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Maimonides [Yad Tefillah 8:12, 15:1], as well as several other Sephardic scholars, [declares] to be ‘illegin (=defective of speech) [those] people who cannot distinguish between the sounds of aleph and ayin or between the sounds of heh and heth. These alone they declare ‘illegin. But our Talmudic sages, when they cited these two pairs of easily confounded gutturals, were citing them merely as examples as is shown by their use of the word kegon (=such as)—a word which always implies that what has been mentioned represents a larger group.^[i] Hence I am amazed at their [i.e. Maimonides and the Sephardic scholars] singling out for the epithet ‘illegin just those who fail to distinguish between aleph and ayin, etc. but forget to apply it to themselves and their countrymen who make no difference between the sounds of samekh and tsadi. Moreover, when it comes to the diacritics—which are to the letters like brains and legs [to humans]—they do not respect each diacritic’s phonetic value. Instead, kamets and patah are all one to them as are tsere and segol.… All this happened to them because they fulfilled the verse [Ps. 106:35] “They intermingled with the nations and learnt their ways.” Having resolved to aggrandize themselves above their fellows, they made every effort to gain admission into royal and princely courts. And the better to ingratiate themselves with the princes, they took up the study of these uncircumcised princes’ tongue, script, astronomy [or science], and philosophy…. Furthermore, they sought to bring their own language [Hebrew] into line with the language of the uncircumcised by retaining only those five of our vowel sounds that correspond to the latter language’s vowels while doing away with all the rest. Misguidedly the [Sephardic] multitude followed their lead until in time all but the five vowel sounds were lost to those communities. Another consequence of the philosophical studies was—for our sins—the proliferation of heretics in Israel.[ii]

The above diatribe leveled against what we think of as Sephardic pronunciation came from the pen of Asher Lemlein ben Meir Reutlingen. This all but forgotten visionary—a messiah to some—appeared on the scene on Izola in Istria at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Contemporaries, both Jewish and Christian, recall 1502 as the “year of penance” when masses of Jews divested themselves of their worldly possessions in preparation for what Asher Lemlein had led them to believe was their imminent redemption.

Ephraim Kupfer who published the surviving writings of Asher Reutlingen,[iii] quotes several such reports and assessments of Asher’s impact, by chroniclers both contemporary and slightly later—including Abraham Farissol (d. 1525). In his book Magen Abraham, Farissol writes:

In these regions of Italy, in the Venetian domains[iv] there arose a man of stature[v] from the ranks of Ashkenaz by the name of Asher Lemle.[vi] He put on airs of being a king despite his limited wisdom and deeds. Through the mediation of his disciples he misled the entire region [into believing that] the redeemer is coming. Indeed, to the multitudes he would announce that “he [the redeemer] is already here.” From his place of seclusion he let most of the Diaspora come to believe in him, his teachings, the fasts and flagellations; for they said “the redeemer is here!”—until it all ended in “emptiness and chasing the wind.” These events played out before me in the year 262 [1502] here Ferrara where I reside.[vii] [DEA1] 

 A generation later the historian Joseph haKohen (d. 1577) records in his ‘Emeq haBakhah:

In Istria, which is near Venice, there arose an Ashkenazic Jew by the name of Lemlin—a fool of a prophet a madman in spirit.[viii] Jews flocked to him saying “he is surely a prophet since God has sent him to lead His people Israel and to ingather the scattered of Judah from the four corners of the earth.” Even among the rabbis he had some followers. They called for fasting, wearing of sackcloth, and for everyone to repent of their bad ways; for they said “Our redemption is close at hand[DEA2] .”

The recollections of David Gans (d. 1613) are charming—if second-hand:

Rabbi Lemlin announced the coming of the messiah in the year 260 [1500]. Throughout the dispersions of Israel they believed his words. Even among the gentiles his fame grew and many of them also believed his words. My grandfather Seligman Gans of blessed memory smashed the oven he kept for baking massoth in his total confidence that the following Passover he would be baking massoth in the Holy Land. I myself heard from the venerable Rabbi Eliezer Trevis, head of the Francfort beth din, that it was no trifling matter[ix]—[Asher] having provided signs to prove it. He [R. Trevis] added “perhaps our sins were the cause of its failure[DEA3] .”

Lastly, the remarks that the Christian protagonist addresses to his Jewish counterpart in haVikuah by the famous Hebraist Sebastian Münster (d. 1552):

In the year 262 [1502] Jews did penance wherever they lived in all lands throughout the diaspora in expectation of messiah.[x] It continued for almost a full year; young and old, children and women. Never had such penance been done as was done in those days.[xi][DEA4] 

Asher Lemlein is certainly fascinating in his own right; but our present interest is his conviction that seven diacritic signs must represent an equal number of distinct vowel sounds. Fewer sounds than signs made no sense to Asher. His logic seems perfectly cogent, and was to be echoed by other worthies until the dawn of the modern age. As late as the second half of the eighteenth century, R. Jacob Emden (d. 1776) was faulting the Sephardic vowel system:

[W]ith regard to the pronunciation of the vowels, happy are we [Ashkenazim] and goodly is our portion unlike the Sephardim who do not distinguish between kamets and patah, thus making the holy profane[xii] .… In addition to that, they diminish the number of the vowels which were handed down to us from Sinai…. They do the same with the vowels segol and tsere, making the pronunciation of both alike.[xiii]

Emden’s allusion to the vowels’ Sinaitic origin is cryptic; but almost certainly harks back to a talmudic passage in Nedarim 37b.

What is the interpretation of the verse “They read in the scroll of (var. in)[xiv] the Torah of clearly they made its sense plain and gave instruction[xv] about what was read” [Neh 8:8]? “They read in the scroll of the Torah of God” this refers to Scripture proper; “clearly” refers to Targum [=Aramaic translation]; “they made its sense plain” refers to the division of the text into verses; “and gave instruction about what was read” refers to the cantillation—or, according to others, to the masorot. R. Isaac said: The reading of the Scribes, the embellishments of the Scribes, words read but not written or written but not read are all halakhah le-moshe mi-sinai.[xvi] Examples of “readings of the Scribes” are the two ways of pronouncing the consonantal word spelt aleph resh tsadi [=earth, land]. Also, the consonantal word spelt shin mem yod final-mem [=sky, heaven] and the word spelt mem tsadi resh final-mem [=Egypt].[xvii]

Although R. Isaac obviously attaches the highest importance to giving each vowel its proper phonetic value, he says nothing about seven vowel sounds—let alone any diacritical sigla. Nevertheless, both R. Emden and Asher Lemlein, the former explicitly, assume the seven diacritics along with their respective values to be ancient, if not coeval with the biblical text itself. Nor were these teachers alone in that assumption. Indeed, some Sephardim showed symptoms of an inferiority complex on account of their indifference to the kamets! For example, R. David Ibn Yahia (d. 1528) makes the following confession: “Know that we [Sephardim] have lost the proper way to read written texts…. We do not differentiate between kamets and patah nor between tsere and segol …. Undoubtedly each consonant and each vowel must have its discrete sound….”[xviii] Even today one occasionally hears the argument that neglecting to differentiate between patah and kamets or segol and tsere must surely be a deviation from what was intended by the tradition that instituted these distinct sigla. For the sake of full disclosure, I own up to my own bewilderment regarding this seeming anomaly of having two distinct “squiggles” to represent one and the same sound. When I finally mustered the courage to ask my father, he proceeded to show me a text with supralinear Babylonian vocalization. Today, he said, we know that the Babylonian system of vocalization differed radically from the Tiberian, and certainly did not assign distinct values to tsere and segol—and possibly not even to patah and kamets.[xix] However, the Tiberian system won the day and ousted the Babylonian—at any rate among scribes and writers of vocalized Hebrew. But not in the mouths of entire communities who retained their erstwhile pronunciation, either through inertia or in conscious defiance of the “officially” sanctioned system.

            My father’s answer was no more than a distillation of a century of discovery and scholarship that has identified not merely two but three historical systems of vocalization. Some of the most accessible scholarship in the field can be found in the writings of pioneers such as Benjamin Klar (d. 1948), Paul Kahle (d. 1964), Yehiel F. Gumpertz and in the ongoing research of Israel Yeivin and others. These are some of the primary scholars whose conclusions we shall now summarize, paraphrase and/or cite.

Benjamin Klar

From the very beginning of the enterprise of vocalizing the sacred texts—i.e., from the Gaonic age—there existed three distinct systems.… It is premature to say what the historical relationship between the three systems might have been. But it would not be unreasonable to conjecture that the so-called “Egyptian-Sephardic” pronunciation was the most ancient since it is attested in the transcriptions of the Septuagint as well as Josephus.[xx] If so, the Tiberian and Babylonian systems must be due to later influences. It is worth noting comparable phonetic developments in Persian where the long ‘a’ sound mutated into a Swedish ‘å’.[xxi]

Paul Kahle

When in the course of the ninth century the Masoretes of Tiberias began their work of adding a consistent punctuation to the text of the Hebrew Bible, they were convinced that it was their duty to give the text of the Bible as correct a form as possible.… They secured the abolition or adaptation of all the texts provided with a different kind of punctuation such as the Babylonian.… The text fixed by the Masoretes has been almost the only one considered in the preparation of our Hebrew grammars. Now we know this text was altered by the Masoretes. I have tried to show that the Masoretes of Tiberias introduced a number of new vowels to safeguard the newly-established pronunciation of the gutturals.[xxii]

Yisrael Yeivin

The well known report in Mahzor Vitry regarding the existence of three systems of pronunciation appears to be taken from a compilation by the twelfth century R. Jacob bar Samson. That report, found in the commentary to Pirqe Avoth, reads: ‘Therefore Tiberian punctuation differs from our punctuation, and both differ from the punctuation of the Holy Land.’[xxiii] M. Friedlander thought that ‘our punctuation’ referred to the Babylonian system. To the objection that a 12^th century Frenchman was unlikely to identify his group as Babylonian, Friedlander responded that Vitry’s commentary to Pirqe Avoth was a miscellany of material borrowed from a variety of sources, including Gaonic, which the compiler incorporated as he found it. Nehemiah Aloni rejected Friedlander’s theory, preferring to understand ‘our punctuation’ as referring to the ‘expanded’ Tiberian punctuation…. If so, Vitry cannot be counted as a witness to Babylonian vocalization.[xxiv]

All agree, then, that the system we are most familiar with, originated in Tiberias and comprised seven diacritics. The system that developed in Babylonia probably had no more than six. A third system, often referred to as the vocalization of Erets Yisrael, seems to have had just five. Although the Tiberian system with its seven sigla ultimately prevailed, not all communities renounced their traditional way of pronouncing Hebrew. This can be demonstrated in a number of ways. For instance, a plethora of extant manuscripts can be seen to disregard the quintessentially Tiberian vowel distinctions; interchanging kamets with patah and sere with segol. Many of these old manuscripts would have shocked the messiah of Istria because they hail from the very heartlands of Ashkenaz.

Yes indeed! Careful study by scholars, notably Hanokh Yalon (d. 1970),[xxv] of early French and German manuscripts showed that their writers, too, were pronouncing kamets the same as patah. Take for example the comments of Rashi (d. 1105) to the “Earth, Heaven, Egypt” passage at Ned. 37b (cited above). Since the Talmud is typically written without matres lectionis, Rashi sets out to describe in his own words the sound of nouns such as ERETS (=earth) and their pausal modifications. “It is the “readings of the Scribes” that fixes the two ways of pronouncing the consonantal word spelt aleph resh tsadi. For there is no yod between the aleph and resh nor between resh and tsadi [to fix the pronunciation as ERETS]. Similarly for the pausal form, there is no second aleph or heh between the aleph and resh nor is there a yod between resh and tsadi [to fix the pronunciation as ARETS].” By explaining that the pausal is pronounced as if there were a mater lectionis aleph or heh between the initial consonantal aleph and the resh, Rashi reveals that the kamets was just like patah in his own system of pronunciation.[xxvi]

Another important proof is furnished by transcriptions of Hebrew in European alphabets. In 1273 R. Abraham Ibn Ezra’s astrological treatise Reshit Hokhmah was translated into French.[xxvii] Yehiel F. Gumpertz in his Mivta’e Sefatenu (Jerusalem 1953) analyzed the transliterated Hebrew words in this thirteenth-century Old French text. Gumpertz begins by telling us that the Hebrew (and Arabic) words were dictated to the scribe Obers de Mondidier by Hagin the Jew. The latter could not write French and the former knew no Hebrew (or Arabic). “The first thing to emerge [from my study of this text],” Gumpertz continues,

was a total and unqualified confirmation of Hanoch Yalon’s theory regarding the “Sephardic” pronunciation of the kamets by French Jews. Indeed so “Sephardi” are his transcriptions that I began to suspect Hagin to be an Iberian Jew. However, his non-Sephardic origin was soon revealed in the way he represents shevas and hatafs, no less than in his transcriptions. For instance, the Hebrew word for myrtle he gives as hedas instead of hadas. Hedas is attested exclusively in non-Sephardic MSS of the period. (Gumpertz, ibid.)

A third clue comes from rhymed Hebrew compositions by early French and German versifiers. Very frequently kamets and patah words are used to form the rhymes, strongly suggesting that the rhymsters treated them as homophonous.

But to gain a fuller picture of Ashkenazic pronunciation and its evolution, we turn now to—of all unlikely linguists—Max Weinreich. Weinreich’s Yiddish researches necessitated a thorough understanding of the kinds of Hebrew that fed Yiddish at its various stages. Not only did Weinreich (d. 1969) master the evidence available in his day, but he managed to present it in a manner succinct as it is orderly. Indeed, we cannot do better than quote him in extenso.  

Up to a hundred years ago, not only the reading of the Bible, but all of Hebrew grammar was based on the Tiberian tradition. There are statements of medieval authors that the pronunciation, along with the text of the Torah, were given on Mount Sinai. Aharon Ben Asher [early 10^th century] himself maintained that punctuation derived from the men of the great assembly, namely from the beginning of the second Temple. Still others, more critical, came to the conclusion that Hebrew speakers in the period of unmediatedness needed no punctuation.… The Tiberian punctuation was created with the conscious aim of teaching correct reading at a time when Hebrew had long ceased to be an unmediated language.… Scholars can now declare with sufficient confidence that of the three attempts to elaborate a punctuation, the Tiberian attempt was the most recent. The Babylonian system apparently came into use around the year 600, the southern Palestinian[xxviii] about 700, that is some 50 years before the work of the Tiberian sages had begun….

Behind the north Palestinian punctuation there was an inventory of seven vowels whereas the southern Palestinian punctuation has an inventory of only five vowels. One fact is striking; this vowel system is similar to what was later called the Sephardic pronunciation…. From southern Palestine and Egypt it [the five vowel system] penetrated all of northern Africa and even the Iberian Peninsula. The centre of learning in Kairwan was also a point of supply of Jewishness to Italy…. From there it passed into Loter-Ashkenaz…. It was one exclusive Western sphere, from southern Palestine to the Atlantic, from the edge of the Sahara to the northernmost settlements in central Europe. The southwestern sphere retained the five-vowel reading system [while] the northwest, that is, central Europe, was pervaded by the Tiberian; through conscious efforts of the adherents of this system there grew up here what is known as the Ashkenazic pronunciation… The similarity of the pre-Ashkenazic pronunciation in Ashkenaz to the Sephardic pronunciation was not the result of the influence of Sefarad on Ashkenaz. There was no such influence, but both Sefarad and Ashkenaz drew their spiritual sustenance from one pre--European source. Sefarad clung to the old system; Ashkenaz changed its reading system radically and the break came not because the scholars of Ashkenaz created the Ashkenazic pronunciation ex nihilo… but by virtue of external prestige.

In the writings of the Rosh, born in Ashkenaz about 1250, we find the same as in the case of Rashi's grandsons: the kamets symbol was called a patah. But [soon] there begin to appear in Ashkenaz signs of the northern Palestinian system, and towards the end of the 14th century Ashkenazic Hebrew manuscripts are usually pointed according to the Tiberian style. [Nevertheless] Ashkenazic Bible manuscripts of the 13th, 14th, and a few perhaps even from the 15th centuries have also been preserved that … can be understood only in the light of the southern Palestinian reading. Some of these manuscripts have a patah instead of a kamets and a kamets instead of a patah; similarly a segol instead of a tsere …. A second group of manuscripts have only patah and segol…. Such confusion and such interchange is conceivable only in the case of punctuators whose vocalic value of patah and kamets on the one hand, and segol and tsere on the other, differs from the Ashkenazic pronunciation of today.

Since it is a matter of proving that today's reading in Ashkenaz is not the original one, the question of how far back the Ashkenazic pronunciation was demonstrably the same as it is today has to be raised. The answer is about 1500; that is, since the beginning of the middle Yiddish period the situation has been more or less the same as today. In the last quarter of the 15th century the Ashkenazic value of the kamets is confirmed by both Jewish and non—Jewish testimony.… Up to the 13th century there are no indications of “Ashkenazism”….The oldest known instance of a kamets with the value ‘o’ is in a Cologne Hebrew document dated 1266.[xxix]

If there has to be a moral to this story of phonetic vicissitudes, let it be this: No Jewish community need deem its own tradition for pronouncing Hebrew superior or inferior to any other phonetic tradition. Doubtless those Sephardic authors who expressed misgivings about their neglect to respect kamets or segol would have been relieved to learn that their ‘neglect” was justified all along. Nor should the antiquity of such linguistic heterogeneity surprise us when we ponder the shibboleth–sibboleth dichotomy of Jephtha’s day. “The Gileadites held the fords of the Jordan against the Ephramites. When any fugitive of Ephraim said, “Let me cross” the men of Gilead would ask him, “Are you an Ephramite?”; if he said “No” they would ask him to say “shibboleth” but he would say “sibboleth” being unable to pronounce it correctly” (Jud 12:5–6).

In his commentary to these verses, R. David Kimhi (Radak, d. 1235) actually compares the phonetic differences between Gileadite and Ephramite to a situation in Europe of his day: “Just as they would test the Ephramites with this word shibboleth, they would likewise test them with any word that had the letter shin; shibboleth serving merely as an example.… Perhaps it was the climate that influenced their discrete pronunciations in the same way that the people of sarfat [=France] are unable to make the ‘sh’ sound but rather pronounce it as a soft tav.”

New ideas about the teaching and learning of mathematics present challenges for Orthodox schools. In part, these ideas about the teaching and learning of mathematics are challenging to any schools: teachers lack content knowledge in the subject because they have had insufficient opportunities to learn themselves; teachers are strained pedagogically to teach a subject that they learned differently as students; ambitious aims for subject matter learning compete with a whole host of educational issues that need no enumeration here. For Orthodox schools, new understandings about cognition and learning are particularly fraught. Readers of this journal will not be surprised to read that there are tensions inherent in a stance that embraces Torah uMadda, but in this piece I relate an experience that brought this tension into strong relief for me: conducting a professional development seminar on teaching and learning for heads of modern Orthodox yeshivot.

   Rabbis and Third Graders Doing Math. To give a glimpse of these tensions, we peek in on a gathering of heads of school and teachers of religious studies from schools that define themselves as modern Orthodox. For this professional development seminar, school leaders from around the United States gathered for three days of collaborative study about teaching and learning.[1] The seminar began with my posing a mathematics problem to the participants, virtually the same problem that they would subsequently watch third graders working on: "I have pennies, nickels, and dimes in my pocket. If I pull out three coins, what amounts of money might I have?" Unaccustomed to doing math problems in a group setting, and even less comfortable making public presentations about their mathematics reasoning, the school leaders shared their solutions to the coin problem and explained how they arrived at their answers. The rabbanim came to the chalkboard to show their solutions; they eventually came to consensus that there are 10 possible solutions to the 3-coin problem and collectively constructed an informal proof to convince themselves. The rabbanim then turned their attention to the video of third-graders working on a very similar problem that their teacher had posed: "I have pennies, nickels, and dimes in my pocket. If I pull out two coins, what amounts of money might I have?"

In the video, we first see the teacher leading the class through a discussion of the parameters of the problem, and the definitions of the terms used. She then sets the students loose to work independently for a few minutes. Children draw or record different possible combinations in their notebooks. Some shuffle coins on their desks to find different arrangements; some draw the coins in their notebooks while others use a range of symbols to show each combination.  After working for a while, the teacher asks the children to share their solutions. The discussion proceeds at a slower pace than most mathematics lessons; there are long silences and children offer a number of wrong answers. The teacher gives few comments and little correction; instead, she asks many questions and throws it to the class to determine if a child's answer is correct. She asks repeatedly, "How did you get that?" "How do you know?" "What do other people think about that?"

Here is a brief excerpt from this classroom discussion:

Mathematics Teaching and Learning to Teach Project.  (1990). Deborah Ball, Third Grade, September 18, 1989                Unpublished transcript.   University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, MI. The names of the students have been replaced with           pseudonyms.

The assembled rabbanim were intrigued by this classroom excerpt. They were keen observers of teaching and learning, despite protests that some had no formal education training. Our seminar used this video and the mathematics work that preceded it as a springboard to discussions of learning and teaching-- in mathematics and in general. In this excerpt, students had reasoned through a complex problem to learn mathematics, and the role of the teacher's authority had shifted from one of providing answers to one of facilitating the reasoning through ideas so that students could come to warranted mathematical conclusions. We saw the teaching of mathematical practices that students could use to develop robust understandings of mathematical ideas. Participants found this image of teaching to be engaging and powerful; a number of them approached me to do continuing work in their schools to develop this kind of teaching and learning school-wide.

I hesitated. Over the days of this professional development seminar, I had become increasingly aware of the tensions between this model of teaching and learning and my understanding of the mandates of Orthodox education. As deeply committed as I am to this kind of teaching and learning, and as much as I want to join with others in the improvement of Jewish education in the Orthodox sector, I am not sure that these two forces are compatible.

In what follows, I will describe how this model has evolved, its antecedents, and why I believe it provides an authentic and rich learning experience in mathematics and in other subjects-- including limmudei kodesh. At the same time, I see that the issues that preoccupy even "modern" Orthodox schools today are in some cases orthogonal to this view of learning. It is this tension that I write about in this article.

A "New" View of Teaching and Learning [Mathematics]. Here I elaborate further what is meant by this "model of [mathematics] teaching and learning."  I place "mathematics" in brackets because the current wave of educational reform is based on a general view of teaching and learning that extends to mathematics as well as other school subjects.

 In the case of mathematics, the model of teaching and learning envisioned goes beyond traditional models where teachers show students how to perform procedures and mathematical routines. Complete understanding...includes the capacity to engage in the processes of mathematical thinking, in essence doing what makers and users of mathematics do: framing and solving problems, looking for patterns, making conjectures, examining constraints, making inferences from data, abstracting, inventing, explaining, justifying, challenging, and so on. Students should not view mathematics as a static, bounded system of facts, concepts, and procedures to be absorbed but, rather, as a dynamic process of "gathering, discovering and creating knowledge in the course of some activity having a purpose." (Stein, M. K., B. W. Grover, and Hennigsen, M., 1996. "Building student capacity for mathematical thinking and reasoning: An analysis of mathematical tasks used in reform classrooms." American Educational Research Journal 33(2): 455-488; emphasis in the original)

Instruction in such classrooms departs in some ways from traditional mathematics instruction. Students reason through problems, and the teacher's authority is less about conferring correctness than it is about helping students learn how to engage in mathematical practices so that they can adjudicate for themselves what is mathematically correct and what is not. This model does not mean that students no longer learn algorithms or have to practice procedures; it also does not mean that each student is free to determine for herself what is correct and what is not-- mathematics instruction will always be directed towards precision, correctness, and convergence around a right answer. Although this model includes these aspects it goes far beyond them as well.

It is clear why this model holds such appeal for the school leaders I worked with. Swap "Torah learning" in place of mathematics above, and most Jewish educators nod their heads in vigorous agreement with this stance towards learning. The image of students engaged in "a dynamic process of 'gathering, discovering and creating knowledge in the course of some activity having a purpose'" is just what school leaders say they want.

            This way of teaching mathematics is based in part on a disciplinary view of mathematics. In Proofs and Refutations (Lakatos, I., 1981. Proofs and refutations: The logic of mathematical discovery. Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press) Lakatos provides an image of how learners arrive at mathematical truths in his description of an imaginary classroom working on a geometry problem respecting the number of vertices and edges and faces in regular polyhedra. (The details of the problem have mostly been omitted for our purposes.)

The dialogue takes place in an imaginary classroom. The class gets interested in a PROBLEM...

After much trial and error they notice that for all regular polyhedra V - E + F = 2. Somebody guesses that this may apply for any polyhedron whatsoever. Others try to falsify this conjecture, try to test it in many different ways-- it holds good. The results corroborate the conjecture, and suggest that it could be proved. It is at this point-- after the stages problem and conjecture-- that we enter the classroom. The teacher is just going to offer a proof.

