Think of the many blogs of the last decade in which an Orthodox person publicly documented his or her loss of faith in Orthodox dogmas and the equally large number of blogs in which people questioned the halakhah. In many of these discussions, the people discussing theology had never read Spinoza, Hobbs, or Hume and without any sense that philosophers disproved the theistic arguments centuries ago or of the corrosive to religion naturalism of the Enlightenment or modernity.. They also argued without any knowledge of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, or modern Jewish philosophy, or any history of Jewish thought.

Elchanan Shilo has a PhD and was trained in Jewish thought, Kabbalah, and Jewish literature, as well as having attended Yeshivat Har Etzion. His first book was The Kabbalah in the works of S. Y. Agnon [Hebrew] (2011) and he has written on Lithuanian Mitnagged Kabbalah, with articles on Rabbi Isaac Haver and Rav Kook. He put out a volume called Yahadut Kiyumit  (May, 2017) [Heb.] a Judaism of Existence, that we can live by. In this book, he tackles all the perennial issues discussed on the blogs. but with PhD.

(The official translation is Existential Judaism, but he uses the word the way Netanyahu uses the word when he says Iran is an Existential threat, meaning directly connected to  existence, not as influence by Camus or Sartre.)

In the volume, we see his loss of faith in Orthodox doctrine and his loss of faith in Orthodox halakhah as well as his attempt to create a new Jewish movement, the same issues as all those American Bloggers, but with a PhD.

I blogged about Elchanan Shilo’s ideas already seven years ago, when he proposed having a continuous Judaism between religious and secular, in which everyone could work together as part of one community. A noble idea in an age of polarization. That is still a good part of the book.  His article elicited a full response from Rav Dovid Bigman of Yeshivat Maaleh Gilboa.

In his recent book Yahadut Kiyumit, he collects his thoughts and newspaper articles of the last few years into a single volume. The book has been widely received in the Relgious Zionist world included a positive review by Prof. Ron Margolin of Tel Aviv University as well as by Hagai Hoffer.   Here is an hour long youtube interview he did last month about his book. 

The book has two parts. The first part contains his articles about faith from the newspaper in which he moves from his Religious Zionist position to the acceptance of Biblical criticism and the human elements in the Bible, the keeping of mizvot without believing they are commanded by God and a denial of providence because of the Holocaust. Needless to say, he was fired from the religious school (ulpnana) in which he taught becuase of these non-Orthodox ideas. He also rejected the authority of the halakhah because of it attitude toward modern life, legalism, and oppressive laws of personals status. In its place he wants the keeping of Judaism as a voluntary practice, each person taking as they see fit.

Unlike the American bloggers who either leave the fold or want to remain “Orthoprax” (their own self-defining neologism) of full observance despite not believing, Shilo seeks to also reject halakhah. He wants a full spectrum traditionalism without law or belief. Shilo does, however, like Jewish ethno-nationalism.  In many ways, his book has much in common with Yoav Sorek’s The Israeli Covenant (Hebrew), but this book is more about the impossibility of maintaining faith, than a new nationalism. I did not find myself concurring or consenting with the first part of the book. I found it distancing and derivative.

The second part of the book, however, is a contradictory collection of ideas that were quite interesting. They are his personal reflections which he compares to Rav Kook pensées, but to me seems like all so many blog posts or Facebook statuses. They are clearly the best part of the book.  They are all designed to elicit response. If you saw them on Facebook, and you were interested in the topics you would likely be compelled to respond, to amplify, or to reject his thoughts. Here are some selections to give you a taste. Any thoughts on these?

The rhetoric of the using the word “avodah zara” (idolatry) for all sorts of modern phenomena and for other religions is demagoguery and the whole way one can laugh along. Isaiah Leibowitz used this phrase often but one can claim that Leibowitz himself is idolatrous because he does not worship God, rather the halakhah.” (165)

Rav Shagar discusses the Hardal position on women. He says that the negation of the values of modernity is denial of the self…He gives the appearance of being torn. I say “appears” because being broken and including both sides can only exist in the realm of thought.  In the practical realm, one needs to decide and Rav Shagar already decided. He decided against modern values and for the halakhah when there is a conflict between them. He prays in synagogues that exclude women. (162)

