## Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument

###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 1
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
*Tradition as Argument*


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 2
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
We argued in the last chapter that if there is to be covenantal renewal, it is important that the Jewish tradition – the tradition of revelation and halakhah – speak with as many voices as possible. Behind this assertion lies a specific item of faith. That faith is one of the most distinctive features of rabbinic Judaism, and one which has fallen into disrepair in recent times.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Perhaps the best way into the subject is a profound set of remarks delivered by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most impressive contemporary philosophers of ethics. His book *After Virtue* (1981) is an attempt to reinstate the idea of tradition as a central category in moral thought. What is of interest here is a passage in which he describes a feature which he believes characterizes traditions in general:


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 4
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
When a tradition is in good order, it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 5
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
So when an institution – a university, say, or a farm or a hospital – is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict….


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 6
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
A living tradition then is a historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 7
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This characterization is extraordinarily germane to Judaism. The sages, as we noted in the Introduction, celebrated *machloket le-shem shamayim*, “argument for the sake of heaven.” They epitomized it in the archetypal debates between Hillel and Shammai, about which it was said that *elu ve-elu divrei Elokim chayyim*, “these and these are the words of the living God.” The central document of rabbinic Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud, is written in the form of sequences of argument. The argument itself and the clarification of the issues involved are often more important than the conclusions reached. Rejected opinions are considered as closely as accepted ones. Indeed, the Talmud states that the rulings of the school of Hillel became authoritative because, among other things, they studied the views of their opponents as well as their own and stated them before their own.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 8
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Argument, for the sages, was a deeply religious mode of discourse: not only argument between man and man, but even argument between man and God. The aggadic or interpretive literature of the talmudic period turns the biblical conversations between man and God – Moses’ plea for the Israelites after the sin of the golden calf, for example, or Hannah’s prayer for a child – into intense and dramatic confrontations which the rabbis termed *chutzpah kelapei shamaya*, “audacity toward heaven.” In this respect they were continuing a biblical tradition of argument between earth and heaven – we recall Abraham’s dialogue over the fate of Sodom, Job’s over his tragedy, Moses’ and Jeremiah’s over the justice of Providence. It is a highly distinctive tone of Jewish spirituality, one that embarrassed Philo and other Jewish philosophers, but one that remained close to the Jewish heart. We hear it again in some of the elegies composed in the wake of the medieval massacres, in Solomon ibn Verga’s account of the Spanish expulsion, and in the prayers of the chasidic master R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 9
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Reality, these arguments seem to imply, is not monolithic. There is always more than one true perspective on events. At the most basic level, there is the perspective of God and the perspective of man. Neither obliterates the other. Therefore there can be argument between them. Heaven always secures justice in the long run. But man sometimes calls for mercy, not justice; or for justice in the short run, not the long. The perspective of man has, for the sages, its own integrity and claim to attention. The rabbinic literature is, to be sure, acutely aware of the conflict between authority and argument. The angels, in these passages, attempt to silence man for his presumption. But God always allows him a hearing and often is swayed by his arguments. In argument, man reaches his full dignity before Heaven.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 10
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
So too with halakhic argument. Two of the most powerful passages in the Babylonian Talmud concern the attempt to silence argument. Rabban Gamliel uses his authority as *nasi* or religious head of the community to exclude dissenting views. R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus invokes the authority of a “heavenly voice” to overcome his opponents on a question of ritual purity. In both passages freedom of argument is affirmed. Rabban Gamliel is deposed, R. Eliezer excommunicated. The very dignity of the sage, in rabbinic Judaism, is part of the religious celebration of argument. For the sage is not a prophet. He is, said the rabbis, greater than a prophet. A prophet invokes revelation, which cannot be argued with. A sage invokes texts, interpretations, inferences, and analogies. He employs argument, therefore he can be argued with.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 11
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The process of argument, like a cubist painting, allows different perspectives to occupy the same canvas. Since reality is not monolithic, dialogue and debate are closer to its texture than systematic and reductive philosophical programs. Though the Middle Ages produced a series of great Jewish philosophers, the enterprise of philosophy never captured the Jewish imagination as much as the talmudic argument. Nor did Moses Maimonides’ remarkable halakhic code, the *Mishneh Torah*, a compendium of conclusions on Jewish law with all argumentation removed, supplant the study of argument for its own sake. Indeed the entire literature of Judaism from the early rabbinic period to the threshold of modernity – halakhic, exegetical, philosophic, and mystical – is a series of commentaries on the biblical text, an ongoing and open-ended argument about the meaning of the word of God.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 12
