north to New Mexico shortly thereafter. During his nearly half century in the colony, Gómez held several civil and military positions.^[64]  Not only was Francisco Gómez Robledo found to have been circumcised,^[65] considered by inquisitors as a certain indication of judaizing,^[66] but his younger brothers, Juan and Andrés, were as well. It is worthy to note that in 1662 testimony against the latter two, the witness, Domingo López de Ocanto, conveyed the impression that knowledge of the circumcisions was widespread among the community:

They were asked if they knew, or if they had heard of any person or persons who were circumcised.

He replied that he only knows that Juan Gómez and Andrés Gómez, sons of Francisco Gómez, deceased, citizens of the Villa of Santa Fe, who are of the age of this witness, when they were young boys used to bathe together, and that it appeared to him that they had their parts circumcised, and that all of the young men of that age know this . . . (emphasis added).^[67]

As a result of this revelation, Inquisition prosecutor, Rodrigo Ruíz suggested that:

Juan and Andrés Gómez, brothers, sons of Francisco Gómez and doña Ana Romero [read Robledo] with regard to the aforesaid sign of circumcision or cutting, which demonstrates that they are observers of Judaism, as a consequence should be severely castigated by the Holy Office with the penalties established by law. . . .^[68]

Despite the clear indications of Judaic identity and practice, and the stern admonition by prosecutor Ruíz, Francisco Gómez Robledo was acquitted of all charges, and neither Juan nor Andrés were ever prosecuted by the Inquisition.

            So, too, did the record generated by the trials of Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal and his wife, Teresa de Aguilera y Roche suggest a connection to Jewish background. López, arrested for judaizante in 1662, swore that he was of pure Old Christian noble origin, and that none of his ancestors had ever been castigated by the Inquisition.^[69] He rather conveniently neglected to mention that one of his maternal great-grandfathers, Juan Núñez de León, had been penanced by the Mexican Inquisition for judaizante in 1603.^[70] Testimony against Aguilera included Sabbath observance, such as changing linens and bathing on Fridays, and reciting prayers in secret on Friday evenings.^[71]

            Cristóbal de Anaya Almazán, as cited above, had been arrested on an unspecified charge of heresy. His testimony, however, appears to have suggested a fear of charges against him for practicing Judaism:

Item—he also says and declares that in August of the previous year, in the pueblo of Sandía, having complied with the order brought by the Holy Tribunal, don Fernando de Durán y Cháves said to the witness that he had taken back that which the Holy Tribunal had ordered, to which the witness responded to him, I, too, take back what I said so that the people should not be saying what is being said, that perhaps they arrested me for practicing Judaism, which was said before don Agustín de Cháves, Padre fray Raphael, and doña Catalina Vásques, from whom I also ask for mercy as a Catholic Christian.^[72]

            During the course of the 1660s persecutions in New Mexico, testimony emerged from the trial of Governor López that shed light on the Jewish practices of another early colonist. Padre fray Nicolás de Villar, related that during lent of 1657, one of his Franciscan brethren had told him of a young girl, the eldest daughter of Portuguese blacksmith Manuel Jorge, who had confessed to him that “she observed the Law of Moses with exquisite rites and ceremonies.” The priest did not report her heresy to anyone, since the Mexican Tribunal was 500 leagues distant, and he was not aware of the presence of any Inquisition official in the colony.^[73]

Conclusion

            The examples cited above suggest that the crypto-Jewish identity and practices of early New Mexico colonists were quite well known both to the general populace and to religious officials. But, absent extraneous factors, in this case the effort in the 1660s on the part of the Franciscans to break down the political power of Governor López de Mendizábal, the authorities, both civil and religious, appeared to be unconcerned about this heresy in their midst. In this sense, the New Mexico experience supports the thesis that the frontier served as a haven for those fleeing from the authority of the Inquisition. The farther one found oneself from the metropolis, the greater the sense of toleration. In the case of the crypto-Jews, those who fled from their homes in Spain and Portugal found a relatively safe haven in central Mexico. During the two aberrant periods of persecution by the Mexican Holy Office in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, New Christians were able to escape to an even more secure environment on the far northern frontier of New Spain. Indeed, it appears that the distant outpost of New Mexico represented, in Solange Alberro’s words, “the zone of refuge from the zone of refuge” with regard to its policy of toleration of a crypto-Jewish presence.

Notes

* The author would like to acknowledge the Estate of Eva Feld for its support of the research that formed the basis of this article. His book, To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, was published by Columbia University Press in 2005.

In the opening paragraphs of his thought provoking essay, Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo assails the smug complacency that has come to define our synagogue worship. Sadly, he does not devote much attention to the sorry state of public prayer, despite his central thesis that God has left the synagogue, seeking out those who seek Him elsewhere. And he is correct. Synagogue services lack feeling. They lack aesthetics. They lack a sense of encountering the divine via the mechanism of prayer. R. Lopes Cardozo aptly describes the symptom; we enter our prayer houses, put on the “auto-pilot,” as he terms it, and mindlessly mouth the time-worn prayers, giving them no thought and then head home to our Sabbath or holiday repast. He does not, however, describe how the ideal service, one that both uplifts the worshipper and challenges him or her spiritually, might appear.

            Why do Jews come to the synagogue to pray? Is it merely a need to fulfill the technical halakhic requirement that one pray with a minyan, a quorum of 10 men, that directs one to the synagogue? Assuming that were the only reason people came to synagogue, our liturgy describes the recipient of our prayers as “. . .haBoher beShirei zimra. . .,” the One who prefers hymns and songs. We would be duty-bound to beautify our prayers as part and parcel of the requirement to pray. But for most people, it is not the technical requirement of a minyan that draws them to the synagogue; it is to interact with the deepest recesses of their souls and in some small way, to encounter the divine.

            The Talmud records the dramatic aftermath to man’s creation, that fateful Friday afternoon. Adam, upon his creation, enjoyed the Garden of Eden. He thirstily drank from the two rivers that formed its boundaries, and ate of its produce. But he was totally unprepared for the advent of sunset and nighttime. As the world plunged into darkness, Adam, we are told, fell into mortal dread of a cold world bereft of sunlight. Fear of the darkness, and existential angst over how he might survive so cold and unforgiving a place, tormented him that night. But the next day, when the sun shone again, and Adam felt its warmth, the Midrash continues, he sang out the Sabbath Psalm: “It is good to praise God and to sing to His lofty name.” Humankind’s first creative expression was music—his first approach of the divine in song. The lesson to be derived from this Midrash is that creativity in prayer is to be found not only in the “matbeah haTefillah,” the core text, but in its exposition as well.

            If, as Rabbi Lopes Cardozo posits, people are leaving the synagogue in favor of alternate venues that offer up greater profundity, it is due to the poor presentation of the liturgy that pervades our synagogues. Where there was once a noble and grand tradition of synagogue music, designed to both interpret the text and inspire the worshiper, we now have pithy little ditties worthy of a Romper Room sing-along. Gone is any attempt to infuse our services with meaning derived from aesthetics and artistry. Rather, our prayer leaders are merely pace-setters. Each is expected to sound like all the others. Creativity at the amud has been rejected in favor of homogenous and bland rote. It didn’t used to be that way.

            In his book about the hazzanim of yesteryear, Legendary Cantors, Samuel Vigoda, describes the approach of Nisi Belzer, (the cantor of the Great Synagogue in Odessa in the mid-nineteenth century) and says that his pieces on Rosh Hashanah usually began with the basses and worked through the baritones, then the second tenors, then the tenors and finally the boy singers. They were designed, according to Vigoda, to be legal briefs on behalf of Kelal Yisrael, before God. They began with the basses, putting forth simple straightforward notes (i.e., basic arguments) and the complexity of the "arguments" (i.e., the music) rising through the vocal systems until the altos, the young boys, echoed the basses, but with their innocent sounding pure tones. How could God not respond to such a structured presentation? How could the worshipper not have been moved to greater concentration and fervent prayer? The late great Cantor David Bagley, when teaching a student a particular piece, once exclaimed: ". . .YOU'RE TALKING TO GOD!" How many people who ascend a synagogue reader’s desk do so with the sense that they are encountering the divine and representing the congregation before Him, the King of Kings? How can congregants be expected to find inspiration in the tefillah, if their representative before God lacks any sense of purpose? It is the aspect of representing a congregation before God and the awareness of the awesomeness of the task that is missing. There is neither the trepidation that accompanies advocating for the unworthy, nor the confidence that goes with defending the side of right. In most synagogues, one encounters only tepid emotionless utterances and puerile tunes that reflect nothing of the meaning of the words intoned; nothing to honor God’s presence in what should be His sanctuary.

            Like so many problems that confront us today, a possible resolution to the stilted, boring, and vapid synagogue services can be found in our not-so-distant past cultural history. In November, 2006, an Israeli website featured a video of a very nice memorial gathering at the grave of great cantor Moshe Koussevitzky, z"l. Mordechai Sobol, a preeminent spokesperson for cantorial music, and an expert in the field, spoke about the profound and everlasting impact Koussevitzky had on hazzanut. One of his points was that although Moshe Koussevitzky did not compose any of his “signature pieces,” no one identifies those pieces with their true composers. They are all known as “Moishe’s Hatei,” or “the Koussevitzky Esa Einai.” No one speaks about the "sheYibane Beis haMikdosh" of Israel Schorr, or of Schorr's "Hatei," or about Yardeni's "Esa Einai" or of Kotlowiz's "Aneinu." Still, Koussevitzky deserves to lay claim to these melodies and call them his own. He internalized them and modified them to fit his unique voice and distinct persona. When he sang those pieces, he was not simply singing music by Yardeni or by Schorr. Those compositions simply supplied the backdrop for the artist to present his own music. Shlomo Carlebach once said that he didn't like to sing other people's compositions since they were not the products of his soul. He and the great cantors of old preferred to toil in the fields of tefillah, to continually perform a comprehensive “heshbon haNefesh” and discern what in the siddur rang significant to them and then transmit that awesome emotion to the congregation. Our tradition assures us that “devarim haYots’im min haLev, nikhnasim laLev,” that sincerity, honestly expressed, makes an impression on the listener. Our prayer leaders, laypeople, and professional cantors alike, have to follow the example of the greats of old. They must look at the liturgy, personalize it, and set about transmitting that meaning to the congregation. “Aseh Toratkha kevah, ve’al ta’aseh tefilatkha kevah.” Uniformity and predictability in prayer, especially in the way one presents it when leading a service, is impossible and contrary to prayer’s own intrinsic ethic. No two people are ever entirely alike, and no two people can daven the same way—and no one person should daven the same way all the time. Moods change, and thus the experiences and vicissitudes of life should shape the way we address God, understand prayer, and convey it to the masses. Hazzanim today deny themselves the zekhut of being unique individuals. It pervades Jewish society. Yeshivot have become (to paraphrase R. Yitzchak Hutner, z”l) "wurst fabriken." The yeshivish uniforms of apparel and doctrine have come to dominate even that which should be special and unique. Our approach of the divine has been co-opted, and it shows in contemporary synagogue services.

            Sadly, so very few people understand this basic concept. But imagine what it must be like to experience real meaning-packed prayer presented by a leader who labors intensely to both show the worshiper the meaning of the liturgy as he understands it and in doing so veritably puts his own soul on display. What must it have been like to sit in shul as a congregant on that Rosh Hashanah morning in Rovno in the 1880s when Zeidel Rovner premiered his Melokh, or on the Shabbat in Odessa when Rozumni first intoned his Av haRahamim, or the Yom Kippur afternoon in the 1920s when Israel Alter first presented his BeRrosh Hashanah Yikateivun with the immediate reference to the Viddui. Can anyone fathom what that must have been like; to hear these hiddushim in prayer for the first time? Imagine that day in Rovno when Rovner sang “veYeida kol pa’ul ki atoh pealto” as a soft contemplative phrase and then moved into the duet with the bass at “veYomar kol asher neshama beApo,” and he sang it again and again and again; four times altogether. I promise, no one looked at his or her watch. But I'm sure people gave very serious thought to what it means to have a soul implanted within one's body and how that soul enables us to perceive the majesty of the divine. Perhaps a few trembled at the prospect of "meeting God" via his neshama. What were people thinking the first time Kwartin cried out Tiher R. Yishmael? What anguish did he evoke with his pitiful sobs over the martyrdom of the sages? How humble and in awe of God was the congregation privileged to hear the premier of Yosselle Rosenblatt’s Hineni? I have no doubt that the sensitive congregant who heard Pierre Pinchik lecture God on the concept of Am haMuvhar when he chanted the Ahava Rabbah, stopped to think about his exceptional relationship with the Almighty. These were hazzanim who had a sense of mission. It was not their voices that ruled the day, not even their musicality. It was their drive to impart the meaning of the text to the congregation that mattered.

            Prayer stands at a precarious precipice. People are forgetting how prayer is supposed to sound. In the 1920s the great cantor and musicologist Leib Glantz went to the shtibels of the New York’s Lower East Side to hear old Jews pray the daily Shaharit. From their intonations, he composed his classic Shomer Yisrael for the Selihot service. In doing so, he preserved something of the essence of how prayer, at its most intimate and meaningful, should sound. It’s a sound worth listening to and remembering. It is the sound of a people who carried their sacred liturgy from the smoldering ruins of Jerusalem into the diaspora. It is the song we sang when we built the grand synagogue of Granada, the Shulhoff of Vilna, the Altneushul of Prague. It is the song of our nation and our history; hopefully of our future destiny. And it exists in a unique and beautiful form in the soul of every Jew. It is the key to opening up the meaning of the prayers to us. God is a “boher beShirei zimrah” and it’s time for us to be as well. Maybe then, God, and all of us will come home.

2015.)

Since the founding of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT), and some years later, Yeshivat Maharat (YM), I and others have been asked whether we are creating a new movement within Orthodoxy. Movements are generally not announced; they evolve. They are not proclaimed; they emerge, sometimes gradually, other times swiftly. Their growth is usually painstaking, surfacing here and there. Although they meet opposition, if they are strong and viable, they coalesce to become a powerful voice. It’s only years later that one can assess whether a movement has taken root.

