National Scholar Updates

“It’s All Relative: The Contemporary Orthodox Jewish Family in America”

by Chaim I. Waxman

(Chaim I. Waxman is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Jewish Studies, Rutgers University, and lives in Jerusalem. He specializes in the sociological study of Jews and Judaism, including, America’s Jews, Orthodox Jewry, Jewish identity and identification, Israeli society and culture, and Zionism. He is the author of numerous books and articles.)

I recently received an inquiry for an interview from a journalist who was writing a story about the Orthodox Jewish family. The interviewer assumed that Jews “used to live together in one place for generations in previous generations,” and was interested in “what changed and why.” Although I should be used to it by now, I am regularly struck both by the prevalent assumptions about the idyllic nature of the Jewish family in Eastern Europe and by the assumption that the imagined Eastern European Jewish family is the model of the “authentic” Jewish family.

All too frequently, discussions of “the Jewish family” are based on the assumption that there is one single model of that family and it is typically that of the stereotypical Jewish family in Eastern Europe. Actually, there is no one single model of the Jewish family. From as early as 598 b.c.e., Jews have been and continue to be “a nation spread out and separated among the nations.” In every society that they have dwelled, Jews acculturated to one degree or another and internalized cultural patterns from the larger society. That is a major source of the differences in the traditions of Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Jews from North Africa, Asia, and so forth, and between those of the various groups among all of them. Hence, the Polish Jewish family was different from the German Jewish family, the German was different from the Turkish, the Turkish from the Moroccan, and so forth. (This raises an interesting and important question that cannot be discussed here, as to whether one can speak of “Jewish culture” and even “Jewish identity” as if there are such things when there are actually different Jewish cultures and different Jewish identities.)

            One more point about many discussions of the Jewish family, is the tendency toward nostalgia, to romanticize “good old days” that, in many ways, as the late Prof. Nathan Goldberg would consistently remind his students at Yeshiva College, were actually not so good at all. Nor were most Jewish families there like the stereotypical large, extended family in which people married young, were cared for by parents and in-laws while they had many children, and all of the extended-family members lived near each other and shared warmth and bliss.

            Shaul Stampfer, for example, rejects the notion that the Eastern European family was patriarchal. As he convincingly demonstrates, women had active and independent roles in economic matters; very many if not most wives worked to help support their families; and wives made the most important daily decisions for the family, including what household items should be purchased; disciplining children; and finding spouses for the children (“How Jewish Society Adapted to Change in Male/Female Relationships in 19th / Early 20th Century Eastern Europe,” pp. 65–84 in Rivkah Blau, ed., Gender Relationships in Marriage and Out, Orthodox Forum 17 New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2007). He likewise shows that the age of marriage among Eastern European Jews rose during the nineteenth century, and rose even more significantly during the inter-war years of the twentieth century (“Marital Patterns in Interwar Poland” pp. 173–197 in Yisrael Gutman, ed., The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press, 1989). If that is not enough, evidence also indicates that there was a high level of divorce in Eastern Europe traditional Jewish society.

That having been said, I turn now to the American Jewish family, in general, and the American Orthodox Jewish family, in particular. (I omit any discussion of the frequency and impact of intermarriage, as that topic is beyond the scope of this article.) Until recently, evidence indicated that, although Jewish men and women in the United States married somewhat later than non-Jews, this was not a reflection of a declining significance of marriage and family for Jews. Jews were more likely than non-Jews to eventually marry, less likely to divorce and remain divorced and, at almost every age, a lower percentage of Jews than non-Jews were either previously married or widowed. The most recent evidence questions whether the Jewish values of marriage and family remain as strong as they were. According to the 2008 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life/U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the gaps between Jews and Christian white Americans have narrowed and, in some cases, are non-existent. Thus, on the one hand, the percentage of people who are divorced/separated among Jews (9 percent) is lower than that of Mainline Protestants (12 percent), Evangelical Protestants (13 percent), and Catholics (10 percent). On the other hand, the percentage of married people among Jews is the same as for Mainline Protestants (57 percent), but lower than Catholics (58 percent) and Evangelicals (59 percent), and the rate of never-married among Jews (19 percent) is higher than that Mainline Protestants (15 percent) and Evangelical Protestants (14 percent) as well as Catholics (17 percent).

            At least since the nineteenth century, Jews in the United States have had lower birth rates than those of non-Jews. Jews marry later, want and expect fewer children, have the most favorable attitudes toward contraception, and have been its best practitioners. Data from various studies show that U.S. Jewish families today have fewer children than the minimum necessary to maintain group size, that is, zero population growth.

            That being said, it must be stressed that, primarily because they are such a small percentage of the U.S. population, most surveys of American Jews do not distinguish between the various wings or denominations within American Judaism and the American Jewish population, and there are almost certainly significant differences among them on all of these issues and more. Indeed, the Pew Religious Landscape Survey did indicate differences between Reform and Conservative Jews, and their data indicated a higher rate of marriage for Reform (61 percent) than for Conservative (53 percent) Jews, but higher divorced/separated rates for Reform (11 percent) than for Conservative (7 percent) Jews.

We have very limited data generally for Orthodox Jews in the United States because, among others, their numbers are so small, relatively, and many of them are reluctant to reply to surveys and interviews. The U.S. census is unhelpful in this respect because it has no religion question and, thus, we can’t even get data for American Jews in general from it, let alone for the Orthodox segment. The 2001 National Jewish Population Survey did contain a reasonable sample of Orthodox Jews, and those data indicate a significantly higher marriage rate, a lower divorced/separated rate, as well as a lower single/never married rate than those of Conservative and Reform Jews. Since Orthodox Jews marry at a higher rate and do so at a younger age, it is not surprising that they are more likely that the non-Orthodox to have children age 17 or younger living in the household. Over one-third (34 percent) of Orthodox Jews have a child living in the household, which is more than double the rate of the non-Orthodox. In terms of future denominational trends, it is especially notable that the Orthodox are considerably younger than the total American Jewish population; about 40 percent is comprised of children, as compared to 20 percent for the non-Orthodox. More than half (52 percent) of all American Orthodox Jews are younger than 45 years of age, as compared to 44 percent for the total American Jewish population. All of these figures reflect a continued strong emphasis on marriage and family formation among the Orthodox. Unquestionably, there has been an increase in divorce among the Orthodox. However, the absence of divorce, especially in previous decades, was not necessarily an indication of a stable and healthy marriage. In any event, the Orthodox divorce rate is still significantly lower than that of the non-Orthodox.

Needless to say, not all Orthodox Jews have strong marriage and family values, nor do they manifest them in the same way or even positively. We do not have hard data on spouse abuse for either the broader American Jewish community or for the Orthodox community, Modern or Hareidi and, in her study of responses to it in Hareidi communities, Roberta Rosenberg Farber (“The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox American Jewish Community to Wife Abuse: Social Change Within a Traditional Religious Community,” Contemporary Jewry 26, 2006, pp. 114–157) reports of professionals who believe that spouse abuse is as common among Jews as it is in the general population. Likewise, with respect to sexual abuse within families, Michelle Friedman reported of her study of over 400 observant Orthodox women in the United States and Israel (“On Intimacy, Love, Kedushah and Sexuality: Reflections on the 5th Annual YCT Rabbinical School/Community Yom Iyyun in Conjunction with Congregation Ohab Zedek,” Milin Havivin 2, 2006, p. 187), “Sadly, we found the same statistics for sexual molestation and abuse of girls and teens as in the secular population.” Neither Farber and Friedman nor any other studies suggest that there has been an increase in either spousal or sexual abuse of minors within families among Orthodox Jews. What is significant here is that there is likewise no evidence of any decrease in either of these horrible sins.

            Be that as it may, there have clearly been American social and cultural changes, including technological changes, that have affected the Orthodox Jewish approach to family and family behavior. To begin with, sex is much more public than it was just several decades ago. Not only are words and scenes that were previously taboo on television now normal prime-time fare; the Internet has broken all barriers. There are no longer any taboos, and it is increasingly difficult not to be bombarded with pornography. Whatever one thinks of the freedoms of the press, the airwaves, and the web, they impact on religious behavior, especially for young adults. Some parents refuse to allow television and some refuse to allow the Internet into the home, while others implement various net filters, but none of these is fool-proof and nobody is immune. Of course, none of us was ever totally immune, and the Orthodox community is struggling to adapt as best as it can. It appears that the only ones who are talking publicly about the problem are those who have decided to completely ban the new technologies, but not too many appear to be following them.

One social pattern that is apparent, especially among the Modern Orthodox, is a growing tendency of later marriage. There has been a noticeable growth of singles communities such as the one in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem (which is the subject of the popular Israeli television series, Serugim) and on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. These communities raise challenges even as they resolve others. Some twenty years ago, Calvin Goldscheider pointed to the rising Orthodox divorce rate and suggested that the primary challenge is the potential religious alienation of the divorced individuals that results from their not being in families. Likewise, he pointed to the growing pattern of later marriage as challenging in that it results in increasing numbers of Jews who are rejected due to their unmarried status and become religiously alienated (Calvin Goldscheider, “Family Changes and the Challenge to American Orthodoxy: The Implications of Recent Social Science Data,” Tradition 23:1 (Summer 1987), pp. 71–81). The new Orthodox singles communities undoubtedly serve as a buffer against the religious alienation upon which Goldscheider focused, but on the other hand they may be making it increasingly acceptable and less inconvenient to remain single longer. The growth of these singles communities potentially challenges the Orthodox growth rate, and, assuming that there has been no significant change in libido patterns—I know of no studies indicating any such change—challenges ritual observance with respect to a number of sexual matters.

Abstinence from all sexual activity prior to marriage has been a Jewish religious norm for at least the past 2,000 years, and presumably, it was always difficult. Anyone who says otherwise has forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. Also, as was indicated, late marriage is not new, nor are some of the religious challenges it presents. What has changed is the frequency and openness of male-female interaction and, perhaps even more significant, the religious, ethnic, and sexual statuses of the males and females in the interaction. Their increased social and cultural equality often removes social-psychological barriers that prevented the development of intimate interaction. Today, those barriers are no longer supported externally and, thus, there appear to have been changes even among the Orthodox.

During the 1960s, Rabbi Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg was a very popular professor at Yeshiva College, and in an interview that appeared in the college newspaper, The Commentator, on April 28, 1966, he made some remarks that were interpreted by some as his advocating “a new value system and corresponding new halakhot about sex” for non-married as well as married men and women. This caused somewhat of a storm and, in the May 12^th issue, Greenberg wrote a lengthy letter to the editor in which he adamantly disavowed any such notion, clarified his views, and apologized for being insufficiently clear and precise in the interview. Despite his clarification, he was taken to task by Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein in his lengthy letter to The Commentator, in the June 2^nd issue. (I thank Menachem Butler for providing me with copies of those letters. This episode and the much broader Greenberg-Lichtenstein debates are astutely recounted and analyzed in David Singer, “Debating Modern Orthodoxy at Yeshiva College: The Greenberg–Lichtenstein Exchange of 1966,” Modern Judaism 26:2 (May 2006), pp. 113–126.)

In their mid-1980s study of varieties of Orthodox Jews, sociologists Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen (Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 173–179) found, across the range of Orthodox people they studied, “younger respondents consistently reported more indulgent attitudes toward the practice of premarital sex than their older counterparts”; that almost a quarter of those they labeled as “centrists” (not to be confused with what scholars at Yeshiva University term “centrist”; see David Berger’s highly critical review of the Heilman-Cohen book, Modern Judaism 11:2, (May 1991), pp. 261–272) do not disapprove of sexual relations between couples who are dating seriously, and as many as 40 percent do not disapprove for those who are engaged to be married; and that among younger centrists, only about half disapproved sexual relations for those dating seriously, and less than half disapproved for engaged couples. Although these figures reflect attitudes, it is hard to imagine that there was a highly significant gap between attitudes and behavior. The popularity of the expression “tefilin date” also apparently reflected a reality of otherwise observant Orthodox Jews who spent the night with their dates but prayed wearing tefilin the following morning.

Most recently, Zvi Zohar (“Zugiyut al-pi haHalakha lelo hupa veKidushin,” Akdamot 17 (Shevat 5767), pp. 11–33) argued, based on the opinions of Nahmanides (1194–1270), Rabbi Abraham ben David (Rabad, 1125–1198), and Rabbi Shelomo ben Aderet (Rashba, 1235–1310), as well Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697–1776) that there is no prohibition against sexual relations without marriage so long as the relationship is not illicit, that is, it is consensual and monogamous, and the woman observes the laws of niddah and mikvah. His thesis was strongly rejected (in the same issue of Akdamot) by Rabbi Yehuda Herzl Henkin, Shemuel Ariel, Mikhal Tikochinsky, and Rachel Shprecher Frankel. Despite their rejections of its halakhic legitimacy, sexual relations among the unmarried was apparently perceived to be significant enough of a phenomenon in the Orthodox and traditional communities that the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Yonah Metzger, issued a ban on allowing unmarried women to use mikvaot. The effectiveness of that ban is anyone’s guess.

Relatively recent technological developments have had significant impact on Jewish family life in that for the first time in history human beings can conveniently and effectively control reproduction. This has had major impact on attitudes toward sexual behavior, making it less threatening to the unmarried and those married who do not currently want to bear children. It also has fostered new medical techniques that enable previously infertile couples to bear children. With all of these developments, however, come a myriad of halakhic issues. One of the first and most controversial addressing the problem of infertility was that of artificial insemination.

Beginning in the late 1950s, concerning different types of artificial insemination—one in which the donor was Jewish, one in which he was not, and the third in which the husband was the donor—Rabbi Moshe Feinstein issued lenient rulings and was staunchly attacked by numerous opponents, including Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe. Since then, a body of literature has emerged not only on matters of fertility and halakha (see, for example, Richard V. Grazi, Overcoming Infertility: A Guide for Jewish Couples. New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2005, and all of the sources to which he refers), but also on the much broader question of the role of the posek, including the extent to which his own perspectives and sentiments, as well as social and psychological forces, have a place in the process of halakhic determination. With respect to the specific issue at hand, in his Masters thesis analyzing Rabbi Feinstein’s method of ruling in a series questions related to childbearing (“Rabbi Moshe Feinstein’s Rulings Regarding Questions of Fertility, Contraception, and Abortion,” Talmud Department, Bar Ilan University, 5766 [Hebrew]), Baruch Finkelstein argues that R. Moshe’s lenient rulings on artificial insemination “were motivated by his compassion for the infertile woman.” Going further, in an address at a conference at the Ramban Synagogue in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem, on the occasion of a the publication of a Hebrew translation of Richard Grazi’s book (Horut nikhsephet: Etgar haPiryon beMabat rephui veHilkhati. Jerusalem: Magid, 2009), Rabbi Benny Lau emphasized the impact of hashkafa on halakha, and he lauded the declaration by the rabbinic head of a leading fertility institute that, “There is no halakhic infertility,” and “We will go the entire route with this couple in order to resolve the problem,” as a leadership declaration. By contrast, in a review essay of the Grazi volume (“Technology in the Service of the First Mitzvah,” Ḥakirah, the Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought 6 (Summer 2008), pp. 259–267), Gideon Weitzman rejects the notion that compassion figured in to R. Moshe’s pesak halakha. He asserts that, for R. Moshe “and all other posekim,” it is halakha that influences their approach to ethical problems, rather than vice versa, and the halakhic decision is based on the careful analysis of the sources.

As indicated, the issue is much broader than that of infertility and artificial insemination. As I indicated elsewhere (“Toward a Sociology of Pesak,” in Moshe Z. Sokol, ed., Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy” Orthodox Forum 1, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992, pp. 217–238), there are those who argue that “authentic” or “pure” pesika is that which is rendered by a posek in a computer-like manner, solely on the basis of characteristics inherent to the specific case involved and impervious to psychological and/or social forces, while others see a role for those forces in the halakhic decision-making process. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “the Rav,” seems to suggest an intermediary position when he wrote,

. . . the mutual connection between halakha and an event does not take place within the realm of pure halakha but rather within the depths of the soul of the halakhic man. The event is a psychological impetus, prodding pure thought into its track. However, once it begins to move in its specific track, it performs its movement not in surrender to the event, but rather in obedience to the normative-ideal unique to it. . . To what is this comparable? To a satellite that was launched into a particular orbit. Although the launching of the satellite into orbit is dependent on the force of the thrust, once the object arrived at its particular orbit, it begins to move with amazing precision according to the speed unique to that orbit, and the force of the thrust cannot increase or decrease it at all.

The Rav’s approach has echoes of Max Weber and his approach to the place of values in sociological research, namely, that the sociologists’ values surely influence the choice of subjects whom they study. However, once the research has begun, the rules of scientific research take over, and evaluation is made solely on the basis of the empirical evidence. Value neutrality, in the sense of excluding one’s own preconceived values in the subject of one’s studies, is a cardinal requirement. Of course, anyone who has studied the social sciences knows that the goal of value-neutrality is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. We are, after all, human, and we are influenced in many ways of which we are unaware. Similarly, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein cites the Rav’s distinction between the “psychological impetus” and “pure thought” in the halakhic process and suggests, “It is a nice distinction, and I confess that I am not certain it can be readily sustained in practice.” (“The Human and Social Factor in Halakha,” Tradition 36:1 (Spring 2002), p. 12) it might be argued that Hazal recognized it’s unsustainability in practice, and therefore decreed that certain type of people, such as very old people, eunuchs, and the childless, should not be appointed as judges to a Sanhedrin. Maimonides (Hilkhot Sanhedrin 2:3) provides the reasons, namely, that very old people and eunuchs should not be appointed because they have a cruel streak, and the childless should not be appointed because the judge should be merciful. In other words, it was recognized that judges have an impact on “the orbit” of the law.

In an article published a year earlier, Rabbi Lichtenstein had already indicated the human element in the decision of the posek, and he averred that

A sensitive posek recognizes both the gravity of the personal situation and the seriousness of the halakhic factors. In one case, therefore, he may tend to view the points of contention in one way, while in a second case exhibiting slightly different details, he may tilt the decision on these points in the other direction. . . He might stretch the halakhic limits of leniency where serious domestic tragedy looms, or hold firm to the strict interpretation of the law when, as he reads the situation, the pressure for leniency stems from frivolous attitudes and reflects a debased moral compass. This approach is neither evasive nor discriminatory. The flexibility arises from a recognition that halakhic rulings are not, and should not be, the output of human microcomputers, but of thinking human beings; a recognition that these rulings must be applied to concrete situations with a bold effort to achieve the optimal moral and halakhic balance among the various factors. (Aharon Lichtenstein, “Abortion: A Halakhic Perspective,” Tradition 25:4 (Summer 1991, p. 12)

Abortion is another issue where the question of whether the perspectives of the posek have any influence on his halakhic decision-making came to the fore. To support his argument that a halakhic decision is immune to the perspectives of the posek, Gideon Weitzman (referred to above) cites as evidence R. Moshe’s pesak (Iggrot Moshe, Hoshen Mishpat 2 (1976), 69, p. 300), in which he rejects a more lenient pesak by Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg (Tzitz Eliezer 9 (1967), 51:3, pp. 239–240) and prohibited an abortion for a women carrying a fetus with Tay-Sachs disease. “Can we possibly claim that Rav Feinstein did not have compassion on those unfortunate couples who are both carriers of Tay-Sachs?” Weitzman asks. To him, it is obvious compassion had nothing to do with R. Moshe’s rulings on abortion, artificial insemination, or any other issue. Interestingly, Rabbi Benny Lau cited the same halakhic decisions of R. Moshe as well as that of Rabbi Waldenberg and their respective arguments as proof that the perspective of the posek does influence his halakhic decision. He argued that the reason R. Moshe took such a strict stance on abortion was to counter what he perceived as the larger social and cultural patterns in which abortion was becoming too commonplace. Indeed, in the final paragraph, R. Moshe explicitly states that he wrote the entire responsum in light of “the huge breach in the world that the governments of many countries have allowed the killing of fetuses, including Israeli heads of state, and countless fetuses have already been killed, such that at this time there is a need to make a fence (safeguard) for the Torah . . .”. In other words, under other social conditions, he might have ruled differently.

In line with R. Moshe’s wishes, though more as a result of greatly improved and much more widely used contraception methods, the number of abortions worldwide has decreased during the past decade and more. However, abortion is readily available and used in Israel and, more to the point, it has increased in the religious community there. Over the past decade, awareness of the possibility of abortion has increased in the religious community. According to estimates by several medical professionals, religious women don’t speak of it publicly but at least 70 percent of the religious women do an ultrasound to detect Down syndrome and, if detected, at least 90 percent have an abortion. For more serious defects, where the fetus will not survive, even Hareidi women will abort. Also, not all religious women, Hareidi and not, seek rabbinic advice; some decide on their own, as has always been the case. The difference, according to the head of the ultrasound unit of Hadassah University’s Obstetrics and Gynecology Department, is that there has been a revolution in the medical knowledge of rabbis. They now understand the complexities better, are more sensitive to all of the issues, and are better able to help the pregnant woman decide to abort. Prof. Simcha Yagel claims that religious women cope better with that difficult decision because they have religious authority assisting them with it. (Yifat Ehrlich, “Beten Meleia,” Dyokan Magazine, Makor Rishon, May 8, 2009, pp. 10–14).