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Diversity and Dialogue**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 13
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
To a remarkable degree Judaism was, is, and sees itself as, in MacIntyre’s phrase, “a historically extended, socially embodied argument.” It was through this argument that fierce antagonisms were channeled into a sense of common purpose. “Even a father and son or a teacher and disciple,” said the sages, “who study Torah at the same gate begin by becoming enemies to one another. But they do not leave off studying until they come to love one another.” The discipline of rabbinic study is precisely a matter of laboring to understand the strength of an opposing position and seeing that it too has its own integrity. It belongs within the shared tradition of texts, precedents, and canons of interpretation.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 14
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
That tradition often yields more than one answer to a concrete question of how to live in a given circumstance and time according to the word of God. To be sure, not every answer is authoritative. This is implicit in the idea of halakhah. Judaism is a community of action. If, for example, there were many different ways of living out the command to rest on the seventh day, Shabbat would not create a *community* of rest, even though it might create a series of individualized variants of the same idea. Judaism draws the line between community and individual differently from that proposed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberalism. It extends communal norms into what John Stuart Mill might well have seen as the domain of private life and personal decision. That is the nature of a faith expressed in terms of halakhah, religious law.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 15
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Thus, when it came to norms of action, though there might be more than one justified inference from the sources, a halakhic *decision* is called for, arrived at by argument and consensus. A rejected opinion may be false, but it may not be. It may simply be a truth that did not find favor among the majority of the sages, or one that is not appropriate to this circumstance and time. The views of Shammai, according to one mystical tradition, though rejected as law in the present time will become law in the messianic age.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 16
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
There is, nonetheless, a perceptible reluctance in the rabbinic tradition to close the argument and make a formal decision between alternative viewpoints. If a decision is not needed now, the Talmud asks: *Hilkheta li-meshicha*? “Will you make a ruling for the messianic age?” If there is no immediate urgency, there is no need to foreclose the discussion. So too with matters that did not affect the community of action. Questions of belief and attitudes that had no behavioral implications did not call for halakhic resolution. Neither did ethical questions of ideal temperament and disposition. Despite Maimonides’ inclusion of such subjects within his halakhic code, subsequent codifiers, especially R. Joseph Karo in his *Shulchan Arukh*, omitted them.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 17
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The same is true even of the fundamentals of faith. Belief in the messianic age, ruled Maimonides, is one such fundamental; but a detailed spelling out of its implications is not. “Neither the exact sequence of these events nor their details constitute religious dogmas.” Indeed the debate about the essentials of Jewish belief, which occupied thinkers for some two centuries after Maimonides had published his famous thirteen principles, took place at a philosophical rather than halakhic level. And in Jewish philosophy, unlike Jewish law, there are no decisions.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The result was to make Judaism not merely a tradition of argument, but also an unusually open-ended argument “about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.” The arguments that demanded closure in the form of a halakhic ruling tended to be on immediate questions of the rules of conduct. Ultimate questions on the meaning and purpose of Jewish life were debated with equal seriousness in the literatures of *aggadah*, philosophy, biblical commentary, and Jewish ethical and mystical treatises. But there was no need to bring the argument to an end and choose between alternatives except where a view was so disruptive that it threatened the entire community of faith.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 19
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Continuities of Conflict**


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Held together as a people by its community of action, halakhah, and the broad framing principles of faith, traditional Jewry was thus able to find a home for an extraordinary variety of visions of what an ideal Jewish life should be. Did it include participation in work and society, or should it be devoted exclusively to the study of Torah? Should education be vocational, or purely “religious”? Were women who studied Torah to be encouraged or discouraged? Did scientific knowledge govern our interpretation of Torah, or did Torah govern our interpretation of science? Was the ideal person one who maintained an emotional balance or one who lived on the outer edge of emotional intensity? Under conditions of oppression, should one reach an accommodation with the ruling power or defy it to the point of courting martyrdom? Was the symbol of military power, the sword, a badge of honor or a mark of shame? Was the messianic age for which Jews longed an event within natural history or a supernatural break with history?


