A Collision of Consciousness

The previous chapter described the halakhic strategy for preserving Jewish unity in the face of division over fundamentals and termed it inclusivist. But it raises a number of questions. Why can there be no halakhic strategy along the lines favoured by those outside Orthodoxy, namely pluralism? If Judaism recognizes pluralism along a number of axes, why not halakhic pluralism? And if it should emerge that inclusivism is the only available strategy, is it indeed a formula for Jewish unity? Does it not fail by its own unacceptability to those outside of Orthodoxy? To answer these questions, we must first be clear what the terms mean.

John Hick, discussing the relationships between one faith and another, defines three possibilities: exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Exclusivism is the view that “one particular mode of religious thought and experience (namely one’s own) is alone valid, all others being false.” Inclusivism is the view that “one’s own tradition alone has the whole truth but that this truth is nevertheless partially reflected in other traditions.” Pluralism is the view that “the great world faiths embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real or the Ultimate.”¹ (London: Macmillan, 1985), 91.

footnotes: ¹ John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism

Let me put the distinction more precisely as it concerns Judaism. Inclusivists and exclusivists share the view that there is only one authoritative set of religious truths and imperatives. They hold, in other words, the classic rabbinic position that every Jew is bound by the principles of faith and the rules of halakhah. These are the boundaries of Judaism. But they move on from this starting-point in opposite directions. An exclusivist takes rejection of these norms at its face value. Karaites who rejected rabbinic law, conversos who out of fear embraced Christianity or Islam, and liberal or secular Jews who broke with halakhah had placed themselves outside the community of faith. They were heretics. They had no share in the world to come. The good deeds and Jewish rituals they performed were not mitzvot.² (Jerusalem: Wasserman, 1963), 67. They or their children, at least in some respects, had forfeited their status as Jews.

footnotes: ² See, e.g., Elchanan Wasserman, Kovetz Ma’amarim

Inclusivists do not take rejection at its face value. As the term implies, they seek to include within the faith those who apparently stand outside. Thus Maimonides saw conversos and the children of Karaites as Jews still within the ambit of salvation. Sometimes an inclusivist will give an interpretation of deviant conduct different from that which its agent would give himself. So Rabbi Kook saw secular Jews as implicitly religious. So, too, Chabad Hasidism sees all Jews as wishing, in their innermost selves, to be connected with God and Torah. It would be going too far to make a principled division between exclusivists and inclusivists as if these were two distinct strands in Jewish law and thought. Halakhic authorities judged each case by its circumstances. None the less, as we have seen, the central thrust of Jewish law in modern times has been towards inclusivism, for reasons that have equally to do with the character of modernity and with principles that are embedded deep in the logic of Judaism.

Pluralism takes issue with both exclusivism and inclusivism. It asserts that there is no single authoritative definition of Judaism. Instead there are many valid interpretations, none of which excludes or necessarily includes others. Pluralism is not the same as subjectivism, the idea that there is no objective truth in ethics or theology. It suggests, instead, that the same objective reality may be interpreted in different but equally valid ways, because it can be seen from different perspectives, with different purposes and through different cultural traditions. Pluralists are fond of illustrating their point by imagining blind men trying to describe an elephant. One feels its leg and identifies it as a tree. Another feels its trunk and concludes that it is a snake. A third feels the tail and says it is a rope. Theologies may seem to conflict, yet they may be perceptions of the same thing under different aspects.

The difference between Jewish inclusivism and pluralism, then, is this. Inclusivism asserts that there is an authoritative set of beliefs that constitute Jewish faith. It involves, among other things, belief in the divine revelation of the Torah and the authority of rabbinic tradition, interpretation, and law. Denial of these propositions cannot be understood, as pluralists would argue, as an equally legitimate way of understanding the covenant. It is, instead, an error. But – and this is the crux of inclusivism – it is an excusable error, not to be attributed to defiance or rebellion. Inclusivism preserves Orthodoxy while not excluding the non-Orthodox from the covenantal community.

A Jewish pluralist, on the other hand, would argue that liberal, Reform, Conservative, and secular Judaisms are equally legitimate ways of understanding the Jewish destiny. None is an error. He or she might flesh out this proposition by pointing to the different values each particularly exemplifies. It used to be argued, for example, that while Orthodoxy concentrated on Torah, Conservative Judaism focused on the Jewish people, while Reform Judaism was more concerned with theology and God. In terms of their decision-making processes, the alternatives might be stated somewhat differently. Reform attaches more weight to the individual, Conservative Judaism to the Jewish community in the present, and Orthodoxy to the Jewish people in its unbroken continuity. Regardless of how the different movements are characterized, pluralism argues that none is false. Each emphasizes some covenantal values. Each to some extent underemphasizes others. They are related to the transcendent realities of Jewish faith as are, say, paintings by Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh to the landscape they depict. To call one correct and the others erroneous is to fail to understand the essential multiplicity of interpretation.

Inclusivism, then, is compatible with Jewish tradition. Is pluralism?

PLURALISM AND TRADITION Rabbinic Judaism, I have argued, is pluralist in a number of respects. First, it recognizes the validity of at least some other religious traditions. Chasidei umot haolam, the pious of the nations of the world, have a share in the world to come.³, Sanhedrin 13:1; Yad, Melakhim 8:11. Islam, most authorities agreed, is pure monotheism. Rabbi Menachem Hameiri extended this validation to all nations “who are disciplined in the ways of religions and civilization.”⁴ on Bava Kama 37b–38a; see Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 114–28; Nachum Rabinovitch, “A Halakhic View of the Non-Jew,” 18–23. Maimonides saw both Christianity and Islam as facets of the divine plan of history, in which both religions served to prepare the world for the messianic age.⁵, end of ch. 11 (uncensored eds.). See Lawrence Kaplan, “Maimonides on Christianity and Islam,” L’Eylah, 22 (1986), 31–34. Rabbi Kook spoke of the “brotherly love of Esau [Christianity] and Jacob, of Isaac and Ishmael [Islam],” and of Judaism’s respect for religious diversity.⁶, i. 112. To be sure, a Jew is not allowed to abandon Judaism, but non-Jews are not called on to embrace it. There are other equally legitimate ways of serving God.

footnotes: ³ Tosafot ⁴ Beit Habechirah ⁵ Yad, Melakhim ⁶ Igerot Harayah

Secondly, as we have seen, rabbinic Judaism is pluralist with regard to matters that lie outside halakhah. There are many striking statements to this effect within the tradition. There is prophetic pluralism. “The same communication is revealed to many prophets, but no two prophesy in the same style.”⁷ There is interpretative pluralism. There are “seventy faces” to the Torah.⁸ “Just as perfume gives forth many scents, so when a verse is expounded you find in it many senses.”⁹ The divine reality and the divine word both overflow any particular attempt to capture them in concepts. Infinity cannot be caught in the language of finitude. The reluctance of tradition to authorize precise articulations of faith or a single reading – even a single style of reading – of the biblical text is testimony to its sense of the inadequacy of language in the face of the Infinite.

footnotes: ⁷ Sanhedrin 89a. ⁸ Nachmanides on Gen. 8:4. ⁹ Song of Songs Rabbah 4:10.