The Internet has had impact on the entire area of halakha and Jewish family life with the introduction, especially in Israel, of a relatively new phenomenon: Internet responsa. Indeed, it is an interesting question why the phenomenon is so prominent in Israel and yet is relatively absent elsewhere. Perhaps it has to do with the differences in the nature of the role of rabbi in Israel and elsewhere. Also, Israeli Orthodoxy is more pluralistic because of the much wider ethnic mix there and because of the non-denominational character of Israeli Judaism.

Be that as it may, in Israel the Internet has dramatically altered the role of the rabbi, in a number of vital ways. The anonymity of those engaged in the discussion allows people to ask very intimate and demanding questions that they might not have asked if their identity was known. In addition, the limits of the community that a rabbi serves have been expanded from finite physical boundaries to almost infinite virtual ones. Finally, for our purposes, the Internet provides greater public awareness of a particular rabbi’s decisions, which, on the one hand, makes him more vulnerable to criticism but also, on the other hand, enhances his stature as prominent rabbi.

An examination of topics covered in Internet responsa reveals that family and sexual issues play a major role among the questions raised. Thus, of the three volumes of such responsa by Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, the head of Yeshivat Hesder of Petah Tikva and the most prolific of the Internet rabbis, the largest volume, Reshu”t HaYahid, is wholly addressed to issues concerning modesty, couples and family. In published Internet responsa on the leading Internet site for the dati-leumi/Modern Orthodox communities, www.kipa.co.il, as well as on a range of other Jewish religious Internet sites and blogs, family issues are central. Among the issues discussed there are: early marriage—a concern especially for students in yeshivot hesder; singles; premarital sex; agunot whose spouses refuse to give them a get; gays and lesbians in the Orthodox community; and others.

An issue related to the artificial insemination matters that R. Moshe discussed (but not specifically discussed by him) is one that also addresses an aspect of the singles phenomenon, namely, voluntary single motherhood. One of the earliest sociological studies of the phenomenon (Jane D. Bock, “Doing The Right Thing? Single Mothers by Choice and the Struggle for Legitimacy,” Gender & Society 14:1 (February 2000), pp. 62–86) focused only on the Reform branch of Judaism and found it to be basically accepting. Since then, Conservative Judaism has become likewise increasingly accepting. Mainstream Orthodox Judaism opposes voluntary single motherhood on social policy, if not “pure” halakhic grounds, but it is gaining acceptance at least among some Modern Orthodox. Dvora Ross, herself a voluntary single mother, has not dispassionately reviewed the “pure” halakhic and social policy aspects and staunchly defends single motherhood (Dvora Ross, “Artificial Insemination in Single Women,” in Micah D. Halpern and Chana Safrai, eds., Jewish Legal Writings By Women Jerusalem: Urim, 1998, Hebrew Section, pp. 45–72). Most of the Orthodox criticism of Ross’ article is not on grounds of pure halakha but on the basis of the phenomenon’s negative consequences on the Jewish family unit (See for example, Rabbi Aharon Feldman’s scathing review-essay, “Halakhic Feminism or Feminist Halakha?” Tradition 33:2 (Winter 1999), pp. 61–79. The reference to Ross’ article is on p. 74). To many, as Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein points out in his seminal essay on the role of social factors in halakha (cited above), such concerns are within the purview of the halakhist. Others, such as Rabbi David Stav, one of the heads of the Yeshivat Hesder of Petah Tikva, argues that the only halakhic issue is that the father’s identity is unknown and that might, conceivably, present a problem when the child wishes to marry. Other than that, “on the halakhic level, there is no argument between the posekim that there is no prohibition for a woman to become pregnant through artificial insemination…. This is not a halakhic question but one that is in the realm of social policy.” When weighing the anguish of single women who yearn to have children against the fear that women might not want to get married—and include the admittedly remote halakhic complication from not knowing the identity of the father—leaves Stav unable to decide. However, his colleague, Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, is reported to allow artificial insemination for single women who unsuccessfully sought to marry by the age of 37.

This issue is surely one of a group of contemporary issues in which the extent to which the halakha can remain in its own orbit and its unique speed without being the force of the thrust increasing or decreasing it, to use the Rav’s analogy, in cases that involve major cultural clashes, is somewhat dubious. We saw this with the issue of women’s prayer groups and the “pesak” of the “RIETS 5,” which was clearly much more about the role of women in society than about the laws of tefilla. The issue of voluntary single motherhood, likewise, is one that is controversial and emotionally charged in American society, in general. Even at the highest levels of analysis, there are some scholarly works that view it as very harmful to the children involved and, ultimately, society as a whole (See, for example, David Popenoe, Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). There are other works (see, for example, Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice. New York, Oxford University Press, 2008) that present evidence indicating that although some women became mothers in a “radical” way, they were motivated by normative family values and aspirations, and their family lifestyles are actually very conventional. In terms of Orthodox voluntary single mothers, although the rabbis and others may debate the halakhic and meta-halakhic issues involved, the meager evidence available suggests that the many of the women involved are making their choices individually, without careful consideration of those issues.

Perhaps the most emotionally charged family and sexual issue of our time is homosexuality. In terms of its prevalence, recognizing the difficulty in determining rates due to the variety of definitions of homosexuality and the unwillingness of many people to offer information about their sexual behavior, the empirical evidence suggests that there has not been any significant increase in homosexuality in the past half-century and more. We have no studies of it prior to the 1940s, so we really do not know if there has been any increase in the behavior. Shaul Stampfer found hardly any references to it among Eastern European Jews during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it is difficult to believe that the phenomenon was non-existent. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that there actually has not been any significant increase in homosexuality. Rather, the phenomenon is now much more open, primarily because of the rise in identity politics in Western society and culture during the 1960s and 1970s. On the other hand, perhaps it has actually increased because the tolerance of it allows those with surmountable homosexual tendencies to avoid undertaking the effort to change. (I thank Prof. Martin Lockshin for this suggestion.)

Judaism across the spectrum incorporated the biblical condemnation of homosexuality as an abomination (“to’eva”) and had, until recently, not only vehemently censured the act but ostracized the offenders as well. With the growing acceptance of homosexuality in the broader society, Reform Judaism was the first branch of American Judaism to alter its stance, when, on March 29, 2000, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) overwhelmingly approved a resolution giving rabbis the option to preside at gay and lesbian commitment ceremonies. Not long afterward, the movement’s temple and synagogue organization, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now called the Union of Reform Judaism) called for full legal equality for homosexual couples, including legal recognition of their relationships. 

During that same period, on March 25, 1992, Conservative Judaism’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS) voted in favor of a lengthy responsum written by Rabbi Joel Roth that reiterated the traditional stance of homosexuality as an abomination. It also rejected castigations of some social activists who labeled the decisors as callous, and proclaimed, “It is possible for a decisor to be understanding, empathic, sensitive, caring, and without irrational fears, and yet conclude that the halakhic precedents are defensible, warranted, and compelling.” In a postscript, Roth went on to distinguish between halakha and civil law and, in the realm of the latter, saw “no justification for civil legislation proscribing such acts.” Thus, while the Rabbinical Assembly reaffirmed its traditional prescription for heterosexuality, it supported complete civil equality for homosexuals; deplored violence against them; reiterated that they

are welcome as members in their congregations; and called upon the entire movement to

increase “awareness, understanding and concern for our fellow Jews who are gay and lesbian.”

Awareness of homosexuality in the Orthodox community increased by the award-winning documentary, Trembling Before G-d (2001), which portrayed the conflicts experienced by Jewish gays and lesbians between their strong bonds with God and the Orthodox Jewish tradition, on the one hand, and Judaism’s very strong condemnation of homosexuality, on the other. A number of Orthodox rabbis, Hareidi as well as Modern Orthodox, have expressed compassion for individual homosexuals while, at the same time, affirming the condemnation of prohibited homosexual activity, and have urged that those violators not be shunned any more than are other sinners, such as Sabbath desecrators. Among the more Hareidi of those who profess compassion, one senses an outreach approach that aspires to enlist them in programs aimed at reorienting them from their homosexual tendencies (See, for example, Avi Shafran, “Dissembling Before G-d,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Feb. 21, 2002). There is much debate in society at-large as to the feasibility of such reorientation, based on the question as to whether homosexuality is hereditary or learned behavior.

For the Orthodox community in particular, the publication of Steven Greenberg’s Wrestling With God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) had the potential to create a real stir and perhaps even change some attitudes. Greenberg, after all, has ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University, and considers himself as part of the Orthodox community. However, as Asher Lopatin elucidates in his extensive sympathetic yet forthright critique (“What Makes a Book Orthodox?” Edah Journal 4:2 (Kislev) 5765/2004), the book is not and will not be seen as an Orthodox work because the author is admittedly not fully committed to Orthodoxy; because its methodology and style are not those of Orthodox works; and it is insufficiently creative halakhically. That and the facts that it was published by a university press with limited distribution and, even more, that has an erotically suggestive painting on the cover, have made it a non-event in the public Orthodox community. How widely it was read under wraps in that community is anyone’s guess. Not surprisingly, Greenberg replied to Lopatin’s critique (Edah Journal 5:2 (Sivan) 5766/2006), stating that his intent

was not to settle the thorny halakhic issues, but to set the stage for richer halakhic engagements that in time will follow. It is my view that a full-fledged halakhic “solution” to the problem of homosexual relations is premature. . . .There is still too little understanding, let alone empathy, in the Orthodox community for the gay religious person and too much entrenched fear about the consequences of any partial, let alone full-fledged acceptance, of embarking on such a project.

If one were to assume from this that there has been little change in the Orthodox community, one would be very mistaken. There definitely has been change. There are now several openly gay Orthodox groups in Israel. One, Havruta, held its first anniversary event in Jerusalem recently, where the guest of honor was none other than Rabbi Yaakov Medan, who is one of the heads of Yeshivat Har Etzion. A number of other prominent Orthodox religious personalities participated as well (Yair Ettinger, “Of Pride and Prayer,” Haaretz, Feb. 26, 2009). Also, the second season of the Israeli television series, Serugim, will include homosexuals, and there are even several gay Hareidi web sites (such as Mendy’s Blog and Homo Hareidi).

            Does all of the change documented lend support to Blu Greenberg’s famous assertion that, “Where there's a rabbinic will there's a halakhic way?” As a historical statement it may. Orthodox Judaism is, by definition, conservative, and all conservative religious groups manifest stronger family values that the non-traditionals do. On the other hand, no group is immune to the broader social and cultural patterns, and their families of today are not quite what they were a half-century ago. However, if the assertion is taken to be a political call to action, none of what has been discussed should necessarily be taken as supporting that assertion. All too frequently, such calls backfire and lead to a reactionary impulse, because they are seen as undermining halakhic authority, and serve to make it even more difficult to achieve the very objective intended by the call. As several of the issues discussed above suggest, working with halakhic authorities, rather than attacking them, is much more productive.

            As the world shrinks—and technological innovations assure that it does—broader social and cultural patterns will change even more rapidly, and they will increasingly impinge on the Jewish family, including the Orthodox family. Nor is there anything novel about it. As R. Yehudah Hehִasid (c. 1150–1217), the author of the Sefer haHassidim, recognized centuries ago, “As is the custom of the gentiles, so are the customs of the Jews in most cases.” How Orthodoxy will respond to these new challenges is anyone’s guess. It is increasingly obvious that digging one’s heels in, furthering the “she’erit haPeleta” (“saving remnant”) approach, and trying to ignore the changes does not work, as a look at the rising divorce rates among the Orthodox, including Hareidim, indicate. Perhaps increasing numbers of Orthodox rabbis and other communal leaders will decide to learn more about the broader societal and cultural patterns, to work with experts in society-at-large, as well as with each other in attempts deal with the changes within a halakhic framework. The latter, of course, presents a formidable challenge of agreeing on an appropriate halakhic framework. One might be tempted to say that only Mashiah will be able to bring that about, but unless he arrives shortly, we may not be able to wait.

Violence Is Not Grounds for Divorce

by Batya Kahana-Dror

(Batya Kahana-Dror is an attorney at Mavoi Satum, an organization that assists agunot who have been denied a divorce (get) from their husbands. Mavoi Satum ("dead end") provides social and legal support as well as conducting lobbying efforts on behalf of agunot. This article was originally published in Hebrew in issue 46 of Eretz Aheret magazine, with the title "The Chief Rabbinate vs. the Jewish People.")

The approach to women's rights in the rabbinical courts today is pitting Jewish values against the democratic reality we live in. It is not a pretty picture. In the rabbinical courts the chasm between dayanim and litigants is widening. The dayanim, under the guise of democratic self-expression, refute civil law as an authoritative source, and litigants are helpless to act. The civil rights revolution has been bypassed.

The struggle of mesoravot get poses one of the greatest challenges to the religious legal system, a system that functions within a democratic reality. Points of contention include halakha versus civil law, rabbinical courts versus civil courts, theocracy versus Western liberalism, Jewish feminism versus spreading fundamentalism, and conservative, reactionary Orthodoxy versus modern liberal Orthodoxy. 

In the State of Israel, marriage and divorce between Jews is only performed, in accordance with religious law, by the Rabbinical Courts, under the authority granted by the Law of Jurisdiction in the Rabbinical Courts. In the last few decades, the handling of issues of women's status by the rabbinical courts has sorely tested Jewish values against the liberal, democratic values of the State. In the rabbinical courts, the chasm widens between the dayanim and those who stand before them, as the two sides do not speak the same language. The dayanim, using the facade of democratic discourse, refute civil law as a source of authority, and litigants are helpless. There is no synthesis between Orthodoxy and modernity that would provide a solution.

[H1] Human Rights and the Rabbinical Court

Human rights—such as the right of a person to his or her life, body, honor, property, freedom and privacy—have been determined by the Basic Law of Human Rights and Freedom. Concurrently, this law allows for legal restrictions on an individual's human rights in cases where the values of the State of Israel are challenged. Time and time again, the rabbinical courts create a schism between the halakha they believe they are applying and the values that the Basic Law represents.

This begs the question of whether the violation of a mesorevet get's rights is a case in which personal freedom is justly restricted, akin to that of a tax evader or the arrest of a criminal suspect. Is the violation of the rights of a mesorevet get, whose only crime is to ask for a divorce, a reasonable infringement, one that is deemed necessary by law? What is the benefit to the general public of a woman being denied the right to have children or being freed from a failed marriage? Is this the way to implement the Jewish values of the State of Israel?

For example, the rabbinical court in Tel Aviv granted a recalcitrant husband compensation of 60,000 NIS in exchange for his consent to grant a divorce. "The husband deserves compensation in return for his consent to grant a divorce against the position that he has expressed throughout the years" (six years). The Beit Din Hagadol [the religious supreme court] added that, "The husband had the halakhic right to continue being married. The husband agreed to abdicate this right in exchange for the right to sue for damages" ("HaDin ve-haDayan"—The Law and the Judge—edited by Dr. Amichai Redziner, published by the Rackman Center for the Status of Women, and Yad L'Isha, 4[8] and 11[10]). The court recognized the man's right to marriage and completely ignored the woman's right to freedom and her right to choose whether or not she wanted to live with this man. In addition, not only was this recognition of rights one-sided, but the court also violated the woman's basic economic rights in order to protect the man's right to be married.

In another example, the rabbinical court does not view "regular" violence—defined as “beatings that cannot kill”—as grounds for divorce. The Ashdod rabbinical court imprisoned a man because of violence and his refusal to grant a divorce. Yet the court differentiated between "regular beatings" which does not merit a hiyuv get [a rabbinical mandate to force the man to grant a divorce], and beatings that can kill, which does in fact merit a hiyuv get (see haDin ve-haDayan 4[3]).

In the opinion of the rabbinical court, it seems that "regular" beatings are something that a woman is capable of living with, and in any event, divorce should not be imposed because of it. An act that constitutes a criminal offense in the State of Israel does not constitute grounds for divorce in the rabbinical court.

[H1] "The Altar Sheds Tears..."

Like every legal system, halakha is naturally conservative by nature, and aspires to maintain ancient legal traditions. Since halakha is a religious legal system that considers itself to be of Divine origin, it is even more conservative than the secular legal system. Despite the fact that over the centuries there has been room for creating mechanisms for halakhic change and renewal (such as edicts, special rulings, needs of the day) nevertheless, objective circumstances prevented major halakhic renewal in Orthodox society, in particular over the past 200 years.

The ongoing changes in issues of personal status create a serious challenge for halakhic adjudication in the modern age. Even those who generally favor the approach of "sit and do nothing" cannot help but apply some minimal halakhic thought to modern-day situations. How much more so, religious judges in the State of Israel, whose authority rests on the principle "rise and act," must deal with the new reality in which most of the people in need of their services are not religiously observant.

The huge immigration to Israel and the establishment of the State raised expectations among certain sectors of the Orthodox community that there would be a religious, halakhic renewal with varied and broader interpretations of the Torah. However, this has not been the case. Although solutions to some halakhic issues such as kashruth and shemita were created, the scope of halakhic jurisdiction in Israel shrunk compared to its jurisdiction in the Diaspora. All civil and criminal legislation was given to the State, which rules according to civil law. Personal status remained in the hands of the religious judges, yet it was defined and placed under the auspices of the rabbinical court system by the State.

Over time, as a result of the increasing political power of the Hareidi sector, the rabbinical court took on the character of the Hareidi community, which succeeded in positioning its own people as dayanim, judges. Only the protest of women's organizations stirred the religious-Zionist public to act, but it was too little too late. This situation created a dearth of Modern Orthodox halakhic rulings that recognize women's suffering and women's rights. In practice, the religious-Zionist community accepted the authority of the rabbinical court and did not establish an alternative model of halakhic jurisdiction.

Why did the Modern Orthodox community accept this situation? First, the rabbinical court is a national entity working on behalf of the State of Israel. The Modern Orthodox sector is predominantly Zionist and thus maintains a loyal attitude toward State institutions even though the rabbinical courts do not represent State policy. An example of this attitude can be found in the actions of Zevulun Orlev and Rabbi Yitzhak Levy, Knesset members from the now defunct National Religious Party (NRP), who continue to introduce bills to expand the judicial power of the rabbinical courts—the same court that they claim does not have enough Modern Orthodox judges. Another reason is the religious-Zionist community's narrow focus on settlements. Finally, there is a fear of opening the door to Reform and Conservative Judaism.

Women's organizations filled this void. At first they concentrated on representing women seeking divorce whose rights were being compromised. Only later, after the magnitude of the injustice came to light, did they embark on a public campaign. The accessibility of halakhic knowledge coupled with the revolution in women's religious learning enabled women to promote halakhic solutions that the rabbinical courts chose to ignore. Orthodox women's groups started calling for change. The women themselves, most of whom belong to "Kolech," slowly adopted the feminist lexicon and became flag bearers of the struggle for women's equality in the rabbinical courts. Their positions caused a furor and their actions were viewed by the Hareidi and even the Modern Orthodox as undermining halakha. Women's organizations were trapped. Their members stopped believing in the rabbis and in their ability to institute change, but at the same time did not dare to take action without rabbinic consent (although the more radical among them claimed that a struggle that relies on rabbis actually empowers rabbis and thus makes the situation worse).

While expanding the struggle for women's rights, two steps were taken. The first was recruiting the civil courts, (whether through appeals to the Supreme Court or through lawsuits in the family court) claiming compensation for damages caused by the rabbinical court. The second step was investing more resources in bringing the issue into the public arena. Lawyers, religious pleaders, and social workers were joined by women campaigners who publicized the procedures of the rabbinical courts and worked to promote legislative change that would restrict the rabbinical courts' authority.

The fact that Orthodox women's organizations are leading the campaign has its disadvantages. First, the women's campaign is viewed in the religious world as a feminist issue and not in its broader context—as a struggle between liberal and conservative attitudes—and as such does not enjoy the support of most religious men, who tend to support the rabbis. Second, the push by Orthodox women is perceived by the general public as an internal religious issue and not as a battle against the violation of human rights, so the secular public and human rights organizations are barely involved in the campaign.

[H1] The Response of the Rabbinical Courts

The threat of reducing the judicial powers of the rabbinical courts, along with the growing opposition to court rulings that do not support Western liberal tenets, have led the rabbinical courts to issue more defensive and conservative rulings.