TEACHER: In our last lesson we arrived at a conjecture concerning polyhedra.... We tested it by various methods. But we haven't yet proved it. Has anybody found a proof?...

In Lakatos' description of a classroom, we see his emphasis (in the original text) on the mathematical processes captured in the nouns guess, conjecture, corroborate, and prove. The classroom dialogue that helps students participate in these practices is a medium in which mathematical conclusions are derived. In a more traditional mathematics classroom, students would be told that V - E + F = 2, and perhaps shown a proof for why this is so. In contrast, in Lakatos' example, students participate in the construction of this proof themselves. This kind of mathematical reasoning is one of the disciplinary images on which current models of mathematics teaching are based. It is centrally concerned with students' deep understanding of the discipline, not just their performance of school tasks.

This model of teaching and learning also draws from wider ideas in the philosophy of education. Israel Scheffler expresses one conceptualization of teaching and learning that underlies this view:

Teaching may be characterized as an activity aimed at achievement of learning, and practiced in such manner as to respect the student's intellectual integrity and capacity for independent judgment. Such a characterization is important for at least two reasons: first, it brings out the intentional nature of teaching, the fact that teaching is a distinctive goal-oriented activity, rather than a distinctively patterned sequence of behavioral steps executed by the teacher. Second, it differentiates the activity of teaching from other activities such as propaganda, conditioning, suggestion, and indoctrination, which are aimed at modifying the person but strive at all costs to avoid a genuine engagement of his judgment on underlying issues. (Scheffler, I.,1965. "Philosophical Models of Teaching." Harvard Educational Review 35(2): 131-143)

            In Scheffler we see where this model of teaching and learning collides with the mandates of an Orthodox education. To what degree, and in what subjects, do our Orthodox schools want to nurture and encourage "independent judgment"? In issues of faith, and in questions of halakha, to mention two prominent examples, are we prepared for students to make independent judgments? And these are not tangential subjects in Orthodox schools; one might argue that both issues of faith and questions of practice are the raison d'etre for Orthodox schools, and part of what distinguishes them from other streams of schooling. As the seminar with the rabbanim progressed, I became more and more aware of the press for their schools to insist on convergence of thought and action in the teaching of particular subjects.

            The view of learning depicted here does not apply solely to mathematics. It is not even about a subset of school subjects. It is descriptive-- it describes how students learn, generally. This description of how students learn, though, implies a normative view of teaching-- how teachers should teach, given that learning proceeds in this way. And mathematics is perhaps a kal vahomer case in the sense that it seems to non-mathematicians as an unlikely discipline to be reasoned through and understood--  and for this reason is even more threatening than perhaps other school subjects. A discipline that was always, at least in the school context, construed as positivist, in which authority for right and wrong was determined by the teacher and the textbook, is instead a discipline --like others-- in which knowledge is socially constructed and the authority for right and wrong is in part determined by what the students reason to be correct, with teacher and textbook guidance. For the Orthodox educator, this has serious implications for how all subjects will be treated. I do not know that the current climate in Orthodox schools can accommodate this stance; on the other hand, teaching that is responsible and responsive to learners requires it.

            Challenges of modernity. This small vignette about the teaching and learning of mathematics provides a window onto the challenges of modernity for Orthodoxy. We tend to name the onslaught of media, the vivid intrusion of non-traditional lifestyles into our communities, and constant press of material culture, as major challenges to Orthodoxy. Instead this vignette points to the challenges of epistemologies that recast authority, truth and the creation of knowledge as human constructs. I fully embrace these modernist epistemologies, but do so cognizant and even wary that they do not rest easily with the worldview that has taken hold in the current Orthodox environment. To ignore these new views of learning, in my mind, is to deny how students actually acquire knowledge, habits of mind, and dispositions. This suggests that we will need to imagine educative environments for Orthodox students that, in Scheffler's words, "respect the student's intellectual integrity" and strive for "a genuine engagement of his judgment on underlying issues."

            What might such educative environments look like? Here I defer to my colleagues whose primary work is instruction in Orthodox schools, who are engaged with its specifics of context and content on a daily basis, to develop instructional designs particular to this need. I close this article with some broad outlines for the kind of instruction this approach implies in limmudei kodesh. First, we would need to imagine the treatment of all limmudei kodesh that could be shaped by their disciplinary practices as conducted by experts-- by talmidei hakhamim, as we saw in the case of mathematics, such that children would engage in the very practices that more advanced talmidim encounter, instead of learning school subjects as "bounded system[s] of facts, concepts, and procedures to be absorbed." One example already present in many schools is the mode of pedagogy found in the traditional beit midrash which provides a model of teaching and learning, even for young children. Elie Holzer's analyses of hevruta  study provide one window into such a practice (See, for example, "What connects good teaching, text study and hevruta learning? A conceptual analysis, Journal of Jewish Education 72 (3), 2006). To put such practices into play widely, our work in teacher education would be to devise pedagogical scaffolds for teachers so that students can effectively engage in these practices using materials and methods suited to their ages and prior knowledge. It would require, too, revisiting the nature of the teacher's authority in limmudei kodesh, one that would acknowledge the wisdom of our sages and teachers and concomitantly put students' thinking at center, bringing both worlds into productive dialogue. We look back to the transcript of a third grade mathematics discussion at the beginning of this article as a model for how such conversations might proceed. A teacher's authority in such environments would be a function of his content knowledge as well as his ability to bring students to engage in the "gathering, discovering and creating knowledge in the course of some activity having a purpose."

             But we cannot shy away from such subjects as dinim or halakha, and the practice of tefilah. Here too schools might strive for students' genuine engagement of judgment, to echo Scheffler. Students, even at young ages, would learn to reason through the multiple points of view presented by our sages across the centuries, by the teachers in our schools, and by fellow students. Our schools have tended to teach dinim as lists of rules and formulae to memorize, analagous to the V - E + F = 2 formula for regular polyhedra. The same can be said for interpretations of humash--and in fact most subjects in limmudei kodesh. I wonder if we have avoided opportunities for students to reason through ideas rather than memorize them as foregone conclusions, understandably fearful that our children will come to their own conclusions that move them away from Orthodoxy. Instruction in these subjects could be expanded to include the reasoning process of the rabbis, the arguments and stretches of faith that characterize the conversations of HaZal. Of course this kind of instruction is already happening in many schools. I want to suggest that this kind of teaching and learning-- even when it comes to halakha and questions of faith-- will show a tradition that is robust, multifaceted, and stands up to scrutiny. To address diverse learners-- diverse in hashkafah, in family background, in learning styles-- the school curriculum will need to include an array of pedagogical presentations that includes this approach. Rather than threatening our continuity, this pedagogical stance conveys a respect for the individual's intellectual integrity and the ability to reason and come to independent conclusions.

            The last decades have seen Orthodox schools overtaken by decidedly non-Modern elements. To recruit knowledgeable teachers who live authentic Jewish lives, Modern Orthodox schools have hired more and more teachers who do not embrace a Modern perspective. This is a pity; our schools need to reflect and generate a particular world-view, and we are missing the opportunity to do so. Our teacher education seminaries need to be guided by a vision of education centered on helping students gain tools to come to warranted conclusions in the intellectual company of one's sages, teachers, and peers. This educational stance could distinguish the contribution of Modern Orthodox to the Jewish education world, and would require the design and scholarship of educational researchers to develop protocols, pedagogical structures, and instructional activities that would carry this vision into practice. Modern Orthodoxy has the capacity for these ambitious goals; our schools and teachers' seminaries can be generative sources for an Orthodoxy where this is the hallmark.

I saw an old friend the other day whom I hadn't seen in about a year. "You look happy," she said with a hint of surprise in her voice. Through her eyes, I saw the new, more comfortable-in-my-skin self. The old me was tired and anxious. In part, my new relaxed state is due to achieving a milestone in my parenting—my kids are starting to gain just the barest hint of independence. They can fill their own water glasses at the bathroom sink and play out in the back yard with minimal supervision. But the bigger difference in my demeanor is no doubt due to the tremendous weight I crawled out from under this past summer when I finally came up with enough cash to finish paying off the Bet Din for my conversion to Orthodox Judaism. My conversion certificate is, after many long years, sitting comfortably in my filing cabinet at home.

Whether a construct of my own mind, a legitimate social fear, or a bit of both, I long thought that if I dared to deviate from the yeshivish perspective under which I became Orthodox, my conversion would be revoked. My children, all bearing very Jewish names, would be declared no longer Jewish and I would be cast out of my community. It was an awful thought and enough to keep me in long skirts and sleeves with my collarbone and head covered even though, in my heart, I believed that the concept of tseniut encompassed more of the complete person and really had little to do with a dress code.

I didn’t consciously suffer all that time. For the first few years after I decided to become frum/religiously observant, I wholeheartedly believed that the yeshivish way was the most authentic way. After all, when I questioned back then why the Modern Orthodox women I saw in the town where I converted generally wore trousers and didn't wear hats except on Shabbat, I was told that Modern Orthodox people were not as growth-oriented as the yeshivish community. When I asked whom to trust when it came to rabbinic decisions, the answer given was to examine who knew more Torah (the implication being that the yeshivish rabbis knew more).

I knew from a young age that I wanted to be Jewish. When I was 13 years old, I used to spend my lunch hours sitting on the floor of the school library just pulling books off the shelf— often because I liked their covers. One such glossy volume was Rabbi Malka Drucker’s Shabbat, part of her Jewish Holidays series. The idea of Shabbat captivated me. My mainstream Presbyterian upbringing was mostly empty of ritual, and Shabbat was exotic. When my parents left the house one Friday night, I poured red cranberry juice (the closest I could get to grape) into a clear glass and recited the Kiddush blessing in English as it was written in the book. It felt holy even sitting on the worn countertop in our Northern Michigan kitchen. In time, I secretly purchased the only Star of David necklace on sale at our local JC Penney department store, and I wore it tucked into my shirt. I knew I had to become Jewish.

When I went to university, I made a last-ditch attempt to reconcile with Christianity. I tried different churches from the evangelical to the staid and traditional. Eventually, I found myself attending Kabbalat Shabbat services at the campus Hillel. The beautiful songs and the way the students took turns each week giving a devar Torah really impressed me. They were so mature and thoughtful and they possessed a knowledge about themselves, their religion, and the world that I envied. I felt that it was time to summon the courage to speak to a rabbi about conversion.

It took me another few years before I met with a rabbi willing and able to take me on as a conversion candidate, in the Conservative movement. One of the first questions Rabbi Dobrusin asked me was “What is your favorite Jewish holiday?” Easy answer. Shabbat. In the middle of studying for my Conservative conversion, I started dating a nice Jewish boy and he took me to a local kiruv organization’s campus house for Shabbat dinner. I can still remember where I sat at the table that first time. Shalom Aleikhem...Eishet Hayil...the zemirot and devar Torah...the dark wood and deep purple and blue majestic hues in which the restored house was decorated added to the warmth and class of the experience. This was what I wanted. This Shabbat. These books lining the walls. This joyful time-out-of-time rest and enjoyment and relaxation. I became a regular there and it wasn’t long before I was invited for Shabbat to a home in the nearby Orthodox enclave. The openness of the families I met and the simplicity and beauty I perceived in their lifestyle were only enhanced by the strong feeling of community. I felt at first like I belonged in this yeshivish Orthodox Jewish world.

Before I finished my Conservative conversion, I was already thinking about an Orthodox conversion. Two Batei Din were within reasonable driving distance. One was staffed by more Modern Orthodox rabbis and the other was black-hat. I chose the black-hat Bet Din because I feared that my conversion might not be accepted by absolutely everyone if I were to convert with the Modern Orthodox rabbis.

By now, however, some of the luster had come off the closed, yeshivish world for me. Women not singing really bothered me. I found the snoods and sheitels weird and dowdy. The shiurim I attended were interesting but something niggled at my mind about the content. I know now that suspending independent, rational thought was what bothered me most. Even so, I worked hard to squish my doubts into a little box and shut the lid tight—and I filled out the paperwork to begin the Orthodox conversion process. A few times, my doubts popped out but I firmly pushed them back and told them that I would address them after-the-fact, thank you very much. I wanted my future children to be Jewish without question, and this seemed to be the best way to ensure that outcome.

When I finally went to the mikvah for Orthodox conversion nearly three years later, I had moved into the Orthodox community and was immersed in yeshivish culture. I had a social group of dear, down-to-earth friends and I adapted myself to my new way life, believing that I had found Truth in yeshivish Orthodoxy. I learned the Ani Ma’amin by heart and recited it as I stood wrapped in a sheet in the mikvah on my conversion day. The experience was surreal. The sheet would not behave as the rabbis told me it would—“Just lean forward! The sheet will float to the top!”—and I made several attempts at nearly drowning myself before the mikvah lady told them she would witness my final dunk herself without the sheet. When it was over, I felt pure and very much like I had a new neshama.

I threw myself into frum life. The dress code continued to bother me, but Shabbat and kashruth were mostly a pleasure. Many times I snuck out of my house on wear-your-jeans-to-work Friday in my favorite Levis, and I brazenly refused to put up and take down my storm windows in a skirt for fear of falling. My old rebellions and questions were still there hidden away under all the new ideas.

In time, I began to date and was introduced to my future husband via a frum shidduchim website. We married, and I moved across the country to a city with only a small handful of frum Jews. I wore my sheitel on Shabbat and played with hats and scarves during the week. Maintaining the dress code was a way for me to keep ties with my former community, many of whom wondered if I was really still frum. I put my jeans away for good.

The birth of my first son shook my world in many ways. Everything I did and had done for the past several years was focused on being frum. I displayed all the right books in my living room. I wore the right clothes. I tried to read the right books and get inspired at various online learning websites. But when my beautiful blond boy showed up, suddenly the old me, the me I had always really been, was right there. I tried to learn and sing Jewish lullabies to him but would eventually give up and find comfort in my own Irish lullaby. I felt guilty. We bought him Jewish toys and books, but more and more, my child brought out in me instinctual behaviors I learned in my own childhood. The super-frum-24-hours-a-day me just faded away. I sat with those feelings for a while, keeping the mitzvoth but without the ba’alat teshuvah fervor. I got even more distracted by the birth of my second son, a redhead this time who looks like my father. I was beginning to try to reconcile my frumkeit with who I really was at heart when I got pregnant again.

My daughter, my third child, was born on a rainy November night. I had known in advance that she would be a girl and I was scared at what parenting a girl meant. She was a little pink mouse who was content as could be, and because she was a winter baby, I had many nights where we snuggled together on the couch as she nursed and grew. I watched the first season of Glee as she slept and found myself drawn increasingly to strong women and their stories. My job was to create the best world for this little female being whose velvet head I was kissing, and I needed to explore for myself what our options could be.

I realized that I never had the same fear about my boys and their prospects in the world. It's still a man's world in many ways, certainly in Orthodox Judaism, and I hadn’t yet taken the time to reconcile how growing up with yeshivish values would impact all of my children. Until my daughter was born, I only envisioned sweet boys in tzitzith and white Shabbat shirts and girls in fancy Shabbat dresses sweetly saying divrei Torah at the Shabbat table. The implications of the dress codes and how I personally felt hindered by my skirts and headgear began to merge as my girly and I got to know each other and I pondered her future with as few limitations as possible.

It was around this time that I began to take a second look at the Conversations journals, which had been arriving at the house periodically for almost a year. We had been put on the mailing list by an acquaintance we met when we tried to convince the regional yeshivish kiruv kollel not to send another full-time rabbi to our city. Two Orthodox shuls in our town was one too many for the 10 or so frum and becoming-frum families. We had staked our claim with the Chabad shul even though we don’t affiliate as Lubavitch because my husband became religious via the Chabad shaliah here, and the yeshivish shul was simply too far to walk to. This turf war started me looking critically at yeshivish Judaism, and I increasingly found a darker side of politics and cover-up.

I had honestly been afraid to read the articles in Conversations lest they contain opinions that weren't given approbation by the yeshivish rabbis. Instead, I found that they were not only interesting and challenging, but many of the articles were full of good sense and rational thought. Partially through reading Conversations, I regained my ability to question—to hold each idea up to the light and examine it on all sides. The world looks different when you take your head out of the sand. And, as lovely as it is to be immersed in Torah from a yeshivish perspective, I realized that those ideas would not hold water when it came to my children’s education.

I began an email correspondence with the wife of a Modern Orthodox rabbi whom I had known many years before. She helped me figure out exactly what the halakhot of tseniut were and how they applied today. Perhaps it seems strange that a dress code would weigh so heavily on my mind, but I honestly felt encumbered. I was wearing a costume that prevented me from being and expressing who I really am in the world. Although there are only a handful of Jews in my city who identify as Orthodox, the Jewish community as a whole is much larger, and I actually found that my dress code was saying things about me to the broader community that just were not true. To those kind-hearted women and men who do many, many mitzvoth but not those which the Orthodox world holds up as de rigeur, I wanted to tear off my hat and say “See! I’m one of you, too!” The skirts and hats were hampering me physically, mentally, and they maintained a barrier between me and my own community.

I also embraced JOFA and its mission and continue to give thanks for its online articles and resources. I learned that there is halakhic basis for Modern Orthodox praxis, in spite of what I had been told years ago and I discovered that Modern Orthodoxy is really where I feel free to question and pursue intellectual honesty even if that takes me outside the bounds of traditional, rabbi-approved sources.

Shortly after I received my conversion certificate in the mail, I dug out my old pairs of jeans and wore them around the yard. Then I wore them to the grocery store. Now I wear them daily and almost everywhere. I haven’t yet run into anyone who would raise an eyebrow at the switch, but I know that day will come. I feel enough like my true self and I feel grounded enough in my Judaism that I’m not afraid anymore.

A close friend who happens to be more yeshivish and who has known me throughout my move into Modern Orthodoxy said to me the other day as we were discussing the Modern Orthodox view of halakha, “Do you really want to walk that close to the line?” But I know that there are 70 faces of the Torah and that an evolving, intellectually vibrant, honest, and compassionate Orthodoxy is where I’m going to thrive—and where I’m best positioned to pass on the beauty of Judaism to my children.

The Sephardic approach to … life is characterized by hessed,[1] optimism and a spirit of inclusiveness and hospitality. The Sephardic tradition is compassionate, tolerant, and sympathetic to the human predicament.[2]                                                                                                              

                                                                      — Rabbi Marc D. Angel

       In his 1990 novel, Mr. Mani, Israeli author A. B. Yehoshua anchors his historical exploration of the formation of modern Jewish identity in several pivotal experiences: the despair and fatigue of the 1982 Lebanon war, often called Israel’s “first war of choice”; the first Intifada; the failed hopes for an Arab-Israeli peace; and the escalating terror attacks on Israeli civilians.[3] Yehoshua posits that an ominously self-destructive pathology exists in Israel and that it has resulted in the nation’s extended periods of “oppression, defamation, persecution and martyrdom.”[4]

    The novel explores the impacts and implications of Jewish attitudes that to a large degree have shaped the past[5] and that are likely to impact the present contours of Israeli identity unless fundamental changes are made. At its foundation, Mr. Mani questions the role of religion and nationalism in the formation of Israel and even the modern Middle East.

    In Yehoshua’s view, Israel has a self-destructive heritage that manifests in the Jewish people’s desire to retain their identity as a nation while resisting the responsibilities of creating and maintaining an independent national existence within distinctly defined territorial boundaries. Israeli society, Yehoshua implies in Mr. Mani, has failed to achieve the dreams of its Zionist Ashkenazic founders and resembles other Western societies in many ways. The salient aspects of the Zionist effort to shift the center of Jewish existence from Diaspora to Zion constitute a contemporary transformation of the Diasporic conviction that the continuing cohesion of the Jewish people is not predicated on their adherence to particular territorial and communal bounds but rather on their peoplehood.[6]

   Taking it further, Yehoshua proposes that an alternative, a bicultural Sephardic Zionism, would be more constructive,[7] and that Israeli society would do well to free itself from itself from the more narrow Ashkenazic and Exilic heritage, which he sees as no longer appropriate in the present state-oriented situation. To that end, the cross-culturalism of the Sephardim and the idea of the Sephardim as the link between Jews and Arabs[8] are prominent themes in Mr. Mani. Yehoshua centers on the Sephardic identity and the Sephardic response to historic events to emphasize what might have been rather than what is the present situation in Israel. The Sephardim in this novel are portrayed as cosmopolitans, whose worldliness has allowed them to remain free of the ravages of ideology and free to glimpse historical options and the turning points of history not seen by others. At the same time, the Sephardim’s susceptibility to obsessive notions and obsessive desires prevents them from making an impact on history; indeed, it puts their very survival at stake.[9] 

    While Mr. Mani focuses on the hidden realms of the individual psyche embedded in its familial, social, and cultural context, Yehoshua also addresses ideological, political, and ethical issues, and he questions the very tenets of Israeli society: Judaism, Zionism, religion and nationalism, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and anti-semitism.

    Certainly a Sephardic response to historical events in Israel, conditioned by the pillars of the Sephardic identity and a different attitude toward Arabs, would have resulted in a distinctly different situation in Israel. Such an inquiry involves an intellectual game of “what if”: What if Arab-Israeli relations had taken a different course and the many conflicts between these two peoples had been averted?  Yehoshua adds the Sephardic angle to this “what if” exercise when he bemoans the marginality of the Sephardic community in the early days of European Jewish settlement, when the ultimate fate of the region was being forged.

    To develop this “what-if” argument further, it is helpful to understand Yehoshua and his insights into the Sephardic identity and his own experiences as a Sephardic Jew and how they are expressed in the novel’s plot and themes. This essay reviews the Sephardic counter-history after a discussion of the crossroads of history portrayed in Mr. Mani, and it explores why Yehoshua chronicles the Israeli counter-narrative of the last 150 years through such a dysfunctional family and why the Sephardic relationship with the Arabs offers a distinctly different framework for the State of Israel.

A. B. Yehoshua

    Yehoshua, one of Israel’s leading writers and recipient of many literary prizes, was born in Jerusalem in 1936. Mr. Mani, his fourth book, was greeted with universal critical acclaim in Israel and the United States, and literary critic Alfred Kazan called it “one of the most remarkable pieces of fiction I have ever read.”[10] Yehoshua’s books have been translated into 26 languages, and many of his stories and novels have been adapted for the theater, cinema, television, and opera,[11] demonstrating their wide appeal.

    Unlike most prominent Israeli cultural figures, Yehoshua was born into a Sephardic, rather than an Ashkenazic, Jewish family. Indeed, he represents the fifth generation of a Sephardic family on his father’s side and the first generation on his mother’s side. His father, Jacob Yehoshua, an Orientalist by training, wrote a number of books recounting the life of the Sephardic community in Jerusalem from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, and two books on the Palestinian press of that time. While his father’s occupation with the language, history, and culture of the Palestinians probably opened Yehoshua’s eyes to their unique plight and thus indirectly influenced his worldview, his father’s numerous books served him well in Mr. Mani. His mother, Malka née Rosolio, came from a wealthy Francophone Moroccan family whose members immigrated to Palestine in 1932, and she too had a strong influence on Yehoshua. She insured that he had a secular education and was exposed to Zionist ideology and to a moderate Sephardic version of Jewish tradition. Thus, both his mother and father contributed to his preoccupation with the complex theme of identity, which underlies all his writings.[12]

    After some years in Paris and a return to Israel and following the Six-Day War and its ensuing upheaval, Yehoshua became involved in left-wing movements and started publishing essays that elaborated on his ideological and political stance. His active participation coupled with his intellectual and rhetorical skills have made him one of the major spokesmen for the Zionist left wing and the Israeli peace camp, at home and abroad.

