An Agenda of Future Jewish Thought

The last chapter suggested a pessimistic conclusion: that Orthodoxy and modernity are fundamentally incompatible. Orthodoxy is predicated on revelation and tradition: on the power of the past to command. By contrast, writes Edward Shils, “The time through which we have just lived has been one in which what was inherited from the past was thought of as an irksome burden to be escaped from as soon as possible.”¹, London: Faber and Faber, 1981, 2.

footnotes: ¹ Edward Shils, Tradition

The whole thrust of post-Enlightenment thought has been hostile to religious belief in general, classic Jewish values in particular.², Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987. Few of the concepts in which the Jewish tradition is constituted can be translated into the terminology of contemporary culture. Halakhah – the idea of right conduct as expressed in law – cannot be transposed into the language of autonomy – the idea of right conduct as expressed in personal choice. The idea that there are significant roles into which we are born – differentiating between Jew and non-Jew, for example, or between men and women – runs contrary to the modern idea that the only significant roles are those which we choose. The very concept of covenant, and with it the idea of the singular destiny of a chosen people, runs counter to the Kantian idea that ethics is essentially universal, a matter of rules that, if they apply at all, apply to all.

footnotes: ² See, for example, Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law

So the conflicts of consciousness between Jewish tradition and secular modernity are many and deep. The conclusion seems inevitable. There is and can be no synthesis between Judaism and modernity. There is instead an either/or choice. Either Judaism or modernity but not both. Therefore the project of modern Orthodoxy is destined to failure.

The analysis is true, but the conclusion is false. The programmes of Samson Raphael Hirsch, Rav Kook, Rav Soloveitchik and others are as imperative as ever, perhaps more so. Let us summarise those programmes. Essentially they were four-fold. First there was the critical dialogue between Judaism and contemporary secular culture, as expressed in Hirsch’s maxim of Torah im Derekh Eretz or Yeshiva University’s Torah u-Mada, “Torah and science.” Second was the reconstruction of Judaism as the ethic of a nation in its own land, the project of religious Zionism. Third was the affirmation of knesset Yisrael, the congregation of Israel, as an indivisible entity. This led figures like R. Seligmann Baer Bamberger and R. Marcus Horowitz to oppose Orthodox secession from the general Jewish community in Frankfurt and R. Isaac Reines, founder of Mizrachi, to oppose a similar secession from the secular Zionist movement. Implicit here was the assumption that an ongoing dialogue must be maintained between Orthodox Jews and others for the sake of the Jewish people as a whole. Fourth was the Hirschian emphasis on what was traditionally known as kiddush ha-Shem, the idea of the universal Jewish ethical example. Judaism might be the religion of a particular people, but it carries a wider responsibility. The Jewish people is to serve as an inspiration and model to humanity as a whole.

These values are currently in eclipse. This fact tells us about the mood of the contemporary Jewish world. But it tells us little about whether that mood is justified.

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES It is not. Consider the four programmes in turn. The first was the dialogue between Judaism and secular culture. Recent figures suggest that as many as ninety percent of young American Jews attend college. Throughout the Jewish world the present generation of Jews is arguably the most secularly educated of all time. The confrontation between Judaism and the contemporary intellectual environment might have been, in Saadia Gaon’s and Maimonides’ time, imperative for those few only who had ventured into the foreign fields of philosophy and had become disorientated and lost. Today it is applicable to the overwhelming majority of Jews, whose exposure to secular culture is a daily phenomenon, through the media, literature and the arts, and whose knowledge of the classic texts of the Jewish tradition is, by contrast, meagre and sporadic.

Torah im Derekh Eretz in the late twentieth century may be a more critical undertaking than it was a hundred and fifty years ago when Hirsch first proposed it. There may be fewer points of contact and less likelihood of synthesis. In the process Judaism may have less to learn, and by implication, more to teach. But the imperative is all the more urgent, to engage the taken-for-granted assumptions of contemporary scholarship, politics and ethics in critical conversation with the values of Torah. To abandon this undertaking is to imply that Judaism does indeed have nothing of consequence to say about the ways in which contemporary society understands and organises its world. This is not so much pessimism as a lack of faith in the power and relevance of Torah to all environments and cultures.

The second programme was religious Zionism. The state of Israel has been through difficult times since the Yom Kippur War. The continuing hostility of the Arab states, the internal problem of the Palestinians, the intifada, and Israel’s international isolation have shaken two of the deepest held assumptions of secular Zionism: that the existence of Israel would end antisemitism – which it saw as a phenomenon of the diaspora – and would lead to the “normalisation” of “the Jewish condition.” What is more, socialism, the secular religion of Israel’s early statehood, has been a less than convincing ideology in the last decade. Shelilat hagolah, “negation of the diaspora,” another premiss on which secular Zionism was built, has also become increasingly untenable. For the diaspora has persisted and has proved to be the source of Israel’s most unconditional support.

There has, in short, been a vacuum in secular Zionist thought as to the distinctive character of a Jewish state and its relationship with the diaspora specifically and international opinion generally. This calls out for a fresh statement of religious Zionism. That religious groups can flourish in Israeli society as a sub-section of the population has been established. That religious thought can yield a society-wide vision of justice, righteousness and compassion on the model of the Book of Deuteronomy has not yet been established. To abandon the project of religious Zionism as the attempt, albeit tentatively, to shape a messianic order would be a dereliction of Jewish destiny in the face of a merely temporary demoralisation.

The third concern of modern Orthodoxy was the idea of Jewish peoplehood as something that ultimately transcended ideological schisms. Internally, in the twentieth century, Jews have been deeply divided, between Orthodoxy and Reform, religious and secular, and between those who chose to live in Israel and those who chose to remain in the golah. Externally, though, Jews have been tragically conscious that hostility makes no such distinctions. The Final Solution took no account of the religious, political or cultural affiliations of Jews. More recently, anti-Zionism has proved as undiscriminating as antisemitism.

The Jewish fate, recent history has suggested, is indivisible. Jews have sensed the immense power of what R. Soloveitchik called the brit goral, the covenant of shared history. The inner and outer realities of Jewish peoplehood have been sharply discrepant, out of step with one another. Inwardly, ideological and spiritual divisions have deepened. Only external crisis has had the power, momentarily, to unite Jews into a community of shared feeling and purpose. Jewish unity has perhaps never before seemed simultaneously so desirable and so inaccessible. Recovering the substantive reality of knesset Yisrael, the covenantal congregation, is another transcending imperative of the present.

The fourth element of the programme, Samson Raphael Hirsch’s idea of Judaism as a universal ethical example, is no less relevant to the present. Hirsch was surely correct in his understanding of the role of Judaism in an open secular society. The Jewish destiny, he argued, is neither particularist nor universalist but a complex interaction of both. To be a Jew in a predominantly non-Jewish environment is to be partially integrated and partially segregated. It means living by a set of values, some of which are common to humanity as a whole, some of which are specific to Jews. This is not a comfortable or easily negotiated stance. It is not surprising that it has been described by its critics as “ambivalent” or “schizophrenic.”