Thirdly, rabbinic Judaism admitted cognitive pluralism. There is more than one way of knowing the world. Rabbi Soloveitchik’s early work, The Halakhic Mind, is an essay on this theme.¹⁰ (New York: Seth Press 1986). See Jonathan Sacks, “Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik’s Early Epistemology,” Tradition, 23:3 (1988), 75–87. “Sober epistemological facts,” he writes, “demonstrate the heterogeneity and pluralistic character of the most basic cognitive methods.” The concept of knowledge cannot be dissociated from the telos or purpose with which it is sought. Because human purposes are many and various, so are the forms of knowledge. “Systematic knowledge means the understanding and grasping of the universe in consonance with a definite telos.... Pluralism asserts...that the object reveals itself in manifold ways to the subject, and that a certain telos corresponds to each of these ontical manifestations.”¹¹, 14–16. An artist, a scientist, and a man of faith may see a sunset in different ways because they approach it with different frames of reference.

footnotes: ¹⁰ Joseph Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind ¹¹ Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind

Soloveitchik writes as if cognitive pluralism were a peculiarly modern cultural phenomenon. But classic Jewish thought contains many examples. The biblical narrative of Joseph, for example, is an extraordinarily subtle example of shifting perspectives, in which a single sequence of events is seen now under the aspect of human intention, now under the guidance of an overarching providence. The text relating to the third plague in Egypt – when the Egyptian magicians, unable to produce lice by their magic arts, declare, “It is the finger of God”¹² – is almost a philosophical essay on different ways of understanding the miraculous: as that which is sent by God or that which cannot otherwise be explained. The rabbis, distinguishing between Torah and chokhmah (wisdom), recognized an independent domain of secular knowledge.¹³, xv. 55–80. The halakhic system, with its elaborate structure of legal constructs, drew clear lines between empirical and legal facts.¹⁴. Even legal facts could not be disentangled from their purposes. For example, a barrier might be considered a wall by the law of sukkah (the temporary dwelling used on the festival of Tabernacles), but not by the law requiring separation of the sexes in the synagogue. Not only divine reality, then, but the world of the senses also was given to plural modes of knowledge.

footnotes: ¹² Ex. 8:19. ¹³ See Entziklopediah Talmudit ¹⁴ On this see Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man

Fourthly, there was the pluralism of halakhic argument. In any given case there may be only one normative halakhic ruling, but there may be several equally well-founded halakhic opinions. A view which is rejected is not necessarily a view which is false. The schools of Hillel and Shammai both represent “the words of the living God.” “The words of those who prohibit and of those who permit,” said Rabbi Joshua, are “all of them given from one Shepherd.”¹⁵ Rabbinic Judaism recognizes the integrity of “argument for the sake of Heaven.”¹⁶ Rabbi Menachem Hameiri praises intellectual conflict as the means of arriving at truth.¹⁷ on Mish. Avot 5:17. Rabbi Kook goes further and sees conflict as the most complete representation of a truth that is necessarily many-sided.¹⁸, i. 330.

footnotes: ¹⁵ Chagigah 3b. ¹⁶ Mish. Avot 5:17. ¹⁷ Beit Habechirah ¹⁸ Kook, Olat Rayah

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF PLURALISM Some forms of pluralism, then, are compatible with tradition. But clearly not all. The concept of Orthodoxy (or as the Mishnah puts it, beliefs the denial of which involve forfeiting a share in the world to come)¹⁹ presupposes the possibility of heresy. The idea of halakhah – Judaism as law, binding on all its members – involves the possibility of rebellion as well as transgression. One can place oneself outside the law, as well as break it. Tradition sees Jews as constituting a covenantal community, and a community is defined by boundaries. Boundaries may be sharply or loosely defined, but there must exist a territory outside them for them to be boundaries at all. Not everything can count as a legitimate interpretation of faith or practice. Were it otherwise, Judaism would have no substantive content as the religion of a people.

footnotes: ¹⁹ Mish. Sanhedrin 10:1.

Religious pluralism, far from being a self-evident phenomenon, in fact calls out for explanation. To be sure, all non-sectarian religious systems will tolerate differences of opinion on matters considered inessential to the definition of the faith community. Rabbinic Judaism, defining its faith community in terms of revealed law, was pluralist in the ways described above, precisely because they did not impinge on the halakhic system. But at the heart of any traditional religion lie ultimate claims about reality and authority. Religious belief is understood in terms of an objective truth that excludes alternatives. The great religious schisms, Jewish or otherwise, were fought on the ground of conflicting truths. The idea of pluralism – that ultimate truths are not incompatible, merely alternative expressions of the same reality – is revolutionary and sharply at odds with religious history. Certainly the great ideological battles of the nineteenth century between Orthodoxy and Reform, diasporism and Zionism, and the religious and secular interpretations of Zionism itself were fought on absolutist grounds. The radical reformers and secularists, far from maintaining that theirs was merely one possible interpretation of tradition, held that it was the only rational response possible to the times.

Jewish denominational pluralism is a specific phase in the dialectic of tradition and modernity. The initial period is marked by movements of radical accommodation to modernity. For Reform, this was the first half of the nineteenth century, for secular Zionism the period between 1880 and 1930. The ideology, if not the practical politics, of both movements defined itself in opposition to the antecedent tradition. Reform was the negation of the religion of the ghetto. Zionism was the negation of the diaspora. Each saw itself as throwing off the yoke of an outworn past, and as the sole survivor of modernity. Pluralism has no place in the mood of these times.

By the late twentieth century, however, the vision has been succeeded by achievement: social integration and acceptance in the diaspora, and the creation of the State of Israel. The initial impetus to radicalism has become a distant memory. The radicals, moreover, turn out not to be the sole inheritors of the future. Orthodoxy survives. So does the diaspora. More unexpectedly still, Orthodox Jews are at home in secular culture. Diaspora Jews are Zionists. The either-or of ideological radicalism no longer describes the way Jews act or think. To this must be added the powerful thrust lent by the Holocaust and Israel to the sensed reality of Jewish peoplehood. It becomes more plausible to think in terms of what unites rather than divides Jews, and more urgent.

But even these processes would not explain the emergence of pluralism as an ideology of the late twentieth century without one further factor: the deepening impact of secularization. Modernity privatizes the religious domain. Liberal theologies, accommodating themselves to social and intellectual change, translate statements about external reality into propositions about believers themselves, and propositions about authority into the vocabulary of personal choice. Religious language, instead of describing a given external and objective order, now designates a chosen internal and subjective reality. Once this move is made, pluralism becomes an intellectual possibility. Statements of objective truth clash in a way that statements about subjective perception do not. When religion no longer contests the public domain, coexistence takes the place of conflict. Because ultimate realities have been internalized, religious movements can see their differences as matters of interpretation rather than truth. “The phenomenon called “pluralism” is a social-structural correlate of the secularisation of consciousness.”²⁰, 126.

footnotes: ²⁰ Berger, The Sacred Canopy

Denominational pluralism, then, is neither a feature of Jewish tradition nor even a first response to modernity. It occurs, argues Peter Berger, when religious authority is demonopolized and different groups have to compete for commitment in an open market.²¹ It is, suggests Bryan Wilson, the result of a crisis of secularization. Inter-denominational co-operation, he writes, “is not in itself a revival of religion, nor a reconversion of society. It is the turning in on itself of institutionalized religion as its hold on the wider social order has diminished.”²², 202.

footnotes: ²¹ Ibid., 126–53. ²² Wilson, Religion in Secular Society

It emerges when revolutionary movements persist beyond the circumstances that brought them forth; when the ideological wars of the first confrontation with change have subsided; when movements discover that their opponents, scheduled for oblivion, have survived; when the shared experience of modernization brings the realization that religious groups across the ideological spectrum have much in common; when religion has been marginalized to the point that its internal discords are less prominent than the difference between those of any religious commitment and those of none; when religions have sacrificed the language of truth for that of choice; and when the idea of objective authority has been replaced by that of self-fulfilment.