     The writing careers of A. B. Yehoshua and his father reveal an interesting parallel: Jacob turned from his scholarly preoccupation with the history of the Palestinian Arabs to the Sephardic community of his childhood after his own father’s death in 1955. The son turned more openly in his fiction to Sephardic characters after Jacob’s death in 1982.[13] In an article, Yehoshua stated that “although my father was in no palpable way connected with Spain, he defined himself as a Sephardic Jew.” Jacob’s identity as a Sephardic Jew was not meant merely to signify his difference from Ashkenazic Jews but was also bound up with Spain itself, which he regarded as the original source of that identity. Within his extended family, Jacob spoke the Judeo-Spanish language, Ladino, which gave him a sense of carrying living genes of the true Spanish language.[14] In the spring of 1987, the son wrote an introduction to the father’s sentimental, nostalgic recreations of his Jerusalem childhood, in that introduction, A.B. investigates the complex, if often repressed, nature of his own Sephardic identity, through a fusion of three themes, which foreshadow Mr. Mani:  “Yehoshua’s relationship to his father, his attitude to his Sephardim, and the type of fiction he produces. …We …see in this essay of 1987 some of the same basic structures that shape Mar Mani, which was written about the same time.”[15] 

Yehoshu’s Reflections on the Identity and Experience of the Sephardic Jew

   In “Beyond Folklore: The Identity of the Sephardic Jew,” Yehoshua asked why a man like himself, a thoroughly secular Israeli steeped in Western culture, whose principal identity was as an Israeli, a man with no particular connection with the Spanish language or culture, defined himself deep down as a Sephardic Jew?  He then noted that in many of his novels, characters appear who may be identified as Sephardic Jews. These include the five generations of central characters in Mr. Mani, who stand at five critical crossroads in the history of the last 150 years, and each time, at each crossroads, another Mani is offered an historical or political option that is not, in the end, realized.[16]

    In Yehoshua’s opinion, this Sephardic identity contains – overtly or covertly – Christian, Muslim, and Jewish elements that are blended in the memory of a wondrous and powerful cultural symbiosis, real or mythic, during a Spanish Golden Age in the first centuries of the second millennium. The three-way dialogue during that period also produced highly significant and influential texts. Therefore, even after the Christians took absolute control of Spain and made it into a strictly Catholic country, there remained within Spanish identity a recollection of that strong symbiosis, which even after the expulsion of the Jews and the Muslims continued to murmur beneath the surface in Christian Spain.[17]

    When the Jews left Spain and moved to Muslim countries in North Africa, the Christian element, the Christian memory, remained in their identity as well despite the absence of Christianity in their immediate surroundings. Similarly, Jews who moved to such Christian lands as Italy, Southern France, or even Holland, retained a whisper of Arabic culture and Islam in their identities even when there were no Muslims or Arabs in the vicinity.[18]

    Yehoshua explained that the special quality that is preserved in Sephardic identity is its ability to include the Other even when he is gone and forgotten. The consciousness of the Other became a structural element that enriched and fertilized Sephardic identity, even as the reality of the Other became foggy and ultimately vanished altogether. This internal element developed into a kind of cultural gene, strengthening its carriers’ capacity for tolerance and pluralism. The wistfulness or nostalgia for the vanished Other was handed down from generation to generation, for hundreds of years after the expulsion. This sad, nostalgic mood permeates folk songs in Ladino, the language whose very existence nourished Sephardic identity even when the languages actually spoken by Sephardic Jews in other countries were different. The subconscious existence of the absent Other in Sephardic identity – whether that of the Muslim as fellow exile or of the forced Jewish and Muslim converts who stayed behind in Spain – made the Sephardic Jew heavier of heart but also more tolerant. [19] Yehoshua noted that religious fanatics are hard to find among Sephardic Jews. Such zealotry did develop among Ashkenazic European Jews, who had to struggle against doctrinal Christian animosities, both Catholic and Protestant, and against Jewish secularization, which became a threat in the modern period. However, such ideological secularization, by and large, was not a factor in traditional Sephardic societies.[20]

    Yehoshua spoke of what he calls “Mediterranean-style pluralism,” one of whose unifying components is the Sephardic Jew, who carries in his soul that vanished Other, the Christian and the Muslim. This is the Sephardic role; this is its mission. Not merely Ladino love songs or folkloric foods or Sephardic melodies and modes of prayer in the synagogue, but a political and cultural mission. A mission of peace and tolerance, addressed first and foremost to the Arabs of the Mediterranean, a mission with which Israelis who are not Sephardic are also likely to identify.[21]

    The Mediterranean basin was the cradle of the Sephardic Jews, who gave us the most memorable poetry of the Golden Age in Spain. However, the oldest community of Jews in Jerusalem, the Sephardim, declined alongside the onset of Zionism and modernity. The early harbinger of this process appears in the middle of the nineteenth century: Rabbi Alkalay (1798-1878), the Sephardic rabbi who preceded Pinsker, Herzl, and Ahad Ha' am. His name is rarely mentioned today.[22]

    Yehoshua discusses his relationship with his Sephardic past in an essay, “Remembrance of Sephardic Things Past,” included in the anthology of his father’s essays published in 1987 and in his second essay collection, The Wall and the Mountain (1989). In relating the influence of Sephardim on his writing, Yehoshua wrote:

I felt I could no longer dominate a text with the kind of figure that represents the Israeli in general or the Ashkenazi Israeli of the center in general. And this was my way of approaching reality: little by little, I discovered the Sephardic element that I had repressed a little and didn’t want to touch in my earlier writings. I discovered the Sephardic element in my own identity and tried to use it as a way to penetrate through to my human soul and to the Jewish experience through my own biography. And I think this is the way I came…to Mr. Mani itself.[23]

    In discussing what his Sephardic roots meant to him personally, Yehoshua stated:

Of course it is … a return to some of my own sources and to the possibility of being courageous and admitting some of my sources … by engaging Jewish history from a Sephardic point of view[24] … I very much wanted to understand this Sephardic element – Sephardic not in the sense of the Oriental Jew, but in the sense of a Sephardic Jerusalemite of the nineteenth century.[25]

Mr. Mani

    Mr. Mani reads like a frontal assault on the mystique of Sephardim. Playing with the conventions of the family saga, Yehoshua’s novel gives equal attention to five generations of a family of Spanish exiles who emigrated from Salonika to Jerusalem in the middle of the nineteenth century. The cultural and historical description is thick, and the will to engage the meaning of Sephardim unmistakable.[26]

    Mr. Mani is also a direct assault against the nationalists and fundamentalists in the war for memory, hence the soul and future of his nation. Yehoshua’s way of engaging in this battle is to dive deeply into the historical and mythological past of the Jewish people. His purpose, in writing the book, “is to understand the present.”[27] He is insistent that Mr. Mani “…is not a historical novel”[28] – even though it covers 150 years of history. The present, he says, is the target. “I feel that Israel is at a crossroad, between war and peace, and I want very much very much to understand that crossroad.”[29]

   Yehoshua does not believe Mr. Mani is a novel of ideas. Rather, the essence of his idea is that Israel’s collective past impinges on its collective present. He feels that before ideology, before Jewish history, before the crossroads of Jewish history, one must try to explore the unconscious material that comes from fathers to sons and from grandfathers and great-grandfathers to ourselves.[30]   

    In his seminal article, “Behind Every Thought Hides Another Thought,” Israeli literary critic Dan Miron observed that the Yehoshua corpus can be characterized as a “poetics of wit.” Mr. Mani, Miron suggested, exposes how narrative can be thought of as an intellectual game because of its artificial, constructed nature. Miron claimed that Yehoshua made intentional “mistakes” in his narrative: “battles will occur a year before or after they took place, locations will move a bit, people will know things they could not have known…” He believed that the reader is invited to uncover these mistakes by Yehoshua as a kind of game. [31] The “game,” in many cases, directs the reader to the salient “what-if” conversation that Yehoshua is emphasizing.

    Above all, Yehoshua describes Mr. Mani as "a conversation novel." Indeed, this chronicle of the Mani family from the mid-eighteenth-century to the mid-1980s comprises five conversations, documenting five speakers. Only the last speaker is a Mani; the others relate the fate of the Manis they have known. These conversations are unique, also, in that most of the speakers occupy positions of power during the periods in which the conversations take place.[32] An otherwise absent editor supplies each conversation’s prologue and epilogue in a neutral, authoritative tone.[33] Yehoshua succeeds in forcing the reader into a double take – as an outsider and an insider, both a detached observer and an involved confessor.[34]

    In each conversation, a new speaker describes his or her encounter with a different member of the Mani family. The responses of the speaker’s conversational partner are omitted, but his or her identity is known to the reader and clearly influences how the speaker communicates.

    The novel begins in the present and moves back in time, reenacting the life of six generations of the putatively typical Sephardic family, the Manis. The shadow of Freud looms large over Mr. Mani, where Yehoshua – who has been married to a psychoanalyst for half a century – invites readers on an archeological approach, that is, to dig into the text in order to recover underlying connections and decode recurring symbols.[35] Yehoshua’s historical intersections are obvious, recognized episodes in the construction of the Zionist narrative: the rise of nationalism in Europe (1848), the Zionist Congresses (1899), the Belfour Declaration (1918), the Holocaust (1944), and the Lebanon War (1982).[36] Yehoshua touches on these historical intersections by way of this family, which is the subject of each conversation. These conversations continue, by allusion, all the way back to the mythic origins of the Jewish people in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.[37] Over all, the conversations retrace the emergence of modern nationalism, in particular Zionism, and its effect on the Middle East and the Jerusalem Sephardim. Significant in its absence is the most crucial date in the rise of modern Jewish nationalism: 1948, the establishment of Israel as a sovereign state, the epochal date without which one cannot conceive of the modern Jewish world – or the world of this novel.[38]

    The speakers in the conversations describe the Manis as outsiders who produced idiosyncratic individuals in extreme reaction to their surroundings. The first and last conversations feature speakers who have decided to revive the dying Sephardic Mani clan: Hagar Shiloh in the 1980s and Avraham Mani in 1848, both of whom resolve not to let the future generations die out. The three middle speakers have brief encounters with a Mani: a German soldier in Crete in 1944, a Jewish British lieutenant in Palestine/Eretz Israel in 1918, and a Jewish physician in western Galicia (Poland) in 1899.

    In this novel, Yehoshua "regresses" to a mode of narration that can, in part, be seen as traditional. Not only is there conversation in which the voice of the interlocutor is not heard; there is a further "regression" to the romantic depiction of the Arab as typically found in the writing of the pre-statehood generation. In a way, the novel – dedicated to the author’s father– is a return not only to the era depicted but to the older literary approaches as well, i.e., to the hitherto unacknowledged Sephardic  literary forefathers. Yehoshua employs a double framework here: on one hand, there is his faithfulness, through speech, to the periods he depicts, and on the other, there is the hindsight of the 1980s. In the process, Yehoshua reclaims his lost literary Sephardic "parentage," and, therefore he sees the Arab cry for nationalism in a far different light.[39]

Kibbutz Mash’abei Sadeh, 1982

    The first and most contemporary section of Mr. Mani takes place in the midst of the war Israel was conducting in Lebanon in 1982.  The speaker, Hagar Shiloh, is talking to her mother at Kibbutz Mash’abei Sadeh, of which they are members. Hagar, whose lover is Efi (Ephraim) Mani, believes she is pregnant and is trying to tell her mother about her visit to Efi’s father, Gavriel Mani, in Jerusalem. She saves Efi's father Gavriel, a respected judge, from suicide. Hagar’s pregnancy turns out to be illusory, but she later becomes pregnant and gives birth to Roni Mani. Efi refuses to marry her, and she decides to raise the baby alone.[40] In her conversation with her mother, Hagar feels that she is in a play whose implacable script has already been written: the end of the dynasty. Against all odds, therefore, she decides to change the text; she is not alone but is part of a long story in the hands of someone else. As an Ashkenazic, she is doing something audacious in trying to enter the Sephardic clan and invigorate its tired blood. She seeks her place in a family that is not a family but "a version of a family."[41]

    Hagar’s brief sojourn in Arab East Jerusalem is one of the most delicately suggestive episodes in Mr. Mani. She concludes that this is a place in which she is an outsider while it is a place to which the Arabs she encounters naturally belong. She feels the distinct and separate Arab space most strongly as she rides the hospital van after her short stay in an Arab hospital where she thought she had miscarried:

I began traveling through Jerusalem from the opposite direction that evening, together with the hospital workers who had finished their shift. And it was the most wondrous journey, Mom. To places where you have never been, through neighborhoods and little villages that are right inside the city itself, dripping at times through barren ravines, still spotted with snow, and bumping into dark streets, full of potholes and big puddles, that would suddenly turn into bustling commercial centers alive with colors and people, young and old, walking along with their donkeys, or shopping bags. And everyone actually seemed very pleasant and very relaxed, as it they really felt good being alone together and may have even become accustomed to it.[42]

    Hagar’s account of her experiences in the Arab sector of Jerusalem supports the Sephardic narrative that views the division of the Land of Israel into two States would be as healthy for the integrity of the Palestinian identity as it would for the transformation of the Israeli sense of self.[43]       

Heraklion, Crete, 1944

    In German-occupied Crete, a young German paratrooper, Egon Bruner, explains relates to his mother his experiences in Crete with the Mani family, which he was hunting down. During an interrogation, Efrayim Mani tries to convince Egon that he is no longer a Jew because he has willingly canceled his Jewishness and has become, simply, a person. Having been brought up without a mother and by an adoptive father and perhaps aware that his real father was not a Jew, Efrayim believed he could escape his historical identity and destiny.[44]

   Egon experiences the human toll that occupation inflicts not only on the occupied but on the occupier as well. Upon encountering members of the Mani family, Ego experiences his first taste of what he later come to call:

…that sweet and sour dish called Conqueror’s Fear from which we eat until it makes us sick. This is the cause of the anxiety and the dread that emanate from each one of us, even when he is walking along innocently, absorbed in the loftiest and most humane thoughts. This is the reason for the careful attention that each of our soldiers gives to every move he makes, even when he begins to loathe himself.[45]

    In this chapter, Yehoshua suggests that the dangers of Israeli militancy and its occupation of Arab lands is fraught with the dangers experienced by Egon in Crete. The “what-if” scenario is a return to the amity of the Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem before 1948.

Jerusalem, Palestine, 1918

    Ivor Stephen Horowitz, a young Jewish lawyer serving in the British Army in Jerusalem, which has recently been occupied by the British army, explains to his superior the case of the political agitator, Yosef Mani, who is being tried for treason and is eventually sentenced by a military court to banishment on the island of Crete.   

    Yosef grew up among the polyglot of Christian, Jewish, and Arab groups that made up Jerusalem during the first decade of the century. Yosef advocates the idea of bi-nationalism[46]—two people on one land —and concentrates on political pursuits. He is preoccupied with the questions of national identity and engages in “practical education,” attending meetings of Shiites, Druze, Christian Communists, Maronites, Catholics, and all kinds of clerical assemblies, moving from identity to identity. He also maintains his connections with the Sephardic Jewish community and makes the acquaintance of many young eastern European Jews headed for Palestine.

    Having made himself an indispensable translator in the British advancing army, Yosef offers his services as a spy to the Turks in exchange for the opportunity to address gatherings of Arab villagers throughout the countryside. His message to his sleepy and uncomprehending listeners is that in the wake of the Balfour Declaration, Palestine will be divided up among those wise enough to grasp the opportunity and that the Arabs will lose out unless they awaken to the meaning of the hour. Night after night, he stands before groups of sullen Arab villages who have been forcibly assembled by the Turks to warn them of the coming perils and advise them of the steps they must take to avert this:

And this is what he would say to them: “Who are you? Wake up before it is too late and the world is completely changed. Get yourself an identity fast!” And he takes out his Arabic translation of Lord Balfour’s declaration and reads it to them without explanation. Then he continues, “This land is yours and it is ours, half for you and half for us.” And he points toward Jerusalem, and says, “The British are over there and the Turks are over here, but they will all leave, and we will be left alone. So stop sleeping and wake up.”[47]

    Yosef wants the Arabs to awaken to the fact that the Balfour Declaration’s promise of a Jewish national home will mean a massive influx of Jewish immigrants, which will drastically alter the demographic balance and put the Palestinian Arabs at a distinct disadvantage. He wants them to understand that, as a result of these new circumstances, the Jews have become “like a swarm of locusts that is now hiding in the desert but will soon swoop down.”[48] He also offers them a preemptive solution. Toward the end of each speech, Yosef displays a handmade map of Palestine and reiterates,

“Get yourself an identity. All over the world nations are taking on identities. If you delay, it will be too late. If you delay, there will be a disaster. Because we are coming.” And he takes out a pair of scissors and says, “Half for us and half for you.” Then he cuts the map from top to bottom, giving them half with the mountains and the Jordan River and keeping the coast and the sea for himself.” [49]

    When they seem disappointed by not getting the sea, he takes out another map and cuts it in half another way. [50]

    Here, Yehoshua goes back to the crossroads of the Balfour Declaration, where Britain’s call for the establishment of the State of Israel, instead of advocating a two-state solution, would have dramatically changed the history of Israel and Palestine.

Jelleny-Szad, 1899

    A young doctor, Efrayim Shapiro, reports to his father his experiences at the Third Zionist Congress and his subsequent trips to Jerusalem with his sister, Linka, who has had an affair with a Dr. Moshe Mani, an obstetrician. This dialog takes place in Jelleny-Szad in southern Poland (near Oswiecim) in 1899.

    Moshe Mani ran a lying-in clinic in Jerusalem using modern obstetrics, and women from all the nationalities in Jerusalem came to give birth under these enlightened conditions. The clinic is described as “multiethnic, syncretistic, and ecumenical.”[51] Dr. Mani appears as a polyglot microcosm mingling women of all nationalities, a confusion of boundaries of all sorts.[52]

    Fascinated by the figure of Herzl and his vision of a Zionist state, the doctor travels to Basel for the Zionist Congress of 1899 and there meets Efrayim and Linka from Galicia who return with him to Jerusalem. The doctor has fallen in love with Linka and accompanies the Shapiros on their return to Galicia. Dr. Mani tells the two visitors that one day, with the progress of technology, there will be a train running from Jerusalem to Oswiecim, the Polish town with the name Auschwitz (which is the neighboring town to the Shapiros' estate in Jelleny-Szad).  

    Here, of course, Yehoshua is imaging a counter-history where Jews in the Diaspora emigrated to Israel and were saved from the ovens of the Nazis.

Athens, 1848

   In Athens, Avraham Mani reports to his elderly mentor, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiaha-Haddaya, the intricate tale of his trip to Jerusalem and the death of his son. Avraham, the rigidly conservative patriarch, and Yosef, his iconoclastic son, differ in their views of religion and territory.[53] Avraham’s dedication to a universal Jewish faith conflicts with the aspirations of Yosef to a mode of national existence that is essentially territorial. Yosef disavows traditional notions of Jewish peoplehood and dedicates himself to transforming his nation by uniting its people around the territory they inhabit. He wishes to fuse all the inhabitants of the land into a single national body that is founded on a native belonging to this land.[54] 

     Yosef Mani was the first member of his family to settle in Jerusalem, an act of cardinal importance in a novel that attempts to formulate – or reformulate – the historical background of the Zionist state. Young Yosef traveled to Jerusalem from Istanbul in 1846 not out of any sense of religious yearning or nationalism but simply to marry Tamara, to whom he had been betrothed the year before. This chapter describes a world of Sephardic families residing in the major cities of the Eastern Mediterranean and living out their lives mostly unaffected by the dynamic political winds sweeping Europe. Yosef, for instance, was born in Salonika, spent his youth at the home of his teacher in Istanbul, and is betrothed in Beirut to Tamara Valerio from Jerusalem. He is familiar with the streets of Istanbul and Jerusalem; he speaks Ladino, Turkish, French, English, and Arabic; in Jerusalem, he works as a courier and guide for the British consulate. He is impressed by the similarity between the Arabs and the Jews and develops a theory, his idée fixe, that the Arab inhabitants of Palestine (whom he calls Ishmaelites) are the unknowing descendants of the original Hebrews and really are “Jews who still don’t know they are Jews.”[55] Avraham, the father, also has an idée fixe, which demands that the unity of religion and nationality be maintained and the continuity of the family dynasty be perpetuated.

    However, there is a dark side to this seemingly comfortable cosmopolitanism: Yosef is a homosexual, a voyeur, and will not have sex with his wife; therefore, he will not father children. Yosef is killed, apparently by one of his Arab lovers (possibly with assistance from Avraham[56]), in order to preserve the continuity of national and religious unity both within his family and within the larger Jewish community.[57] Avraham, who had come to Jerusalem from Salonika to look into the doings of the young couple, sleeps with his very young daughter-in-law and she bears his child, Moshe.[58]

    In this culminating fifth section, Yehoshua addresses his concern with the relationship of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and to the Arabs who inhabit it. In the novel, the first Yosef reflects Yehoshua’s wish for the Sephardim’s early nineteenth-century experience of living peacefully, side by side with the Arabs.

Arab Relations

    One of the most interesting issues in Mr. Mani is the Jews’ relationship with the Arab. In Yehoshua’s earlier fiction, the Arab maintains a central but separate existence. In contrast, in Mr. Mani it seems as if the Arab has entered into the psyche of the Israeli and the self-definition of the Israeli is intimately bound up with that of the Arab. This is in stark contrast to the position of the Arab in earlier Hebrew literature where the depiction of the Arab was so romanticized, so kept at a distance, that there could be no talk of the Arab's taking a place "within" the Israeli psyche.[59]

    Mr. Mani’s image of the Arab may well be traceable to the emergence of Yehoshua’s Sephardic roots in his writings and to his increasing homage to Sephardic as well as to Ashkenazic writers and thinkers of the pre-statehood days. For example, as noted above, he portrays Yosef of the 1848 Mani family as believing that Arabs are in essence ancient Jews who ought to be brought back into the fold. Presumably, the recovery of a common ancestor of Arab and Jews can serve to eliminate the animosity between them and liberate both sides from their cultural limitations.[60] 

    The Sephardic sense of familiarity with Arab culture is depicted in the epilogue and biographical data that conclude every conversation in the novel. Gavriel Mani decides to travel to the kibbutz in the Negev to see his grandson; he drives through Hebron, to the horror of Hagar and her mother, Yael. Over their apprehensions, he assures them that he feels entirely safe in going from Jerusalem to Beersheba through Hebron and that the villagers are peaceful. It is the fall of 1987, and when a stone is thrown at his car, he confesses that to take this road is now inadvisable, although it still tempts him.[61]   

    Mr. Mani’s narrative seeks to discern, critique, and ultimately, transform the manner in which traditional notions of Jewish territorial affinity affect Israeli perceptions of the national and territorial prerogatives of the Arabs who inhabit the Land of Israel.[62]

The Arab-Israeli Conflicts

    Mr. Mani opens with a signature paragraph introducing Hagar Shiloh and the brute fact that time in Israel is measured by the dates of wars.[63]

Born in 1962 in Mash’abei Sadeh, a kibbutz thirty kilometers south of Beersheba that was founded in 1949. Her parents, Roni and Yael Shiloh, first arrived there in 1956 in the course of the army service. Hagar’s father Roni was killed on the last day of the Six Day War as a reservist on the Golan Heights. As Hagar was five at the time, her claim to have clear memories of her father may be correct.[64]

    The Arab-Israeli conflict and its many wars might have been solved long ago had the leadership of the Zionist movement been entrusted to the indigenous Sephardim of Eretz Yisrael who understood Arab sensibilities better than did the Ashkenazim.[65] An essay by Elie Eliachar, a former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem and a member of one of Israel's oldest Oriental Jewish families, makes the same argument: “Had the Zionist leaders in those days been wise enough to accept the guidance of these [Sephardic] and other individuals who had experience with Arabs, a better understanding between Jews and Arabs might have been brought about without any harm done to our national movement.”[66]

    Eliachar pointed to item after item that antagonized the Arabs to the point of armed conflict: land purchases that did not take the Arab tenants into consideration, Hebrew language instruction in schools that excluded the Arabs, repeated personal insults of Arab dignitaries, incursions into their lands. He wrote in 1975 that his position of 1936 presented to the Royal Commission still held and things would have been different had the Sephardic point of view conditioned the relationship with the Arabs.[67]

We are Jews of Semitic-Oriental origin despite the extensive sojourn of a considerable number of people from the West. The Land of Israel lies in the Orient and our first duty on returning is to regain the Oriental characteristics which we lost in the West, without in any way relinquishing all the positive traits we acquired there. Jews and Arabs are Semites and hence related. The Hebrew and Arabic languages stem from a common source, as do our religious beliefs: even many of our basic characteristics are alike. [68]

    Eliachar’s views on the Sephardim are generally consistent with Yehoshua’s notion that a Sephardic version of Zionism would have created a different landscape where two peoples would be living side by side in peace.

Sephardic Themes

    Sephardic responses to the Ashkenazic culture and hegemony challenge the “Zionist master narrative” created by the Ashkenazic literary establishment.[69] Sephardic Zionism as an ideology, with its pluralistic foundation and tolerance toward the Arabs, was displaced by the Ashkenazic power structure, which was European in origin, and whose notions of Jewish nationalism were thus founded along the lines of nineteenth-century European nationalist models. Sephardic Zionism, only remotely influenced by these new ideas, is implied in Mr. Mani.  The Sephardic Manis respect Arab nationalism and have an intimacy with the Arab communities of the Mediterranean. As a consequence, the Sephardic Jew is more at home in the Middle East than the Ashkenazi and, perhaps, more capable of living at peace with the Arab inhabitants of the area.

