Between Two Covenants

In confronting the Jewish world, Orthodoxy faces a situation at once full of possibilities and risks. We have suggested that the Jews of many different kinds have, for the last two decades, been moving emotionally closer to and yet sociologically further away from tradition. The most enduring effect of the shift in consciousness since 1967 has been a renewed and deep sense of Jewish peoplehood. But does “the Jewish people” still exist?

At a theoretical level, its meaning, role, and destiny are understood differently by Orthodoxy and Reform, by Israelis and Jews in the diaspora, and by secularists and religious Jews in Israel itself. At the most basic level there are those who believe themselves to be Jews, having been so pronounced by Reform rabbis in America on the basis of conversion or the patrilineal principle. Yet halakhically they are not Jews. It is not accidental that the question “Who is a Jew?” has provoked such bitter controversies, for it goes to the heart of the matter. If there is no clear and single answer to that question, can we speak lucidly of a Jewish people at all? And if we cannot, what becomes of the sense of peoplehood? Jews have sought unity in the late twentieth century, while still living within divisions created in the nineteenth.

Imagine a group of friends in a mountain valley. Their aim is to climb. They agree that each will take a separate route. For some time, each is fully occupied in the difficult task of negotiating, step by step, a path upwards. Each is out of sight of the others. Eventually each emerges at the top. But they then discover that each has reached the top of a separate peak. They can see one another on their separate summits. They want to be reunited, but none is willing to climb down. Yet that is exactly what they will have to do if they want to be together as a group again.

That is the nature of Jews and Judaism today. Each group can claim to have reached its particular summit, even if each has privately to admit to falls and injuries on the way. Secular Zionism can point to the State of Israel, created and sustained by secular means: through politics, diplomacy, and wars. The liberal Jewish denominations can point to a flourishing diaspora, particularly in America, affirmative in its identity which it still chooses to express through religious institutions, even if its attachment to Jewish law and observance is slender. Orthodoxy can point to its unprecedented successes in Jewish education, its burgeoning day schools and yeshivot, it high birth rates, its passionately committed young, its resistance to assimilation, and its growing power within the Jewish world.

But there are separate summits. And there were injuries on the way. Secular Zionism would have to admit that its initial vision does not have the power to explain and sustain Israel’s character today. To find meaning in their personal lives and their internal and external confrontation with the Arab world, Israelis have turned toward religious language and in some cases toward a religious way of life. In recent years, more Israelis have chosen yeridah than diaspora Jews have chosen aliyah. Reform Judaism in America has recently been growing. But only because it has chosen to provide religious legitimation for the great numbers of Jews who have intermarried. In so doing it has consciously courted the risk of writing itself and its members out of the Jewish people. Orthodoxy has seen the biblical and rabbinic tradition, of which it has been the uncompromising defender, lose its power over the vast majority of Jews in both Israel and the largest diaspora community, the United States. It is a successful and confident minority, but it is a minority nonetheless.

Each regards the others as a threat to itself. Secular Zionism is threatened by a Reform that legitimates the diaspora, and by an Orthodoxy that either attaches little independent value to the state or, in the form of Gush Emunim, seems to want to take it into an aggressive, risk-ridden confrontation with the Arab world. Reform is threatened by an Israel that has made life increasingly awkward in the diaspora, and by an Orthodoxy that seeks its delegitimation. Orthodoxy is threatened by a State of Israel and a diaspora Reform, both of which it sees as active agents of secularization.

And yet, more powerfully than any events since the destruction of the Second Temple, twentieth-century history has made Jews conscious that their fate is indivisible. The Holocaust, the birth of Israel and its subsequent isolation have made Jews feel that, with or against their will, they are involved, each in the destiny of all. The various sections of the Jewish world have not simply gone their separate ways. Israel retains close links with the diaspora and the diaspora with it. Reform has sought new ways of recognizing the centrality of Israel on the one hand, traditional observance on the other. Orthodoxy has been involved with the Israeli political process, and has held back from formally excluding Reform Jews from the Jewish people even if it will not and cannot admit Reform as a form of Judaism.