But of one matter I am certain: Since the early 1990s, Orthodoxy has undergone a number of great shifts. Responding to a precipitous move to the right within Modern Orthodoxy, a plethora of institutions and organizations have emerged. These include the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), Edah, YCT and YM, the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, and the International Rabbinic Fellowship (IRF). In Israel, too, Beit Morasha, Beit Hillel, Ne’emanei Torah Ve’Avodah, and others were founded, and today women are being ordained (receiving semikha) from Yeshivat Maharat as well as Yeshivat Har’el.

Modern Orthodoxy, which 25 years ago faced a significant decline, has been reclaimed by tens, even hundreds of thousands of adherents.

Debate has surfaced over what this reassertion should be called. In the end, names are secondary to the substantive changes that have been put in place. Still, names matter as they are descriptive of what we are, our mission and values, taking into account the changes and challenges of the times.

For example, when Rabbi Norman Lamm became president of Yeshiva University (YU) in the late 1970s, he abandoned the term “Modern Orthodoxy,” replacing it with “Centrist Orthodoxy.” My sense is that he did so as a way of distancing Yeshiva University from Rabbi Emanuel Rackman and Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, two of the most dynamic and charismatic leaders of Modern Orthodoxy. For RIETS (Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school) and the RCA (the rabbinical organization of which most YU rabbis are members), Modern Orthodoxy was becoming too liberal. A more cautionary, middle-of-the road label was necessary: Centrist Orthodoxy.

From the beginning, I and others were uncomfortable with this term. Centrist Orthodoxy never resonated, as it suggests a position in the center of those on both sides. As the flanks shift, the center must also shift in order to remain in the middle. Centrist Orthodoxy becomes reactive, losing its autonomy.

With the advent of YCT, YM, the IRF, JOFA, and others, honest and respectful discussion is taking place concerning what terms should be used to describe these new phenomena in Orthodoxy.

Some suggest the continued use of the term “Modern Orthodoxy.” Modern Orthodoxy is a trademark term. Bearing in mind that it has been abandoned by RIETS and the RCA, a vacuum has been created. Why not fill that vacuum by reclaiming it and infusing it with new ideas and new perspectives while holding on to the term with which people feel comfortable.

Others, like myself, prefer a new term: “Open Orthodoxy.” In the 1960s and 1970s, Modern Orthodoxy dealt primarily with two issues: secularism and Zionism—more broadly, the modern secular world, and the modern State of Israel. Modern Orthodoxy insisted that one could be Orthodox while embracing the humanities and science, even as one could be Orthodox while committed to the rebirth of the State of Israel.

Truth be told, those battles are behind us. Today, large portions of the Haredi world encourage their young people to attend college and to participate in the workforce. They may not see “holiness” in disciplines outside of Torah, but they have come to understand the importance of acquiring skills to making a living and getting along in the modern world. While secularism for the Haredi has no pure, intrinsic value, it is a means to a greater end.

Over time, the Haredi world has also become more committed to the welfare of Israel—its defense and citizenry—even as it rejects the religious significance of the establishment of the State. Agudah, Shas, and Chabad do not sing Hatikvah, nor do they recite the tefillah lishlom haMedinah—but they care deeply about the welfare of Israel, the safety of its citizens, and its security.

“Modern” issues of 40 and 50 years ago are no longer modern. We are, in fact, in the postmodern era, as we face new issues and challenges.

The dividing line within Orthodoxy today revolves around inclusivity. Is Orthodoxy inclusive of women—encouraging women to become more involved in Jewish ritual and Jewish spiritual leadership? Notwithstanding the Torah prohibition on homosexuality, are those in such relationships included as full members in our synagogues, and are their children welcomed into Day Schools? Do we respect, embrace, and give a forum to those who struggle with deep religious, theological, and ethical questions? Do we insist upon forbiddingly stringent measures for conversion, or do we, within halakhic parameters, reach out to converts with love and understanding? Should Orthodox rabbinic authority be centralized, or should it include the wide range of local rabbis, who are not only learned but also are more aware of how the law should apply to their particular communal situations and conditions? Are we prepared to engage in dialogue and learn from Jews of other denominations, and, for that matter, people of all faiths?

Put simply, is our focus on boundaries, fences, high and thick—obsessing and spending inordinate amounts of time ostracizing and condemning and declaring who is not in—or is our focus on creating welcoming spaces to enhance the character of what Orthodoxy could look like in the twenty-first century? To quote the late Rabbi David Hartman’s description of having been raised Orthodox: “I grew up in a home where I didn’t feel piety needed an object to hate. I felt close to God without saying, ‘I don’t like him, I don’t go into his shul.’ I never felt piety through anger and negation, but piety was the result of internal conviction and joy.”

This is Open Orthodoxy. While insisting on the foundational divinity of Torah and observance of halakha, this Orthodoxy is not rigid. It is open to a wider spectrum.

In my travels through America, I have found that people—the amkha—have become alienated from such ossified terms as “Modern Orthodoxy.” This term no longer reflects vibrancy; it is dried up. People are looking for something new that speaks more directly to their inner convictions and passions. They are looking for an Orthodoxy that is inclusive, non-judgmental, and open.

It’s the model of our forebears Sarah and Abraham. Unlike Noah, who is best known for his ark—insulated and separated by high walls from the rest of society—Abraham and Sarah dwell in a tent. It is open on all sides, welcoming not only those who come in, but they are also prepared to run out of the tent and greet all passersby, encouraging them to drink from the waters of Torah.

The primary question any educator must ask him or herself before determining how to teach particular material is why it should be taught at all, which will lead to what should be the “take-away” for the student. Is the teacher a purveyor of information that is vital for the students’ success in acceptance to college? Is the teacher an educer of values that the student already holds dear, and will that teacher only feel a sense of success if the students identify his or her own ethical anchors? Is the teacher, perhaps, a demagogue (rather than pedagogue) who measures his or her success by the percentage of students who end up subscribing to his or her particular value system? Or, is the teacher a facilitator of skills and knowledge, who sees his or her own job as empowering students to feel a sense of comfort with difficult texts and, ultimately, the ability to master those texts and synthesize them into their own worldview as they use critical judgment (fostered along the way) to evaluate those self-same texts and the lessons learned from them?

Most of us—committed teachers, invested parents, and members of the community alike—would dismiss the first three “teachers”—especially the middle two—as failing in their educational mission. Nonetheless, the reality that many who inspire our children in their Judaic studies in yeshivot—from elementary through secondary schools—fall short of the educational ideal is a shortcoming we recognize and admit. How often are our students given reams and reams of information to commit to memory, some of which strains credulity while much is of questionable relevance to the student? Questionable teaching is a phenomenon I have encountered in meetings with students from numerous communities. More crushing are the reports we hear, too frequently, of teachers who use their position as well as the text, as a vehicle for promoting (sometimes questionably appropriate) dogmas and viewpoints. This could be ascribed to teachers from insular viewpoints (commonly called “Haredi”), who are teaching in institutions where the students ostensibly come from “Modern Orthodox” families and the teachers feel themselves obligated to preach “proper” values which are often at odds with those stated by the school and those held dear by the parent body. On the other hand, we occasionally meet teachers who seem to have walked “right out of the 1960s,” and intuit, Rogers-style, that all the truth lies within the student and the text is a great vehicle for allowing the student to find that “truth within.” It should be noted that in the descriptions above, a “text” may be a passage in Tanakh, a particular commentary on that passage, a secondary source—in a sense, the vehicle matters little when it has little to do with the end-goal. At least the “information-purveyor” is concerned with a particular paideia (curricular body of knowledge) that he or she wants the students to master—but they master by memorizing and the text remains foreign to them and, teflon-like, bounces off of their souls.

We often make the mistake of thinking that students will find relevance in a text if we can show them why it is meaningful to them. However, this doesn’t work, as relevance is something that must be intuited, not explained. No one can convince me that I ought to feel that news about elections in Israel ought to be relevant to me; rather, it is relevant because I have a deep emotional, familial, social, and/or spiritual investment in the welfare of Israel, which determines its relevance to me as opposed to, say, the rise or fall of the GDP in Niger.

Before moving on to explore how our hero, teacher #4, the “skills-and-knowledge facilitator,” succeeds where others fail, one note must be sounded about the role of the personality of the teacher in the classroom. There is no doubt that the charisma, warmth, humor, personal connections (including home hospitality for Shabbatot, ability to play guitar, lead a kumsitz, play basketball with students, and so forth) play a helpful role in the teacher’s success in the classroom. Ultimately, however, the classroom experience is one that succeeds best if it is one that ties the student to the discipline, not to the “middleman.” While having a relationship with a teacher is a central component in the life of any Ben or Bat Torah, it is chiefly due to that teacher’s role as a “matchmaker” between the student and a body of texts which, ultimately, the student must personally embrace. Sometimes, counter-intuitively, the charismatic teacher is at a disadvantage as he or she can paper over a lack of substance with a thrilling classroom experience—but the students still leave class no richer in knowledge or skills than 40 minutes (or a year) earlier.

The Model

Our ideal educator, the “skills-and-knowledge facilitator,” is a far more complex construct than we may wish to imagine. This type of teacher must combine a clear sense of what needs to be accomplished with an awareness of who is doing the accomplishing; a group made up of an entirely different set of students than the previous year—and each individual student comes to the table of Torah with unique background, expectations, abilities, fears, and attitudes. We will be able to flesh this out by studying a small piece of Tanakh together.

Let’s take, as an example, the brief story of Moses and Aaron at the waters of Meribah (Numbers 20:1–13):

1. And the children of Israel, even the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month; and the people abode in Kadesh; and Miriam died there, and was buried there. 2. And there was no water for the congregation; and they assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron. 3. And the people strove with Moses, and spoke, saying: 'Would that we had perished when our brethren perished before Hashem! 4. And why have you brought the assembly of Hashem into this wilderness, to die there, we and our cattle? 5. And wherefore have you made us to come up out of Egypt, to bring us in unto this evil place? It is no place of seed, or of figs, or of vines, or of pomegranates; neither is there any water to drink.' 6. And Moses and Aaron went from the presence of the assembly unto the door of the tent of meeting, and fell upon their faces; and the glory of Hashem appeared unto them.

7. And Hashem spoke unto Moses, saying: 8. 'Take the rod, and assemble the congregation, thou, and Aaron thy brother, and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes, that it give forth its water; and thou shalt bring forth to them water out of the rock; so thou shalt give the congregation and their cattle drink.' 9. And Moses took the rod from before Hashem, as He commanded him. 10. And Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said unto them: 'Hear now, ye rebels; are we to bring you forth water out of this rock?' 11. And Moses lifted up his hand, and smote the rock with his rod twice; and water came forth abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their cattle.                

12. And Hashem said unto Moses and Aaron: 'Because ye believed not in Me, to sanctify Me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them.' 13. These are the waters of Meribah, where the children of Israel strove with Hashem, and He was sanctified in them.

The information-purveyor may be concerned that each student know—perhaps by heart—the various approaches among the classical commentators as to exactly where Moses (and Aaron) sinned; he or she may focus on the Midrashim that connect Miriam’s death with the “thirst” that (seemingly) occasioned the events that led to the striking of the rock, and so forth.

The values-educer may wish to enable the students to explore their own feelings about divine justice, higher standards to which great leaders are held, or the impact of the death of a loved one on even the greatest human beings.

The demagogue (or values-inducer) may choose to highlight the greatness of Moses—in that he was held to such a high level of perfection that even a minor slip cost him dearly, or to underscore the powerful impact of great leaders and the terrible loss felt at their passing (the midrashic well of Miriam and its disappearance at her demise).

The skills-and-knowledge facilitator wouldn’t necessarily be put off or feel a lack of success if his or her students were to learn and internalize any or all of these approaches. Rather, this teacher is far more concerned with how the knowledge is attained than by the amount of knowledge gained. In a sense, this educator may be the least result-oriented of our four models, as he or she measures success by how well the students have become part of the process of developing information, as opposed to end-users—which is the real key to developing a sense of “relevance” about any text.

Relevance—A Function of Excitement, Anticipation, and Success

Relevance is directly related to the excitement the students feel when they anticipate success at a task that is a challenge—yet that they can succeed in mastering.

When students walk into a classroom where they are asked to internalize information given to them—there is no challenge, except for “making room” in their heads, among the terabytes of social, cultural, and assorted academic data, for a list of opinions about why Moses and Aaron were punished. To an inquisitive mind, this is the essence of ennui. Students may appreciate having their opinion solicited, but when it is requested on the basis of no work, no research, and no background—the students themselves have little respect for the process. If, in the case of the demagogue’s classroom, the students can anticipate being told what conclusions they ought to draw from a particular story, law, or comment—there isn’t a whole lot to make it feel relevant.

If, however, the students know from experience with this teacher that in each session they will learn a new skill, review and strengthen an already taught-skill, or find a new way to utilize that skill—they will find immediate relevance and be excited about what comes next.

Two critical points to maintain relevance and keep students excited about the next skill—the exercises and the skill must be immediately tied in to the material being studied so that the students will see that mastering that skill will reap immediate benefit in their studies. Secondly, the skill ought to be integrated into regular study, such that each skill taught becomes a regular part of their “learning arsenal” and they continue to use it such that it becomes as natural an instinct.

Back to the Quarrelsome Waters

In order to illustrate how our skills-and-knowledge facilitator would instruct, let’s go back to the wilderness of Zin and see how the story of the “quarrelsome waters” (Mei Merivah) might be taught. There is much more to investigate about this passage; we will limit our observations to those germane to the method highlighted herein.

As a prefatory note, any of the skills assumed to have been internalized and habituated below could just as well be brand new to the class; in which case, this passage is a perfect opportunity to teach that particular skill.

A: For openers—the panoramic view

Students will have learned, during the course, to read the passage, looking for words they don’t understand (and given translation strategies, such as context clues, looking for the radicals [“roots”], anticipating the word, and so forth) and learning two critical “big-picture” strategies:

1. To place themselves “inside the narrative” and read it from the perspective of an Israelite living in the first month of the (presumed) 40^th year of wandering
2. Look for anomalies in the text—unexpected turns, odd juxtapositions, and the like

Immediately when reading the text, besides the obvious question of the gravity of the punishment meted out to Moses and Aaron and identifying the particular sin for which they are held liable—are two other oddities. The mention of the death and burial of Miriam seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the story and doesn’t seem to belong here.