One example of this is the ruling by the Bet Din haGadol on an erroneous get. A get was cancelled as the rabbinical court decided that it was a "mistaken get" and insisted on arranging an additional get—regardless of the fact that the rabbinical court believed that there were enough halakhic options and explanations to view it as a valid get (HaDin ve-haDayan, 16th edition, 5 [17] 8). The rabbinical court clarified that "the rabbinical court does not rush to annul a get, and in fact this happens very rarely," but they added that they are annulling the get because "in this new reality, in which [the civil courts] want to bind the hands of the rabbinical courts so that they will be unable to continue to rule on agreements that they ratified [Sima Amir's appeal to the Supreme Court], and in which civil courts enjoy easily nullifying decisions of the rabbinical courts, this situation has the potential to cause serious harm...".

It is clear from the judges' language that they obviously weigh issues that have nothing to do with the specific case before them—considerations that take into account the erosion of their authority by the civil courts. Similar statements were made by the rabbinical courts with respect to the civil courts to explain the decision to become much more stringent in this particular case and invalidate the get: "The problem is that the civil courts created an opening for parents to sue on behalf of their children in order to evade the commitments of parents toward one another in their agreements, even though we are dealing with a case in which the parents themselves are suing. This trend distorts the law and the halakha and its only purpose is to undermine the authority of the rabbinical court and is exploited by family court judges."

[H1] Halakhic Pluralism

It is important to emphasize that pluralism does exist within halakha, both intellectually and in its practical application. It developed through the geographic dispersal of the Jews, and had evolved over time since its development in Mishnaic times. If we take into account the entirety of halakhic rulings and the span of literature connected to it, we can see that the dayanim have wide avenues to maneuver within halakha. In this respect, dayanim have a broader range of choices than civil judges who are limited to one legislative codex. As such, the dayan's beliefs and attitudes have a very significant and determining influence on his choices in his rulings.

The famous ruling of Maimonides states that, "If [a woman] says, “[my husband] is repulsive to me”... he is pressured until he gives it of his own will..." In other words, according to Maimonides, a woman who claims "he is repulsive to me" will be granted an immediate get by pressuring the husband. Rabbeinu Tam, who gave more weight to the fear of "forced get" over the principle of leniency, abolished this approach. However, of all the available halakhic rulings, the rabbinical courts chose to reinstate the halakha of the Maharashdam, Shemuel ben Moshe de Medina, who lived in Salonika in the sixteenth century. The rabbinical courts have accepted his position that one has to accept the husband's conditions if the court considers them reasonable, even when the husband has already been halakhically obligated or forced to grant the get. Consequently, the man's bargaining power is increased—even though he had significantly more power than the woman to begin with—as he is entitled to absolute free will during the divorce process.

In one case, the district rabbinical court decided not to discuss forcing the husband to grant his wife a get because he agreed to grant the get if she complied with a number of conditions. In this case, the rabbinical court listed what they considered to be reasonable conditions: "We want to clarify that the right to set conditions exists, not only in the financial realm, but also in the behavioral realm, for example, she will not be allowed to eat certain foods or wear certain items of clothing. Even the rabbinical court cannot force the woman to agree to these demands, but they are binding as conditions for a get and have to be implemented even in the situation where a husband has been obligated or forced to grant the get" (HaDin ve-haDayan, 7[5]). The rabbinical court thus sees as legitimate and even reasonable to violate the freedom of choice and the dignity of women by imposing the husband's conditions on her, even after the two are completely disconnected from one another, in order not to force the husband to give the get.

Reliance on this Maharashdam ruling with its current religious-court interpretation absolves the rabbinical court of all responsibility and abandons the woman to the husband's caprices. The rabbinical court thus reduces the woman's power and makes her efforts to obtain a hiyuv get from her husband irrelevant, since the hiyuv get loses its effectiveness if the husband's conditions have to be accepted. The use of the Maharashdam's halakha leads to unprecedented extortion of the woman, and legitimizes the phenomenon of get denial.

[H1] Between "Din Torah" and "Giving Advice"

In contrast to the Maharashdam's halakha, the judges have another, just as easily accessible ruling by Rabbi Haim Palachi (an adjudicator of Jewish Law who lived in Izmir in the nineteenth century). He ruled that in a case of a couple living apart for eighteen months, the husband has to be forced to give the get. This pragmatic ruling could have solved many cases of get denial, but for the most part this ruling is not used in the rabbinical courts. Furthermore, the court warned against applying Rabbi Palachi’s halakha: "It is not his intention to force the couple to divorce but is merely a piece of advice to adjudicators" (HaDin ve-haDayan, 18[8]). Redefining Rav Palachi's ruling as "a piece of advice" rather than "Torah law" suits the increasingly stringent bias in the rabbinical courts. The juxtaposition of these rulings—that of the Maharashdam versus that of Rav Palachi's—and the ways in which they are used or not used, epitomizes the ways in which dayanim make choices, the influence of a dayan's personal outlook on his rulings, and the outrageous situation in the rabbinical courts today. Another practice that is often used in many rabbinical courts today is to recommend that the couple come to an agreement instead of the court making a decision and imposing a get. This practice is upheld even in cases where it is clear that a couple will never be able to reach an agreement because the case has dragged on for many years. In this way the dayanim encourage the prolongation of proceedings and increase the possibilities of blackmail. To emphasize the philosophy behind these procedures, MK Moshe Gafni in the State Audit Commission stated: "There is a vested interest that the rulings should not be implemented. I said this in the legislative commission as well. The altar sheds tears for a man and a woman who separate". It seems clear that the rabbinical court has its own agenda, and is not at all concerned with the parties’ needs. There is a disregard for the wishes or the rights of an individual to divorce, as halakhic conservatism will always override those individual wishes.

[H1] Expansion of the Judicial Powers of the Rabbinical Courts

In a 2006 ruling (Supreme Court ruling 8638/03 Sima Amir vs the Higher Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem), the Supreme Court ruled that "legislative principles" dictate that the authority of the rabbinical courts to rule on plaintiffs outside of the issue of marriage and divorce needs to be legislatively effectuated. The Supreme Court thus explicitly determined that it is illegal for rabbinical courts to act as arbitrators with authority on civil matters and personal status disputes that erupted as a result of their own rulings.

As a result, Knesset members from the religious parties re-proposed a law to set this expansion of jurisdiction in law. A few months after this Supreme Court ruling, the new Kadima-led government was formed, based on a coalition agreement with Shas that included a commitment to legislate on the expansion of the rabbinical court authority. Until the Sima Amir Supreme Court ruling, and even afterwards (according to the State Comptroller), the rabbinical court acted as an arbitrator on all matters.

This practice demonstrates that the rabbinical courts see themselves as an independent judicial body with added authority—a judicial body that deviates from the mandate given it by the law (personal status) and converts itself into an autonomous body. This is similar, however inconceivable, to a case in which the Labor Courts, for example, might begin judging cases under the jurisdiction of the magistrates' court because they have declared themselves arbitrators. Moreover, the rabbinical courts did not distinguish between the authority they were given and the authority they simply took for themselves. When the dayanim would act as arbitrators, they would often use the rabbinical courtrooms and stationery with the State of Israel's letterhead. The hours they dedicated to arbitration were also considered part of their regular working hours.

The dayanim were also inclined to send refusal notices to parties who refused to appear before them—in direct defiance of the arbitration law that states that a condition granting authority to the arbitrator is consent of both sides—and in this way they expressed their view that the rabbinical court is in essence the defining authority for the religious community, with no need for that society's consensus. Incidentally, the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Joseph Katz put an end to these practices (Supreme Court ruling no. 95/3260, Joseph Katz vs. the Jerusalem District Rabbinical Court [4], 590).

The rabbinical court is trying to use the governmental authority it has been given over one specific matter in order to establish itself as a court that rules on Torah issues as well as civil matters, and to promote itself as a substitute to the Israeli Justice System. These ideas find expression in the ruling of the Jerusalem Religious District Court by which the  halakha forbidding litigation in courts also applies to litigation in the Israeli Civil Courts system "as it stands today" (file 38/2824, 11 [259]).

 The rabbinical courts do not allow room for error. This is a halakhic ruling of the rabbinical court in the State of Israel that takes on a role and authority that was not granted to it, and emphatically forbids one to be judged in the Israeli Court system "as it stands today." This attitude of the rabbinical courts also finds expression in the disapproval that judges convey toward women who have opened cases in the family courts, and in their support of the demand (usually from the husband) to transfer cases from the civil to the rabbinical courts, and even to reopen cases that have already been settled. Even graver are cases in which the wife presented a damages claim against the recalcitrant husband. In these situations, the women are subjected to threats by the dayanim who claim that they will not continue to judge the get cases until the women withdraw their damages claims.

In their campaign to expand their judicial authority, the rabbinical courts found a supportive argument from an unexpected source: postmodern theory on pluralistic systems of law, which recognizes the rights of religious sects to live and be judged according to their own beliefs. These postmodern Hareidi groups want to have their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, they hold on to their own mandatory role on all issues of personal status, and are unwilling to open another rabbinic court. They are also unwilling to forego their unequivocal authority on all issues related to divorce (Law of the Jurisdiction of Rabbinical Courts, section 3, marriage and divorce, 1953). On the other hand, they demand judicial pluralism for their own people, claiming, "There is nothing wrong with people wanting to live according to their beliefs and be judged by a different set of laws."

Leaving aside the inherent contradiction, I would like to focus on the issue of judicial pluralism. From the perspective of a democratic society, there are problematic issues in this approach: voluntarism and basic values. The nagging questions generally and in this specific case are: how to ensure that only those who want to be part of a separatist legal system will be included in it; how to ensure that neither social pressure nor any other pressure will cause people to seek out the rabbinical courts; and how to ensure that basic democratic values, such as human dignity and freedom (for example, the right not to be beaten), will be preserved.

Even those who support pluralism cannot ignore the fact that religious rulings as they are applied today in rabbinical courts often do not recognize phenomena that are considered criminal—such as violence, drugs, gambling, and more—as grounds for divorce.

[H1] "I Am Satisfied"

An important tool for establishing democratic norms in the rabbinical courts is assistance from the State Comptroller's Office and the Knesset Comptroller's Committee. In contrast to other courts, the religious courts "excel" in their high number of procedural and disciplinary irregularities.

The latest State Comptroller's report, published in May this year, paints a particularly distressing portrait: reports of breaches in 83 percent of the cases in Petach Tikva, and in 75 percent of the cases in Tel Aviv; reports of excessive foot-dragging and abuse of the law; 26 percent of hearings that took place in the absence of a full panel of dayanim (which causes delays in receiving a get); 257 cases of arbitration opened in direct contravention of a clear Supreme court ruling, (decision of Sima Amir, see above); irregularities in dayanim's attendance records; dayanim taking up residence outside their area of jurisdiction, which unequivocally violates the conditions of their contract— even after being issued warning letters regarding this practice. In addition to these facts and figures, the report creates a dismal picture regarding the attitude of the management of the rabbinical court toward civil law and the rule of law. The rabbinical courts and their judges do not view the State, the law, and the body that elects them—The Committee for Appointment of Dayanim—as a source of authority over them, despite the fact that, outwardly, they present themselves as a system willing to accept criticism and to correct any improprieties.

The common attitude in the rabbinical courts about the source of their authority is that Israeli law is man-made but the rabbinical courts rely on divine authority. Former Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapiro wrote, "Courts of law derive their authority from State law, they make their rulings based on the administration of the day, what the members of the elected house of government happen to legislate. By contrast, we, the judges of the rabbinical courts, rule with the power of the authority of the Torah for all of Israel, according to the laws of the Torah" (quoted by Judge Menachem Elon in "Jewish Law", Magnus, 5733/1973).

Particularly surprising was the position taken by the Chair of the State Comptroller's Committee, a member of the now defunct National Religious Party (NRP) that examined the report's findings. Besides the compliments he showered on the management of the rabbinical courts and on the Chief Rabbis for their streamlining and efforts at improvement, he expressed a clear discomfort with the content of the report to other participants in the meeting. It seemed that there was an incomprehensible gulf between the complacency felt at the meeting and the outrage felt by the public.

Religious Zionism and its Knesset representatives have adapted themselves to ultra-Orthodox practice, and not only in halakhic matters. They accept guidelines on a range of issues from rabbis—including from Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, a member of Shas, who himself is susceptible to the pressures of the ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian stream. The Chief Rabbis' office and the rabbinical courts, despite the fact that they are completely controlled by the ultra-Orthodox, are still supported by the religious Zionist camp, who views them as one of their own. Religious Zionist Knesset members and religious Zionism views the issue of State authority as a centerpiece of their ideology (even though after the disengagement from Gush Katif, an increasing number of voices within the Religious Zionist camp began challenging this assumption). The national religious public is still reluctant to openly come out against State institutions, even though it is clear to them that little if any national awareness exists in the present religious establishment. The national religious public is unwilling or unable to come out systematically and offer an alternative to the State establishment. Therefore, at the end of the State Comptroller's Committee meeting, Knesset member Orlev placed the primary blame for the problems in the rabbinical courts squarely on issues of funding and legislation, and concluded, "I am satisfied."

[H1] "It Is Not Your Responsibility to Finish the Work, But Neither Are You Free to Bypass It"

We have reached the peak of evading accountability. The conversion crisis exposed the differing approaches to conversion within Orthodoxy. The gap between the progressive approach and the more defensive, conservative approach within Orthodoxy has not been so clearly delineated in a long time. The public is beginning to gain an understanding about halakhic alternatives that are unavailable in today's religious establishment. The tensions between the religious legal system and the system that propounds equality and human rights are starting to show.

Two bills to improve the processes of conversion and divorce were recently proposed and then rejected. The laws intended to give communal rabbis the authority to convert potential individuals and correct the law on division of property. (This article was written in August, and since then the law on division of property before the giving of the get has passed after years of campaigning by groups such as ours.) When it comes to the injustices in the religious courts, not only does the political system avoid helping, but political pragmatism and coalition concerns overcome the need to resolve the problem of divorce in Israel. It seems that the apathy of the general public enables the emissaries of the law to displace this issue with their own political, economic and security interests

The inability to effect change has caused sectors of society to lose faith in the political system that tends to regularly cave in to ultra-Orthodox demands. This capitulation is not only politically motivated, but also emanates from the belief that ultra-Orthodox Jews are the true guardians of the Book, who see their unofficial role as maintaining the Jewish character of the State.

A Modern Orthodox alternative does not exist. The ultra-Orthodox have access to the State rabbinical courts as well as their own private courts. The Reform and Conservative movements have their own organizations. It is only the Modern Orthodox, national religious public that has no alternative. Since many traditional people identify with the national religious camp (that is, the synagogue they do attend is Orthodox), this is not a struggle between various factions, but rather the creation of an alternative that will serve a large portion of the Israeli public, and would therefore have tremendous societal importance.

The State's position, which disallows an alternative Orthodox voice, is leading us to disengagement. We have not yet healed from the wounds of the first disengagement, and we are on the brink of another huge rift in Israeli society. The degree of aversion to the religious establishment is only deepening, both in the national-religious and the secular population. The Israeli public finds it difficult to come to terms with the personal suffering caused by conservative and inflexible halakhic thinking. At the same time, the popularity of religious marriage ceremonies, which are not conducted by the rabbinical establishment, is rising among religious and secular couples- a clear show of distrust in the rabbinical establishment and the rabbinical courts.

It is up to the national religious community to publicly break away from the apologetic, defensive, conservative Orthodoxy of today, a break that would mean establishing a new Israeli Orthodox stream that would, among other things, establish its own religious courts.

Modern Orthodoxy must propose and build this alternative in an organized, systematic way. It must propose an alternative that includes broad halakhic thinking, which, while based on halakha, recognizes the greater good and modern day needs. It must propose an alternative that incorporates the knowledge acquired through the twenty-first century, including civil rights, changes in women's status, and public consensus, and seek to find solutions (including recognizing civil marriage) for the entire public.

This stream of Orthodoxy cannot define itself merely through Zionism and settlement of the land, but has to embrace halakha and its modern-day development against a backdrop of liberal Western values. It is not enough to create lenient rulings versus stringent rulings. A clear line must be drawn between halakha and its relationship to contemporary times and the society in which it operates.

The creation of an alternative religious establishment will integrate an additional halakhic outlook within the Jewish mainstream—one that has a body of followers among the religious and traditional sectors. Its institutions will return halakha to its essential dynamic state, reconnecting it to our everyday lives and at the same time reconnecting all of society to the essential character of the State of Israel as a Jewish state.

And it was after these things that God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham,” and he replied, “Here I am.” And He said, “Please take your son, your only one, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the land of Moriah; bring him up there as an offering upon one of the mountains which I shall tell you.” So Abraham woke up early in the morning, and he saddled his donkey. He took his two young men with him and Isaac, his son….(Bereishith 22:1–3)

Isaac faces the supreme test of his religious obedience: the Akeida, the “binding of Isaac.” Countless articles and books have been written to describe Abraham’s test of faith. Most surprisingly, however, is the fact that there is no textual reference describing Sarah’s response to the Akeida. From the moment God commands Abraham to heed Sarah’s voice following her directive to send away Hagar and Ishmael, “Whatever Sarah says, listen to her voice,” (Bereishith 21:12), not only does Sarah never speak again, but she is not even mentioned again in the Torah text until it records her death. (Bereishith 23:1) Her entire life has been bound up with her passion to mother the covenantal son; now, that dream—and her son’s very life—appear threatened, yet we hear not one word from Sarah herself, or even a textual mention of Sarah during those endless days that Abraham and Isaac are away.

The commentaries themselves are aware of this thunderous silence and attempt, with various explanations, to fill in the gap. The commentaries differ on what Sarah “knew” and how she responded to that knowledge. Sefer Tosafot haShalem proposes that Sarah knew nothing of Abraham’s plans. Worried about Sarah’s response to his true mission, the commentary states that Abraham told Sarah he was taking Isaac away in order to educate him. Ohr haHayyim concurs, stating that Abraham entreated Sarah to allow Isaac to accompany him to learn Torah. Rashi adds that by the text’s placement of the event of Sarah’s death in the chapter immediately following that of the Akeida, we learn that there exists a cause and effect relationship between the two events.

The relationship between Sarah’s death and the Akeida is imagined by several commentaries. Pirkei d’Rabi Eliezer describes a disgruntled Satan who had sought Isaac’s death—perceiving that Isaac is alive and well—turning his evil intentions to Sarah. He approaches her saying, “Your old man took your son, Isaac, and sacrificed him on an altar to His God. And the boy was crying out and wailing, and there was no one to save him.” Assuming that her son was slaughtered, Sarah cries out three times, her soul departs, and she dies. The commentary states that the blasts of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah immortalize Sarah’s anguished cries. According to Siftei Hakhamim, the messenger of doom need not have been Satan, who convinces Sarah, incorrectly, that her son is dead, but only an ordinary wayfarer from Mount Moriah, who relates the true story of the Akeida. Before he could finish the story, however—with the happy ending that Isaac was saved from death—he pauses for a brief instant to catch his breath, and in that instant, Sarah is overwhelmed by his tale, her soul departs, and she dies. In both of these interpretations, Sarah is led to believe that her beloved son Isaac is dead. Rashi posits another story. According to Rashi, Sara in fact learns that Isaac has survived the Akeida, narrowly escaping death. In that instant, Sara realizes that although Isaac survived, her entire life could have been annihilated by the razor’s edge of Abraham’s sword. According to Rashi, this knowledge resulted in extreme anguish and existential angst, which caused her death.

These three commentaries give Sarah a presence during the time of the Akeida. Ultimately, with these interpretations, however, one must certainly wonder about Sarah’s faith—or rather lack of faith—at this most important moment. The Akeida confirms Abraham’s supreme faith in God, and by inference from these scenarios, Sarah dies by what appears to be a supreme lack of faith! Sefer Tosafot haShalem, however, draws the opposite conclusion, by asking rhetorically, “How could Sarah, a woman of such enormous faith in God, have grieved over God’s choice of her son as a sacrifice. On the contrary, her faith is so great, that she was able to extract undiluted joy from the fact that, for whatever reason, God had chosen her son.” According to this commentary, Sarah then dies of the powerful flood of emotion, which resulted not from grief, but from overwhelming joy.

In all these scenarios, however, Sarah appears to be a passive bystander to the Akeida—the Akeida is Abraham’s test of faith—not Sarah’s. What I would like to suggest is that Sarah is not passive in this story—quite the contrary. She is actively by Abraham’s side—as she has always been—if not physically, then emotionally and spiritually. The Akeida, therefore, becomes her own test of faith as well.