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 21
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Answers on both sides are to be found in the rabbinic literature, and we are struck, in reading the debates, by the subtlety and power with which the sages kept the questions open. There are instances where we are led to feel admiration for a sage who acts against the consensus; others where we feel critical of the sage who acts within the law. There are times when an excess of piety is portrayed as foolishness. There are others when a failure to go piously beyond the law is a dereliction of ethical duty. *Ve-zu mishnat chasidim*? asks the Talmud Yerushalmi at one point. “You may have acted according to the teaching of the law, but is this a teaching for saints?”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 22
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Who is the ideal type within rabbinic Judaism? The sage, the saint, the zealot, the martyr, the person of simple piety, the figure of public authority, the creative intellect, the intellectual conservative, the man of learning, the woman of good deeds, the compassionate, the just? The question is impossible to answer. Each emerges as a distinctive kind of religious hero. The tradition even found it possible to portray sympathetically the relationship between R. Elisha ben Abuyah, the archetypal rebel against tradition, and his disciple R. Meir, one of the architects of the Mishnah.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 23
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This is the mark of a living tradition. It embraces diversity while preserving the structures of community. Maimonides, in the *Guide for the Perplexed*, defined this as the challenge of law and leadership. Human beings, he argued, are less like one another than the members of any other species, yet they need, even to pursue their individual aims, to form societies. The leader uses law “so that the natural variety [of human beings] should be counterbalanced by the uniformity of legislation.” Halakhah creates a society, a community of action. Beyond halakhah are matters no less religiously important, but which are marked by diversity and individuality.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 24
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Beyond halakhah too are those divergent voices on the ultimate questions of how a commanding past is to be carried forward into an open future. Again MacIntyre’s description is apt. A sense of tradition, he writes, “manifests itself in a grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available to the present. Living traditions, just because they continue a not-yet-completed narrative, confront a future whose determinate and determinable character…derives from the past.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 25
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The arguments within nineteenth-century Orthodoxy, for example, were of just such a kind. How, given the radical change in Jewish circumstance brought about by European emancipation, was the Jewish future to be written? Did it lie, as Hirsch argued, in exemplary participation in a secular society, bringing the ethical truths of Judaism to bear on Western culture? Did it lie, as R. Kook contended, in seeing that exile was ending and a messianic process about to begin, in which Jews were summoned to leave the lands of their dispersion and come home to the promised land? Or did it lie, as R. Moses Sofer and his successors implied, in carrying on the past as exactly as possible, resisting any suggestion of the relevance of change?


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
These are voices within a single conversation on what is essential, and what accidental, to the Jewish vocation, and on how historical process is to be interpreted through the perspective of faith. To be sure, Hirsch and R. Kook and R. Sofer were not pluralists in the modern sense, each conceding the rightness of alternative positions. To the contrary: their views essentially exclude one another. If one is right, the others are wrong. And yet their positions remained legitimate choices within the same tradition. Adherents of one would be compelled to recognize adherents of the other as members of the same tradition and the same community of faith. That is what is meant by calling them “voices within a conversation,” or more traditionally, partners in an “argument for the sake of heaven.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 27
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
That is how tradition handled conflict. And the question that has become suddenly urgent is whether the current conflicts within Jewry can be incorporated within this model of “argument for the sake of heaven.” If so, there can be dialogue. If not, there can only be confrontation. The one creates community, the other destroys it. Why then has dialogue between Jews become so difficult in the twentieth century? Why is it so often replaced by mutual delegitimation? If even Reform and secular Jews have turned, in recent years, toward tradition, why has there not been a revival of rabbinic Judaism’s greatest tradition: the tradition of argument, tradition *as* argument?