Necessarily, then, Orthodoxy cannot subscribe to pluralism in the contemporary sense, for Orthodoxy is the decision to continue to understand tradition in the traditional way, as objective truth and external authority. Pluralism arises when a movement initially conceived in opposition to a tradition seeks to reaffirm its links with that tradition within the framework of a non-traditional consciousness. It involves a revisionary translation of the tradition into new terms of reference. Jewish pluralism, as an argumentative strategy, consists in recategorizing issues that had hitherto been grounds for schism into one or other of the areas where the tradition had allowed for more than one interpretation. It involves seeing debates that had previously been central to the definition of Judaism as in fact marginal. To see how this happens, and why Orthodoxy cannot accede to it, let us consider one example of the pluralist case: the argument from argument.

HALAKHIC ARGUMENT, HALAKHIC DECISION The argument is this.²³; Reuven Kimmelman, “Judaism and Pluralism,” Modern Judaism, 7:2 (1987), 131–50; Jacob Petuchowski, “Plural Models within the Halakhah,” in Bulka (ed.), Dimensions of Orthodox Judaism, 149–61, and Walter Wurzburger, “Plural Models and the Authority of Halakhah,” ibid. 162–74; David Dishon, Tarbut Hamachloket Beyisrael (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1984); David Hartman, “Halakhah as a Ground for Creating a Shared Spiritual Language,” in his Joy and Responsibility (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Posner, 1978), 130–61. Liberal Judaism differs from Orthodoxy in its practices. To a greater or lesser extent it will permit what halakhah forbids. In the early pre-pluralist stage of its ideological development, this fact was explained by arguing that sections of the halakhah had become inapplicable to the present moment. The new dispensation was not seen as halakhic behaviour. Its legitimation lay elsewhere. Pluralism, however, seeks to re-traditionalize it as halakhic behaviour of a kind. It belongs to a halakhah which is answerable – and which, it is argued, was always answerable – to personal autonomy (Reform) or the ethics of the age (Conservative). Clearly, though, this is not halakhic behaviour as Orthodoxy understands the term. The conflict must be explained. But this is simple (so the pluralist contends) given what we know of the traditional pluralism of halakhic argument. The differences between liberal and Orthodox halakhah are exactly akin to those between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, or the other arguments of which the Talmud is full. These and those are the words of the living God. Halakhah itself is pluralist.

footnotes: ²³ On Jewish pluralism see Greenberg, Toward a Principled Pluralism

The argument itself is specious. It involves confusing halakhic argument with halakhic decision. The schools of Hillel and Shammai each interpret the words of the living God, but the law follows Hillel. One can, to be sure, discern a genuine difference of opinion throughout the rabbinic literature between realists and positivists, between those who see halakhic argument as converging on the truth and those who see it eventuating in a decision.²⁴, Chagigah 2:9, however, suggests that halakhic controversy arose between the two schools only because the disciples did not sufficiently attend on their masters. On this view, controversy is not intrinsic to the halakhic process but instead represents a failure in the transmission of tradition. The realist view – realist meant here in a Platonic sense, that halakhah corresponds to truth – is suggested by Nachmanides in his remarks to the effect that the spirit of God is always present among the judges of Israel (Commentary on Deut. 17:11, 19:19). However, Nachmanides’ way of putting it, that “the Holy One, blessed be he, assents to the verdict” of the human court, is consistent with positivism and the view that the binding power of halakhah is a matter not of truth but authority. One talmudic passage, Rosh Hashanah 24b–25b, adopts an explicitly positivist stance. The date of the new moon is determined by the decision of the court even if it is in error. See also the interesting distinction made by Rabbi Akiva Eger in Gilyon Hashas on Makkot 5a between situations where obligations are created by acts, and those where they are created by decisions of the court. See also below in the present chapter, on the case of the rebellious elder. For further discussion, from different perspectives, see Norman Lamm and Aaron Kirschenbaum, “Freedom and Constraint in the Jewish Judicial Process,” Cardozo Law Review, 1 (1979), 99–133; Yochanan Silman, “Hikba’uyot Halakhtiot Bein Nominalizm Verealizm: Lyunim Bephilosophiah Shel Hahalakhah,” Dinei Yisrael, 12 (1985), 249–66; H. Ben Menahem, “Is There Always One Uniquely Correct Answer to a Legal Question in the Talmud?” Jewish Law Annual, 6 (1986), 164–75; Bernard Jackson, “Jewish Law or Jewish Laws,” ibid., 8 (1989), 15–34. For the former, rejected opinions are false. For the latter, they may be true but non-normative. But for both, halakhic argument converges on a single authoritative ruling. Halakhic argument may be pluralist. Halakhic practice is not.

footnotes: ²⁴ The view that the schools of Hillel and Shammai both represented “the words of the living God” suggests positivism, namely, that both are true but that one must make a decision between them. Tosafot

There were, of course, divergences in practice. As early as the talmudic period, Jews in Palestine and Babylon had distinctive customs.²⁵ (Vienna, 1878). From these emerged the different Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions.²⁶ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). There were numerous minor local differences.²⁷ These flowed from the absence of a central supreme halakhic authority. “So long as the Great Sanhedrin was in existence,” writes Maimonides, “there were no controversies in Israel.... After the Great Sanhedrin ceased, disputes multiplied in Israel, one declaring “unclean” and giving a reason for his ruling, another declaring “clean” and giving a reason for his ruling.”²⁸ 1:4. In the post-Gaonic period, no single authority was regarded as having global jurisdiction.²⁹ Rabbinic decrees and enactments could have only local force. But the system retained its coherence through defined limits of legal procedure, argument, and decision. There was consensus on fundamental issues of substance, on what were the authoritative halakhic texts, methods of argumentation, and limits of judicial autonomy. A ruling could be adjudged simply wrong if it ignored agreed precedent.³⁰, Yoreh De’ah 242:31. See Entziklopediah Talmudit, ix. 333–9; Nachum Rabinovitch, Hadar Itamar (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1972), 1–10. Halakhic practice was not pluralist. Rather, it resembled a legal system in which certain domains were delegated to local legislatures. To call liberal norms that accord weight to personal autonomy or the ethics of the age “halakhah” is to equivocate between local variations in a single legal system and two different legal systems altogether.

footnotes: ²⁵ Joel Mueller, Chiluf Minhagim Bein Benei Bavel Livenei Eretz Yisrael ²⁶ H. J. Zimmels, Ashkenazim and Sephardim ²⁷ For examples from the early rabbinic period see Shabbat 130a; Pesachim 50b–51a, 55b–56a. ²⁸ Yad, Mamrim ²⁹ See Yad, Intro. ³⁰ Shulchan Arukh

Where then does the argument gain its plausibility? By the secularization of the idea of halakhah. Halakhah is law, binding on the Jewish people in its totality. But when religious law loses its coercive power, as happened to Jewish law during emancipation, it loses the institutional context that made its character as law self-evident. Traditional behaviour comes to seem expressive of less formal commitments: private ethical persuasion,³¹, 4:1 (1984), 47. For Borowitz, halakhah represents a “resource” for the modern Jew, not law. or historically endorsed habit,³², custom, growing through the experience of human beings and interpreted by them in response to particular conditions in human history”: Louis Jacobs, A Jewish Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973), 224. or even a code of social belonging.³³, 30 (1958), 90. This is his version of Mordecai Kaplan’s position that instead of Jewish law, we should speak of Jewish “folkways.” Each of these can be overridden as law cannot. Each admits of pluralism as law does not. Halakhah becomes “tradition,” which is to say the sacred past rather than the commanding present.³⁴ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). Halakhic pluralism is, in short, a symptom of the secularization of religious behaviour. This is why it is self-evidently plausible to modern consciousness and at the same time necessarily incompatible with Orthodoxy. For Orthodoxy is the refusal to transform Jewish law from the revealed constitution of the covenant into a self-defined code of personal autonomy or an evolving historical process.