Having reached this set of separate summits, where does the Jewish people go from here? In facing this question, Orthodoxy bears a peculiar responsibility of leadership. To see why, we have to return to first principles.

Jewish Peoplehood

Jews and Judaism represent more than a religion accidentally tied to a people, or a people coincidentally bound to a religion. The definitive moment which brought Israel into being was the covenant at Sinai, which married a people to God, and God to a people. The conventional distinctions between religion and nation here fall away. For the people of Israel was to be constituted by a covenant which embodied the religion of Israel. The relationship between the two might be tense and troubled, but a split was inconceivable. There could be no people without a specific faith, and no faith conceived independently of a particular people.

By the covenant at Sinai, the people agreed to be bound by a distinctive, holy way of life. In return, their history would be uniquely written in moral rather than natural categories. It would be a commentary on their covenantal loyalty or betrayal. It would be seen, both by themselves and by others, as evidence of the presence of God in history, or sometimes, tragically, as the temporary “hiding of the face” of God. The people of Israel would be both edah and ed, a congregation and a witness, summoned and testifying to a Divinely endowed destiny.

They would find that their end was already written in their beginning. There would be a pattern to their fate. Jewish history would repeatedly be written in terms of exile, exodus, and glimpses of redemption. From time to time Jews would disappear. Assimilation, forced conversions, and persecutions would take their toll. But as a people they would survive. With a perfectly uncanny conviction, the prophets were certain of this: that the covenantal people would endure every persecution, and be ingathered from the furthest exile. But it would survive on the basis of the covenant. It would survive because dispersion and persecution would recall them to their singular sense of peoplehood and from there to their holy way of life.

Judaism cannot therefore coherently imagine a divorce between Torah and the Jewish people, or between either and the place of their redemption, the land of Israel. Tradition envisaged no Jewish identity that was ethnic without being religious; or that was religious without the dimension of peoplehood; or which was not, in some sense, turned toward Israel; or which was based on an Israel unrelated to the Jewish people as a whole, or to Torah. Because there was only one God and one revelation, there could be only one Jewish people, one Torah, and one land which is a Jewish home. Individuals might make their choice to live outside one or the other. But there would be no enduring or lucid Jewish identity that did not define itself in relation to these three framing realities.

Covenantal Crisis

But underlying this definition is a monumental assumption, namely that Jews would continue to see themselves in these terms. “It is not with you alone that I am making this covenant and this oath,” says Moses, addressing the generation that would cross the Jordan and take possession of the promised land. “I am making it both with those who are standing here with us today before God our Lord, and with those who are not here with us today.” The covenant would bind all future generations. But why would it? Why should it?

We here confront the central, if unstated, question that has hovered just below the surface of Jewish life since the beginning of emancipation. Why be Jewish? Judaism marries fact and value, birth and obligation. One is born a Jew. Yet to be a Jew involves the assumption of responsibilities, a set of commands that define a way of life. A key, or perhaps the key assumption of Western thought since the Enlightenment is that these two propositions cannot be joined to one another. Obligation presupposes choice. Existence, in Sartre’s phrase, precedes essence. How then can a Jew be bound by the terms of a covenant made somewhere else and long ago, in a lonely desert by an ancient people? As a human being, surely he is free to write his own destiny. He is free to be a Jew or not a Jew. Or, deciding to be a Jew, he is free to shape that fact as he chooses. If there is choice, how can there be fate? If there is freedom, how can there be a prescripted Jewish destiny? In one way or another, this question has haunted the history of Israel since its earliest days. But there are times when it becomes particularly acute. At such times, there is covenantal crisis.

We can identify earlier periods at which the givenness of the Jewish destiny became acutely problematic. In exile in Babylon after the fall of the First Temple, Jews might have gone the way of the ten tribes before them, of disappearing through assimilation into a larger culture. After the fall of the Second Temple, again Jews might have chosen the way of Rome, or even the way of Pauline Christianity, integrating themselves into and even transforming from within the dominant imperial power. In the fifteenth century in Spain, they might have chosen, en masse, publicly to accept Christianity even if they remained marranos, Jews in secret. European emancipation offered a similar embrace, half menacing, half benign. Each invited Jews to abandon or merge their particular identity in favor of a more universal conception of civilization, history, and faith.