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 28
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Tradition and “Tradition”**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 29
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The short answer is that the *brit yi’ud*, the covenant of Torah, has not yet been renewed. Jewish attitudes have become more “traditional” without yet returning to tradition. The inability of Jews to communicate across their ideological divides is a measure of the extent to which Jews still stand “between two covenants.” And it is here that we must examine a word we have used frequently, thus far without analysis or explanation: the word “tradition” itself.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 30
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
What traditionally was “tradition”? First, it was a set of authoritative texts: the Torah, the rest of the biblical literature, the Mishnah, the Babylonian Talmud, and a range of other writings including halakhic codes, rabbinic Midrash, and Jewish Bible commentaries. Together they constituted a canon, an authoritative body of literature. Its boundaries were not always precisely defined. Nonetheless the shape of the canon was relatively clear. It embodied a *Torah she-bikhtav*, a written Torah, the five Mosaic books, and a *Torah she-be’alpeh*, an oral tradition, authoritatively set down in the Mishnah and Talmuds.


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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
It was to these texts that Jews turned for guidance in the conduct and understanding of their lives. But a tradition is more than a collection of texts. It is a set of beliefs about what those texts represent and why they are authoritative. Despite the flurry of argument in the Middle Ages about what Jewish belief essentially was, there was a clear consensus, best expressed by R. Shimon ben Zemach Duran (1361–1444). Jewish belief, he argued, had three components: belief in God, revelation, and Divine justice. It was over the second of these beliefs, the nature of revelation, that argument was fiercest and schism most likely.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 32
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
For rabbinic Judaism revelation meant first, that the Mosaic books were the unmediated word of God; second, that they yielded a set of commandments about how to live and construct a society; third, that after Sinai, Jews were covenantally bound for all generations to keep those commands; fourth, that the covenant could not be modified or annulled by a further revelation; and fifth, that along with revelation went an authoritative tradition as to how to interpret its words and apply them to new situations: the “oral law.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 33
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 33](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/33)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
There are arguments within the tradition. But there are other conflicts that transgress the boundaries of tradition. By denying the validity of the oral law, sectarian groups like the Samaritans, Sadducees, and Karaites eventually placed themselves outside the mainstream of tradition. By asserting a new revelation and covenant, so did Pauline Christianity. These groups saw themselves as heirs to the same sacred text: the Torah. But they were not heirs to the same tradition of interpretation. Argument and conversation became impossible. Schism was the inevitable result.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 34
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 34](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/34)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Jewish modernity began with another assault on revelation: that of Spinoza. This led in turn to an astonishing variety of attempts to redefine the meaning of Jewish existence. There were radicals, especially among the secular Zionists, who sought to sever all connections with the texts of the Jewish past, just as, in early Christianity, Marcion had argued that Christians must dispense with the “Old Testament.” For the most part, however, in modernity as in antiquity, tradition proved indispensable.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 35
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 35](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/35)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
But in order to legitimate change, tradition had to be reinterpreted in revolutionary ways. For the reformers, it no longer yielded a set of commands; instead it was a collection of broad ethical truths. For the secular Zionists, it was no longer a set of religious texts; instead it was national literature, the history of a people and its relationship to a land. Such is the power of tradition over human identity that an attempt to rewrite the future almost always involves an attempt to rewrite the past. Reformers and secular Zionists were thus able – as were Sadducees, Karaites, and Christians before them – to see themselves as heirs to the same Jewish past and tradition. But it was a tradition that had become unrecognizable to those – Pharisees, rabbinites, and later Orthodox Jews – who resisted radical reinterpretation and carried on the tradition in the traditional way.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 36
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 36](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/36)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This is how traditions fragment and split apart, and how dialogue eventually becomes impossible. At a certain point one can no longer say, as the rabbis said of the positions of Hillel and Shammai, that “these and these are the words of the living God.” For this presupposes that the two sides hold in common a shared idea of the meaning of the phrase the “words of the living God.” When this is absent, the phrase is inapplicable. Argument no longer proceeds on the basis of shared assumptions about the authority of text and the rules of interpretation. It ceases to be “argument” in the sense understood by tradition. Instead it becomes a confrontation, to be settled by force or temporarily deflected by diplomacy.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 37
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 37](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/37)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
As long as the various parties have no interest in conversation with one another, the problem is not acute. Each side is content to let history deliver its verdict, each confident that it will inherit the future. But this is a dangerous strategy. It led Christianity, for example, to assume the disappearance of Jews and Judaism; and this led to fearful animosity when both, in fact, survived. If secular and religious, Reform and Orthodox, diaspora and Israeli Jews are unable to recover the framework of argument, and are left instead with only the strategies of confrontation, other fearful consequences are not impossible. It is this more than anything else that has led thoughtful Jews on all sides to seek dialogue in recent years. But we are now in a position to see why that dialogue should prove so surprisingly difficult. For each side, while claiming to represent the same tradition, in fact embodies quite a different version of it.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 38