footnotes: ³¹ Thus, the Reform theologian Eugene Borowitz writes, “I do not see how, even in principle, Jewish law can be imposed on such a Jewish self. Rather, with autonomy essential to selfhood, I avidly espouse a pluralism of thought and action stemming from Jewish commitment”: “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” Modern Judaism ³² “Yes, it is true, in a sense, that the whole of Torah is minhag ³³ Thus Jack J. Cohen, a Reconstructionist, calls halakhah the repository of “the mind and character of the Jewish people”: “Halakhah and the Life of Holiness,” Rabbinical Assembly Annual ³⁴ See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition

PLURALISM OR INCLUSIVISM? Pluralism, then, proposes a mode of Jewish unity acceptable to modern consciousness. But it is ipso facto unacceptable to Orthodoxy. It succeeds only if the terms of Orthodoxy are false. This is why the most persuasive theologies of pluralism – those of Emil Fackenheim and Irving Greenberg considered in the previous chapter – are so insistent that traditional faith is impossible in the post-Holocaust age. But pluralism fails within the terms it sets itself. For it sought to accommodate liberal and Orthodox Judaisms within the same universe of discourse. They were variant interpretations of the same covenantal truth. But Orthodoxy cannot be so accommodated. Only an Orthodoxy misconceived as an ultra-traditional liberalism can. Orthodoxy is defined in terms of truth and authority, not interpretation and option. This fact cannot be translated into pluralism.

We are left with the traditional alternative, inclusivism. But we are now faced with a critical problem. Inclusivism proposes a mode of Jewish unity acceptable to traditional consciousness. But this threatens to make it ipso facto unacceptable to liberalism. The reason is this. From the point of view of a liberal Jew, inclusivism has a benefit and a price. The benefit is that it allows Orthodoxy to relate to him or her in a spirit of kinship and shared fate. The price is that this happens through a deliberate and systematic conflict of interpretations.³⁵ (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975), 178–93; Hayahadut Vehatarbut Hachilonit (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uchad, 1981), 110–42; “Two Neo-Orthodox Responses to Secularization.” Reform Jews, for example, will see their willingness to drive on the Sabbath, eat non-kosher food, or appoint a woman cantor as part of a principled understanding of Judaism. Orthodox Jews, if they are inclusivist, will see such willingness as a culturally conditioned error. Inclusivism involves a refusal to accept the self-evaluation of those outside tradition. This is its strategic crux.

footnotes: ³⁵ The point has been made frequently by Eliezer Schweid in his writings on Kook. See, e.g., his Hayehudi Haboded Vehayahadut

Attaching no significance to liberal Jews’ description of their own actions and intentions allows Orthodoxy to include individuals within the halakhic community while excluding their ideologies. In so doing, it bypasses the conflict between communal unity and doctrinal integrity. It is, as we have seen, a device that allows enormous inclusivity. But it does so by devaluing the legitimacy of any interpretation of Judaism that lies outside the parameters of traditional faith. It is a strategy of which non-Orthodox Jews might understandably not wish to avail themselves. Explicitly or implicitly, they will feel that it assaults their authenticity. Reform Jews, defending their integrity, wish to be understood not as transgressing the law through excusable error, but as adhering to another conception of Jewish law, or if not law, then another conception of Judaism as ethics, or ethnicity or autonomy.

The Reform Jew seeks no less than a pluralist approach to Judaism, one that will concede the legitimacy of alternative interpretations of halakhah and the fundamentals of faith. But Judaism, as classically conceived, admits of pluralism in this sense only in respect of other faiths. This, then, generates the tragic paradox that Orthodoxy can only accede to the Reform Jew’s request at the cost of seeing Reform as another religion altogether. Some Orthodox authorities have indeed suggested just this. In response to the Reform rabbinate’s demand for official recognition in Israel, they have argued that it should be granted on the basis that Reform, like the Samaritans and Karaites, is sufficiently distinct from Judaism to constitute a separate religious community.³⁶, 21 (1986), 31–6. The same suggestion has been reported in the name of the former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Goren. Reform would then be recognized, like Christianity and Islam, as a religion explicitly independent of Judaism. This would formalize a total and probably irreparable schism. Pluralism, when translated into the categories of tradition, achieves a result directly opposite to that sought by the liberal Jew.

footnotes: ³⁶ J. David Bleich, “Parameters and Limits of Communal Unity from the Perspective of Jewish Law,” L’Eylah

This is what I meant when, in an early chapter, I noted that in the contemporary Jewish world the pursuit of unity is inherently divisive. Pluralism denies the self-definition of Orthodoxy. Inclusivism denies the self-definition of non-Orthodoxy. Were liberal Jews to accept Orthodoxy at its face value, they would be forced to abandon the terms of pluralism and argue that Orthodoxy is false. Were Orthodoxy to accept liberal Jews on their own terms, they would be forced to conclude that they lay outside the covenantal community. Inclusivist and pluralist conceptions of unity are incompatible. The one cannot absorb the other. We here come face to face with one of the most profound collisions between tradition and modernity.

The problem, to restate it, is that inclusivism assaults the self-respect of the liberal Jew. It rests on a distinction between liberal Jews and liberal Judaism. To legitimate the former it must delegitimate the latter. To include dissenting individuals it must exclude dissenting ideologies. Tradition can only interpret the covenantal community as a community of faith and practice. To include those who stand outside the boundaries of traditional faith and practice, it must see their stance as non-essential, the result of environmental influence and excusable error. What is essential is their desire to be counted in the community, to be identified as Jews, even on terms to which they do not explicitly subscribe. Inclusivism, in driving a wedge between the dissenting individual and his or her beliefs, deliberately marginalizes the central virtues of modernity: authenticity, integrity, the deep congruence be- tween the self and its expressions. Liberal Judaism asks Orthodoxy to respect its integrity. That is precisely what Orthodoxy, for the sake of Jewish unity, proposes not to do.

Is the problem insuperable? What is happening in this confrontation? Is it that Orthodoxy in fact believes that non-Orthodox Jews do not sincerely believe what they profess? Or is it that Orthodoxy does not recognize sincerity, authenticity, or integrity as values? It is, I contend, neither of these things. Instead we are caught in a conceptual impasse, the result of an intellectual revolution that threatens to render the values of tradition untranslatable into the language of modernity. To understand the problem in its proper perspective we must consider the changing ideas of self and society. We can then approach the question of integrity, or the dignity of dissent.

THE MODERN SELF In traditional societies, the individual is identified by his or her membership of a variety of social groups and by occupancy of a set of roles. In a stable and long-standing culture, these roles – of spouse, parent, child, occupation, social class, and so forth – carry with them established duties and responsibilities. The scope for individual choice, sometimes even with respect to marriage partner,³⁷ (New York: Plenum Press, 1985). is relatively circumscribed. As Michael Oakeshott has pointed out, in such traditional communities “the moral life does not spring from the consciousness of possible alternative ways of behaving.” Instead, “we acquire habits of conduct in the same way as we acquire our native language.”³⁸, 2:2 (1948), 69. The self is largely defined by society.

footnotes: ³⁷ See Egon Meyer, Love and Tradition ³⁸ Michael Oakeshott, “The Tower of Babel,” Cambridge Journal

By contrast, the individual in the contemporary urban setting typically occupies a series of roles that are experienced as not given but chosen. Nor are they definitive of personal identity. Sociologists have observed that modern identities are peculiarly “open-ended, transitory, liable to ongoing change.”³⁹, 74. As a result, “biography is...apprehended both as a migration through different social worlds and as the successive realization of a number of possible identities.”⁴⁰ Religious or ideological commitments too become forms of role of which we may choose several, successively or simultaneously. No longer universes we inhabit, they become positions we adopt. Life-worlds become lifestyles. The self is distanced from its social roles.

footnotes: ³⁹ Berger, Berger, and Kellner, The Homeless Mind ⁴⁰ Ibid., 73.