From the very first, Sarah is an equal and active partner at Abraham’s side. She is his counterpart in his mission to introduce his God to the Canaanite world. The text states that Abram takes his wife, Sarai, Lot, his brother’s son, all their possessions, and the souls they made in Haran. Midrash Rabba explains the use of the plural—they. The midrash states that the souls they made were converts. Abram converted the males, and Sarai converted the females. Thus, the text credits them equally in the creation of converts to monotheism. Although God has promised Abraham a child to continue the covenant between Him and Abraham, time passes and Sarah remains barren. Sarah realizes that despite God’s promise of fertility, she remains unable to conceive. She offers her handmaiden, Hagar—the first surrogate—to her husband, hoping that Hagar will bear Abraham’s child for them. “And Abraham listened to Sarah’s voice” (Bereishith 15:3). Sarah hopes that she and Abraham will raise this child as their own. Perhaps God’s promise was to be fulfilled biologically through Abraham only, and was not to be Sarah’s biological child.

In contrast to Sarah’s lifetime of barrenness, Hagar becomes pregnant immediately with Abraham’s child. Hagar ridicules Sarah about her infertility compared to her own success in conceiving a child, and Sarah complains to Abraham. Abraham instructs Sarah to deal with the matter as she sees fit. The relationship between Sarah and Hagar becomes untenable for Hagar, and she flees. An angel accosts Hagar in the desert, promising her a strong nation from the son she will bear—and Hagar returns. A child, Ishmael is born of that pregnancy. It is following the birth of Ishmael that God changes their names from Abram and Sarai to Abraham and Sarah, and instructs Abraham that the covenantal child will not be Ishmael, but will be born from Abraham and Sarah. God sends messenger angels who reiterate His promise; within the year, Sarah is blessed with her only child, Isaac. As the boys grow, Sarah observes a negative influence that Ishmael, Hagar’s son, has on Isaac, and wants to banish both Hagar and her son. Abraham is greatly distressed at Sarah’s desire to banish his firstborn son—and perhaps the mother as well—but God clearly commands him, “All that Sarah says, listen to her voice.” Abraham obeys God’s command to listen to Sarah, and sends away Hagar and Ishmael. It is only twelve sentences later—after a brief description of a covenant of peace between Abimelekh and Abraham—that the test of the Akeida appears.

Abraham listens to Sarah when she offers him a surrogate, Hagar, to bear him a child. He is reluctant, however, to listen to Sarah, when she urges him to banish Hagar and their son, Ishmael. It is here that God actually commands him to listen to “all” Sarah says to him—and Abraham does listen to Sarah, and expels Hagar. God does not say to Abraham to listen to Sarah in this instance only—expelling Hagar—but explicitly states, “All that Sarah says, listen to her voice, for your offspring will be perpetuated through Isaac.” Thus, God tells Abraham to accept Sarah’s advice always, for through Isaac will Abraham’s seed be recognized. Rashi fleshes this sentence out further, playing on the Torah text’s unusual use of the preposition “Be” meaning within, rather than “Le” meaning, to. Rashi would then read the sentence as, “Listen to the voice of divine inspiration from within her.” Analyzing this amazing sentence, we see two apparently disparate, but connected thoughts. First, God commands Abraham to listen to whatever Sarah says. The first part of the statement is, by itself, an astounding proclamation by God to Abraham. God commands him to listen to everything that his wife says! In addition, the second half of the sentence, usually considered less revealing and often omitted when the first part of the sentence is quoted, may be even more astounding—“for your offspring will be perpetuated through Isaac.” Not only is God giving Abraham a general command to obey Sarah, but He is stating the reason—because all that God has promised Abraham—the blessing and the covenant, will be passed down through Isaac’s—not Ishmael’s—progeny, through the child that Abraham has conceived with Sarah, not the child he has conceived with Hagar.

Surprisingly, after this explicit command to Abraham, until the death of Sarah, there is nothing written about Sarah advising Abraham, or of Abraham accepting Sarah’s advice. It seems strange that God tells Abraham to do whatever Sarah says, and then, she says nothing! It would seem therefore to be reasonable to assume that Sarah did in fact give Abraham advice regarding their son Isaac, but for some reason the Torah alludes to it, without explicitly stating it.

In the Torah text, Sarah is portrayed as a woman of words. Interestingly, however, there are two episodes, other than the Akeida, when her voice is not heard. In the two episodes where Abraham describes Sarah as his “sister” rather than as his wife, Sarah is mute. In these stories Sarah’s own honor and existence as she has known it are at stake. She is carried off into the bedchamber—first—of the Pharaoh, King of Egypt, and at a later date to that of Abimelekh, King of Gerar. She does not cry to Abraham, nor plead for herself before the kings, nor even raise her voice in prayer to God. We are not privy to her innermost thoughts. Here, as later at the Akeida, we thirst for her thoughts and words, but we only hear the sounds of silence.

Shofetim, the book of Judges (Chapter 4) relates the oppression of the Israelites by Yabin, king of Canaan and his general, Sisera during the time of the reign of Deborah, the prophet, and her general, Barak the son of Abinoam. At Deborah’s command, Barak assembled ten thousand able bodied men and confronted Sisera’s entire force, which was equipped with nine hundred iron chariots. In the ensuing battle, Sisera’s army was decimated. Sisera abandoned his chariot and escaped by foot, fleeing for his life. War weary, tired and thirsty, he arrived at the tent of Yael, the wife of Hever the Kenite.

“Come in, come in to me; fear not,” she said, offering him refuge. And he pleaded, “Give me a little water, for I am thirsty.” Yael gave the shivering man a blanket to warm himself, and a jug of milk. And he said to her, “Stand in the doorway of the tent, and if anyone asks you if there is a man here, say, ‘There is not.’” Weary from battle fatigue, he fell asleep. Yael quickly took a hammer and an iron tent-pin, thrust the pin deep into his temple, and he died. (Shofetim 4:18–21)

Pursuing the escaping Sisera, Barak arrived at Yael’s tent. Yael came out to meet him. “Come and I will show you the man whom you seek.” And behold, Sisera lay dead, the pin in his temple. Upon his return, Deborah and Barak exalt God with a song of victory, an expression of cognizance and gratitude to God. The song encompasses the entire period of the Judges up to Deborah’s time, including the battle of the defeat of Sisera. In the song, Deborah blesses and praises Yael’s deed. Surprisingly, in this concise ballad of their recent Jewish history, Deborah devotes several sentences to the response of Sisera’s mother to the delayed return of her son from the battlefield.

Through the window, Sisera’s mother looked out, and peered through the window. “Why is his chariot late in coming? Why tarry the wheels of the chariots?” The wisest of her friends answered her, and so she consoles herself, “He is finding and dividing the spoils of war—one woman, no, two, to each man, valuable embroidered garments….” (Shofetim 5:28–30)

Why does Deborah incorporate these sentences into her victory song? What are we to learn from the reactions of Sisera’s mother and her friends?

Two mothers—Sarah, Isaac’s mother, and the unnamed mother of Sisera: both mothers have sons who have left the safety of their homes and their mother’s protective watch. Sisera’s mother has watched her son, regal in military attire go off to war in his iron chariot in the service of Yabin, the Canaanite King. Sarah, whether she actually saw Isaac leave with Abraham, or does not realize they had gone until she awakes later that morning, must know that her son has gone off somewhere—in the service of God. Both mothers wait expectantly at home, not knowing what is happening to their sons, or when they will return. Will a sacrifice be made, or will they return safely, each to his waiting mother’s arms?

I would suggest that the responses of the mothers represent the secular and the religious responses to the anxiety of the unknown—to existential angst.

Staring out of the window, as seconds stretch into minutes, and minutes seem like hours, Sisera’s mother is unable to live with this heart-wrenching anxiety. She bursts forth, verbalizing her innermost thoughts, “Where is he? Why don’t I hear the sound of his chariot? Why the total silence on the road?” What she is expressing is her deep worry that something has happened to her son—something that has stopped that iron chariot from returning home, something that has stopped it from bringing back her victorious son with rowdy cheering crowds accompanying him. She knows, deep in her innermost soul, that something is very wrong. Unable to live with that thought, and with the help of her well-meaning friends, she considers an alternative ending. The chariot must be delayed because her son is busying himself with the rewards of war—raping young women, stealing the valuables of the men. He will of course be home later—now is the time for celebration. She tries to find a measure of peace with that alternative rationalization.

I would suggest that the secular or psychological response to not knowing the outcome and moreover, being unable to affect it—absolute helplessness in an intolerable situation—is exemplified in the response of Sisera’s mother. One can imagine the worst or one can imagine the best. One can become deeply anxious and depressed, or one can perhaps delude oneself into accepting a more satisfying ending. Neither depression—anticipating the worst, nor delusion—anticipating the best, will affect the outcome. The outcome is beyond oneself, whatever one’s temporary response is while waiting to hear what has ultimately transpired.

Contrast Sisera’s mother’s response to that which we can glean from the biblical text and commentaries regarding Sarah’s response. Isaac has gone off with Abraham. The midrashic sources cited above relate varying hypotheses as to the depth of her foreknowledge. Certainly, at some point Sarah knows that Isaac is not home—and that she does not know when he will be home. How odd, it appears that the Bible relates the response of Sisera’s mother to her son’s absence, and not Sarah’s response to her son’s absence! Why should we learn of a heathen’s response, and not the response of that of our Matriarch Sarah? I would like to suggest that perhaps Sarah’s response is there. We only have to look carefully for it.

Perhaps the answer is her silence—the divine inspiration within her. It is this inspiration, this faith, that let her be led away—twice, into the bedchambers of kings. And it is this faith that now enables her to watch her son being led away by her husband. Sarah knew that her God would protect her, as she was led away by foreign kings, and as she now knows that He will protect her son.

Notwithstanding that most of the commentaries and midrashim state that Sarah knew nothing of Abraham’s plans, and in fact relate her death to her hearing of the Akeida, I suggest that Sarah knew everything about God’s command to Abraham to take Isaac up that famous mountain and to bind him upon the altar. Sara and Abraham were partners. They converted multitudes of people to monotheism together; they travelled together; they welcomed and fed travelers in their tent together; they took action to have a family together. It is inconceivable that Abraham would not discuss God’s ultimate command with his life partner, Sarah—seeking her wise advice, and listening to all that she would say, knowing that God Himself would accept his consulting with Sarah, and obeying her decisions.

So, where can we hear Sarah’s words about the Akeida? Certainly not before Abraham sets out with Isaac early that morning—but then, we hear no words from Abraham either. God commands him to take his son and bind him upon the altar, and Abraham immediately obeys, in silence. He awakens early, saddles his donkey, splits the wood for the offering, and sets out with his son Isaac, and his two aides. Isaac looks at his father, questioningly, “Father?” “I am here, my son,” Abraham answers. “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering?” Abraham answers, “God will show him—lo—the lamb for the offering, my son. And the two of them went together.”

“God will show him the lamb for the offering, my son.” These are the only words uttered by Abraham during the Akeida. The pronouns are confusing. Abraham does not say, “God will show both of us, or you Isaac, or me, the lamb; rather, Abraham says, “God will show him the lamb.” Whom will God show? Given the confusion of the pronouns, several commentaries explicate the Hebrew word “lo” as reflexive—“God will show Himself the lamb for the offering.” Perhaps that solves the problem, but I wonder if that interpretation adds to the confusion? How does God’s showing Himself the lamb answer Isaac’s question? I would suggest, with some trepidation, that perhaps the pronouns fit better if Sarah initially said this sentence to Abraham. Perhaps she said these words to him at the end of an all night discussion before his early morning departure with Isaac. Abraham’s own faith intact, perhaps he discussed with Sarah how to answer Isaac if he asked the question. Sarah then answers—“God will show him—meaning Isaac—the lamb for the offering.”

Sarah, then, knowing that God has commanded Abraham to listen carefully to the inner meaning of her words, comforts him with her faith—the faith that is strongest at those moments of existential crisis in her life. Sarah’s faith is deep and strong. She is neither depressed nor delusional. She accepts that her son’s fate is in God’s hands, and she conveys this acceptance to Abraham. She knows it must end well, for God has promised that the covenant would be fulfilled through Isaac. “Don’t worry about how to allay Isaac’s fears,” she may have told Abraham. “God will show him the lamb for the offering.” It is perhaps her words of faith and encouragement that Abraham quotes verbatim to Isaac, as he answers his question—the words from within her, the words of divine inspiration—revealed to her husband Abraham as he sets out on the trial of his life.

As he approaches the mountain he orders his two aides to remain behind, and Abraham goes forward with Isaac. In silence, Abraham places his son on the firewood, and ties him to the altar. A voice cries out, ordering Abraham not to lay a hand on Isaac or hurt him in any way, for now God knows of Abraham’s awe of God, that he has yirat Hashem. He too, has passed the test.

I have always aspired to be a Jewish leader. The specific shape that this kind of service might take has never been clear. Since I was young, the future of service that I have envisioned is one combining teaching, halakhic decision-making, pastoral counseling, social activism, and spiritual guiding. However, as I grow older it has become increasingly clear that the greatest impediment to the actualization of this dream is neither communal attitudes nor halakhic considerations. Rather, the fiercest obstruction is education.

In Judaism, certainly in Orthodoxy, no single form of religious expression is more emphasized and valued than Torah education. And this makes sense. We are a people shaped by the texts we produce and subsequently study with fervor. It goes without saying, then, that we expect our religious leaders to not only be familiar with our intellectual canon but also to be creative innovators of Torah themselves. Surely religious leadership takes many shapes, but none can themselves be divorced from serious Torah study; “greater is study, for study leads to action.” Although Torah study takes many forms and each style is itself comprised of various methods and manners, few can dispute the centrality that Talmud study has played and continues to play in the shaping of our communal intellectual identity and, by extension, expression of our Judaism. In fact, unfamiliarity with Talmud is a crippling scar on anyone who hopes to serve one’s people from within a normative religious framework and signifies the greatest impediment to women’s ascension to leadership of this kind.

Don’t get me wrong—we have certainly come a long way. Women have been granted unprecedented opportunities and exposure to text study in recent years. It is now taken as a given that young girls, like young boys, will be taught Torah throughout their childhood, well into their adulthood and beyond. Midrashot for women abound as do classes, lectures, and hevruta opportunities geared specifically toward them.

Nevertheless, the highly knowledgeable and scholarly women educators and leaders that we have are few and far between. Who can name a sefer authored by a woman outside of the realm of Tanakh, when even within that niche there are so few? When we have a halakhic query (outside the domain of taharat haMishpahah), how many of us will turn to a woman for guidance? And even when we have a question or confront a difficulty while learning, we inevitably run to ask a man. How might this reality be accounted for?

            I was twelve years old when my mother first introduced me to the rigor of Talmud study. It was about that time that my twin brother began studying Talmud seriously with our father. However, as we progressed in grade school and then in high school the disparities in our education began to emerge. And, although I excelled in my high-school Talmud and halakha classes and studied scrupulously with my father in the evenings, by the end of my Shanah Aleph, the first year of study in Israel, at Migdal Oz of Yeshivat Har Etzion, it was clear that I was too far behind my male peers to ever catch up.

            This realization was very difficult to swallow. It just did not seem to make much sense; I was banking in roughly the same amount of time for Talmud that my male friends were and I was a devoted student, at the top of the class. Yet, by the end of Shanah Aleph, and certainly Shanah Bet, my second year of study, these boys were light-years ahead of me and my female friends. This realization led to a series of frustrated conversations amongst my friends and a handful of meetings with our teachers devoted to figuring out how to raise the bar during our preparation and class time. It seemed as if we were hitting a brick wall, but I was unwilling to let this awareness slow me down. Returning from Israel, I attended Stern College for Women, where I enrolled in its Honors Advanced Talmud course and later began studying in the Graduate Program for women in Advanced Talmudic Study at Yeshiva University. By then, my male friends were so far ahead of me and my female friends in “learning” that the attempt to catch up seemed simply futile.

            Although the Talmud itself cautions against teaching women Talmud, calling it “tiflut” (and there is no shortage of disparaging remarks in our traditional canon about women’s cognitive abilities), arguments of this kind are not palatable to the twenty-first century ear. That is to say, blaming the gender disparity in learning on women’s intellectual capacities is simply ludicrous. Clearly there is something more here, but what?

             Years ago we could have blamed this on the fact that women were uneducated. But now, when we have so many schools and study opportunities for women there seem to be no excuses for this reality. Certainly not all women are taught Talmud from a young age, but some of us are exposed to these texts at the same time that boys begin to explore them because we study in co-ed classrooms. Often, when we have separate gender classes in grade school the curricula are different, with men’s studies emphasizing Talmud text learning while women’s classes focused more on Tanakh. This differentiation carries over into the yeshiva and midrashah world and helps explain the deep disparity between men’s scholarship and women’s, and thereby accounts for the dearth of competent and proficient female educators and by extension leaders. For, although some of us attend co-educational schools throughout high school, studying Talmud alongside our male peers, once we graduate and go to Israel for our years of study, we are placed in separate environments, which inevitably bear different products and account for my own experiences and that of my friends as well.

Obviously there is no single reason that might account for these disparities, but surely a combination of factors explains them. For one, most women’s institutions do not offer Talmud courses and even in those that do, the time allotted and the quality of the study is significantly lower than that found in men’s yeshivot. Sometimes this is because the women entering these institutions do not have the requisite background to jump in and learn in the same way that their male counterparts are able to. Additionally, even in schools that do provide women with the choice to spend many hours studying Talmud, it is nevertheless a choice and not a requirement as it is in most men’s institutions. The choice to study Talmud for women is taken at the expense of other important areas of study such as Tanakh, halakha, and philosophy. That is to say, for a woman to choose to study Talmud is itself a choice of sacrifice. On the other hand, for men, for better or for worse, it is taken as a given that they will consecrate most of their studying time specifically to Talmud. Moreover, even in the institutions that offer women significant courses of study in Talmud, this is seldom the bread and butter of the experience as it is in men’s yeshivot.

Teachers also play a major role in this reality. The most competent and knowledgeable teachers of Talmud both for men and women tend to be men. At times, though not across the board, the most competent among these choose to teach in men’s institutions and inevitably women students are left with second-rate educators.  Additionally, male teachers cultivate relationships with their male students that they are unable to nurture with their female students. This rebbe-talmid bond and even pressure, coupled with a certain element of competition amongst the students, often push the student to maximize his learning, which engenders a unique environment not replicated in women’s institutions of higher learning.

            Another major factor contributing to the disparity between women’s and men’s learning is that there are few women role models for girls and young women to aspire to be like. When a girl grows up and all of her most knowledgeable Talmud teachers are men, this sends her a message that this domain is not something women can ever have a portion in. And so, as studies have shown in the corporate world, this has a discouraging affect on women, telling them this is not something they might ever accomplish. The obvious solution to this would be to produce more competent women educators. But how might we accomplish this? Clearly, the current formula in having different institutions for men and women has not succeeded in building women scholars comparable to men.

            Although the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, it was not until 1954 that the Supreme Court overturned precedent establishing the racial doctrine of “separate but equal” as unconstitutional. The Court argued, referring to racial segregation that “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)). It is time that the Orthodox community confronts this reality and recognizes not only that separate-gender yeshivot are inherently unequal, but that because of this and until this is rectified we cannot hope to ever have women religious leaders on par with men.

            Some might argue that blaming the gender disparity in learning on separate educational facilities is pinpointing the symptom but not the cause. That is to say, it is clear that these institutions are not equal but this reality reflects the values of our community—if we valued women’s education more than we do now, surely we would build better curricula for them, give them more skilled teachers, and encourage them from a younger age to pursue Talmud study. Or more, this disparity is a reflection of the fact that men are obligated in the commandment of Torah study while women are not. Although there is no way to escape the reality of the latter argument, with regard to the former, certainly there are factions within our community who do very much value women’s Torah study and would like them to have the same educational opportunities awarded men. And even if this is not the case, integrating women into our yeshivot, like forced desegregation, might be ahead of the times, but nevertheless a necessary move.

            Integrating women into our yeshivot is the first step to producing competent and knowledgeable women leaders. Moreover, once the community sees that women are as able as men are in terms of scholarship and skills, this will likely affect their views not only on women’s education but on the possibilities of women’s leadership as well.

Recently, there have certainly been exciting developments for women’s education and, by extension, their leadership. However, until women learn alongside men in their yeshivot, women will continue to be the recipients of different materials, methods, and even values than their male counterparts. Consequently, women will forever be less competent and less impressive Jewish leaders.

It is difficult to think about my own future. Although there are a handful of institutions dedicated to advanced Jewish studies for women, and I am grateful to have studied and to continue studying in these places, there is nowhere for women to advance beyond these schools. Moreover, because all Orthodox institutions are gender-separate, they are inherently unequal. This means that practically it will be very difficult for me and my peers to ever achieve the same level of competence in text and knowledge as our male counterparts do. Must my dream of becoming a Jewish leader wait until we have the same educational opportunities as men, until we collectively demand, “Give unto us a possession among the brethren of our father?” (Numbers 27:4).