[…] Rav Kook’s Kabbalah remained in isolation and its students remained “Lonely men of secrets” but to the outside world he appeared as if the wellsprings burst forth. (188)

Combining the study of Bible in a religious university (Bar Ilan) with liberal a Yeshivat Hesder education, brings on the positive side– aspects of scholarly analysis and critique of things without historicity, on the negative side it brings blindness to the theological aspects of scholarly study. They bring sublime pilpulim to justify the traditional positions and present scholarship as lacking logic. (142)

Dividing society based on praxis – who goes to the beach on Shabbat and who goes to synagogue, or those who do both- is shallow and does not say anything about ones inner life. (144)

The 21^st century practice of liberal [Religious Zionist women] to cover their hair symbolically- for example with a bow-has a symbolic function of status similar to a wedding ring, rather than actually covering the hair. (149)

The request of Rav Bigman for the simple Jew to sit and wait for “a new generation of rabbis” more than it changes reality, silences it. The redemption of the people and the return to the land did not come from people who waited. Rather it came from people of action who broke through what was accepted in their time. So too in the halakhic plane, a simple person has to work below without waiting for miracles from above. (154)

What appears in my eyes as God appears to another person as Satan. The God who commanded to kill the one who chopped wood (Numbers 15) is not God in my eyes, rather Satan…. From an external perspective it seems that people who pray together are all worshiping one God, in practice they are all worshiping their own God. What one calls God, the other calls Satan. (178)

I have found many Haredim and Baalei Teshuva, but I have not even one percent as many of those who seek the truth. This is proved by the small number of students in University Bible departments. The number is negligible compared to the  multitude who seek yeshivot. (175)

I want to propose a less radical solution to the conversion problem [in israel] that does not require a conceptual change from the accepted methods of conversion. This solution was told to me by my father Z”L who heard it from Rabbi Moshe Tendler, Rosh Yeshiva at RIETS, afterwards I head it directly from him.

Since infants have no data (awareness), their conversion does not require the acceptance of mizvot, just mikvah and circumcision. Therefore, we need to build permanent mikvaot in courts and hospitals. After every child is born to a couple considered an “Other” in their identity papers, we should do this process. The Rabbinic judge should immerse the child in front of the mother before they leave the hospital, and be registered as a Jew. If it is a male, the parent will also be obligated to circumcise him. This way we solve the problem of conversion… I want to return to the halakhah. The Rambam wrote, pace the Talmud, “We immerse a minor who seeks to convert based upon the guidance of the court. For it is an advantage for a person [to convert]. (Forbidden Relationships 13:7) (189)

Shilo sees his book as a manifesto and his ideas as the start of a new movement. However, I see his book as part of a bigger trend of Israeli traditionalism. I could give an entire course, or create a reader placing Shilo’s book on the shelf with a number of similar works including: Yoav Sorek’s nationalist vision that is conservative socially but religious liberal with Meir Buzaglo’s defense of the Sephardi mesorati position, with Dov Elbaum’s presentation of the tradition for those outside, the studies of mesorati Jews by Yaacov Yadgar, and with Tomer Persico’s religion and spirituality for those coming from the secular perspective.

Yet, Shilo’s thought in the first part of the book most reminds me of the liberal Conservative Mordecai Kaplan influenced authors of the 1940’s and 1950’s- Jacob Agus, Ira Eisenstein, and Milton Steinberg, with an emphasis on peoplehood over dogma or halakhah. There were many articles in the Reconstructionist journal, in its prime, about commandments without a commander. Or see the Israel educator, Mordechai Bar-On, “The Commandments and the Commander” (Reconstructionist, 1977).

I did not find myself in much agreement with Shilo, but his book reflects the debates in Israel today and it is important to note that his book is reviewed within the Religious Zionist world. It is an enjoyable quick read and worth reading, However, while covering similar ground it is not a classic like Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization, rather editorials and blog posts.

1)   What is the story of your book

In the second half of the 1990s, I began to write aphorisms – fragments of thoughts, similar to the style of Rabbi Kook, Pascal and Nietzsche. At that time, I considered naming my book: “The Song of Thoughts”.

At the same time, there were parallel processes developing in society such as plans for the establishment of joint religious-secular pre-military preparatory programs.