As the social world becomes pluralized and fragmented, self, not society, becomes the main bearer of reality. But the modern self, unlike its traditional counterpart, has no specific content. Little is given to it by way of birth, culture, or preordained role. In Erving Goffman’s sociology, for example, the self becomes a mere peg on which various roles are hung. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, the self has no “essence” and is, instead, the perpetual awareness of possibilities. “This democratised self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing.”⁴¹, 30. The self is “deinstitutionalized.”

footnotes: ⁴¹ MacIntyre, After Virtue

This has profound implications for ethics. Virtues are sometimes untranslatable from one social context to another. An example: the verse in Psalms “Gird your sword upon your side, O mighty one; clothe yourself with splendour and majesty” invokes a code of military distinction. It belongs to a period of warrior kings. By the time we reach the talmudic period, however, we find it understood by Rabbi Kahana to refer to words of Torah.⁴² The sword as a symbol of military honour had become incomprehensible in a rabbinic culture of quietism and scholarship. What was the weapon of a scholar? His words of Torah. The verse used a vocabulary of virtue that had, by the time of the Babylonian sages, to be translated into an altogether different social frame of reference.

footnotes: ⁴² Ps. 45:4; Shabbat 63a.

Or consider an example directly relevant to the transformation we are considering. In a scintillating essay, the sociologist Peter Berger discusses “the obsolescence of the concept of honour.”⁴³, II (1970), 339–47; repr. in Michael Sandel (ed.), Liberalism and its Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 149–58, and in Berger, Berger, and Kellner, The Homeless Mind, 78–89. The notion of honour, and the closely associated one of chivalry, belong in the main to stable and hierarchical societies in which the individual is defined by preordained roles. Honour has to do with the conduct owed to a person in respect of a position. The concept which has supplanted it, dignity, belongs to an era in which the individual self is seen as something apart from its various enactments. Dignity has to do with conduct owed to a person as such. “The concept of honour,” Berger writes, “implies that identity is essentially, or at least importantly, linked to institutional roles. The modern concept of dignity, by contrast, implies that identity is essentially independent of institutional roles.” The idea of honour is simply inapplicable to a world in which the language of ethics has become detached from the fulfilment of socially established roles.

footnotes: ⁴³ Peter Berger, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honour,” European Journal of Sociology

Alasdair MacIntyre has noted that it is this deinstitutionalized self that lies at the heart of contemporary moral philosophy. “It is in this capacity of the self to evade any necessary identification with any particular contingent state of affairs that some modern philosophers, both analytical and existentialist, have seen the essence of moral agency.” The self of modern moral theory stands apart from any particular tradition. “To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved...and to pass judgement on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is detached from all social particularity.”⁴⁴, 30. The weight given in contemporary moral philosophy to individual freedom, authenticity, and rights is thus the product of a particular social transformation and of that detraditionalized entity, the modern self.

footnotes: ⁴⁴ MacIntyre, After Virtue

THE TRADITIONAL JEWISH SELF This mode of discourse and consciousness collides with classic Jewish assumptions at several points. First there is the constitutive idea of Judaism itself, that Jews are born into obligations. Jewish identity commits what in modern moral thinking is seen as a fallacy: it fuses fact with value, “is” with “ought.” A Jew is a Jew by virtue of birth. But this fact carries with it certain duties and obligations. Membership of the Jewish community is thus simultaneously a biological and ethical proposition. Jews do not choose the commands by which they are bound. This assertion is untranslatable into Kantian or Sartrean ethics. The previous chapter mentioned Irving Greenberg’s suggestion that today Jews are bound only by a “voluntary covenant.” We now sense the deep conceptual tensions that lead to such an idea, radically at odds as it is with tradition. For the notion of an involuntary covenant conflicts with the characteristically modern view that only obligations that are voluntarily undertaken are ethically binding.

Secondly, within Judaism itself there are distinctions of obligation which follow from birth rather than choice. There is the special sanctity of the kohen, which precludes him, among other things, from marrying a divorcée. There are the distinctive roles of men and women in the religious life. There are the disabilities of the mamzer, the child born of an adulterous or incestuous relationship. These become moral cruxes in liberal Judaism precisely because they are not consequences of choice on the part of the person concerned.

Thirdly, the specificities of Jewish law conflict with what, on liberal assumptions, would be deemed to be matters of personal choice. The prohibitions against homosexuality or intermarriage, for example, seem to intrude into domains which are peculiarly personal. They become difficult to justify within the categories of modern secular ethics. Indeed, they concern areas of conduct to which, to the liberal mind, the concept of law as such is inapplicable. These too are issues on which some exponents of liberal Judaism have felt morally bound to part company with tradition in the name of autonomy.

Above all, the otherness of Jewish law as something given by God and interpreted by an authoritative rabbinic tradition runs counter to the fundamental thrust of modernity. This, as we have seen, has been central to the philosophical critique of religious ethics as heteronomous – legislated from outside the self – since Kant. Indeed, this proved to be the critical issue which divided Orthodoxy from all other modern constructions of Judaism: its insistence on the givenness of Torah and halakhah.

So modernity and Jewish tradition seem to conflict in their deepest assumptions about the self. Tradition postulates an objective order, differentiating in role if not in status between Jew and non-Jew, man and woman, that clashes with the contemporary premiss that the only significant roles are those we choose. It places religious-ethical authority outside the self, while modern ethical theory makes the self its own legislator. If the Jew of tradition lived in the free choice of whether or not to obey the law, the post-traditional Jew lives in the free choice of what law to obey. Not surprisingly, the most problematic of all traditional ideas for the modern Jew is that of Torah as revealed legislation, given at Mount Sinai and binding subsequent generations without their consent.

THE AUTONOMOUS SELF AND JUDAISM Perhaps the simplest way of indicating the revolution of consciousness involved is to note that authenticity, in the twentieth-century sense of genuinely doing that which is right in one’s own eyes, is the central existentialist virtue⁴⁵ (London: Pelican Books, 1973), 135–72. and the archetypal biblical vice.⁴⁶ The word “authentic” originally meant “genuine,” “authoritative,” or “justified.” Recently it has come to mean something like “that with which we genuinely identify.” The transition between the two is simple to trace. An authentic da Vinci is one which he himself painted, as opposed to a counterfeit, fake, or forged da Vinci. Authentic, in this sense, means really proceeding from its author. The transformation comes when we perceive ethics, or Judaism, as bearing the same relationship to the self as a painting to its painter, namely: a free creation, essentially unpredictable, whose authentication lies in its trueness to self.⁴⁷ and predicative adjectives; see his “Good and Evil,” Analysis, 17 (1956), 33–42. “Yellow” is a predicative adjective, for the sentence “That is a yellow bird” can be analysed into “That is a bird and it is yellow.” But the adjective “good” in the sentence “He is a good cricketer” cannot be analysed into “He is a cricketer and he is good.” “Good” in this sense is attributive. Bernard Williams calls an attributive adjective one that is “logically glued to the substantive it qualifies”: Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 54. One of the problems with the word “authentic” is whether it is predicative or attributive. Is the phrase “an authentic Jew” analysable into two distinctive and separate components – being a Jew and being, independently, authentic – or is “authentic” attributive? Is the meaning of authenticity determined by the meaning of Judaism? The issue addressed in the text is the slow transition from attributive to predicative authenticity, from an authenticity determined by objective criteria to one determined by trueness to self. This, as I argue, is part of a wider cultural process in which personal identity, and with it the key terms of ethics, shifts from determination by roles to free-standing selfhood. See Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 84–109.

footnotes: ⁴⁵ See John Macquarrie, Existentialism ⁴⁶ Deut. 12:8; Judg. 17:6, 21:25. ⁴⁷ The point can be put more philosophically. Peter Geach distinguishes between attributive

In the Bible, the supreme virtue is to do that which is right “in the eyes of God.” To do that which is right in one’s own eyes is the paradigm of lawlessness. Post-Kantian ethics reverses these values. Mere obedience is inauthentic. Moral agency means to be the author of one’s own behavioural code. From the perspective of the autonomous self, then, halakhic existence is inauthentic because it flees from making personal choice the centre of its universe. From the perspective of tradition, much of contemporary ethics is inauthentic precisely because it makes personal choice the measure of all things.