Some Jews did. In not every case was it a matter of defection to another people or culture or religion. It could take the form of limiting Jewish identity so that it fitted into the space left for it by the dominant culture. It could become a Hellenized Judaism that accommodated to the eclecticism of the Greek and Roman worlds. It could become a secret Judaism that took outwardly Christian forms. It could become a denationalized and ethicized Judaism that accorded with European notions of what a religion might be in a secular state. It could become a Jewish nationalism that sought expression in a secular state of its own. Alternatively, Jews could mount an attack on both their own and the dominant faith, seeking a world of pure universalism in which there were neither Jews nor Gentiles. Such, in modern times, was the strategy of Spinoza, Marx, and Freud. In each case the assumption of Sinai was shaken, that Jews had a unique and particular destiny that accorded with no universal norms. The question ceased to be theoretical and became burningly real and personal: Why should Jews remain bound to and commanded by a remote and distant covenant?

Why Be Jewish?

We can trace, too, the answers Jews gave to that question. There was the mystical answer given by the sages. The covenant in the wilderness was made not only with one generation but with the souls of all Jews as yet unborn. They were there and gave their assent. Sinai is, as it were, written into the collective unconscious of the Jewish mind. Then there was the natural law answer given, in fifteenth-century Spain, by Isaac Arama. Jews had found safety only under the wings of Providence. Cast to the winds of chance, they had been treated savagely by every people among whom they had come to live. It was no more possible that all Jews should forsake the covenant than that all members of a particular species should commit suicide. The law of Sinai was as deeply engraved in Jewish consciousness as the law of life was written into nature. Alternatively there was the legal-metaphysical answer given, also in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition, by Don Isaac Abarbanel. Jews had ceded their freedom to God by becoming His servants after the exodus from Egypt. From then onward, Heaven held a title, as it were, to the Jewish people.

Each of these was an attempt to show how fate could coincide with freedom, and how a covenant could be passed on across the generations. But undoubtedly the answer that held the greatest resonance was a much older one, first given by the prophet Ezekiel. “You say: We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world…. But what you have in mind will never happen. As surely as I live, declares the Lord God, I will rule over you with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath. I will bring you from the nations and gather you from the countries where you have been scattered – with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath.” History would recall Jews to their destiny. They might succeed individually, but not collectively, in assimilating. The nations would resist it. They would expel Jews. There would be an exodus against their will.

The question and the answer recurred again and again. The talmudic sages envisaged a line of argument that suggested that history had broken the covenant. They read this back into the Babylonian exile. Jews came to the prophet and said: “If a master sells his slave, or a husband divorces his wife, does he then have any further claim on them?” Having sent Jews into exile, God could have no further claim to their loyalty. It was an argument that was to be repeated by Spinoza on the threshold of modernity. Jews, he argued, had ceased to be bound by the covenant since the collapse of their national autonomy. It has been heard more recently in the wake of the Holocaust, this time from Elie Wiesel and Irving Greenberg. Greenberg argues that after the Shoah there can be only a “voluntary” covenant. Its “authority” has ended. Wiesel explains why. “The Jewish people entered into a covenant with God. We were to protect His Torah and He in turn assumes responsibility for Israel’s presence in the world…. Well, it seems, for the first time in history, this very covenant is broken.” In this last remark Wiesel is wrong, for the words have been heard before.

And yet repeatedly the unexpected has occurred. Jews did not see their sufferings as a sign that they had been abandoned by God and that they should now take refuge in the world. Instead they saw it as a sign that they had been abandoned by the world and that they should now take refuge in God. The covenant, said Isaiah, admits of no divorce between God and His people. Attempted genocide by Haman did not lead to Jewish defections but instead, as the Talmud put it, a renewal of the covenant more miraculous, because more voluntary, than at Sinai itself. Suffering would always lead back to, not away from, the Jewish destiny. If nothing else led Jews to return to their faith at the end of days, said the sages, Heaven would send “a king whose decrees will be as harsh as those of Haman” and they will repent.