It is, in fact, neither of these things but the classic challenge of Jewish existence. On the one hand Judaism speaks of the Torah as a private covenant with the Jewish people: “He has revealed His word to Jacob, His laws and decrees to Israel. He has done this for no other nation.”³ On the other hand, it projects the values of Torah against the backdrop of mankind. “Observe them carefully,” says Moses about the commandments, “for this is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations. They will hear all these rules and say: This great nation is surely a wise and understanding people.”⁴ A Jewish perspective is both inward and outward, concerned to maintain a critical distance from other cultures while at the same time engaging their attention and ultimately admiration. To be a Jew is to be a witness to the world of the presence of God.

footnotes: ³ Psalms 147: 19–20. ⁴ Deuteronomy 4:6.

It is a difficult challenge, and there are two quite different ways of abdicating from it. One is assimilation: the way of total integration. The other is withdrawal from society: the way of total segregation. These are opposite but not equal alternatives. Assimilation leads to Jewish extinction. Withdrawal may be a mode of Jewish survival. But the fact that segregation is infinitely preferable to assimilation does not thereby entail that it is an ideal. It is not. For Jews are summoned to something altogether more vast than mere survival. They are called to play a specific part in the development of human civilisation as a whole. That universal vision was never wholly absent from the Jewish imagination, though there were some ages in which it was less relevant than others.

It is extraordinarily relevant today. Western societies generally have moved from monolithic to pluralist cultures. The Jewish voice on ethical issues is sought and given an attentive hearing. The state of Israel is looked to as a model of democracy and civil liberties in the Middle East. That it is sometimes judged by friends and critics alike by a different standard from that applied to its neighbours is a phenomenon that should be seen for what it is: an implicit ethical compliment. Jews today are faced with possibilities for kiddush ha-Shem of which Hirsch, a century and a half ago, could only dream. That this ideal should be treated with scepticism, above all in Orthodox circles, is not only religiously tragic. It is in the long term unwise.

For if Judaism, either in Israel or the diaspora, fails to win the admiration of observers, it will fail ultimately to win the emulation of Jews themselves. Jewish survival, that miraculous succession of defiances of probability, depends on more than the pursuit of survival as an end in itself. It depended, classically, on the pursuit of a vision of a holy people whose fidelity would one day lead the world to God. However difficult that vision is to sustain in a post-Holocaust world, it must be attempted, for it is essential to Jewish self-definition.

ADJECTIVES AND IDEOLOGY So the mood of pessimism which has settled over Orthodoxy in the last two decades is, from any wider perspective, untenable. The essential hopes of Samson Raphael Hirsch and Rav Kook have been realised. It has proved possible to engage in advanced secular study, participate in the shaping of a plural society and achieve civic prominence while remaining faithful to Jewish teachings.

The state of Israel exists. The general secular environment is more self-questioning, less abrasive, more open to tradition than at any time since the birth of Enlightenment. Jews today stand at the threshold of religious possibilities that were, a century ago, improbable. The time is opportune, therefore, for a re-engagement of Orthodoxy with the problems of modernity.

But on what basis is it to proceed? Along the lines of Hirsch or R. Kook or R. Soloveitchik? Or along some new intellectual-spiritual axis altogether? We would argue that these are the wrong answers and the wrong way of understanding the question. The burden of our case in this chapter is that Jewish thought generally, Orthodox thought specifically, has been limited and distorted by being allocated into adjectives and ideologies. A certain kind of thought has been labelled “modern” Orthodoxy. Recently the preferred term has been “centrist” Orthodoxy.⁵ 22:3 (Fall 1986), 1–12. Evidently these terms answer to a perception, or they would not have been coined. But they mislead. Adjectives of ideology have no place in the ongoing life of Torah.

footnotes: ⁵ Norman Lamm, “Some Comments on Centrist Orthodoxy,” Tradition

The labels “centrist” and “modern,” along with their counterparts, “right-wing,” “left-wing” and “traditionalist” Orthodoxy, misconceive halakhah and aggadah, Jewish law and thought, and their application to changing circumstance. They make it all too easy for certain positions to be delegitimated. A sociologist may identify different groupings within Orthodoxy and may label and categorise them into movements, denominations and tendencies. But there is a vast difference between the detached observation of the sociologist and the internal reasoning that takes place within Judaism itself. And here these labels have no place.

Traditionally Judaism knew of sharp differences of style, custom and intellectual orientation. There were Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Chassidim and Mitnagdim, mystics and rationalists. There were fierce arguments within Volozhyn yeshivah in the nineteenth century, for example, over whether pilpul or peshat, intellectual ingenuity or fathoming the plain sense, was the proper method with which to approach the talmudic text. There were equally fierce arguments within the Lithuanian yeshivot as to whether mussar, the discipline of ethics, was a proper part of the curriculum. A living tradition contains such divergences and arguments.⁶, London: Duckworth, 1981, 206–207.

footnotes: ⁶ See the fascinating remarks by Alasdair MacIntyre on the relationship between tradition and argument in his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

What tradition did not know was the projection of these arguments into ideologies and movements with separate organisational bases and no strong lines of communication between them. Instead the question that confronted the Jew was: what does Torah require of me in this time and place? The question was answerable by reference to the texts and interpretations of tradition. The answer might be influenced by a particular orientation, or shittah. But it was not to be determined in advance by an ideological position. The importation of adjectives and ideologies into Orthodoxy is a symptom of the breakdown, socially, of the structures of community and intellectually, of the tradition of argument which is the dialogue between Torah and its application to a given age.

IS ORTHODOXY MODERN? Consider the two adjectives in turn. In what sense can there be a “modern” Orthodoxy? First, Orthodoxy can be responsive to its time. A modern Orthodoxy in this sense would be one which bore the signs of its specific place in history. But in this sense all varieties of contemporary Orthodoxy, from the most avowedly modernist to the most uncompromisingly “traditional,” are modern. We have argued that R. Sofer’s rejection of modern social processes was as much a considered response to modernity as Samson Raphael Hirsch’s acceptance of them. Descriptively, all Orthodoxies are modern.

Evaluatively they are not. For quite clearly, as we have seen, there were thinkers like Hirsch and R. Kook who were enthusiastic about the possibilities of modernity while R. Sofer saw it as a threat to tradition. In this second sense Hirsch and Kook were “modernists.” But neither of them was ideologically so. Hirsch was clear about the dangers as well as the challenges of emancipation. R. Kook believed that the upheavals through which he lived were part of the messianic process. But he had specific expectations about the return of secularists to tradition; and those expectations are open to refutation. In short, neither embraced modernity a priori and unconditionally. Modernism, for them, was not an ideology and in this sense they were not exponents of a “modern” Orthodoxy.