Certainly, neither art nor ethics nor liberal Judaism moves in unmediated freedom. But we face a Copernican revolution none the less. This is evident when we consider the work of the most distinguished contemporary liberal Jewish theologian, Eugene Borowitz.⁴⁸ (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968), 177–213, and Choices in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: Behrman House, 1983), 243–72. Borowitz wishes to give an account of “the autonomous Jewish self” that is at the same time close to tradition. Autonomy, he argues, “makes sense only in terms of the self’s actualization of God’s will since God is the source and standard of its own being.” Moreover, the contemporary Jewish self has a “direct, primary, ethnic form.” It is “structured by an utterly elemental participation in the Jewish historical experience of God.” The Jew is bound to a particular community, and this rules out extremes of individualism. Aiming, too, at a unified life, the Jew cannot value spontaneity over all else. “Form, habit, institution and structure have a necessary role to play.”

footnotes: ⁴⁸ Most of the quotations below are drawn from his most complete presentation thus far: Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self.” Some are drawn from his other presentations of the same subject: A New Jewish Theology in the Making

This is, by previous standards of liberal Judaism, an extremely traditionalist portrait. Nineteenth-century Reform was universalist and humanist, and valued ethics over ritual. By complete contrast, Borowitz declares that the need now is to “recapture a compelling particularism.” Reform’s “confidence in humankind and in western civilization” has “been shattered.” Religious discipline is needed to overcome liberal Judaism’s “drive to anarchy.” A highly traditional Jewish life could be incorporated within this philosophy. With one exception.

The liberal Jew is permitted to break with tradition when conscience so dictates. He is guided by precedent but “not to the point of dependency or passivity of will.” Borowitz’s traditionalism “does not rise to the point of validating law in the traditional sense, for personal autonomy remains the cornerstone of this piety.” It is, in short, tradition without halakhah. Halakhah, I argued, was Judaism’s equivalent of Strawson’s “social morality.” It shapes a people into a community of action. It is the domain in which universal norms take precedence over individual ideal. For Borowitz there is no such domain. Faced with a conflict between society and self, norm and conscience, the self must reign supreme.

Borowitz’s philosophy is a lucid example of how tradition is transformed when translated into the terms of the modern self. Tradition itself is turned from halakhah – community-creating law – into a catalogue of “resources one can draw on to meet one’s personal needs.” The autonomous self is not simply one motif of modern thought among many which can be added to Judaism as cosmetic ornamentation. Once introduced into the system, inevitably it moves to a place of controlling power, shaping all else to its contours. When the autonomous self rules, the values associated with it – integrity and authenticity – become fundamental. So the liberal Jew’s request of Orthodoxy, that it respect his or her integrity, is more than a matter of etiquette or even ethics. It is a fundamental issue of self-definition. The question we must now ask is: Is tradition itself capable of admitting such an idea, namely a respect for the integrity of those who refuse to obey halakhah out of principle?

INTEGRITY AND FUNCTION At first sight the answer must be an overwhelming No. Firstly, the idea is utterly destructive of halakhah. A system of law cannot admit into itself the systematic right to disengage from it. Secondly, the intellectual world of halakhah is at odds with the mode of consciousness in which integrity in this modern sense figures as a virtue. As law, halakhah presupposes a congruence between self and society. As divine law it presupposes an even deeper congruence between self and the source of the commands. “Authenticity” as the priority of the individual over social or divine imperative is, in this context, not integrity but rebellion. Halakhic man, writes Rabbi Soloveitchik, finds authenticity precisely in obeying the command. It “seems to him as though he discovered the norm in his innermost self, as though it were not just a commandment that had been imposed upon him but an existential law of his very being.”⁴⁹, 65. There will, surely, be moments when he faces a command to which he cannot assent. But then, like Abraham at the binding of Isaac, faith reigns. Man acknowledges his finitude in the presence of the Infinite. He experiences the “victory of defeat.” Man, says Rabbi Soloveitchik, “defeats himself by accepting norms that the intellect cannot assimilate into its normative system.”⁵⁰, 17:2 (1978), 37. This is an idea almost impossible to make compelling to a modern sensibility, but it cannot be edited out of the tradition.⁵¹ (New York: Free Press, 1985) is an attempt to do so. My argument is that the attempt must fail.

footnotes: ⁴⁹ Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man ⁵⁰ Id., “Majesty and Humility,” Tradition ⁵¹ David Hartman’s A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism

This is not to say that a benign attitude to liberal Judaism is impossible from the perspective of Orthodoxy. It is possible. But not in terms of integrity. Orthodoxy might, for example, draw a distinction between liberal Jewish theology and practice. Thus one observer has noted that “the bulk of American Jews regard Reform rabbis...as having a function which Orthodox and Conservative rabbis cannot and need not have as long as there are Reform rabbis, namely the sanctifying of life-cycle events which are halakhically invalid but which the community feels, albeit reluctantly, it must approve.” Intermarriage is a good example. No Judaism, halakhic or otherwise, can sanction marriages between Jews and non-Jews without threatening traditional Jewish continuity at its foundations. Such, however, is the rate of intermarriage in highly acculturated Jewish communities that exclusion of the outmarried can equally be perceived as a demographic disaster. In this conflict between de jure norm and de facto reality, “the Reform rabbi...serves the larger Jewish community by sanctifying non-halakhic but communally sanctioned behaviour.”⁵², 16 (Jan. 1970), 44.

footnotes: ⁵² Norman Mirsky, “Mixed Marriage and the Reform Rabbinate,” Midstream

In principle, Orthodoxy might concede that the existence of Reform has beneficial consequences even while dissenting completely from its ideology. This is no paradox. No clearer precedent exists than Maimonides’ attitude to Christianity. On the one hand, few Jewish thinkers have taken a more negative view of Christian theology than did Maimonides. On the other hand, few were more positive in their estimate of the consequences of Christianity. Because of it, “the messianic hope, the Torah, and the commandments have become familiar topics of conversation among the inhabitants of distant isles.”⁵³ 11 (uncensored eds.). See Lawrence Kaplan, “Maimonides and Christianity and Islam.” The analogy is invidious, but the point is clear. Historical or sociological function is one thing, respect for integrity another.

footnotes: ⁵³ Yad, Melakhim

INTEGRITY AND TRADITION But it is precisely this approach that is likely to scandalize the liberal Jew. He or she wishes to be respected for principles held, not consequences created. Liberal Jews wish to be understood at their own valuation, namely, as individuals who have rejected halakhic precedent as a matter of conscience and integrity, not de facto pragmatism. This is a reasonable request. What is more, tradition has room for it. First impressions notwithstanding, the rabbinic concept of integrity is more complex than it seems. It accords an ethical dignity to principled dissent. But it is just here that we can see most clearly why such an idea, if invoked, would have consequences opposite to those sought by the liberal Jew.

