His kind of faith is a gift.

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

— Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen

I. Introduction: Proofs, Old and New

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. Gifts to the Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. What If Anything Do Religious Experiences Prove?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here I am not alone. Rowan Williams writes:

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

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

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

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

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

IV. Interlude: Epistemic Legalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. Swinburne et al.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. Conclusion: Making Sense of Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harder Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding a Path

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

[5]      Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 48b.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selective Spiritual Autobiography

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

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

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

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

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

Transformative Spiritual Experience

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

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

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

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

Spiritual Experience as a Primary Source of Truth in Orthodox Communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Introduction

The serious and very practical question of permitting fertility treatments in general and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in particular has been widely debated among Jewish circles in recent years.[i] Naturally, several opinions that surfaced were subsequently presented in a recent issue of a well-reputed halakhic journal.[ii] We feel, however, that there are a number of points pertaining to the discussion of sex selection within Jewish law that require further clarification. In this piece, we intend to facilitate, or at least initiate, the process of better understanding the moral minefield introduced by the advent of reproductive technologies.

Alleviating Initial Suspicions and Doubts

The arguments hitherto suggested were reminiscent of the debate of several decades ago when, in the summer of 1978, Louise Brown became the first child to be born via in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology. The onset and widespread use of IVF that soon ensued called into question a myriad of ethical, moral, and religious concerns. Some religiously affiliated individuals were quick to voice their opposition to IVF, calling attention to the possibility for mistakes to occur behind the closed doors of fertility clinics and laboratories. Those who managed to document high-profile errors only exacerbated the uncertainty involved and contributed to the general unease of rabbinic decisors who were then beginning to grapple with the new and potentially problematic procedures.

As a result of the increasing ambiguity over the permissibility of assisted reproductive technology (ART), the Puah Institute—a leading Jewish fertility organization in Israel—instituted supervision services at fertility clinics and laboratories in Israel and across the globe. Puah arranged for a trained network of mashgihim (professional supervisors) to oversee the entire fertility process and workup. From initial treatments to eventual birth, the mashgihim ensured that all fertility-related procedures were conducted in strict accordance with Jewish law. As expected, rabbinic decisors followed by developing more lenient attitudes and adopting more permissive approaches in tackling the medical, ethical, and religious concerns incurred by ART.

This implementation of halakhic supervision, endorsed by rabbinic authorities and lauded by the Jewish community, is nothing less than a small revolution within medical-religious arena. A rather simple halakhic solution effectively changed both the perceptions and the nature of rabbinic rulings, thus blazing the path for future progress in similar areas involving an interface between technology and halakha. Rabbinic supervision proved reliable and consistent. Most significantly, it demonstrated that previous suspicions can be allayed with prudent precautions and thorough measures. This sort of pragmatic approach could also be part of a resolution in the case at hand.

Fear of the Slippery Slope

Some of the other opponents to ART were not so much concerned with the potential chaos of mistakes committed in the lab; their worry, instead, was of a more general nature—that is, the fear of the slippery slope. While virtually every innovative technology brings with it the potential for a slippery slope, it is unclear exactly what these critics feared. It could be sensed, however, that there was general unease in the air. Instead of laying claim to specific arguments and coherent propositions, this cohort of critics seemed merely troubled by the permissive atmosphere in and of itself.  They obsessed over the lenient positions being formulated in response to ART and worried that the momentum was heading in a ruinous and disastrous direction.

In one particular conversation with such a rabbinic decisor, he related that although  he had attempted to hold back the “tide,” the people had turned the tide and voted with their feet. In today’s society, he continued, there is very little one can do to change the scenario of infertile couples undergoing IVF and ART despite the initial opposition of certain rabbinic authorities.  The “tide” referenced here—and why its resistance to change was problematic—is ambiguous at best. Again, there appears to be general discomfort emanating from some authorities without any real, transparent arguments or rational explanations for dissent.

It is interesting to note that in a personal conversation with Bob Edwards (the British physiologist and pioneer of reproductive medicine who was instrumental in the first successful human IVF birth) I asked whether in the early days of IVF anyone had accurately conceived of the enormity and impact that ART would have in terms of reshaping our future conceptions of reproduction, procreation, and lineage. He replied in the affirmative, recalling that deep philosophical questions regarding fertility procedures were immediately raised, challenged, and analyzed from the very first drafted paper on the subject. We concurred in our approach to facing problems head-on, opening intellectual forums for reasoned and well-seasoned debate, and seeking necessary precuations to prevent sliding down the slippery slope. Preempting problems, experience continuously confirms, is always preferable to damage control.

There is a vital lesson not to be missed here. The fear of the slippery slope is a valid one. Leon Kass, an American bioethicist, once remarked: “Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.” Indeed, unchecked and unpaved territory is frightening, but only at first. With boundaries intact and cautious measures in effect, the fear and mystery that surround the slope begin to fall away. Human beings advance only through experimentation and trial and error. Humanity reaches great heights only by climbing the stairs, forging ahead, and taking the initial plunge. Had the slippery slope deterred scientists in the past century, many more once-infertile couples would still be yearning for children. If anything, the slippery slope helps to remind us of the important role that boundaries and borders play in our lives, but it ought not to limit and restrict the possibilities for great technological innovations. Our ability and success to create and innovate is far too strong to be curtailed by paying much attention to the argument of the slippery slope.

Obligation vs. Permission

In debating the merits of sex selection—that is, the in vitro selection of either a genetically male or female embryo for subsequent implantation into the gestating womb—there seems to be an unfortunate mix-up of two disparate issues, which are neither synonymous ideologically nor halakhically. On one hand, there exists the question as to whether a man who has children of only one sex is obliged to undergo some form of sex selection to ensure the birth of a child of the opposite sex. In other words, is the man who is commanded to “be fruitful and multiply” obligated to employ sex selection technology to guarantee that his offspring consist of, at minimum, one boy and one girl? On the other hand, there is a distinct question as to whether one is allowed to enlist for sex selection as a valid method of family balancing or for any other desired reason. That is to say, barring any sense of obligation, is one halakhically permitted to make use of sex-selection technology? These are two distinct questions that ought not to be intertwined; obligation connotes something entirely different from permissibility.

The Shulhan Arukh, the primary centerpiece of authoritative Jewish law, as well as other codes of normative halakhic behavior, do not sanction the notion of sex selection—but they do not expressly condemn it either. The absence of any imperative mandating the necessity to take any and every possible step to ensure both male and female sexes among one’s children strongly suggests that there is at least no obligation to undergo a process of sex selection. Therefore, a man with children of only one sex type (only males or only females) dutifully fulfils the mitzvah of peru u’revu.[1] While there were certainly no advanced technologies of sex selection during the lifetime of the author of the Shulhan Arukh, failure to make mention of any such obligation, even if only imaginably conceivable, is quite telling. Obligation may not be the case, but the option of permissibility cannot and should not be ruled out. Previous published matter on the subject, we note, demonstrated a weakness in investing far too much time and effort in the obligation aspect while neglecting to report on the equally, if not more significant, aspect of permissibility[iii].

In fact, in our clinical experience with dozens of couples seeking PGD for sex selection, couples rarely cite the biblical injunction of peru u’revu as an impetus to pursue sex selection. More often than not, couples generally elect PGD for sex selection for reasons entirely unrelated to halakha—be it of social, cultural, or personal preference. Some individuals, for example, express the existential need to have a boy or a girl as their sole motivation. Quite interestingly, and not surprisingly, some religious couples who desire a child of a specific sex have the faulty assumption that it is their absolute biblical duty to produce one boy and one girl through whatever means technologically feasible. Ultimately, they tend to forgo treatment upon hearing an enlightened version of the halakha and are pleased to learn that the halakha speaks in no place of a requirement to defer to sex selection as a means of securing both male and female children. 

Thus, the question of obligation is a moot point.  It is essential that these two aspects—obligation and permission—be separated and filtered out before the application of appropriate halakhic principles. The focus of discussion must shift from obligation to permission in analyzing the use of PGD for sex selection. Of course, when extricating this or any other halakhic inquiry, the approach should be one that assumes permissibility unless demonstrated otherwise. The burden of proof then lies on the shoulders of those who utterly dismiss and disallow the procedure of sex selection. So, what are the halakhic prohibitions, if any, against sex selection?