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 38](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/38)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Being Traditional**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 39
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 39](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/39)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
In what sense are Jews today “traditional”? One of the most intriguing documents of American Jewry in the 1970s was a book entitled *The Jewish Catalog.* It sold several hundred thousand copies and was succeeded by several companion volumes. It emerged from the *chavurah* movement, the Jewish equivalent of the communes that flourished in the 1960s along with the student “counter-culture.” *The Jewish Catalog* seemed to signal a return to tradition. It was interested in precisely those things that most American Jews had hitherto dismissed as largely irrelevant to their lives. It was about *kashrut*, Shabbat, *mikveh*, and Jewish learning. It was about the detailed texture of Jewish life. It was a hands-on, do-it-yourself guide to traditional Jewish living.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 40
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 40](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/40)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
But as the Reform theologian Eugene Borowitz pointed out, it was not a contemporary American version of the *Shulchan Arukh.* It was not a code of Jewish law. It was, as the authors said, “a selection of materials which offer the possibility for immediate application and integration into one’s personal environment.” It was, as its name implied, a catalogue. And a catalogue, as Borowitz noted, “presents resources one can draw on to meet one’s personal needs.” A catalogue “only offers; it never presumes to tell its readers what they *must* choose.” Borowitz concluded that “for all its rich Jewishness…*The Jewish Catalog* rejects Orthodoxy.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 41
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 41](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/41)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
*The Jewish Catalog* represents one way in which behavior can be “traditional” without being part of a tradition. Take *kashrut* for example. Two people can be seated together at a kosher restaurant enjoying the same food but for quite different reasons. For one, *kashrut* is a series of rules about what foods may be eaten, a dietary code. For the other, kosher food is simply a feature of Jewish ethnicity. One can enjoy “traditional” cuisine once in a while, without in any way feeling that there are laws governing the act of eating. Clearly the word kosher means different things to the two people. The same systematically applies to all Jewish behavior. It may be a *mitzvah*, an act performed in human response to a Divine command, or it can be a “Jewish expression” in the same way that doing a particular kind of dance or singing a folk song can be a Greek or Russian expression.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 42
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 42](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/42)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The *Catalog*, along with Borowitz’s Reform Judaism and contemporary Reconstructionism, turns tradition into a range of Jewish behaviors that have nothing to do with the idea of *halakhah* or law, but everything to do with liberal individualism. “Tradition” in this sense *excludes* nothing. Many American Jews, for example, light candles on Chanukkah, the symbol of a Jewish war against foreign worship, and at the same time buy Christmas trees. “Tradition” here has been secularized into behavior which has lost all contact with the beliefs which gave it meaning.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 43
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 43](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/43)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
A similar process is at work in quite a different direction in what Jonathan Woocher in America, and Liebman and Don-Yehiyah in Israel have described as the new Jewish “civil religion.” Here what is central is not the individual but the group. Religious symbols are employed to provide “sacred legitimation of the social order.” The phrase “a people that dwells alone” is used to explain Israel’s international isolation. The idea of covenant and collective Jewish responsibility is used to give depth to fundraising programs. Traditional motifs are enlisted in the public rhetoric and ritual of essentially secular organizations.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 44
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 44](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/44)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The group has always been more central to mainstream Judaism than the individual, so that civil religion is in some ways closer to tradition than Borowitz’s idea of Judaism as personalized choice. But it is not tradition itself. It focuses on public occasions with little or no follow-through into private life. Its function is group solidarity, not worship of a transcendental power. Its role is to endorse, not criticize, the social structure. Religious language is used with deliberate vagueness and ambiguity. Here, too, “tradition” has been domesticated and secularized out of all relationship to its past.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 45
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 45](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/45)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
There is a third sense of “tradition.” It is one of the undercurrents of the Conservative movement or what is sometimes called *masorti* or “traditional” Judaism. Tradition here is understood in the sense usually attributed to the political philosopher Edmund Burke and is a religious equivalent of political conservatism, defined by Roger Scruton as that outlook “which springs from a desire to conserve existing things, held to be either good in themselves or better than the likely alternatives, or at least safe, familiar, and the objects of trust and affection.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 46
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Conservative Judaism was born in 1845 when Zechariah Frankel walked out of the Reform rabbinical conference, which had just voted to abandon Hebrew as the language of prayer. Frankel’s objections were not so much halakhic as sentimental and pragmatic. Judaism, he believed, could and should change, for the collective consciousness of Jews in any given age was itself a revelation of the will of God. But change should always be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Indeed it should proceed so slowly as to seem not to take place at all. Change, he wrote, “must be grasped with such care, thought through with such discretion, created always with such awareness of the moment in time, that the goal will be reached unnoticed, that the forward progress will seem inconsequential to the average eye.”