When I began to write, I felt as if I am a voice calling in the desert. When I finished my writings, I found myself in a new social movement, Called “Israeli-Judaism,” which includes pluralistic Batei Midrash, and pre-military religious-secular preparatory programs, see in this link:http://www.panim.org.il/en/organizations

For many years I was worried that publishing my thoughts could harm my relationship with my workplaces. And that’s exactly what happened. Two days after the publication of my article on Biblical criticism, (“Divine revelation in human text” Makor Rishon 6/19/2009), which edited some of my aphorisms related to this subject into an article; I was notified by telephone that my work at Orot College (a religious college) had ended.  At the Nezer David Institute, that publish the Nazir writings, (a disciple of Rabbi Kook), my work was stopped when I finished publishing the Nazir’s commentary on a book attributed to the Ramhal book Kalach Pitchei Hokhmah. I was told that only if I retracted what I had written in Makor Rishon, I could continue my work. I could not acquiesce to their offer. since I could not go back to Orthodox dogma even if I wanted to.

Volition does not bring belief.  Belief is outside of freewill- Shadal in the name of Crescas Or Hashem 2:5:2. Many people want to believe, but cannot. (Site editor’s note Cardinal Newman says the opposite, that belief is entirely volitional.

The burning of the bridges with these Orthodox institutions liberated me to write what I had in my heart. After that, continuing for six years, from the beginning of 2009 until the end of 2014, I published some more articles in Makor Rishon. This ended when I submitted the article “The Question of Evil and the Ability to Believe” (the fifth chapter in my book). It was not accepted, since the paper was bought by Sheldon Adelson, and he made the editorial position of the paper more conservative. This is the point I moved to the next step, preparing my articles in a book form.

2) Why did you create the book in two parts, a regular book and then aporhism Resesei Mahshavot? The first part 120 pages and the second 80 pages.

My meditations are like poetry raising ideas from different points of view. It is not always possible to unify all points of view that I present within my chapters. My reflections contain complexity, in which the resolution cannot always be ascertained at first glance. For example, regarding the subject of abortions, in my aphorism. I wanted to show that despite my liberal views, I am not captive by the liberal discourse, and can criticize it.

There are short passages that belong to some of the chapters, but reflect a point of view that I have once experienced, but not anymore. Another example: when I become aware of internal contradictions in some of the miracles in the Bible, I wrote it under the heading “Epicurus (Heretic) against his will”. “I really want to believe that miracles are possible, that there is truth in the miracles recounted in the Bible, that there is justice in the world, and that God intervenes in the world and changes the laws of nature when he wants, but these desires break on the rock of reality.” I discussed these issues in the main chapter. Yet, it is important to show that there was a genuine search for truth and I did not mark the goal in advance, it was forced upon me.

The inability of Orthodoxy to provide a real and not apologetic answer to the proofs of biblical criticism, compelled me to abandon the traditional position with which I began to explore the topic, with a surplus of self-confidence in the justice of its path. I then adopted the historio-critical perspective on the Torah, as a text written by many authors, written hundreds of years after the events described in it.

When I submitted the book to the publishing house, I placed my short thoughts at the end of each chapter, but the editors did not like the leap from genre to genre, and this is the reason why all the short thoughts are in one section and all chapters in another one. Every decision has pros and cons. There were people who like the short thoughts, which sometimes are thought-provoking and suitable for study groups. ( In the review of my book by Prof. Ron Margolin in Makor Rishon, (4/10/17, “Saving the faith from itself”) more quotes were taken from the second part than from the first part.

 3) What does it mean to create a continuity between halakhah and secularity?

This means that instead of a society divided into sectors of religious and secular, there should be a continuous Jewish society ranging from secular to religious. In which each individual can find his own place according to where he comes from and according to the root of his soul.

The philosophical basis has two assumptions (1) The Jewish way of life today derives from a process of human development and creativity throughout the generations, and therefore it is not absolute. Not every person at any time and place can fit to this lifestyle. The awareness that this is a human development leads to the conclusion that seeing the observance of the commandments as a divine command is fiction. The meaning of the Mitzvot must be constructed from the content itself, and not from a belief in God who commands them. 2) There are different types of people. Some people are religiously inclined and for some people the religious world is alien to them. In the middle, there are people who are partially suited to a Jewish lifestyle. They feel it intuitively, but they lack a philosophical basis, and that’s what I’m trying to do with my book. To present a model that is softer than the halakhic model, and to show the meaning it contains.