Jewish Medical Ethics vs. Medical Ethics

It is worth mentioning the following brief points of comment. In the series of articles that appeared in the journal Tradition, one of the articles made reference to widely accepted Western ethical considerations and principles. Although Judaism as a whole accepts, welcomes, and identifies with the major ethical principles (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) that govern medicine in the West, there certainly come times when normative Jewish thought and law diverge with classical secular ethics. Such dilemmas, for example, arise particularly in the form of life-and-death decisions that conflict with a patient’s autonomy.  Jewish medical ethics most drastically differs from secular medical ethics in its source of validity and working methodology. Jewish ethics, along with its other commandments, laws, and statutes have their source and validity deeply rooted in the divine, as expressed in the biblical and oral law. In addition, Jewish law strongly adheres to precedent as a basis for formulating a stance in each situation. Whereas secular ethics searches primarily to apply the same major recurring ethical principles to any given scenario, Jewish medical ethics places a large emphasis on evaluating each situation independently, and only then applying the most applicable and appropriate principles, as grounded in Jewish literature. 

Is IVF Dangerous?

Some opponents of PGD for sex selection opine that this procedure is dangerous and therefore unquestionably forbidden according to Jewish law. Indeed, the Torah is very concerned that one must distance oneself from harm and even potential danger. Yet, it has been clearly demonstrated that there is almost negligible danger involved with PGD. The small magnitude of risk associated with PGD is most similar to the risks of IVF (and studies actually show that IVF risks are more commonly linked with the underlying causes of infertility rather than with the procedure itself). Dr. Abraham Steinberg, pediatric neurologist and author of Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics, suggests that crossing a street is statistically more dangerous than any ART procedure and, not shockingly, street crossing has yet to be outlawed.

It should be noted that Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook originally sought to forbid traveling in cars for purely recreational purposes. He considered “joy rides” to be dangerous and buttressed this claim by pointing to the staggering rates of injuries and fatalities caused by automobile accidents. Rabbi Kook only ruled that driving was problematic, however, if it served no teleological reason. His ruling did not extend to instances beyond recreational driving; he outright permitted purposeful driving, even if unintended for fulfillment of a Torah obligation, so long as it was within the framework of normative human behavior.

If the risks of IVF and PGD are indeed comparable to those of pedestrian street crossings, as initially proposed by Steinberg, then we could reasonably assume that ART poses too minimal a danger to ban its meaningful efficacy and success rate. Some may be quick to retort that IVF is unique since it is performed with the intention to fulfill the biblical duty of procreation and, as such, any potential danger may be more immune to warrant prohibition.[2] But it is unclear if one may technically fulfill the commandment of procreation via ART. If IVF is not an acceptable form of carrying out the commandment of procreation, the argument goes, then we might be left with the inclination to forbid both IVF and PGD procedures.

It is widely accepted, however, to permit the use of IVF despite possibility of associated risks. The underlying reason for this allowance brings us to our next point concerning sex selection.

The Definition of Illness

It is fair to say that ART is an elective process. Halakhic technicalities may prevent us from characterizing the outcome as a fulfillment of procreation, and thus the element of risk enters into the equation more potently. There is still ample reason, however, to permit ART despite its elective nature.

The majority of contemporary rabbinic decisors do allow IVF and other methods of reproductive medicine. This touches upon the very notion of how we define illness in the first place. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”[iv] This definition has not been altered since 1948 and has survived accusations that “the perfect definition of health espoused by the WHO is Utopian and removed from reality.”[v] Some posit that the WHO’s version of health is more a definition of happiness than of health.[vi] Understanding the implications of “health” is essential since the manner in which we choose to visit health directly affects our perception of illness.

Is there a unique Jewish or a halakhic vision of illness? Various talmudic sources point to illnesses that come with different degrees of severity and with distinct definitions. The sick person is generally obliged to study the Torah and obey the vast majority of commandments. There are some examples, however, when the ill individual is exempt from religious duties. The sick are exempt from sitting in the sukkah on the holiday of Sukkoth and from the requirement of appearing at the Temple before God on the festivals. Additionally, an ill person is exempt from standing in the presence of a Torah scholar and from donning the ritual tefillin.

Interestingly, the halakha actually differs in its depiction of the ill person from one source to another. The ill person exempted from the sukkah need not be dangerously ill and extends to one “who is in no danger, even if he has a pain in his eye and a headache.” This exemption is derived from the nature of the condition to “dwell in the sukkah as one would dwell in his own house” (“Teshvu k’en taduru”). The ill person who is exempt from trekking out to Jerusalem for the festivals is one who cannot walk.

The ill person who is permitted to remain sitting before a learned scholar is either one who is entrenched in his own pain and unhappiness or one who is lying on his or her deathbed. The ill person who is exempt from tefillin refers to an individual with digestive difficulties (there are other opinions that suggest that general suffering due to any illness exempts one from tefillin due to the impossibility of proper attention and mindset).

Clearly, considerations for defining illness are specifically dependent on the sort of obligation in question. It is also evident that a life-threatening disease or debilitating medical condition is not a necessary condition to exempt an ill person from the abovementioned commandments.

Elsewhere, in a discussion regarding someone who is terminally ill, Maimonides relates: “One who has a headache or a pain in his eyes, leg, or hand is considered to be well for all matters connected to his business dealings. But, the ill person whose entire body is weakened due to his illness or someone who cannot walk outside and is confined to the bed is called a shekhiv me’ra.” Here, Maimonides presents a scenario of an individual who experiences discomfort and mild pain, but whose condition is not sufficiently severe to classify as an illness.

The WHO’s somewhat deficient definition and the above cited halakhic sources indicate that even something as seemingly simple and basic a task as defining illness is more complex than first meets the eye.

In a past article, we explored the opinions of several rabbinic decisors that perceive infertility as an illness. Beyond the physiological incapability of naturally conceiving a child, infertility is often accompanied by serious psychological distress and insecurities. Thus, illness is not merely defined in physiological terms. The halakha sympathizes, empathizes, and acknowledges the internal frustration of the infertile individual and/or couple. Accordingly, psychological distress and discomfort account for a condition to be regarded as an illness within Jewish law.

This mental and emotional pain—indeed, a natural component of coping with the reality of not being capable to conceive naturally—serves as the primary basis to permit this elective surgery and others like it. Though there is no medical necessity, elective surgery in halakha is often grounded in justifications that highlight the relevant psychological factors. Despite lack of medical necessity, there is room to permit virtually any surgery that would alleviate serious psychological suffering (assuming there are no external contraindicating reasons and/or significant possibility of harm in electing the surgery).

Is Sex Selection Permitted in Cases of Psychological Pain?

Sex selection via PGD could likewise be rendered permissible. Most couples that opt to undergo the sex selection process do so because of psychological reasons.   Before outright sanction of sex selection, it might be worthwhile to establish guidelines to determine when and to what degree psychological distress or desire warrants its use. But, then the tricky question obviously becomes: who and how can one adequately determine what amounts to sufficient psychological pain to permit an elective treatment? May parents experiencing an extended period of secondary infertility undergo ART?

Searching for a similar precedent, the Talmud (Shabbat 50b) discusses a man’s removal of a bodily scab. The rabbis debate if this practice is a strictly female activity that would be forbidden for males as a corollary to the general prohibition of men wearing women’s clothing. The Talmud concludes that it is forbidden to remove a scab as a method of beautification (an activity associated with females), but it is within the confines of halakha to remove the scab in order alleviate suffering or pain. The Tosafot commentators question what sort of pain is necessary in order to allow the removal of the scab; does embarrassment of presenting oneself with a scab on the face qualify as “pain”? Tosafot emphatically answer in the affirmative, even going so far as to insist, “there is no greater pain than this” in reference to psychological pain. Emotional pain and psychological stress cannot go unnoticed and unacknowledged. What one experiences as shameful and embarrassing might not register as such with another individual. This fact only tells us that emotions and psychology could be subjective and personal. Indeed, psychological pain may be highly subjective, but is real and valid nonetheless.