Ezekiel’s words echoed through the ages. History would bring back Jews to their vocation. Isaac Arama told the marranos, “You will find no rest among the Gentiles, and your life will hang in the balance.” Abarbanel, quoting Ezekiel, added that “though they and their descendants would do all in their power to assimilate, they would not succeed. They would still be called Jews against their own will and would be accused of Judaizing in secret and be burnt at the stake for it.” Moses Hess used remarkably similar language in the nineteenth century to the assimilationist Jews of Germany. And this, above all, is what has happened to Jewish consciousness in modern times. It is how most Jews react to the impact of the Holocaust and anti-Zionism. The Jewish destiny cannot be normalized in either the diaspora or Israel. The world will not let Israel, the people or the state, be “like the nations, like the peoples of the world.” More than anything else, a sense of history answers the question: Why be Jewish?

A Partial Renewal

But in the past, this was only one aspect of a two-sided process. A sense of shared history led to a sense of shared destiny. To use R. Soloveitchik’s terminology, brit goral, the covenant of fate, led to brit yi’ud, the covenant of purpose. In discovering that persecution did not distinguish between Jews, the Jewish people summoned themselves to a common future in the light of their common past. When Moses, and later Joshua, and later Ezra turn to address the people of Israel in a formal ratification of the covenant, they each preface their remarks by recalling Israel’s history. Covenantal renewal begins in memory, much of it painful. But the pain does not end there. Joshua calls on the people to put away their strange gods. Ezra calls on them to put away their strange wives. To move toward a covenantal future means renouncing some aspects of the past.

What makes the present moment in Jewish history so tense and fateful is that we stand midway between two processes that have never hitherto been separated. The Holocaust, Israel, and anti-Zionism stand at the very forefront of Jewish identity. There has been a renewal of the brit goral. Jews feel part of a shared history. They feel bound together and in some sense “over against” a hostile non-Jewish world. They feel responsible for one another. They act in concert to defend one another. But there has been no renewal of the brit yi’ud. There has been no convergence toward a reinstatement of revelation and tradition. Because both Reform and secular Zionism have been “traditionalized” this has seemed to take place, but in reality it has not. Instead, tradition has been used to legitimate both secularization and intermarriage, the very things that Joshua and Ezra excluded from the covenant.

In this unprecedented situation Orthodoxy is faced with an awesome challenge and responsibility. For it was Orthodoxy which, through the last two centuries of a deeply unfavorable intellectual and social climate, has been the guardian of the brit yi’ud. Against Reform it insisted that there could be no secularization of the idea of revelation and no abandonment of the binding authority of halakhah. Against Conservative Judaism it insisted that halakhah is not determined by the values of the age; instead it is halakhah that determines the Jewish response to the values of the age. Against secular Zionism it argued that neither a land nor a state are ends in themselves. Against some recent Holocaust theologians, it has argued that no event in history can “rupture” the covenant or “break” its claim upon Jews.

Surveying Jewish history since 1789, the Orthodox Jew – ­especially if he has a belief in Providence – can surely find it in his heart to recognize the achievements of movements which he cannot in principle legitimate. It was a secular Zionist movement that brought into being a Jewish state. It was liberal Judaisms – Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist – that held the loyalties of substantial numbers of Jews who might otherwise have drifted altogether away from the Jewish people. There is a difference, in both Jewish law and thought, between means and ends. He may rejoice in these consequences even as he regrets the means by which they were brought about.

It might have been otherwise. The early precursors of Zionism were deeply religious Jews. Among the advocates of settlement of the land were the Vilna Gaon, R. Moses Sofer, and a number of chasidic leaders. Rabbis Yehuda Alkalai, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, Isaac Reines, and Avraham Kook were all, in their different ways, architects of a Zionism that was itself a form of Orthodoxy. Nor did preserving the loyalty of acculturated Jews necessarily lead to Reform. In Anglo-Jewry, for example, cultural accommodation took place entirely within the boundaries of halakhah. It did likewise in Hirsch’s neo-Orthodoxy. Zionism and liberalism might have evolved within the parameters of tradition and without shattering the covenant. But history is not written in terms of might-have-beens. As the sages said: What was, was. And in what actually transpired, liberal Judaism and secular Zionism played their part.