One critical note must be injected here—for us to be successful in facilitating skills, students have to learn to look at a text with fresh eyes. That means temporarily withholding interpretations and applications that are not found in the text but have become very popular and identified with the text. A case in point is the midrashic device of Miriam’s well (Tosefta Sotah 11:1, Seder Olam Rabbah Ch. 10). The well seems to have been reported here in order to answer a question—which is exact oddity that we’ve noticed—since Miriam’s death, on the face of it, has nothing to do with the encounter between the people and Moses, perhaps her death occasioned an unexpected thirst that caused the crisis. A cursory look at the sources cited above will bear this out.

By now, the students may have realized (or been coached into seeing) that deaths and burials are never inherently significant enough—any death and/or burial mentioned in the text is reported due to a secondary consideration. Often as not, it is a demonstration of the fulfillment of a divine promise (for example, the funeral of Jacob was a direct fulfillment of God’s last words to him in Genesis 46:4; the death of Sarah was occasion for Abraham to finally realize God’s commitment of over 60 years that he will inherit the Land). Those students who have internalized this lesson will immediately realize that the mention of Miriam’s death and burial seems to be unnecessary here.

Next, the students, placing themselves “inside the story,” should notice that the complaint of the people isn’t about thirst—they only mention “u-mayim ayin lishtot” (there is no water to drink) as an apparent afterthought—strangely enough, their main complaint is about the desert not being a land for seed, figs, grapes, and pomegranates, which the students should immediately recognize as an odd premise. Why would the Israelites think that this way-station on their way to the “good, wide land” should have any of those resources?

The students, by now, should have understood a principal reason for the need to become “part of the story”—we, the omniscient reader, know how everything is going to turn out; we know that Pharaoh will refuse Moses’ requests; we know that Esau will discover Jacob’s masquerade; we know that Rachel will die on the road—and we know that Moses will never enter the Land of Israel. We have to remember that none of the players know that until they do—either when it happens or when they are prophetically given that information.

The Israelites do not know where they are—just that they have been traveling for a long time with a beautiful land awaiting them at the end of that journey. They may have heard that the land to which they are traveling is “flowing with milk and honey;” they may have even heard about the famed seven species (although only adumbrated in Deut. 8:8)—but all that they’ve seen is grapes, figs, and pomegranates. If they don’t remember this from chapter 13 (if, for instance, they are only studying selected passages and didn’t recently delve into the story of the “scouts”), then a quick concordance-check will lead them straight back to 13:23, which, surprisingly, lists exactly the same three types of fruit, the absence of which they bemoaned here. (This is usually when a few students are heard to mutter, under their breath: “cool”—that’s when “relevance” kicks in!)

So…the Israelites must have thought they were in Israel—and that’s why they are complaining about the lack of fig and pomegranate trees and grape vines. What might have given them the idea that they had already reached their destination?

If the students have effectively walked into the narrative, they can be prodded—“What have we been carrying with us since we can remember”? They may first answer that the Testimony (“luhot ha-Edut”) has been with us—but we can ask them about another box that we’ve been carrying—and they will readily remember that Joseph’s bones have accompanied us since we quit Egypt. Why didn’t we bury our ancestor in Egypt? Evidently, we bury important people in the Promised Land—Joseph has a special location (cf. Gen. 48:22), but no one is buried “out there” (except for the entire generation that passed away in the dessert and whose death was a fulfillment of a divine decree). So…if Miriam died and was buried “there” (“sham”), we must have arrived at the Land of Israel!

We can now understand the catalyst for the crisis—the people believe that they’ve arrived—but the “beautiful land, flowing with milk and honey, boasting fantastic fruit” is nowhere to be seen. “And what of the grapes, figs, and pomegranates that we’ve seen with our own eyes (or our parents saw and related to us)?”

B: Assessing what we’ve discovered and anticipating further

Now that the students have addressed the text from the “long view” and found the people’s misjudgment (that they’ve already entered the Promised Land) and its cause (Miriam’s burial “there”), they should be able to anticipate what should come next. We would expect that Moses’ response—or that directed by God that he take—would be to assure them that they are still on the road, not yet arrived and that, indeed, the land to which they are coming is truly filled with luscious fruits and grains.

It takes a strong imagination to be able to see the text as it is not, to imagine what might have come next and then to “be surprised” at what actually ensues. This is nothing less than the traditional approach of Midrash (especially Midrash Halakhah), which is built on what should be written and then allowing what is written to teach additional lessons. By training our students to recognize a rhetorical pattern in Tanakh, whether it be nomenclature (see Rashi’s comment at Gen. 1:1 noting that the “unexpected” use of Elokim followed, in chapter 2 (v. 4 ff.) by Hashem Elokim indicates a change in “divine policy” vis-à-vis creation), presentation of laws or any other genre of biblical literature, we train them to notice what is “off” about a particular passage and what that unusual twist may be signaling. This also makes reading the classical medieval commentators that much more empowering and impactful, as the students can already identify with “what’s bothering Rashi/Ramban/ibn Ezra (etc.)?”

As such, we are surprised that God neither instructs Moses to march them into the Land or to inform them that they haven’t yet arrived—which we can take in one of two ways. Either our hypothesis is wrong and the confrontation between Moses and the people isn’t about the Land, but about thirst—or we may be right, but there may also be something bigger going on, beneath the superficial complaint, and that is what God is instructing Moses to address.

C: Back to the panoramic view

If we take a look at the passage, we can see that the people’s complaint doesn’t jibe with what we know about the narrative. We know that God took the people out of Egypt, that God is leading them through the desert and directing their travels—but we are so accustomed to hearing the people’s plaint to Moses (and Aaron): “Why have YOU brought the assembly of Hashem into this wilderness…And why have YOU made us to come up out of Egypt…” that we don’t necessarily pick up on the incongruity of their complaint. Why aren’t they angry at—or disappointed with—God, who has led them to this place?

There is a simple answer that the student may discover and, when he or she does, that “magic moment” happens; the student realizes that the Israelites of this new generation believe, as did their parents, that it was Moses and Aaron who led them out of Egypt and who are leading them through the desert. In effect, nothing has changed since the complaints first registered just after we were miraculously brought through the Sea (Exodus chapters 15–17).

Pedagogic interjection: Much of this development may be beyond the independent scope, background and ability of the students, even at an advanced level; but, with training and a bit of coaxing or Socratic-style questioning, they can put most of it together on their own. There may be a point, here or there, that needs to be bolstered and proven. To that end, the teacher may choose to assign homework or to give an inquisitive student who asks a sharp question an opportunity to earn “extra credit” by researching the topic with guidance.

D: Discussion—the meaning of conflict

At this point, in order to help the students discover the next layer of meaning in the text, the teacher may choose to direct a discussion about conflict; it is easy to draw students out once they are sufficiently invested in solving an enigma—and we still haven’t addressed the “big” question of the sin imputed to Moses and Aaron. Conflict is a universal experience and one that can be described in terms common enough to apply elsewhere—in our case, the point that every conflict is really about something deeper (couples who fight about sleeping with the window open or closed are invariably experiencing a much deeper conflict).

The students can then identify three different issues going on in our passage—

1. An elemental and existential need for water—as confirmed by v. 2
2. A disenchantment with the “Land” that they believe they have come to (v. 5)
3. A gross theological error about who (or Who) is leading them

Once the students have identified these three, they can create a causal chain of malaise (peeling the layers off the onion)—the lack of water opens up the wounds about the place, which in turns reveals a festering problem of belief.

E: Testing the hypothesis

If our students are right (and this entire process may have taken several days), then we should expect God’s response to address the ultimate problem of belief; He does so (as we will discover forthwith) without sacrificing a solution to the most immediate problem of water. He directs Moses to act in such a way that belief in God’s all-encompassing role in their deliverance, journeys and eventual destination would be confirmed.

The command to take the staff implies that Moses should use it to strike the rock (as Ibn Ezra argues, and based on the parallel story in Exodus 17); what are we to make of the directive “ve-dibbartem el ha-sela.” Here again, the students’ familiarity with the rest of Tanakh, their learning to focus only on the text (and suspend interpretive memories) and to read with anticipation will help. As there is no other occasion in all of Tanakh when anyone is commanded to speak to (and command) an inanimate object, the students may be willing to challenge the usual translation of the prepositional el and to read, rather al (once guided, using the concordance, dozens of examples where the two are interchanged) and read, rather, “speak about the boulder” and understand that Moses and Aaron were directed to speak to the people, in front of the rock, about that selfsame boulder. But what were they to say?

Once we recall the underlying crisis of faith that lies at the heart of our textual onion, the students may, of their own accord, come to the conclusion that Moses and Aaron were to use the rock as a way of showing the people that it was God, not they, who were directing the people’s lives, feeding them, leading them and protecting them through the desert.

Our hypothesis, developed with the students, that the real cause of the crisis was the people’s misconception about Moses and Aaron’s role in their destiny, can now be substantiated and, at the very least, we can continue to use it as a tentative approach as we come to the denouement of the passage.

F: The “sin”

This is a wonderful opportunity to open up a discussion about leadership and the need for a shepherd to know his flock and for his communication skills to be apt for his following. What do we expect Moses to say at this point? “I will bring water from the rock, something no human can accomplish. Therefore, you all see that it is God Almighty who is protecting and leading us”….or something to that effect.

Instead, Moses used the device of a rhetorical question to make his point “ha-min ha-sela ha-zeh notzi lakhem mayim?”—but a rhetorical question will only work if the intended audience knows how to interpret it. When a teen’s mother declares “Do you call this a clean room?”—her son understands that she is calling it a mess—but if an immigrant has just moved in and she says the same thing—he may think that she is impressed with his work or even asking him what he thinks about the room.

Evidently, the new generation of Israelites didn’t properly understand Moses’ intent and his opportunity to inspire belief was lost—they could have been moved by his words to renew their belief in God, but instead (evidently) understood his words as anger, or defiance; either way, as confirmation of their belief in Moses as the “wizard” who was leading them.

The students, again guided to read the text carefully, will notice that Moses and Aaron were not punished with being condemned to die in the desert—but were stripped of their leadership. Read not “lo tavo’u”—  you shall not come—rather “lo tavi’u”—you shall not lead; the inability to lead this new generation, evidenced by a communication gap between the old leader and the new community, necessitated a removal of Moses and Aaron from the helm of leadership.

Afterword

I have presented four models of instruction, each of which has ample representation in Jewish secondary schools; I have argued that the facilitator of skills and knowledge is the only one whose method and goals will generate interest, mastery and a love of the material—all of which spells the relevance that we always seek to engender in our students. The texts will speak to our students if we teach the students to interact, in class, in havruta and alone—with the texts themselves.

Ladino Transitions:

Vernacular Religious Literature and the Modernization of Ottoman Jewry[1]

By Matthias B. Lehmann

One of the earliest newspapers that appeared in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of the Ottoman Jews, was Sha‘arei Mizrah (later known as Puertas de Oriente), published in the port city of Izmir since the mid-1840s. In one of its first issues, Sha‘arei Mizrah expressed clearly the educational agenda of the nascent Ladino press: the editor thanked the Ottoman authorities for having granted permission for the newspaper to be published and declared with much confidence that this must have been due to Sultan Abdülhamid’s desire to see his subjects progress and be educated. “Being aware that the benefits of printing are such that we can learn about every aspect of science, just like the most civilized nations of Europe,” the authorities had granted their support to the publication of this new Ladino journal, and its editor expressed his hope that “thus we will be able to prosper in everything” and will become “worthy subjects of such a gracious and just sovereign.” These phrases represent the themes that set the agenda for the political and cultural changes in Ottoman Sephardic society promoted by the secular Judeo-Spanish press throughout the second half of the nineteenth century: Ottoman patriotism, the desire for a regained prosperity through modern education, and the rhetoric of “civilizational progress” inspired by Western, European culture.

After timid beginnings in the 1840s, the newspapers in Ladino flourished from the 1860s onwards and were the most important vehicle in spreading the politics of westernization and modernization among the Sephardic communities of Turkey and the Balkans. Secular genres in Ladino literature such as the novel, adapted from Western (in particular French) literature, developed in the framework of a growing Judeo-Spanish public sphere. Historians have pointed out the significance of these secular genres of Ladino literature and in particular of the new Judeo-Spanish newspapers for the modernization of Ottoman Jewry in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. As a force of change and modernization, they reinforced the effect of two other agents of change: the political-legal reforms adopted by the Ottoman state, the tanzimat of the nineteenth century; and the influence of the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle, which advanced its own westernizing agenda through a network of schools that it opened throughout the Ottoman Empire. In fact, if the direct reach of the Alliance was limited to a small, westernizing elite, the writers of Ladino literature and Ladino newspapers were broadcasting its ideal of modernization through westernization to an ever increasing audience of Ottoman Jews.

If, however, we want to understand the beginnings of the modern transformation of Ottoman Jewry—its “genealogy of modernity”—then we need to go back to the beginnings of Ladino literature in the eighteenth century. If the combined effect of tanzimat, the Alliance schools, and a secular Ladino public sphere profoundly transformed Ottoman Jewry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, this transformation was only possible because the rise of a vernacular Judeo-Spanish literature beginning in the eighteenth century had prepared the ground. This early stage of Ladino literature has attracted surprisingly little attention among historians who still tend to privilege the external forces, imperial-governmental or European, in their accounts of Ottoman Jewish transitions in the modern age. In those accounts, Ottoman Jews mostly responded to change, but they didn’t contribute to it. In particular, the Ottoman rabbis are usually seen as a rather passive force, steeped in their traditionalism, and responding to developments around them but never quite being part of the story. In spite of themselves, however, these rabbis had laid the foundations for the subsequent flourishing of Ladino print culture, and thus, the traditional leadership contributed, in spite of itself, to the rise of modern Sephardic culture, including its more secular manifestations.