This subjective aspect becomes apparent from some clinical cases that Puah has helped mediate. Among the scenarios were the following cases: a kohen who needed a sperm donor and was absolutely unwilling to undergo the procedure unless guaranteed future anonymity (i.e. by selecting for a girl), a woman suffering from depression after having three children of the “wrong” gender, and a couple who had six children of the same gender and were desperate to conceive a child of opposite sex. Invariably, upon presenting these cases, there is always at least one person in the audience who will argue that it is our duty to convince such parties that it is not so terrible not to have a child of the other sex. Skeptics suggest that the kohen must come to terms with revealing the truth of a sperm donation in the case of a male child, the woman must seek psychological help to convince her that having another child of the same gender is not the end of the world, and the couple must accept the reality and plausibility of conceiving a seventh child of the same sex. In a word, critics claim, such individuals must suppress their inner worries, tensions, anxieties, and pressures. Life is fine and elective PGD for sex selection is uncalled for. Seek therapy, work it out, and get over it.

What these critics and naysayers fail to grasp, however, is that our own personal intuitions, or anyone’s individual feelings, are totally irrelevant here. In light of the Talmud’s depiction of shame and embarrassment as a legitimate form of pain, we must recognize that anguish and distress come in all different sizes, shapes, and colors. Where pain—any form of pain, be it physiological or psychological—could be lessened, we must strive to do so through rational and scientifically available means. It is far too easy to quickly dismiss someone’s situation as trivial or petty. It requires a certain degree of fortitude and integrity to see one’s pain for what it is and to acknowledge one’s distress as duly legitimate. Humans do not experience pain equally. Some hurt a little more, others a little less. What makes humanity great, however, is its ability to breed two drastically disparate individuals who nevertheless understand and acknowledge each other’s personal, yet equally genuine, concerns and emotions.

Conclusion

Artificial reproductive technologies, and PGD in particular, call into question numerous moral and halakhic issues. As science continues to innovate and discover, it is vital that the Jewish community not veer away from grappling with the challenges, if any, posed by new reproductive techniques. Instead, we ought to embrace the challenges and engage in meaningful dialogue. For some, it is tempting to brush aside modern technology and cast it as antithetical to the letter and spirit of Jewish law. Through serious research and scholarship, however, more often than not it becomes clear that Judaism invites and welcomes technological and scientific advancement. As we have hopefully demonstrated, there is ample room within Jewish law for permitting the practice of sex selection through PGD.

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

by Laura Shaw Frank

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

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

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

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

Girls’ Education in Germany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girls’ Education in Eastern Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions for Today

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

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

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

During the spring semester of 2011 I was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill in Barbados lecturing on Brazilian Culture and researching Caribbean film. The opportunity also allowed me to study a subject that has interested me since high school, the outcome of the Sephardim who left Portugal for the New World.  In addition to Barbados, I wanted to visit the communities on two other islands, Curaçao and Jamaica, and see the famed sand floors of their synagogues. As a Portuguese scholar fascinated by the Judeo-Spanish tradition, I sought to find out if these languages were still used in the services or spoken by descendants of the early Sephardic settlers.  Intrigued by the history of colonization, I asked myself which European power allowed the Sephardim the most freedom religiously and economically, and how that may have affected their situation today. Having grown up in the Midwest where intermarriage was common, I also wanted to see how the Caribbean Jewish communities addressed this issue. Ultimately, I wondered if the Sephardic experience on the islands offered a key to the overall survival of Jews in the Diaspora.

Though an Ashkenazi Jew by heritage, my interest in Sephardim stems from being a high school exchange student in São Paulo, Brazil. At the age of sixteen I went to live with a family in South America’s largest city. Their origin, however, was Recife, Pernambuco and I discovered later that they had chosen me because they thought they were descendants of Jews who had lived amongst the Dutch. They were excited to have me in their home and always treated me with respect, asking question about my faith though they had not practiced it for centuries.

After college, where I became fluent in Portuguese, I returned to Brazil and traveled to the Northeast where I visited the area known to have been the first Sephardic community in the Americas. At the time, the synagogue on Rua Bom Jesus (Good Jesus Street) had not been restored, nor its mikvah excavated. Still, I was amazed at how the visit spurred in me the desire to trace the path of the Sephardim both to their source in Iberia and then to the New World.

My formal education intertwined perfectly with my project. As a graduate student doing a dissertation in Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison I earned my first Fulbright Scholarship to go to Portugal in 1994-95.  Though my official research was on the Lusophone or Portuguese African Diaspora, during my time off I went around the country looking for signs of the Sephardic Diaspora. A regular at Shabbat morning services at the main synagogue in Lisbon, Shaarei-Tikvá, I became friends with a Scottish Jew who took me to Belmonte, one of the only villages that has practiced a form of Secret Judaism for over 500 years. I was amazed by its history, especially the importance of women in maintaining rituals within the home as synagogues were prohibited and men could not openly show their faith. I learned that the community had first been breached in the early twentieth century by a Russian miner who happened to be in the region and discovered that the Belmonte Jews considered themselves to be the only Jews left in the world.  Only when he said the Shema did they believe that he, too, was a member of the faith. I wondered how the Belmonte community survived for so long under the harsh threat of the Inquisition. They lived in a very isolated region of Portugal, the Beira Alta or Upper Beira that was hard to reach. They pretended to eat the foods that non-Jews ate by making recipes using chicken instead of pork. The “alheira” or garlic sausage was one such delicacy eaten in the region. Most of all, they regulated the community through marriage. Sometimes people of the same family would marry—such as first cousins, though there may have been even closer connections such as uncles and nieces. As a result there were birth defects that I actually saw during my visit.

In addition to Belmonte and the synagogue in Lisbon I traveled to the Alentejo, Portugal’s southern breadbasket. There I visited places that no longer had a living presence but rather street signs such as “judaria” where the Jews were once forced to live. Overall, I found that few people in Portugal knew much about Jewish ritual or religion, rather that many who had names linked to flora and fauna may have been descendants of New Christian. After nearly a year living in Iberia I, too felt a little isolated as a Jew and looked forward to leaving.

I did not forget my experience searching for remnants of a Sephardic past in Portugal, and though I eventually earned my doctorate and moved to New York, my interest in learning more about their journeys continued. In the fall of 2010 I presented a paper in London on nineteenth century Sephardim of Great Britain, then two weeks later flew to Singapore to lecture on the Jews of India.

By the time I left Barbados to start my teaching and research, I was exhausted and looking forward to the opportunity of living in the tropics . Before arriving on the island I had learned that there were two synagogues, both Ashkenazi. On my first Friday night I went to a hotel and asked if they had any information on religious services. The concierge immediately put me in touch with Rose Altman, who at 88 was the oldest member of the Jewish community. She had all the information I needed regarding the synagogue and even more about the people who attended it. I learned that during the hot summer months people went to a house that was turned into a synagogue for practical reasons—it had air conditioning. In the winter some of the community, now numbering a few dozen families, and tourists many from cruise liners, go to the newly renovated Sephardic synagogue, Nidhe Israel or “the Scattered of Israel.”

My first Kabbalat Shabbat service was memorable.  I entered a thick gate and walked past two buildings, one I learned was a state-of-the-art museum dedicated to the history of the Sephardim and the importance of sugar cane, a crop brought over by the Jews of Recife. There was also a mikvah that actually has a spring fed well. I noticed two cemeteries, with neatly arranged gravestones lying horizontal on the ground. Looking closely I could see that the headstones had inscriptions in a variety of languages; Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew and English. Carved cupid figures and hands chopping down trees adorned some of them. When I saw people moving into the synagogue, I went in, too, looking for the women’s section. After seeing men and women sitting together, I sat down on a wooden bench and admired the building. The interior was beautiful, with a grand reader’s desk in the middle of the room with four pineapple shaped carvings symbolizing the tropics. There was a balcony, though it went unoccupied. An Israeli man in his mid-40s led the Conservative-style service and afterwards there was a small Oneg Shabbat in the back.  A couple of women served cake and soda, greeting the members and guests.