The idea of the integrity of principled dissent is not altogether absent from the halakhic literature. Jewish law, for example, distinguishes between a meshumad lete’avon and a meshumad lehakhis, one who habitually sins because of “appetite” or weakness of will, and one who does so out of rebellion. The latter is more serious than the former, for while the weak-willed breaks the law, the rebel places himself outside it altogether. A view is none the less expressed in the Talmud (though it was not taken up as law) that in one respect principled rebellion is preferable to self-indulgent transgression. Rava argues that the rebel is qualified to give testimony in a Jewish court of law.⁵⁴ The “sinner out of appetite” is suspected of being willing to perjure himself for gain. The “sinner out of principle” is not. Perhaps this is as near as Jewish law comes to recognizing an independent virtue of integrity even when expressed as rebellion.

footnotes: ⁵⁴ Sanhedrin 27a. The law, though, follows Abbaye, that a rebel is disqualified from testimony. To be sure, Abbaye may not disagree with the logic of Rava’s position, but he understands the verse “Do not accept the wicked as witness” (Ex. 23:1) more widely to include even those who are not wicked for gain.

Thus far halakhah. But aggadah, the realm of value and theory, presents a more subtle picture. The paradigm of principled defiance was the case of the “rebellious elder.” This was a qualified judge who dissented from a ruling of the supreme court and gave a contrary ruling in accordance with his own reading of the law. Biblical law prescribed capital punishment in such a case, albeit hedged with qualifications.⁵⁵ 3:4–7. Aggadically, however, how was such a rebel to be regarded? Was the supreme court the legislator of truth, so that a rebellious elder was guilty of obstinate error? Or was the issue the quite different one of authority? On this interpretation, the rebel may have been as justified in his ruling as the court, perhaps more so. He is punished not because he is wrong, but because he refuses to accept the authority of the majority verdict.

footnotes: ⁵⁵ Deut. 17:12; Yad, Mamrim

There were certainly those, such as Nachmanides, whose writings suggest the idea that providence attends the deliberations of a Jewish court, so that its verdicts are always true.⁵⁶ on Deut. 17:11; 19:19. See also Judah Halevi, Kuzari, 3:41. But there were those, Maimonides among them, who saw the law of the rebel as a matter of judicial authority alone. “Even though he [the rebellious elder] judges and they judge, he has received traditions and they have received traditions, none the less the Torah has ascribed honour [i.e. authority] to them. If the court wishes to forgo its honour and leave him be, it may not do so, so as not to multiply disputes in Israel.”⁵⁷ 3:4; see also Guide of the Perplexed, iii. 41. Nachmanides, too, seems to accept this idea. One is obliged to accept the ruling of a court even if one is convinced that it is wrong, because otherwise “disputes would multiply and the one Torah would become many Torahs.”⁵⁸ on Deut. 17:11.

footnotes: ⁵⁶ Commentary ⁵⁷ Yad, Mamrim ⁵⁸ Commentary

This opens the way to a potentially tragic dilemma for the individual judge. What if he is certain – on the basis of his received tradition itself – that the majority are wrong? On the one hand, the Torah has given authority to the majority consensus and commanded that it be obeyed.⁵⁹ On the other hand, Judaism does not allow the individual to transgress what he knows to be the law merely because others have commanded him to do so. There is no “agent for wrongdoing,” no defence that one was merely obeying orders. “When the words of the master conflict with the words of the pupil, whose words are to be obeyed?” the Talmud asks, rhetorically.⁶⁰ When the word of God conflicts with the word of man, the word of God must take precedence. All authority recognized by halakhah, including that of a king over his subjects⁶¹ 3:9. On this subject much has been written. See, e.g., Moshe Greenberg, “Rabbinic Reflections on Defying Illegal Orders: Amasa, Abner and Joab,” in Kellner (ed.), Contemporary Jewish Ethics, 211–20. and a parent over his child,⁶², 6:12. is qualified by this: that it does not take precedence over the authority of the divine word. Here then is a judge who believes the divine word indicates one course of action, while the court believes it indicates another. How shall he act?

footnotes: ⁵⁹ Deut. 17:11. ⁶⁰ Kiddushin 42b. ⁶¹ Yad, Melakhim ⁶² Yad, Mamrim

The dilemma provides the rabbinic literature with some of its most haunting scenes of moral conflict. Let me give two examples. When “testimonies” were being taken on rabbinic traditions, Akavia ben Mehalalel found himself in disagreement with the majority of his colleagues on four issues. The Mishnah reports,⁶³ “They said to him: Akavia, withdraw what you have been saying on these four things and we will make you av beit din, father of the court. He said to them: It is better for me to be called a fool all my days than that I should become, even for an hour, a wicked man in the sight of God. And let not men say that he withdrew his opinions for the sake of achieving power.” The Mishnah concludes, “They excommunicated him and he died while under excommunication, and the court stoned his coffin.” A deathbed scene is recorded between Akavia and his son. “In the hour of his death, he said to his son: Retract from the four opinions I used to declare. His son said to him: Why then did you not retract? He replied: I heard them from the mouth of the many and they heard them from the mouth of the many. I stood firm by my tradition, and they held firm by theirs. But you have heard [my views] from the mouth of a single individual and [their views] from the mouth of the many. It is better to leave the opinion of a single individual and hold by the opinion of the many.”

footnotes: ⁶³ Mish. Eduyot 5:6–7.

The Mishnah finishes with Akavia insisting to the end on individual integrity. “His son said to him: Father, commend me to your colleagues. He replied: I will not commend you. His son said: Have you found some fault in me? He replied: No. But your own deeds will bring you close [to them] or cause you to be far [from them].” We are left in no doubt as to the moral heroism of Akavia’s stand. The Mishnah itself records the tribute that “the Temple Court never closed before anyone in Israel equal to Akavia ben Mehalalel in wisdom and the fear of sin.” The logic of his position, too, is clear. Giving testimony, he must report the facts as he remembers them. His colleagues remember them otherwise, but he cannot withhold the truth as he sees it. Here, then, is one instance of the integrity of principled dissent.

The other concerns one of the most famous passages in the entire rabbinic literature, the argument between Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and the sages on the ritual cleanliness of a broken and reconstituted oven. Rabbi Eliezer declared it clean; the sages ruled against him. He “brought all the proofs in the world” for his view but none was accepted. After invoking several miracles, he finally appealed to Heaven itself, “whereupon a Heavenly Voice was heard saying: Why do you dispute with Rabbi Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the halakhah agrees with him?” This proof too was rejected, on the grounds that “It [the Torah] is not in heaven.” Once the Torah has been given, its interpretation depends not on revelation but on the majority vote. Rabbi Eliezer was then excommunicated.

Attention is often given to the continuation of the passage, in which the Talmud celebrates the principle of rabbinic authority. Rabbi Nathan meets the prophet Elijah, who reports to him the reaction of Heaven to its defeat by the sages. “The Holy One, blessed be he...laughed [with joy], saying: my sons have defeated me, my sons have defeated me.” But there is a further sequel, describing what happened when Rabbi Eliezer was excommunicated:

He [Rabbi Eliezer] tore his clothes, removed his shoes, and sat on the earth. Tears streamed from his eyes. The world was then smitten: a third of the olive crop, a third of the wheat, and a third of the barley crop.... A tanna [sage] taught: Great was the calamity that befell that day, for everything on which Rabbi Eliezer cast his eyes was burned up. Rabban Gamliel too was travelling in a ship when a great wave arose to drown him. “It appears to me,” he said, “that this can only be on account of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus.” He arose and said, “Master of the Universe, you know full well that I have not acted for my honour, nor for the honour of my father’s house, but for your honour, so that disputes should not multiply in Israel.” The storm subsided.