When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, some of the exiles appeared in Ottoman cities soon after, as early as the summer of 1492 in the case of Constantinople. The first Spanish-Jewish immigrants were followed by subsequent waves of Sephardic immigration, some of whom arrived by way of Italy or North Africa in the course of the sixteenth century, then by conversos who had been forced to convert to Christianity in Spain (1492) or in Portugal (in 1497) and left the Iberian peninsula in a constant trickle of emigration throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Spanish Jews brought with them their religious-cultural traditions and, given their demographic predominance in many parts of the Ottoman Empire, soon established their primacy over the local, mostly Greek-speaking Jews. They also brought with them their own language, Castilian Spanish, which morphed into a distinct form of Judeo-Spanish—the vernacular language of the Ottoman Sephardim also called Ladino. Their influence was such that Judeo-Spanish became the Jewish language in the Balkans and in Asia Minor, and it persisted as a distinct language of the Sephardic community even in places where the immigrants encountered a strong Arabic-speaking Jewish community, for example in Aleppo or in Jerusalem. As a matter of fact, in spite of the promotion of French literacy in the Alliance schools and the commitment to educate the Jewish public in Turkish which was professed by many Ottoman Jewish intellectuals, still at the turn of the twentieth century some 85 percent of Jews in Turkey declared that Ladino was their first language.

            In spite of the predominance of Ladino as a spoken language, few books were published in Judeo-Spanish before the eighteenth century. Those that were printed—Spanish Jews had introduced the printing press into the Ottoman Empire as early as 1493—were largely directed at former conversos who needed vernacular literature to facilitate their return to Judaism after having escaped the Inquisition. But these texts remained marginal in an Ottoman Jewish literature that continued to be written and published in Hebrew. One author who did write in Judeo-Spanish, including on secular topics, was Rabbi Moses Almosnino. In the 1560s, Almosnino was part of a Jewish mission from Salonika to the imperial government in Istanbul in order to negotiate more favorable economic conditions for his community. During the lengthy visit to the imperial capital, Almosnino wrote a short history of the Ottoman sultans and an extensive description of the city, all of it in the Judeo-Spanish language. His work was printed, in Latin characters—though outside the Empire, in 1638 in Madrid.

            It was only in the second quarter of the eighteenth century that Ladino emerged as a language of literature. Credited with this development are primarily two figures, both living and working in the imperial capital Istanbul: Jacob Huli, who published the first volume of his encyclopedic Bible commentary, the Me‛am Lo‛ez, in 1730; and Abraham Asa, a prolific translator and author of literature in the Judeo-Spanish vernacular. Asa published the first complete Ladino translation of the Bible between 1739 and 1745, explaining the educational reasoning behind his monumental effort in the introduction to one of the volumes:

David Qimhi [a medieval biblical exegete] explains that what sustained the Jews in their exile was their ceaseless study of the Bible. And Isaac Abrabanel [a leader of Spanish Jewry in 1492] says that the reason for the expulsion from Spain was that people did not study Scripture; while they had more than five thousand rabbis of universal fame, the masses did not read the Bible.

Since most people do not understand what they are reading when they recite the biblical text in Hebrew, Asa went on to say, “the printer Jonah [Ashkenazi] wanted … to print the Bible in Ladino, well translated [bien ladinado], and including Rashi’s [classical biblical] commentary.”

            These remarks by Abraham Asa capture the educational ethos of a group of writers who I call the “vernacular rabbis.” These rabbis responded to what they perceived as the cultural decline of Ottoman Jewry and to a much broader educational ideal that developed as a corollary of the Lurianic school of Jewish mysticism coming out of sixteenth century Ottoman Palestine. They were no longer content with a learned discourse limited to the rabbinic elite and remaining beyond the grasp of most Ottoman Jews. Instead, they developed an educational ideal which appealed to the Ottoman Jewish “masses.” The fact that Asa explicitly acknowledged the role of Jonah Ashkenazi, the printer of many of his and numerous other Ladino works, further testifies to the close relation between an emerging group of scholars, printers, intellectuals, and rabbis who produced and disseminated a growing number of books in the vernacular language of the masses. In due course, Asa added translations from the Hebrew of the prayer book, a digest of rabbinic law, rabbinic ethical writings, and even a “History of the Ottoman Kings.”

            Jacob Huli, in turn, authored what became the first in a long series of biblical commentaries and a classic of Ladino letters in the eighteenth century and beyond. His monumental Me‛am Lo‛ez was a veritable encyclopedia of Jewish knowledge, intertwining information about Jewish religious law, moral teachings, entertaining stories, and instruction on a wide array of topics within what was ostensibly a Judeo-Spanish commentary on the Bible. Huli provided a vast anthology of rabbinic tradition in an easily accessible, vernacular idiom, making it entertaining at the same time. In a similar vein, Asa produced an entire library of Jewish knowledge through his tireless translation efforts. Together, these authors (and others of their generation) gave shape to what became a new Ladino literature, which had not previously existed. What their works had in common, and what they shared with the secular and westernizing literature of modern Ladino writers in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, was that they wanted to educate and entertain. It has been said that all of Ladino literature was educational, whatever the literary format or genre, and thus, long after Huli’s and Asa’s ideal of a religious revival gave way to the secularizing ideal of Alliance-educated authors a century and a half later, the basic function of Ladino literature as an educational device addressed to a popular audience had not changed at all.

It is important to note that the emergence of Ladino print culture (and the revival of Hebrew print) in the eighteenth century was not an isolated development. The same period also saw the emergence of Ottoman-Turkish print in Arabic script. Up to that point, Muslim jurists had rejected the use of print for Arabic or Turkish works. While Jews and later various Christian minorities had established their own printing presses in the Ottoman Empire before, it was only in the late 1720s that we find the timid beginnings of an Ottoman Turkish print culture. An emblematic figure in the advancement of printing in the Ottoman Empire was Ibrahim Müteferrika, who is also known as one of the first Ottoman diplomats to have advocated a new openness towards the West and the reformation of the Ottoman military on European models. In 1726, he submitted a treatise, “The Means of Printing,” to the Grand Vizier and the leading Islamic authorities; after obtaining authorization to establish a press, he began operation a year later. None other than Jonah Ashkenazi, the Hebrew printer of Asa’s Bible translation and Huli’s Me‘am Lo‘ez, was among those credited with having helped Müteferrika establish his press. Ibrahim Müteferrika even applied to exempt his Jewish associate from the poll-tax, for he had, as he explained, “profited from the services of the Jew named Yuna [i.e., Jonah], who possesses all the important elements [needed for printing] ….”

What exactly was the contribution of rabbinic literature in the Ladino vernacular to the subsequent transformation, or modernization, of Ottoman Jewry? It seems somewhat counterintuitive to attribute such an impact at all to a literature that emerged precisely to bolster traditional religious knowledge among Ottoman Jews, and there is no question that Ladino rabbinic literature continued to be a conservative effort aiming at the preservation of the existing religious and social order. One of the most important contributions of Judeo-Spanish literature for Ottoman Jewish culture, however, was that it opened rabbinic literature to women—and, in fact, to all who did not belong to the educated elite. Women had been all but excluded from the traditional ideal of studying rabbinic tradition, but they were now discovered as a relevant reading audience by the vernacular rabbis. Initially, in the eighteenth century, women were still addressed in an indirect way. In one classic translated by Abraham Asa, a book called Shevet Musar, the author included women as a public to be instructed in Judaism, but not as a reading public: “The ignoramus who does not know to read,” he wrote,

should go on the Sabbath and festivals and at any time of the day to the study house to listen to words of Torah and derekh erets (proper deportment). And what he hears, he should tell his wife and the people of his household when he returns home in the evening.

The ordinary man attending the rabbis’ studies at the bet midrash is thus understood as a broadcaster of the rabbis’ educational message, taking it beyond the immediate audience of listeners and readers.

In the nineteenth century, the inclusion of women became more explicit. In the Pele Yo‘ets, one of the most popular rabbinic works in Ladino of all time, Judah Papo (son of Rabbi Eliezer Papo who wrote the original Pele Yo’ets in Hebrew) spelled out an educational ideal that included a female reading public alongside his male readers. Thus he suggested the establishment of separate women’s study groups:

How good it is if women, friends and relatives, meet, one Sabbath at the home of one friend, and another Sabbath at another friend’s home, and each group appoints a woman who can read and they spend the hour with [study]. One advantage is that they will look for ways to teach their daughters [how to read as well].

Significantly, Judah Papo encouraged women to learn how to read and write not only for the sake of religious study. He explicitly mentioned secular commu­ni­cation like reading and writing letters among the things women should be able to do. Other Sephardic rabbis who published vernacular books at the time also insisted on the importance of educating girls. Isaac Amarachi and Joseph Sason wrote, for example, that it is appropriate

to teach the daughters the holy tongue [Hebrew] and the language of the country in which one lives, and teach them to understand the prayers they say, and writing and calculus, and then teach them a profession, because idleness leads to promiscuity.

Obviously not all women took advantage of the new possibilities opened up to them by vernacular rabbinic literature, just as not all men flocked to the study sessions or read the new volumes of Judeo-Spanish rabbinic writings. But reading and study were now increasingly stripped of their gender-specific association with a male public sphere. Some rabbinic authors may very well have resisted this development, but they could not stop its far-reaching social consequences. By including women among the intended readers of their popular books, the authors of popular Ladino rabbinic literature paved the way for the emer­gence of a female reading public which would prove a most re­ceptive audience for new, secular genres of Judeo-Spanish literature that began to flourish in the nine­teenth century.

The vernacular rabbis did not only address a new reading audience, thus democratizing access to traditional Jewish knowledge and decentralizing rabbinic control over Ottoman Jewish reading culture. Over time, Ladino rabbinic literature also began to introduce new ideas, though it did so cautiously. By the late nineteenth century, however, the rabbis were increasingly forced to respond to new ideas promoted in the secular Ladino press and literature, for which they had helped prepare a reading public but which was now beyond their immediate control.

The explanation of lunar and solar eclipses provides an interesting example of how the vernacular rabbis moved from representing traditional rabbinic ideas in Judeo-Spanish language, then cautiously introduced new ideas, and finally responded to the open challenge of rabbinic authority presented from the outside. Jacob Huli, in the Me‛am Lo‛ez of 1730, simply presented the classical astronomy of the rabbis as it was expressed in the Talmud. According to his explanation, the sun revolves around the earth; it is in the north during summer and in the south during the winter, which allows the earth to cool. (Elsewhere, Huli cited the slightly divergent opinions of two Talmudic rabbis and explains that the sun moves below the sky during the day and above the sky at night.) Writing in 1730, Huli was by no means defensive in his approach to Talmudic authority on scientific issues: if Ashkenazi rabbis in Central Europe (perhaps most prominently the Maharal of Prague) had found it necessary to grapple with the implications of a heliocentric model of the cosmos back in the seventeenth century, Huli was seemingly oblivious to contemporary astronomy. In any case, Huli was not interested in knowledge for its own sake but as a vehicle to promote observance of rabbinic law and piety. In Huli’s understanding, eclipses did not require a scientific explanation because they constituted a divine warning and their real purpose was to teach a moral lesson. Thus, he asserted that an eclipse of the sun was a bad sign for the entire world and an eclipse of the moon a bad sign for the Jewish people. He also gave a rather odd list of four things that caused an eclipse of the sun, for example an occasion when a great sage has not been buried according to his rank, or the sin of sodomy. In other words, Jacob Huli did not discuss astronomy for its own sake. Natural phenomena interested him insofar as they carried a divine message (such as a call for repentance), but not as something that called for a scientific explanation.

Almost one hundred years later, with Ladino rabbinic literature entering its second golden age, the situation was markedly different. Two Salonikan authors, Amarachi and Sason, wrote popular rabbinic treatises in Ladino in which they perpetuated, on the one hand, the traditional message of rabbinic popular literature. But, on the other hand, they also chose to use their writing to educate and to enlighten their readers through exposing them to secular knowledge. Thus, for example, they pointed out the importance of smallpox vaccinations, noting that “more than a thousand children” had died in Salonika the previous year of smallpox. This would not have happened, they claimed, if everyone had listened to the rabbis, who had called for the smallpox vaccination of all children. The authors opposed popular miscon­ceptions and ignorance, denouncing what they called old women’s talk, which had led the uneducated masses to doubt the importance of vaccination. If rabbis previously had explained disasters such as this one as divine punishment for the sins of the community, Amarachi and Sason now offered a rational explanation, juxtaposing the enlightenment of the rabbis to the ignorance of the masses.

In Amarachi’s and Sason’s writing, secular knowledge and rabbinic knowledge do not compete but are presented as entirely compatible. They undertake to teach their Ladino-reading public some basic astronomy. In doing so, they confidently proclaim the traditional pre-Copernican, geocentric view, which also informed the Me‘am Lo‘ez:

It is well known that the sun moves around the earth in twenty-four hours. When the sun is where we are, it is night for those who are in America, and when the sun is on America’s side, it is night for us ….

They claim that the Talmudic sages and the Zohar had made it quite clear that the earth is round—“una pelota”—and they proudly conclude:

Behold how great was the science of our ancient sages. They had already told us about something that appears to have been discovered by the scientists through their studies, and there is nothing which is not already written or hinted at in our holy Law.

What is interesting is the fact that Amarachi and Sason take most of their scientific explanations from a Hebrew work by a Lithuanian rabbi that had been published in 1797 (Pinhas Hurvitz’ Sefer ha-Berit ), translating several passages into Ladino. The Hebrew original, however, included an extensive discussion of Copernican versus rabbinic astronomy, and presented a long argument in defense of the traditional view as expressed in the Talmud. Huli, Amarachi and Sason were obviously aware of the conflict between rabbinic and scientific knowledge, yet they decided that it was irrelevant to their readers and to their educational project. In the 1840s, it seems, Ottoman rabbis still had no need to compete with a non-traditional worldview that would have challenged the authority of Jewish tradition. Instead, they proclaimed that rabbinic and scientific knowledge were compatible and that rabbinic literature was, in fact, the best way to enlighten the masses. In adapting an Ashkenazi, Hebrew work wrestling with the tension between secular and rabbinic knowledge, they chose to omit all sign of controversy.