Over time I got to know some of the Barbadian Jews, the pride they felt towards the synagogue as well as the difficulty they had maintaining the community.  The structure was refurbished in 1987 on the site of a synagogue originally constructed in 1654 and rebuilt after it was destroyed by an 1831 hurricane. By the second decade of the twentieth century there were no longer Sephardim left on the island and the synagogue was closed, its religious articles sent to England in 1929. In the 1980s the post-colonial government wanted to use the property for a courthouse but Paul Altman, a descendant of the Polish Jews who had arrived on the island in the 1930s, led efforts to preserve and renovate it. Though the ancient artifacts were never returned from London, there are several Torahs in the Ark and the community is relieved that its future on the island is secure. The building has also become a major tourist attraction bolstered by the Barbados National Trust that gives lectures on Sephardic history and leads tours around its grounds. Yet, those who actually attend services know that fewer and fewer members show up. Intermarriage is considered a major problem and over the years it has broken up a few families. As a result, children are often sent overseas to boarding schools, usually in England or Canada, with the hope that they will find a Jewish spouse. But it does not always work because those raised on the islands sometimes feel more of a kinship with non-Jews in the Caribbean Diaspora and end up marrying outside the faith to the dismay of their parents.

The second island I visited was Curaçao in the western Caribbean.  I had just received an extension on my scholarship to attend a Caribbean Studies conference in Williamstad and it offered a wonderful opportunity to see the Sephardic synagogue there. Getting from Barbados to Curaçao in the Lesser Antilles islands was not easy and my “island hopping” by way of Trinidad took hours. But the trip was well worth it. Curaçao was so much different from the former British island I was living on. First of all, the climate was arid and instead of palm trees and green brush, there were cacti everywhere. The architecture of Williamstad, the capital, was colorful, lining an inlet crossed by a moveable pedestrian bridge. 

I went to the Sephardic synagogue, Congregation Mikvé Israel-Emanuel twice during my stay on the island. The first time I visited a museum that was in the courtyard of the synagogue.  It proudly displays religious artifacts that had been used by the community through the centuries. There is also a memorial to George Maduro, a young man who went to Holland to help fight the Nazis in WWII and was killed in Dachau near the end of the war. Molds of gravestones saved from a large cemetery affected by the acid rain from a nearby oil refinery line the outside walls. They feature some of the same carvings as the headstones in Barbados though one had a hand with four fingers split reminiscent of a blessing by a Cohen. In addition to the permanent collection, there was a recent exhibition, “Keys to My Heritage”, featuring keys that were saved by Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition.

A few days later I went back to the synagogue to attend Shabbat services. Walking into the stately synagogue, dating back to 1732, I was amazed by its mahogany interior, blue stained glass windows, and sand covered floor. I thought about the reasons given for the sand—to remind us of the years the Israelites spent wandering in the desert or the attempt to muffle the sounds of prayer in fear of the Inquisition. As in Barbados I looked around to see where I should sit and noticed that there were women seated alongside men. Joining them, I took a prayer book and began to follow along. Though the people around me spoke accented English and Dutch, the rabbi sounded as if he came from the United States and at one point during the Torah service read a prayer in broken Portuguese. I was surprised to hear the language that I had studied since high school. After nearly four hundred years the Caribbean Sephardim did not forget the idiom spoken by their ancestors in Iberia. After the services there was a celebration for the children who had just finished another year of Hebrew School. Taking turns, each child, both girls and boys, climbed to the reader’s desk and gave thanks to their teacher for another year of learning. I was impressed by the fact that there was a school catering to the next generation, though small in size.

Once the service was over, the congregation gathered in a community hall across the courtyard. There was a Kiddush and people talked to one another about the upcoming summer. I asked a few people some questions regarding the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel and learned that it was a combined congregation of two synagogues that had split during the mid 1860s when the Reform Movement was sweeping Judaism in Germany and the United States. Decreasing membership led the two to join together in the 1960s using a combination of traditions from both.  The Sephardic community went through another, more extreme change in 2000 when it became egalitarian allowing women to participate in services and sit alongside the men. Not all were in favor of this and some joined the Ashkenazi synagogue on Curaçao, Shaarei Tzedek.

My visit to Curaçao made me think of the difficult choices that Jews everywhere make to continue their traditions. Combining synagogues and deciding which prayers to keep or omit during a service was not easy. Nor was the decision to become egalitarian, a move that divided the community and is still an issue for discussion. Yet people still revere their heritage and invest in the next generation’s education. One of the major concerns they have is intermarriage and a majority of children study abroad in the Netherlands, England or the United States. As in Barbados, this does not ensure that they will marry Jewish, but at least they will have a greater opportunity to do so given that the community numbers around 115 households or 350 members.

Once I returned to Barbados, the last trip I planned in my Sephardic Caribbean sojourn was Jamaica. Having received an invitation to visit the island from Ainsley Henriques, a leader of the Jamaican Jewish Community who I had met at a conference in New York, I decided to go in July. Jamaica, like Curaçao fascinated me because I had heard that it still had a Sephardic “essence” to it as opposed to Barbados that had become completely Ashkenazi aside from its synagogue building. Going to Shabbat services in Kingston, however, showed me how the traditions could evolve with the influence of different colonizers and peoples. For example the synagogue itself, Shaare Shalom, is a large, white colonial style building with sand floors. People of various ethnicities worshiped together in a style that to me was reminiscent of the British Protestants who once ruled the island combined with what Mr. Henriques described as “Sephardic liturgy and music”. After services there was a Kiddush and I noticed that the attendees were somewhat older, though some were accompanied by grandchildren from abroad. As Mr. Henriques gave me a tour of the museum that also serves as a community center, I looked at photos of earlier community presidents from a different era. Now, only 200 Jews are affiliated with the United Congregation of Israelites though it is quite active for its size. There is a Hebrew School, Hillel Academy, as well as a home for the aged, synagogue sisterhood and B’nei B’rith. A new rabbi was hired in September 2011 and international groups help maintain the nearly 23 cemeteries around the island.  The United Congregations of Israelites is also committed to educating both visitors from abroad and local Jamaicans about the Jamaican Jewish heritage. Each year hundreds of school children visit the center to learn about the important contributions made by Jews to the island country.

My time on the islands ended in August and since then I have thought a great deal about my visits to Barbados, Curaçao and Jamaica.  I traced the remnants of the Sephardic communities from Portugal to Brazil to the islands imagining the difficulties they must have faced as they tried to survive. What I found was that there was something in common—something that Jews everywhere could learn from.  First of all, numbers matter. A community will have a difficult time surviving if its members leave en masse or completely assimilate into a host nation. In the case of Barbados, the entire Sephardic population had disappeared by 1929 either through intermarriage or emigration to other countries such as Canada and Great Britain. Curaçao and Jamaica have both seen their young go abroad and not return or marry non-Jews. Secondly, rifts between synagogues need to be put aside in order to stabilize the population. In the case of Curaçao, decreasing numbers forced the communities of Mikvé Israel and Emanuel to join together after a century-long split, though the decision to have egalitarian worship prompted some members to leave the community once again.  Jamaica also formed the United Congregations of Israelites. A third factor is the education of the young. Both Curaçao and Jamaica have Hebrew schools for their children and though they may leave when they reach high school or college age, their children will have a Jewish identity.

In conclusion, for Jewish communities to remain viable in the Diaspora, a minimum population committed to education and cohesiveness is essential, though outside factors such as politics and economics may ultimately affect the conduciveness of some locations.

We are confronted daily basis with choices that require us to consult others before making a decision. We may call a lawyer for advice on a legal issue or an accountant for advice on our taxes. We do this because although we may be very good at what we do, no one person knows everything—and it is helpful to be guided by a professional who deals with the issue at hand on a regular basis. If one has a sink that is leaking or an electrical outlet that is malfunctioning, one might ask an electrician or plumber for advice, and will likely follow the advice if it sounds reasonable. When it comes to issues regarding our health—and specifically issues that have significant impact on life-and-death situations—we likely consult with a physician.