4)      How are you different from  Israeli mesorati or the Israeli Reform movement?

Judaism of Existence” (Kiyumit) suggests double states of consciousness, religious and secular. For example: entering into a state of religious consciousness while praying and entering an atheistic state of consciousness while facing evil. This is even more left than what the Reform movement that see itself as a religious movement that believes in God.

In terms of the everyday life, the model of Sabbath observance, of using electricity in certain need or distress, is practically close to the Orthodox model, and differs from the characteristics of the Reform Sabbath, which is a model of a “secular Shabbat” + prayer, lighting the candles and Kiddush.

With regard to kashrut, non-eating some non-kosher animals takes on significance because it identifies with the moral ideal of vegetarianism. Since it is morally problematic to eat animals, reducing the types of meat to a small number of animals is an intermediate state between the celebration of flesh and vegetarianism. This form of keeping kosher is a softer model than the halakhic model, which forbids eating from vessels that are cooked with unkosher flesh.

Most of the traditional Jews in Israel do not experience a crisis between traditional beliefs and their modern world. Their perceptions of religion are Orthodox, but their lifestyle is different. Traditional existence is a will to continue the legacy of our Fathers, whereas for the Jew of Existence (Kiyumi) this is not enough. He must identify with the content itself. The difference is not limited to a certain lifestyle – like another model of Shabbat, but also to matters such as kashrut, in which the Jew of Existence will be similar to the traditional Jew, but In terms of his inner world, his consciousness, will be completely different.

5)   What is the weakness of Neemanei Torah veAvodah?

The weakness of the liberal wing within religious Zionism is that it is still bound within the halakhah, which often reflects an ultra-Orthodox world view.

To use sexuality as an example. Why does the liberal Religious Zionist complain about the need for separation between boys and girls in order to prevent halakhic prohibitions of “transgressions”? Halakha, and the ultra-Orthodox society, sees a sin in every erotic expression that is outside of the framework of married life, and calls it yetzer hara (evil inclination). Halakha forbids all forms of art that contain erotic elements, or alternatively, a touch of affection or even a touch without affection, between men and women. The liberal national religious are in conflict, between their modern conception of sexuality and their commitment to halakhah.

Another example, attitude toward general culture. Liberal Religious Zionist see the figure of a rabbi who has a broad general education, but according to the Shulchan Aruch, “it is permitted to study by random external wisdom, only so long as there are no species books of heresy (Yoreh Deah, 247,4). That is why the Liberal Religious Zionist is inferior to the more conservative parts of religious Zionism.

The liberal religious parents will have to submit to these stricter decisions because of their commitment to halakhah. What I am trying to do is to liberate the liberal religious from their commitment to halakha, so that they can present their positions without having to apologize. If my book convinces them to abandon their commitment to halakhah, they can feel comfortable standing up for their positions.

6)      How can you have mizvot without a commander?

The question is not how to perform mitzvot without a commander, rather  how do people continue to deceive themselves, and to identify with a way of life that has been developed by ordinary people over thousands of years into a divine command. In addition, the model of man as subordinate to God, is contrary to the consciousness of the modern free man.

The observance of mitzvot without a commander stems from a will to continue the Jewish culture and national heritage that is a part of you. My starting point is the will to connect to the practical level of observance, and I turn only to those who are interested in it and try to give it a philosophical foundation. I am aware that a large part of the secular population is not interested in this, and therefore my vision is to create a continuous Jewishness, between halakhah and secularism.

7) What is your view of revelation as from heaven but creating a human text?

There are two questions. 1) The emergence of the texts. 2) Dealing with immoral things written in the Torah.

The ignorance or apologetics of the Orthodox in dealing with biblical criticism, and the failures of it which I show in my book, creates a softening that enables us to deal with moral questions as well. The strict faith in “Torah from Heaven” is crumbling, which also create moral damages, such as the prohibition of homosexuality, which causes a life of suffering for homosexual religious people. Some of them remain in loneliness and do not have sex, because they think that God dictated this commandment to Moses.