But there is a next stage. Covenantal renewal has not run its course. It has reached halfway to its destination. Until there has been, in some sense, a ratification of the brit yi’ud, the centrality in Jewish life of the covenant of revelation and command, the shift in Jewish consciousness we have dated to 1967 will remain unconsummated. For this to happen, there must be movement in every section of the Jewish world toward some common sense of identity and purpose. But it must surely be Orthodoxy which initiates the process. And this will mean a shift in the direction of Orthodoxy itself. How so?

Orthodoxy and the Jewish People

As Samson Raphael Hirsch noted, there is something odd about the word Orthodoxy itself. He objected to it. Judaism, he wrote, “knows of no mosaic, prophetic or rabbinic, and of no orthodox or progressive Judaism. It is either Judaism or it is not.” He did not add, but we must, that Judaism knows of no Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews. They are either Jews or they are not.

The phrase “Orthodox Judaism” is therefore an anomaly. For the word orthodox as currently used suggested a denomination, one kind of Judaism among others. Whereas Jewish Orthodoxy itself, whether defined in terms of Maimonides’ thirteen principles or any of their medieval variants, established the boundary conditions of Judaism. A non-Orthodox Judaism would have been a contradiction in terms, for by its very non-Orthodoxy it would have parted company with Judaism. The phrase “Orthodox Judaism” at any age prior to the nineteenth century would have been tautological. What other kind of Judaism was there? What other kind of Judaism could there be? Neither the word “Judaism” nor the word “Jew” admits qualifying adjectives.

The concept of Orthodoxy as one kind of Judaism among others has been a critical tension in the development of tradition since emancipation. In halakhah there is no such thing as a plurality of Judaisms, beyond minor local variants of custom. But in sociological terms, there was. In theory, Orthodoxy is the religion of all Jews. In practice it was the commitment of only some, and in some countries, a minority. Leaders of Orthodoxy were therefore caught in a dilemma. Were they to safeguard the religious integrity of the Jewish people as a whole? Or was their primary concern to preserve a minority within the Jewish people, those who held firm to traditional faith and practice? Tradition suggested the former. Pragmatism suggested the latter. And so the history of Orthodoxy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became a story of its progressive disengagement from collective Jewish enterprises.

In 1868 most of Hungarian Orthodoxy seceded from the general Jewish community. In 1876 Hirsch insisted that his Frankfurt community do likewise. In 1912 Agudat Yisrael was formed to mark the secession of most of Central and East European Orthodoxy from the Zionist movement. There has been increasing pressure within American Jewry for Orthodox rabbis to secede from interdenominational rabbinical groups like the Synagogue Council of America. Wherever Orthodoxy found itself in a minority, among reformers on the one hand or secularists on the other, the consensus was that they could not continue to be associated. They would be lending their names and their authority to decisions with which they could not in conscience agree. They would be helping to legitimate positions which ran directly counter to tradition.

There were those who disagreed. There was gemeinde Orthodoxy in Germany, “status quo” Orthodoxy in Hungary, and Mizrachi within the Zionist movement, each of which refused to sever its connections with the community as a whole. They had some distinguished representatives, but they were a minority within the Orthodox world. Faced with a general Jewish community unreceptive to its guidance, Orthodoxy turned inward and concentrated on strengthening its own ranks. In retrospect it was a successful strategy.

But that moment has now passed, or it shortly will. Orthodoxy has secured its future. It has emerged in a position of commanding strength, demographic and ideological. It has achieved the task it set for itself, or rather that was set for it by Jewish destiny. It preserved the Torah against the twin assaults of Enlightenment thought and Jewish “normalization.” The time has come for it to point the way to a reunification of Torah and the Jewish people. For that is the necessary next stage of covenantal renewal.

The Constituency of Jewish Law

But it is just here that we encounter a head-on conflict between the aims of “Orthodoxy” considered as a section of the Jewish world, and “Judaism” considered as the faith and way of life of all Jews. For Orthodoxy has found its strength precisely in its disengagement. No longer constrained by the need to formulate halakhah in such a way as to be livable by all Jews, no longer empowered to enforce Jewish law throughout the Jewish community, Orthodoxy was able to develop its own voluntary communities, each an elite of the most committed and intense. Halakhah itself reflected this narrowed constituency. Jewish law became, for the first time, a code not for a people as a whole but for a self-selecting group of the faithful. This was not intentional; but in many cases it was inevitable.