One of the enduring themes of my religious life has been the reconciliation of my Jewish and American cultural identities. As the daughter of a Modern Orthodox rabbi who taught me to look critically at the ways in which religion can be variously used and practiced, I became very aware of the pushes and pulls of different religious factions and how they have informed by beliefs. As a student of science, I gained insight into the importance of empirical knowledge and learned to look critically at the claims of universality and objectivity of research theories. My own framework for understanding differences in religious philosophy has developed over time, and centers around my personal struggles with the resolution of the cultural tension between my experience as an American—steeped in pervasive scientific values based on rational knowledge—and my experience as a Jew—with a set of mores and beliefs about the world that are strongly held but grounded within a framework that seems incompatible with the uncertainty that intellectual analysis brings.

The center of the internal struggle to integrate these seemingly incompatible aspects of myself crystallizes around my understanding of the observer effect. In science, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observing will make on the phenomenon being observed. Thus, every experiment is necessarily influenced by the presence of the investigator, and no researcher can be factored out of an experimental system. An elaboration of this discovery has led to the idea that as humans we inevitably try to impose order on a fundamentally chaotic universe; thus the way we structure our studies is implicitly biased and colored by human experience. This radical principle revolutionized the way we think about science and has led to a paradigm shift in the way we conceptualize and study other fields as well, comprising a vital component of postmodern scholarship.

Postmodern ideas now permeate almost every scholarly enterprise, from literature and history to psychology and sociology. Serious scholarship in many fields requires an open acknowledgment of the perspectives that provide the lens through which ideas are given meaning. The intellectual ramifications of the observer effect pervade twentieth-century intellectual thought and are an implicit part of a Western cultural sensibility. Despite its importance to our scholarship, this paradigm has not seriously influenced the way large segments of the Modern Orthodox world think about or treat religion and religious study. This disparity, as I see it, is one of the fundamental problems facing Modern Orthodoxy today. Since Judaism is taught in a factual way, while at the same time uncertainty permeates every other faction of our life, religion can become encapsulated or split off as a result.

In my various experiences growing up and living in different Jewish communities, I have found that Orthodox Jewish thought is often taught and learned in a categorical way that does not take into account differing viewpoints. As students, we are not taught to think critically about religious material or our religious leadership but must learn to do so on our own, outside of traditional educational systems. Religion is taught unequivocally, in a way that leaves out the doubts and subtleties each teacher necessarily brings to the material he or she teaches.

Under the current mainstream yeshiva system, pertinent information is selected and taught by instructors whose students are expected to grasp and apply it without significant evaluation of its merits. Teachers' formulations and interpretations are often implicitly presented and accepted as objective truths to be assimilated by their students. In this educational system, many learning experiences are characterized by acquiescence to the expertise of the teacher-as-authority. This method of indoctrination makes sense for young children as the stability and structure of an educational institution provide a sense of security, granting refuge from an ambiguous understanding of ideas. Yeshiva schooling constitutes a safe environment that provides a secure, though embryonic foundation for the understanding of religious knowledge.

The problem arises when this culture of indoctrination continues into our experiences as adult members of Orthodox communities. The dominant contemporary explanations of Jewish theology are generally given over in a way that precludes open debate or critical assessment of merit. In my experience, many religious leaders tend to be more concerned with making a point than with openly approaching others as an interpreter with a culturally bound perspective; this reluctance to address uncertainty extends to common religious discourse as well.

For many who do not acknowledge their participation in American culture, this does not pose a problem. They are content in being handed over objective knowledge, secure in the truth of their belief. But for those who choose to engage in Western culture and concomitantly adopt its cultural ethos, the struggle to integrate their American and Jewish sides is more difficult. It is not necessarily the content of the religious teachings that makes this challenging, but the way that knowledge is confused with or presented as objective truth. The prevailing methods for the dissemination of Jewish religious thought within communities are definitive and conclusive, as though the injection of any doubt or uncertainty into the discussion could lead the child or layperson astray. This trend can be alienating to those whose belief is influenced by American culture, as it leaves little space for a personal relationship with religious material. This can make it difficult to assimilate meaningful interpretations of religious information—and in effect widens the cultural divide between religious and secular selves.

The first time this conflict came starkly into my awareness was in my freshman year of college, in a humanities class covering a scholarly reading of the Old Testament. I had never before come into contact with this material—and its effects were gut-wrenching. I responded to what felt like an assault on my beliefs by holding on to my religious understanding of the Bible, defending it at all costs. As I listened to myself debate my classmates on the merits of these theories, I realized that I was approaching the issue from within a cultural perspective that was different from many of my fellow students. My only previous experience with the Bible had occurred within the framework of religious study, with an eye for one objective truth.

In this new, intellectual environment, my religious views seemed undeveloped; my beliefs were fundamental to my way of thinking but had never been challenged by the lens of historical scholarship. My previous yeshiva training had formed a secure basis for my religious beliefs but had not prepared me for impingement by the general prevailing cultural standards for critical thought. Because I could not locate my belief within a context, I was not equipped to effectively engage in intellectual discourse on the topic.

Years have passed since that shock of self-awareness, and yet I still find myself struggling with the same issues.  How is it possible to incorporate a fundamental religious belief system with a world based in critical rationality? I believe that the first step in bridging this divide would start with a growing awareness of the subjective nature of our beliefs. We may posit the existence of a set of objective religious beliefs, but as human beings interpreting these truths, our knowledge is necessarily bounded, even flawed. Even objective truths based in religious faith must be filtered through our subjectivity. The observer effect has taught us that because we are a part of the system we are studying, there is no way of standing apart, separate from our cultural milieu.

Acknowledging the biases with which we enter religious debate is never an easy task. Religion is the scaffolding on which our society is built and has provided a vital function for humanity. It forms the underpinnings for Western civilization and the guidelines by which many of us live our lives. Perhaps the centrality of Judaism’s position in our lives makes this struggle such a poignant one. It feels dangerous to subject our faith to critical examination as it may lead to a cynical deconstruction of our traditional Jewish beliefs. On the other hand, denying that our environment informs our perspective closes us off from seeing reality.

Each person must engage in his or her own quest for navigating meaning in religious tradition and modernity. For me, this has involved the reconciliation of the dueling sensibilities of my American and Jewish identities. The observer effect has helped me to locate my religious beliefs within a context. When viewed through a prism of critical rationality, Judaism becomes more complex, and is cast with ambiguity and nuance. And although it is decidedly more multifaceted and difficult, I am at peace with the uncertainty of my perspective, as it feels more compatible with the overarching environment in which I live. As humans our knowledge is necessarily limited; in our fallibility, we may take comfort in having others join in our struggle with uncertainty.

The rabbinic roots of the Fetaya family can be traced back to Hakham Reuven David Nawi (1770–1821). Hakham Reuven was disciple of Hakham Moshe Haim, the father of the Ben Ish Hai, and was described by the latter as “the great scholar, master of the Torah, our master….” Hakham Reuven passed away at a young age, and only one of his halakhic works, Yehi Reuven, has been published. His grandson Hakham Moshe Yeshua Yehezkel Fetaya (1830–1905) was a mystic and a poet. He founded one of the first printing houses in Baghdad in 1866, with his brother Aharon and their partner Rahamim ben Reuven. Fifty-five books were printed by the printing house until 1882, but Hakham Moshe’s own poems, covering a range of themes from mysticism to stories of personal miracles and prayers for redemption, were printed only in 1909 by his son, my great-grandfather, Hakham Yehudah.

I have heard the following story from my grandfather, Hakham Shaul Fetaya, regarding the initiation of his father into the wisdom of Kabbalah. Hakham Yosef Haim, better known as the Ben Ish Hai, who was 25 years Hakham Yehudah’s senior, used to deliver a sermon on Shabbat afternoon at the great synagogue of Baghdad, Midrash bet Zilkha, also known as Slat il-Kbiri. The Ben Ish Hai was a mesmerizing orator, and his sermons lasted several hours and included halakha, Torah commentary, ethical teachings, and Kabbalah.

In 1869, when Hakham Yehudah Fetaya was only nine years old, he came home crying one Shabbat afternoon. To his father’s inquiry, he answered that he attended the Ben Ish Hai’s sermon and felt frustrated that he could not understand the Kabbalah part of it. His father was moved by his son’s genuine interest and promised him that he would teach him Kabbalah. He did so until his son Yehudah turned 12, at which point his father told him that he has taught him all that he knows and that the time had come to search for a greater master. Young Yehudah duly enrolled in the Rabbinic Seminary of Hakham Abdallah Somekh (1813–1889), the most prominent of Baghdad’s rabbis in the nineteenth century.

In 1876, four years into his studies with Hakham Abdallah Somekh, the Hakham asked 16-year-old Yehudah to be the Hazzan for Minha at the Rabbinic Seminary. One of the older rabbis who was present protested, claiming that a Hazzan must be a married man with a full beard, but Hakham Abdallah Somekh insisted that the teenager he chose will be the Hazzan. “I cannot make his beard grow,” he said, “or marry him off right now, but since everyone agrees that a rabbi can serve as a Hazzan, I will now ordain him.” And so young Yehudah Fetaya was ordained, as a rabbi, at the age of 16.

The honor bestowed upon Hakham Yehudah by his great master did not quench his thirst for knowledge. Alongside his studies of Talmud and halakha under Hakham Abdallah, he learned Kabbalah under Hakham Shimon Agassi and the Ben Ish Hai, eventually becoming their colleague.

Hakham Yehudah was a prolific author, who wrote his first commentary on Kabbalah at the age of 23. The book, which he called Afiquei Mayim, is a commentary on Rabbi Haim Vital’s Etz Hayim, and was only published in a facsimile edition. He later expanded the commentary to what has become his magnum opus, the two-volume commentary on Etz Haim known as Beth Lehem Yehuda. This commentary was praised when first published and is still considered by leading scholars in the field as “The Rashi” on Etz Haim. Hakham Yehudah also wrote commentaries on portions of the Zohar, Yain HaReqah, on the portions known as Idera Raba and Idera Zuta, and Matoq LaNefesh on the Zohar of Parashat Mishpatim. He chose to write a commentary on those portion because they were widely studied during anniversaries for the deceased, and he wanted people to better understand what they were reading.

In general, one could say that despite his lofty field of study, Hakham Yehudah was very much down to earth and involved with the people. His house was open for all and he addressed questions and counseled people constantly. In his private diary, which is kept by my family, he describes a period in his life in which he experienced great closeness to God, a meditative state known as Devekut. He writes how his legs would carry him to his destination, while his mind and soul were elsewhere, but when he got to the yeshiva to deliver a class on Talmud, he reconnected with reality. I find that story intriguing not only because of the meditative state it describes, but for the ability of Hakham Yehudah to detach himself from this state of spiritual bliss for the sake of his students.

Among the many books of Hakham Yehudah, there are anthologies of commentaries on the Torah and Pirkei Avot, original prayers, and mystical writings, but the most popular of his works is no doubt the one he calls a notebook. That book, Minhat Yehudah, is basically a kabbalistic commentary on the Bible, but in several places, the author segues to discuss the interpretation of dreams and issues related to reincarnation. In the introduction to the book he writes that his main purpose in writing the book was to inform people of the full spiritual scope of their life in this world and the world to come and to encourage them to repent.

Among the many disciples in the field of Kabbalah were H. Sasson Mizrahi, H. Yitzhak Khadouri, H. Salman Moutzafi, and H. Salman Eliyahu, father of H. Mordecahi Eliyahu, Chief Rabbi of Israel and a very close friend of my grandfather and my family, but although his printed works focus on Kabblah, H. Yehudah’s activism and teachings were not limited to the esoteric. In one of his few halakhic responses that were preserved, he uses harsh words to criticize men who take advantage of women desperate to get married. He calls on the other judges to amend the situation where all the power was in the man’s hand, saying that women should not need to suffer by being summoned to court, or by feeling that they are tied in marriage to a man against their will.

He was also concerned with the physical and mental health of the people who came to him for a blessing or to seek help. My mother, who was eight years old when her grandfather passed away, told me that people used to say about him in Arabic “idou khudhra”—his hands are green—meaning that they felt special spiritual energy when he blessed them. She herself felt it, and I have experienced it as a child when my grandfather, H. Shaul, took care of me after I was frightened by a dog and could not sleep several nights. He sat me on his lap, placed his hand on my chest and recited verses, and I felt a pleasant warmth spreading through my body and soul. Years later, when my own children went through similar experiences, I tried to do the same, thinking that it might have been a placebo effect, but I failed.

There are many stories about H. Yehudah as a miracle worker, but the one that is close to my heart is one that can be emulated by all of us, and does not require an expertise in Kabbalah. The story is about one of his students in Baghdad, whose wife was expecting. H. Yehudah was concerned that the due date had passed, and asked the man about his wife’s health and whether she gave birth already, but his student dodged the question. The Hakham understood that something was wrong and kept pressing, until finally the man admitted that his wife was acting in a strange manner after she gave birth, and so she was sent by the embarrassed family to live with a Muslim foster family in a village outside the city. H. Yehudah asked for the name of the family and their whereabouts, and then immediately left the Rabbinic Seminary and went home. He asked his daughter Lulu, who was 17 at the time to join him, and together they traveled several hours until they arrived at the foster family’s house. They found the woman, who suffered from what today is known as postpartum depression, in a miserable condition. Besides the shock of being rejected by her family and separated from her young daughter, she was weak and emaciated, since she refused to eat non-kasher food.

H. Yehudah promised the woman that he would help her. He then traveled with his daughter Lulu to the nearest Jewish settlement and went directly to the local rabbi’s house. The rabbi was amazed to see the great hakham at his door. H. Yehudah explained that he was traveling with his daughter to Baghdad and that they were very hungry, and asked if the rabbi can offer them a hearty meal. Once the meal was ready, however, Hakham Yehudah said that he cannot delay and asked the perplexed host to pack the food “to go.” The Hakham and his daughter returned to the woman’s bedside where they fed and took care of her until she was strong enough to travel back to the city of Baghdad. When they arrived there, the women in H. Yehudah’s household took care of the woman for several months until she recovered physically and mentally. H. Yehudah then called the husband and reintroduced him to his wife, not before rebuking him for abandoning her at her darkest hour.

This story, which I have heard at a very young age, is engraved in my mind in a way which overshadows all the other stories about miracles attributed to H. Yehudah Fetaya. It is important because it teaches something that we are all capable of doing, even if we are not prodigies or great mystics. The Hakham’s great sensitivity and understanding of human nature shines through this story.

He was concerned not only with the learning of his students, but with the well-being of their families; and when he heard of the crisis he dropped everything and rushed to the woman’s help, but did not rebuke the husband yet, knowing that he would not listen to him. He traveled with his daughter, because he wanted the woman to feel comfortable with Lulu taking care of her. When visiting the rabbi’s house, he did not reveal the real reason he was asking for food, and would rather cast himself in a negative light, barging into a home and asking for food to go, in order not to embarrass the woman who needed the food. Finally, after returning to Baghdad, he made sure that the woman has fully recovered and then orchestrated her reunion with her husband and daughter.

The many halakhot that can be gleaned from this story cannot be found in any halakhic compilation, and they should be for us a guiding light in our dealings with others. This is but one example of his tireless work for the people of Baghdad and Israel.

Hakham Yehudah’s fame reached the Iraqi diaspora in India, and he was offered a position with that thriving Iraqi community, an offer that he rejected since his aspiration was to migrate to the Land of Israel. He settled in Israel in 1905, but returned to Baghdad after several years. He made a second attempt at aliya in 1923, and finally fulfilled his wish in 1934, at the age of 74. He initially lived in Ramat Gan, where there was a concentration of Iraqi Jews, but eventually moved to Jerusalem, where he was actively involved in the study circles of the kabbalist school Beth El, as well as Shoshanim LeDavid and Ohel Rahel, not far from Mahane Yehudah.

Bound by Hope

Hakham Yehudah Fetaya passed away the 27^th of Menahem Av, 74 years ago. My grandfather told me that during the funeral the sky was covered with dark clouds and heavy rain started pouring. Being that this is very atypical to the Israeli summer, people felt that the heavens were weeping for his death. Since then, each year on the anniversary of his death (except between 1948–1967), hundreds of people ascend to his grave on Har HaZetim (Mount of Olives), to read the special prayers he composed for tumultuous times, and specifically the Holocaust. He kept abreast of the news from Europe and conducted prayers for the Jews of Germany years before the Holocaust. When the war started, Hakham Yehudah’s efforts intensified. Besides running, with his son, Hakham Shaul, a center for distributing basic food staples to poor families, he wrote and published special prayers in a booklet he titled Asirei haTikva, Bound by Hope, a name that conveys the message that despite all the difficulties, we are still bound to God by our faith and hope.

The introduction to the first edition, printed in 1940, reads:

The order of prayers in this booklet is what we had to do, with great sorrow, in the holy city of Jerusalem, in the year 1940 (corresponding to the Hebrew date alluded to in the verse: Sound a great shofar and bring forth our freedom), as we were drowning in the tidal waves of disaster [in Europe]. We had to publish it to make it available for all, so we can join together, with one heart, to plead with prayer and supplications before God, and hope that He will have mercy for the remnant of his flock and will not let their blood spill like water….

Those special prayers, which Hakham Yehudah conducted almost daily at Rachel’s Tomb and other sites, were not his only effort in trying to help the Jewish People. At one point, he procured an airplane from the RAF, and with a minyan of kabbalists performed a service of Kapparot over the Land of Israel.[1]

One of the dramatic stories I heard from my grandfather was of the time his father summoned God to trial. Hakham Yehudah gathered all the sages and kabbalists of the famed Beth El and Ohel Rahel academies in Jerusalem, and summoned God to a Din Torah, a trial, with the specific purpose of acquitting the Jews and proving that God must stop the massacre in Germany. In order to have a fair trial, he appointed both a prosecutor and a defense attorney [himself, obviously] for the Jews. My grandfather told me emphatically of the warning his father issued to the prosecutor: “Speak briefly. Do not cast the Jews in a negative light. After all, they all are good people.” The trial came to an abrupt stop when the prosecutor went on a blaming rampage against the Jewish People, and would not stop despite threats and supplications. My mother added to that story that the man lost his sanity afterward. The message of that story guided my grandfather, and since he was my master, guides also me until this very day in dealing with questions of halakha, education, and working with the community. This unique event is typical of Hakham Yehudah, as well of his son, Hakham Shaul, who did not shy away from confrontations with God Himself.

The booklet Asirei haTikva offers an example of his unabated love for the Jewish People, his deep pain for their suffering, and his willingness to argue with God.

When people visited his grave on the anniversary of his death, these gatherings did not include dancing, eating, or lighting candles at the grave. Rather, the prayers he composed were read by the public in what was an awe-inspiring event that left a very deep impression on me as a young child. My grandfather, Hakham Shaul, our cantor, Gurji Yair, and many elders of the Iraqi community would go around the grave seven times, reading the prayers Hakham Yehudah composed during the Holocaust.

Hakham Shaul, following in the pathways of his great father, felt the pain of the needy and the poor, the Holocaust survivors whose spirit was broken, and those who felt imperfect, whether spiritually or physically, and his prayers echoed his pain.

The pinnacle of the prayers at Hakham Yehudah’s gravesite were the special poems he composed in honor of our Mothers, Sarah, Rivka, Rahel, and Leah. He wrote these poems in the early 1900s as an addition to the traditional Haqqafot, which mention only men. One might say that he wrote the first modern feminist Midrash. Hakham Yehudah wrote four poems, one for each one of the mothers, but Rahel received a special treatment. Her poem, Zekhut Rahel, is three times as long as all the others combined. The special affinity of Hakham Yehudah for Rahel was a product of his kabbalistic background, and of the special attention given to her by the prophet Jeremiah and the midrashic literature, but it also had a personal element. His wife’s name was Rahel (affectionately, in Iraqi Arabic: Chahla), and they had lost several children in their infancy. They had also suffered the blow of losing their married daughter Simha and her husband Shimon during the plague of 1914, and had taken the couple’s little orphaned daughter, Haviva, under their wing. The tragic life of our matriarch Rahel, was for him much more than a biblical image and a mystical metaphor for the Shekhina, it was the real-life story of a bereaved father sharing the pain with his beloved wife Rahel.

In the poem, he pleads with God but also argues bitterly with Him, demanding a better treatment for the nation and the individual. Here is the full text of the poem with my translation:

For Rahel’s Sake

 Recall, God, the merit of Rahel, for her wandering children.

She who has brought her adversary under her own bridal canopy in a sleepless night.

She hid under the bed and responded from there [instead of her sister].

Please, from your seat on high, hear her bewail and lament.

Her thundering voice, shattering walls, can be heard from great distances.

She who was buried at the crossroads, is wailing and asking:

“Where is Joseph, where is the one who hugged me? Woe to me for my sweet child!

Where is Ben Oni, who never saw me, who never rested on my chest?”

She went and asked the Patriarchs: “Where are my dear children?”

[They said:] “Go ask ben Amram, who is buried on Mount Avarim!”

“My son Moshe, please speak up, where have you abandoned the flocks?”