The dissolution of the traditional concept enables a softer conception of God’s revelation. The groundbreaking moral concepts and ideas that we find in the Bible can be seen as ideas inspired by God. As opposed to other content, which is human, especially when it has negative aspects.

8) How should we view God in the new age?

The awareness that all the perceptions of divinity over the ages are human ways to perceive what is beyond all perception, brings to choose one of many perceptions, one that is best suited to the modern era, and to give it dominance. The concept of mystical divinity, as developed by Rabbi Kook, is the most appropriate because the divinity is not a personal God that commands, but as all of reality perceived as divine abundance. In this perception, the rupture between the holy and the secular consolidates and unites, and the secular values ​​become an expression of divine abundance.

9) You seem like another datlash (formerly observant) who does not believe anymore and does not accept all of halakhah anymore? Lots of Israelis are like that.

You can call me a “former Orthodox,” but my attempt to connect to the  world of prayer and to softer model of Shabbat, which is close to the Orthodox Sabbath, distinguishes me from the datlash, whose religiosity is a thing of the past, a “former religious.” I am not only a person who has lost the innocent faith, and then would become a secular Jew. I am a person who in addition to the loss of his innocent faith tries to build and to connect to tradition from a new point of view, which will enable me to maintaining important and essential parts of the Jewish tradition, and to make them meaningful and relevant.

10) You seem very similar to the American liberal movements such as Conservative or Reconstructionist?

The Conservative Movement sees itself as halakhic, whereas “existential (kiyumi) Judaism” is not halachically obligated and I observe the commandments according to my ability to connect to their content.

One of the major innovations of my book is breaking the division between religious thinkers and secular thinkers such as Brenner, in whose world God does not exist. And at the same time still working with Heschel, Soloveitchik and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who deal with different types of a believer.

I present a new position between them, which places the ontological issue of God’s existence in brackets (on the side), and focuses on the subjective experience. My goal is not to deny our various emotions and to allow the possibility of entering a state of consciousness of faith in the living God when you pray or celebrate Independence Day the ingathering of the exiles to the Land of Israel. At the same time, to be able to enter an atheistic state of consciousness when facing the blindness of evil and death, such as earthquakes.

11) Are you just a liberal form of Yoav Sorek?

You are not the first person to similarities in our visions. Nevertheless, we have many differences. I would like to accentuate three of them: )1) Sorek speaks of a discourse of commitment to halakhah, even if it is a “soft” halakhah. Whereas “existential (kiyumi) Judaism” is not halachically obligated and observes the commandments according to the ability to connect to their contents. (2) His thought gives no room for total secularism and atheism, which will continue to be part of the mosaic within the various possibilities it offers. (3) In addition, I claim that on many  values ​​of Western-modern culture which are against traditional Jewish values, the Jewish values should be rejected. In many cases, we should accept Western-modern culture over Jewish values.

12) You claim to be a new movement. But, you do not have an organization, money, institution, speakers? If so, how are you a new movement?

In one of the letters that  I received from one of my readers, I was asked: “Do you intend to establish a stream/Beit Midrash/party?, I would be happy to be a partner and hear more.” Since there is no such stream, I leave things in the open deliberately, and write about it only in one of the inner pages of the second part of the book: “If there are enough people who identify with the idea of ​​existential Judaism, a website will be set up, and if it is joined by people with economic capabilities, a Beit Midrash or pre-military academy will be established in the spirit of these ideas. I am  aware that a movement will not be established without it.

The vision of establishing a movement or institution in the spirit of the ideas of this book is a dream that will probably not materialize, but maybe in another twenty years or in another generation it will arise, who knows?

What did Rav Shagar think about secular studies? He answers in a twenty page, 7000 word homily on Hanukah On Translation and Living in Multiple Worlds.  – go read the 20 page essay.  I provided a guide to the essay below to be used alongside the original text.I  planned on posting this essay the week for Hanukah already in August, without connection to the recent spate of free floating op-eds about the idea of a Rav Shagar. If you have not grasped his vision yet, this 20 page essay is one of the best places to see what he is trying to achieve.