Amarachi’s and Sason’s unapologetically traditional view should not obscure the novelty of their approach. While they avoided contrasting rabbinic and scientific knowledge, they did contrast rabbinic enlightenment with popular folk knowledge and they sought to include scientific explanations into the canon of vernacular literature. Thus, unlike Jacob Huli in the Me‘am Lo‘ez, Amarachi and Sason stripped the phenomenon of the eclipse of its ominous character. Instead, they told their readers not to be terrified, adding a rational, scientific explanation based on Sefer ha-Berit’s geocentric astronomy. The two Salonikan authors are thus a good example for the (certainly unconscious) revolutionary potential of Ladino rabbinic writing: they saw themselves as enlightening Ottoman Jews, appropriating scientific knowledge as compatible with rabbinic tradition and challenging what they identified as popular superstition.

A generation later, in the 1870s, the scene had changed quite dramatically. Judah Papo, in the widely-read Pele Yo‛ets, at first sight continued in the mold of early Judeo-Spanish literature. He affirmed the traditional geocentric version of a stationary earth and the sun revolving around it. The decisive difference was that Judah Papo, writing less than thirty years after Amarachi and Sason, found it necessary to defend his view. What was taken as a truth self-evident to the intended reader in the 1840s, needed to be explained and justified when Papo published his Pele Yo‛ets in the 1870s. Not only did he acknowledge that the traditional geocentric worldview of the rabbis was at odds with modern science, but he presented a lengthy polemic against those who relied on modern science instead of trusting the validity of rabbinic knowledge. Confronting a new kind of reader, Papo had now to contend with a secular, westernizing discourse promoted by the schools of the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle and the new Judeo-Spanish newspapers. The modern Sephardi intellectuals who were promoting Western education and were the enthusiastic editors of numerous Ladino journals and daily papers were making their own voice heard in a public sphere that hitherto had been dominated by the rabbis. They employed literary techniques first developed by the vernacular rabbis in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like their predecessors, they wanted to educate, enlighten and entertain Ottoman Jews, and they did so by presenting a secular and Western worldview as an alternative to the previously dominant rabbinic tradition.

Papo dismissed the assertions of non-Jewish scientists—in fact, unlike his predecessors, he made a clear distinction between Jewish, i.e., rabbinic, knowledge and non-Jewish, i.e., scientific or philosophical, knowledge. In the Pele Yo‛ets he claimed that the non-Jewish scientists were not even certain of their own knowledge (and he uses this assertion to back up his claim that the readers of secular Ladino literature should return to the certainties offered by rabbinic tradition). “According to the theory of the ancients,” he says,

the sun revolved around the earth and the earth was stationary. In later generations, other philosophers discovered that the sun is stationary and the earth revolves around the sun. In later generations, yet other philosophers claimed that the sun is moving and the earth also. … And as it happened to the philosophers of earlier times, so it can happen to the philosophers of our day. This is to say, in the science of philosophy there is no basis and nothing is certain.

Nevertheless, it must be added, Judah Papo was ambivalent about secular knowledge and acknowledged the benefits of one of the main vehicles for the communication of this new knowledge, the newspapers. In the same Pele Yo‛ets in which he denounced the follies of modern science, he also endorsed the usefulness of the Judeo-Spanish press for spreading knowledge among the masses. In doing so, he echoed the self-understanding of the editors of the Ottoman Ladino press.

In an article dedicated to the explanation of eclipses, the Istanbul-based newspaper El Tiempo (published in November 1873) challenged the traditional notion of considering them a bad omen, which had been the message in Huli’s Me‛am Lo‛ez. If, in the traditional view, eclipses were ominous harbingers of disaster, divinely ordained signs warning of imminent punishment, then El Tiempo praised modern science as liberating people from such superstitions. In typical enlightenment rhetoric, the article affirmed: “[Science] liberates the people from darkness, it illuminates them by sending out the rays of its light and makes them feel the heavy weight of their cloak of ignorance ….” The vernacular rabbis, writing in Ladino since the 1730s, could not have said it better—except that they would have substituted “rabbinic tradition” for “science.” What Ladino literature, from its outset in the early eighteenth century to the flourishing of secular genres in the late nineteenth century, had in common was its didactic agenda. The vernacular rabbis in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries set out to educate the Ottoman Jews and enlighten them through reading. Once a new, Judeo-Spanish public sphere had been created, the modern intellectuals educated in the schools of the Alliance used this same public sphere to push their own educational agenda, contributing further to the fundamental transformation of Ottoman Jewry in the last half-century of the Empire’s existence.

The very term “Spirituality” has in recent years acquired negative connotations. In Judaism, it is often associated with an expression of religious fervor devoid of halakhic content or commitment. It conjures up New Age pseudo-religion, unreliable, inconsistent, flaky sentimentality. To borrow a Christian bon mot, “Mysticism,” it is often asserted, “starts in a mist and ends in a schism.” Nevertheless both rationalism and mysticism are equally integral elements in Jewish, indeed all, religious life. It is the relationship between them that I want to explore in this essay.

It is probably true to say we can all distinguish between someone we consider religiously observant (perhaps the correct Hebrew term is “Aduk” or perhaps “Shomer Mitzvot”) and one we consider to be a person “of Spirit,” someone with “Ruhniut.” Some might even want to use this as a way of differentiating the Lithuanian tradition from the Hassidic. Yet that would not be completely fair. And both may be combined in the same person.

On the one hand, we may point to the rigorous, Germanic approach of the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz, who considered religion a matter of duty, a commitment to fulfill obligations, a purely rational phenomenon. And on the other hand, we may consider the late Nazir of Jerusalem who was lost in an ethereal world of “deveikut.” Halakha is clearly defined and empirically verifiable. The test for a witness in a Jewish Court of Law is not theology, but whether one adheres to the laws of Shabbat in public. The personal encounter with God—deveikut—is the essential element in any mystical tradition. Deveikut is not something anyone else can verify. What is its origin?

In the Bible

            The biblical narratives distinguish between those personalities who have a reciprocal relationship with God and those who are loyal to the traditions of the tribe and the people but whose engagement with a divine supernatural force is their defining characteristic. Aharon, the functionary, with his emphasis on inter human relations is an example of the first. The second was initiated by Avraham. Moshe is the archetype of a person who encounters God face to face. Only “The Fathers” and Moshe are described as struggling to “know” who and what God was and to feel God’s presence on a personal level.

The Torah itself allows for different paradigms, the priest and the judge (Deut. 18:8 and 19:18) and the prophet and the king (Deut. 18:14,18 and Deut. 17:14) one might also add “the elders” both national (Num. 11:16) and local (Deut. 21:4). All are overshadowed by the unique leadership of Moshe and then certain Judges. After Samuel, the king emerges as the typical leader. In the unique cases of both David and Shelomo can one say that the political and the spiritual were combined. Otherwise it seems throughout the first commonwealth it was the prophet who preserved the mystical tradition. Often he was in conflict with the monarch. The priesthood usually allied itself with the ruling power, what we would call the establishment. Its primary role was to make sure the National Sanctuary ran according to its rules. I cannot think of one example in the Bible of a priest communing or pouring his heart out to God in the way for example that David does. And this is precisely why it is Eliyahu the Prophet and his Chariot of Fire that is seen as the forerunner of the great mystical tradition. It is fire throughout the Bible that is used as the dominant (though not exclusive) symbol of the divine presence. What better metaphor for passion could there be?

 Furthermore the Bible, being a pre-philosophical text, is not concerned with the rational arguments for faith. There is no explicit command to believe. The first of the Ten Commandments is phrased as a given, not as something one needs to find proofs of. Rather it is an assumption of involvement and commitment. Indeed the biblical use of the word emunah, faith, is quite removed from the Aristotelian idea of intellectual belief. It is more a matter of being convinced, firm, secure, like the arms of Moses during the battle at Rephidim against Amalek.

In the Talmud

The Talmud continues this distinction of approaches, most obviously in the persona of Honi HaMa’agel (Mishna Taanit 3:2 and Gemara). His intimate relationship with God is recognized and yet challenged by Shimon Ben Shetah, the leader of the mainstream Pharisaic community. Shimon can recognize the unique contribution of Honi and his ability to go beyond the normal constraints of public religion. And yet he also recognizes the danger of what he sees as “Lese Majesty.” That particular talmudic passage goes on to give examples of the dangers of “wonder rabbis” using mystical powers in ways that normative halakha would not approve, as in the case of R.Yosi Ben Yokeret (Taanit 23b).

The ambiguity is there. One might think that the talmudic opposition to Greek culture and thought would place the whole of the rabbinic world firmly in the non-rational, mystical camp. The highlighting of Elisha Ben Abuya’s apostasy, only hinted at as being because of his following Greek rational thought, might lead one to think that rationalism was simply not a talmudic value. Yet those rabbis who follow in the Honi tradition are not always regarded as being correct. Hanina (Berakhot 17b), who sustains the whole world, is contrasted with the Gabeans, who might not be as mystically advanced but produced no heretics. The hint is clear. Similarly it is precisely the strange exceptions such as Shimon bar Yohai, who is valued for his obvious spiritual greatness, nevertheless is implicitly criticized for going beyond the boundaries of halakha when he puts working men to death for not spending their time in study (Shabbat 33b). It is the very objection to Shimon Bar Yohai’s absolutism that highlights the difference between an exceptional degree of spirituality that is inevitably the realm of a few, as opposed to the normative, if less exciting Judaism of the masses. Still Shimon Bar Yohai, Pinehas Ben Yair, Hanina, and the others are regarded as being exceptional precisely because of their spiritual relationship with God rather than as being in the first rank of scholars. They contrast with such personalities as Shimon Ben Gamliel as a man of authority rather than spirit.

In Medieval Theology

   It was the dominance of theology in first millennial Christianity and Islam that exercised such a powerful influence on Jewish thought. The Aristotelian bifurcation between spirit and matter led almost inevitably to the distinction taken for granted until the late nineteenth century. It was precisely against this over emphasis on rationalism that Kabbalah emerged as such a potent force at the very time when mysticism in Christianity began to challenge established norms, and similarly Sufism in Islam. Kabbalah’s creation of the system of sefirot integrated all “parts of the human, from the creative, reproductive sefira of yesod, to the intellectual sefira of hokhma and the intuitive of bina that challenged a rational world view. The human was a holistic reflection of God beyond. Nevertheless the distinction remained deeply rooted as evidenced in the persistence in some circles of the “gartel,” which divided the holier upper body from the more suspect lower regions.

The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book, was based on the work of English philosopher Gilbert Ryle. It illustrated the fallacy of how we had all come to think of the mind as good and the body as bad. Since Aristotle, we in the West have seen the intellect as the purest expression of humanity. In the world of ideas that Judaism lived, mind was good, body was bad.

It is possible that Maimonides himself understood the problem of the distinction between the “rationalism” of which he was a devotee, and the “emotion of mysticism” in his subtle distinction between the expression “to believe in,” a process more dependent on intuition and feeling, rather than the more rational “to believe that.” In Sefer HaMitzvot and The Yad, describing the command to believe in God, he uses the words “SheNa’amin sheYesh,” “we should believe that there is,” as opposed to “LeHa’amin Be-” ‘to believe in.’ But when it comes to his Ikkarim, his principles of faith, there is no command to believe that God exists. The usage of belief there, is “in” and the principle is that God is the creator and director of the Universe. Perhaps Maimonides intentionally allowed for a different way of encountering the divine.

Mysticism has always been an antidote to intellectualism. And yet it would be inaccurate to transpose the rational and the mystical in Judaism too rigidly. The greatest of Lithuanian rabbis such as the Vilna Gaon, studied the Zohar and even the Mussar Movement took its main text, The Paths of the Righteous, from a Kabbalist. Perhaps it was no different from the Talmud referring to those who specialized in Aggada as opposed to Talmud (Hagigah 14a). Still, there is a difference because the personality that devotes itself to one is usually very different from the one who gives himself to the other.

In Current Times

  And so it seems that the choices of rational or mystical depend more on personal preference than some intrinsic bias within Judaism. The modern quandary stems from the inescapable fact that formal, behavioral religion and its commitment to strict practice of the minutiae of halakha can be arid without the passion that mysticism can bring to it. This explains why a diet of Western religion that emerged with the Enlightenment has left so many people feeling uninspired and alienated. It explains why the mysticism of the orient has found such fertile ground in alienated Jews and Israelis. Jewish mysticism was until recently locked away in a well-guarded world where established rabbis held the keys and made sure only suitable initiates were permitted in.

 The reaction to this in our free and open world has been the popular appeal of an ersatz Kabbalah that is hardly distinguishable from self-help panaceas but bears little resemblance to the high degree of devotion, commitment, and religious observance that genuine Kabbalah requires. Judaism, I would argue, in its ideal form requires the holistic combination of all aspects of the human being. It should not be a matter of deciding whether at the Shabbat table one sings zemirot or tells divrei Torah. One should do both. It is just that some people are tone deaf just as others are intellectually challenged.

So if some of us are drawn to one and others to the other, how can one explain the obvious preferences that some of us have? In recent years a lot has been written about the physiological aspects of religion. One of the pioneers in the new field of neurotheology is Andrew Newberg, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind. He has published a book, Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth, written with his colleague Mark Robert Waldman[i]. Carl Zimmer’s research[ii] and Dean Hamer’s book[iii] have both highlighted the genetic basis for spirituality. Psychology Today has published articles linking spiritual experiences to serotonin.[iv] The NPR website has an article on research showing the changes in the brain of those who meditate and pray, as does Wired Science.[v] Of course none of this tells us anything about God. But it does tell us something about ourselves. It does confirm what we see with our own eyes, that some people seem more naturally spiritual and conversely many people who are outwardly religious seem to show little interest in or propensity for spirituality. Clearly there is a need to encounter the divine as much as there is to express other parts of our intellectual and emotional makeup and some human brains seem to have a greater need than others.