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 47
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 47](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/47)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
Though “traditionalism” seems to be close to tradition, there are considerable differences between them. Jaroslav Pelikan puts it thus: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” Traditionalism is always conservative whereas tradition itself is sometimes highly radical. In its early days, for example, the chasidic movement was revolutionary; so, more recently, was Gush Emunim. A traditionalist values tradition because of its age; its authority lies in its “pastness.” Someone firmly within the tradition, however, values it because of its immediacy; its authority lies in its “presentness.” History is a key category for the traditionalist, but not for tradition.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 48
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
One of the key problems for traditionalism in general, and Conservative Judaism in particular, is knowing how and on what grounds to mandate change. Within tradition the answer is relatively straightforward: change is permitted only when it takes place according to the rules of halakhah. But conservatives have often sought to go beyond halakhic precedent and include the idea of historical evolution in accordance with the ethos of the age. And it has proved difficult to provide any criterion for distinguishing what, in the ethos of the age, should be Jewishly adopted and what resisted, and why. The confusion within the movement was evident recently when the Jewish Theological Seminary of America voted in favor of ordaining women as rabbis, some on the grounds that the change was in line with Jewish tradition, others because it was a “creative violation” of tradition.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 49
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This then is one reason why internal Jewish dialogue is so much more difficult than it seems. The word “traditional” creates the illusion that Reform, Conservative, and secular Jews share the same tradition as Orthodoxy. In fact, though, each of these three groups has subjected the tradition to revisionary reinterpretation. They have translated it into conceptual frameworks like personal autonomy (Reform), group solidarity (civil Judaism), and historicism (Conservative) that have no place within tradition itself. We can imagine a hypothetical situation in which a number of villages used the same vocabulary but quite different rules of grammar. When members of two villages met, they would initially believe that they were speaking the same language. All the words they used, they would have in common. Only after a long series of mutual misunderstandings would it dawn on them that they were, in fact, speaking different languages. This is the situation within Jewry today.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 50
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 50](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/50)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
**Orthodoxy and Uniformity**