There is a third sense of the word. For more recently there have been thinkers who have deliberately sought to integrate “modern consciousness” within the tradition in a more radical way than any of the figures we have thus far studied.⁷, edited by Jacob Neusner, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 147–164; David Singer, “The New Orthodox Theology,” Modern Judaism (forthcoming). They have argued that at least some values embedded in contemporary secular society – liberalism, personal autonomy, democracy, role equality between the sexes and pluralism – can be accommodated within halakhic Judaism. They have sought a larger role for the individual as against the community, for halakhic change as against stasis, and for the dignity of the self as against structures of authority.

footnotes: ⁷ See Charles Liebman, “Religion and the Chaos of Modernity,” in Take Judaism, for Example

Emanuel Rackman (b. 1910), for example, has called for a “teleological” approach to halakhah which would allow for development within Jewish law according to a broad sense of its underlying purposes rather than a narrow sense of precedent.⁸, Tel Aviv: Greenfield (undated). Eliezer Berkovits (b. 1908), similarly, has argued the case for recovering the flexibility of Jewish law understood as “the Word intended for this hour, for this generation.”⁹ Faith, New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1976; Not in Heaven, New York: Ktav, 1983. More radically, David Hartman (b. 1931) has sketched a complete philosophy of Judaism “in terms of a covenantal anthropology that encourages human initiative and freedom and that is predicated on belief in human adequacy.”¹⁰, New York: Free Press, 1985. More radically still, Irving Greenberg (b. 1933) has outlined a post-Holocaust Judaism in which the very terms of the covenant have been rendered “voluntary.” Greenberg speaks of a “third era” in Jewish history, marked by religious pluralism and “holy secularity.”¹¹ (1980), The Third Great Cycle in Jewish History (1981) and Voluntary Covenant (1982). These thinkers are modern in a thoroughgoing sense. For they believe that Judaism is itself transformed in its encounter with modernity. To be sure, they seek to stay within the rabbinic tradition. But they believe that the tradition itself contains resources for change, and that it has in fact changed with each confrontation with a new social and intellectual order. But it is precisely here that the question arises: can Orthodoxy be modern in this sense and still be Orthodoxy?

footnotes: ⁸ Emanuel Rackman, One Man’s Judaism ⁹ See Eliezer Berkovits, Crisis and ¹⁰ David Hartman, A Living Covenant ¹¹ Irving Greenberg’s analysis is contained in three papers published by the National Jewish Resource Center: On the Third Era in Jewish History

For each of these philosophies stresses one side of the rabbinic tradition at the expense of another. There are tensions in Judaism between legal precedent and underlying purpose, halakhah and personal autonomy, religious authority and individual freedom. Indeed some positions – like Greenberg’s denominational pluralism – almost certainly lie outside tradition altogether. Admittedly, Rackman, Berkovits and Hartman are aware of contrary tendencies in Judaism. Hartman explicitly describes his approach to rabbinic texts as “selective.” His concern, he writes, is “to locate specific tendencies or possibilities within the rabbinic tradition that could be supportive of a covenantal religious anthropology capable of participating adequately in the challenges of modernity.”¹², 13. But is a selective reading of tradition still tradition? Is it not precisely an attempt to tailor tradition to a set of a priori ideological assumptions, rather than to let it speak with its own authoritative voice?

footnotes: ¹² A Living Covenant

IS ORTHODOXY CENTRIST? So “modern” as an adjective describing Orthodoxy is redundant in the first sense, misleading in the second and contestable in the third. The same doubts apply to the adjective “centrist.” What is any kind of Orthodoxy to be centrist between? Between Orthodoxy and heterodoxy or halakhic and non-halakhic Judaisms there is no middle ground within tradition. Centrism, like the words right- and left-wing, is a term transferred to Judaism from the vocabulary of politics. Roger Scruton neatly defines the view espoused by centrists as “the supposed political position somewhere between the left and right, where political views are either sufficiently indeterminate, or sufficiently imbued with the spirit of compromise, to be thought acceptable to as large a body of citizens as would be capable of accepting anything.”¹³, London: Pan, 1983, 57. The use of such an adjective in a Jewish context is a significant symptom of the politicisation of religious life: a phenomenon which affects all sectors of contemporary Judaism and which deserves serious consideration in its own right. But even if its legitimacy is granted the same problems apply to religious as to political centrism: confrontational politics tend to favour clear alternatives over the vague attempt to “capture the middle ground.”

footnotes: ¹³ Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought

There is, to be sure, something more substantive to the idea of “centrism” within Orthodoxy. Maimonides spoke of the “middle way” between extremes as the ideal conduct of the chakham or sage.¹⁴, ch. 4; M.T. Deot 1. He was speaking of ethical character rather than communal policy, but there are suggestions in his work that the same applies here too: a balance must be struck whenever there is a conflict between two or more Jewish values. Many of the issues that have created controversy in Orthodoxy in the last two centuries have been of this kind. How was one to choose between social integration and segregation, or Torah and secular study, or concern for the position of women as against concern for the stability of traditional roles and institutions? If both sides of the equation are values within Judaism, as we would argue that they are, then a concern for the tradition as a whole dictates a careful balance between them.

footnotes: ¹⁴ Maimonides, Eight Chapters

But that balance cannot be specified in advance. Consider one example: the strange fate of Hirsch’s idea of Torah im Derekh Eretz. Samson Raphael Hirsch and R. Moses Sofer, as we saw, held diametrically opposed views on the relationship between Torah and secular culture. Yet within a generation the gap between Frankfurt and Pressburg was dramatically reduced. Hirsch’s son-in-law and successor, R. Solomon Breuer (1850–1926), had been a student of R. Moses Sofer’s son and successor, Abraham. Breuer, though he had himself studied at German universities, was a fierce traditionalist. He founded the Association of Orthodox Rabbis in Germany which excluded all rabbis who maintained contact with Reform-dominated communal organisations. He was a prime mover of Agudat Yisrael, which brought together East and West European Orthodoxy in opposition to the Zionist movement and which likewise sought to exclude non-secessionist rabbis.

The principle of Torah im Derekh Eretz could not long survive. If Orthodox integrity demanded a principled withdrawal from the general Jewish community, the same argument applied with no less force to involvement in secular culture. In 1890, two years after succeeding Hirsch as the rabbi of Frankfurt, Breuer founded a yeshivah on the East European model. A major revision of Hirsch’s programme was under way. Hirsch’s daughter, Mrs. Solomon Breuer, wrote to R. Moses Sofer’s grandson, Shimon, that Hirsch had never intended Torah im Derekh Eretz as a universal norm.¹⁵ 2:1 (February 1982), 23–52. It was specifically limited to his own community and to the circumstances prevailing at the time. Thus began a process of reinterpretation which has continued ever since. Openness to secular culture was, on this view, a hora’at sha’ah, a temporary concession not a universal rule. It had been intended to combat the inroads of the Reform movement, or to comply with pressure from the state that all children receive a general education, or as a means to a professional or business career.

footnotes: ¹⁵ See Samuel Heilman, “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy,” Modern Judaism

Exponents of Hirsch, among them Joseph, Isaac and Mordechai Breuer, R. Yechiel Weinberg, Dayan Grunfeld and Lord Jakobovits,¹⁶, London: Jewish Post, 1958; Immanuel Jakobovits, “Torah im Derekh Eretz Today” L’Eylah 20 (Autumn 1985), 36–41. have pointed out that Hirsch unquestionably believed otherwise. As Hirsch himself wrote, “We maintain that a familiarity with all those elements which lie at the root of present-day civilisation, and a study of all the subjects required for such an acquaintance, is of the highest necessity for the Jewish youth of our day as it was in fact at all times, and should be looked on as a religious duty.”¹⁷ For Hirsch, Torah im Derekh Eretz was permanent, not temporary; an obligation, not a concession. Nonetheless, the revisionists were essentially correct. The Hirschian synthesis was a hora’at sha’ah. It was a product of its time.

footnotes: ¹⁶ See, for example, I. Grunfeld, Three Generations ¹⁷ Quoted in Grunfeld, 116.