 Interestingly, in serious medical situations, many observant Jews will seek a consultation with a rabbi for advice as well, to ensure that the medical decision they are making is in accordance with Jewish law and ethics. Jewish law is based on the will of God as transmitted through the Bible and understood by our sages. Therefore, all decisions a Jew makes must be in accordance with this law. The law, however, can at times be ambiguous or difficult to apply to modern medical issues. We try our best to extrapolate from what was written by our sages, which often leads to differing views on what Jewish law would prescribe in different medical situations. It is surprising however, that even in situations where the vast majority of rabbis are in agreement with what the law should be, the vast majority of laypeople believe otherwise. This is not because they disagree with the rabbinic judgments; rather it is often because they are unaware of them. Rulings on medical issues do not get published in everyday books that are found in the synagogue, and rumor becomes the most efficient medium to spread incorrect concepts.

 In my practice, I have noticed three possible causes as to why a patient may receive improper advice from his or her rabbi regarding medical decision-making. It is important to note that I have had many positive experiences with the interaction between rabbi, doctor, and patient; however the cases below are meant to illustrate the times the system fails. Although the current system often does work, and provides an excellent service to both doctors and patients, there are still too many times when it does not. The purpose here is to evaluate why some situations are not handled properly and how we can learn from our past mistakes for the benefit of the Jewish community in the future.

The first issue is simply not knowing the law. Often, what the general public believes to be the law, is not actually the law. Consider the following scenario: A Jewish man is in a car accident and is brought to the hospital and placed on a respirator because he is not breathing on his own after hitting his head. The remainder of the body is intact, his heart is still beating, blood is flowing through the veins and all organs are functioning well. A neurologist performs an exam and determines the person to be brain dead. The doctor recommends removing the respirator and all intravenous fluids and sustenance, which will inevitably cause the breathing to stop, leading to cardiac arrest and the death of the other organs. If one took a poll of the general community, one would likely find that many people incorrectly believe that according to Jewish law this person is still alive and the machines cannot be turned off. Most rabbis have accepted that brain death is equivalent to death in Jewish law and that in this case the machines should be turned off. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel (both Ashkenazic and Sephardic) has therefore legislated it into Israeli law and once brain death is determined, all medical intervention should cease, despite a continuing heartbeat, and the body should be buried as soon as possible (ASSIA – Jewish Medical Ethics, Vol. I, No. 2, May 1989, pp. 2–10). The only intervention permissible at this point would be to harvest the viable organs. Leaving the brain dead body on a respirator or continuing to manipulate the body with medical intervention is considered disrespectful to the body and is against Jewish Law. (Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 339:1) It is unclear to me why, although the majority of rabbis have ruled one way, many of lay people believe the other. This often leads to a situation when in an attempt to follow Jewish law, one will actually be transgressing the law by simply not knowing the ruling of the chief rabbinate and going on assumptions based on what popular opinion says the law is.

A second problem that arises is when we seek a rabbinic consultation and are only presented with one view of the law and are advised accordingly. When seeking a consultation, one not only seeks the opinion of the person they are consulting with but often expects to be informed of different opinions on the matter and then advised based on the personal views of the consultant. This holds true in many fields of consultation. However, when seeking a rabbinic consultation, rabbis often present the law based on one view without presenting the other opinions available. At times this advice may be following only one view of the law while differing from the majority view. In medicine, there are times when there is disagreement among the experts regarding the best treatment. A responsible doctor will present both sides to the patient and may even explain why he personally believes one view to be preferable to the other. But it would not be appropriate to present the case as having only one solution that all agree on. The same holds true for rabbis. If there is more than one acceptable opinion on the matter, the person who is coming for a consultation expects to be given all the information available. This is especially true when a rabbi gives advice based on a sole opinion, which disagrees with that of the majority. Even if the rabbi chooses to follow the view of the minority position, he should at least inform the patient that there is a majority view that disagrees.  This situation usually arises when most people know of the minority view and it is therefore easy to accept when told to them by the rabbi as it conforms to what they in any case thought to be the law. An example of this situation is the issue of abortion. Again, if one were to poll the average Orthodox Jew on the acceptability of abortion in Jewish Law, the majority would plainly state that the fetus is a life and it is therefore forbidden to terminate the pregnancy according to Jewish law. Some may go so far as to state that it may even be tantamount to murder. Although this is the correct Catholic view, it does not accord with Jewish law. There is essentially no sage that suggests that the fetus is considered a life and aborting it would be considered murder. This would mean that if that were the case, then someone would deserve the death penalty for performing an abortion, since there would be no difference in status before or after birth. In actuality, none of the early sources of Judaism from the Bible through the Mishna and Talmud make any mention of forbidding abortion. On the contrary, it seems from the Torah that if one caused another women to abort against her will, he simply pays a fine (Exodus 21:22). This is not to say we encourage wholesale abortions at anytime in pregnancy for any purpose, but the majority of rabbis do allow abortions in early pregnancy (some allow within 40 days of conception which is the equivalent of about the eighth week of pregnancy while others allow up to three months from conception which is about the 15^th week of pregnancy) for a host of different reasons including medical or psychological stress and the need to abort after a rape or adulterous union. Again, the chief rabbinate of Israel, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, follow the majority view and have ruled as such in Israel. Interestingly, Rabbi Eliezer Waldenburg, a highly respected Ashkenazic rabbi has allowed abortions even in the seventh to ninth month since there is no real source within Jewish Law for only allowing it up to 40 days or three months (Tzitz Eliezer 13:102). These are arbitrary numbers that do not have any significant biological basis. With this introduction one can understand how problematic this can become should someone get improper advice from her rabbinic consultant. Imagine the young girl that is raped, or the married woman who was raped or had an affair that becomes pregnant and goes to her rabbi for advice. I have seen cases of rabbis that advise her that she must continue the pregnancy since abortion is a transgression of Jewish law and hence the will of God. Without providing all the information, this young girl will now have to care for this child her whole life and will always be a reminder of the horrible way she conceived. The married woman will give birth to a mamzer who will be forbidden to marry an ordinary Jew. All this could have been avoided if the woman simply had received the proper consultation.

We see similar problems when dealing with the issue of abortion for a baby with a genetic malformation. Many rabbis have permitted abortion in these situations; even if it is not assured that the baby will be born with a defect but only has a high probability of that likelihood. Different rabbis have varying opinions about when and under what circumstances an abortion is permissible. The most lenient view is that of Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli (Amud Hayemini 32). He permits abortion to prevent potential psychological stress to the mother or the potential child. He goes so far as to rule that even if the sole problem is a genetic malformation that will only affect his looks, an abortion is permitted as it may cause others to look at him in such a way that would produce psychological stress. He states that there is no greater pain than this and he reminds us that in Jewish law, emotional pain is considered even more serious than physical pain. This is very different from the view held by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Although Rabbi Feinstein recognizes the importance and need for premarital testing for Tay Sachs, he unfortunately, did not go one step further. He does write that when one's health is potentially in danger, and a genetic test can avert or alleviate that danger, the test must be taken. He therefore discourages carrier couples from marrying since this will lead to a 25 percent chance at each pregnancy of having a child with Tay Sachs (a debilitating progressive disorder that gradually leads to loss of mental and physical function, and at the peak of the symptoms the child goes blind, has seizures, and suffers in a hospital bed as the parents look on helplessly). This is why he appropriately supports premarital testing and admits the need to avoid giving birth to a child with Tay Sachs. However, situations have arisen where premarital testing was not done, or where testing may have been done but the couple felt a strong desire and commitment to each other that they decided to get married in any case. In these situations, the must make a choice on how to proceed with childbearing. They can risk having children with Tay Sachs, or they can opt to perform prenatal testing while the mother is in early stages of pregnancy, so that if it’s found that the baby has Tay Sachs they can abort the pregnancy, within the appropriate time frame as defined by Jewish law, thus saving the future child and the family from this pain. Rabbi Feinstein ruled that families in this situation must go through with the pregnancy, thereby creating a child that is destined to pain and suffering. This ruling seems to contradict his usual mode of requiring us to use medical technology in order to preserve and improve quality of life. What is most surprising is that according to traditional Judaism there is no law against performing abortions even on a healthy baby found in any of the early sources of Jewish law. Rabbi Feinstein forbade the abortion not on legal grounds, but on philosophical grounds. He felt that we are not in a position to play God, and we can always hope for a miracle that this baby’s genes will somehow miraculously change and he will not have the disease. This is again surprising as it seems to contradict what we know from the Talmud, that in general we do not rely on miracles and specifically in pregnancy we are taught by our sages that a baby’s genes cannot change and therefore it is improper to pray for the gender of the baby once this has already been determined (Berakhot 60a, Shulhan Arukh Orah Hayyim 230:1). Rabbi Feinstein also allows and even requires one, to “play God” when it comes to other areas of medicine and treatment, but mysteriously not in this situation.  