We have once again to thank Levi Morrow for his translation of the essay. Please let me know of any errors. (For links to our more than 18 prior posts on Rav Shagar,  see here, here. here, here, and here.) As an important side point before you start the essay. If you were looking for an Orthodox postmodern theology, then the Sephardi Algerian thinker Rabbi Professor Marc-Alain Ouaknin wrote such a work twenty years ago, The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud (Princeton University Press, 1998). Rav Shagar is not that; see my excursus on Torah Umadda below.

On Translation and Living in Multiple Worlds

A Sermon for Hanukkah

Shagar starts his homily as follows. The Chanukah candles are placed in the doorway between one’s home and the outer world, which for Rav Shagar means we cannot retreat into the safety of our homes of just having Torah. In Shagar’s view “we have no choice but to exist in the space between inside and outside, between identity and strangeness.

The homily works with the Chanukah tension between the Hellenistic Greeks and the Jewish world of Torah. Shagar assumes that “to Jew” and “to Greek” are two fundamentally different attitudes to life. His question is: how to bring the two together? He offers (1) Rav Kook’s idea of translation, (2) Rav Nachman’s personal grappling with the evil klipot of the haskalah, in which he distinguishes between idolatrous language and holy speech. and (3) his own view that we are all now Rav Nachman and we are all now required us to decent into klippot.

Rav Shagar claims that the “wisdom of the Torah and the wisdom of Greece, along with the holy language and Greek language, were originally clear and distinctive signifiers.” Over the course of history” they no longer “signify specific languages or books, rather ways of learning and existing. Greek wisdom, therefore, is… able to exist even within the walls of the traditional Jewish study hall.”

The term “Greek wisdom” changed over the course of history to the term “external wisdom” which is knowledge that lacks the intimacy of “being with itself,” and at its source is an objectification of the knowledge. Hence, the conflict [between Torah and Greek Wisdom] does not have to focus on the context of the wisdom or the language used, but on intimacy and personal identity, the intimacy and identity that are the eros of the wisdom.” A distinction between “wisdom that is beautiful and effective, but lacks all passion and intimacy” and “a wisdom overflowing with meaning and intimacy, a revelation of existence and substantive content.” Notice that the term Greek wisdom could just as well apply to Torah, or Torah uMadda, while Torah as the wisdom of existential meaning that touched one’s identity may apply to any wisdom.

Rav Shagar on Secular Studies

I will start with his own opinion before we return to how he used Rav Kook and Rav Nachman. He says Rebbe Naḥman’s guidance toward naiveté and simplicity does not respond to our form of life.” Further,  Rav Shagar applies Rav Kook’s bold statement about spirituality to secular studies: “anyone who does not suffer from spiritual descents has no chance of religious ascent.” There is danger in this decent “but only this descent-endangerment can lead to ascent.” He seeks a decent into secular studies for the sake of religious ascent.

Rav Shagar thinks that we have to accept the inevitable and acknowledge that we live in multiple cultures and not fight it with sectarianism by blocking out the wider world of knowledge. “For better or worse, we are citizen of multiple cultures and we live in more than one world of values. We are not able to deny this situation, nor would we deny it if we could. Denying it would be self-denial, leading to deep, radical injury to our religious faith itself.”

Rav Shagar thinks that the confrontation with the Greek, even in Israel, is not at the university level but already from an early age via the media, literature, and our culture. “We therefore need a substantial religious-spiritual-Jewish alternative.”

Rav Shagar is firmly against the bifurcation of religion and secular into compartmentalized identities, like that of Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz who opened “an unbridgeable gap between them; he would never bring them together. Leibowitz lived with a contradiction.” Instead, Rav Shagar wants everything to reach “his subjectivity or personal identity.” In contrast to compartmentalization, Shagar wants the Religious Zionist soul to live “not in one world but in many worlds, which it likely cannot integrate. It does not compartmentalize them -Torah versus labor, faith versus science, religion versus secularism- but rather manages a confusing and often even schizophrenic set of relationships between them.”

In his essay: “My Faith: Faith in a Postmodern World” Rav Shagar suggests that the believer in modernity such as Rav Soloveitchik and Yeshayahu Leibowitz live in what he calls a “two-world approach.” “This approach establishes a boundary between the internal and the external, between one’s faith and the world in which one resides.” He argues that this worldview is  “at its core [it] is an attempt to fend off modernism’s criticism by isolating faith from the world and its values.” Within this modern worldview, “faith is not perceived as a substantive assertion about reality.”