    Several scholars, writing about Mr. Mani, failed to connect the Sephardic critique of Ashkenazic Zionist ideology to Yehoshua’s interrogation of the entire history of the Jewish people in Mr. Mani. For example, Gilead Moragh finds the notion puzzling that Mr. Mani is preoccupied with questions of Sephardic identity and that it provides a counter-narrative to prevailing versions of Zionism discourse by engaging Jewish history from a Sephardic point of view. Moragh argues that with one significant exception, the fifth conversation, Sephardic characters have little voice and no independent existence in Mr. Mani.

The little there is in their speech is reported speech, and their inner worlds are reconstructed or invented by others who are often profoundly alien to them. The narrative perspective in the first four conversations belongs to a sequence of explicitly non-Sephardic narrators who are appropriating the Mani story to serve their own needs. It is not surprising that in these narratives, the Manis do not come to embody much that is typical or representative of the Sephardic community and its culture. This also explains the paucity of knowledge about what most of the Mani men actually think or feel.[70]

Yael Feldman agrees with Moragh: “The Manis are far from being a representative Sephardic family and it is impossible to maintain that the Mani perspective constitutes a hidden Sephardic critique of European Zionist ideology.” [71] However, I disagree with Morahg and Feldman on this matter and find the writings of Yaron Peleg and Alan L. Mintz to be much more in line with my thinking concerning the Sephardic counter-narrative.

    In Peleg’s view, for example, Mr. Mani examines the Sephardic element in pre-Zionist Palestine from an Ashkenazic point of view, which looks at the Palestinian Sephardim with a mixture of admiration, bewilderment, and anxiety. The Ashkenazis sense the almost mythic ability of the Sephardim to survive in an ever-changing world, an ability that is sustained by their native attachment to the land and their natural relations with the Arabs. The novel pays homage to the deep affinity of the Sephardim to Eretz Israel, irrespective of politics. The characters in Mr. Mani are a natural part of the Mediterranean world. They know it intimately and move through it freely. For them, Zionism is just another regional political phase that does not determine their relation to the Land of Israel. The Ashkenazic point of view calls attention to the nature of Zionism as an artificial and perhaps even a harmful development in Jewish history. The natural attachment of the Sephardim to the Mediterranean Muslim world questions not only the validity of Zionism but its overall benefit to the Jews. The novel seems to say that, unlike their Ashkenazic brethren, the Sephardim never really had a Jewish problem.[72]

    In “Constructing and Deconstructing the Mystique of Sephardim in Yehoshua’s Mr. Mani and Journey to the End of the Millennium,” Mintz notes the manner in which Mr. Mani peels away the layers of historical inevitability and rolls back the triumph of Western ideology as it moves one step closer to a time when nations and national identities were finally consolidated. Mr. Mani provocatively and perversely follows this line not into the recesses of the Ashkenazic Diaspora where Zionism was derived but into the world of Sephardic Jewry, which historically composed the largest segment of continuous Jewish settlement in Jerusalem, though it is a smaller percentage of world Jewry. Jerusalem is presented before Zionism and places within it an hypostatized Sephardim whose growing entanglement with Western Zionism can be traced through resistance and capitulation.[73]

      Mr. Mani makes claims for a superior worldliness of the Sephardim, a quality that enabled them to see alternatives to the ideology-driven march of Western history. Jews of the Ottoman Empire lived in closer and less conflicting contact with Muslim peoples than with the members of the other principal minority, the Christians. Their mercantile travels gave them an international perspective and a sensitivity to the relations among national groups. 

    In contrast to the Judaism of their East European coreligionists, the religious convictions of the Sephardim were deeply but less fanatically held and were less insulated from the world. When religious faith collapsed for a segment of Russian Jewry at the end of the nineteenth century, political Zionism was seized upon as a substitute for failed messianic beliefs and turned into an ideological movement. The Sephardim chose a path of accommodation instead. Rather than rejecting religion and adopting secular replacements for it, they made room for elements of modernity alongside their family-centered piety. Zionism came to them naturally, not as a radical redefinition of the Jewish people but as an extension of a primordial attachment to both an ideal geography and a real place.[74]

The Dysfunctional Mani Family

    The Manis as a family and as individuals are ineffectual and obsessed in ways that undercut the legitimacy of their visionary policies and it all starts with the first Yosef Mani. In fact, as mentioned above, Yosef believed that the Arabs are Jews who have forgotten their Jewishness. According to the account given by his father, an unreliable but insightful narrator, Yosef’s ideas are the ultimate result of the boy having been seduced by the young wife of his elderly rabbi and teacher, which in turn leads to his homosexuality and his death. The father calls the son’s notions an idée fixe, and he journeys from Salonika to try to ensure that the marriage “bears seed and not just idées fixes.” His failure to do so and his guilt over impregnating his daughter-in-law lead him later in life to contemplate suicide. And so the urge to suicide, obscurely enacted by Judge Mani more than a century later, is imprinted in the genetic code of the Manis.[75] Mr. Mani is about obsessions that are self-destructive in that the heroes in the novel are directed by an antique self-destruction, with murder and incest lying in their unconscious.[76]

    Because the Mani family’s notions come to naught, their decision to pursue their ideas at the expense of the preservation of their species is doubly self-defeating. For faced with the choice to sow their seed or to sow their ideas, they constantly do the latter. In contrast to received notions of potent oriental patriarchs propagating vast clans, the Manis have to be tricked into reproducing. From the father who sleeps with his daughter-in-law at one end of the novel to the kibbutz student who gets Judge Mani an illegitimate grandson at the other, this is a family whose dynastic line hangs by a very tattered thread.[77] The Manis prefer to remain bachelors, are barely attracted to the female sex, and would rather not fulfill the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Each of them has but one descendent, who only with difficulty secures the continuation of the line. The either/or choice between sexuality and political consciousness is vividly expressed in the case of Yosef Mani, the treacherous translator and homo politicus of the third conversation.[78]

    All the characters in Mr. Mani are self-deceiving individuals who “do not understand themselves and the motives for their behavior in personal relationships”[79] and in compensation, they “fashion group-identifications (Sephardim, Zionism, Pacifism, Universalism, Nazism, Religion,) which they delude themselves into believing will solve all their problems.” [80] Moreover, the Manis suffer from an assortment of psychological problems, ranging from passivity to aggression, from incest to filicide, and from frigidity and repressed homosexuality to suicidal urges. Undoubtedly, this is a portrait of a family far removed from the classic ethnic stereotype of the Sephardic family.

     Why, then, would Yehoshua undermine his own creation? I believe that Yehoshua turns, symbolically, to the biblical tales of the patriarchs and matriarchs because they, like the Manis, are hardly paragons of virtue. There is the story of Tamara, who sleeps with her father-in-law Judah in order to produce an heir to her husband, the transfer of the burden of infertility from the matriarch of Genesis to the Mani patriarchs; Abraham and Joseph and the aqedah episode; and Ishmael, the banished son of Abraham and Hagar. [81]  

    The fifth conversation gives us the only speaker who is a Mani. In one of many reversals, Avraham Mani comes to his teacher, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiaha-Haddaya, as the rabbi is dying to give confession and extract vengeance.

    Yehoshua sees the Manis as reflecting many of the problems of family relations and, especially, the father-son dynamic. “Family relations,” wrote Yehoshua in an essay published in 1998, “…are, in my view, one of the areas of life that are richest in moral dilemmas and choices. Here…a person’s morality is tested. Especially because connections of love and mutual dependence are so characteristic of family relations, the moral equations become subtle, complex, and often painful.”[82] Interestingly, Yehoshua’s wife, a psychoanalyst, has remarked that all his fiction is at heart about the friction between father and son.[83]

    Most of the members of the house of Mani are indeed “mani-acs” who represent the Mani dynasty over a period of 150 years. Yehoshua’s depiction of them represents his views on the biblical narrative, family relations, and father-son dynamic. In effect, Yehoshua is saying that there is a little “Mani” in all of us, some to a lesser or greater degree.

Conclusion

    Mr. Mani is replete with references to the “what-ifs” of the Sephardic Zionist counter-narrative. The Sephardic point of view, reflected in this fictional chronicle, points to the close proximity and amity between Arabs and Jews. The Sephardic community is a community of moderation. Hence, there are opportunities for accommodation with the Arabs and Christian Europeans that are invisible to the Ashkenazic coreligionists.[84]

    Mr. Mani is not a nostalgic evocation of the Sephardic past or an embittered tirade against Ashkenazic humiliation of Sephardic or Oriental Jews, the two convenient subgenres of Hebrew fiction situated in non-Ashkenazi milieus. Rather, it is an agonized fictionalization of the problems of Israeli existence in the time of its composition, after the Lebanon War, and at the beginning of the Intifada. Actual political events of the 1980s are referred to only in the first of the five sections of the novel, and then only as background to the story, which takes place in Jerusalem. However, like many Israeli novels, it is motivated by a well-grounded conviction that something has gone awry in the realization of the Zionist dream. Yehoshua attempts to work out here the search for what went wrong. The innocent assumption is that if you can identify the wrong turn, you can return to it and make the right turn.[85]

        Neither sparing nor idealizing the Sephardim, Yehoshua posits an alternative narrative in which Sephardim participate in the traditional Zionist story and create their own version. The Mani (read: Sephardic) attachment to the land of Israel is not political, ideological, or interchangeable; rather it is organic. The Manis are the link to the land and also the bridge to the Arabs, the true indigenous people.[86] By placing Dr. Mani with Herzl at the Zionist Congress meeting in 1899, Yehoshua effectively includes the Sephardim in the European enterprise. European Zionism is embodied by the figure of Herzl, shown to be weak and ailing, on the verge of total collapse. By contrast, the Sephardic counterpart, Dr. Mani, is robust.

    In Mr. Mani, Yehoshua suggests a different Zionism conceived by Sephardic Jews as an alternative to the Zionism developed by the Ashkenazic Jews, which, in his estimation, prevents Israel from resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Through the Mani family lineage, the novel points to a Sephardic Jewish solution. In contrast to Ashkenazic Zionism, which ignored the national aspirations of the Arabs when conceiving the establishment of the Jewish state, each generation of the Mani family in Yehoshua’s novel attempts to establish the Jewish hold on the Land of Israel by means of a compromise with the Arabs.[87] In this hypothetical scenario, the nation-state is undermined as the major achievement of the Zionist movement. With all the attention paid to dates, the absence of 1948 is an omission fraught with significance. European Zionism is weak and fails.

        The Sephardic counter-narrative is further exemplified in the novel by the initiatives of the Manis in response to the events depicted in 1918 and 1899.Though there are many differences between England in 1918 and Poland in 1899, the central message is similar. If the Mani of either conversation, father Moshe of the fourth conversation or son Joseph of the third, had succeeded in his rhetorical endeavors, the era of the Shoah would have found a different Jewish people in Europe. If Moshe Mani had persuaded Efrayim Shapiro to stay in Jerusalem, there would have been no Shapiros in Poland to transport to Auschwitz. If Joseph Mani had persuaded the Arabs to take on the national political identity in 1918 or, more subtly, if he had persuaded Ivor Horowitz immediately that he was an English Jew and not a Jewish Englishman, perhaps he, and not his grandson, would have been the first family to settle in Israel, in the 1920s, not the 1960s or 1970s, and perhaps a state of Israel would have come into being earlier, particularly considering Great Britain’s political role in the matter. What is unquestionable, however, is that if many Polish Jews of Shapiro’s social position and generation had emigrated to Israel in 1899 or if many English Jews of Horowitz’s social position and generation had done so in the 1920s, the Nazis would have encountered a different Jewish reality in Europe and the Middle East in the 1930s.[88] The Holocaust represents both the consequence of these earlier choices and a road that saw Jewishness as an identity purely of the mind.

       At crucial junctures of modern history, such as the Balfour Declaration, the Manis, because of who they are and where they come from, are able to glimpse options invisible to the Ashkenazic Zionist movement. They contemplate an alternative path that does not foreclose possibilities, one that negates the unremitting tension with its neighbors.[89] The Yosef of section five has the ideological conviction and alternative existential vision. Yosef has come to believe that it is imperative to obliterate the ethnic and religious distinctions that divide the inhabitants of Jerusalem and cause constant conflict among them. Furthermore, Yosef constantly seeks “to forge relationships among strangers and to fight against what he considers isolation or self-segregation.”[90] He does this out of his conviction that “when all will recognize their true but hidden nature, they will make peace with each other.”[91] The first Yosef Mani’s attitude is rooted in the ideological stance of Canaanite thinkers such as Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, who regarded Palestinian Arabs as “converted descendents of Jews” who had remained devoted to the land after the destruction of the Second Temple. While according to Canaanites, the Arabs of Palestine privileged their loyalty to the land, the Jews chose to be loyal to their faith, losing contact with the native soil.[92]

        In many important ways, the second section of Mr. Mani in German-occupied Crete is an extended exploration of the consequences of Israel’s present-day transformation into a nation of conquerors with an evolving culture of occupation. Egon’s initial aspiration for national transformation coincides closely with the fundamentals of the Zionist dream. Both are idealistic visions of a national renewal that requires casting off the heritage of a despised past and drawing on tropes of an ancient Mediterranean culture to evoke the redemption that will occur upon the nation’s return to the mythic land of origin.[93]

    When Yehoshua is writing about the occupation of Crete, he is thinking about Israelis in the territories that they occupy. For example, the second section of Mr. Mani is an extended exploration of the consequences of Israel’s deliberate choice to transform itself into a nation of conquerors with an evolving culture of occupation.[94] Hence, we can begin to discern the way in which the contemporary collective choice is as monumental as those reflected in Mr. Mani. That is, if the Jewish people persist along the road of occupation and create no peace settlement, what new Shoah lies twenty years in the future, a future that includes the real possibility that nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons of mass destruction could fall into the hands of terrorists or be used by terrorist states? While one can look with dismay at the choices not taken by European Jews sixty years ago, one must contemplate the picture of grandchildren sixty years from now looking back with comparable dismay at the choices not taken now.[95]    

ENDNOTES   

During my first teaching experience (it was the Frisch School in 1983) I was asked by one of the parents at a Parent-Teachers meeting why Biblical Criticism was not included in my curriculum. The parent argued that his son would surely encounter the questions raised when he was in college, and it would be important to discuss the ideas in a traditional Jewish framework. 

I do not recall what I answered at the time, but Biblical Criticism was not part of my teaching repertoire. 

In an article that appeared in the Journal of Jewish Education, Dr. Susan Tanchel argues that teaching the Documentary Hypothesis is an essential part of her school’s curriculum. 
Do you have it in yours? 

I raised this question on the virtual pages of Lookjed, an online discussion aimed at Jewish day school educators. In 1999, when high-speed internet could only be dreamed of and modems that connected to the internet were rarely found in private homes, the Lookstein Center of Bar-Ilan University launched this ongoing conversation. Today more than 3,500 teachers, administrators, lay leaders, and even occasional students weigh in and debate topics of current, and, occasionally, recurrent interest. Threaded archives of those conversations appear at http://lookstein.org/lookjed/.

The subject of academic Bible study has been discussed in Lookjed on a number of occasions. In the course of a conversation about how to teach “the strange malon story” (when Moses stopped at an inn en route to Egypt, see Exodus 4:24–26) a reader suggested that James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible might be used to shed light on the matter. This led to a heated discussion on the place of such works in a Day School library. At some point the conversation turned to whether college-age students in a yeshiva environment should be studying Biblical Criticism, and, indeed, whether the invitation tendered to Professor Kugel by one of student clubs at Yeshiva University should have been rescinded by the administration.

In this brief article I do not intend to discuss theories of Biblical Criticism, which can be found elsewhere. The focus here is on attitudes toward the introduction of modern literary and academic methods to the Tanakh classroom, as expressed by classroom teachers, administrators, and educational leaders. Although much of this information is based on the discussions that took place in Lookjed, I will also devote a few words to the “parallel universe” of Day School education, that is, the mamlakhti dati religious public school system in Israel.

The brief quotations that appear in this article are all taken from the Lookjed discussions. I am sharing them here without attribution, but their sources can be found in the online threaded discussion archives.[1]

The question of teaching Biblical Criticism is one that depends on the outlook and affiliation of a given school, its mission, and its constituency. In most cases the responses that came to the list identified the type of school in which the writer worked. The Lookjed list, reflecting the values of The Lookstein Center, is open to a multiplicity of voices. Although many of the Day School educators who participate in these online discussions come from an Orthodox perspective, in this particular conversation, whose beginnings were rooted in an article about a Community School setting, contributions were received from across the ideological spectrum.

Once of the first replies that I received commented in strong terms on the appropriateness of raising the question in the manner that I did. It read:

I am a little shocked at the rather offhand way you threw out a question about Biblical Criticism: “In an article that appeared in the Journal of Jewish Education, Dr. Susan Tanchel argues that teaching the Documentary Hypothesis is an essential part of her school’s curriculum. Do you have it in yours?” 
 

You could be asking about whether our school uses indirect lighting, or shares a certain math program, rather than striking at the absolute essence of what it means to be a believing Jew. “Do I have it in mine?” . . . Do I relish systematically undermining the faith of my students to pay homage to the modern god of “pluralism?” Um, no. 
 

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if the authorship of the Torah is undermined, all observance falls like a house of cards. Inoculating college-bound students against Biblical Criticism is responsible if done properly. Destroying their faith so we can pretend we are intellectually honest and enjoy splashing in the shallow waters of heresy is quite another. 

Although this respondent rejects the possibility of systematic study of Bible Criticism in school, he does allow for the possibility that in the context of preparation for the challenges that are found on college campuses, a presentation of the tenets of Biblical Criticism would be appropriate. This response was echoed by a number of educators affiliated with Orthodox Day Schools.

A Yeshiva University professor wrote to affirm that when teaching Torah “belief in Torah mi-Sinai is fundamental to Orthodoxy. Adopting a neutral position on the subject is equivalent to adopting a neutral position on the divinity of Jesus.” He allows that for a student today to understand the writings of twentieth-century Orthodox thinkers such as Rabbis David Zvi Hoffmann, Mordechai Breuer, or Yoel Bin-Nun, it is necessary to have some familiarity with elements of Biblical Criticism. Nevertheless, he laments

Unfortunately, the vast majority of high school students do not have the basic knowledge of Tanakh to master these thoroughgoing, profound controversies. Very simply—how many know the Torah well? How many know the rest of Tanakh well? Without such knowledge can one follow the back-and-forth debates? Can one easily discuss how different versions of a story or a legal theme appear in different sections of the Torah if the basic material is not yet familiar, if one has no familiarity with the thousands of years of tradition and analysis that precede the modern period? 
 

One Orthodox high school administrator described where modern literary methods fit into his school’s curriculum:

Our Tanakh curriculum is certainly informed by modern scholarship, but does not teach the Documentary Hypothesis.

We began a program where we explore a variety of topics in symposium-style discussions. This is aimed to prepare the students for different challenges of life after high school, and to stimulate intellectual curiosity by making learning exciting without tests. We refer to it as either the Senior Seminar, or the Lishma program. 
It is in this context that we discuss higher and lower criticism, and the insights these methodologies have uncovered. We also, of course, discuss why we can still faithfully maintain our belief in Torah Mi-Shamayim. It has always been a well received unit in the senior seminar. 

In fact, the general approach of Day School educators, even in non-Orthodox settings, was that the introduction of a class on Biblical Criticism as a systematic course of study would not be welcome in their schools.

One long-term administrator from a Solomon Schechter school rejected the suggestion that such a course be introduced for a number of different reasons, among them:

• Educators must focus on the ultimate goals of Tanakh study, which he argued should be “to equip students with the text-access and text-analytical skills they need to be confident, independent, and resourceful students of Tanakh.” The introduction of a year-long course in Biblical Criticism will ultimately raise many serious theological questions that will force a teacher to talk “about the text” rather than focus on the text itself.
• Invoking James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, he argued that introducing the Documentary Hypothesis to adolescents “is likely in many cases to produce an explosive reaction at an age at which non-traditional perspectives should be at most gently and tentatively introduced,” concluding that it is, therefore, both risky and unnecessary.
• Why must students of Tanakh be taught the intricacies of how the Documentary Hypothesis works any more than computer users need to understand the coding of the software that they use or drivers the wiring of their automobiles?

Rather than rejecting “non-traditional” study out of hand, the author makes suggestions of what should be taught in order to prepare students for “more advanced study,” suggestions that he attests are used in the schools where he has worked. These include the following:

1. Training in identifying literary features such as repetition, irregular structures, parallel passages, enigmatic expressions, and non-linear chronology
2. Training in using textual evidence to propose their own explanations of, or commentaries on, problematic literary features
3. Exposure to multiple commentaries that explain literary anomalies differently, ideally including both classical and modern voices
 

All of this is to be introduced in grades 1 through 8. Beginning in high school, two additional features are introduced to students:

4. Aspects of biblical society and culture in the context of surrounding societies and cultures
5. Reference materials, including biblical atlases, encyclopedias, primary and secondary historical sources, and archaeological artifacts, as additional ways—over and above the classical and modern commentaries—to deepen understanding of Tanakh

The author concludes,

It should be noted that, on this model, the aim of introducing modern commentaries and understandings is in service of the text, in order to uncover its rich and layered meaning. The nontraditional beliefs and assumptions underlying these perspectives are never in the spotlight, never the focus of study, but are rather the nearly always unarticulated background and context of student learning.

An individual who teaches Tanakh in the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, a non-denominational Day School in New York City, weighed in on this discussion, stating at the outset that “the Documentary Hypothesis is an exercise in theology, not Bible.” He argued that introducing the Documentary Hypothesis to students in high school—as is done in the Heschel School—requires the students to have not only advanced text skills but also “a meta-textual mindset and background: significant substantive experience grappling with one’s own approach to Tanakh study; exploration of the tenuous and often shifting boundaries between subjective and objective readings; separation between self and text in order to recognize where they meet; and aptitude in distinguishing between facts and conclusions, between weak and strong interpretations.”

He writes that as taught in his school, this is a course

…for students who have already come face to face with their own conception of God, who are accustomed to pushing at theological comfort levels, and who welcome tension, encountering the Documentary Hypothesis creates a climactic moment: How does my conception of Torah, of God, of religious studies, withstand, absorb and react to its stiffest challenge? As such, reacting to the Documentary Hypothesis is not the portal into these questions, an early overt foray into one’s theological and religious identity; it is the capstone.

As such, the Documentary Hypothesis is introduced in his school not as a value in and of itself, but as part of a course whose goal is to explore what it means to learn Torah. To accomplish that, Biblical Criticism is presented in the context of other approaches that offer a variety of possible entrances to its study:

To that end, students engage with four differing approaches: classical commentary highlighting the peshat-derash divide, modern literary analysis, archeology, and biblical scholarship.

In explaining the rationale for this he writes:

[The theory of] multiple authors is not the only answer. It may be the best—it may not—but that’s irrelevant if it is presented on its own, with no alternatives as part of a dialogue. The question is not ‘here is the Documentary Hypothesis, how do you react?’ but ‘here is a problem with a range of approaches, how do they fit with the rest of your complex understanding of the book that is the most important to your religion?”

It is interesting to note that when I shared the Lookjed discussion about How to Read the Bible with James Kugel, he responded by saying that the book was not intended for high school students—for that matter it may not be appropriate for all adults—and that he was unsure whether it had a place in a Day School library. He did share his own thoughts about an appropriate high school curriculum in Tanakh, writing:

I do have my own curricular ideas for high school, mostly based on my own kids’ sometimes disappointed reaction to classes [in Tanakh]. I think it’s fine for very little kids to do Humash and Rashi the way they do in elementary school. But I think I’ve noticed that by the time these kids get to high school, if you keep teaching them the same way they were taught in elementary school, the best of them soon develop a strong interest in chemistry or social studies. Although they don’t often formulate the idea in words, I think what bothers them is the disconnect between what the Hebrew words of the biblical text say—by now their understanding of Hebrew is much stronger, along with their common sense and self-confidence—and what Rashi (and a lot of other commentators) sometimes say those words mean. 

So I think what I would do, at that point in the curriculum, is not go to modern biblical scholars, but try to get students to understand the exegetical problem from Rashi’s point of view, or, for that matter, that of the early rabbinic midrashim on which he relied. To begin with, this would require them to understand that the Torah and Rashi, or even midrash, are not simultaneous, and that the interpreters are confronting a text that has been around for some time and cannot be changed or rejected. Basically: ‘You be Rashi. How are you going to explain this verse in a way that is consistent with the other things you know from the Tanakh and from halakhic practice, everything that we believe and follow?’ ... I admit, this approach might not pass muster in Meah Shearim, but I really think it’s honesty that kids want and need; so do we all. 
 