The genius of our religion is that it provides for the very wide spectrum of human needs in terms of experience and intellect. The fact that it insists on behavioral detail while leaving the theological requirements loosely defined, enables the range of human minds to find their places within the religious spectrum. Provided one adheres to the common denominator of halakhic behavior, the room for individual spiritual experience is left up to each one of us to either indulge or neglect. Maimonides thought that through neglect we could totally eradicate the soul gene, or the soul element within us (Hilkhot Teshuva 8:5). Mysticism on the other hand regards the souls as eternal, transcendental, indestructible. So long as you and I both keep Shabbat, what we think about our soul is, is subjective.

The sad fact is that in too many parts of the Jewish world such freedom of thought is too rarely accorded.

Introduction

Filling the position of Posek haDor, the leading halakhic arbiter of the Jewish people, has become an almost hopeless undertaking in our complicated and troubled times. We are told that the Posek haDor must be someone whose halakhic knowledge is greater than anyone else’s. He must be someone who is totally imbued with Torah knowledge; he has acquired Torah values and refined his character to such a degree that he embodies, and is thus qualified to offer, Daat Torah (an authentic and authoritative Jewish view on all matters). Daat Torah is seen as quasi-prophetic, and thereby beyond reproach.[1] The Posek haDor has to decide on issues of life and death, literally and figuratively. He must make judgments about political matters—especially in and concerning the Land of Israel—that are so complicated that they are nearly beyond anyone’s grasp. People insist that this person must have wisdom that surpasses anything ordinary mortals could ever dream of. He is asked to singlehandedly decide on matters that will affect hundreds of thousands of religious Jews, and, by extension, millions of secular Jews. This is most dangerous.

To Be A Posek HaDor: Is It Possible?

The establishment of the State of Israel cast all Jews around the globe into a new world order, and created a need for pioneering religious leadership and a completely new kind of halakhic arbiter. Social and economic conditions as well as ideologies have changed radically, creating major upheavals in Jewish life. As a result, unprecedented circumstances have arisen that need to be translated into reality. The question is whether the Posek haDor will grasp these opportunities and turn them into major victories so as to inspire people. Developments in the rabbinical world show that we no longer have such extraordinary people. Most of the time, halakhic authorities have withdrawn, living in denial and continuing to believe that the world has not evolved and that nothing of substance has happened that requires an altogether new approach.

Today, halakhic authorities need to lead religious Jewry through a new world order. They must realize that their views will affect Jews as well as Gentiles, for their voices will be heard far beyond the Jewish community, transmitted via the Internet. Their observations may cause ridicule and even anti-Semitism if they misrepresent Judaism and Jewish law. Rather unfortunately, this has happened on more than a few occasions.

The posek has to understand that he may be called upon to give guidance to an often extremely secular and troubled world that is in great need of hearing the words of a Jewish sage. His decisions must reflect the imperative that we Jews are to be a light unto the nations—a light that must shine everywhere. It is no longer possible to focus on the often narrow world of Orthodoxy and look down on or ignore the secular and Gentile world.

Is the Halakha Still Exciting and Ennobling?

Most Jews today are no longer observant, nor are they even inspired by Judaism. To them, it has become irrelevant and outdated. The reasons for this tragedy are many, but no doubt a major cause is the failure to convey halakha as something exciting and ennobling, like the music of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. Only when a Jew is taught why halakha offers him or her the musical notes with which to play the soul’s sonata, will he or she then be able to hear its magnificent music.

            Just as great scientists are fascinated when they investigate the properties of DNA, or the habits of a tiny insect under scrutiny, so should even a secular Jew be deeply moved when encountering the colors and fine subtleties of the world of halakha.[2] But does the posek realize this, and does he know how to convey that message when he deals with halakhic inquiries?

The Curse of Nearsightedness

Many religious Jews are nearsighted and in dire need of a wider vision. Is making sure that a chicken is kosher all that there is to kashruth? Or, are the laws of kashruth just one element of a grand weltanschauung that defines the mission of the People of Israel; a mission whose importance surpasses by far the single question of a chicken’s kashruth? Such inquiries are but one small component of a larger question concerning the plague of consumerism and humankind’s obsessive pursuit of ever-increasing comfort. Should the posek who is asked about the kashruth of someone’s tefillin not ask that person: “And what about the kashruth of your much-too-expensive and ostentatious car?” After all, the posek needs, foremost, to be an educator. Hard-line narrow rulings will not create the future for a deeply spiritual Judaism.

The first requirement of a posek is to live in radical amazement and see God’s fingers in every dimension of human existence, including the Torah, Talmud, science, technology, and above all, in the constant changing of history, which may well mean that God demands different decisions from those of the past. Today’s halakhic living is severely impeded by observance having become mere habit. As Abraham Joshua Heschel put it so beautifully:

Indeed, the essence of observance has, at times, become encrusted with so many customs and conventions that the jewel was lost in the setting. Outward compliance with externalities of the law took the place of the engagement of the whole person to the living God.[3]

Over the years, this problem has become exacerbated because everything in Judaism has been turned into a halakhic issue.

Unknown Landscapes

The future posek must reverse this crisis. He can do so only if he is touched by something much larger than himself. It is entirely impossible to pasken (render a halakhic ruling) when his own soul is cold and all he does is go by the book. He must live the Divine, and the Divine must emerge from his decisions. To paraphrase Heschel: The posek must feel more than he understands in order to understand more than he grasps. He must touch Heaven while standing with both his feet on the ground, similar to what takes place when one hears the music of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, and suddenly feels that he is taken on a journey to unknown landscapes. I would even suggest that some posekim should actually listen to this kind of heavenly music while contemplating halakhic problems presented to them. It will broaden their minds and hearts, and they will see a world emerging that opens halakhic possibilities they never contemplated before. They will sense God’s presence, because music sets the soul free and evokes in us wonder about who we are and what we live for. As Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth once wrote, “Whether the angels play only Bach in praising God, I am not quite sure; I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart.”[4]

No Legalism

It is the posek’s task to ensure that Judaism is not identified only with legalism. There is an entire religious world beyond halakha—one of aggada, philosophy, deep emotional experiences, devotion, and often unfinalized beliefs. Shouldn’t these be part of the process of deciding how halakha is to be applied? The task of halakha has always been to ensure that Judaism does not evaporate into a utopian reverie, a superficial spiritualism. But the facts on the ground suggest something entirely different. Judaism has developed in a way that has destroyed the delicate balance between law and spirit, and it has turned into a type of sacred behaviorism. Halakha is supposed to be the practical upshot of even unfinalized beliefs. Judaism was never supposed to become a religion that is paralyzed in its awe of rigid tradition. It is a fluid liquid that must be transformed into a solid substance so as to enable the Jew to act. It must chill the heated steel of exalted ideas and turn them into pragmatic deeds without allowing the inner heat to cool off entirely.

            Halakha is the midwife that assists in the birth of not only answers but also profound spiritual questions created by that very halakha. As such, we must ensure that the Posek haDor does not turn into someone who gives automatic answers on the spot. Instead, he should walk the person through a landscape in which these questions are properly discussed.

The Wife of the Posek

It is high time that a group of women, particularly the wives of posekim, be deeply involved in certain halakhic decisions when they touch on emotions and social conditions that they may understand better than the posek/husband. Why do we almost never hear about the wife of the Posek haDor, her wisdom, and especially the sacrifice entailed in being married to such a great man who is needed by so many and who often has little time for his own family?[5]

Today’s Posek haDor is often absolutely sure of the truth of his religion, but not informed or aware of the many challenges today’s world presents to religious faith and Judaism. How could such a person be able to understand the many issues of people who live in religious doubt? Furthermore, the posek must sincerely appreciate the plight and pain of the confused teenager, the Jewish Ethiopian, the bereaved parent, the struggling religious homosexual, the child of a mixed marriage with only a Jewish father, even the Christian or Buddhist who has an affinity for Judaism and asks for guidance.

The Need for Advice

Is there anyone in this world who has all the qualities necessary to singlehandedly rule on these matters? It is entirely unfair and extremely dangerous to ask one person, however pious and wise, to adequately respond to all these issues. It requires teamwork with fellow rabbis and teachers, who may not be as learned in halakha but are much more familiar with many of the problems of which the Posek haDor may not be aware. The Posek haDor should be advised by a team of highly experienced professionals—psychologists, social workers, scientists, and even poets and musicians—before giving a ruling, so as to prevent major pitfalls. Halakha should be decided by consensus (as was once the case with the Sanhedrin) instead of by one person, even if he is the greatest. Centralized authority has become a dangerous matter. It may be wise to allow people, with some guidance, to decide on their own after having heard all the halakhic views and spiritual dimensions of their question.

New Torah Ideas and Not the Vatican

Posekim should encourage new Torah ideas and shun the denunciation of those books that try to bring religion and science together in harmony. Instead of banning them, as the Vatican used to do in former times, they should encourage these works. In the last few years, powerful rabbis have tried to prevent books from being published, or have condemned them, because they did not agree with their content, claiming them to contain heresy. In their ignorance, they tried to ban them and their authors, causing a terrible hillul Hashem (desecration of God’s name) after secular newspapers were informed of these condemnations and ridiculed them, since they indicated a total lack of scientific knowledge on the part of those who signed and endorsed these bans. Some of these great rabbis should stop the banning and instead learn to offer scientific and philosophical solutions to possible conflicts between Torah, science, and philosophy. But to do so, they need to acquire enough knowledge! What is the point of labeling certain ideas as heresy when one does not have the knowledge to understand the issues involved? In any case, bans and inquisitions have no place in Judaism.

            The Posek haDor must have shoulders broad enough to carry and appreciate different worldviews, including Zionist, non-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox and Modern Orthodox. And he must ensure that all these denominations feel his impartiality and his allowance of space for their varied ideologies. Perhaps he could even have an open ear for Reform and Conservative Judaism and realize that many of their adherents are serious about their religion, even though he would not agree with these movements. And when he disagrees, he should be sophisticated enough to explain why he indeed differs.

A true posek should visit women’s shelters, speak personally with abused women and children, and perhaps periodically deny himself food and drink so that he feels the real horror of poverty and rejection. Unless he is a very sensitive soul, he should perhaps get himself hospitalized and spend time observing and even experiencing the lives of people who are incapable of leaving their beds. They are in the hands of doctors and nurses who do not always deal with their patients in an adequately compassionate manner, whether due to lack of time, insensitivity, or some other reason. He should also carefully listen to the complaints, problems, and frustrations of the medical staff.

The Posek Should Go into Exile

Before dealing with the question of agunot[6] and the refusal of husbands to grant their wives a get (writ of divorce), it would perhaps be a good idea for the posek to leave his wife for a period of time (with her consent, of course) and live in total loneliness, so as to understand what it means to live in utter silence and have no life partner.

Above all, it is the Posek haDor’s responsibility to narrow the serious gap between the ultra-Orthodox and the rest of Israeli society, and to come up with creative halakhic solutions that will boggle the minds of all branches of Jewry.

Posekim must be people who will propose unprecedented solutions for the status of the tens of thousands of non-Jews with Jewish roots living in Israel. They must ensure that courses on Judaism are so attractive that halakha becomes irresistible. They should instruct their students to welcome these people with open arms, knowing quite well that otherwise we will be confronted with a huge problem of intermarriage in Israel, which threatens the very existence of the Jewish state.

The posek’s farsighted and long-term view must ensure that major problems, such as the exemption of yeshiva students from army service, will be resolved once and for all.

Over nearly 2,000 years of exile, Jewish law has developed into a “waiting mode” in which it has become the great “Preserver of the Precepts.” It has been protective and defensive, and mainly committed to conformity, in order to ensure the survival of Judaism and the Jews who were surrounded by a non-Jewish, mostly hostile society. It became a “galut halakha”—an exilic code—in which the Torah sometimes became overly stultified. It may have worked in the Diaspora, but it can no longer offer sufficient guidance in today’s world and in Israel.[7]

The State of Israel is the great catalyst for this new situation, which we have not experienced during the past 2,000 years. Consequently, we are in dire need of “prophetic halakha,” in which not only the rules of halakha are applied, but also the perspectives of our prophets who spoke of burning social and ethical issues. This should be combined with a melodious spiritual resonance that introduces new points of view on genuine and deep religiosity.

 Isn’t it time to leave the final codification of Jewish law behind us; to unfreeze halakha and begin reading between the lines of the Talmud to recapture halakha’s authentic nature?

To Be a Conductor of an Orchestra

To be an arbiter of Jewish law is to be the conductor of an orchestra. It is not coercion, but persuasion that makes it possible for the other to hear the beauty of the music and to accept a halakhic decision, just as one would willingly listen to the interpretation of a conductor—because one is deeply inspired.

To be a posek means to be a person of unprecedented courage; one who is willing to initiate a spiritual storm that will shake up the entire Jewish community. A storm that will free conventional and codified halakha from the sandbank in which it has been stuck. In a revolutionary shift, posekim should lead the ship of Torah, in full sail, right into the heart of the Jewish nation, creating such a shock that it will take days, weeks, or even months before it is able to get back on its feet. With knives between their teeth, like the prophets of biblical days, these great halakhic arbiters, of impeccable an uncompromising conduct, should create a religious uproar that will scare the moral wits out of both secular and religious Jews and weigh heavily on their souls.

To Be Feared and to Be Loved

Posekim should not be “honored,” “valued,” or “well-respected,” as they are now. As men of truth, they should be both feared and deeply loved. Jews of all backgrounds should be shaking in their shoes at the thought of meeting them, while simultaneously being incapable of staying away from their towering, fascinating, and above all, warm personalities.

Halakhic decision-making is a great art. The posek should never forget that he is the soil in which the halakha is to grow, while the Torah is the seed and God is the sun.[8]

We are in need of decentralized rabbinical authority in which many more rabbis will have a personal relationship with their flock and consequently be able to respond to the often difficult and very personal questions their followers are asking. There are no longer such unusual great rabbis who know the art of reading people’s minds and hearts without having a personal relationship with them. This was exactly the point that Yitro made when he told his son-in-law Moshe Rabbeinu to appoint ministers “as leaders of thousands, leaders of hundreds, leaders of fifties, and leaders of tens.”[9] Only the major cases would be brought to a giant authority like Moshe. But alas, such leaders no longer exist.