From the grave, speaking to her, rose a mournful, lamenting voice: 

“Why are you wandering on the mountains, what are you searching for, dear aunt?”

[She answered:] “Now is not a time for idle talk, as I have to mend the broken wall.”

Moshe, in deep sorrow, answered: “I have handed them to your son, Yehoshua.”

 [She told him:] “Yehoshua my son, please answer me, where are the tribes?”

Faced with her agony and lament, he responded with his own tears

And the voice of their crying and wailing rose to the heavens.

“Please mother” [cried Yehoshua], “please stop, before I die and perish;”

“I have handed them to the elders and to the shepherd kings of the House of David.”

 She left him and rushed to the grave sites of the city of Zion.

[The kings] told her: “On the Temple Mount, there they shall be sought and found.”

Alas, when Rahel saw that there are no walls nor fences,

And the Temple has been burnt to the ground,

And that there are no priests nor Levites, and no Ark nor Cherubim,

She shrieked in agony, and cast away her shoes.

She tore the striped robe, and her scarf, and her dresses.

She wore sackcloth and rolled on the rocks,

Slapping her flesh to mourn her lost son.

Clad in sorrow for God’s people, she was howling in grief.

 Hurriedly she leapt above, towards God, sitting on high,

Speaking for the People of Zion, and raising her voice with tears, [she demanded:]

“Please Father, see my pain, and heed my plea with mercy!

 My Rock, My Hope, will Your people be forever lost?

How could You tear a bride from her husband’s lap and send her into exile?

How could You shoo the nesting mother, but not take care of the fledglings?

How could You abandon Your sheep among devouring lions?

How can you remain quiet while the People of Edom [Germany] turn them into sacrifices?

Were they not punished enough, were they not engulfed by vicious waters?

Are a thousand years not enough for You?

The sun is already setting on the second millennium, and the pain is not letting.

Where is the miraculous sign? When is the Time of Times?

When will you have mercy? When will you console us?

You keep putting us away, day after day!

Almighty God, redeem us already! Do not soothe us with words!”

 A voice was then heard from the Divine Throne: “Hush my daughter, oh bride of the mighty!

Let your eyes stop crying; Let your voice rest from supplications.

Because of your tears and lament, the heavenly worlds are now in exile.

And He rose up above, and mercy has been invoked.

 I shall not rest until I revenge the spilled blood of my servants,

And shortly I will sever and destroy the wicked.

I will cut the stone, smash the idol, breaking it to shards.

I will open the sealed coffers and release the swallowed souls.

Rise up, shake away your sorrow, and wear your precious clothes.”

I hear the voice of my nation saying:

“Though we are sinners, do for Your great name’s sake!”

The Midrashic Origin of Rahel’s Merit

This poem, in which Hakham Yehudah Fetaya casts Rahel as a defense attorney for her children, is based on two midrashic sources, which are in turn inter-connected. The first Midrash[2] has been made famous by Rashi, who included it in his commentary on Genesis,[3] in order to explain the mystery of how Yaakov was tricked into marrying Leah instead of Rahel. According to that Midrash, Yaakov and Rahel suspected that Lavan would attempt a deception, and so decided on a secret password to enable Yaakov to identify his bride. At the last moment, however, when Rahel realized that her father was determined to lead her sister down the aisle, she felt sorry for her and gave her the password so as not to shame her.

The second, less-known Midrash, is found in the introduction to Eikha Rabbah,[4] the midrashic commentary on the Book of Lamentations, and is based on a verse from Jeremiah[5] which describes Rahel’s agony after the destruction of the Temple:

A voice is heard in Ramah [also: a strong voice is heard]. It is the sound of wailing and bitter tears. It is the voice of Rahel, mourning her children, refuses to be consoled for her sons who are now gone!

In the dramatic narrative of the Midrash, Abraham, Yitzhak, Yaakov, and Moshe are pleading with God on behalf of the Jewish People. Each of the men steps forward and asks God that as a reward for his many sacrifices and dedication to God, the Jewish People will be forgiven and redeemed, but none of them is answered. Rahel then jumps the line, apparently uninvited, and speaks to God about her own experience with her sister. She describes how despite her great love for Yaakov she was willing to let her sister Leah take her place because she did not want her to suffer disgrace, and then levels this question at God:

I am but flesh and blood, dust and ashes, yet I was not jealous of my rival [Leah] and did not cause her shame and disgrace! You, Eternal and Merciful King, why were You jealous of idolatry, which has no value? How could you send my sons go in exile, be killed by the sword, and handed over to their enemies to do with them as they wish?

Unlike God’s treatment of the men who spoke before Rahel, He hears her request and promises redemption, using the subsequent verses in Jeremiah:[6]

Let your voice mourn no more, let your eyes shed no more tears, for your deeds are rewarded… they shall return from enemy lands… your destiny is filled with hope… as the exiled sons will come back home….

Feminine and Masculine Perspectives

At first glance it seems that Rahel’s argument follows the same pattern as the men, and that the only reason the midrashic author makes God answer her and not the others, is that Jeremiah spoke of the dialogue between Rahel and God. A more thorough and comparative reading, however, will reveal deep insights on the nature of men and women and on our understanding of divine justice.

Abraham, Yitzhak, Yaakov, and Moshe, appear before God as if they were in court. They maintain decorum, and each one presents a similar argument: “I did this and that, so I deserve a reward.” Each one of them is ignored, and they interpret it as a sign that their request is turned down, and do not argue any more. Rahel, the bereaved mother, breaks the rules. Like a wounded lioness, she pushes her way past the men and speaks uninvited, as if rebuking them for giving up and retreating.

Rahel is not asking for a reward, but rather lectures God, telling Him that He should learn from her. She suggests that she, a mortal woman, was able to overcome her natural selfishness and jealousy, and that God should follow her example and not be jealous of the “second wife” of the Israelites—the idols.

The audacity of the author of the Midrash is shocking. He questions one of the fundamental prohibitions of the Torah, arguing that God should not punish His children so harshly for worshipping idols. The author speaks more as a loving mother than as a disciplinary leader we know from the stories of the judges and the prophets. I am certain that my great-grandfather understood the pain of all mothers, and of course of his own wife Rahel, and that he took the role of defender of the Jewish people to new levels.

Mother Rahel = Hakham Yehudah

Hakham Yehudah uses the midrashic Rahel to present his theological dispute. From behind Rahel’s mask we can hear the voice of Hakham Yehudah, who conveys both his personal pain and his shock at the terrible massacre of Jews in Europe, while emphasizing the different approach of the forefathers and the one mother.

The poet uses Rahel as a symbol for the nation, and in few lines, sketches Rahel’s tragic life. He speaks of her grief for her lost descendants, and simultaneously of the grief of her immediate sons Joseph and Benjamin. Joseph is described as a toddler who is very close to his mother. In the original Hebrew, he is said to be hovering, conjuring the image of a mother and child huddling together, deriving comfort and joy from each other’s company. Benjamin is referred to here as Ben Oni, the name given to him by Rahel at birth. The name has a double entendre; it could mean the son of my sorrow, or the son of my [last] strength. Rahel is lamenting not being able to breastfeed her son, depriving him, as if it were, of the important role of the mother for the child, that of a nurturer and giver of life. Finally, as if to add insult to pain, she is buried at the crossroads, as if she were not important enough to be have proper burial.[7]

After her initial shock and mourning, she rises from the dust and takes action, going from one male leader to another to inquire about her children. In the original Midrash there is no interaction between the men and Rahel, but Hakham Yehudah creates a dialogue which intensifies the image of Rahel the bereaved mother. She uses terms of endearment when talking of her children, and includes not only her direct descendants, Joseph and Benjamin, but all 12 tribes. She uses harsh words when talking to Moshe, first accusing him of abandoning his people, and then telling him that he is wasting his time in trying to calm her.

In Rahel’s encounter with Yehoshua there is a new element. Not only does she exchange words with him, but her tears and mourning affect him so powerfully that he pleads for his life, even though the readers are aware that he speaks from the grave. The protagonists address each other as direct relatives: aunt, mother, son, showing that a true leader cares for the people the way relatives care for each other, with unconditional love. The poem shows gradual progress as Rahel moves from one man to another. The patriarchs shake away the responsibility and refer her to Moshe. Moshe tries to talk her out of worrying but she would not hear of it. Finally, Yehoshua is influenced by her emotions but it is too much for him to bear and he pleads with her to stop.

Rahel finally arrives at the Temple Mount and witnesses the destruction and desolation. Her spirit broken, she expresses her grief by slapping her flesh, a practice mentioned in the Bible[8] and still common in the Middle East. She tears her striped robe, a reference to Joseph, as well as the attack on Tamar by her brother Amnon.[9] The robe embodies the suffering of Rahel as a mother whose son was torn from her arms.

The following stanza is a turning point in the poem, and it is based on the line in the Midrash which describes Rahel as “jumping” and speaking out of turn.

 Hurriedly she leapt… she demanded… Father, see my pain, and heed my plea with mercy… How could You tear a bride from her husband’s lap and send her into exile? How could You shoo the nesting mother, but not take care of the fledglings?

Unlike the men, who remain passive in their grief, Rahel is able to rise from the crushing pain and take action. She approaches God with harsh words that are, of course, the words of Hakham Yehudah Fetaya. He again uses the language of blood relations, as he makes Rahel address God as “Father” and speaks of the Jewish People as a bride who is driven away. Of all the arguments presented here, the boldest is the analogy Hakham Yehudah draws between the people in exile and the nesting bird. This analogy refers to the commandment of sending away a nesting bird while taking its eggs or fledglings.[10] Obviously, the Torah did not mean to say that one is obligated to separate the mother from its offspring, but rather that if one needs the eggs or fledglings, he should spare the mother. The analogy Hakham Yehudah makes is bold and daring because the talmudic sages specifically said about this commandment that one is not allowed to use it to invoke divine mercy:[11]

If [the one leading the services] says: May You show mercy to us as toy did to the nesting bird… he must be silenced.

The Talmud offers two explanations that seem to suggest that the rabbis feared that such statements will encourage a discussion of theodicy, or divine justice, which was a very sensitive issue for post-destruction Judaism. Not only does Hakham Yehudah Fetaya not shy away from this issue, practically accusing God of treating Jews unfairly and of abandoning them, he very cleverly changes the dynamics of the analogy, making it more dramatic. Whereas the commandment calls for releasing the mother and taking the eggs or fledglings for consumption, in the analogy the mother is sent into exile and the fledglings become the responsibility of the hunter, which in this case is God.

Here, the evolution of Hakham Yehudah’s Rahel is complete. She first transitioned from a bereaved mother to a wandering mourner, and she now becomes a fierce advocate for the Jewish people, firing a rapid succession of 14 arguments against God’s treatment of her children. Through Rahel, Hakham Yehudah speaks of his deep pain over the Holocaust, using midrashic Edom to refer to Germany. He pleads with God but does not hesitate to use an accusatory tone, saying that God has abandoned us and that He does not keep His promises.  

The poem concludes with a promise of redemption with many mystical elements, but its essence is a replay of what has transpired between Rahel and Yehoshua. Just as Yehoshua begs Rahel to calm down because he is overwhelmed by the emotions she stirred in him, God now tells Rahel to stop crying, using the verse from Jeremiah. The reason for that request, according to Hakham Yehudah, is that her powerful prayers caused the Divine worlds to commiserate with her suffering and as a result they are now in exile. Using Rahel as a mask, Hakham Yehudah issues a call to all Jews to be relentless in their efforts to usher in the redemption.

The way to do it, as he signaled in his poem about Rahel, as well as in his teachings and leadership, is to be active and not sink into depression, indifference, and apathy. He taught us that we cannot keep quiet when people suffer and that we must constantly challenge ourselves, and God, until we have a perfect world.
 

Halakha and Kabbalah

Hakham Yehudah Fetaya is considered one of the leading kabbalists of the twentieth century, both in terms of his outstanding disciples and colleagues, and his very important commentaries. It is therefore extremely important to hear his view on the role of Kabbalah in Jewish law, as was conveyed by his son, Hakham Shaul Fetaya. My grandfather explained that halakhot influenced by or instituted by Kabbalah were never meant for the public, but rather only for the true kabbalists. That is because the idea at the basis of these laws and practices is that by performing a certain act in this world, one impacts and changes the divine worlds. Let us consider a famous example of a practice stemming from this kabbalistic approach.

Sweetening the Harsh Judgment

The Talmud says in the name of Rava that one must add water to the wine of Kiddush, or else it will be undrinkable and undeserving of being called wine.[12] Rava’s rationale is that without adding water the wine is too strong. Rava’s opinion was not accepted as binding but rather as a recommendation, and Rabbi Yosef Karo writes that one is allowed to make Kiddush with a very strong wine. He does add that it is preferable to dilute the wine, as long as it is done properly, meaning that the final product is better than the original. Rabbi Moshe Isserles, the Rema, comments on that: “Our wines are better as they are, without diluting.”[13]

According to both Rabbi Karo and the Rema, the practice of diluting wine with water should have disappeared in the modern age, as most wines are drinkable, without any addition of water. This is indeed the case for most Ashkenazim; but the Sephardic world, under the influence of Kabbalah, took a different course. The practice of adding water to wine was explained by kabbalists as an act which weakens, or sweetens, the harsh judgment, as water represents mercy and wine represents rigor.[14] To avoid extreme dilution of the wine, the Kabbalists recommended adding three drops of water to the Kiddush cup, a practice kept in many Sephardic households.

The idea that a person can change God’s mind by adding three drops of water to the Kiddush cup could be deeply disturbing to anyone who is familiar with Maimonides’ principles of faith, and specifically the one that states that God is immutable.

There are several ways to reconcile this contradiction. One is to reject all Kabbalah-influenced practices, while another is to find deeper symbolism and meditative tools in the kabbalistic principles. In the case of water and wine, for example, when one adds the water to the wine, he should contemplate his behavior and decide to make a special effort to override his anger and be more kind and sensitive.

The third approach, that of Hakham Yehudah Fetaya, is that there might be a way in which humans induce change in God’s world. However, this is a role reserved for people with a very high spiritual level, namely the true kabbalists. Hakham Shaul, faithful to his father’s teachings, taught us not to add water to wine and not to wash our hands with Last Water, another practice that would have disappeared if not for Kabbalah. In general, Hakham Shaul was uncomfortable with the popularization of Kabbalah study, as he felt that the study is technical and superficial, and that no attention is paid to spiritual growth and interpersonal relationships. He was also opposed to the phenomenon of seeking blessings from “kabbalists” and rabbis who charge for their services. He told me that Hakham Yehudah Fetaya had a very clear opinion on this issue, which is that one is not allowed to seek advice, guidance, blessings, or prayers, from anyone who expects something in return for those services.

He explained that God does not need middlemen, and if there exists a person who was invested by God with special powers or access to Him, that person should care enough for others as to offer prayers and blessings without asking for a penny. My grandfather added that even if the rabbi does not ask for a payment, but says that he will bless a couple with a child on the condition that he will serve as the Sandak, one should decline the offer.

My grandfather, Hakham Shaul Fetaya (1910–1982), refused to serve as a rabbi, and instead dedicated his life to help people from all walks of life. He was a member of the Etzel underground and helped organize caravans to Jerusalem during the War of Independence. He fought for the inclusion of Iraqi and Sephardic Jews in the administrative offices of the newly born State of Israel, and continued his father’s tradition of helping the poor and needy.

He took care not only of material needs, by personally delivering supplies to immigrant families, but also of spiritual needs, counseling and advising thousands in his little store-office near Mahane Yehuda. His method of dream interpretation was studied by Dr. Yoram Bilu, who was astounded to discover a whole world of symbolism in the mystical teachings of Hakham Shaul and his father.

In the late 1970s Hakham Shaul launched a new initiative with his daughter Simha, my mother, and Dr. Hannah and Israel Openheimer, who were Holocaust survivors. That initiative was an occupational habilitation center in which people with physical and mental disabilities learned new skills or revived old ones, in order to integrate into the regular work market. My grandfather’s motto was the verse from Job (31:15): “His maker made me as well, and we were formed in one womb.” Hakham Shaul extended his belief in equality to the religious realm as well and taught his disciples and grandchildren not to use words such as religious and secular to describe factions in Israeli society. To our question what term to use, he replied that all Jews are observant, but each one chooses to observe different mitzvoth. He taught us that religiosity is not judged by external elements, and that there is much we need to learn about others. In the spirit of equality, he also encouraged my older sisters to have a Bat Mitzvah, as early as 1969, when this was not a popular practice among observant Sephardim in Israel.

My grandfather was the epitome of a Sephardic Hakham. He knew the Bible by heart; he read and wrote poetry; he was an activist, a philanthropist, and a philosopher. He did not believe in leading from above, and preached for loving and respecting one another. His approach to halakha was accommodating and understanding. He never forced anyone to drink wine or eat matzah on Seder night, and he tried to avoid Kabbalah-influenced practices.  I remember very well how on Yom Kippur, when I was seven years old, when speaking about Shabbat observance, he said that he knows that many people watch television on Shabbat, and that he just asks them not to switch channels or play with the volume. His approach of understanding and respect has guided me in my halakhic writings and my community work.

Here is a passage from his book Hirhurim (Musings), in which he addresses the religious elected officials and Knesset members, whom he viewed as enslaved to their seats:

…Enough PR, arguments, and animosity… instead of the noise and storms, come down to the people, walk with the people. It will not take away from your honor, it will only augment it. Didn’t God Himself come down on Mount Sinai, and doesn’t it say that Moshe came down to the people? But you… you rest on the comfortable chairs in your offices and never come down… and when you do you go to synagogues and study halls, but not to the “commoners”…

Please, if you ever decide to come down to the nation, don’t go only to those who know the values and principles, who apparently do not keep them, and who despite all this are called holy people…

Because this nation is wise, intelligent, and willing to listen, they will understand you, they are thirsty for knowledge, especially the youth, the knowledge of Jewish insight, the principles, values, and Israeli tradition. Speak to the youth. Speak to their heart. Explain gently, with love, sensitivity, and attention, and they will listen…

Teach the rabbis, the newly minted and the veterans, to be wise and not use the Torah as a tool to aggrandize themselves, so people will learn from them noble and worthy values.

Talk to the rock—it will give forth water… do not cause pain…

These words epitomize my grandfather, Hakham Shaul Fetaya. My grandfather’s love for scholarship, Bible, poetry, and music, as well his activism has deeply influenced me and my siblings, who all continued aspects of his legacy in one way or another. My oldest sister Haviva Pedaya is a professor of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah and a poet, and the second, Hannah, is the founder and manager of the Firqat al-Nur orchestra, and she spearheads the revival of Sephardic music and liturgy in Israel. My brother Yehudah is the rabbi of my grandfather’s synagogue in Jerusalem, Minhat Yehudah, and he teaches and maintains the unique Baghdadi traditions of Hakham Shaul. My sister Ayyala is an activist, a playwright, and a poet.

As a family, we feel now that there is an awakening, a thirst and longing for the legacy of Sephardic and Mediterranean Jews, and we hope that this legacy will contribute to the creation of bridges of understanding and mutual respect.

Mishlei 1:2-3

“To know wisdom and discipline, to comprehend words of understanding; To receive the discipline of wisdom, righteousness, justice, and equity; To give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth. Let the wise man hear and increase learning. The understanding man shall acquire wise counsels to understand an allegory and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of Hashem is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and discipline.”

Introduction

One of the last conversations I had with my paternal grandmother before she passed away changed my life in ways that I initially could not imagine. At the timeת my grandmother was 94 years old and her memory was starting to fade a bit. From her 80’s into her 90’s she was a bastion of family history and information with a memory that spanned decades and generations. I grew up far from most of my family and after my father died my contact with my grandmother was my main source of connection to them.

In her last years, my grandmother’s conversations were often repetitive due to her advanced age with “How have you been, where have you been, I have’t seen you in a long time, etc.” being the most common points of return for her. Yet, from time to time an almost eerie sense of clarity would come over her and she would say things to me that were often profound; things that she had never told me in the past.

During one such conversation my grandmother kept returning to trivial matters until all of a sudden out of the blue she asked me, “What do you believe in?” The question caught me off guard because it was sudden and had nothing to do with the subject of the conversation. The reality was that time of my life I was in a state of flux, intellectually, even though I thought I had it all figured out.

I stumbled through various ways of trying to answer grandmother’s question, not sure why I couldn’t find the words to explain myself. After a few moments of not giving her a clear and conclusive answer she stopped me and made one of the most profound statements anyone has ever made to me.

“Let me tell you that a day is coming where you will have to be something and believe in something not because of anything I told you, not because of anything your mother has told you, and not because of anything anyone has told you. No, the day is coming when you will have to be something and believe in something because you have investigated it and you know it to be true!”