The passage ends on a tragic note. Rabbi Eliezer prays to God about the incident. Rabban Gamliel dies. Rabbi Eliezer’s wife, who was the sister of Rabban Gamliel, comments: “All gates [of prayer] may be locked, except the gates of wounded feelings.”

The aggadic conflict is clear. Heaven appears, first on the side of Rabbi Eliezer, then on the side of the majority, and finally again on the side of the excommunicated Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Eliezer is one of the great tragic heroes of the rabbinic literature. Rabban Jochanan ben Zakkai, his teacher, declared that if all the sages of Israel were in one scale of the balance and Rabbi Eliezer in the other, he would outweigh them all.⁶⁴ When he died, Rabbi Akiva declared, “You have left the whole generation orphaned.”⁶⁵ A tradition maintained that “when Rabbi Eliezer died, the scroll of Torah was hidden away.”⁶⁶ Neither here nor elsewhere are we left in any doubt that his integrity was awe-inspiring. Heaven takes his side.⁶⁷ The excommunication is a tragedy. But it is an inevitable tragedy. The assertion of authority is necessary “so that disputes should not multiply in Israel.”

footnotes: ⁶⁴ Mish. Avot 2:8. ⁶⁵ Y. Shabbat 2:6. ⁶⁶ Sotah 49b. ⁶⁷ See also Shabbat 130a for another interesting example.

THE PARADOX OF INTEGRITY None of these sources endorses the idea of an autonomous “conscience.”⁶⁸ (New York: Ktav, 1981), 313–28. Akavia, Rabbi Eliezer, and the rebellious elder do not act on the basis of moral intuition. They act on the basis of the tradition as they received or interpreted it. But it is the structure of the conflict that concerns us. At an aggadic level, their principled dissent is accorded an unmistakable ethical dignity. We admire their courage in defence of conviction. The literature invites us to. At the same time we recognize that there is no alternative to their exclusion from the community if halakhic authority is to remain. The conflict is not between right and wrong but between two kinds of right: individual and collective. Akavia and Rabbi Eliezer act rightly from the point of view of individual ideal. Their opponents act rightly from the point of view of social morality. There is no ethical resolution to this conflict. But there is a practical one. They are excommunicated. Halakhah is the constitution of a community, not a code of individual perfection. In a conflict between the integrity of the individual and the integrity of the legal system, the latter must win, even if Heaven aligns itself with the former.

footnotes: ⁶⁸ Michael Wyschogrod has explored the issue of conscience as such in his “Judaism and Conscience,” in Asher Finkel and Lawrence Frizzel (eds.), Standing before God

The conclusion to which we are driven is this. The liberal Jew wishes Orthodoxy to respect the integrity of his abandonment of tradition. We have seen that integrity in the sense in which he uses the word – as the affirmation of the autonomous self – cannot be admitted as a virtue within the halakhic system. Here we are faced with an irresolvable conflict between traditional and modern consciousness. But tradition itself recognized another form of individual integrity, which arose when an individual read the tradition differently from the majority of his peers. This might have served as a model for a contemporary version of the dignity of dissent. But it is just this precedent that warns us of the consequences. Along with the dignity of dissent comes exclusion from the community. Dissent threatens halakhic authority humanly, as the autonomous self does conceptually. The liberal Jew associates integrity with inclusion in the covenantal community. Tradition associates it with exclusion from that same community. Were Orthodoxy to accede to the liberal Jew’s request, the consequences would be the reverse of what was sought.

Historically, this was in fact the case. Inclusivism was adopted by those halakhic authorities who were least inclined to take Reform or secular Judaisms at their face value. There were other Orthodox thinkers who were far more sympathetic to the Enlightenment culture out of which Reform arose. They understood Reform in its intellectual context. They took it seriously, judging it by its own standards of integrity. It was they who abjured inclusivism and sought instead to brand Reform as heresy and exclude it altogether.

Samson Raphael Hirsch took a positive view of emancipation and secular culture. He was educated at a secular high school and went to university. In his student days at the University of Bonn he had been a close friend of Abraham Geiger, the future Reform leader. Initially they had formed a preaching society together.⁶⁹, 116–24; Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform, 61–5. Hirsch none the less became the most zealous and unyielding critic of Reform in nineteenth-century Jewry. He was the leading spirit of Orthodox secession, the refusal to participate with Reform representatives in joint communal organizations, arguing that “the enforced unity of the community...is nothing but an empty, meaningless form.”⁷⁰, 202.

footnotes: ⁶⁹ Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context ⁷⁰ Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context

Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes (1805–55), an outstanding Orthodox rabbinic scholar, was deeply sympathetic to the Enlightenment. He was one of the few traditionalist rabbis of his day to obtain a university doctorate,⁷¹, v. 327. and he was in close contact with other Enlightenment enthusiasts like Nachman Krochmal and Rabbi Solomon Judah Rapoport. But in his Minchat Kenaot (1849), a response to the radical Reform conferences of the 1840s, he made the most extreme exclusivist proposal of the nineteenth century. He argued that Reform Jews, or at least their leaders, be formally declared total gentiles like the Samaritans. It should be forbidden to marry them, mix socially with them, or mourn them.⁷² (2 vols.; Jerusalem: Divrei Hachomim, 1958), 975–1031.

footnotes: ⁷¹ See Encyclopaedia Judaica ⁷² Z. H. Chajes, Kol Sifrei Maharatz Chayes

Hirsch and Chajes were men who understood Reform through its own categories. They had had the same exposure to the intellectual currents of their day as had the radical Reformers, Geiger and Holdheim. As a result they were far less inclined to be inclusive than the more traditional rabbinate. This, then, is the paradox of the Orthodox-Reform relationship. Reform, committed to pluralism, seeks Orthodox legitimation of its own principled integrity. But if this point of view were accepted by Orthodoxy it would lead to exclusivism and schism. Those like Hirsch and Chajes who were most able to see it as it saw itself were the most inclined to sever all relations with it. The alternative is Orthodox delegitimation of Reform, which assaults Reform sensitivities but at the same time allows Reform Jews as individuals to be included within the halakhic community.

Pluralism conceives Jewish unity in terms of modern consciousness. Inclusivism conceives it in terms of traditional consciousness. The two, as we have seen, collide at the most fundamental conceptual level. Statements about the self, society, authority, autonomy, halakhah, integrity, and dissent that are made in the one mode cannot be translated into the other without dramatic reversals of meaning. The point made in the first chapter is here disclosed in its full and tragic depth: contemporary Jews are divided by a common language. Inclusivism cannot embrace the terms of liberal Judaism. Pluralism cannot incorporate Orthodoxy.

It is here that philosophical and sociological analysis reaches its limit. To have defined the problem is not to have solved it. Nor is it to have rendered it insoluble. It is, instead, to show that neither the traditional nor the modern approaches can achieve a complete solution. Each leaves a remainder unaccounted for. Pluralism cannot fully confront the language of tradition: objective truth and halakhic authority. Inclusivism cannot confront on its own terms the autonomous self. Each renders part of the problem theoretically and systematically invisible. The aim of analysis is to restore the remainders to visibility.

Do we then face tragedy? If not a schism, then the fated mutual incomprehensibility of tradition and modernity, Orthodoxy and liberal Judaism? Can there be conversation across this conceptual abyss? Or coexistence? Or convergence? Are the two versions of unity, the inclusivist and the pluralist, destined to divide the Jewish people?