We should be very thankful that we witness the disintegration of rabbinical authority in our days. Nothing could be worse for Judaism and the Jewish people than having rabbis who are admired as great spiritual halakhic leaders when for the most part they are not. We will witness, slowly but surely, the rise of a completely new rabbinical world, which will give us more reason to be proud Jews and live a spiritual halakhic life. Yes, it will take time—but it will surely happen.

Perhaps our future rabbis should first listen to the heavenly music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, after which they will be able to render a truthful halakhic decision. It might do wonders!

I sit at my desk at home near the end of April, far from the joyous Lag Ba’Omer bonfires crackling in Meron a world away, surrounded by my sefarim and books, engulfed by endless online shiurim and 24/7 news crawls on tv. All of this brings to mind a line from the poem The Waste Land, “ These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Outside my window on the radio of a passing car, Alicia Keyes is singing, and I ask myself if her recorded voice, suddenly lost to the gunning of the auto engine, was kol isha? Or was it dependent upon my intent? And then I try to reimagine authentic Orthodoxy, try to reconcile what my friend the hazzan calls “a classical Judaism…structuring life by following classical forms and ideals” with the modern. The nineteenth century poet of Paris, Charles Baudelaire, wrote: “By modernity, I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent…” And I wonder who will come sit in my circle, who will break bread, who will, so to speak, make minyan with me.

I try to write here descriptively, never prescriptively. I am neither by nature nor by accomplishment one to prescribe, certainly not beyond what berakha to make, the order of prayers, or customs of the holidays. More serious matters, such as applying halakha in sensitive personal situations, determining religious responsibility in idiosyncratic or severe circumstances, resolving problems in the fulfillment of mitzvoth hamurot --these are the weighty issues; though routine to the Orthodox Jewish condition, they are best left to the best trained and broadest-shouldered, the posekim who tower in Torah and rule from an ingrained and humane Torah perspective.

I dare to write impressionistically, venture to lay before you “an unfinished inquiry” in the hope that, somewhere out there, there may be readers who lie awake at night after keriat shema thinking the same thoughts, reflecting on the same joys, mulling over the same spiritual aspirations, contemplating the same concerns for our religious selves. Surely there are readers out there who suffer, not always but often enough, the same inconclusiveness? After all, why re-magine Orthodoxy if we are wholly fulfilled? Is there a “but,” a conscious or unconscious hesitancy that prompts the re-imagination?

I can think of one: “But why?”  Yes, we obey the Law to the best of our human capabilities, yet understanding often eludes us. The Chofetz Chayim recognized this. In his introduction to the Laws of Shabbat, he offered the rationale that whoever studies his Mishnah Berurah “will come to know each law, together with its reason and underlying thesis, in both theory and practice.” Rabbi Marc D. Angel recognizes this when he redefines the tam, one of the four sons in the Haggadah sequence. The tam is not “simple and naive” but “pure and whole,” and the tam declares, “I’ll do what my religion requires, but I need something more. I need to know the inner spirit of what the religion demands of me.” Yes, understanding eludes us, yet from the very beginning of Creation, verbal reasoning has distinguished humankind, and the interrogative sentence – Why? What if? To be or not to be? –  has distinguished verbal reasoning. Questioning is an essential tool, a hallmark of our approach to the Torah intended by God to guide every moment of our earthly lives. Certainly we are in our religious rights to seek answers, even impatiently, now, today, before Tishbi Yetareitz Kushiot Uba’ayot, that future time when Eliyahu HaNavi will usher in the messianic age and resolve the unresolved. Admittedly it is stretching the point, but might we not invoke Hillel’s injunction in order to underscore the matter? “Do not justify saying something that is not easily understood on the grounds that, eventually, it will be understood”?

I sit at my desk and my mind conjures voices of the Gaon and the Rav, the Netziv, and Rav Hirsch and the Ramban.  They tumble in memory in no specific manner, for, when the soul wrestles with it, the mind seems to know no order, no time or space, no chronology or hierarchy of Rishonim and Aharonim. Ironically, “There is an order to it all,” they say, their words commingling, “a geometry of Judaism.”

They urge me to go find it in the yod gimmel middot , the thirteen consistent principles of biblical interpretation;  in the underpinning logic of the Seder Olam that “Scripture does not come to hide but to explain” and in the sustained Talmudic attitude “that the essence of Scripture is in the information obtained by logical inferences and extra-logical rules of transference.”

They urge me to find it in the heated Talmudic debate between Rabbi Eliezer and the Sages, where the majority rules by rebutting a bat kol, Divine Voice, from heaven with the biblical text, Lo BaShamayim Hi.” Torah Law,” argue the Sages, “is not decided in Heaven but by application on earth of such hermeneutical principles as have been passed down by tradition.”

They urge me to find it in RavSoloveitchik’s Brisker-inspired pyrotechnics, in the way he discovers patterns across the landscape of authentic Jewish texts and practices, and in the way he elucidates Halakhic Man by comparing him to a mathematician, in that both “ live in an ideal realm…enjoy the radiance of their own creations,” and both discern an “ideal-geometric space [that finds] its actualization in the real world”; to find it in the Gaon’s appreciation of mathematical knowledge and reasoning as a means of understanding the world and of divining its relationship to the ideal Torah.

They urge me to find it in Rav Hirsch’s recognition, as described by Dayan Grunfeld, of two revelations, Nature and Torah, each with a set of principles applicable to its own realm, and in Rav Hirsch’s “endeavor to explain the Biblical text out of itself…to objectively investigate the sources of Judaism as given phenomena” by means of a divine science, a geometry, so to speak, of Judaism.

They urge me to go find it in the Netziv’s introduction to his Humash commentary, Ha’amek Davar, where he draws a similar analogy to that of Rav Hirsch: just as it is a mitzvah for the nations of the world to glorify God by studying Nature via the different disciplines of science, so is it our profound obligation as the Jewish nation to study the Torah and to discover therein all that is Divine. 

And, finally, they urge me to find it in the Ramban’s symphonic hakdama to Sefer Bereishit, where he depicts the many portals of wisdom that God created and transmitted to Moshe Rabbeinu– the portal of wisdom concerning the mineral world, the portal of wisdom concerning vegetation, the portal of the trees, the birds, the fish, the wild beasts, and so on until the nigh-supreme portal of wisdom concerning human beings, those creatures in God’s image who possess speech and reason and knowledge of right and wrong.

Echoing these Gedolim, in faint reverberation, come words of mathematicians from off my bookshelf. Here is number theorist Abraham Fraenkel: “The mathematician does not invent the objects of his science – he discovers them.” And here is another theorist, Srinivasa Ramanujan: ”An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God.” And now Kurt Gödel, one of the great thinkers of the 20^th century: “Mathematics describes a nonsensual reality that exists independently both of the acts and of the dispositions of the human mind.” Floating in like a coda come these words of Michael Tanner, a Cambridge philosopher: “Mathematics is especially fascinating since it both proceeds according to its own laws but also works wonderfully well, for the most part, in application to experience.” 

So too, suggests Tanner, might we describe instrumental music: “ a self-sufficient series of sounds, which succeed one another according to ‘laws’ which bear only tenuous analogies to anything outside music;” so too, the game of chess, “another extremely elaborate activity that seems capable of endless expansion, but one that is autonomous.” So too, then, in this light, might we gain a glimpse of how the Gaon and Rav Hirsch and the Netziv understood the ideal, transcendent Torah.  And so too would the Rav recognize in Tanner’s view his own analogy of mathematics to the halakha, which proceeds according to its own laws and works wonderfully well in affording the practicing Jew “a living experiential feeling that innervates and enlivens hearts,” as Rav Soloveitchik himself expresses it,

But what can we do when reason leads to contradiction?  To confusion? To uncertainty?  That is where conflict appreciation comes in. Not “conflict resolution,” but, if we are reimagining Orthodoxy, conflict appreciation, indeed. Again, like an incantation, words and phrases of the Rav come to the fore –  “fraught with contradictions,” “wrestles,” “struggles with affirmation and negation,” until finally,“out of the contradictions…there emerges a radiant, holy personality whose soul has been purified in the furnace of struggle and opposition.” Why, after all, shouldn’t we experience bouts of uncertainty?  Entertainment of doubt? Possibility of being wrong? RavSoloveitchik dominates yet again, this time in full oratory: “The grandeur of religion lies in its mysterium tremendum, its magnitude, and its ultimate incomprehensibility... The beauty of religion, with its grandiose vistas, reveals itself to man not in solutions but in problems, not in harmony but in constant conflict of diversified forces and trends.”

Certainly, science knows uncertainty. Werner Heisenberg’s experiments led to a principle of uncertainty in the last century, and multiverse theorists in this century, including famed physicist Stephen Hawking, posit different universes with different systems of physical laws and behavior, one system potentially confounding another, straight lines not certain to be the shortest distance between two points. On the other hand, and despite the challenges of uncertainty and indeterminacy, there are those scientists who, in their particular fields, might be said to parallel the Gaon and Rav Hirsch in seeking a unifying ideal, a scientific analogue, narrowly speaking, of the ideal Torah. In 2007, Physicist A. Garrett Lisi proposed “A Geometric Theory of Everything,” as Scientific American later dubbed it, encapsulating its thesis as, “Deep down, the particles and forces of the universe are a manifestation of exquisite geometry.” A geometry of science, a geometry of mathematics, a geometry of Judaism – clever analogies, perhaps, but what then are we to make of the last, which concerns us the most?  What does Orthodoxy, a prime breeding ground for proof texts, seek to prove?

As an autonomous system of Law and Ethics, Orthodoxy promises integrity, conscience, identity to those who adhere to its principles, but does it promise them certainty? Surely it sustains those who practice it, teaches us how to tame this world, affords us templates like Shabbat, Rosh Hodesh and holidays to sanctify our time; like synagogues and the peah corner of a field set aside for the poor to sanctify our space,; like bikku rholim and bal tash-hit to sanctify our deeds; like fixed prayer and, keneged kulam, equal to all, Torah learning to sanctify our thoughts. As Rabbi Ira Rohde writes, “Participation in classical Jewish forms does not merely mold or perfect Jewish character, it actually constitutes that character out of undifferentiated chaos. Structure gives coherent, intelligible meaning, and meaning gives life substance.”

Orthodox tradition does promise certainty in the world to come, envisioning experiences of eternity meted out on a sliding scale according to our levels of adherence to Torah ideals during our lifetimes. But contemplation of olam ha’ba, except for the most saintly among us, rarely forestalls the anxieties, the fears, the dark moods that might trip us up…at any moment…unforeseen. Still, as the Rav exhorts, why are we seeking certainty and proof when “the grandeur of religion lies in its ultimate incomprehensibility”?

So I look into the essays of Rav Soloveitchik’s talmid and son-in-law, Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, where he explores the possibility of finding a middle ground that is “halakhically and hashkafically defensible” for those who, like the tam, the pure son, need something more, need to know the inner spirit. What, I wonder, would it require?  And Rav Lichtenstein answers: “ a principled and consistent attachment…spiritual commitment” to a relevant posek and his community of followers. And, he continues, it would require, too, a self-awareness and conscious avoidance of arrogance and ignorance in the way we seek understanding of both our Torah and our world, in the way we question, in the way we choose our personal religious mentors.

I seek to personally grasp this view, and my tentative conclusions are in no wise endorsed by Rav Lichtenstein. While we cannot find ultimate comprehensibility in religion, we can, like Rabbi Rohde suggests, find meaning in our classical Jewish forms and formulations, in the geometry of Judaism. And perhaps, if we use sound judgment predicated on a genuine Torah perspective, we might with proper motivation, to paraphrase Rav Lichtenstein, selectively gather hashkafic components from various Torah thinkers in order to fuse these into a coherent worldview. 

Now, however, in my mind’s eye Rav Lichtenstein lifts a finger of warning, concludes with a caveat: “Let the selector beware.”  Though he endorses gathering elements “thoroughly grounded in indigenous tradition,” he nonetheless cautions against incorporating “accretions appended to the tradition.” Might we try to argue that one man or woman’s accretion is another one’s Torah U’Mada or Torah im Derekh Eretz? That there may be responsible ways to cast a net into the sea of wider culture in order to find objects, activities, ideas that support and enrich our careers as humans on this planet and potentially even afford us insight into the Torah? Would we be wrong to call upon Rav Hirsch to defend us? These are not rhetorical questions, but sincere stumblings. Do I read Rav Hirsch correctly? Listen with me as he relates how Noah’s son Yaphet produced “nations which characterize themselves in nurturing art, aesthetic beauty…conscious of some higher ideal up to which [humankind] is to work itself out of its crudeness…Through grace and beauty they foster a taste for more spiritual activities, music, poetry, art.” These “spiritual activities” are, admittedly, mere way stations on the road to the ultimate goal on earth, for that is entrusted to Noah’s son Shem, from whom the Jewish people descend. This goal, modeled by the Jewish nation but intended ultimately for all humankind, is “to build their homes on earth in such a manner that God dwells with them.” But, then again, Rav Lichtenstein expresses reservation about Rav Hirsch’s approach…

…And so, my reimagining Orthodoxy comes full circle to un cri de coeur, an appeal not a protest, a heartfelt inquiry not a confirmation bias.  An aggada in the Talmud comes to mind: “A child in its mother’s womb is taught the Torah, beginning to end, but as soon as it sees the light of day, the child is approached by an angel who taps its lips, and suddenly, entirely the Torah is forgotten.” If all Torah learning is a forgetting and remembering, then perhaps that is why our yearning for understanding is so great, since what we once possessed wholly as our own we must now go through life searching for like a lost jewel. Perhaps that is why some of us seek it even in the oddest of places, for who really knows where they might be hiding, those holy recollections of yore? Surely Shem and Yaphet played together as sibling youths, and who really knows what thoughts transcendent Shem and his more earthbound brother shared? As Midrash Eik ha Rabbah confirms: “If someone tells you there is wisdom among the nations of the world, believe him, Torah among the nations of the world, do not believe him.” So who then can say with certainty that knowledge and experience of the wisdom of nations cannot on occasion yield understanding of our experience as Jews and bear fruit in the garden of Torah?