In the early twentieth century, R. Chaim Hirschensohn, an Orthodox rabbi who had moved to America, bemoaned the fact that halakhic authorities had not responded to the realities of an open, assimilated diaspora. In the early years of the State of Israel, Yeshayahu Leibowitz made the same complaint about halakhah there. It had not come to terms with the needs of an independent state, or a total economy, or modern technology, or military security. Orthodox Jews were able to observe Shabbat in Israel, he argued trenchantly, only at the cost of making other Jews their shabbos goyim.

But who was listening? The halakhic change they called for was revolutionary. It could hardly be endorsed by the gedolei ha-dor, the generation’s great halakhic authorities, who had increasingly come to share R. Moses Sofer’s view that any concession to modernity, even if technically permissible, opened the door to secularization. It could not be endorsed by the very people with whom Hirschensohn and Leibowitz were concerned, non-Orthodox Americans and secular Israelis. These did not seek a solution within halakhah, for they did not accept halakhah itself. So here was a solution in search of a constituency. In seeking to make halakhah applicable to everyone, Hirschensohn and Leibowitz found themselves speaking to no one. And that has been the problem of what is properly called Modern Orthodoxy ever since.

Modern Orthodoxy

Modern Orthodoxy in this narrow sense is not the Judaism espoused by Hirsch or R. Kook or R. Soloveitchik. It is not the establishment Orthodoxy of Anglo-Jewry. Nor is it what in Israel is called dati as opposed to charedi. None of these Orthodoxies proposed halakhic change or any radical revision in the way faith was conceived. The project of Modern Orthodoxy, by contrast, is to make Judaism applicable to a wider range of Jews. It recognizes that “modern consciousness” is something different from “traditional consciousness,” and that as a result many Jews have become alienated from Judaism.

Modern Orthodox thinkers focus on three aspects of the rabbinic tradition. The first is that it contains considerable resources for halakhic change. The second is that, at times, it gives vivid expression to the power and dignity of human reason and interpretation. The third is a distinction between the purpose of Jewish law and its detailed enactment. When, because of changed circumstance, the law as it stands frustrates the purpose for which it was enacted, change – they argue – is halakhically mandated.

Modern Orthodoxy in this sense is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its precursors, as we noted, were R. Chaim Hirschensohn and Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Its major spokesmen have been Emanuel Rackman and Eliezer Berkovits, and more recently Shlomo Riskin and David Hartman; more radically still, Irving Greenberg. They have all been highly controversial figures. And we can now see why, and why Modern Orthodoxy did not surface a century before in the days, say, of Samson Raphael Hirsch. Modern Orthodoxy is an attempt to address the constituencies that lie outside halakhah, without abandoning halakhah.

In earlier periods such attempts had been made and subsequently forsaken. Early Reform tried to make distinctions between biblical and rabbinic law. Early Conservatism sought to stay within halakhah, liberally conceived. Early Zionism was constructed in traditional terms. One by one these attempts foundered under the pressure of radicalism. Reform cast loose from tradition in its militant conferences of the 1840s. American Conservatism did likewise under the impact of Mordecai Kaplan. The Zionist movement did so when it shifted from narrowly political to broader cultural aims.

But, as we have argued, the direction of change has since been reversed. Each of these movements has, markedly since 1967, been seeking a place within tradition. Could tradition find a place for them? Could it find a home within the categories of revelation and halakhah for the new situation of women in society? Could it enhance their position in the laws of divorce? Could Judaism confront intermarriage by a liberal interpretation of the laws of conversion? Was there a place within its values for the idea of democracy? Or for a humanistic sense of personal autonomy and dignity? Could Orthodox Jews engage in dialogue and collaborative ventures with secular and non-Orthodox Jews? These were and are the kind of questions raised by Modern Orthodoxy, and in general it found it possible to deliver affirmative answers.