However, in his view this “belief” in knowledge and its bifurcation from faith has collapsed, and in its wake much of what modern Jewish theologians taught, including Rav Kook, has now become “obsolete.” Not obsolete as a subject of study but obsolete as that which can adequately inspire a religiously devotional life today.

I will quote fully a paragraph of what Rav Shagar envisions as way of offering clear contrast to the modernists or Torah uMadda.

A new type of religiosity has therefore developed nowadays, one that cannot be defined by its location on any graph; it is scattered across many different (shonim), you could even call them “strange” (meshunim), centers. This religiosity does not define itself with the regular religious definitions, but enables a weaving of unusual identities, integrating multiple worlds- in a way that is not a way. [Rav Nachman of Breslov] presents a deep personal faith that, in my opinion, carries the potential for religious redemption. Where does this capacity for integrations and combinations come from? Answer: that very same deep personal faith. This faith is not faith in something, rather an act of self-acceptance. It recognizes a deep core of covenantal eros, which enables the freedom to translate and to make integrations, combinations, and connections that our fathers never dreamed of making.

A person accepts their thrown situation of life embracing it fully to make new integrations and connections, however strange or disjoined they seem. It is not located by any one rubric rather similar to Gilles Deleuze’s ideas of rhizome or  chaosmos, it avoids categorization.

To this base, Rav Shagar returns to his core ideas of seeking faith through accepting life in its complexity.

The existence of faith is not dependent on some sort of faithfulness of a given individual, because its roots are much deeper than the consciousness of its bearers. It is present as a fact, and this gives rise to the covenant. Only thus can a person accept his faith and his way of life, a necessary condition for the novel religious phenomenon we are suggesting.

For him, faith is not an assent to doctrine or affirmation of halakhah, nor is faith a Hasidic  or Rav Kookian “essence that a person discovers after removing all the excess, superficial layers around his true, stable identity.” Rather, for him, faith is “a leftover excess that a person cannot remove or digest, which destroys “dichotomies and definitions of identity, readying them for encounter and creation.” Reframing Rav Kook’s essentialism using the Lacanian term of remnant (not in its original meaning) he thinks our innate inner Jewishness still exists despite not having a stable definition or identity.

Compare the milquetoast bifurcated cognitive idea of Torah uMadda to Rav Shagar’s vision below of his ideal as ecstatic, primordial depths, and psychoanalytic.

Ecstatic and multivalent figures are sprouting up before our eyes, and they cannot be located at any one place in society, for their faith comes from a much deeper place, from times gone by. This faith is a remainder, a psycho-theological symptom manifesting as inexplicable stubbornness, as a willingness to be on the losing side of the world simply because “this is who I am and this is who I want to be,” without conscious justification… [It is] the harmony of an individual with who and what he is, without locking himself into a specific identity; he can be who he is, whoever that may be.

I will add that self-acceptance opposes attempts by a religious community to enforce observance of yarmulke, prayer, fringes, phylacteries, etc. These attempts makes religiosity forced, cowardly, and alienating, one of the causes of the spiritual superficiality of the religious community. A religion that sees itself as at war for its survival is a religion without depth and roots.

Instead of this religious enforcement, Shagar wants “a religious reality overflowing with eros. “I am who I am, which is the innermost aspect of the highest will.” He associates this eros with a dimension described in Hasidic texts that exists “beyond and in excess of its meaning.” Ḥabad discourse says that this dimension “cannot be named, nor alluded to by any extraneous detail of the conventions of language at all.” He concludes the essay stating that this is about self-revelation. “This is not the type of identification that compares the concrete manifestation of a person to a picture, symbol, or idea that exists “outside,” beyond him, but the revelation of the person as he is, without any “beyond” – this is me.”

I jumped to the last part of the essay first in order to present his view of worldly knowledge. I will now return to the other parts of the essay on Rav Kook and Rav Nachman.