A few words about the new Tanakh curriculum introduced by the Ministry of Education in Israel. For those of us who grew up in the United States, where Separation of Church and State is an axiom of faith, the fact that the State of Israel offers Jewish education in its public schools is somewhat disconcerting. Nevertheless, the fact that the official Ministry of Education in Israel concerns itself not only with general studies but with religious studies as well, means that for many religious schools in Israel (there are some religious schools that choose to operate outside of the state-sponsored system) there are educational experts who develop formal curricular goals, syllabi, and standardized tests. Diaspora educators appear to be largely unfamiliar with these materials, and I often link to them in response to Lookjed queries asking for support materials on Tanakh or Talmud.

Aside from the religious public school system, the Ministry of Education in Israel also runs an ordinary public school system—mamlakhti—that is not “religious,” although it does include Jewish studies as part of its unit on Jewish culture and Jewish heritage. A wide range of topics are included among the goals of teaching Bible on the high school level. They enumerate, among them, “Biblical criticism, editing changes to the Torah as a means to understanding the text, the authors’ intentions, their world and their views” (My translation. To see a full description of the mamlakhti curriculum and its goals, see http://cms.education.gov.il/EducationCMS/Units/Tochniyot_Limudim/MikraMam/AlYessodi/).

While the mamlakhti system has no problem including Biblical Criticism in its curriculum, the mamlakhti dati system has never attempted to introduce modern literary methods into its classrooms. Until recently, the religious school Bible curriculum followed a time-honored course, whose focus was largely on covering a wide range of material with medieval commentaries (e.g. Rashi, Ramban, Ibn Ezra) and other traditional sources (e.g. Netziv, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch). With a change of leadership, a new curriculum has been developed that is to be introduced in the upcoming academic year (5773).

A description of the goals of the new curriculum reads as follows (my translation):

• Interaction of students with the Word of God

• Developing a connection with the moral values ​​and behaviors required by the Torah

• Strengthening Jewish identity and strengthening students’ ties with the Land of Israel

• Imparting ways to learn Torah and to love Torah in a traditional manner

(A full description of the new curriculum, including links to support materials, appears at http://www.lilmod.cet.ac.il/).

According to a recent article that appeared in the Shabbat broadsheet Olam Katan (available online at http://www.olam-katan.co.il//all_gilyonot/359.pdf), the new curriculum was accompanied by a set of enrichment materials that were available at the abovementioned website, that have since been removed. Four different types of materials were posted:

1. Ordinary articles on biblical themes written from a traditional perspective
2. Articles written by Torah scholars that can be understood as relating to biblical characters in a contemptuous manner (a reference to what is called, pejoratively, Tanakh be-Govah Enayim—“Tanakh at eye-level”; see below)
3. Articles that grapple with questions raised by Biblical Criticism
4. Articles that present Biblical Criticism as a legitimate reading of the Torah

As noted, these enrichment materials were posted as supplementary reading for teachers, and were not an intrinsic part of the new curriculum; they were removed after complaints were received by the Ministry of Education.

The author of the Olam Katan article, who is clearly sympathetic to the more traditional approach to teaching, presents both sides of the argument regarding the introduction of Biblical Criticism—should it be viewed as an evil that questions the very basis of the Torah and Judaism, or must it be taught, given the reality that any student who leaves the four walls of the traditional study hall will be forced to face that challenge at some point in his life. Moreover, there is the idea—one that is accepted by the adherents of the Tanakh be-Govah Enayim school generally and by the students of Rabbi Mordechai Breuer specifically—that although we may disagree with the answers given by Bible critics, their questions are legitimate ones, and we can enhance our understanding of Torah by accepting them and developing our own, traditional responses to them.

Removal of the articles that discussed Biblical Criticism notwithstanding, the heated debate regarding the new curriculum continues.

Part of this is related to the belief is that this new curriculum aims to introduce an approach to Tanakh that is based not so much on the theories of Biblical Criticism, but on modern literary methods, and specifically a method of study that has become known in Israel as Tanakh be-Govah Enayim—“Tanakh at eye-level.” This method, which approaches biblical characters as extraordinary characters with human foibles, albeit from whom we can learn life lessons, has been popularized by the teachers and students at Herzog College, which is affiliated with the Hesder Yeshiva, Yeshivat Har Etzion, in Alon Shvut. It is based on a close reading of the text together with a willingness to explore possibilities that do not appear in traditional commentaries, and has been the source of tension between different factions in the National Religious camp in Israel for a number of years.

This debate promises to become more heated as the new curriculum is introduced in dati-le'umi classrooms in the coming months.

Although neither the contributors to the Lookjed discussion nor the educators who developed the new curriculum for the religious public schools in Israel were interested in developing a systematic course in Biblical Criticism for use on a high school level, it is clear that there is a wide range of attitudes with regard to the introduction of modern literary and academic techniques in the classroom. There appears to be the widespread agreement—even in the liberal camp—that at least some of the theories of modern Biblical Criticism are antithetical to Jewish belief and should be taught only as one approach among many or offered so that students will be prepared for the challenges presented by those theories at some point in the future. At the same time, it is hardly surprising to discover that the more traditional schools have been reluctant to introduce modern literary methods, while less traditional schools view such methods as basic to the understanding of the biblical text in contemporary times.

In closing I would like to share the thoughts of Professor Kugel, who is well aware of the challenges that his research and writings present for many a believing Jew. In answer to a questioner who asked how a religious person can maintain his/her faith and fealty in and to a rabbinic system that is so directly based on the belief of a divinely revealed text, given the conclusions presented in Professor Kugel’s books, he responded, in part, with a parable.

[U]ltimately, any Jew must admit that at some point the divinely-given text leads to the human interpreter and the poseq, indeed, to this specific taqqanah and that specific gezerah shavah. And frankly, we don’t really seem to all that aware of, or even care much about, where the dividing-line falls. This is our “prepared table,” the work of many hands. If someone wants a different table, let him go ahead—but this is the Jewish table, the way Jews serve God.

As one of our sages said: to what may the matter be compared? To a man who wished to see the King. So he went to the royal palace and stood outside and waited for the King to appear. After some hours, the King did come outside, and the man was thrilled. But soon the King went back inside the palace. The man returned the next day, and the next, and sometimes he did catch a glimpse of the King, but always only for a few seconds, and then his view would be blocked by someone, or the King would step behind a pillar or get into his carriage and ride off. What had at first been thrilling now became only frustrating.

Eventually, the king’s close advisor became aware of the presence of the man standing day after day outside the palace, and he approached him and said: “I know what you want, but you are going about it the wrong way. Go up to the palace door and ask to work inside—it doesn’t matter what: janitor, guard, woodcutter or water-drawer! Then you will enter the palace by right and see the King as a matter of course; indeed, He will recognize you and perhaps even call you by name.” And so the man did, and it was just as the King’s advisor had said: he saw the King up close every day, and the King called to him by name.

This is the whole idea of Judaism. If you want to come close to God, the only way is to become His employee. Understanding that avodat Hashem is the true foundation of our halakhah may not de-fang modern biblical scholarship; a lot of what it says will always be disturbing to Jews. But I think that modern scholarship does not, because it cannot, undermine the essence of Judaism or what Jews actually do in their lives; it cannot … cause the system to collapse.

Jewish educators who are successful in teaching their students to aspire to serve God as enthusiastic and passionate Jews can help produce adults whose faith can remain firm even in the face of serious questions.

            In this article I will share my view on the historical role of Western Sephardic thinking. Hence, this article is not devoted entirely to religious leaders. Rather, it encapsulates the story of Jewish devotion, divisiveness, zealotry, and compromise. As far as Western Sephardic tradition is concerned, many people have a rather hazy picture. All they seem to know is that Spinoza was banned from the Amsterdam community for heresy (July 24, 1656). The fame of this particular excommunication’s is due to its being continually cited as an example of religious intolerance and fear of change comparable to the indictment of Galileo (1564–1642) and the excommunication from Islam of Salman Rushdie in our own day. Accused of every crime, denounced from the pulpit of every faith, insulted, ridiculed, and held in contempt, these thinkers and writers created the world we know today. Through their words and deeds they demonstrated the inadequacy of the erstwhile conceptions of religion compared to their views—based on reason rather than superstition—that could withstand the rigors of debate and argument.

To better comprehend the Western Sephardic mind, let us go back to the sixteenth century, the century after the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. Following the Union of Utrecht in 1571, Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin became attracted to the Lower Lands where little inquiry was made as to people’s religious beliefs. Many merchants began to settle in Amsterdam in 1590 but did not openly reveal themselves as Jews.

Dr. Ben Vermeulen, of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, delivered an interesting address at the International Coalition for Religious Freedom Conference on "Religious Freedom and the New Millennium."
The conference took place in Washington DC, April 17–19, 1998, and the address was entitled “The Historical Development of Religious Freedom.” In this lecture he dealt with the development of religious freedom in Western Europe. According to Vermeulen,

The origin of the legal guarantees of freedom of conscience and religion in Western-Europe are found in the civil wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. Western Europe was torn apart by religious strife caused by the Reformation, which disrupted the medieval religious unity of Catholicism. It should be stressed that the impact of these civil wars, raging in particular in France, England, the Netherlands, and Germany, was enormous…At least a partial solution to help end these horrible civil wars was brought about by treaties that secured religious peace. In these treaties the state declared itself neutral (at least to a certain extent), and guaranteed a certain minimum of religious freedom for every citizen. These peace treaties, such as the Union of Utrecht of 1579 (the Netherlands), the Edict of Nantes of 1598 (France), and the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 (Germany) may be regarded as the first codifications of freedom of conscience and religion, and even of human rights in general.

These treaties, especially the Union of Utrecht, have influenced the choice of rabbis, chief rabbis, and ministers of the Western Sephardic community for the past 400 years. Indeed, the Union of Utrecht is the very first legal document to provide religious liberties to the Jews, since it called for religious tolerance in accordance with the Pacification of Ghent. In other words, the provinces were free to regulate religious matters, provided that everyone remained free to exercise their own religion. In the words of the Union of Utrecht:

As for the matter of religion, the States of Holland and Zeeland shall act according to their own pleasure, and the other Provinces of this Union shall follow the rules set down in the religious peace drafted by Archduke Matthias, governor and captain-general of these countries, with the advice of the Council of State and the States General, or shall establish such general or special regulations in this matter as they shall find good and most fitting for the repose and welfare of the provinces, cities, and individual Members thereof, and the preservation of the property and rights of each individual, whether churchman or layman, and no other Province shall be permitted to interfere or make difficulties, provided that each person shall remain free in his religion and that no one shall be investigated or persecuted because of his religion, as is provided in the Pacification of Ghent….

With these treaties, the United Provinces of the Netherlands would subsequently play both direct and indirect roles in the development of enlightenment in the seventeenth century. Its proponents would play leading roles in revising the medieval political institutions of Britain, and in preserving the colonial institutions that American colonists took for granted in the eighteenth century. Indeed, once the United States of America declared its independence, and Napoleon introduced new liberties and civil rights for Jews, life could never be the same anymore. 

The religious and intellectual life of the Sephardic community in the Netherlands was marked by tensions between the strict authoritarian orthodoxy of the rabbis and the majority of communal leaders on the one side, and the critical libertarian, individualist views of influential intellectuals on the other. This conflict was all the more acute as it was the consequence of the underground crypto-Jewish existence, which many had formerly led, and their sudden freedom in an open society. A split developed in Amsterdam’s first congregation, Beth Jaäcob, because of a bitter religious controversy led by a free-thinking physician, Abraham Farrar. In 1639 the three existing Jewish groups united under the name Kahal Kadosh Talmud Tora, and ever since then services were conducted in one place of worship. The magnificent synagogue dedicated in 1675 became the model for Sephardic synagogues in many other places as well.

The intellectual life of the community, in both its religious and secular aspects, attained a high level. As a center of Jewish learning throughout the Sephardic Diaspora, Dutch Jewry wielded a powerful influence and became a focus of intellectual ferment. The Talmud Torah and Ets Haim seminary was celebrated for the excellence of its teaching, covering not only talmudic subjects, but also Hebrew grammar and poetry. Indeed, the upper classes spoke only in Hebrew. The seminary flourished during the seventeenth century under the leadership of Haham Saul Levi Mortera, and subsequently under Haham Isaac Aboab de Fonseca. Its pupils officiated as cantors, ministers, rabbis, and chief rabbis in numerous communities in Europe, the Americas, the Near East, and in the Far East as well. It also produced quite a few scholars, writers, and poets.

Messianic hopes seemed to be realized with the arrival of Sabbetai Sebi in the middle of the seventeenth century. Many became followers of this false-messiah, and only a minority vigorously opposed him. The leadership of the community would remain for a long period under the influence of former Sabbateans, including the Hahamim Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, Moses Raphael Aguilar, and Benjamin Mussaphia. Even in the early eighteenth century, when Haham Salomon Aylion was in charge, a controversy arose over the Sabbatean work of Nehemiah Hayon. A prominent Ashkenazic rabbi, Haham Zvi Hirsch Ashkenazi (1656–1780), who had entered the dispute, was excommunicated by the congregation’s trustees in 1713.

            In their early days in the Netherlands, the Jews of Iberian origin were influenced and challenged by their surroundings, having to debate and defend their faith. In communities such as Ferrara, Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Bayonne, these Iberians—most of whom had been raised as Roman Catholics—were largely unaware of Hebrew and formal Judaism. For their benefit, Bibles, prayer books, and a whole range of works on the essentials of Judaism were published in the vernacular. However, Jewish book printing in Amsterdam was not an enterprise committed solely to didactic works, and many books reflect the broad cultural interest and academic background that these people had brought with them from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire. The encounter between Iberian Renaissance culture and the rediscovered Judaism in environments such as the cosmopolitan, tolerant city of Amsterdam turned these Western Sephardim into the first “modern Jews.” This development is exemplified by the life and works of such intellectual pioneers as Haham Saul Levi Mortera, Haham Menasse Ben Israel, Haham Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, and, in his own way, Uriel da Costa. And that was only the beginning, for it would evolve further from the seventeenth century into the twenty-first century. There were also difficult periods, especially in the mid-nineteenth century, when there was no Haham in Amsterdam, and in the twentieth century, when the community suffered from both world wars. Worst of all were the segregation, deportation, and extermination by the Nazis, which nearly resulted in its total destruction.

            It might be useful to describe the nature of the Sephardic community in the first half of the seventeenth century as something entirely new, rather than as the re-emergence of a suppressed religious identity. Strong arguments for such a view can be made from the conflicts that divided the Sephardic community at that time. Disputes arose between influential laymen and the religious leadership. The clergy itself was divided between a rationalistic faction and those of a more mystical bent. Each of the famous Hahamim of the seventeenth century left his distinct mark on Western Sephardim. It has been remarked that Western Sephardic culture combines the morality of Calvinism, and the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, delightfully combined with a touch of Kabbalah. Renaissance thinkers in both Italy as well as in the Netherlands strongly influenced Sephardic culture. Aristotle and Virgil were not examined as mere “aliens” but as potential contributors to Jewish culture.

            At the same time, it must be noted that the authority of Western Sephardic clergy was limited to advice and consent. Following the Venetian example, the “Mahamad,” a standing committee of seven wardens invested with absolute power, governed the congregation. The Mahamad’s decisions were binding on all, and no verbal or written opposition was brooked. Thus, for example, no member could take another member to court without the Mahamad’s permission, nor could he print a book without its prior approval. Scholars like Juan de Prado, Uriel da Costa, and Baruch de Spinoza were formally excommunicated. Excommunication was a regular tool employed against behavior or speech the Mahamad deemed inappropriate. If a sermon in the synagogue was not to the liking of the wardens, they would excommunicate the preacher.

            Haham Levi Mortera was profoundly committed to rabbinic tradition, while he also followed the Maimonidean method of argumentation in his writings. (See H. P. Salomon, Saul Levi Mortera and his “Traktaat betreffende de Wet van Mozes,” Braga 1988, 31–60.) The Haham struggled against superstition, prejudice, and hypocrisy in order to establish truth and reason as the basis of piety. Thus, Mortera promoted justice, free inquiry, and freedom of expression and thought in support of Judaism. He was of course not the only writer to be critical of superstition. In this he was preceded in his own century by Grotius (1583–1645), Isaac de la Peyrere, and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). His thinking also ran parallel, but not identical, to that of Montaigne (1553–1592), Descartes (1596–1650), Uriel da Costa, and Baruch de Spinoza, whose arguments he applied to the study of Jewish religion.

            Most of the religious literature intended for the guidance of the Sephardic communities was composed and printed in Amsterdam. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many new congregations would be established throughout Europe, the British Empire, and the colonies in the New World. It was an honored and honorable position that the main printer, Haham Menasse ben Israel, held, but it was not a well-paid one. And, like most of the Sephardic ministers and rabbis, he had to supplement his income. Menasse ben Israel set up his own printing press, and, at the request of Efraim Bueno and Abraham Sarphati, on 13 Tebet 5387 (January 1, 1627), he published the first Hebrew prayer book in Amsterdam. Haham Isaac Aboab de Fonseca served as a proofreader. Between 1627 and 1710, Amsterdam printing houses produced a total of 146 liturgical books and booklets. Seven months after his first publication, on July 15 1627, Menasse Ben Israel printed an interesting liturgical manuscript, Imre No’am, by Yosef Shalom Gallego (1614–1628). Gallego was one of the first Hazanim in Amsterdam. The importance of Gallego in the growth of what later became Western Sephardic liturgical music has been well established.

                Imre No’am gives some indication of Gallego’s prominent role as an educator in the community. He relates that the followers of Haham Joseph Pardo were in the habit of gathering in the synagogue on the three Sabbaths preceding the fast of the Ninth of Ab, mourning the destruction of the Temple. Gallego wrote against this custom, urging the members of his congregation to observe the Ninth of Ab with greater strictness, in observance of the Sabbath.

                In Amsterdam as elsewhere, the proclamation of Sabbetai Sebi as a messianic figure in 1665 evoked extraordinary enthusiasm, and the standard liturgy was temporarily changed accordingly. Kabbalah in its various systems and schools had spread and become a central part of Jewish theological discourse, giving Sabbateanism, whose founders and leaders were all Kabbalists, an elevated position. This came in addition to the mythic and folk elements that nourished Sabbateanism. Discussion about the liturgical changes continued for years. The Sabbatean movement refused to accept the reality of Sabbetai’s defection from Judaism to Islam. He had disappointed many, but the sincere hope for redemption continued to encourage many to believe the ideas of the Kabbalah.

            The Sabbatean movement was a thorn in the flesh of Haham Jacob Sasportas (Oran 1610–Amsterdam 1698), who was appointed Haham on April 4, 1693. He was of prestigious decent being the eleventh generation after Nachmanides (1194–1270). The opinion among the members of the Mahamad was mixed, but in the end they supported Haham Sasportas. He was an experienced rabbi, having led the rabbinate in Hamburg from 1659 until 1664, when he became Haham in London. He travelled to Scandinavia, but, returning to Amsterdam in 1672, he was appointed president of Yeshiba de los Pintos. Raphael Meldola published his Responsa in 1737.

    In 1698 Haham Salomon Jessurun d’Oliveira (1675–1700) succeeded Sasportas. Under his leadership new rules of Hebrew grammar were introduced. He was a rationalist, and was replaced two years later by Haham Salomon de Ja’acob Aylion (1700–1728). Aylion was born in Safed in Palestine and grew up in Salonika. He spread mystical teachings all over Europe. In 1689 he arrived in Amsterdam, but a year later he moved on to London to succeed Haham Jacob Abendana, who had died suddenly. The rationalists in London organized against him, and so he returned to Amsterdam in 1700. Haham Aylion’s tenure in the 18th century was characterized by his pre-occupation with superstitious beliefs, which resulted in political problems and a rather unhappy community. Haham Aylion died on 30 Nissan 5488 (April 9, 1728). His responsa are not published, but can be found in the Ets Haim library in Amsterdam. In 1728 the trustees appointed Haham David Israel Athias (1728–1753) and Haham Isaac Abendana de Britto (1728– 1760). They would rotate positions as Haham of the Congregation and President of the seminary until Haham Athias’ death in 1753.

            On a personal note, my great-great-great-grandfather, Haham Samuel A’Cathan (1692–1770), was the son of the Chief Rabbi of Sale near Rabbat in Morocco. He came to Amsterdam, and in 1715 married the daughter of Haham Samuel Ahuby, a Sephardic rabbi in Belgrade, which was part of the Ottoman Empire. Haham A’Cathan succeeded his predecessor, Haham de Mesa, when he died in 1761, and was appointed Ab Beth Din. He was more of a teacher and preacher than a communal leader, and, consequently, sent for Haham Salomon Shalem (1762–1781) from the Ottoman Empire to head congregational affairs.

            It was a controversial time. Haham Shalem chaired the Rabbinate while the above-mentioned Haham Zvi Hirsch Ashkenazi, or, as he was universally known, Haham Zvi; arrived from Altona. In the beginning he was very highly regarded; however, his incorruptible honesty and unselfishness soon made many enemies. One of these was Nehemiah Hiyya Hayyun, who managed to render his position in the congregation untenable. In his outspoken opposition to this unprincipled man, Haham Zvi had drawn upon himself the ill-will of the Mahamad of the Amsterdam Western Sephardic community, and that of the authorities of his own Ashkenazic community. The latter brought the matter before the magistrates, who, in order to obtain full information upon the subject, consulted not only the theological professors of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Leiden, and Harderwijk, but the trustees as well. It was no wonder then that, with this array of counselors, Haham Zvi was relieved of his office (1714). He went by way of London and Emden to Lemberg, where, after officiating as rabbi for a short time, he died in 1718. During the whole of this period the power of the trustees was almost absolute. From time to time however, the Haham was asked for his advice. The trustees modified at will the statutes of the congregation, and procured the approval of the magistrates. For the lay members of the congregation there remained nothing but implicit obedience.

    The year 1795 brought the results of the French Revolution to the Netherlands, including emancipation for the Jews. On September 2, 1796, the National Convention proclaimed the following resolution: "No Jew shall be excluded from rights or advantages which are associated with citizenship in the Batavian Republic, and which he may desire to enjoy." Moses Moresco was appointed member of the municipality at Amsterdam, while Moses Asser became a member of the court of justice there. The old conservatives, at whose head stood the Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Jacob Moses Löwenstamm, were not desirous of emancipation rights. Indeed, these rights were, for the greater part, of doubtful advantage, since their culture was not so far advanced that they could frequent general society. Besides, this emancipation was offered to them by a party which had expelled their beloved Prince of Orange, to whose house they remained so faithful, that the chief rabbi at The Hague, Saruco, was called the "Orange dominie." The men who supported the old régime were even called "Orange cattle." Nevertheless, the Revolution appreciably ameliorated the condition of the Jews. In 1799 their congregations received, like the Christian congregations, grants from the treasury. In 1798 Jonas Daniel Meijer interceded with the French minister of foreign affairs on behalf of the Jews of Germany, and on August 22, 1802, the Dutch ambassador, Sir Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck, delivered a note on the same subject to the French minister.[1]

            From 1806 to 1810 the Kingdom of Holland was ruled by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, whose intention it was to so amend the condition of the Jews that their newly acquired rights would become of real value to them; the shortness of his reign, however, prevented him from carrying out his plans. For example, after having changed the market-day in some cities (Utrecht and Rotterdam) from Saturday to Monday, he also abolished the use of the "Oath More Judaico" in the courts of justice, and administered the same formula to both Christians and Jews. To accustom the latter to military services he formed two battalions of 803 men and 60 officers, all Jews, who had been until then excluded from military service, even from the town guard. The union of Ashkenazim and Sephardim intended by King Louis Napoleon did not come about. He had desired to establish schools for Jewish children, who until then were excluded from the public schools.

Upon the death of Haham Daniel Cohen d’Azevedo (1751–1822), the congregation appointed no Haham, but a Bet Din. This court, consisted of Dayan Jacob Ferares (1772–1852), Dayan Salomon Cohen Paraira (–1828), Dayan Raphael Montezinos (–1866), Dayan Isaac Mendes de Sola (–1849), Dayan Aaron Mendes Chumaceiro (1810–1882) (in 1860 Haham of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Willemstad, Curaçao), Dayan David Lopes Cardozo (1852–1890), Dayan Elazar Aaron Vaz Dias (1813–1885), Dayan Jacob Lopes Cardozo (–1873), and Dayan Jacob Mendes Chumaceiro (1833–1900).

In the nineteenth century the rabbinate spent much time on the correct pronunciation of Hebrew and the perfection of its grammar. New prayer books were printed with Dutch translation. Dayan David Lopes Cardozo was the last rabbi to preach in Portuguese.