What does not follow, however, is that Torah without derekh eretz is a permanent ideal. The reverse is the case. This too is a hora’at sha’ah, a response to the times. The argument over whether Torah study is an exclusive pursuit has been waged at every significant point of rabbinic history. It has taken different forms at different times, and the phrase derekh eretz has shifted its meaning accordingly. Was a father obligated to teach his child Torah only, or prepare him, in addition, for an occupation? Was the ideal life one which combined Torah with a worldly occupation or one devoted wholly to study? Was the study of secular disciplines forbidden, or necessary only in an emergency – to refute the heretic and guide the perplexed – or part of the religious duty of knowledge of God and His works? The argument can be traced from the mishnaic period to the middle ages. Each side, at each point, had its adherents. The questions had no single authoritative resolution.

This brings us to a fundamental point. There are areas of Jewish law where rabbinic tradition allows a wide latitude of application. The standard rubric in such cases is “everything depends on the assessment of the halakhic authority” or “the ruling depends on the place and time.” There are areas of Jewish law where these statements are made explicitly, others where we recognise the implicit operation of such judgements. Restrictive or open policies on conversion, interactions between Jews and non-Jews, the place of women within the religious life and decisions on how to relate to those who break the Jewish law, all come within this category, as does the cluster of issues embraced by the phrase Torah im Derekh Eretz. In all these cases we can trace differences of policy between different Jewish communities at different times.

This is not to say that halakhic rulings are subjective or historically conditioned or the result of sociological causes. They are not. The halakhic process is judicial, the application of precedent to specific circumstance. There are areas of halakhah, however, which require for their application a careful evaluation of the present, one which may involve historical and sociological judgement. In the case of Torah and secular culture, the questions to be answered are: Will a given educational policy enhance or endanger Jewish spirituality? Will it resolve or increase the perplexities of a generation? Will it lead to greater or diminished Jewish commitment? Though the sources on which a ruling must be based remain the same, the answers to these questions will differ systematically from place to place and from one culture to another. These are exceptional but important spheres in which every ruling is implicitly a hora’at sha’ah, local as to its application.

An important conclusion follows. There is no meaningful ideological sense that can be attached to phrases like right-wing, left-wing or centrist, modern or traditional Orthodoxy. For there is no unitary, permanent ideological or institutional expression of the relationship between Judaism and its contemporary environment. There are instead as many modes as there are communities and generations. Orthodoxy developed in one way in nineteenth century Frankfurt, in another in Pressburg, and in yet other ways in England, France, Italy and Eastern Europe. Policies that were effective in one context were destructive in another. R. Azriel Hildesheimer (1820–1899), a commanding figure of both rabbinic and secular scholarship, was bitterly criticised as rabbi of Halberstadt in Hungary for his plans to create a modern rabbinic seminary. The same project was outstandingly successful in his subsequent home of Berlin. R. Yechiel Weinberg reports a telling episode. R. Israel Salanter, leader of the Mussar movement, visited Germany where he found R. Hildesheimer conducting a class in Tenakh and Shulchan Arukh for girls. He remarked: If a rabbi in Lithuania were to do likewise in his community he would certainly be removed from his position. And certainly, such is the law. But nonetheless I hope I can share R. Hildesheimer’s place in Gan Eden.¹⁸, 2:8.

footnotes: ¹⁸ Responsa Seridei Esh

CONFLICTS AND CONTEXTS The point is crucial, for it allows us to recover perspectives that have been obscured in recent times. Their loss has handicapped Orthodox thought and has plagued Orthodoxy itself with fierce internal conflicts that have disfigured the image it presents to the world. Since the image of Orthodoxy is itself a matter of religious concern – at stake are kiddush ha-Shem and chillul ha-Shem, the sanctification or desecration of God’s name – the issue is not a light one. What, then, are the consequences of the idea that there are important areas of Jewish law where rulings depend on the time and place?

First, apparent conflicts may not be real. Let us imagine hypothetically a single halakhic authority in two different situations, first as rabbi of a “nominally Orthodox” congregation, subsequently as the head of a yeshivah. Some of the rulings he would give – precisely on controversial topics such as the permissibility of secular study, or mixed youth groups, or the place of women in the community – would vary systematically between the two contexts. To be sure, his rulings on other issues – the permissibility of certain kinds of medical operation for example – would not. Nor does it follow that his halakhic principles will have changed. It may simply be that as a congregational rabbi he was constrained by such principles as “Just as it is a mitzvah to say that which will be heeded, so it is a mitzvah not to say that which will not be heeded,”¹⁹ 65b. or “Better that they sin unwittingly than knowingly.”²⁰ 30a, Shabbat 148b. But there are areas in which a halakhic ruling is specific to a given time, place and circumstance.

footnotes: ¹⁹ Yevamot ²⁰ Beitzah

Many of the apparent conflicts between “left-wing,” “right-wing” and “centrist” Orthodoxy have been of just this kind. For they have different constituencies. The natural constituency of “centrism” is the synagogue. That of “right-wing” Orthodoxy is the yeshivah or Chassidic community. The context of “left-wing” Orthodoxy is usually academic or intellectual: the university or college campus. The challenges of these three kinds of environment are quite different from one another, and what is an appropriate response to one may be inappropriate to the other. Genuine conflict arises when rulings are divorced from their context and asserted as universal norms. The talmudic literature guarded against this by preserving conflicting judgements within the same tradition, as if to say that there are circumstances in which one judgement is germane and others in which another is more apposite. There are times when the Talmud is explicit; this ruling applies to us, that to them;²¹ 44a and generally. this to Israel, that to Babylon; this to the “early generations,” that to the “later generations”; this to the “pious,” that to the average person.

footnotes: ²¹ Berakhot

There is, then, no “left-wing,” right-wing” or “centrist” Orthodoxy. These phrases, that is to say, are misconceived if they are taken as ideological alternatives to universal questions stated without regard to context. There is instead a single Torah applied to a specific time, place and person. Judgement as to what is appropriate to a given context is part of halakhic “wisdom” or what is sometimes called da’at Torah. The same applies to communities. The parameters of Orthodoxy will vary as between Israel, where it is called on to address issues in the public domain, America, where Orthodoxy is in a minority, and Anglo-Jewry where it represents the affiliation of the majority. This was the basis of R. Yechiel Weinberg’s halakhic critique of Eastern European rabbis who sought to apply their conventions to French and German Jewry. Their rulings, he insisted, were not wrong; they were right; but they originated and had their salience somewhere else.