With that statement her memory faded and she fell back into the trivial conversation we were having before. From that moment forth nothing was ever the same and even though I spent many years trying to come to grips with her statement eventually it came front and center when I chose to dedicate my life to the truth like she told me. That choice led me to ground myself in the reality of Torath Mosheh to the best of my personal ability while learning how to divest myself from falsehoods.

“Through the intellect man distinguishes between the true and the false. This faculty Adam possessed perfectly and completely. The right and the wrong are terms employed in the science of apparent truths (morals), not in that of necessary truths, as, e.g., it is not correct to say, in reference to the proposition "the heavens are spherical," it is "good" or to declare the assertion that "the earth is flat" to be "bad": but we say of the one it is true, of the other it is false. Similarly our language expresses the idea of true and false by the terms emet and sheker, of the morally right and the morally wrong, by tov and ra’. Thus it is the function of the intellect to discriminate between the true and the false--a distinction which is applicable to all objects of intellectual perception.” [1]

A Minority Report

The truth, speak about it in the wrong sectors and you can get strange glances. Have a conversation about the truth with someone in modern-western based society and you may end up in argument about how there is no such thing as absolutes. I can’t even count the number of times someone, with no real experience a particular topic, would tell me something is an absolute truth when in reality due to my own research I knew it was theoretical. Some of the same people, while discussing a topic they term as “religious,” have treated my presentation of facts as problematic when they can’t find contradictions. In many of these cases they often fall back on the, “How can anyone know what the truth is?” or “Nothing can be established as the truth” method of avoiding the issue. In many cases the people who fall into this category are often are not able to see any further than their own perspectives because they are often using the wrong tools for the wrong job while not recognizing the fault in their philosophical approach.

What I mean by this is that if one wants to know if there is a possibility that the Source of Creation spoke to Am Yisrael, as the Torah describes[2], one would not pull out arguments on theoretical physics, chemistry, or mathematics. These fields of study may answer the “how” such an event may have taken place but they cannot answer “if” something actually took place. No, one would first use a historical model which is sometimes termed as a “convergence of facts” or a convergence of evidence.[3] [4] On the other hand, if one wants to make sense of the various statements made by Hazal about human perceived natural events and extra-natural events that Torath Mosheh describes as having sources from Hashem, one would not use the models for historical analysis and instead would use what is currently known in the various sciences.

Thus, when I approach any challenge or any question as to what I hold by[5], what I don’t understand, or what I desire to establish I use my experience as an electrical and an EMC Engineer in line with my studies of Torah to make decisions and come to conclusions. This, as a practice, does not take place once or a few times but is something that I interact with every day as someone who is focused on trying to understand the truth of every matter that affects my personal life and my daily philosophy.

"Adam the first, majestic man of dominion and success, and Adam the second, the lonely man of faith, obedience and defeat, are not two different people locked in an external confrontation ... but one person who is involved in self-confrontation. ...In every one of us abide two personae - the creative majestic Adam the first, and the submissive, humble Adam the second." [6]

Truth – A Daily Companion

My confrontations and struggles with living out the truth, many times as the as a singular individual from a minority or as a minority within that minority, have been varied and numerous. They have spanned my travels in America, Israel, Ethiopia, Italy, and Japan and covered numerous topics. My ammunition has been the study of texts and keeping aware of how one determines the truth in realistic situations; using the right tools for the right situation. An unexpected result of this way of life is that at times it has caused me to stand alone in a crowd, even when surrounded by people who are also Jewish. The truth and one’s dedication to it can sometimes be a lonely place but the benefits of such a stance are well worth it.

It is important note that the point here is not what about one thinks or believes about a particular matter, because both thought and belief are subjective, but instead what one “knows” to be true and can with high level of confidence and certainty establish.[7] This is something substantiated by the Tanakh and the writings of Hazal, such as the comment made by Saadya HaGaon:

“And knowledge has two sides, truth and falsehood, the knowledge of truth is known as a matter that is “from the many is many, the few is few, black is black, white is white, available/established is available/established, and lacking is lacking. Falsehood is known as a matter that is from the many are few, the few are many, black is white, white is black, available/established is lacking, and lacking is available/established.” [8]

In order to unpack these ideas and place them into real word applications, I will detail of number of situations from my life.

Struggling with the Past – New York

For seven years while living between New Jersey and Manhattan I worked at a high tech company in Pearl River, NY. During my day to day functions the truth of the Torah was an integral part of my interactions with my coworkers both Jewish and non-Jewish. I was not the only Jew working for the company but I was the only Jew who openly wore a kippa and tzitziyot. Further, within a group of about ten Jews out of about 200 non-Jews I was one of three Jews who kept Shabbat and Haggim[9] and I was further the only Jew who kept kosher. Given these facts it didn’t take long for me to become the resident answer man for Judaism and it was due to this status that I came into contact with a coworker who took much interest in discussing life issues with me.

He was a Jew with a Christian name and though that may not be so strange in the U.S. it does speak to some of the inner conflicts and contradictions he had. Over the course of the seven years we worked for the same company I had many conversations with him, many of which addressed whether or not the concept of Hashem was logical or not. Because of my willingness to address any topic without reservation or coercion he felt comfortable enough to let down his guard on many personal topics.

During one of his visits to my lab he told me that he was angry because his wife was forcing him to start preparations for their eight year old son to eventually have a Bar Mitzvah. My coworker was actually perturbed by his wife’s request since in his mind this involved years of financial expense, joining a synagogue – another expense, and personal stress for him. I listened to his complaints and when he was finished I responded in the following way.

“I am sorry to hear about your turmoil but let me ask you one question. Is this your Bar Mitzvah or your son’s? Based on what you described you obviously feel strongly about this but your son is a Jew. Do you really want to possibly face him ten or twenty years from now with him asking you why you didn’t give him a Bar Mitzvah? What if he comes to you and states that all of his friends had Bar Mitzvahs and he wants to know why he didn’t receive one? What happens when you give him your answer and he may be angry with you because you robbed him of an experience of his youth? Are you willing to face the possibility of him telling you that this was his experience and not yours to deny him?”

I told my co-worker that if the expense was the problem that there are a number of options that would cost him either nothing or close to nothing. I even offered that I could talk to people at the local Yemenite synagogue in Manhattan where I prayed because all children under the age of 13 receive the 6^th aliyah.[10] As a joke, I even told him to call the local Chabad and tell them he is giving up on all of Judaism unless his son gets a Bar Mitzvah. The joke being that there would shiluchim knocking on his door within minutes to help him for free. I stressed that the important thing is that if we are Jews and if we value our culture and history to deny his son an essential part of the normal modern development would be a sad and shameful thing for a father to do.

After my response my coworker had a silent moment and before leaving he thanked me for my response. A few weeks later he came to me and told me that after speaking with his wife he wanted me to come by their house to help get their son interested in learning Hebrew; to put him on the path of a Bar Mitzvah. I in fact did help teach his son some basic Hebrew after which his daughter proclaimed the she also wanted to learn.

My co-worker eventually opened up even more to be and I began to understand where his anger over thנקe issue of the Bar Mitzvah came from. He explained to me that he grew up in an “extremely secular” Jewish household with a mother who was a scholar and researcher.  What I mean by “extremely secular” is that he once told me that his mother the scholar made it clear that the Torah was utterly and emphatically “wrong.”

My co-worker further explained that he never realized how distant he was from his culture as a Jew until he recently attended a Passover Seder with his wife’s family. His wife’s family were at various stages of the Reform Movement but he said that he felt bad at the seder because he was the only attendant who didn’t know what they were doing. They would sing songs or perform actions as a part of the seder and he was not aware of what to say or do. He explained that during his childhood, while every other Jewish families were doing a seder on Pesah, his mother would sit he and his siblings down to explain how the haggadah was wrong and that there was no Yetziath Mitzrayim (Exodus).

Even with all of that, he was conflicted because he had an appreciation for the importance of being a Jew and he saw the relevance in the existence of the modern state of Israel but no matter how he felt he was always in the shadow of the way he was raised. My words to him were the same as what my grandmother once said to me about the importance of knowing from self-evaluation the truth. His critical decision was to determine and develop his understanding of what is the truth – Torath Mosheh vs. the path that his mother placed him on.

It is interesting to note that I had the opportunity to meet his mother at an art exhibit for his father and upon seeing my kippa and tzitziyoth her first words to me were, “You do know that whole exodus in the Haggada is wrong!” Thus began a classic debate with her stating that she had traveled to Egypt and performed research there finding no sign of any proof of such an event and that the haggada had been invented within the last 2,000 years. I course was not willing to let her statement stand unchallenged since I knew she had not done her researching using Jewish sources written in Hebrew and Aramaic from across the spectrum of the ancient Jewish world. As the argument heated up my coworker stepped in by changing the topic knowing that neither his mother nor I would give ground on the topic.

In 2007, after seven years of work I left that job in order to take on the ultimate challenge of my life - making Aliyah. After moving to Israel I only had a few sporadic contacts with my former co-worker. He left me a short message once on my former blog wishing me luck and thanking me for our interactions. I have no way of knowing what effect I had on him or his family but the truth of the matter is that maybe by being that one Jew out of several to try to walk the path of Torah publically and privately I may have been a part of a shuva process for him or maybe his children.

We Don’t Need the Har HaBayit! – Nachshonim, Israel

Thinking back on my time living in America, it is not hard to imagine situations where a Torah based Jew can feel like a singularity simply due to the lower percentage of Jews to the majority population. It is also a given that the social and professional pressure to be loose on areas of Torah such as Kashrut and Shabbat can be intense even when a handful of Jews are present. In situations where more Torah based Jews are present it isn’t so strange to have someone else who won’t eat with everyone else when business and restaurants excursions take place. In those kind of environments a Jew may feel like less of a minority in a minority but simply like one Jew of several in a non-Jewish environment – just a minority.

By like token, one would expect that it would be a lot easier to not feel isolated with these topics in Israel. We are talking about the modern state with a Jewish majority and a place where supposedly there is more respect for Torah based Jewish values, right? All I have to say is for those who have never spent more than a year here at one time you may be surprised.

I have worked in both hi-tech and in patent law here in Israel, I have also lived in at least 3 different regions of the countries, traveled at least 4 different sectors of the country, and the reality is that there can be situations where Jews who keep Torah are the minority within a secular Jewish majority; after which in contrast to the rest of the Middle East we are thus a minority within a minority.

From my professional experience here in Israel there have been numerous times when secular Israelis have called my kippa “that thing on your head” or my tzitzyoth “that stuff you are wearing.” Of course with Shabbat being an official day where no one is required to work[11] as well as the abundance of “kosher” restaurants Torah in every city; Torah based life is a lot easier to maintain in Israel than outside of it.[12] Yet, there is still the reality that the majority of the Jewish population here does not keep Torah and there are conflicts at times between so called “religious/Hereidi/Daati Leumi” interests and secular interests.

I find myself being in a weird type of middle ground where I don’t feel the need to personally enforce the Torah I hold by on others but at the same time I don’t accept, on any level, encroachment on the standard that I hold dear. At the same time, I have also felt the reach of secular elements of Israeli society which at times does everything it can to distance itself from Torath Mosheh.

I also recognize that the modern state can’t continue as it is and fulfill the prophecies that talk about Yamoth Mashiah, the establishment of an official Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, the rebuilding of the Beit HaMikdash, and the return the exiles to Eretz Yisrael. The truth for me is that something major would have to change in all facets of Israeli governance, life, and thought to facilitate such a complete worldwide social change and thus this is the contradiction of the situation.

This brings me to 2006 when I took part in a volunteer program on two military bases in the Mercaz region of Israel. During my interview process for the program it had been noticed that I wore a kippa, tzitziyoth, and also that I spoke about Torah. I was informed by the person performing the interview to not talk about “religion” when I arrived on the base since it would be frowned upon. I agreed and upon arrival when I entered my room at the barracks and met my room-mates I changed into a uniform while trying to hurry and remove my tallit katan but it was noticed by some of the guys in the room.

By chance after being asked to say the bracha for lighting the candles for Hanukha I became the answer guy since the majority of people in the area didn’t publically wear tzitziyoth. On one occasion I was asked about whether halakha allowed the use of marijuana, on another about male and female relationships, at times why does the Torah say this or that, and on another occasion why I would wake up every day at 04:00 a.m., shower, and head out.

My response to that last question led to interesting situation when I told my roommate that I was heading to the Beith Keneset to pray Shachrit at netz. He asked me, “There is a Beith Keneset here? Where is it?” I described the location to him and then I packed up my things and left. As usual, at that time of the morning there was only two of us praying in the Beit Keneseth but after finishing I noticed my roommate sitting in the back of the Beit Keneset without a tallit and without tefillin. He simple crouched himself over the chair in front of him and prayed. I went to him and asked if he wanted to borrow my tallit and tefillin but he quietly said that that was okay and he continued.

Yet, the highlight of that time was during a conversation with two younger soldiers in a conversation that turned into issues against Arabs. One of them mentioned how he hated Arabs and didn’t trust them for of course obvious and realistic reasons. Yet, before he could go any further the other young man chimed in and asked if we could change the subject because his mother was Jewish and his father was Arab/Muslim.

It was that same young man who turned to me and said he had a question for me. He asked, “You have a kippa and tzitzityoth. Tell me do you believe what the Torah says about the Luchoth HaBrith, the Aron HaQodesh, etc.” I responded, “Yes I do.” He in turned, “If all that stuff is true how come we have never found any of it?” Without pause I responded, “Let me ask you a question. The Har HaBayith (the Temple Mount), is it important or is it not important? Do we need it?” He responded, “No we don’t’ need the Har HaBayth we only need the Kotel.” It was then that I returned with the following statement.

You know it is interesting that you say that because there was a time when for the most part no Jew would have agreed with you. Today you say we don’t need the Har HaBayit, we only need the Kotel, and tomorrow your children will say we don’t need the Kotel we only need Jerusalem outside of the old city. After them your grandchildren will say that we don’t need Jerusalem we only need Tel Aviv. Finally, their children will claim that we don’t need Tel Aviv or Eretz Yisrael at all. You know if that is the case I don’t blame Hashem for hiding things from us because based on what you are telling me we don’t want them.

From there the conversation had to stop since their commanding officer walked in and things had to go back to normal. Yet, the truth of the matter is that maybe it didn’t. In reality, who knows what effect the conversation had on all involved.

Close Encounters, Palestinians vs Israelis – A coffee shop in Jerusalem

Several years ago I had the opportunity to meet with a professor from the United States who was researching how mixed ethnicity is viewed around the world in comparison to the U.S. We met at a coffee shop in Jerusalem and she arrived with a friend whose background I did not know and for most of the initial conversation her friend only listened attentively while taking notes. I explained my perspectives to the professor about how family background, language, and passed down traditional practices plays a major role in how one defines Middle Eastern cultures. I detailed, from my view, how the social affects, parameters, and issues of being mixed in more ancient traditional societies has more far sweeping implications than what exists for the most part in the U.S. for reasons that I spoke at length about.

As an example, I asked the professor’s friend about her family background since she had been quiet during the conversation. She responded to me that I may not want to know her background, to which I expressed no reservations. She identified herself as an American born Palestinian – her parents having been born in the Shomron region and having moved to the U.S. before she was born. I responded that I still had no problem and from there the conversation took a different turn into the realm of politics. She expressed to me that even though she identified with being a Palestinian and she was a very vocal advocate for a Palestinian state, as a secular American Palestinian she was terrified of such a state becoming Islamic and thus being no different than the existing extremist Islamic countries in the region.

I expressed that I could not imagine such a “potential Palestinian state” without some form of Islamic focus as it the only cultural background I have seen any Palestinian attach themselves to. Sure, I have heard some anti-Israel types claim that modern day Palestinians are descendants of Canaanites and the like but I have yet to see any linguistic or cultural practices in their societies that can identified as Canaanite. Further, during the entire time I have lived in Israel and traveled in the Shomron, Gush Etzion, and the Negev I have also never met a an Arab who used this claim.

The young woman had personally never heard of the claim that Palestinians were Canaanites and I explained that the reason was that the claim started as a grasp at straws to make any claim why Jews have no right to be here. Further, I asked her what kind of culture can override the one that currently exists and what common ground does it have the current Israeli one. I could tell by her facial reactions that these were also considerations she had never taken into account and to this point she had no answer.

Her response was to return to the political perspective and she stated that she could not understand why we could not all just live in peace. My retort to her was to ask the obvious questions of, “What exactly is peace, how do you maintain/obtain it on a day to day basis, when was the last time in world history that such a peace was achieved, and why does it not still stand now?” She did not have answers to my questions, and on one some level I think she had never even considered them before. It is also possible that no Jew had ever interacted with her in this way so I continued with the following statement:

“As you can hopefully see that situation is a lot more complicated than what you have considered. Yet, in all honesty I can’t tell you that you don’t have a right to fight for PA State that you or others envision using whatever means you see fit. That would be hypocritical to some degree since I have no divine mandate to dictate what you should dedicate your life to.

I do know that in reality if we Jews can’t maintain ourselves and if we don’t build the society that can withstand claims to the contrary or attacks on our perceived rights to be here then maybe we don’t have a right to be here – using basic rules of survival of the fittest.

Yet, if we can survive all of the claims against us and if we can overcome all those who are against us and if we Israelis can build a society that makes sense, what right does anyone have to oppose the reality as it would stand in that situation?

You though face a different problem; you face the challenges of authentic history and straight forward logic. Historically speaking there has never been an independent and locally elected government which defined itself as “Palestinian” here in this region. If such a nation did exist what was its currency, who were its locally elected officials, what was its local language, what ancient cultural elements can still be seen today, and why is Islam and Christianity the only two religions found being practiced by virtually all Palestinians, even by those who are secular, when these religions are respectfully between 2,000 to 1,400 years old?”

As she considered my questions, I went even further by asking her what her family’s last name is. She responded that it is “Hamdani” to which I asked what was the Hamdani family’s cultural and religion prior to the entrance of Islam in the region from Arabia. She shifted a bit and stated that she didn’t know but a moment later she claimed that more than likely they were a religion-less people. I stated that I didn’t believe that such a people existed here given the fact that we only receive rain during the winter with a delicate eco-system that can be disrupted by either too little or too much rain. That alone may cause any ancient/traditional people to pray to something, even if they didn’t do so on a regular basis.

Lastly, I informed her that Egyptian, Babylonian, Syrian, Greek and Roman accounts describe the local culture for the last few thousand years being Israeli/Jewish and during the 2^nd Temple period in the region of Shomron were the Samaritans so “if” the Hamdani family is of local ancestry, and not by import, they must have at one time been Jewish or Samaritan, one of the two. This statement seemed to shock her because it was not a part of the historical picture she had ever considered; if she had every considered one at all. So, seeing an opening I closed our conversation with the following:

What you need to do is go back to your family in the Shomron and ask the oldest members what were the Hamdanis before the entrance of Islam into this region. You may find some answers in that question that may make your future more focused.

You talked about peace. Maybe, just maybe, if we Jews and you so called Palestinians sat down and talked about ancestry and history we may find that we are from the same source, prior to the entrance of Islam in this region. We may find that at one time a number of so called Palestinians had Jewish or Samaritan ancestry – which is something that is already known to be true in a number of towns in the “so called West Bank.” [13] [14]

Yet, if this is the case this means that you and others may have a decision to make. If you find out that prior to the rise of Islam in this region the Hamdanis were either Jewish or Samaritan this may change the focus of what you are looking for on the national level. This may mean that a conflict between us is fruitless and a coexistence based on our common ancestry shouldn’t be a problem. Yet, who is willing to take these kinds of steps? It takes a bravery that some people may not want to take on because of their personal political agendas.

Listen, it is not my intent to sway you in one way or the other but if the two of us can sit here and discuss history and ancestry and do so in a civil manner why can’t those who are our so called leaders? Maybe, if they were to take this approach we could either settle this over coffee or worse, the other thing.

We parted ways that day agreeing to be who we chose to be – whatever that may have meant for her. In truth, I am not sure where her life has taken her since that point but I did sense that she walked away with a different perspective than what she entered the conversation with.

I also know, looking back, that very few people would have approached the conversation the way I did and there was a time in the past when I would have not been so “open” as I was with her. Yet, even if I am alone in how I handled the situation the truth dictates that I hold by it even if it may seem like an uneasy position to take.

Further, as much as I may have been teaching her I was also taught a lesson about the importance of making the truth the source of one’s perceived political stances and how even in the most unexpected places the pursuit of the truth can bring understanding.

Torath Mosheh vs. Unsourced Religionism

As a last consideration, I feel it necessary to discuss the times I have been at odds with my responsibility to the truth as it relates to the people whom I come into contact from the nations on the internet. I mean this in the sense of both non-Jews and even at times Jews who follow what I term as “Unsourced Religionism.”