On August 12, 1900, the trustees appointed a native-born rabbi as the congregation’s Haham, the legendary Isaac Palache (1858–1927). A few weeks earlier, on July 8, 1900, Palache’s competitor, the Rev. Aaron Rodrigues Pereira (1859–1922) was appointed Haham in The Hague. Pereira’s honesty, his friendly personality, and his prodigious knowledge, made him a famous and beloved personality.

Under the leadership of Haham Palache, new immigrants arrived from the Ottoman Empire. In 1919 the trustees appointed Dr. Haim Benjamin Israel Ricardo (1892–1944) as Rubi (adjunct rabbi). After Palache’s death, Dr. Ricardo was promoted to Dayan. Ricardo was an outspoken Religious Zionist. Most congregants held him in the highest esteem. He was a very social gentleman who would visit congregants and bring hope while they were suffering the consequences of the Great Depression. But Zionism at that time was not politically correct or really popular among Dutch Jewry. Consequently, in 1929, the trustees brought a famous and very learned Ottoman Rabbi to Amsterdam. They appointed rabbi Eliyahu Frances (1928–1944) as Dayan. The Dayanim Ricardo and Frances led the community harmoniously through the depression and World War II.

Rabbi Eliyahu Frances was born in 1875 in Salonika. He studied foreign languages and became the secretary of the Chief Rabbinate in Salonika. The trustees appointed Frances as Ab Beth Din. He became very popular, since he had high intellect combined with great knowledge being strict in the law, he strengthened the tradition, while also being open to the needs of the community. He was pleasant and modest. In 1938 he visited his father, who lived in Jerusalem. He was one of the candidates for Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv. When he did not win that position, he returned to the Netherlands. In due course, he was among the Jews deported and murdered by the Nazis.

Reform Judaism in the Netherlands has never been popular among Western Sephardim. A group of German refugees established a Reform congregation to which the Amsterdam Sephardim donated a Sepher Torah. The relationship remained cordial but distant. While most Western Sephardim lived as secularists, they loved their synagogue, their rabbis, their music, and were very proud of their tradition. In this climate of mutual respect and high tolerance, the majority of the Sephardim felt no need for Reform Judaism.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Dutch Kingdom in May 1940 there were around 140,000 Jews in the country, of whom some 120,000 lived in Amsterdam. About 4,300 of these were Sephardim. Comparatively little has been written about the community’s history during the war years. At the end of World War II, a ravaged community of some 600 survivors returned to where the refugees from the Inquisition had once built up a flourishing Jewish culture.

The Ashkenazic Rabbi, Justus Tal (1881–1954), led the community in Amsterdam between February 1944 and May 1945, while all other Rabbis were deported and murdered. Together with Rabbi Barend Drukarch (1917–1998) and the congregation’s sexton, Salomon Mendes Coutinho, worship services continued until the very end of the war, Shabbath May 5th 1945. Services were conducted, at a private home of the sexton, one week in accordance with Ashkenazic, the other in accordance with Sephardic tradition. In these final days of WWII it was permitted to Dutch Ashkenazim and Sephardim alike to consume rice and beans on Passover.

    As the liberation of the European continent was on its way Major Dr. Salomon Rodrigues Pereira (1887–1969), Haham of The Hague, returned to the Netherlands with the Royal Dutch Princess Irene Brigade, as its chaplain. Soon after the war, the trustees appointed Rodrigues Pereira Haham. He continued to live his life as a freeman in the city of Hilversum, and would visit Amsterdam during the holidays. To mark his fortieth anniversary as Haham of the Sephardic community in The Hague and his work after World War II in Amsterdam, Queen Juliana conferred Knighthood in the Order of the Dutch Lion on him. The Haham did his utmost to rebuild what had existed before the great catastrophe, although he only worked part-time.

            In 1968 Haham Rodrigues Pereira recommended that the trustees appoint Rabbi Barend Drukarch as Dayan. Both the holocaust survivors, as well as the new immigrants arriving from North Africa and the Near East, and from Surinam and the Dutch West Indies, found in Rabbi Drukarch everything they wished for and more. In 1980 the trustees appointed him Haham.  

In 1981 Rabbi Simon Haliwa of Tetuan, Morocco arrived to lead the Congregation. He was well liked, but as a result of differences with Haham Drukarch, he moved on to become a rabbi in Nice, France. At that time Haham Drukarch, assisted by Chaplain Samuel Behar, led the congregation. The congregation opened a second synagogue in Amstelveen. In 2012 Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel, Minister Emeritus of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York installed Dayan Dr. Pinehas Toledano as the Haham in Amsterdam.

In conclusion, the extraordinary legacy of the Western Sephardim included its great hidalguismo, its reverence for its past and the dignity of its culture. It traces its origins to the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Characteristically, its long-standing tradition of tolerance was directly reflected in the policies of the Chief Rabbinate throughout its early history, and into modern times.

This is the list of Senior Ministers appointed by the Mahamad to Haham of Congregation Talmud Torah, the Portuguese-Israelite Community of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, as traditionally recited annually, preceding ‘Arbit, on the Eve of Kippur:

Haham Joseph Pardo (1602–1619)*

Haham David Pardo (1619–1657)

Haham Saul Levi Mortera (1616–1660)

Haham Abraham Cohen de Hereira (1602–1635)

Haham Isaac Uziel (1610–1622)

Haham Menasseh Ben Israel (1622–1657)

Haham Isaac Aboab de Fonseca (1660–1693)

Haham Jacob Sasportas (1675–1698)

Haham Salomon Jessurun d’Oliveira (1675–1700)

Haham Salomon de Ja’acob Aylion (1700–1728)

Haham David Israel Athias (1728–1753)

Haham Isaac Abendana de Britto (1728–1760)

Haham Salomon Shalem (1762–1781)

Haham David A’Cohen d’Azevedo (1781–1792)

Haham Daniel A’Cohen d’Azevedo (1792–1822)

Dayan David Lopes Cardozo (1852–1890) [not on list]

Dayan El’azar Aaron Vaz Dias (1852–1885) [not on list]

Haham Isaac Palache (1885–1927)

Haham Salomon Rodrigues Pereira (1945–1969)

Haham Barend Drukarch (1968–1998)

*These are the dates the Hahamim were in office.

The practice of halakha changes. Every shift in materials, technology, economic structure, and political framework necessarily creates new practical halakha. Can plastics be kashered? Is the completion of an electrical circuit forbidden on Shabbat? May Jews own stock in a corporation that serves hametz in its cafeteria over Pesah? How should we relate to a secular but Jewish State? What are our responsibilities in a secular multi-faith democracy? No matter what answer one chooses, any unprecedented situation creates unprecedented practical halakha.  

The fact of practical change, however, can be explained in many different ways. One can argue for the existence of an unchanging, abstract halakha, and understand practical change as the assignment of new cases to existing categories: Are plastics ceramics or glass? Conversely, one can argue that halakha has no necessary trans-temporal identity, and is merely whatever the Jewish people decide it is at any given moment. Plastics may be ceramics today and glass tomorrow, and a category unto themselves the day after, and the day after that the question may seem wholly irrelevant to religious life.

Modern Orthodoxy is driven in part by a valorization and hyperawareness of change, by identification with “There cannot be a House of Study without creative contribution” (BT Hagigah 2b), far more than with “The new is forbidden by the Torah” (Mishnah Orlah 3:9 as creatively repurposed by Hatam Sofer). We therefore must grapple seriously with the profound theological and practical challenges posed by the acknowledgement of change, including the following:

1. The legitimacy of our worldview and the authority of our halakhic interpretations are grounded in the claim that they represent a current embodiment of a living tradition extending back to Sinai. Change raises the question of identity: If we are not thinking and practicing the same way as our ancestors, what justifies our claim to be their Torah heirs? The power of this question is roughly proportional to the radicalness of the halakhic and hashkafic changes we acknowledge.

2. In the absence of a recognized central authority, change in our community inevitably happens piecemeal and haphazardly. What maintains us as a community when our thoughts and practices vary widely? To what extent should change be limited by the desire or necessity to have all members of our community be able to eat together, pray together, recognize each other as Jewish, and so forth?

3. Change raises the question of standards. If conformity to the past is not necessary, how do we distinguish legitimate from illegitimate changes? Might this be an issue of quantity as well as quality? Is this a decision we make with complete autonomy, or are we to some extent constrained by the opinions of other Torah communities that we acknowledge as legitimate even while we disagree with them profoundly? Must we sharply distinguish ourselves from Conservative Judaism’s theories of change, or can we say that we disagree only with its application of those theories, or even that change is not necessarily a point of denominational disagreement?

4. Change increases responsibility. Rabbis who proclaim the immutability of halakha can, when confronted by moral challenges to halakha as it stands, proclaim their deepest sympathies and yet contend that they cannot change anything. Acknowledging change means that the status quo has much more limited deference, and that critiques, even those rooted in externally derived values, have more force. This has been brought home to me many times at events related to agunot.

Modern Orthodoxy urgently needs a persuasive theory and compelling rhetoric of halakhic change to deal effectively with these issues. We have a great deal of philosophic work to do before we get there. My goal in this article is to advance the conversation by addressing some implications, strengths, and weaknesses of a rhetorical device that is often understood as representing a theory: the assertion that “halakha evolves.”

Why is saying “halakha evolves” different than saying “halakha changes”? Theories are often embodied in metaphors, and metaphors for liberal arts subjects are often drawn from science (which itself relies more on metaphors than is commonly acknowledged). For at least the past 150 years, the most popular scientific metaphor for change has been Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Saying that “halakha evolves” implicitly makes the claim that the process of halakhic change shares vital characteristics with the process of biological change that Darwin described and sought to explain.

But this metaphor needs to be interrogated to see what it means, and whether it is true and useful either intellectually or rhetorically.

A fundamental challenge to the intellectual usefulness of the evolutionary metaphor is that scientific theories are descriptive and predictive, whereas a theory of halakha will in addition be prescriptive. Any claim about how halakha has developed in the past carries with it the implicit argument that similar development should be expected and approved in the future. This confusion between facts and values, between “will be” and “ought,” is familiar from Social Darwinism, and theorists of halakha should not fall prey to it.

A fundamental challenge to the rhetorical usefulness of the evolutionary metaphor is that it (deliberately) alienates those who reject evolutionary science from our halakhic community. “Halakha evolves” has the effect of connecting the acceptance of halakhic change with willingness to engage contemporary science. This is good for morale, and builds support within our community, which has little outward tolerance for obscurantism. But I suspect that it also creates a bias against our position among people who have ranged themselves against macro-evolutionary biology, and makes them less willing to consider our position legitimate. 

Why should this matter? Darwin famously sought to account for the origin of species. Speciation classically occurs when two populations with a common ancestry diverge to the point that they can no longer interbreed. There are two potential halakhic analogues to this process:

1. when scholars from two halakhic camps no longer allow each other’s ideas to fertilize their Torah conversations
2. when the halakhic positions of two halakhic communities lead them to forbid intermarriage with each other.

Each of these, I submit, should be avoided—the halakhic locus for my contention is the prohibition of lo titgodedu, “Do not form factions.” So we might be better off keeping these two issues separated.  

It must be noted that the interbreeding standard for speciation can be challenged in a variety of ways. Claddists focus on the extent of genetic difference rather than on the compatibility of genitalia, and many intuitively distinct species, such as lions and tigers, turn out to be biologically compatible and reproductively separated only by practicality, such as incompatibility of habitat or waking hours. It is not clear to me which concept of speciation is the best analogy to the halakhic factionalization that the Torah opposes.

Now scientific theories themselves change (evolve?) over time, and this has been particularly true of the Theory of Evolution. For example: Is evolution gradual, as Darwin himself thought, or characterized by “punctuated equilibrium,” that is, by long periods of stability interrupted by brief periods of dramatic change, as Stephen Jay Gould proposes? Clearly, “halakha evolves” will have very different implications depending on which version of the theory one adopts as metaphor.

My sense is that most users of the phrase intend it gradualistically, as a way to respond to concerns that proposed changes might snowball. But that approach did poorly explaining the fossil record, and it might do as poorly explaining the history of halakha. Perhaps we are living in the midst of a halakhic equivalent of the Cambrian explosion. It is not obvious to me that we should only legitimate incremental change, or that all the changes currently being considered within Modern Orthodoxy are incremental.

Darwin’s theory became much more attractive once it was paired with Natural Selection, or “survival of the fittest,” as its causal mechanism. Natural selection is often taken to suggest that change over time inevitably works out for the best, as only those mutations that increase “fitness” survive. So too, we might think, halakhic change is always for the good over time, as the negative changes will die out and the positive changes will reproduce, and overall the halakha that emerges will be fitter.

But this is a misunderstanding of both science and halakha. Survival of the fittest is a tautology: It cannot independently predict anything, as we cannot know in advance what is fittest. Moreover, short-term fitness often leads to medium-term extinction. Halakhic Judaism is not parallel to the entire arena of life, nor even to the animal kingdom; it is at most a species, and thus every mutation puts it at risk of extinction. Biological evolution is horribly inefficient, and can afford to be, but halakha does not have the same luxury.

The second great modification of Darwin came with the discovery of genetics. This field itself has been in almost constant flux, but here are two ongoing developments that I think are significant for the halakhic analogy. First, the connection between genotype and phenotype grows ever more complex—the same gene or set of genes can find radically different expression depending on environment and a whole set of iterative genetic “switches.” Second, mutations more and more seem predictable, in the sense that we know which proteins in which places on the DNA strands are most likely to be replaced, and by which other protein. This means that wholly new “mutations of first impression” are extremely unlikely.

Put together, these developments suggest that even radical changes are rarely unprecedented, and that significant biological changes are rarely the result of a single mutation. If halakhic change is analogous to biological change, then “halakha evolves” is not a good description of what happens when a particular halakhic responsum drives a social change. On the other hand, the recognition that an organism with a fundamentally stable genotype can, under the right circumstances, produce radically different phenotypes might provide a very useful analogy to halakhic change: “Even that which a veteran student will rule in the future in the presence of his teacher was already said to Moses at Sinai” (Yerushalmi Peah 2:4).

Genetic change occurs in two ways: recombination through sexual reproduction and mutation. The intellectual analogue of sexual reproduction is serious, open-minded conversation. A culture in which students can have only one teacher, or learn in only one school, will produce the equivalent of inbreeding. At the same time, a specific genetic combination, especially if many of the genes involved are recessive, will often survive only if it is given the opportunity to reproduce for some time in an isolated breeding group. To what extent is Modern Orthodoxy an established subspecies whose health will be enhanced by mingling its genes with a larger population, and to what extent does it yet need to be sheltered?

Mutations happen all the time, but particularly harmful mutations are often the result of extreme environmental pressure, such as radiation. Some mutations are helpful when carried but harmful when expressed, or helpful in some environments but damaging in others. If the analogy is valid, we should be careful to distinguish halakhic changes that arise from unending regular engagement with Talmud Torah, and those that reflect engagement with external thoughts and realities, and perhaps be more suspicious of the latter. Or perhaps we should see takkanot as radical mutations, and interpretations as new expressions of the existing genome. Perhaps viral insertion and symbiosis leading to incorporation have halakhic analogues as well.

Regardless, a fundamental failing of the analogy may be that halakhic change is not, cannot be, and ought not be blind. I might argue that Modern Orthodox halakha should be seen instead as the product of an expertly supervised breeding program.

In sum: The evolutionary analogy can be intellectually stimulating, but it does not serve as shorthand for a compelling account of halakhic change. We must also acknowledge that where the analogy seems apt, its implications may challenge rather than support the legitimacy of particular Modern Orthodox innovations.

A variety of other analogies may yield more consistently authentic and useful results. Within the realm of science, for example, the Copenhagen model of quantum mechanics, in which only probabilities exist before the act of measurement “collapses the wave-function,” seems to me a useful and true way of describing the relationship of halakha decision-making, or pesak, to abstract study of halakha. The idea that the self is constructed via narrative, that we are the same people we were as infants because we can tell coherent stories using the word “I” throughout, may be very helpful in determining the parameters of change. But these and others have yet to be effectively exploited and synthesized.

Out of a vast array of intellectual resources, a Modern Orthodox conception of halakhic change awaits formulation.

“And afterwards, the Rabbanan Sabborai saw that Jewish women were becoming dependent upon the Gentiles to get divorces from their husbands by force … from which ruin emanates.”

—Responsum of Rav Sherira Gaon,

  Head of Academy at Pumpedita, Tenth Century[1]

Introduction[2]

            The problem of the agunah,[3] the Jewish woman whose husband will not or cannot give her a get, a religious writ of divorcement, thus forcing her to remain chained to a dead marriage, engendered enormous debate in the Orthodox Jewish community in America in the late twentieth century. The debate touched on many difficult emotional and philosophical issues for American Orthodox Jews. In an increasingly secular and rights-oriented America, the agunah issue served as a reminder that traditional Jewish thought was at ever-increasing odds with modern society. Especially as the women’s liberation movement took the national stage in the 1960s and 1970s, Orthodox women became sensitized to, and sometimes resentful of, how different their lives were under American law and Jewish law. At the same time, Orthodox rabbinic leaders saw themselves as increasingly on the defensive, fighting against feminism and other modern ideologies that, in their perception, threatened the stability of Jewish tradition. Lastly, Orthodox rabbis had to negotiate what they believed the proper relationship of the secular state apparatus should be to the internal Jewish communal problem of the agunah. All of these questions cut to the heart of how late- twentieth-century American Orthodox rabbis saw the relationship between Orthodoxy and modern America. 

The desire to differentiate themselves from the Conservative movement, and an ever-increasing fear of halakhic activism led Orthodox rabbinic leadership in America to foreswear any systemic halakhic solutions to the agunah problem by the late 1960s. However, as the Modern Orthodox community began to engage in debate about feminism and questions of equity in Jewish divorce law in the early 1970s, the Modern Orthodox rabbinate was forced to respond with some sort of a solution to the agunah problem. Seeing that Jewish women had already learned that the civil courts would assist them in obtaining their gittin, Jewish divorces, the rabbis understood that they could either let individual women access the civil courts on their own in a manner that might prove halakhically problematic, or they could channel the way Orthodox women used the civil courts to receive a get. By the mid-1990s, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), the rabbinic body of the modern/centrist Union of Orthodox Congregations of America, had supported the passage of two pieces of legislation in the State of New York and had adopted the use of a civil prenuptial agreement to be signed by couples to prevent situations of aginut, or “chained-ness.”

On the other hand, the right-wing sector of the American Orthodox rabbinate, those who maintained membership in the Agudath haRabonim or Agudath Israel organizations, never permitted a conversation about feminism to occur within their ranks. When right-wing Orthodox rabbis and community leaders discussed feminism in the twentieth century, they did so only in order to quash it as anti-Torah and destructive to Jewish tradition. Without public pressure from women within their ranks, the right-wing rabbinate did not feel the same urgency to come up with a workable solution to the agunah problem. Furthermore, right-wing Orthodox rabbis found the prospect of turning over the agunah problem to the civil courts to be potentially dangerous. Sympathy to the cause of women’s rights in state courts, they quickly realized, could undermine the power of Batei Din, Jewish courts, to decide issues of divorce law according to strict interpretations of halakha. The right-wing Orthodox rabbinate viewed the civil courts as a place for one thing only—receiving one’s civil divorce.

In one critical way, however, the Modern and right-wing Orthodox rabbinates remained unified throughout the twentieth century, and that was in their ultimate refusal to adopt a systemic halakhic solution to the agunah problem. The solutions adopted by both wings of Orthodoxy were imperfect and left many Orthodox women at the mercy of blackmailing husbands and corrupt Batei Din. Most of all, they were utterly reliant on the enforcement powers of the civil courts. In the end, feminist ferment went only so far in swaying the opinions and actions of the Orthodox rabbinate.[4]

Background: The Agunah Problem in the Modern Era

Although there is evidence of the existence of agunot in Jewish communities since the times of the Talmud, the combination of the decline of rabbinic authority and the rise in the incidence of divorce in modern European states, together with the massive Jewish migrations of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, exacerbated the problem significantly. In pre-modern Europe, Batei Din were vested with the power of the state to arbitrate litigation of a civil or religious nature for the Jewish communities. However, as Jews were emancipated in many Western European countries during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, civil governments divested the Batei Din of their power, and expected that Jews would use state courts to settle their disputes. This led to a disintegration of Jewish communal authority that meant that a husband did not have to listen to a Bet Din that ordered him to give his wife a get. He could simply leave the religious community, move to a different jurisdiction, or even emigrate, leaving Europe for America or other countries. Such a man could even marry another woman in a new location without suffering the condemnation of rabbinic authority whence he came. This constellation of factors was toxic: When divorces were few and far between, and the Bet Din had coercive power in the Jewish community, the agunah problem was kept in check, but the greater number of divorces coupled with the ever-lessening power of the Bet Din created fertile ground for the growing of the modern agunah problem.[5]

            By the post-World War II era, due to a decline in international migration and increased affluence, occurrences of American Jewish husbands deserting their wives were becoming less prevalent. The agunah problem did not disappear, though. Instead, the majority of agunah cases became those in which a husband simply refused to grant his wife a get out of spite, or used get withholding as a tool to coerce his wife to give up claims to marital property or even custody of children.[6] Batei Din had few halakhic tools to prevent such agunah cases, and in many instances, in order to ensure that a woman would receive her get, rabbis encouraged women to submit to their husband’s financial and other demands. 

Turning to the Secular State

In 1953, in light of the new form of agunah that had emerged, the Conservative movement presented a new solution to the agunah issue. This solution became known as the “Lieberman Clause,” named after its drafter, Rabbi Saul Lieberman, the world-renowned halakhic authority and Talmud professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. This Aramaic clause, which was to be inserted into Conservative ketubot, was intended to reinvest the Bet Din with the power to order a husband to give his wife a get by using the secular courts to enforce compliance. It provided that upon civil divorce, either husband or wife could bring the other before the Conservative movement’s Bet Din for effectuation of a Jewish divorce. If either spouse either refused to appear before the Bet Din or refused to comply with the Bet Din’s order, the other spouse could seek redress in civil court. This was the first time that a body of American Jewish rabbis had created a policy that employed the secular state apparatus to assist in solving the agunah problem.[7]

            Due to the stature of Saul Lieberman, it initially appeared that the Lieberman Clause might gain traction beyond the Conservative movement. In the mid-1950s Lieberman met secretly with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Rosh Yeshiva of the Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University (RIETS) to discuss creating a national Bet Din, recognized by both the Conservative and Orthodox movements as having exclusive authority with respect to issues of Jewish family law. According to the plan, Lieberman and Soloveitchik would jointly appoint the members of the Bet Din, all of whom would be Orthodox. Lieberman and Soloveitchik also agreed that the Lieberman clause would be revised to meet with Soloveitchik’s approval and included in Orthodox ketubot as well as Conservative ones. In the end, the plan never took effect because it was voted down by the RCA. Even the imprimatur of Soloveitchik was not sufficient to take away the sting of Lieberman’s participation.[8]

            Even in the Conservative movement, though, the Lieberman clause did not have the power to solve the agunah problem. Most importantly, it could only resolve agunah situations in which the couple had the clause physically present in their ketubah. Additionally, rather than presenting a systemic halakhic solution to the problem, the Lieberman clause was merely an arbitration clause that stated that the couple agreed to abide by the decisions of the Conservative Bet Din, and could enforce any Bet Din decision in civil court. The clause did not empower the Bet Din with any powers it did not previously have, neither did it present any halakhic innovation. Lastly, it was unclear whether the clause, as part of a religious document, was actually enforceable in a civil court.

            Despite the fact that the Lieberman Clause was more of a glorified arbitration clause than a halakhic innovation, both the Modern and right-wing Orthodox rabbinate united in strong and unyielding opposition to it. The RCA and the Rabbinical Alliance of America Bet Din issued a joint statement forbidding their members from officiating at any ceremony using the revised ketubah, and declaring that they would not recognize as valid any acts or decisions of the Conservative Bet Din. The statement warned that remarrying based on any such divorce could endanger the religious status of offspring of the new union.[9] The right-wing Agudath haRabanim also issued a scathing statement against the Lieberman clause, labeling Conservative rabbis “porshim miDarkei haTzibbur” (seceders from the correct ways of religious Jewry) and ordering that they not “be entrusted with any rabbinic functions.”[10]

But the Orthodox response extended beyond a halakhic critique. Herbert Berman, lawyer for the “Orthodox groups” opposing the Lieberman clause said that in addition to the halakhic problems, the clause created “serious legal problems” by potentially breaching the First Amendment by putting a secular court in the position of having to enforce the decision of a religious body, i.e., the Bet Din.[11] In a similar vein, Yeshiva University published a short pamphlet in 1955 entitled “New Provisions in the Ketubah: A Legal Opinion” in which legal scholar A. Leo Levin and Rabbi Mayer Kramer outlined ostensive legal problems with the Lieberman clause. In the introduction, Rabbi Morris Finer, Director of the Community Service Division of Yeshiva University laid bare the real reason behind the publication, declaring, “It is devoutly to be hoped that a viable solution might be developed, one that would be acceptable to the Orthodox rabbinate which alone possesses the collective scholarship and the religious authority to deal with the matter.”[12] While the legal questions raised by Orthodox leaders were valid—the Lieberman Clause had not yet been tested in any civil court, and would not be tested until the late 1980s—the way Orthodox leaders raised them showed that they meant to discredit the clause, not to engage in serious legal debate about a potential solution to aginut.