Much conflict and confusion has followed failure to observe this fact. The vast geographical dislocations of Jewry following the Russian pogroms of the 1880s and in the years surrounding the Second World War led to clashes of custom and perception between indigenous rabbis and those newly arrived from Eastern Europe. Many of the tensions in contemporary Orthodoxy flow from the competing claims to authority of the yeshivah head and the congregational rabbi. Both phenomena arose from the transfer of rules which governed one context into another. Perhaps the process was unavoidable. Certainly the resulting clashes enlivened Jewish life and forced each side to sharpen its self-definition. But they would have been less acrimonious and more creative had they been accompanied by a proper mutual respect for the context-specific nature of certain halakhic traditions.

There are other consequences. For example, it is sometimes lamented that “modern Orthodox” or “religious Zionist” yeshivot and yeshivah high schools have moved away from their original ideologies toward a more traditionalist disdain for secular education and “narrow, particularistic, authoritarian” values.²² (Fall/Winter 1979), 25–34. But this is inevitable. The natural environment of traditionalism – its Sitz-im-Leben – is the enclosed, segregated community. The one leads to the other. “Modern” Orthodoxy will always have difficulties in creating its own yeshivot, for its place and role lie elsewhere, namely, in congregational life. The real crisis of “modern” Orthodoxy has been the sharp split between yeshivot and congregations. Few figures today combine – as was once the norm – the roles of yeshivah head and communal rabbi. This leads to a concentration of poskim, halakhic authorities, in yeshivot. Relatively few have had experience of congregations. What follows is an inevitable distance between halakhic rulings and the realities and traditions of congregational life. This leads to the “crisis of legitimacy” experienced by many congregational rabbis.

footnotes: ²² Lawrence Kaplan, “Education and Ideology in Religious Zionism Today,” Forum

THE CHALLENGE OF THE NEW There is another consequence. The closer Orthodoxy comes to the social processes at work in congregations (“centrism”) or to the intellectual currents of the academic world (“left-wing” or modern Orthodoxy proper) the more its environment is subject to change. The segregated community of the yeshivah or Chassidic group may aspire to something approximating stasis. Not so Jews who inhabit the secular world. There, values and intellectual fashions change. It follows that those who attempt to speak to such Jews must reckon with a constantly changing context. In a phrase, “modern” Orthodoxy must continually re-invent itself.

This brings us back to the idea of Torah im Derekh Eretz. It is sometimes supposed that the phrase means that there is a definitive synthesis, whether of the kind envisaged by Hirsch or along the lines set out by R. Kook, between Judaism and secular culture. There is, we suggest, no such thing, for there is no stable entity that can be designated as secular culture. Culture is a process, not a state. It is fluid and constantly in motion. It follows that Torah im Derekh Eretz is itself a process rather than an achievement. Dayan Grunfeld, himself a follower and translator of Hirsch, defined Torah im Derekh Eretz as “the relationship between Torah and the civilisation of a given epoch”²³, 8. or “the proclamation of the sovereignty of the Torah within any given civilisation.”²⁴ This is a far more general idea than that espoused by Hirsch, and leaves open the possibility that there may, at any given moment, be no synthesis available. We believe that this is a more accurate way of describing the relationship between Torah and the ethos of the age.

footnotes: ²³ Three Generations ²⁴ Ibid., 12.

Torah im Derekh Eretz is the ongoing critical dialogue that must always occur at the interface between Judaism and its environing culture. It is essentially incomplete, ongoing and open-ended. The resolutions of one generation are inadequate to the next. Secular culture has meanwhile moved on. Its positions have shifted. Its contours have subtly changed. A major error of “modern” Orthodoxy has been its canonisation of Hirsch, R. Kook or R. Soloveitchik as if their work yielded a definitive philosophy of Judaism in modernity. New challenges may yield different inspirations. It may be that other, hitherto neglected figures of the last two centuries, may come into new prominence: R. Chaim Hirschensohn, for example, or R. Isaac Reines or, from the ranks of German Jewry, Rabbis Hildesheimer, Ettlinger, Bamberger and Hoffman.

There are times in which the philosophical orientation of Judah Halevi is more compelling than that of Maimonides. There are ages in which the relationship between Judaism and general culture is one of congruence, at others a sustained critique. There are periods in which a universalist mood answers to Jewish experience; others at which particularism is more appropriate. Ultimately there is no escape from a continual re-engagement with the sources, biblical, talmudic, midrashic and halakhic and the identification, through their categories, of the dangers and possibilities of the new. Torah im Derekh Eretz is not an ideological position but a process, and one whose outcome is impossible to predict in advance.

Tradition renews itself through its encounter with the new. It atrophies whenever it declines that encounter through either systematic rejection or systematic accommodation. Chadash muttar min ha-Torah, “the new is permitted,” is as far removed from a living tradition as chadash assur min ha-Torah, “the new is forbidden.” Ironically it has been the most traditionalist communities that have been the most innovative in recent decades and the most quick to respond to changing public moods. It was the yeshivah and Chassidic communities that first noted the trend, in the 1960s, toward tradition, ethnicity and the search for “roots.” They developed outreach networks, sought baalei teshuvah, religious returnees, and created for them new styles of yeshivot. They pioneered new modes of informal education: the lunchtime learning session for businessmen, the “student encounter” and the residential retreat. They were the first to exploit the educational potential of the telephone (Dial-a-Daf Yomi) and cable television. ArtScroll, a traditionalist publishing house, applied modern typographical techniques to traditional texts. To be sure, these are instrumental rather than principled uses of modernity. But they demonstrate that traditionalists, no less than Hirsch in his day, are quick to perceive value-neutral possibilities in the contemporary cultural and technological climate.

There are no static traditions, least of all the tradition of modernity. Those who sought to create a liberal tradition out of the work of Hirsch, R. Kook and R. Soloveitchik quickly discovered that all three could be cited on the opposite side of the argument. The Hirsch who wrote the Nineteen Letters was also the Hirsch who advocated Orthodox secession and segregation from the general community. As Samuel Heilman has noted, Hirsch became “a hero of a traditional Orthodoxy no less than he had earlier become the ideal of those drawn to modernity.”²⁵ The R. Kook who wrote of the inner harmony pulsating through creation became, after the Six Day War, the inspiration of the ultra-nationalist Gush Emunim, and in the 1980s of the machteret, the religiously motivated “underground” group that perpetrated acts of terrorism against Arab targets.²⁶ 1:2 (Winter 1985) and 2:1 (Fall/Winter 1985). The R. Soloveitchik who valued human creativity at the beginning of “The Lonely Man of Faith” was also the R. Soloveitchik who delivered a crushing assault on secularism at its end.

footnotes: ²⁵ “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy,” 50. ²⁶ On the issues involved, see the collection of articles in Morasha

Every deeply considered Orthodox response to modernity has strands within it that can be taken in both liberal and conservative directions. Those who wish to do in their generation what Hirsch, R. Kook and R. Soloveitchik did in theirs have no option but to begin again at the beginning, in the meeting between contemporary culture and the biblical and rabbinic texts. Neither the dynamic of the new nor the stasis of the old are achieved without constant reinterpretation.