In addition to this philosophical issue, Rabbi Feinstein defends his position based on a mystical tradition. According to one view, a soul cannot achieve complete perfection until it has been placed in a body and has been born. In order to assure that this fetus’s soul (if it has one) is able to enter the world to come, Rabbi Feinstein requires a mother to carry the pregnancy to term. Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg took issue with Rabbi Feinstein in a heated written debate (Tzitz Eliezer 14:100). He argued that we do not even know if that mystical concept is correct as it is just one opinion, and that even if that were correct, who gave us the obligation to assure that every soul is born and goes to the afterlife, or even the right to purposefully continue a pregnancy that would ultimately lead to the pain and suffering of the future child and the family? It should be noted, that although, Rabbi Waldenberg allowed abortions in situations such as these even into the ninth month of pregnancy, most rabbis have adopted stances allowing abortions only in the first trimester at various time points. There is no rabbi that has forbidden abortion outright in all circumstances. Although the Catholic religion did forbid abortion in all circumstances as they deemed the fetus a full human life, it is clear that Judaism has never held this approach, as the fetus does not have full human status before delivery. Since the fetus is not an independent human life, and is simply a part of the mother, it should be treated as any other body part that is ill and requires surgical intervention. It is common knowledge that finding the best possible mate is a difficult task. With Rabbi Waldenberg’s approach, even if we discourage Tay Sachs carrier couples from marrying, we at least do not have to ban it completely, and in circumstances where the potential marriage is beneficial for the couple, we are able to allow the marriage and still prevent suffering of future offspring. Again, we can now understand the situations that have arisen where a woman was pregnant with a Tay Sachs baby and went to her rabbi for a consultation who only informed her of Rabbi Feinstein’s view without disclosing the other opinion.

Another common problem is when a rabbi is consulted regarding issues he may not be familiar with and/or may not have full knowledge of. A scenario that has occurred in my practice several times is when a rabbi is consulted and he does not seek out or is not interested in having all the information. As an example, a child has ADHD and has significant difficulty in both his Judaic and secular studies to the point that he is failing and is not progressing academically. This often leads to poor self-esteem and lack of self-confidence. In a situation such as this I have recommended a trial with a stimulant medication that has been found to effectively correct the chemical imbalance, thereby allowing the child to succeed academically. In addition to academic improvement these children typically improve their overall quality of life. This is secondary not only to their improved education but also to improved confidence and self-esteem. These children are sometimes quite impulsive and can often experience physical injury due to their symptoms as well. The decision on whether or not to treat is done only after fully evaluating the child and receiving information from several sources, including the school, on how these symptoms are affecting this particular child. One such patient’s mother subsequent to the medical consultation, called a rebbe in Israel for a religious consultation on whether she can administer the medication to her child. Not willing to discuss the situation with the doctor and without personally knowing the family, the rebbe felt comfortable forbidding the woman from using the medication. This is unfortunate for the child who continues to fail in school and to have a dangerous level of impulsivity, and who has poor social interactions and growth due to these symptoms. Had the rabbi understood better how the disorder is affecting this particular child by getting to know him, through interactions and dialogue with the child’s teachers, family, and physicians, the rebbe may have been able to come to a more comprehensive ruling that takes into account all the factors involved. In another instance, the same rebbe approved a child in a similar situation to take the same medication. The rebbe did not know or meet either child, and yet made medical decisions on their behalf.

One of the most common medical questions asked of rabbis regards circumcision. One such question pertains to possibly delaying the circumcision due to jaundice. The common decision among rabbis and mohalim is to delay the circumcision based even on moderately elevated levels of bilirubin and jaundice. There is no medical reason to delay the circumcision in these cases and one is therefore delaying the circumcision, in these situations, unnecessarily. Medically, circumcisions are done routinely in these situations without adverse events, and there is therefore no justification to delay the circumcision. Within this category, is also the question of metzitzah. In brief, after the circumcision is complete, there is a tradition that the mohel sucks some blood out from the incision site. For convenience this was done with direct suction from the mohel’s mouth without a barrier. This procedure was done for medical reasons that are no longer valid. On the contrary, it is currently medically beneficial not to perform this procedure at all, especially without a barrier, as there is risk of infection from the procedure. This is especially true in situations where the mohel may be infected with the herpes virus and may transmit this to the child. Unfortunately, doctors are rarely consulted prior to the procedure, and rabbis are asked to make the decision on whether this procedure should be performed and how it should be performed. Without the proper precautions, we have seen many cases of children being infected and developing seizures. This is sometimes a permanent condition caused by this procedure. It seems ironic that a procedure that the rabbis instituted to protect our children, is now having the opposite effect; yet rabbis who are not trained in the specialty of infectious diseases can not make a sound decision without consultation with an expert in the field.       

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            In the modern world we are very concerned and are careful regarding who we consult regarding our physical health decisions. When we have a general concern we are comfortable asking our local general practitioner physician for advice. However, when we have a specific concern we would never only consult with a generalist but will make every effort to ask a specialist in the field who deals with those issues often. Even with all that, we will often still seek a third or fourth opinion from other respected specialists in the field who have proven their depth of knowledge in the subject. Unfortunately the vast majority of people do not afford the same importance to their religious and spiritual decisions and well-being. Similar to physicians, we have many generalist rabbis who have made a career around helping the masses. They are available for all general religious needs from attending a circumcision to attending the funeral. These rabbis are much needed and fill an important role in the communities’ lives. Some work from the pulpit, some as teachers in our schools, and some simply offer advice in their free time from whatever other career they are simultaneously pursuing. However, these generalist rabbis cannot be expected to be experts in every single area of Jewish Law and ethics. We expect too much from our rabbis. Even in the time of the Talmud, we find statements of rabbis admitting they are expert in the laws of isur v’heter (forbidden and permitted matters) but not hoshen mishpat (financial law) for example. The semikha system developed at that time even incorporated different examinations for the different categories of Jewish law. There were three general categories at the time: laws for daily living, business law, laws regarding permitting first-born animals (these are known as Yoreh Yoreh, Yadin Yadin, and Yatir Yatir). Rabbis would only advise people in areas of law within which they received their certification. Today, just as the body of knowledge in medicine has made it impossible to master every area in depth, the same holds true for the rabbinate.

In addition to the Bible and Mishna, which the rabbis of the talmudic period had to be experts in, we have 2,000 more years of literature that rabbis need to be knowledgeable about when making their rulings.  In addition to this enormous body of religious literature, before rendering a decision, the rabbi needs to fully understand the medical, financial, technological, etc. issues at hand at well. It is almost impossible for one person to be able to master all this in a lifetime, especially with today’s rapid advancements in science and technology. How can a rabbi decide laws regarding Internet transactions on Shabbat without a complete understanding of the intricate details of the network and the way the financial transactions occur, even if he were a full expert in Jewish business law? Today that is simply not enough. How can a rabbi decide if a genetically engineered fruit or animal can be kosher without having both a deep understanding of kosher laws, and of genetic engineering? Similarly, how can a rabbi make a decision regarding euthanasia, brain death, organ transplantation, genetics, abortion, medical Shabbat laws, and so forth, without having a full mastery of biology, physiology, and the physics and technology that comprise the respirator, the heart-lung machine, the electroencephalogram? It is simply not reasonable or appropriate to expect all this from every generalist rabbi.