Meanwhile, individual Orthodox women began to realize that they could turn to another forum to seek receipt of a get—the civil courts. In 1954, a Queens, New York, trial court issued a significant decision in a divorce case called Koeppel v. Koeppel. Maureen and William Koeppel had entered into a post-nuptial contract that specified that each of them would appear before a Bet Din to execute a get. Maureen Koeppel filed suit against William Koeppel for refusing to abide by this contract. The court did not view the contract as constitutionally problematic, noting that “[c]omplying with his agreement would not compel the defendant to practice any religion. … Specific performance herein would merely require the defendant to do what he voluntarily agreed to do.”[13] Although the trial court ultimately dismissed Maureen Koeppel’s complaint for specific performance of the contract because she had already remarried at a ceremony officiated at by a Reform rabbi, it had, at least in theory, upheld an agreement to give a get. [14]

            The Koeppel case was significant on two levels. First, it showed that the secular courts would, in theory, uphold a contract to ensure the effectuation of a get.  However, there was a darker side to the Koeppel decision for the Orthodox rabbinate. The secular court did not understand, neither did it care, that according to Orthodox Jewish law, the Koeppels (especially Maureen) still needed a get to remarry. The fact that Maureen Koeppel managed to find a rabbi to remarry her did not change that reality. Indeed, any children born to Maureen Koeppel and her new husband would be mamzerim, and would not be allowed to marry anyone but other mamzerim under Orthodox and Conservative Jewish law. Therefore, if the secular court system was to be an acceptable agent for the Orthodox rabbinate in ameliorating the agunah crisis, it would have to be under very strict supervision of Orthodox rabbis.

            The combination of the Conservative movement’s adoption of the Lieberman Clause and the Koeppel decision evidenced a new trend of turning to the secular courts for assistance in solving the agunah problem. The secular court solution might have initially seemed unseemly to Orthodox leaders because the Conservative movement was the first to raise it, and because it certainly posed significant halakhic challenges. However, Orthodox rabbis began to realize that if they could shape how the secular courts assisted agunot, use of the secular legal system could prove extremely productive. Indeed, the first record of an American Orthodox rabbi suggesting the use of the secular courts as an avenue to help agunot occurred in the same year as the Koeppel court decision and the adoption of the Lieberman clause. None other than Rabbi Soloveitchik wondered:

[W]ould it not be possible through the legislatures of certain states to have legislation passed whereby there will be an understanding that a civil divorce would not become final until a satisfactory disposition, in keeping with halakhic standards, was made concerning the get?[15]

Secular legislation that comported with halakha would be the best of all worlds: Orthodox rabbis could solve the agunah problem without having to take a halakhic stand, and at the same time, could ensure that the state did not create more halakhic problems than it solved.

            Before the Orthodox rabbinate could proceed along this path, however, it was faced with responding to a proposed systemic halakhic solution.[16] In a book published in 1966 called T’nai Be-Nisuin U’ve-Get (Conditional Clause in the Marriage and Divorce Agreements), Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, a Modern-Centrist Orthodox rabbi and scholar, presented a number of different possible halakhic solutions to the agunah problem, all of which were based in some way on making the nisuin, or the Jewish marriage, conditional. One solution Berkovits proposed was that the validity of a marriage would be made contingent on an agreement that the marriage would be invalidated if two years after its civil dissolution, the husband refused to give his wife a get. Another, based on the talmudic principle that “whoever marries does so with the agreement of the rabbis,” provided that the Bet Din could have the power to annul marriages under certain particular circumstances to be determined by halakhic authorities.[17]

            Initially, Berkovits’ proposals seemed to meet with lukewarm support from Orthodox rabbis. The revered European halakhist Rabbi Yehiel Yakov Weinberg responded to the book with cautious approval.[18] He wrote an extensive approbation in which he emphasized the importance of addressing the agunah problem, particularly at that time when more and more husbands were refusing to grant their wives gittin, and more and more women were simply remarrying in civil ceremonies.[19] In a similar vein, Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, the newly appointed Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, in a review of Berkovits’ book in 1966, noted that although the book would “no doubt meet with much determined opposition,” he hoped it would “be a powerful impetus to an intensified search for procedures” to solve the agunah problem.”[20]

However, Berkovits’ proposals soon met their demise. In 1968, the Conservative movement, discouraged by the failure of the Lieberman Clause to solve the agunah problem, adopted a combination of two of Berkovits’ proposals as law.[21] The Conservative Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards unanimously voted to adopt the insertion of a clause into the ketubah that made marriage conditional upon the husband granting a get without six months of a civil divorce. If the husband did not grant the get, then the bet din had the power to annul the marriage. This clause put an end to the agunah problem in the Conservative movement once and for all. Following the Conservative movement’s decision, Orthodox thinkers began to speak more critically regarding Berkovits’s proposals. In 1969, Menachem Kasher an Orthodox rabbi and editor of Noam, an annual journal on Orthodox Jewish thought, published an article forcefully attacking Berkovits’s book. The article included a letter from Rabbi Weinberg stating that he regretted ever having written his approbation in support of Berkovits’ book to begin with. The letter stated:

At the time that I wrote my letter, I was unaware of the discussion that had occurred in America…. Furthermore, I am surprised that the author [Berkovits], who certainly knew of the entire correspondence in this matter, dragged me into this controversy. Because of my poor health, I am not capable now of dealing with a matter of such serious implications and I regret ever having written the letter to him.[22]

As Marc Shapiro relates in a lengthy footnote in his book on Rabbi Weinberg, there is strong evidence, although no proof, that Kasher forged the letter. Until the end of his life, Berkovits claimed that the letter was a forgery, and Kasher never produced the original.[23] Whether or not the letter published by Kasher was forged, the damage to Berkovits’s work was done. Future writings by Orthodox rabbis regarding the agunah issue either categorically rejected Berkovits’s proposals or ignored them entirely.[24]         

            Thus, in the early 1970s, the agunah problem in America remained as unsolved as ever in Orthodox Judaism. Orthodox rabbis bemoaned the plight of the agunah, and some worked to solve individual cases for individual women, but no one offered any systemic solutions.[25] Luckily for the Orthodox rabbinate, divorce was still relatively rare among Orthodox Jews, and communal knowledge about the agunah issue was spotty at best. However, another element was about to be introduced into the agunah debate—the advent of Orthodox feminism. Whereas previously, it was non-Orthodox Jews who complained about the inequality of Jewish divorce law, the 1970s saw the emergence of a critique by individuals who remained squarely within the Centrist Orthodox camp.

This phenomenon caused a two-pronged response. On the one hand, a feminist critique from within could not be shut down by simply claiming that the speakers were outside the pale of Orthodoxy. The agitators were the wives, mothers, and daughters of Orthodox rabbis, leaders, donors, and synagogue members. They could not be dismissed that easily. On the other hand, if not properly answered, feminism could cause significant damage to Orthodoxy by weakening the faith and commitment of those who had become sensitized to issues regarding equality of women. Over the next two decades, Centrist Orthodox rabbis learned to tread carefully around the feminist issue, both invalidating feminist arguments and incorporating more pro-woman language into Orthodox discourse at the same time.

Although the women’s liberation movement began in America in the early 1960s, feminist ideas took some time to percolate into the socially conservative and traditional Orthodox community. By 1972, however, discussions of women’s rights within Orthodox Judaism had become prevalent enough to be covered by the New York Times. One young Orthodox woman, Deborah Weissman, stated, “Most of us have had these feelings of being left out but we never conceptualized them. The women’s movement has galvanized us.” Defining Weissman’s statements as evidence of a new trend, the article went on to quote Dr. Irving Greenberg, a left-leaning Centrist Orthodox rabbi in Riverdale, New York, who noted:

At one time most people who felt strongly about such things checked out of the religion. Now we have people who are not leaving but are committed to the Orthodox experience and are challenging from within… they are ahead of their time, but I think they are the spearhead.”[26]

Although feminist ferment had already reached the Reform and Conservative movements of Judaism, the critique noticed by Greenberg was new both because it came from within Orthodoxy and because those engaged in it refused to leave. Rather than seeking greener pastures in a more liberal branch of American Judaism or by leaving Judaism altogether, these women wanted to see change within Orthodoxy.[27]

            It was not long before a modern Orthodox thinker explicitly labeled the agunah problem as a feminist issue. In a seminal 1973 essay, the left-leaning Rabbi Saul Berman, Chair of the Judaic Studies Department at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, engaged in a critical exploration of women’s issues in Orthodox Judaism. Linking the agunah issue to the feminist critique of Orthodoxy, Berman declared, “From her complete silence at the traditional wedding ceremony, to the problem of the Agunah, the law seems to make women not only passive, but impotent to remedy the marital tragedies in which they may be involved….” He suggested a turn to the civil courts to “solve our problem for us” with the use of an ante-nuptial agreement that would require the parties to, at the dissolution of a marriage, “consent to and execute the issuance and acceptance of the Jewish divorce.”[28]

In the same year that Berman’s article appeared in Tradition, three different divorce cases addressing issues with respect to agunot were reported by New York courts.[29] Orthodox Jews were not immune to the increase in divorce rates in 1970s America, and as more Orthodox divorces made their way through the civil court system, the courts had more and more opportunities to weigh in on the agunah issue.[30] The decisions in these three cases would have a significant impact on the way the Modern/Centrist Orthodox community viewed the agunah problem. More than ever before, Modern/Centrist Orthodox rabbis would advocate a turn to the civil justice system to solve the problem for them, and more than ever before, they would realize how important it was for their hands to be guiding that system’s efforts.

The first of the three cases, Margulies v. Margulies, involved a stipulation signed by the couple after their divorce that provided that the husband would grant his wife a get. The husband failed to comply with this stipulation, and was held in contempt of court, for which he was fined, and ultimately sentenced to jail for fifteen days. Although the Appellate Division overturned the incarceration order, it replaced it with a $450 fine, stating “…[W]e can only conclude that the defendant never intended to carry out the terms of the open court stipulation and that he utilized the court for his own ulterior motives. Such behavior may not be countenanced.”[31] Later that same year, in a case called Rubin v. Rubin, a Bronx, New York, court cited Koeppel in upholding a couple’s post-nuptial agreement to give a get, stating explicitly that the New York courts “have recognized the validity of an agreement to obtain a Get.”

In Pal v. Pal, the last agunah case reported in 1973, the trial court upheld a post-nuptial agreement that not only specified that the parties had to effectuate a get, but also detailed how the rabbis on the Bet Din should be selected.[32] On appeal, the Appellate Division reversed, holding that the trial court “had no authority to, in effect, convene a rabbinical tribunal.” Because the trial court has interfered in the actual get giving process, a religious procedure, it had strayed into forbidden territory. However, it went on to say that the husband, by failing to grant his ex-wife a get in keeping with the divorce judgment, did not come into court with “clean hands.” Thus, while the court refused to uphold the trial court’s interference in the actual convening of a Bet Din, it also was unwilling to let Mr. Pal get away with refusing to grant his former wife a get as had been ordered.[33]

All three of these court cases showed that, at least in theory, New York courts were willing to enforce agreements to render a get. Orthodox rabbis concerned with the agunah problem took note, and began to ponder how the civil courts could best assist them in encouraging recalcitrant husbands to grant their wives gittin. One of the first ideas explored by Orthodox rabbis was the implementation of ante-nuptial agreements, as Saul Berman had suggested in his 1973 article on women’s rights. Ante-nuptial agreements in contemplation of divorce had, up until this point, been considered void by most states because they were deemed contrary to public policy for giving incentive to divorce. However, the law with respect to such agreements was changing in the early 1970s due to the increased social acceptability of divorce and the corresponding surge in divorce cases. The Modern/Centrist Orthodox community had taken notice of the new legal acceptability of such agreements, and rabbis published a number of articles in the early 1970s exploring the halakhic and legal ramifications of using some type of prenuptial agreement to prevent situations of aginut.[34] As divorce rates continued to rise, and rabbis from liberal branches of Judaism increasingly performed weddings for couples no matter the status of their previous marriages, Orthodox rabbis feared that if they did not figure out a way to solve the agunah problem, they would be faced with scores of mamzerim in the coming generations.[35] Furthermore, rabbis perceived the feminist critique of Orthodox divorce law as a threat to the stability of the Orthodox community. At the same time, however, Orthodox rabbis did not want to be seen as caving in to pressure from the feminist community, and they feared systemic halakhic solutions that empowered the Bet Din to grant a get when a husband was unable or unwilling to do so. Thus, any solution to the agunah problem would have to tow a fine line between solving the problem and not appearing too radical or transformative of normative Orthodox practice.[36]

Thus, while pressure by feminists and agunah activists on Orthodox rabbis to free agunot continued to increase during the 1970s and 1980s, the pressure did not lead to their desired results. Although the Orthodox rabbinate increasingly discussed more global solutions to the agunah problem in addition to its traditional focus on getting individual recalcitrant husbands to grant gittin, the solutions they came up with not only lacked effectiveness, but also outsourced the problem to the secular courts. At the same time, centrist rabbinic leaders maintained a constant barrage of criticism toward feminists and agunah activists for undermining God’s will and millennia of Jewish life and law.  

One of the first rabbinic responses to the link between feminism and the agunah problem was penned by Moshe Meiselman, then-Rosh Yeshiva at the Yeshivath Brisk in Chicago. Discounting Saul Berman’s feminist critique of Orthodox theology, Meiselman sneered, “What are the forces of the male dominated society of which Rabbi Berman speaks? They are none other than the Almighty Himself and the divinely inspired Psalmist, David, King of Israel.” Protesting that Orthodox Judaism was already sufficiently concerned with the lot of women, Meiselman declared, “It goes without saying that we must be concerned with the religious quest and observance of women. It also goes without saying, something that Rabbi Berman implicitly seems to deny, that this has always been true of religious leaders throughout the millennia.”[37] With respect to the agunah issue, Meiselman dismissed Berman’s potential solution of an ante-nuptial agreement out of hand. Like the Orthodox critique of the Lieberman clause, Meiselman couched his dismissal of the idea in both halakhic and legal terms. “One does not arrive at solutions as quickly and easily as Rabbi Berman suggests,” he scorned:

His form of antenuptial agreement, I have been told, would not be upheld in court. A secular court cannot enforce a contract to perform a religious act. While there are countless varieties of antenuptial agreements that could be drawn up, I seriously tend to doubt that most people would sign them.

Meiselman’s comments about the legal validity of ante-nuptial agreements were, of course, flawed. By 1975, the New York State courts had made it quite clear that they would, in fact, enforce a properly-worded contract to effectuate the giving of a get. Meiselman’s response to the agunah problem was to discount any proposed solution.[38]

            Meanwhile, the New York State courts continued to uphold agreements to effectuate gittin. In the 1976 case of Waxstein v. Waxstein, the court enforced a provision in the couple’s separation agreement requiring the husband to grant his wife a get, stating unequivocally, “A separation agreement is a contract, and if lawful when made will be enforced by the courts like any other contract….” The Appellate Division unanimously upheld the trial court’s ruling, and the Court of Appeals denied Arthur Waxstein’s motion for leave to appeal. The Waxstein decision left no question that the New York State courts were willing to enforce agreements to give a get.[39] 

At the same time, Orthodox Jews, especially women, were speaking out more and more about issues that troubled them in Orthodox Judaism, particularly the situation of agunot. The year 1977 saw a rash of articles in Jewish publications about women’s issues in traditional Judaism, and particularly about Jewish divorce law. One author, Blu Greenberg, who later became known as the “mother of Orthodox feminism,”[40] criticized the Orthodox rabbinate for inaccurately portraying Jewish law with respect to agunot, declaring, “men can no longer decide that it’s alright for women to suffer indiscriminately.”[41] At the 1977 RCA Annual Convention, the rabbinical organization took the unprecedented step of organizing a public session on issues of women and Orthodox Judaism. The all-male panel of three found themselves facing the difficult questions of rabbis’ wives, angry about the plight of agunot.[42]

More than just talking, Orthodox women were beginning to organize. In 1979, a group of women from the Young Israel of Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York founded an organization called Getting Equitable Treatment, or G.E.T. Gloria Greenman, the founder and first president said, “We were commiserating over a friend’s daughter (who had been unable to obtain a get), and I just said, ‘Let’s stop talking, let’s do something.’” The organization assisted women through the Bet Din process and advocated for the social shunning of recalcitrant husbands, including preventing them from receiving synagogue honors. By 1984 the organization had 400 members, most of whom were Orthodox. Greenman noted that G.E.T. had wrought significant changes in the attitudes of the rabbis. “The rabbis have felt the need more than ever to do something,” she observed.[43] 

            However, at least in writing, much of the Centrist Orthodox leadership claimed to be uninfluenced by feminist ferment. In 1978, Yeshiva University Press published a book as part of its Library of Jewish Law and Ethics that it touted as an “in-depth treatment of Jewish feminism.” The book, entitled Jewish Woman in Jewish Law, was written by Moshe Meiselman, the same rabbi who had critiqued Saul Berman’s piece on Orthodox women’s issues in 1975 and sported an Editor’s Forward written by Norman Lamm, the President of Yeshiva University.[44] Arguing that feminism “is based on a very definite value structure which is at odds with Jewish values on a number of basic points,” Meiselman defended the Orthodox status quo regarding the agunah problem, dismissing all those who had, throughout the past century, attempted to suggest systemic halakhic solutions as being “not sufficiently versed in the Jewish marriage and divorce laws.”[45] 

            After scathing critiques of the Lieberman and Berkovits proposals, Meiselman concluded, “The only remedy that seems to be consistent with Jewish law is the one specifically suggested by the Talmud—the use of the secular judicial system.”[46] However, although he reviewed in detail the New York case law on the subject, Meiselman equivocated even about this possible solution. “At this time,” he wrote, “it is still unclear what direction the courts will take.” “Fortunately,” Meiselman reassured his readers, “cases where husbands refuse to grant divorces when required by Jewish law are few and far between, and a beth-din very often has sufficient power, by using social pressure, to secure compliance with its decision.”[47]

Unwittingly, Meiselman created a template for the late twentieth century American Orthodox party line in his analysis of the agunah problem. He created a pattern of (1) discounting any systemic halakhic solution, (2) minimizing the problem, (3) calling for a solution that used the secular judicial system, and (4) refusing to outline what such a solution might look like. Meiselman’s book did not bring the Orthodox establishment any closer to solving the agunah problem; it simply supported the status-quo. However, in one way Meiselman’s book represented a sea change: By the late 1970s, the Centrist Orthodox rabbinate was addressing the feminist critique of Orthodoxy and the issue of agunot more frequently and in a more in-depth fashion than ever before. While solutions were not forthcoming, the issue was no longer being ignored.[48]

The arguments of Meiselman and others like him did not stop the feminist critique of Orthodoxy. In 1981, Blu Greenberg published a book on Orthodox feminism entitled On Women and Judaism, in which she devoted an extensive chapter to the issue of divorce in Jewish law. After reviewing the history of rabbinic debate over the issue, Greenberg called for a systemic halakhic solution to solve the problem once and for all. To rabbinic leadership who would call her ideas anti-halakhic, Greenberg responded thus:

To say [rabbis’] hands are tied, or to say they can resolve an individual problem, but not find a global solution, is to deny their collective responsibility. Worse, it bespeaks a lack of rabbinic will to find a halakhic way. What they are really saying is they are not worthy of the authority vested in them, for well they know that the only person whose hands are tied is the woman whose family must pay blackmail.

Greenberg went on to warn rabbis of the potential results of their inaction: “Growing numbers of Jews [will] solve their problems elsewhere.”[49] The fact that Tradition published two extensive reviews critiquing Greenberg’s book showed that hers was a voice that the Orthodox rabbinate could not ignore.[50]

            Interestingly, however, when rabbis finally acted to implement some solution to the agunah problem, the action did not come from the centrist camp, but rather from the right-wing Agudath Israel. A number of reasons likely contributed to this development. First, even in the early 1980s the Agudah still had more experience advocating for specifically Orthodox Jewish causes in the public sphere than the RCA or OU.[51] Additionally, while Centrist Orthodox rabbis remained fearful of appearing to cave to feminist pressure, right-wing Orthodox rabbis were sufficiently distanced from feminist ferment. Lastly, Centrist Orthodox rabbis were far more concerned with their standing in the eyes of the right wing than vice-versa, and likely feared the reaction of the right to any solution they might raise to the agunah problem.

In 1981, the same year as Greenberg’s book was published, Rabbi Moshe Sherer, President of Agudath Israel of America, gathered a group of nationally-known Jewish lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, Nathan Lewin, and Aaron Twersky at the Agudah’s offices in New York City. Sherer, who had close connections with Speaker of the New York State Assembly Sheldon Silver, believed he could get some form of legislation passed in this area, and he wanted these lawyers to help him come up with what the legislation should be.[52] The proposed law ultimately drafted by the group required the filing of an affidavit by the plaintiff in any divorce action that stated that “to the best of his or her knowledge, he or she has … taken all steps solely within his or her power to remove all barriers to the defendant's remarriage….; or that the defendant has waived in writing the requirements of this subdivision.”[53] Before sending it to Sheldon Silver, the Agudah sent the draft bill for approval by rabbinic heavyweights including Rabbi Moses Feinstein. All the rabbis consulted gave the bill their stamp of approval, assuring that a get given as a result of this law would not qualify as a halakhically invalid “get meuseh,” a coerced get.

Despite several objections on church-state separation grounds, the Get Bill passed with ease through the New York State Legislature and was signed into law by Governor Mario Cuomo on August 10, 1983.[54] At the ceremonial signing of the bill into law, Sherer triumphantly declared, “This is a happy day for many sad people.” The Centrist Orthodox rabbinate also touted the new law. The Orthodox Union, at its 84^th National Convention in 1983, passed a resolution entitled “Divorce,” which read:

All member congregations are urged to deny the benefits of membership; and community sanction to men who refuse to grant their wives a get following civil divorces….The Orthodox Union and its constituent synagogues shall work to create legislation in all states comparable to New York’s [Get] Law, which seeks to ensure that all impediments to a successful civil divorce, including the granting of a get, are removed before a divorce is granted.

The publicity surrounding the law said nothing about the possibility of halakhic solutions to the problem. Indeed, the Agudah scored a public relations coup, portrayed in the press as an activist and politically savvy organization that used its power to help agunot.[55]

Notwithstanding all the hoopla surrounding passage of the 1983 Get Law, the actual effectiveness of the law was minimal at best. The law was only effective against plaintiffs in civil divorce actions in the State of New York. Thus, in the far more common situation in which the recalcitrant husband was the defendant in the divorce action, he would not be required to file an affidavit before receiving his divorce. And of course, the law could do nothing to help women seeking a get outside New York. In the wake of the passage of the 1983 Get Law, the only solutions offered by the Orthodox rabbinate for the plight of agunot were communal sanctions, and the largely ineffective law itself. [56]

At the same time, Centrist Orthodox rabbis continued to rail against feminists and their arguments on behalf of agunot. Rabbi Emanuel Feldman, the Associate Editor of Tradition published a contemptuous critique of Blu Greenberg’s On Women and Judaism in 1984. He scathingly declared the book to be

a recounting of feminist arguments of the most conforming sort, papered over with occasional halakhic rhetoric which barely conceals that which lies underneath: imprecise scholarship, slippery logic, and major conclusions often based on nothing more than personal feelings, emotions and intuitions.[57]

Feldman concluded that Greenberg’s book was “an object lesson in how not to approach the halakhic system,” one that created “a web of confusion in which halakhah—and ultimately, women themselves—emerge the losers.”[58]

However, another response to feminist ferment also emerged. The OU began to take pains to be seen as concerned with women’s status in Orthodox Judaism. That same year, it passed a resolution entitled “The Orthodox Woman in Contemporary Society” which read:

The Orthodox Union supports women in their ongoing quest for greater involvement within the Orthodox community.… Rabbis and congregations are urged to seek to increase the participation of women in Torah study programs.… Member congregations shall take all necessary steps to enable female members to participate more fully in synagogue programs.