THE RENEWAL OF TORAH IM DEREKH ERETZ We have argued, then, against a conception of Orthodoxy that sees it as a set of conflicting ideologies. The parcelling of Orthodoxy into right, left and centrist positions, or into an antinomy of modernism against traditionalism, is a symptom of the collapse of overarching structures of community and the fragmentation of Orthodox life into non-communicating organisational enclaves. The cause is social, the effect intellectual, and the loss spiritual. What is lost is the ongoing critical dialogue between Torah in its full authority and a particular context in its full specificity. Instead Torah is allowed to speak only in those accents ideology has determined in advance. And local context is mistaken for a universal situation.

Tradition then speaks in a series of strident voices, each of which denies the legitimacy of others, instead of in its classic mode: as an open-ended argument between different perspectives. This delegitimation of alternatives within the same tradition is what is sometimes called fundamentalism, and it is important to note that there can be a fundamentalism of the left and centre, no less than of the right. In its place we have argued for the recovery of a non-ideological approach to Jewish thought, one that sees its role as the application of a single Torah to a specific time, place and constituency. Such thought will recognise the presence of conflicting voices within the biblical and rabbinic tradition, as well as the existence of other contexts and constituencies that may evoke different judgements. This is not relativism or pluralism. It is what is involved in the application of Torah to changing circumstance.

What, then, are the issues that shape the agenda of future Orthodox thought? They are what they have been since the threshold of Jewish modernity. For we have argued that the four great projects that have engaged the imagination of the great Jewish thinkers of the last two centuries must be addressed anew in every generation. They give rise to processes, not definitive resolutions. No synthesis or antithesis between Torah and its surrounding culture is final. It is at best provisional. The great questions must be taken up again in every age.

Let us restate them. The first is Torah im Derekh Eretz, the meeting between Torah and contemporary culture. But here we must divest ourselves of a priori expectations as to what that meeting will yield. Hirsch and before him Saadia Gaon believed it would yield a kind of static synthesis, convergence on a single truth from different starting points. R. Kook – as to some extent did Maimonides – anticipated that it would produce a more enveloping synthesis, a unity of the disciplines. R. Soloveitchik – not unlike Judah Halevi – foresaw conflict. There is, for them, no ultimate meeting point between the universalism of secular thought and the particularism of revelation and covenant. The comparisons between these modern thinkers and their medieval predecessors are tentative and analogies could be drawn in different ways. What they have in common, though, is what Quentin Skinner calls a predilection for the “Grand Theory,”²⁷, edited by Quentin Skinner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. a framework of prior expectation, in this case as to the outcome of the encounter between Torah and secular civilisation.

footnotes: ²⁷ The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences

We have argued for a more modest, case by case approach. The strength of Torah im Derekh Eretz lies in its detailed application, not its general philosophical stance. We have had, in recent years, impressive beginnings. There have been useful works on Jewish economic and medical ethics and some initial thoughts on the relationship between Judaism and psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy. But these are only beginnings. There is a tendency to suppose that a book on one of these subjects sets forth the Jewish view on the questions under review, and that therefore no more work needs to be done. But it is in fact rare to find a contemporary issue about which one can aspire to present the Jewish view. At most one can argue a Jewish view. The Jewish view emerges, if it does at all, only after alternative views have been presented and argued and a consensus develops. Torah im Derekh Eretz is a process, not a set of conclusions.

Consider a small, or perhaps not so small, example. Sol Roth, in his recent book Halakhah and Politics: The Jewish Idea of a State,²⁸, New York: Ktav, 1988. argues that within limits Judaism is compatible with democracy, individualism and human rights. At the same time Gershon Weiler’s Jewish Theocracy appeared in English.²⁹, Leiden: Brill, 1988. Weiler, an Israeli secularist, argues that rabbinic Judaism is radically incompatible with politics and a liberal, democratic state. Weiler is opposed to Judaism, but the same point has been made in the name of Judaism by Neturei Karta, opponents of the state of Israel on religious grounds, and by religious nationalists like Meir Kahane who has argued that “there is a potential confrontation between the Zionist Jewish state…and modern ideas of democracy and citizenship.”³⁰, London: I. B. Tauris, 1988, 188.

footnotes: ²⁸ Sol Roth, Halakhah and Politics: The Jewish Idea of a State ²⁹ Gershon Weiler, Jewish Theocracy ³⁰ Quoted in Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel’s Fateful Decisions

At stake is one of the deepest issues facing religious Zionism. And a question like this cannot be resolved by polemics on the one hand, apologetics on the other. It requires sustained, close and critical study informed by halakhah and aggadah on the one hand, political theory and history on the other. It requires, too, an extended and reasoned debate between opposing positions. And it requires that the debate be accessible to a wider audience than academics and scholars if it is to become part of public argument within a Jewish state. That argument is part of what Torah is in the public domain.

One of the most serious contemporary threats to Judaism as a living tradition is the divorce of Torah from derekh eretz. When Jewish political theorists, for example, are insufficiently grounded in Torah, and exponents of Torah insufficiently knowledgeable in political theory, a question like the ideal form of a Jewish state is secularised on both sides into an issue that can only be settled by political confrontation and a war of cultures. Torah im Derekh Eretz is a religious imperative not only – as Maimonides and Hirsch saw it – as a means to the perfection of the self, but more basically as a precondition of a mature halakhic response to the many pressing ethical, social and political questions of our time.

TIKKUN OLAMAND RELIGIOUS ZIONISM*** *Arising immediately out of this is what Maimonides listed as one of the aims of the halakhic system, tikkun olam, “the perfection of the world,” or as we might more modestly translate it, “the establishment of society.”³¹ 1:2. In both biblical and rabbinic thought, Judaism is actively concerned with society as well as self. This is implicit in the very concepts of mitzvah and halakhah – of religious truth as expressed not only or even primarily in terms of personal experience, but also in terms of law. Law governs communities. It creates societies. And it is this fact that has become intensely problematic in the modern world.

footnotes: ³¹ M.T. Mamrim

For secularisation, as we now know, does not result in the eclipse of religion. Instead it transfers it from the public to the private domain. There, it is experienced not as societal norm but as personal commitment: not as law but as choice.³², New York: Doubleday, 1967. This affects all modes of religious behaviour, from the most liberal to the most conservative. For liberal Judaisms, such as Reform, it results in the substitution of choice for law altogether, so that personal autonomy is seen as the central value of Judaism.³³ 4:1 (February 1984), 39–56. Some Reform thinkers still use the word “halakhah,” but the word has been robbed of its traditional sense. The impact on traditionalist Orthodoxy is quite different but no less profound. Orthodoxy comes to be identified with voluntary communities, above all the yeshivah, instead of with the Jewish people as a whole. Instead of being seen as the law of a people, halakhah is experienced as the code of those who volunteer to be bound by it, a choosing elite.

footnotes: ³² Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy ³³ See Eugene Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” Modern ­Judaism

In either case religious thought has effectively abandoned the public domain. But it is precisely this that lies at the heart of two of the great projects of Orthodoxy in modernity: religious Zionism and the role of Judaism in a secular diaspora.