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 51
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
But there is one other factor behind the demise of “argument for the sake of heaven,” which has to do with developments within Orthodoxy itself. As long as tradition was coextensive with the Jewish people as a whole, it had of necessity to recognize a multitude of voices. Jews were united by halakhah; therefore they could be divided on other things. Jewish law preserved the integrity of the community. Beyond that there could be differences: of custom, culture, personal piety, and philosophical orientation. The tradition maintained a balance between uniformity and diversity.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 52
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This balance existed so long as the Jewish community was both a varied society and a halakhic society. But secularization has utterly changed the sociology of tradition. Halakhic observance, whether in Israel or the diaspora, is for the most part wholly voluntary. It is not supported by the wider cultural ambience. To the contrary, to be halakhically observant is to go against the secular tide. The Jew who is both Orthodox and involved in the secular world is regularly conscious of a deep inner conflict between the two roles. The result is that Orthodoxy is today experienced as consistent, lucid, and harmonious only in environments that exclude the secular world: in yeshivot, or chasidic circles, or restricted neighborhoods. These are environments that do not mirror society as a whole. To the contrary, they are composed of a voluntary self-selecting elite. They are communities of the likeminded. For the most part today, where there is a varied society, it is not a halakhic society. And where there is a halakhic society, it is not a varied society.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 53
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
This leads to a shift in the balance of tradition within any given enclave of Orthodoxy, away from diversity towards uniformity. To be sure, the differences within Orthodoxy are as pronounced today as at any time in the past. Each yeshivah and each chasidic group has its own particular style. Almost every shade of political opinion in Israel has its Orthodox advocates. What is lacking is the public domain of dialogue in which the various sides meet and engage in “argument for the sake of heaven.” Torah once emerged from internally diverse communities. Today it emerges from homogeneous subcommunities. And this does not encourage a serious confrontation with the views of one’s opponents.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 54
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 54](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/54)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The structures of argument within the Jewish world closely mirror the structures of community. The medieval Jewish community, the *kehillah*, spanned all Jews within a given locality. It had to find religious space for diversity and argument. The *kehillah* was shaken by the divisive impact of the Shabbatean movement in the seventeenth century and by the split between *chasidim* and *mitnagdim* in the eighteenth. It eventually collapsed altogether under the impact of emancipation. In Germany, Hungary, Israel, and America, Orthodoxy began its long retreat into segregated enclaves. Orthodox Jews found themselves unable to speak a common language with other Jews and eventually even with other Orthodox Jews.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 55
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
There was no overarching community to which they all belonged. As a result there was no context for a conversation that would bring different positions into dialogue. This is a potentially tragic situation, all the more so since tradition so obviously contains the resources to channel conflict into constructive argument and ultimately, consensus.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 56
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
For rabbinic Judaism *is* a tradition of argument. And many of the issues that today divide Jews are precisely those to which the canonical texts yield more than one answer. How far is Judaism compatible with democracy and liberalism in a Jewish state? How far should Jewish law govern the public domain of Israeli life, even at the cost of infringing on civil liberties? Should the influence of Judaism on Israeli society be felt through the political process, or the educational system, or through personal example? Does Judaism mandate religious coercion? Is the state’s religious duty to stand firm in the face of international opinion or to set an international example of the ethics of self-restraint? May Israel trade land for peace?


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 57
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
The same is true about Judaism in the diaspora. There are legitimate questions about the halakhic response to contemporary society. Should conversion be made easier or harder in a situation of high rates of intermarriage? Which enhancements of women’s roles in Judaism reflect the concerns of the biblical and rabbinic literature, and which import values hostile to the tradition? How far, as a matter of religious duty, should Jews be engaged in the ethical concerns of their wider ­society? Which changes in the shifting political and moral climate are to be welcomed and which challenged and subjected to critique?


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 58
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**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
These are questions that would have traditionally created “argument for the sake of heaven.” And the faith of rabbinic Judaism is that Torah lives more in the way the argument is conducted than in the conclusions reached. If it proceeds through a debate informed by text, precedent, and interpretation, it becomes part of Torah. It becomes part of the commentary each generation of Jews writes to the covenant. But if it proceeds through political pressure, mutual delegitimation, and violent confrontation, there is no real argument. There is a search for victory, not truth. The clash of opinions becomes secularized. Judaism, instead of providing the means for handling conflict, fuels the flames of conflict into conflagration. The great tradition of “argument for the sake of heaven” comes to an end.


###### Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 59
[Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, PART IV; FUTURE, Chapter 11; Tradition as Argument 59](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Arguments%20for%20the%20Sake%20of%20Heaven/s/PART%20IV%3B%20FUTURE,_Chapter%2011%3B%20Tradition%20as%20Argument/r/59)

**Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023:**
That has happened in our time. It is a process that must be reversed.