Such a resolution, although toothless, portrayed to the Orthodox rank-and-file that their rabbinate was concerned with women’s issues and helped bolster arguments that the Orthodox rabbinate was not ignoring women’s complaints about Orthodox Judaism.

Meanwhile, in 1983 the highest court in New York State issued the strongest statement of any American civil court yet about the enforceability of an agreement to give a get. The case, Avitzur v. Avitzur, interestingly involved a couple who had been married using the Conservative ketubah that incorporated the Lieberman Clause into its text. Following the couple’s civil divorce in 1978, Boaz Avitzur refused to comply with the Lieberman Clause and grant his ex-wife a get. The case ultimately ended up in the Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York State, which ruled that the Lieberman Clause of the ketubah was enforceable just like any other contract; there was “nothing in law or public policy to prevent judicial recognition and enforcement of the secular terms of such an agreement.”[59] Boaz Avitzur appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States which declined to hear the case, thus allowing the decision of the Court of Appeals to stand.

As the first decision by the highest court of any state to address issues of get acquisition, Avitzur was closely watched by the Orthodox community.[60] It did not take long for Orthodox leadership to analyze the meaning of Avitzur from both a legal and halakhic perspective. Amazingly, such analyses often continued to discount the possibility of using a civil agreement to ameliorate the agunah problem. Rabbi J. David Bleich, now a Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva University, reiterated the oft-stated Orthodox rabbinic claim that “there were, and indeed still are—many serious questions regarding the enforceability of [an ante-nuptial] agreement in civil courts.” Such arguments held little water in the wake of Avitzur, a fact Bleich begrudgingly admitted when he wrote that the decision in Avitzur “serves to endow this document with some legal authority.” [61]

In the years following the Avitzur decision, though, due to continued pressure from women within their ranks and incontrovertible evidence of acceptability from civil courts, Centrist Orthodox rabbis became increasingly open to the idea of prenuptial agreements, even if not in the form taken by the Lieberman Clause. Indeed, J. David Bleich himself published an article in Tradition in 1986 arguing in favor of a particular format for a prenuptial agreement which he argued would address both halakhic and American legal issues.[62] A few years later, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, a well-respected member of the Centrist Orthodox rabbinate’s more liberal wing, published a book entitled Women and Jewish Divorce: The Rebellious Wife, The Agunah and the Right of Women to Initiate Divorce in Jewish Law, a Halakhic Solution. The book argued for a systemic halakhic solution to the agunah problem, but realizing that adoption of any such solution would be nearly impossible, Riskin concluded with a far more practical call for the use of prenuptial agreements that would cause a husband to pay his wife a specific sum on a daily basis until he gave her a get.[63]

As Centrist Orthodoxy warmed to the idea of prenuptial agreements to prevent agunot, right-wing Orthodoxy continued to avoid acknowledging the extent of the agunah problem and remained steadfast in its opposition to any innovation to solve it other than communal sanctions and the 1983 New York Get Law. In a 1988 Jewish Observer article dedicated to discussion of marital problems and divorce in the Orthodox world, Aaron Twerski, one of the attorneys who had worked on the 1983 Get Law, came out staunchly against taking divorce disputes to civil court. While Orthodox agunah activists had often claimed that the Bet Din system favored men over women, Twerski assured his readers that “in fact, batei din that deal with family law problems are staffed with fine, ehrliche rabbanim—men of integrity who do their utmost to deal with the issues honestly, conscientiously, and in a manner consistent with Torah principles.” Not once in the entire article did Twerski mention the word “get” or “agunah,” although he discussed many other issues that could arise in a matrimonial dispute, including counseling, child custody battles, and impact of divorce upon children.[64]

The Agudah also worked to discredit feminists who criticized the rabbis for not solving the agunah problem. In 1990, the Jewish Observer published an article by Rabbi Yissochar Frand that was a scathing critique of feminism in general, and Blu Greenberg specifically. Frand firmly closed the door on the possibility of any halakhic innovation to assist agunot, declaring emphatically, “What was assur (forbidden) yesterday, remains assur today, and what is mutar (permitted) today was always mutar…. Halacha is not an amorphous area wherein changing social needs can be legislated….” Railing against feminism as a “subtle and insidious” threat to Judaism, Frand discounted feminist critiques of the Orthodox rabbinate’s failure to help agunot. He objected that the rabbis cared enormously about agunot, relating a hagiographic story that Rabbi Moshe Feinstein suffered from a stomach ailment that flared up each time he had to deal with an agunah question.  “Yet,” he protested, “these militant feminists claim that the rabbis don’t care!” Like his rabbinic predecessors had done with respect to other civil court solutions, Frand insisted that “according to legal experts in the U.S., this type of [ante-nuptial] agreement is probably not enforceable in most jurisdictions.” Frand’s solution to the agunah problem was social ostracism until the husband gives a get. He admitted that a recalcitrant husband could go to a different community and avoid such punishment, and also that there were cases in which such a “scoundrel could buy… himself a beis din which rules in his favor.” Despite this, Frand concluded his discussion by invalidating any legal or halakhic solution to the agunah problem, saying that Orthodox Jews “must continue to seek social cures for what is essentially a social malaise.”[65]

Such arguments were no longer working for many Orthodox women denied a get, and they and their attorneys increasingly turned to civil courts to obtain relief. The courts responded. In 1992, a New York Appellate Division decision called Golding v. Golding opened a window into the internal workings of some Batei Din during agunah cases. David Golding told his wife that he would not give her a get unless she gave into every demand he made with respect to the divorce settlement. The parties appeared before a Bet Din, and the rabbis presented Mrs. Golding with a document in Hebrew listing all of her husband’s demands and told her to sign it or she would not receive her get. Fearing becoming an agunah, Mrs. Golding signed the document. The court held that the settlement was invalid because it constituted “inequitable conduct” and that there had been “no indication of rabbinical arbitration.” Despite the evident coercion that existed in the Golding case, an Orthodox rabbi quoted by the New York Times in an article about the decision continued to claim that Batei Din took care to make sure that women would not be victimized by any “spitefulness or revenge on the part of husbands.”[66]

Cases like Golding were embarrassing to the Orthodox rabbinate. Not only did they portray Jewish divorce law as inequitable and unfair to women, they also exposed the failings of some Batei Din to act ethically in protecting women’s rights. While the Agudah continued to deny the existence of a problem, the Modern/Centrist Orthodox rabbinate, with its more rights-oriented congregants, was no longer able to do so. Thus, in 1991, as the trial court’s decision in the Golding case was winding its way through the Appellate Division, the RCA issued a resolution acknowledging the abuses taking place, and acknowledging that such abuses were a “chillul Hashem,” an embarrassment to the Jewish community. Among other things, the resolution called for the RCA Halacha Committee to develop a legally and halakhically valid pre- or post-nuptial contract that would help solve the agunah problem, and condemned “in the strongest terms” using the withholding of a get as a form of blackmail. This was the strongest institutional statement yet to come from an Orthodox rabbinic body acknowledging the existence of a serious problem of abuse of the get process.[67]

As the RCA was passing its 1991 resolution, a New York state trial court was hearing another agunah case that would soon become notorious in the Orthodox world. The case, Schwartz v. Schwartz, involved the divorce of a well-known couple in the Orthodox community—Naomi Schwartz’s father was the publisher of the national Centrist Orthodox weekly newspaper, The Jewish Press. Her husband, Yehuda Schwartz refused to give her a get unless she turned over a large number of shares in the Jewish Press. The case was splashed across the pages of the Jewish Press for close to a year, and was even picked up by other mainstream New York periodicals.

More than any previous agunah case, Schwartz v. Schwartz raised awareness in the American Jewish community and in New York State at large, about the agunah problem and the suffering of agunot. Articles about the case related in lurid detail the regularly-occurring instances of husbands blackmailing their wives to turn over property and large sums of money in exchange for a get. One article in the Village Voice detailed the particularly egregious case of a man who was separated from his Holocaust-survivor wife. The man refused to give his wife a get unless she turned over the money she received in war reparations from the Germans. Another article, published in New York Magazine, detailed the story of a woman whose husband was withholding her get. As the article related, the woman ended up receiving the get because her husband “dragged her for a block as she held on to the open door of his car, breaking her leg. She got her get after giving him $15,000 and agreeing not to file assault charges.” The press depicted the Orthodox rabbinate as sexist and patriarchal, and therefore unwilling to find solutions to such abuses.[68]

Ultimately, the court in Schwartz v. Schwartz, pointedly noting “the unequal allocation of power between spouses to terminate a religious marriage—particularly where the partners are of the Jewish faith,” allowed Naomi Schwartz to bring in evidence of Yehuda Schwartz’s coercion and withholding of the get at the future hearing on property division.[69] At that hearing, the court held that, because he withheld the get, Yehuda Schwartz forfeited his claim to a substantial amount of marital property totaling $184,500. In the interim, in October 1993, he finally gave his former wife her get.[70] 

In the wake of the Schwartz ruling, Sheldon Silver, the New York State Assemblyman who had proposed the 1983 Get Law, proposed another bill to assist agunot. This bill essentially codified the holding of the Schwartz court, providing that a judge could consider the existence of a barrier to remarriage as a factor in the distribution of assets in a divorce action in the State of New York. It was passed unanimously by both the Assembly and the Senate in 1992, and was signed into law by Governor Cuomo later that year. As in the case of the 1983 Get Law, Orthodox organizations sent letters to the governor urging him to sign the new get bill into law. However, this time, there was a glaring difference: while three centrist Orthodox organizations—COLPA, the National Council of Young Israel, and the OU—wrote in support of the law, the Agudah did not. Indeed, the Agudah strongly opposed the law, even threatening to fight for its repeal, because its rabbinic leadership felt that it would cause violations of the prohibition against a get meuseh, a coerced get. If a husband faced financial repercussions for withholding a get, the right-wing Orthodox rabbinate argued, this constituted coercion on him. Since a get meuseh was halakhically invalid, the 1992 Get Law could cause the invalidation of numerous gittin, with all the requisite problems such invalidation would create.[71] 

The Agudah’s articulation of its opposition to the law showed its hostility toward feminist activists as well as its ongoing passivity regarding any possible solution to the agunah problem. In a 1993 Jewish Observer article, Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, the Director of Government Affairs and General Counsel for the Agudah, acknowledged the existence of an agunah problem, but quickly added:

To be sure, there is ample basis to cast a skeptical eye on the claims that have been advanced by certain “aguna activists” about the alleged magnitude of the problem within the Orthodox Jewish community. There is also good reason to beware the larger agenda of the some of these activists, whose rhetoric often cultivates disrespect for established halachic procedures and rabbinic leaders, and who use the aguna issue to promote some of the most insidious anti-Torah values of contemporary secular feminism.

Zweibel went on to argue that “there are situations where a husband may be fully justified in not wanting to give his wife a get, or where a wife is not entirely without blame herself for her husband’s recalcitrance.” Although he closed by reminding readers that “we must not lost sight of the seriousness of the aguna problem and of the urgent moral imperative it places on us,” Zwiebel did not offer any solution to the agunah problem; he simply discredited the 1992 Get Law and those who supported it and renewed the decades-old vague call for rabbis to give “careful study” to proposed solutions.[72]

The 1992 New York Get Law proved far more effective than its 1983 predecessor in addressing individual cases in which a recalcitrant husband refused to give his wife a get, however it, too, was limited in its ability to systemically solve the agunah problem. First, it only affected divorce cases filed in the State of New York. While the vast majority of Orthodox Jews in America lived in New York, there were certainly large Orthodox communities in other states with agunot who could not be helped by the New York Get Laws. Furthermore, the 1992 law would do nothing to assist an agunah who had no significant marital assets at issue. Without the division of the marital estate to hold over a recalcitrant husband’s head, there would be no economic impetus for him to grant his wife a get. The same held true for very wealthy men who had retained assets outside their marriages. Such men would not need the assets from their marriage, and thus would not be pushed to give gittin to their former wives.

While agunah activists celebrated the 1992 Get Law, they also recognized its shortcomings and continued to argue for a systemic halakhic solution to the problem. As the ranks of activists grew through the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Modern/Centrist Orthodox rabbinate found it more and more difficult to ignore or discredit their voices. In addition to G.E.T., another agunah rights group called Agunah, Inc. had been founded in 1987 by a group of Orthodox women agunah activists, including Rivka Haut. Whereas G.E.T. worked behind the scenes to advocate for individual women to receive their gittin, Agunah, Inc. took a more activist path. Women from Agunah, Inc. spoke out frequently about Batei Din that permitted husbands to blackmail their wives in return for a get, and issued repeated calls for systemic halakhic action on the part of the Orthodox rabbinate to solve the agunah crisis. They led protests in the streets of Brooklyn, in front of the homes of recalcitrant husbands, and even at two of Agudath Israel’s Annual Conventions. On a more national level, a 1989 documentary about Jewish feminism in the United States, Canada, and Israel presented Orthodox feminist Alice Shalvi publicly calling Orthodox rabbis to task for not working harder to solve the agunah problem. “If the rabbis really heeded the basic meaning of Judaism,” she declared, “they could not possibly behave in as uncompassionate a manner as they do without relating to the pain and … misery” of agunot.[73]

 Thus, as feminist ferment and publicity about the agunah problem continued to grow and spread, the Centrist Orthodox rabbinate found itself forced to offer a more substantive solution or risk appearing uncompassionate and closed-minded in the face of women’s suffering. In 1993, the Centrist Orthodox Caucus unveiled a new prenuptial agreement that would, it claimed, solve the agunah problem for those who signed it. The agreement, drafted by Rabbi Mordechai Willig, provided that every day that husband and wife are separated without a get, even prior to the issuing of a civil divorce, the wife was entitled to receive a per diem sum of money for her support. The husband and wife also contracted to appear before an agreed-upon Bet Din to arbitrate the get. If the wife should fail to appear before the Bet Din, or fail to abide by its decision, the husband’s financial obligation toward her would terminate.

As one of the roshei yeshiva at RIETS, Willig had the stature and halakhic authority in the centrist Orthodox world to draft such a document. No friend of feminism, Willig had been one of the famed “RIETS 5,” a group of five rabbis at RIETS that had issued a proclamation in 1984 outlawing Orthodox women’s prayer groups. Willig would not be accused by other Orthodox rabbis as pandering to the left-wing of Orthodoxy or to feminists.[74] Furthermore, in contradiction to his forebears who painted such agreements as dangerous inventions of those not sufficiently concerned with halakha, Willig presented the prenuptial agreement as being rooted in a centuries-old precedent, arguing that this should assuage the “reluctance of rabbanim to introduce innovations to the institution of marriage.”[75]

The Centrist Orthodox rabbinate quickly rallied around Willig’s prenuptial agreement, celebrating the agreement as an effective tool to reduce the number of agunot in America. One Orthodox rabbinic leader went so far as to call it “a light at the end of the tunnel” for the agunah problem. The RCA immediately adopted a resolution in June 1993 calling upon its members to utilize Willig’s or another rabbinically approved prenuptial agreement prior to performing any wedding, an act “which will aid in our community’s efforts to guarantee that the get will not be used as a negotiating tool in divorce proceedings.” The Orthodox Caucus disseminated copious information about the agreement, ultimately publishing a booklet in 1996 containing the text of the agreement and instructions for its use together with articles about the history of the agunah problem, the halakhic justification for the Willig prenuptial agreement, and a list of approbations for the agreement received from halakhic authorities in America and Israel. While a number of Centrist Orthodox rabbis since the 1970s had proposed the use of prenuptial agreements to help solve the agunah problem, many others had objected to such agreements as unhalakhic. The Willig prenuptial agreement ended all of these objections.[76]

Agunah activists greeted the news of what quickly became known as the “Willig prenup” with less excitement than did their rabbinic leaders. Although they were relieved that the rabbis were finally attempting to implement a more global solution to the agunah problem, they saw the RCA’s embracing of the Willig prenup as too little, too late. Pointing out that prenuptial agreements similar to Willig’s had been in use for years, they complained that rabbinic leaders were “the last to endorse the agreements.” Furthermore, like every solution implemented by rabbis in the twentieth century, they recognized that the Willig prenup was flawed in its ability to protect women from becoming agunot. Of course, like the Lieberman Clause, the Willig prenup was only helpful if the couple signed it. Even once signed, the goal of the agreement was not to get the woman her get, but rather to get the couple to appear before the Bet Din. Under the agreement, if the wife failed to appear to the Bet Din, or failed to abide by the Bet Din rulings, she forfeited her right to the “support payments” from her husband. Rather than ensuring that each woman who signed the Willig prenuptial agreement would receive a get, the agreement merely ensured that the couple would submit to the authority of the Bet Din, authority that had over and over again failed to help agunot. Additionally, like all the civil court solutions, the Willig prenuptial agreement would not assist women whose husbands had disappeared, had become insane or otherwise incapacitated, had no assets, or were wealthy and vindictive. Lastly, in order to enforce the financial provisions of the prenuptial agreement, a woman would have had to file suit in civil court, a process sure to cost her copious legal fees and a great deal of time. Rather than solving the agunah problem, the Willig prenuptial agreement merely ensured that the Batei Din would retain their control over Orthodox Jewish divorce cases, control that had done little over the past century to help agunot in America.[77]  

The Agudah, for its part, did not embrace the use of prenuptial agreements. Rather, it continued to insist on the efficacy of the 1983 New York Get Law and the use of social sanctions to assist agunot. Using the 1992 Get Law or the Willig prenuptial agreement to obtain a get required a woman to use the secular court system, something the Agudah was loathe to permit its members to do. Indeed, in 1993, the Jewish Observer published another article by Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, which warned readers that halakha mandated that they litigate all matters in the Batei Din, not civil courts.[78] The fact that women almost always fared better in terms of property division in civil court was of no concern to right-wing Orthodox rabbis. In fact, many right-wing Batei Din refused to hear cases if the woman had already filed suit in civil court. The end of the twentieth century saw few developments to assist agunot in the right wing Orthodox world.[79]

Conclusion

In the waning years of the twentieth century, the strongest champions Orthodox women had in their fight against becoming agunot were the civil courts. Throughout the century, Orthodox rabbis had failed to put forth effective solutions to solve the agunah problem, preferring to use the secular state apparatus resulting in solutions that were flawed and inadequate. In the wake of the decision in Schwartz v. Schwartz, Rivka Haut wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times saying:

The Orthodox rabbinate has abandoned the Torah principles of justice and compassion, persistently refusing to implement Jewish law appropriately and to provide true justice, leaving it up to the civil courts of this state to protect Jewish women and children. Perhaps the rabbis will now follow the model set by civil court judges and will utilize Jewish law in order to help those who abide by it.

Haut’s letter reflected the view of agunah activists and Orthodox feminists that a solution to the problem had not been achieved.  Although permitting an open dialogue about women’s rights ultimately forced the Centrist Orthodox rabbinate out of its passivity about the agunah problem, the solutions it implemented were flawed at best. The right-wing Orthodox rabbinate, by never opening itself up to feminist ferment, was able to offer up a largely ineffective law as its only solution to the agunah problem. In the end, twentieth century American Orthodox women, like their tenth-century forebears, were dependent on the non-Jewish world around them to protect them from get extortion and to save them from becoming agunot.  

            Tanakh lies at the heart and soul of Judaism. The Talmud and Midrash, Jewish philosophy and mysticism, and Jewish thought all find their deepest roots in the Bible. For millennia, Jews and other faith communities have been transformed by this unparalleled collection of 24 books. Tanakh is accessible and enjoyable to small children and to the most sophisticated scholars and thinkers. It is a singular privilege to encounter its sacred words, to engage with its eternal messages, and to be galvanized to greater ethical and social action and spiritual growth as a result of our study.[1]

            From the perspective of contemporary religious students of Tanakh, we have remarkable opportunities today. Scholars publish critical editions of our classical commentators so that we have access to the most accurate texts from our greatest teachers. Scholars discover and publish previously obscure rabbinic works, enabling us to broaden our understanding of the range of interpretation in the classical period. They also advance the field of biblical study in areas including, but not limited to, literary analysis, archaeology and history, and linguistics. The information readily available in books, online resources, and classes is breathtaking.

            At the same time, however, these opportunities also pose serious challenges to our enterprise. How do we balance this flood of knowledge and methodology with the fact that many scholars in the field are not Orthodox Jews and therefore bring their own assumptions and biases to their work? Are there means for sorting through which information and methodology is beneficial for our religious growth and which must be discarded or modified? Ultimately, the litmus test of success for our study of Tanakh is that it deepens our religious commitments and inspires us to greater ethical behavior. How do we shape the contours of this discussion to maximize those benefits and characterize that process with intellectual honesty and integrity?

When we learn and teach Tanakh properly, we convey a sense of holiness and reverence, coupled with respect for individuality and intellectual struggle with our most sacred texts and traditions. Tanakh has the singular ability to inspire and edify people of all ages and backgrounds. The potent combination of rabbinic commentary and contemporary scholarship enables our minds, hearts, and souls to complement one another in a holistic spiritual and intellectual experience. The maturation of sophisticated Tanakh study provides us with a system with which to navigate the complicated contours of scholarship and religious growth. Rabbis and educators have the immense responsibility to sort through available information, commentaries, and methodologies in order to steer the discussion for the benefit of the community.

In theory, the text analysis in the yeshivah and the academy could be identical, since both engage in the quest for truth. The fundamental difference between the two is that in the yeshivah, we study Tanakh as a means to understanding revelation as the expression of God’s will. The scholarly conclusions we reach impact directly on our lives and our religious worldview. In the academy, on the other hand, truth is pursued as an intellectual activity for its own sake, usually as an end in itself. There also are no accompanying beliefs in the revelation of the text.

The ostensible conflicts between traditional and academic scholarship have led some scholars, including several who identify with the Orthodox community, to conclude that traditional faith is incompatible with scholarship. This supposition has led some to reject traditional belief outright, or to radically redefine faith to make it compatible with their scholarly conclusions, or to radically reinterpret classical sources in an attempt to justify such paradigm shifts as being within tradition. These positions have led to counter-reactions in some Orthodox circles that adopt excessively dogmatic and restrictive positions to prohibit scholarly inquiry or peshat learning altogether. Both sides may be motivated by a profound and authentic religious desire to connect to God and the Torah, but they distort aspects of tradition and create dangerous and unnecessary rifts between us.

In Ad HaYom HaZeh, Rabbi Amnon Bazak, one of the bright stars at Yeshivat Har Etzion and its affiliated Herzog College, offers a sophisticated understanding of Tanakh and our faith axioms while simultaneously being fully open to contemporary scholarship. Addressing the fact that many in the Orthodox world disregard contemporary academic scholarship, Rabbi Bazak offers three reasons why such willful ignorance is inexcusable: (1) On educational grounds these issues are widely publicized, and therefore rabbis and religious educators must be able to address them intelligently. (2) Many of the questions are genuine, and must be taken seriously on scholarly grounds. (3) We often gain a better understanding of Tanakh with the aid of contemporary scholarship.

Rabbi Bazak’s central premise is that we must distinguish between facts and compelling tools of analysis, which must be considered in our learning; and the assumptions of scholars, which we reject when they conflict with traditional beliefs. Rabbi Bazak argues that nothing based on facts forces one to choose between faith and scholarship.[2]

The growing popularity of what Rabbi Shalom Carmy calls the “literary-theological” approach to Tanakh study has been transforming the way we approach our most sacred texts. This methodology demands a finely tuned text reading, along with a focus on the religious significance of the passage. The premises of this approach include: (1) Oral Law and classical commentaries are central to the way we understand the revealed word of God, and (2) it is vital to study biblical passages in their literary and historical context.[3]

Over the past two centuries, analysis of literary tools, comparative linguistics, and the discovery of a wealth of ancient texts and artifacts have contributed immensely to our understanding the rich tapestry and complexity of biblical texts. Much also has improved since the 1970s as a result of the literary revolution in biblical scholarship. After generations of dissecting the Torah and the rest of Tanakh, many Bible scholars have recognized that the Torah and later biblical books can be analyzed effectively as unified texts. Every word is valuable. Passages are multilayered. Understanding the interplay between texts is vital.

Great traditional scholars of the previous generation such as the authors and editors of the Da’at Mikra commentary series,[4] Professor Nehama Leibowitz,[5] and Rabbi Mordechai Breuer,[6] exemplified different aspects of how one could benefit from the information and methodology of academic Bible scholarship through the prism of traditional faith. Similarly, the prolific writings of leading contemporary rabbinic scholars such as Yoel Bin‑Nun,[7] Elhanan Samet,[8] and Shalom Carmy[9] are intellectually and spiritually stimulating, as they benefit from the academy while working from the viewpoint of the yeshivah.[10]