Consider first religious Zionism. One of the great questions confronting it has always been: what impels rabbinic Judaism, embodying as it does a tradition of political quietism and the belief that exile would be ended only by Divine intervention, to seek to reconstitute itself as a state in the land of Israel? There were two classic answers to this question, one given by R. Kook, the other by R. Reines. The first was mystical, the second pragmatic. For R. Kook, the ingathering of Jews to Israel was the start of a messianic process. For R. Reines it was a simple matter of saving lives from persecution. Though both answers remain relevant and profound, neither speaks lucidly to the situation of Israel in the late twentieth century. On the one hand it is beset by too many conflicts, internal and external, to be obviously messianic. On the other, Israel is too exposed to danger, and some diaspora communities are too well-established, for Israel to be the only obvious safe haven for Jewish existence. The classic answers may remain ultimately true but they are not immediately self-evident. Hence the current crisis of religious Zionism.

But there was a third strand of religious Zionist thought which remains tantalisingly germane. Until emancipation, in a series of enclosed and semi-autonomous Jewish communities, Jews lived Judaism as part of the public domain. Education, arbitration, civil disputes and community ordinances were informed by Torah. One could speak coherently of a Jewish culture, enriched by a bricolage of borrowings, but integrated nonetheless. It was emancipation and the collapse of the self-governing kehillah that drove Judaism inward and secularised the public domain. And it was this that led a number of traditional Jewish thinkers, among them R. Moses Sofer, to seek Jewish revival away from Europe in a settlement of the land of Israel. Indeed until the 1880s the majority of Jewish settlers of the land was intensely and traditionally religious.

Israel is the one place Jews can today seek to construct a Jewish and Judaic public culture. It “expands the possible range of halakhic involvement” as David Hartman puts it, to include “the moral quality of the army, social and economic disparities and deprivations, the exercise of power moderated by moral sensitivities, attitudes toward minorities and the stranger, tolerance and freedom of conscience,”³⁴ 7:3 (October 1987), 229–252. It is the sole remaining Judaic context in which society can become the vehicle for – in Aharon Lichtenstein’s striking phrase – “collective beatitude.”³⁵, edited by Arthur A. Cohen, New York: Harper and Row, 1970, 423.

footnotes: ³⁴ David Hartman, “The Challenge of Modern Israel to Traditional Judaism.” Modern Judaism ³⁵ Aharon Lichtenstein, “Religion and State: The Case for Interaction” in Arguments and Doctrines

But this presupposes that Judaism, not just Jews, re-enters the public domain. What would it be for a modern macro-economic system to embody halakhic values? Or a contemporary welfare state? Does Judaism indeed favour a welfare state, or does it prefer a minimalist state which leaves major educational and charitable decisions in private hands? What kind of inequalities of wealth and income are compatible with Jewish values? What generally is the place of halakhah in a secular state? Should it be made law by a secular legislature? Should it remain a voluntary and self- imposed code? What are the possible and desirable interactions between Judaism, culture and society?

Yet again these questions have no immediate and definitive answer, for between the authoritative texts and their contemporary application lies the process of interpretation and argument. Torah is constituted more by the conversation than by its conclusion, which in any event is provisional. But again we are struck by the relative poverty of the detailed working-out of responses to these and related questions. Here too there is a predominance of Grand Theory over detailed analysis. But if Jewish thought does not assume this responsibility, the result will almost certainly be its confinement within the “four cubits” of home, school and synagogue. In which case a Jewish life can be lived as cogently in Boro Park as in Bayit VeGan, in Harvard no less than in Haifa.

TIKKUN OLAMAND JUDAISM IN THE DIASPORA*** *A similar though more complex set of concerns arises out of the place of Judaism in a pluralist diaspora. Here we face an issue whose existential impact is recent even if it arose theoretically more than a century ago. Emancipating societies were in theory secular; in practice their public cultures remained residually Christian. Jews saw their interests best advanced by a more universalistic order. They became passionate advocates of liberalism, socialism and secularism. Many – devotees, observers and critics alike – came to see these causes as in some way essentially “Jewish” without any clear sense of why or how this was so, other than that they were promoted by Jews and were sometimes buttressed by vague references to “the prophetic tradition.”

These identifications are no longer adequate. Politically Jews, whether in Israel, America or England, are no longer overwhelmingly associated with the left. They have become aware, in the last two decades, of some of the political problems of socialism and the cultural problems of liberalism. They have been reminded, too, that there is a religious politics of the right. As mature members of diaspora societies, they are more conscious also that there is a potential conflict between a Judaic voice on ethical and social questions, and the more narrow concerns of Jewish sectional self-interest. In the modern state, composed as it is of a vast variety of ethnic and religious groupings, there is an unprecedented place for a Jewish contribution to the question, as Mary Warnock puts it, “What kind of society can we praise and admire?”

Warnock’s remark arose in the context of the Committee of Inquiry she chaired, at the invitation of the British Government, into human fertilisation and embryology (1982–1984). It raised important issues of medical ethics, but it raised them against the backdrop of a morally diverse society. Her opening observations are significant: “In our pluralistic society it is not to be expected that any one set of principles can be enunciated to be completely accepted by everyone. This is not to say…that there is no shared morality whatever. The law…sets out a broad framework for what is morally acceptable within society.… Within the broad limits of legislation there is room for different, and perhaps much more stringent, moral rules.”³⁶, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985, 2–3.

footnotes: ³⁶ Mary Warnock, A Question of Life

This distinction between a public legal code and a more demanding moral community comes close to the classic Jewish distinction between the sheva mitzvot bnei noach, the Noachide commands binding on humanity as such,³⁷, New York: The Edward Mellen Press, 1983. and the more rigorous demands – 613 commandments – binding specifically on Jews as the people of the covenant. A Jewish ethic that responded to a pluralist society would therefore have to make a rigorous distinction between “Jewish” and “Noachide” halakhah. It is just this that the rabbinic tradition is unusually, perhaps uniquely, well poised to do. But here too the quality of Jewish responses has been low, sometimes failing even to make this elementary distinction between the rules that bind Jews, and those that, according to Jewish sources, bind society as such. There is room here for a renewal of a neglected, because not previously urgent, branch of Jewish thought.

footnotes: ³⁷ One of the few recent studies of the issue is David Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism: An Historical and Constructive Study of the Noahide Laws

The issue is of more than academic concern. Jews in the diaspora are occupied in shaping and building societies. For the most part their involvements and interactions are with non-Jews in contexts governed by neutral rules and roles. The extant halakhic literature has relatively little to say about these interactions, beyond a general concern for kiddush ha-Shem, “sanctification of God’s name,” darkhei shalom, “the ways of peace,” and the avoidance of eivah, “animosity.” Unless there evolves a more nuanced and articulated set of rules or values for these situations, Jews will inevitably live out compartmentalised identities. For there will be no specific way for them to behave Jewishly in these contexts, nor even a detailed sense of what Judaism regards as acting “humanly.” They will be “secularists in the street” however deeply religious they are in their private lives. Perhaps this is just what galut – exile – is in our time. But this judgement seems at the very least premature.