Modern Orthodoxy is, in short, an attempt to locate modern consciousness within tradition. It is a symptom of an age in which “modernism” has itself become more traditional. It addresses the same issues that were once confronted by Reform, Conservative, and secular Zionist thought but stops short of their break with halakhah. Its overwhelming problem in finding an audience is that these alternatives still exist. Those who wish to give Jewish expression to feminism, liberalism, or personal autonomy can do so more freely elsewhere. Those who are attracted to Orthodoxy are so because it expresses opposite values: authority, community, and a highly defined sense of personal role.

Tradition’s Many Voices

Modern Orthodoxy stands at the extreme outer boundary of tradition. It is a matter of some argument within Orthodoxy as to which side of the boundary it stands: inside or outside. It is nonetheless an important phenomenon. It is not one to which the author of this study would personally subscribe. Judaism. I believe, is far less compatible with modern consciousness than Modern Orthodoxy has suggested. Nor is halakhah as open to change as some statements within the tradition might lead one to conclude. There is a difference between the wide powers theoretically available to a Jewish court of law and the much narrower precedent of how those powers have actually been used. Nor can it be taken for granted that everything that can halakhically be permitted, ought halakhically to be permitted. The famous remark of Blu Greenberg, that “where there is a rabbinic will, there is a halakhic way,” does not entail that where there is a halakhic way, there is a rabbinic will.

There are serious counter-arguments to many Modern Orthodox positions. Invoking the power of a rabbinical court to retroactively annul marriages, for example, on a scale never before practiced, would alleviate the position of women whose husbands refuse to grant them a divorce, but it would weaken the structure and sanctity of Jewish marriage as a whole. A more liberal policy on conversion than that practiced by many Orthodox courts in the diaspora is certainly available, and has at times been adopted by rabbinical courts in Israel. But there is a case for saying that this would be seen to be a tacit legitimation of intermarriage. One can, as David Hartman has done, write an account of Judaism in terms of anthropology rather than theology, focusing on those sources which stress human initiative and downplaying those which emphasize human dependence on and submission to the supernatural. But does this adequately represent the full meaning of such concepts as prayer, command, and Providence? There is a place within Judaism for personal autonomy. But there is also a place for the idea of obedience to law and reverence for its great interpreters.

But – and this is the crux – there is a difference between Orthodoxy as one kind of Judaism among others and Orthodoxy as the faith of the Jewish people. On this latter conception, it becomes profoundly important that the tradition speaks with as many voices as possible, and that as many positions as possible find their home within tradition. Saadia Gaon in writing his Beliefs and Opinions, and Maimonides in writing the Guide for the Perplexed, did not set out to address all Jews. They set out explicitly to speak to those whose doubts were leading them away from Judaism altogether. R. Soloveitchik, in his introductory remarks to The Lonely Man of Faith. declared it to be a completely personal statement, which may or may not strike an answering chord among his readers. What makes these works important is not that they represent a universal norm, but that they resolve certain cultural crises within the framework of halakhic Judaism.

I once wrote that “a sober analyst of the history of Jewish philosophy may conclude that its practitioners solved no ultimate problems; rather, they allowed certain personality types and mental frameworks to take their place in Judaism. The rationalist feels at home because of Maimonides; the antirationalist, because of Judah Halevi. R. Soloveitchik, in his philosophical writings, has answered no questions, but he has done what a great Jewish thinker should. He has given a home to the previously unhoused: to the Jew in the modern world who experiences conflict, loneliness, and the sharp unease of faith.”

A similar statement could be made about Modern Orthodoxy. It has indicated certain possibilities within the tradition that had not been systematically explored before. It is possible, even probable, that Modern Orthodoxy is more significant to those outside Orthodoxy than those securely within. That explains its controversial nature and its difficulty in finding a following. It does not negate its significance. For it is Modern Orthodoxy that provides a bridge between Orthodoxy itself and Conservative and Reform Judaism and secular Zionism. Such a bridge must be found if Orthodoxy is once again to become the faith of the entire Jewish people. It must be found if there is to be a renewal of the brit yi’ud, the covenant of Sinai, with the Jewish people as a whole.