Rising from my desk, I put my iMac to sleep and turn toward my sefarim and books. I am torn between my Rebbe’s Rebbe, HaRav Elchanan Wasserman, who saw up to the Heavens by looking to the ground in order to keep the gashmiyut of the street at bay, and between my heart’s Rebbe, HaRav Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook, who looked into people’s eyes and declared that he could not help but love all humankind; who fervently embraced the Jewish people and their homeland of Zion; who advised that, rather than immediately refute an idea which seems to contradict the Torah, we instead build the palace of Torah above it.  I am torn between Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, whose commentary seems to me to bestride the Humash like a colossus and whose essays bespeak a modern sensibility and a traditional soul, the very model of Torah im Derekh Eretz, and between Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, who analyzes with clarity and brilliance the Torah’s most complex issues, who lives the Torah’s highest ethic, who at times articulates his original Torah thoughts by reference to world literature and classical humanism, and yet who struggles to consider Rav Hirsch’s humanism as something more than an accretion.

So I turn from the bookcase to the window. The street is quiet, few cars pass by in the evening. The lunar month is half gone and the waning moon is reflected in the glass storm door of my neighbor, a jazz musician; for a moment, I fill the evening’s silence with melody by imagining him nestled against the pillows of his living room couch listening intently to Miles Davis’ album Kind of Blue. It is far easier, I tell myself, than reimagining Orthodoxy. Suddenly, my cell phone vibrates, reminding me that it is time for ma’ariv. As I walk out into the night, I find myself both anticipating the ancient invocation of Barekhu in the beit midrash and wondering, still, who might be out there to make minyan with me.

The Modern Orthodox community today is treading water. It certainly is not dying, but it also is not excelling. Many have noted that the movement today is not only lacking great leadership but also heart and soul. It is recognized for its cognitive prioritizing of intellectual endeavors (Torah and academic study), but the movement is often out of touch emotionally and socially. However, the immense potential for the Modern Orthodox is uniquely distinct from the non-Orthodox and the Hareidi.

There have been few attempts to study Modern Orthodox Jews as a separate demographic group. For example, the National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001 listed a U.S. Orthodox population of about 567,000, slightly more than 10 percent of the U.S. Jewish population, but it did not distinguish between the Modern Orthodox and the Hareidi populations. Despite being in such a small minority, the Orthodox community has reason to be optimistic about growth, as Orthodox Jews have a higher prevalence than other Jews in many geographic areas, and only about 5 percent of Orthodox Jews intermarry, as opposed to nearly half of all Jews in the United States. Orthodox Jews comprise

• 21 percent of all Jews who belong to a synagogue
• 34 percent of young Jews (age 18–34) who belong to a synagogue
• A 39 percent higher birth rate, compared to other Jewish denominations
• 23 percent of all Jewish children

On the other hand, there are indications that the Orthodox denomination has difficulty retaining its members. Only about 41 percent of those raised as Orthodox Jews remain Orthodox into adulthood. Thus, while it has been estimated that Modern Orthodox families average between three and five children (as opposed to five to 10 children among the Hareidi), the rate of growth is mitigated by the high rate of those who cease to identify as Orthodox.

I would propose that there are a few key adaptive changes that need to be made for the Modern Orthodox community to move from a state of mere survival to a position where it is thriving:

1. Embrace our national and global interconnectivity.
2. Make Torah values relevant for the world.
3. Demonstrate the added value that Torah observance makes to the world.

Embrace Our National and Global Interconnectivity

We must move out of the Modern Orthodox shtetls that have developed around the United States and expand our reach and sense of community. We should be more proactive in forming strong relationships with non-Jews and non-Orthodox Jews and recognize that we are also dependent upon others. When other good people succeed, it can be our success, and when other good people lose, it can be our loss; our identities as Jews, as Americans, and as global citizens make us highly interconnected and interrelated with those around us.

We live in a world in which we cannot escape our co-dependencies. This is reflected well in the following story:

In the kingdom of Solomon there once lived a two-headed man. Upon the death of his father, the man became embroiled in a bitter dispute with his brothers and sisters over the inheritance."Since I have two heads," he claimed, "I deserve twice as much of the money as the rest of you." "Perhaps you have two heads," his siblings responded, "but you have just one body. Therefore, you deserve only one share." The case was brought before King Solomon, the wisest of the wise. His response was characteristically enlightening.

"Pour boiling water over one of the man's two heads," said King Solomon. "If the second head screams in pain, then we will know he is one person. If not, then we have determined that the two-headed person is in fact two separate, independent individuals."

The lesson for us is that when one of us feels pain, we all feel the pain. A loss to one is, of course, a loss to all. That sense of collective responsibility has enabled our people to survive and thrive.

While many prefer the role of giver to that of taker, there comes a time in most every life when the giver must, of necessity, become the taker, most commonly in one’s elder years. This situation is reflected well in a story in the Chofetz Chaim’s Ahavat Chesed:

A young child once observed his father throw his grandfather out of the house because the grandfather was unable to keep himself or his surroundings clean. Shaken as the child was, he could not deny the cruelty he had witnessed. Later, he met his grandfather wandering on the street. The grandfather asked the child to bring him a coat, so that at least he could avoid freezing in his homeless state. The child returned to his father and asked him if he could have a coat for the grandfather.

"Go up to the attic," said the father. "There's an old coat up there that he can have."

When the child returned from the attic, he was holding half of a coat."What happened to the coat?" the father asked. "Why has it been cut?"

"I did it for you," said the child, "so that when you grow old, you can have the other half."

The Jewish tradition teaches that one who neglects others will ultimately come to be neglected, a lesson that has universal application. Martin Niemoller, the German pastor, served as a U-boat commander in World War I, and along with too many others who had supported the Kaiser and German nationalism, valued order over the chaos of Weimar Germany. Although Niemoller quickly grew apprehensive of the Nazis, it took him several years to openly denounce them. By the time he began his imprisonment at the Sachsenhausen (and later Dachau) concentration camp in 1938, millions had already been imprisoned or murdered, and those remaining in Germany were quiescent. Too late, Niemoller grasped the consequences of his inaction, and after the war he powerfully and famously taught this idea thus:

When the Nazis came for the Communists, I remained silent; I was not a Communist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists, I remained silent; I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

Others see the positive potential of actively bringing the Torah to life in and for the entire world. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch is one example:

Judaism is not a religion, the synagogue is not a church, and the Rabbi is not a priest. Judaism is not a mere adjunct to life: it com­prises all of life. To be a Jew is not a mere part, it is the sum total of our task in life. To be a Jew in the synagogue and the kitchen, in the field and the warehouse, in the office and the pulpit, as fa­ther and mother, as servant and master, as man and as citizen, with one's thought, in word and in deed, in enjoyment and privation, with the needle and the graving-tool, with the pen and the chisel—that is what it means to be a Jew. An entire life supported by the Divine idea and lived and brought to fulfillment according to divine will. (Judaism Eternal, 103)

Rabbi Joseph B.Soloveitchik went further, seeing a mandate to create and remake the world (tikkun olam):

The Jewish people see their own fate as bound up with the fate of existence as a whole.... Physical reality and spiritual-historical existence—both have suffered greatly on account of the dominion of the abyss, of chaos and the void, and their fates parallel one an­other.... The Jewish people bring a sacrifice to atone, as it were, for the Holy One, blessed be He, for not having completed the work of creation. The Creator of the world diminished the image and stature of creation in order to leave something for man, the work of His hands, to do, in order to adorn man with the crown of creator and maker. (Halakhic Man, 107, 113)

The Rav acknowledged the quandary of a people who often lived apart from society in the ghetto, at times a refuge from outside persecution but at times a stop on experiencing the full potential of this world and wrote of this ambivalence:

Our approach to the relationship with the outside world has always been an ambivalent character, intrinsically antithetic, bordering at times on the paradoxical.... In a word, we belong to the human society and, at the same time, we feel as strangers and outsiders. We are rooted in the here and now of reality as inhabitants of our globe, and yet we experience a sense of homelessness and loneliness as if we belonged somewhere else. We are both realists and dreamers, prudent and practical on the one hand, and visionaries and idealists on the other. We are indeed involved in the cultural endeavor and yet we are committed to another dimension of experience. (“Confrontation,” 6)

Make Torah Values Relevant for the World

One example of the great contribution we can make is that the Dalai Lama asked to meet with a group of rabbis in 1989 to learn how the Tibetans can survive in the Diaspora as well as the Jews have. The contributions we can make to the rest of the world are not limited to our history of persecution, however; the intellectual life and moral sustenance of the Torah, and Judaism broadly, are gifts we can and ought to share.

The prophets taught us that our people had to move from being transmitters of a parochial, sacrificial religion to practitioners of a universalistic, giving religion (Hoshea 6:6: "For I desire kindness, not a sacrifice."). Much later, the rabbis taught that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananyah and Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai were walking past the ruined Temple Mount when Rabbi Yehoshua said, "Woe unto us! The Temple, the source of all forgiveness for our sins, has been destroyed." Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai replied, "My son, don't despair. We have another source of atonement, and it is acts of kindness" (Midrash Yelamdeinu).

To truly re-imagine how the Jewish people can best leverage our gifts to share with the world, we must revisit our educational assumptions. One widely held false assumption is that "the halakha works," that it will transform us if we follow it. But halakha doesn’t “just work,” and this is why so many leave observance. Rather, it needs to be done with certain intentionality to make it work. The mystics embraced certain kavannot (intentions) to try to make halakha a transformational tool, but this approach is not attractive or effective for most of us. We must expand the role of the spiritual imagination, of middah (character) development, and of moral introspection through the performance of mitzvoth. We must help other Jews make halakhic observance relevant and transformative. Bur first, we need to make sure it's working for us. The Rambam, at the end of the Book of Purity, taught that the goal of Jewish observance is to create a pure heart and moral personality. This is the radical approach that Jewish education must now place front and center. In most yeshivot today, the goal is to cram in as much “practical” material as you can without mastering its spirit or meaning. It's about literacy and competency, not relevancy. For halakha to be relevant and transformative, we can't just learn it and live it; we need to play the music of the tradition and then transcend the chords through it.

There are many Jewish concepts that could be made relevant for the broader world. For example,

• Teshuvah—models of self-growth and healing
• Shabbat—the value of rest for all people, workers, animals, and the land
• Pikuah Nefesh—the value of saving life (and end-of life issues, such as organ donation)
• Ketubah—the value of marriage (and  system of commitments and obligations)
• Havruta—collaborative education models
• Onesh—compassionate and effective models of criminal justice (eved ivri, ir haMiklat)
• Aveilut—the value of mourning and spiritual practices for communal comforting

Demonstrate the Added Value that Torah Observance Makes to the World

Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin brilliantly explained how a religious person must engage with others in the world in a humane spirit:

Besides the fact that they were tzaddikim (righteous) and hassidim (pious) and showed great love towards God, they were also "yesharim," i.e., they [the patri­archs] behaved respectfully toward the most distasteful idolaters; they related to them in a loving way and were concerned about their welfare since this is the foundation of all civilization... This is clearly to be deduced from the degree to which Avraham struggled and pleaded with God to spare the people of Sodom who were thoroughly wicked... and how Yitzchak went out of his way to appease the shepherds of Avimelech who made him great and awful difficulties.... The same is true about Yaakov who showed infinite tolerance towards his father-in-law, Lavan. (Ha’amek Davar, introduction to Bereishith)

We should not live in a self-imposed ghetto, but we must demonstrate righteousness wherever we may go. The Torah teaches that there was ambivalence among the heavenly host about bringing such morally flawed creatures into the world. But our role is to teach the potential of teshuvah, that we can all change and grow and develop to new heights even though we are inevitably hopelessly flawed.

Rabbi Shimon said: "In the hour that God was about to create Adam, the angels of service were divided. Some said: 'Let him not be created.' Others said, 'Let him be created.' Love said, 'Let him be created, for he will do lov­ing deeds.' But, Truth said, ‘Let him not be created, for he will be all falsity.' Righteousness said, ‘Let him be created, for he will do righteous deeds.' Peace said, 'Let him not be created, because he will be full of strife.' What, then, did the Holy One Blessed be He do? He seized hold of the truth and cast it to the earth [where it broke into pieces], as it says, ‘You cast truth to the ground.' (Daniel 8:12)" (Bereishith Rabbah 18.5)

Although we are all flawed, each person also has tremendous gifts to share with the world and was created in order to share them.

Every person is created for his telos and that is his "service." likewise, Israel was created to be an illumination unto the nations and to cause them to achieve knowledge of the Lord of the universe. (Ha’amek Davar, Ex. 12:51)

Various organizations have emerged in the Modern Orthodox community to help further a more relevant and impactful religious Judaism in America.

The innovative and vibrant rabbinical seminary, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, has led the way in training Orthodox rabbis for the twenty-first century who are deeply religious and profoundly open minded. The IRF (International Rabbinic Fellowship) has become a major force in Jewish life.

Another important development is the rich pursuit of social justice work being undertaken by passionate Modern Orthodox Jews. Uri L’Tzedek, the Orthodox Social Justice movement, has created a revolution engaging tens of thousands of young Modern Orthodox Jews in education, leadership development, and activism in just six years so far.

One positive development within the Modern Orthodox movement today is the increasing involvement of women. This year, Yeshivat Maharat, will be ordaining its first three women as Orthodox authorities of Jewish law and as spiritual guides. The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) held its First International Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy in 1997, and in December 2013 it will hold its 8^th Conference. In addition, JOFA sponsors Campus Fellowships at more than a dozen colleges, for women who wish to take leadership positions within their school’s Orthodox community.

The Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals is furthering a high level of intellectual discourse in the community. The TAG Institute for Social Development “promotes interdisciplinary research integrating insights from Jewish texts and practices with the methods and concepts of the social sciences to create interventions that promote the wellbeing of individuals, families, communities, and society.”

The Modern Orthodox community can play a vital role as a bridge between the non-Orthodox community and the Hareidi community. More importantly, it can be the representative for the relevancy of Jewish values for an evolving complex world. Jewish law has sustainability and rootedness while it also has a mechanism for evolution making it a tremendous tool for guiding social change. This is the way Modern Orthodox Jews should see themselves, and this vision should be the guide to retention, growth, and vibrancy in the years and decades ahead.