Which takes us back to one of the key words of “modern” Orthodoxy: synthesis. The word has standardly been applied to education and culture – to the idea that some fusion is possible of Judaism and secular disciplines. We have argued that synthesis in this sense may simply not be available. It depends on the state of secular culture. What is more religiously interesting is the idea of synthesis as applied to an individual life. Here it is a value long recognised in the rabbinic tradition under the rubric of “let all your deeds be for the sake of Heaven”³⁸ 2:15; see also Avot de-Rabbi Nathan (2), 30; Beitzah 16a. or, as Maimonides put it, “directing the powers of the soul toward a single goal.”³⁹, Maimonides’ introduction to his commentary to Mishnah, Avot. That tradition recognises such a value makes it dear that compartmentalisation cannot be a religious ideal.

footnotes: ³⁸ M. Avot ³⁹ The title of the fifth of the Eight Chapters

The question then is: What is it to live one’s life in accordance with Jewish law and values as a doctor, lawyer, academic, businessman, industrialist, or any of the countless other occupations in which Jews are engaged, when the people with whom one deals are not Jews or if they are, are not bound by halakhah? Orthodox thought has been almost totally silent on this question. It has disattended it, as if to say that only within Jewish contexts can behaviour be coherently Jewish. But this is to withdraw from the challenge of both religious Zionism and of post-emancipation diaspora life: of living in a non-religious society on the one hand and a non-Jewish one on the other. Can it be that the vast literature of Torah has no answer to this question, which today encompasses most dilemmas of most Jews most of the time? Against this we must reaffirm the faith of Ben Bag-Bag: “Study the Torah again and again, for everything is contained in it.”⁴⁰ 5:25.

footnotes: ⁴⁰ Avot

It was Franz Rosenzweig who was most perceptive about this impoverishment of Orthodoxy. He argued instead that “Exactly those things generally rendered permissible by Orthodoxy must be given a Jewish form” and insisted that “the two worlds, the one of the Jewishly forbidden and the one of the ‘permissible’ extra-Jewish, flow into one another.”⁴¹, edited by N. N. Glatzer, New York: Schocken, 1955, 83, 84. Rosenzweig’s ideal of the Jew was of a person who had “prepared himself quite simply to have everything that happens to him, inwardly and outwardly, happen to him in a Jewish way.”⁴² What that means, remains obscure. Once again, the Grand Theory exists; its detailed working out does not.

footnotes: ⁴¹ Franz Rosenzweig, “The Builders: Concerning Jewish Law” in On Jewish Learning ⁴² Franz Rosenzweig, “Towards a Renaissance of Jewish Learning,” in Glatzer, op. cit., 66.

Here then is the proper sphere of the search for synthesis. It will be created not in the house of study but in a series of existential models: the employer, perhaps, who creates new ways of acting humanely to employees, or the architect who enhances the urban environment, or the industrialist who reinvigorates an area of inner-city depression. There is no way of specifying in advance the way a life can be a model of kiddush ha-Shem or tikkun olam, of sanctifying God’s name or perfecting society. There are potentially as many ways as there are human lives. Something of this lies behind the stunning remark of the sages: “The Holy One, blessed be He, made every person in the stamp of the first human being, yet not one of them resembles his fellow. Therefore every person is obliged to say: The world was created for my sake.”⁴³ 4:5.

footnotes: ⁴³ M. Sanhedrin

Each life presents a unique set of possibilities for sanctification. Yet there is a task for Jewish thought – indeed for a Jewish literature – in identifying which lives are, and which are not, models for emulation. The range of such models has grown extraordinarily narrow in the last century, dominated by stories of yeshivah heads and Chassidic leaders. The Chassidic literature once celebrated the lives of ordinary Jews in ordinary situations – the “hidden righteous men” – but it is a tradition in eclipse.

RECOVERING FAITH The last and perhaps the most urgent task of Orthodoxy in modernity is to think a way forward to recovering the substantive reality of knesset Yisrael, the Jewish people as a single entity standing before God. On this, I have written extensively elsewhere,⁴⁴ and One People? Tradition, Modernity and Jewish Unity. as has Michael Wyschogrod in his impressive theological study, The Body of Faith.⁴⁵ Minneapolis: Seabury Press, 1983. Suffice it to say that there is a deep inner contradiction between an Orthodoxy which acts as if it were one denomination among others in the Jewish world, and which at the same time believes as a matter of deepest principle that there are no denominations within Judaism: that Judaism is either Orthodox or it is not Judaism. If Orthodoxy is to act responsibly toward the whole Jewish world and not simply toward its own immediate constituency, there are deep dilemmas to be faced about its relationship with secular and non-Orthodox Jews. It cannot consistently embrace pluralism, the view that a secular or non-halakhic reading of tradition is legitimate. But it cannot withdraw altogether into segregation without abdicating the responsibilities of religious leadership.

footnotes: ⁴⁴ In my forthcoming books, Traditional Alternatives ⁴⁵ Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith,

There are problems here that have not been seriously confronted by religious thought, so insoluble do they seem. Once again though let us reiterate that the task of Torah is not necessarily to find solutions. In part it is to frame problems and point the way, if necessary an inch at a time, to making them less intractable. The second half of the final book of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed is dedicated to the proposition that religious ideals cannot be legislated suddenly and immediately in the human situation. There is slow progress from less to more perfect states.⁴⁶ 3, 32. Religious leadership for Maimonides – and in this respect it comes closest to imitatio Dei – is a matter of the governance of a total society.⁴⁷ 1, 54; 2, 40; 3, 54. The challenge of Jewish leadership in the past two centuries has been to exercise that governance over a Jewish people many of whom have become alienated from Jewish law and faith, and in the absence of any coercive powers. That religious leadership has for the most part retreated into enclaves where its authority remains strong has perhaps been inevitable, but it is a measure of the challenge that still lies ahead.

footnotes: ⁴⁶ See especially Guide for the Perplexed ⁴⁷ See Guide

The perspective that emerges from this survey is paradoxical in the extreme. The great visions that drove Samson Raphael Hirsch and R. Avraham Kook have been substantively achieved. Jews have found it possible to be acculturated and integrated in the diaspora without abandoning halakhah or the fundamentals of Jewish faith. They have constructed a state and society in Israel in which religious Jews and Judaism, far from disappearing as secular Zionists believed, have grown in prominence and influence. And yet at precisely this juncture of success, the traditions of Jewish thought they initiated have lost their way. Torah im Derekh Eretz and religious Zionism have become suddenly problematic. The reasons for this, we have suggested, have been sociological rather than intellectual or spiritual. In the wake of the Holocaust, anti-Zionism, deepening secularisation and the intractable problems confronting Israel, Jewish thought has given way to a premature despair of the world and turned instead to a narrow survivalism.

This is understandable, but it remains a failure of trust. The sages explained the phrase “God of faith” to mean “God who had faith in the world He was about to create.”⁴⁸ to Deuteronomy 32:4. Something of that faith is needed in the domain of Jewish thought. There are times when faith in God comes easier than faith in the world He created. Yet both are integral to Jewish belief. Neither the biblical nor rabbinic tradition allows a prolonged retreat from the tense, unpredictable, ongoing dialogue with ­contemporary culture, with society in its Israeli or diaspora dimensions, and with the Jewish people as a whole. Renewing that holy argument is the future task of Jewish thought. For at stake is the fate of Torah whose living commentary is the Jewish people in dialogue with its covenantal calling.

footnotes: ⁴⁸ Sifrei