One option is for a rabbi to have available a group of experts he trusts in certain fields who also have a strong understanding of Jewish law and whom he can consult when needed. An ideal option that has emerged is specialist rabbi. Many rabbis have taken upon themselves to become specialists in a particular field. There are rabbis who are particularly knowledgeable about Jewish law regarding end-of-life issues, transplant issues, medicine on Shabbat issues, bankruptcy law, Jewish law regarding technological issues, and so forth. Unfortunately the majority of community members will approach their generalist rabbi with all these questions, leading to an answer, which at times may produce unintended and unfortunate consequences. People would rarely go to their generalist physician for a consultation regarding their advanced-stage brain tumor. It would be inappropriate to expect a complete answer from the generalist. Rather the generalist should refer the patient to a neurosurgeon and/or neuro-oncologist for the proper advice. We should treat our religious health with at least the same level of importance and expectations, and when dealing with a specialized issue, a specialist rabbi should be consulted.

            One such example that is often encountered is prenatal testing for Duchene Muscular Dystrophy. Duchene is a devastating disorder in boys that begin as healthy children, but by toddler years have difficulty walking, by teenage years require the use of a wheelchair, and by their late teens require use of a ventilator for respiratory support. This condition leads to death in early adulthood. Throughout this period of motor and physical decline, the patients are cognitively intact and have a full understanding of what is in store for them. This disorder is caused by a genetic mutation on the X chromosome. Every father has one X and one Y chromosome, while every mother has two X chromosomes but no Y chromosome. The sons will all inherit the Y chromosome from their father and either of the mother’s two X chromosomes, while daughter with all inherit their father’s X chromosome and either of the mother’s X chromosomes. When a child has a mutated X chromosome in a certain region, this causes Duchene Muscular dystrophy as described above. These boys rarely have children, as they die so young. Girls however have two X chromosomes, so that even if one is defective the other can almost completely compensate for it. Therefore an adult woman may be a carrier of the disorder, yet can still lead a full healthy life (possibly with some mild weakness). When a couple give birth to a child who is found in early childhood to have Duchene Muscular Dystrophy, she will be counseled that half her male children (the ones that inherit the defective X from her) will have the disease, while the other half will be healthy. In addition, half her daughters will be carriers (the ones that inherit the defective X from her) like she is, and will be in the same situation as she is when they get older. The parents at this point have to make a serious decision that affects the remainder of their life. They can either not have any more children (and this decision is very different for a couple where the first child was found to have Duchene compared to when it is their fourth child) or to continue building their family. If they continue to build their family they have a 25 percent chance of giving birth to another son who will have the disease (and suffer and die young) and a 25 percent chance of having a daughter who is a carrier and will have to make these same decisions in adulthood.

One option available to them is to perform genetic testing during the early stages of pregnancy to determine if the fetus is a boy or a girl and if it has the defective chromosome. This affords the parents the option of aborting the fetus in the early stages of pregnancy and then trying again. This will lead to a healthy family that can continue to grow and fulfill their dreams and religious and spiritual goals. Although this last option appears to be the most obvious choice for many, it is highly underutilized in the Orthodox Jewish community. The main reason for this is the issue described in the prior paragraph. When facing this decision, the family will often ask either their local generalist rabbi or in some communities the rebbe of the entire community for advice and guidance. These rabbis are then expected to make these decisions and rulings without a complete understanding of the situation, the medical information and technology available, all the Jewish laws involved and the overall ramifications of their decisions on the family. Some of the worst cases I have witnessed included a family that was aware of the diagnosis, but was advised by their rabbi that they have a religious obligation to procreate no matter what the situation and must simply have faith in God. This unfortunately left the family with three affected sons, two carrier daughters, and two healthy children. To make matters worse, the eldest sister was not informed of the family genetic condition and was married without informing the groom. They had two affected children before she came to a neurologist, where she was finally informed of the genetic situation, and that all the suffering that her two children would go through over the next 20 years could have been easily avoided, had her mother received the appropriate advice from her spiritual leader. Luckily this young woman was more open to help, and I was able to show her that using current technology, she can be tested in such an early stage of pregnancy that would allow her to abort the affected fetuses within her acceptable window for early abortion.

 This true event is only one of dozens in which I have been personally involved, and there are obviously many more in which I have not been involved. It is unclear to me (as the rabbi refused to discuss the issue despite my sincere effort at a respectful discussion) why this particular rabbi, and others make such unfortunate decisions in these life-changing situations. It may be that they are not experts in the laws of abortions, where the vast majority of rabbinic authorities allow at least early (first trimester or 40 days) abortions in these types of situations; it may be that they misunderstood the situation and its ramifications caused by a lack of communication with the physician; it may also be a lack of familiarity with modern medical breakthroughs that are literally occurring daily, that they were not able to come to a more sympathetic decision. How many people have asked their rabbi for advice but were referred to a specialist rabbi instead? It seems to occur very rarely. It is human nature for the rabbi to feel the pressure of coming up with the solution to the problem himself. Many doctors behave the same way and will try to answer a patient’s questions to the best of their ability, even if they are not experts in the field. This is simply human nature. What is important is not whom to blame, the laypeople for expecting too much of their rabbi, or the rabbis for not referring the laypeople to a specialist rabbi. Rather, the important issue at hand is how to fix a broken system that doesn’t want to be fixed. Rabbi Yosef Caro ruled that someone who is not an expert in a particular field is not permitted to give medical advice or treatment—and if he does he can be considered a murderer (Yoreh Deah 336:1). The Aruh haShulhan adds that according to halakha, one must be licensed in the field of question and approved by the state (in whichever governing body has jurisdiction) to offer such advice. These rules apply to doctors and all the more so to rabbis who may not have such training or certification.

At what point do we decide to stand up to our leadership and demand a better system? How much suffering must continue in vain before we fix this broken system? There is a current concept based on a misunderstood passage in Pirke Avoth that is held in high regard, which is “Ase Lekha Rav,” make for yourself a rabbi (Avoth 1:6). This is commonly understood today as stating that every Jew must pick one rabbi and always follow that rabbi. It is considered inappropriate to ask another rabbi other than your own, a question of Jewish law. This is absurd and has never been the way our ancestors operated. This new rule, of only asking one rabbi every type of question, is not founded in halakha. Even the rabbis of the Talmud understood that some rabbis had expertise in business law, agricultural law, marital law, etc. and specific rabbis had differing authority based on their area of expertise. Why is it that we expect a rabbi who may have not even studied basic biology to understand the intricacies of complex genetics? The majority of doctors, who went through rigorous medical training, still do not comprehend cutting-edge medical genetics. It wasn’t until 1953 that Watson and Crick famously described the structure of DNA and it wasn’t until many years later and even until very recently that we are beginning to understand how to test and manipulate genes. My grandfather, Dr. Albert Moghrabi, for example, a first-class physician, studied in medical school in the 1940s, prior to the discoveries of Watson and Crick. Although he is an expert in general medicine and has kept current in his knowledge of genetics, he admits not to be an expert in genetics and would refer to a specialist for genetic counseling.

It is important to realize that there is no one that is “at fault” here. Both the rabbis and the community want what is best for our physical and spiritual health. However, it is the current system that is failing, as it is not structured to keep up with developments of modern life. I believe the best way to address these issues is to have the rabbis, laypeople, and doctors sit down together to openly discuss ways to fix the system. It can’t be stressed enough that the problem does not stem from the rabbis, the laypeople, or the doctors. Rather, it stems from the defective interaction between these three groups that leads to the problems mentioned above. As a start, one possible solution may be to publish a book listing both generalist and specialist rabbis in different fields so that one can easily be referred to the appropriate authority who can handle the question for which they are seeking guidance. This is a simple and effective way to help both the community, and the rabbis that are being asked questions that are outside their expertise. Doctors can also use this resource to direct their patients to appropriate authorities, and rabbis would also have a resource open to themselves to assure what they are doing is in accord with Jewish law. Many doctors already have a specialist rabbi that they consult; this would provide a list of rabbis in different specialties as well. This may also lead to training programs where rabbis are specifically trained in different fields of medicine so that they can have a better understanding of the situations they are being asked to advise. It would be helpful to have some rabbis attend a neurology clinic, or a cancer clinic, or an intensive care unit once per week or for a six-month training period. We need the appropriate leaders to organize this with our local hospitals and yeshivot. For every case mentioned above where there was inappropriate advice, I can name ten cases where the interaction between the rabbi, the patient, and myself was invaluable. In many of these high-stress situations, open dialogue with rabbis complements the medical treatment by encouraging and supporting the patient from a religious standpoint. This engenders more confidence in the doctor and the treatment leading to better outcomes for the patient. Without a rabbi’s involvement, a religious patient may be scared and untrusting of the modern treatments. A rabbi who has the medical knowledge and spiritual leadership can support the treatment and the patient in ways the doctor never could. It is time that we demand the same level of treatment of our religious and spiritual well being that we demand for our physical and medical well-being. In this time of health care reform, it is appropriate to look into rabbinic care refinements as well.