I define Unsourced Religionism as the practices and customs that one comes up with which do not adhere to any proven historical or logical methodologies. The truth is of course in stark contrast to this method of living and often Unsourced Religionisim is the source of some of the strife found in the world. Whether it be false religious concepts that lead people astray, worthless Atheist vs. Religious debates, or the various forms of fanaticism - the lack of contact with the truth has had devastating effects on human history.

This can be seen in the various cults throughout history that have risen up and convinced both the rational and irrational to throw away their logic and replace it with feel-good brain-washing. There was a time when I would have believed that it was not worth the time to confront the falsehoods of such groups but that changed when I came to know several individuals who had been drawn into religious cults – forcing me to use the truth of the Torah to fight an intellectual war against the falsehoods.

One such incident involves one of several cults that falls under the rubric of the title “Sacred Name Movement.” This movement is made up of former Christians who have come to believe that the more prevalent forms of Christianity are influenced by paganism and that specifically the four letter name of Hashem must be pronounced/uttered in order to have salvation. Though these cults believe that the various forms of historical Christianity practices have pagan origins, they use of the New Testament and their culture involves some type of belief in Jesus being divine although they believe his name originally had the two letter name of Hashem in it.

I recognize full well that debating this type of cult is an activity that most Jews would not engage in; especially given the fact that most Jews have never even heard of them. The time and energy needed to confront these types of falsehoods can take a certain toll on a person’s personal life and often the question may be asked, “is this thing I am doing having any true effect of the world at large?” Yet, even with all the reservations I have had in the past about my involvement in this type of activity I have learned that there are times when not expressing the truth can have a negative effect on the world around us.

With that in mind, I once spent an entire year defending a book review I did against a Sacred Name cult’s supposed translation of the Tanakh due to having personally known several non-Jews who were considering involvement in these cults.[15]

The back story of this situation is that more than a decade ago I came into contact with a non-Jewish friend who had purchased a supposed translation of the Tanakh produced by said cult based on Abiline, TX. I skimmed over the book and noticed that this cult was taking huge liberties with the text with no basis in Tanakh and accurate mesorah. Because the cult used a flashy apocalyptic end of times message and prided itself on revealing things to Christians who were already exploring the so called “Jewish roots of Christianity” I realized that I needed to do something to warn those who may be tricked into joining them.

At a certain point I decided to write a review against the so called translation, spending much time on methodically breaking down how unfaithful this cult’s book was to both the original Hebrew Tanakh and also to the historical mesorah[16] of the text. I ended my review by advising all who were interested in the book to instead spend time trying to learn Hebrew and Aramaic since the people who I knew who were interested in the sacred name cults were searching for the truth but had little or no tools to determine it.

My review garnered numerous positive responses as being helpful, several personal emails requesting help with finding a more accurate translation, and requests for assistance in finding resources to learn Hebrew but it also drew the attention of the cult that created the text. Several of them, and even one of them that someone informed me was most likely the cult’s leader, wrote nasty messages to me in the comments section. I wasted no time in responding to their false accusations and claims by using both textual and historical proof to make my points. As the back and forth continued the cult members resorted to name calling and condemnations of hellfire against me and anyone who favored my review. The language they used and their refusal to prove the accuracy of their work, by providing the source text they supposedly translated from, caused a number of parties who were originally interested in their text to abandon their interest while thanking me from preventing them from wasting their money and time.

As the cult’s members descended into even more non-sense with their responses, such as calling me a Catholic at one point, the next calling me a Pharisee, and later a Saducee, the site that the review was found on started deleting the cult member’s comments since they had received so many marks as being useless in the review process of the book. As more and more potential victims of the cult began to see that joining said cult would have been a waste of time I was reminded of the Rambam’s comment in his responsa concerning teaching Torah to Christians.[17]

Yet, even with this victory there is another side of this issue and that is when I have had to do mental battle with missionary/messianic cults and organizations. Most of them are evangelical types but in one case I was approached by an Islamic organization that focuses on trying to convince Jews to convert to Islam. In the case of the latter I was engaged in a two month back and forth with a member of said Islamic organization concerning what they claimed were inaccuracies in Judaism that are only understood correctly in Islam. Having had a background in Islamic studies, I knew the claims and was able to counter them in an honest and respectful manner. I had to do so though remembering that though the truth can break through any argument the Rambam advised in one of his responses against teaching Torah to Muslims since they could in turn use that information against us.[18]

The Truth: For What It’s Worth

Whether it is being responding to falsehoods on the internet or defending the truth of Torath Mosheh against falsehood the question at times may be – what is the benefit? For what reason would a person need to interact in this way with these types of people? The answer to me comes in two forms – one for Am Yisrael and the second for all of humanity. In several instances through my responses I was able to convince missionaries to become Noachides and in a couple of instances those who debated with me became interested in becoming Jewish. Even in situations where neither of these outcomes happen I feel that I have a responsibility as a Jew to stand for the truth when possible for the sake of being an active participant in Tikun HaOlam. Further, I know of situations where Jews have been lost to Torah completely simply because no one in their immediate area stood up for the truth in a strong, public, and dignified way. To this point, I was once pleased to come across a video of a famous Kiruv rabbi here in Israel who was asked by a secular young man why should a person who is good and doesn’t do anything to hurt people make teshuva to the Torah. The rabbi calmly but boldly declared, “There is no reason except for the sake of the Truth.”

[The deception is so great] that even the best of the chasidim [faithful] among our men [scholars] of Torah, think that they are true but forbidden because the Torah forbids them. They do not realize that they are nonsensical false things that the Torah warned against, just as it warned us against [believing in] falsehoods.[19]

In Closing

Years ago I would never imagined that my grandmother’s words would have the type of effect they have had on me for all of these years. I could not have imagined the path her words would have set me on or the completeness it brought me. She passed away before I could thank her but in a small way she may have known the result. The last time I saw her, before she passed away in 2002, she stated that there were things that she told me that she never told anyone else because when my father passed away she knew that I needed something more than everyone else.

When I open my eyes and take a look around I see that there are numerous others who are also seeking to have a love affair with the truth that Hashem has placed upon us. No matter how isolated I may feel at times I must remember to look to the hills where there are others waving the banner of truth; lighting the fires of Torah to draw the attention of any willing to observe. In reality, a life dedicated to truth has a way of changing the world whether it be in passive observance or active participation.

That when judgement is made of truth it is the truth that establishes the world. It brings peace to the world. Thus Hazal teach in the Misnhah on three things the world is established, on the judgment, on the truth, and the peace. The three of them are spoken of in the pasuk (Zecharyah 5) “Truth and justice of peace you will judge your gates.” Because when judgement is done/established, the truth is done/established. And because when the truth is done the peace is done/established. [20]

Thus, I must close with saying that the truth no matter where it places a person has a way of making them jump for joy when they know they have it. The truth has a way of turning sadness to content. It can make conflict into compromise and it has the ability to empower the lonely.

With this constant wrestling with truth of the Torah we in turn fulfill the prophecy that one day Hashem would cause us to become a light to the nations because as the prophets tell us, “ten men from the nations will grab the garment corner of a Jew and state: We have received falsehoods from our fathers. Take us with you because we have heard that Hashem is with you.”[21]   

“Tzedeq, tzedeq [Correctness, correctness][22], pursue; on account you will inherit the land which Hashem your Elokim is giving to you.” (Devarim 16:20)

[23]

The current world is one of information-overload and hyper-stimulation. In this increasingly changing and competitive world, the stakes are high. Being creative gives you the competitive advantage. The fastest and best innovators thrive and survive, and creativity is the key factor. In this article, I propose and will provide support for the argument that Jews historically have been highly creative, and that they are currently very creative in many endeavors.

Jews are creative and use their creativity to innovate and improve the world. The title of this journal is “Conversations,” discussions among people. The concept of conversation is an example of Jewish creative dialogue and learning. This article will examine how the practice of Judaism leads to high-order thinking and creativity. I will discuss the roles of prayer, Jewish education, and self-examination, as tools to become a better and more creative person. The final section of this article provides methods the reader can use to enhance creativity. Each person reading this article probably uses these methods to some degree already; but by articulating the strategies, readers can consciously apply them and enhance their work and personal lives.

Jews Beat the Odds in Terms of Achievement

I nostalgically recall the 1960s when I attended University of California at Berkeley. It was the end of my senior year, and I was having coffee with two Jewish friends with whom I had grown up. In fact, we three students were the only Jews in our public school class in Sacramento, California. We lived in the Jewish part of town and went to Hebrew School together. In those days Sacramento was a relatively small town, and the Jewish population was small as well. What are the odds of three students getting into and succeeding at one of the most challenging Universities in the United States? In Berkeley they do that thing with freshmen: “Look to the student on your left, and now look to your student on the right. Only one of you will graduate.” Fifty percent of freshman students flunked out before their junior year, and only about one-third of entering freshman graduated. Jews were only about 3 percent of the population of California, yet they far exceeded that percentage at UC Berkeley.

The 1960s was a time of change, and Berkeley students were leading this change. Jewish students were major players in the student movements. These movements were driven by social concerns such as free speech, antiwar efforts, equal rights, and unionization of farm workers. The leaders of the student movement as well as the student activists had vision and determination. They wanted a better world, and they would work toward changing the status quo to make a world that was as fair and just as possible. They were practicing Tikkun Olam. Many of the leaders of these student groups were Jewish, including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Bettina Aptheker.¹

What was true in the 1960s and throughout Jewish history is still true today. Jews are creative and take the lead. Currently Israel, where Jews flourish and prosper, offers so many examples of creativity. Most significantly, Israel is a world leader in the high-tech industry, medicine, and military technology. This little country is in a very dangerous part of the world and has few natural resources. Yet this small Jewish country soars in the marketplace of the world.

The list of Jews and creativity would consume a complete article in itself. Therefore, I am going to choose just a few examples that illustrate Jews and creativity.

Military. In terms of military technology, Israel has developed the Iron Dome and the Eitan. The Iron Dome can intercept short range rockets, and the Eitan is a drone spy plane.

Medical. As for medical technology, my husband and I just benefited from Israel’s innovative and technologically advanced medical services. We were in Hashmona'im, a small Yishuv in the middle of the country. My husband went to the Urgent Care Center in Modiin, which uses the most current technology and Telehealth system.

High Tech. As for the high-tech industry, many of the major international high-tech companies have located in Israel because of the well-educated, highly competent, and intelligent workforce. For overall brain power, just look at the number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners for examples of Jewish outstanding achievement. The Jews have produced many great thinkers and world changers.

Jews can generate creative concepts, and translate them effectively into economic gain and professional achievements. They succeed in the current global market because they are able to produce a high rate of questions and ideas, they have the ability to overcome obstacles, and they have skill set to translate those ideas into marketable products that solve real-world problems. Creativity drives the engine in many areas such as the arts, writing, music as well as business and commerce to mention only a few spheres of interest. Personally, I have found that parenting and family matters benefit from creative thinking.

Jews are economic catalysts not only of the current millennia but throughout the ages. There are many examples where Jews have been invited into countries and usher in an economic Golden Age. When Jews are expelled, the country’s economy goes from boom to bust. Many times the Jews are invited back. Currently, Harbin, China is trying to attract Jews in hopes of regaining economic prosperity for their city. In the early 1900s, Jews were invited to come to Harbin. Jews came and with the Jews came economic prosperity. The Jews were forced to leave in the 1950s, and Harbin has experienced economic decline.²

Why are Jews high achievers and leaders? Lama lo! or in English, why not!

How Practicing Judaism Enhances Creative Thinking

The skill sets and brain power that Jews develop by practicing Judaism can be generalized to achievement in scientific, intellectual, artistic, and business scopes of practice. One of my professors at Teachers College, Columbia, Mel Alexanberg, described the shared cultural underpinnings of Jewish life as Jewish metacognition.³ Jews are exposed to a shared intellectual and value system, which are Torah and Talmud.

Jews have a dialogue with God. It is through speaking to God and debating God’s response that a moral, ethical, and survival system was and continues to be developed. Jews are the “People of the Book.” Books are words and words are symbols. Words have meanings, various meanings. Study Judaism and you are exploring multidimensional symbolic concepts. This includes multiples levels of ideas and information. There is thinking, exploring, and conceptualizing in an ever-evolving interaction of ideas and points of fact. Through this process, Jews developed a highly sophisticated strategy that involves complex reasoning.

Jewish education emphasizes asking questions, learning more, and then refining concepts and ideas. Jewish learning trains techniques in acquiring information, integrating the information, and generating new and innovative thought or concepts. Jews continue to refine their ideas by constructing new interpretations and theories. This is a continual process where existing information and theories inform emerging concepts.⁴

Throughout the centuries, yeshivot and synagogues have been centers where Jews immerse themselves in complicated interactive information systems and challenge the construction of these information systems, accessing their higher-order thinking. Jews are driven with a passion to question and then seek answers through studying the Torah.

Rabbi Marc Angel has often pointed out that “The Torah is an inexhaustible source of wisdom.”⁵ The fundamental basis of talmudic discourse is to question. Each Jew is free to develop his or her own unique multilevel information storage base, skill and mental proficiency to recall symbolic code, and apply and use that information. Each Jew develops innovative conceptual schema, and eventually, new realities. Jews are trained to suspend judgment and live with ambiguity as they think through their ideas and concepts. As time progresses, the examination of text and communicating with God through prayer establishes an ever-evolving value system. In my dissertation, I examined creativity in the Hassidic community in terms of an individual in interactions with mental stimulation, and related this interaction to creative productivity. I was able to document notable creativity in the Hassidic community.⁶

Jewish creative abilities skill sets learned through Judaism can be used in other areas of work. That is why Jewish scholars have soared in many business, academic, and artistic disciplines. Jews are exercising and building their mental capacity through studying Torah. Jews ask questions and wonder why. Jews construct complex mental systems which are reciprocal exchanges between the individual in interaction with environmental stimulation to solve real-world problems.

The next section describes strategies for enhancing creativity. These techniques are taught in traditional Jewish education.

Jewish Techniques for Enhancing Creativity

Immerse yourself . Jews immerse themselves in study. They ask questions. Succeeding in any intellectual frontier requires immersing yourself.

Throw yourself into your  work. Learn as much as possible. Always question. Access the most current information. Acquire as vast a body of facts and opinions that you can. All that you are learning is fascinating. At times you can feel overwhelmed with all the information. Learn to live with ambiguity. The process of generating order out of all the information leads to innovation. You know that you have immersed yourself in the problem when you are engrossed and totally consumed by the question.

Be passionate. Jews historically have been passionate and committed to their religion, to understanding God’s message. The world is fraught with many problems and difficulties. God asks that meaning be sought after through study of Torah and Talmud. Being passionate and intently committed to seeking meaning and truth in life can be applied to any other areas of study.

Take on the study of a topic that is compelling to you. You have strong and intense feelings. The topic cries out to you, and all kinds of question soar in your head as you seek a deeper understanding. There is a problem that can be solved, or just another step can be taken in solving a problem. You know that you are passionate when your mind drifts to the question, concept, problem, uncertainty, or difficulty. You are on a quest and feel a sense of being driven to learn more and more. You are on unconventional ground. You do not know the answers, and there is a thrill to the work. There are more questions than answers.

Attach yourself to a community. Jews build communities, and live and work together. Jews develop support systems and rules and principles which enhance their lives. Jews are always engaged in vibrant groups to learn and reexamine the religious texts. Each person sustains and builds their conceptual understanding by examining multiple and often contradictory concepts from others in the group, from revered wisdom of our sages, and from current thinkers. Jews are life-long learners; and when applied to other disciplines, leads to creativity in those disciplines.

Surround yourself with amazing people. Examine the work of people you admire, and have them review your work. Build your conceptual framework on the shoulders of giants in your area of study. Do not be afraid to hold contradictory theories in your brain at the same time. You know that you are part of a community of amazing people when these people stimulate your thinking. These amazing people have ideas and information that is helping you move your concept forward. When you are with these people in discussions, you feel your creative juices flow. These people do not have to agree with you. If fact, it is far more important that they challenge your thinking than rubber stamp your theory.

Often people are considered successful when they reinforce the status quo in their field. They do not challenge the accepted conceptia. Do not mistake success, such as fame and fortune, for innovation. Most of the time and most people doing creative work have a unique vision. This puts creative people outside the mainstream. Being outside the mainstream can be difficult. Do not measure your work in terms a yardstick from the mainstream. Rather, evaluate your work in terms of the amazing people that you have surrounded yourself with, and measure your success by accomplishing your goals. The best of all possible worlds is to have the support of amazing people, accomplish your goals, and become rich and famous.

Use your mind’s eye. Jews pray as part of their life. When Jews are praying, they are also imagining and envisioning. The Jewish experience is thinking of what I am now and what I can become, as I strive to be a better person in the image of God. Most significantly, Jews are seeking clarification and testing themselves as to the progress that they are making towards becoming a better person according to God’s guidance. Using your “mind’s eye” is necessary for novel ideas and innovative solutions.

You want to envision and imagine; and to do this, you use your mind’s eye. This well-honed skill is transferable to the development of innovative products and marketing. It is a process of taking complex situations and making sense out of them. Essentially, you are using your imagination to see the whole problem and the end resolution to the problem. Once you are able to envision, the abstract problem can be broken down into steps. Each mini-step resonates throughout the complex problem and has an impact. When using your mind’s eye, you can match the impact of the mini-step to the goal of solving the problem. You know that you are using your mind’s eye when each mini-step moves you closer to a solution to your problem. Or on careful examination, the mini-step created obstacles to your solving your problem. Every mistake or misdirection offers you the opportunity to rethink the problem and redesign your next step. It provides you with fuller information, more questions, and guides you on your next step. Each mistake is a gift.

Be aware/be in the moment. Praying is a conscious experience that makes actions intentional. When praying with intention, you are in the moment. Kavanah is praying with intention and being aware. You will be more creative in your work when you are aware, present, and in the moment. You should be consciously aware and use the information that you have to produce a clearer understanding of the concept that you are studying. You should be alert and have your mental faculties at their peak performance. All your actions are deliberate and cognizant. All the information that you have gathered facilitates your knowing as much information as possible. Your mind is aroused. It is a dynamic process. You are interacting with the information and using the feedback to refine your thinking. You are in the moment.

Be resilient. Jewish people have had to struggle to survive. They have had to be better than the average guy. Often they have had obstacles that would overwhelm others. Throughout history Jews have experienced misfortune and have recovered and persisted. Jews do not have a choice whether to be resilient. If they are not resilient, they will be destroyed. For periods of time, Jews have been relatively successful in many countries, which are known as Golden Ages. Then crash, the world comes down around them. Jewish history teaches a series of punishing events. Jews have a long memory of all the calamities, yet they pick themselves up and rebuild their lives. I have heard Jewish holidays described as a narrative: they tried to kill us, we won, and now let’s eat. In the face of overwhelming obstacles and repeated failures, the resilient people go forward and possibly achieve their goals. The choice is be resilient and possibly succeed, or give up and assure failure.

Resiliency is recovering from disappointment and managing frustration. Each failure provides the opportunity to recover and keep going. When treading on new ground, you may come to dead ends. Your strength to bounce back will help you keep going even when you are discouraged. Your will know that you are resilient when you are completely defeated, when you blunder and achieve disaster. Yet each obstacle only makes you more determined. You go back for a deeper understanding of what happened, and what went wrong. Despite the setbacks, you try something different. You are imagining a possible different outcome. If you experience only success, then you are not challenging yourself.

Conclusion

Again, I am brought back to the day I sat with my Jewish childhood friends having coffee in Berkeley 1968. Was it by chance that we all succeeded? No, it was not by chance because the Jewish rate of success challenges the probability it was simply by chance. Was it the Jewish education at Hebrew School, or living in a Jewish community, praying, Jewish family values, or our connection to our synagogue? The answer is all of the above and a resounding yes to the great achievements of the Jewish People. There is a shared metacognition. Jewish metacognition is a shared set of symbols, values, and thinking strategies, that trains creativity.

Take a moment. How has your practice of Judaism enhanced your creativity? In terms of the Jewish concept of always trying to improve yourself, what strategies can you use to be more creative? How does your experience with Jewish thought and creativity help you contribute to improving the world?

Notes

1. Mendes, P., ‘“We are all German Jews”: Exploring the Prominence of Jews in the New Left’,    Melilah 2009/3.

2. Hadassah Magazine February/March 2011, pp. 40-48.

3. Conversations with Mel Alexanberg. He was my dissertation advisor in the late 1970s.

4. Miran, MD, Miran E., & Chen, N., DESIGN OF LIVING SYSTEMS IN THE INFORMATION  AGE: Brain, Creativity and the Environment. Eds. Joseph Seckbach ORIGIN(S) OF DESIGN IN  NATURE: A Fresh, Interdisciplinary Look at How Design Emerges in Complex Systems,  Life [ODIN] volume to be published.

5. Angel, M. Angel for Shabbat, Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, USA, 2010.

6. Miran, E. The Ecology of Creativity. Dissertation. Teachers College, Columbia,

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