When exploring certain topics in the Talmud a discussion can be opened by use of a particular verse from which a principle that underlies an entire subject is learned. For example

…
Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥmani introduced this passage with an introduction from here… (Megillah 10b). 

This approach came immediately to mind while reading Rabbi Hayyim Angel’s new book, Keys To The Palace: Exploring the Reglioius Value of Reading Tanakh from Kodesh Press. This work consists of twenty essays from Rabbi Angel on a variety of topics ranging from academic Bible study, to the afterlife, to perspectives on several of the Psalms. What cuts across and unites the work is Rabbi Angel’s mastery of Tanakh and his courageous pursuit of pshat. 

Perhaps I should back up a bit to provide some context. Having been a product of more right-leaning Yeshivot, for years I had lamented my lack of having a good grasp of nach. Fortunately, I recently stumbled across what I would term a revolution in the teaching and learning of Neviim and Ketuvim in a serious way, for adults. One of the pillars at the center of this movement is Rabbi Angel. 

The current work provides the reader with an entree into this world by offering numerous and variegated keys throughout these essays, which have been culled from a number of other works or scholarly publications, into parts of Nach and matters germane to academic Jewish studies today. Each chapter stands on its own, though several reference common topics, such as David’s taking of Batsheva.   

Each essay serves as a key to the topic at hand. In a few short pages Rabbi Angel poses powerful questions, covers the responses of many of the traditional and non-traditional sources, and provides a helpful summary and concise endnotes. The essays are too brief to be exhaustive of the topic, but instead whet the readers curiosity to learn and explore further.  

In his even-handed presentation of how to approach and incorporate academic and non-Jewish sources into the traditional study of Tanakh, Rabbi Angel exposes the reader to some of the towering and influential work that has been generated in Israel and, outside of the scholarly community, may not be well known to the English speaking audience.  

Perhaps as an inversion of Maimonides aphorism to accept the truth from whatever source it comes, Rabbi Angel rejects unconvincing solutions, no matter who proffers them. The author provides many viewpoints on a question and discusses the relative strengths and weakness so that the reader has a clear understanding of where the truth lies.  In his search for pshat and the most reasonable explanation the author presents Tanakh unvarnished,  and in so doing challenges the reader to think deeply, appreciate nuance, and continue to seek the “keys to encountering God in his Palace”.

(Rabbi Hayyim Angel's book can be purchased through the online store at jewishideas.org)

Amazingly, Jews have flourished for nearly

two thousand years in many different lands without having a

central authoritative institution of halakha. In spite of differences of custom

and emphasis which have arisen among different groups of

Jews, the essential unity of halakha was preserved. To this

day, every Jew who adheres to halakha shares in a truly

remarkable historic, religious, sociological, spiritual and national

enterprise.

Some individuals have called for

the establishment of a new Sanhedrin in our times. They

would like a revival of a central halakhic authority for the

Jewish people. The Sanhedrin would not only provide unity

in halakha, but would re-institute the original methodology

of the oral law--interpreting the Torah itself, applying the

law to life with the freedom to overrule precedents and previous

decisions.

One of those calling for a Sanhedrin was the Sephardic

Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi BenzionUziel (1880-1953). In a

speech delivered on 12 Kislev 5697, he called for an authoritative

rabbinic body along the lines of the Great Court of

Jerusalem.[1]  He viewed this effort as a continuation of the

work of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zaccai, who had been instrumental

in establishing a quasi-Sanhedrin in Yavneh following the

destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.

Rabbi Uziel believed it was the responsibility of the

rabbinate to work to achieve this goal. Rabbis are delegated

the responsibility of establishing mishpat, justice. This refers

not only to cases between contending individuals, but also to

public issues, questions of taxation and communal needs. By

working for a Sanhedrin, the rabbis will be working for a

unifying force in Jewish life. Rabbi Uziel argued that one who

simply knew how to rule on what is permitted and what is

forbidden ,or on who is guilty and who is innocent is not in the category of being a posek, a decisor

of halakha. This person is known as a talmid or talmid hakham,

 a student or a wise student. To be a posek, however,

involves having the power of the Great Court. Only the Sanhedrin

can serve as a real posek. "The responsibility of the

Sanhedrin was to clarify and distinguish between true interpretations

(which are true to the spirit of the Torah) and

casuistic interpretations (which are erroneous). "[2]

Rabbi Uziel writes that the posek draws conclusions

from the Torah and the words of the prophets, as well as from

the traditional oral law. "The posek in Israel is not bound by

precedents of the posek who precedes him. If he was,

this would lead to great damage, in that an accidental error

would be fixed as a permanent halakha even though it was

erroneous in its foundation. In order to avoid this harmful

eventuality, the authority of the Great Court was restricted

only to the time in which it sits on the chair of judgment. But

the decisions of the Great Court are not established as law and

do not obligate the judges who will come after them to judge

and to teach like them. "[3]

Rabbi Uziel was deeply impressed by the work of Moses

Maimonides and believed that he deserved the title posek.

Maimonides worked to make the laws of the Torah known to

the general public. In his comprehensive code of Jewish law,

Maimonides recorded the halakha anonymously, to signify

that it represents a consensus, not just the opinion of individuals.

He not only gathered his material from all rabbinic

literature, but he also derived benefit from the teachings of

non-Jewish thinkers. "In this matter, by the way, Maimonides

has informed us that in halakhic decisions one must

comprehend all things on the basis of their content and truth,

and not on the authority of their authors alone. Maimonides

taught a great principle: Accept the truth from those who

have stated it. "[4]

In order to restore a central authority for halakha, Rabbi

Uziel urged: "Let us arise and establish the Great Court in

Jerusalem not in order to judge cases of fines, or capital

cases and not in order to permit the firstborn because of its

blemish. Rather, let us do so in order to solve the questions of

life which confront us each day in our settlements and in our

world, and in order to create a beginning for our destined

redemption: 'And I will return your judges as in the beginning

and your advisers as formerly; for out of Zion will the

Torah proceed and the word of God ·from Jerusalem.' ''[5]

Until a Great Court is re-established in Jerusalem, the

halakha is taught by leading rabbinical sages who draw on

the vast rabbinic literature which has developed over the past

several thousand years. There are variations of opinion on

details of halakha; different sages rule differently: yet, the

halakhic process continues to provide the framework for

religious Jewish life. In order for a sage to be recognized as

authoritative, he must not only have great erudition; he must

not only be personally observant of halakha; he must also be

fully faithful to the idea that halakha is the expression of the

will of God to the Jewish people. Halakha, therefore, must

be taken seriously on its own terms.

A Sephardic Approach To Halakhah[6]

Without a Great Court in Jerusalem, it was only natural

that different approaches to halakha developed among various

Jewish communities during the past nearly two thousand

years. Customs and practices varied from place to place and

from time to time. Attitudes towards halakhic study also

differed. Certainly, the basic assumptions of the divinity of

the Torah and the authority of halakha were accepted: but

differences in style definitely did exist among religious Jewish

communities throughout the ages.

Two major streams of Jewish tradition are the Ashkenazic

and the Sepahardic. Ashkenazim (Ashkenaz means Germany

in Hebrew) primarily lived in Europe. In the Middle

Ages they were concentrated in France, Germany and Italy;

gradually, the centers of Ashkenazic Jewry shifted to Poland,

Russia and Eastern Europe in general. The common feature of

these communities is that they existed in Christian countries.

They were included within the orbit of Western civilization.

The Westernization of these communities was intensified

during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when