Rav Kook: Greek Language on its Own

I was once at a major Israeli academic conference of Jewish studies that allows open submission of proposals. In one of the sessions devoted to Rav Kook, there were papers on his mystical diaries, his kabbalah, and his rejection of secular studies for his closest followers. There was also a paper by a clueless American frum attorney who presented on Rav Kook’s Torah uMadda. The audience did not receive his paper well.  Afterwards, he complained to me when he returned to his seat about all this misplaced focus on mystical and pietistic nonsense, when we know that Rav Kook was a modern Torah Umadda Jew, as presented by Norman Lamm in his book of that title. The attorney grumbled: how could Rav Kook be against secular studies when that is not the way he is presented in the English works he read?

This is part of a wider misreading of Rav Kook in American Modern Orthodoxy as less haredi than he was, and it certainly does not take into account his explicit instructions to his close students to minimize secular studies. More importantly, it ignores the historical trajectory created by his student Rav Moshe Tzvi Neriah who forged a committed core of Merkaz students already in the 1950’s who avoided secular. And it ignores that the interpretations of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook by his son Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook are totally against Western culture. This view of Rav Kook as anti-secular studies is the approach of Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva is what Rav Shagar is responding to in his talk.

The Rav Kook text that Rav Shagar choose to look at was given at “the inauguration of the Mizrahi movement’s study hall (beit midrash) for teachers, during Hanukkah 1932. In the talk, Rav Kook cautioned against external knowledge but language, even conceptual language, as a means of expressing ideas.

 Greek language on its own and Greek wisdom on its own” (Bavli, Baba Kamma, 83a). We see that the main intent was to distinguish between content and style. Greekness as wisdom, as a worldview – harshly injures holiness, profanes it and defiles it. Greek language, however, the language in terms of its expressive capacity, in terms of how richly it describes things – this is an entirely different matter. In the latter, there is no clash between the contents of frameworks of beliefs and ideas. Rather, only an external improvement, which in and of itself does not make contact with or impinge upon internal matters […]. The content we need not accept other than from our holy Torah […]. This is not the case when it comes to style, to the external beautification of things […].

Rav Shagar presents Rav Kook as delineating a boundary between using the Greek as the content and the container, between the medium and the language. For him, “Greek language on its own and Greek wisdom on its own.” a rabbinic phrase “means that the emptying of the light of Torah into the Greek container cannot damage and change the light of Torah, but it is capable of contributing an external improvement, which does not make contact with or impinge upon internal matters.”

Shagar presents Rav Kook as allowing the tools of Greek culture, meaning Western culture writ large. “These tools are, for examples, the tools of the academy – the reflection of research, philological and historical investigation, philosophical, literary, and linguistic richness, which Rav Kook was not afraid to make use of in writing his inspirations.”

In this statement, Rav Shagar rejects the approach of Rav Tau and the Yeshivot HaKav, a breakoff from Merkaz against all secular influences, including influence of modern educational psychology, historical and philological tools, and modern approaches to the study of the Bible.

Rav Shagar then works with Rav Kook’s text to come closer to his own view of seeking personal meaning. Rav Kook asserted in his book Eder Hayakar that the thinking individual can be trusted in his personal searches for truth.

Any idea or thought that comes from research, investigation and critique in its own right, in its pure freedom, could never come to evil, not in the general faith shared by all straight of heart and knowledgeable people […] nor in the foundation of eternal Israel and its connection to the God of its strength […]. Only an evil heart, a licentious heart […] is what causes all the disturbance. (52)

Rav Shagar says that Rav Kook’s

 thought should be seen against the background of the Hegelian understanding according to which the spirit clarifies itself and advances by way of reflection. The spirit, which is the Jewish jug of oil, clarifies itself by way of Greek language, which examines it from an external perspective, investigates it, gives it definitions and conceptual characteristics, but does not defile it internally. According to his position, the problem of Greekness only appears when we try to import an “idol” into the temple of God, meaning the content itself, attempting to integrate with the wisdom of Greece.

Notice both the historicizing of Rav Kook as seeing the theory as spirit (geist) which is crucial for Rav Shagar’s declaration that in our era is the end of Hegalian thinking and its needing to be replaced.

But Rav Shagar also notes and does not develop that Rav Kook thought that sometimes universal ideas needed to be translated and embedded in Torah. In Rav Kook’s case, he thought the ideas of freedom, nationalism, and universal morality needed to be translated into Torah. For Shagar, there are elements within Existentialism, psychoanalysis, and post-modernism that have to be translated into Torah. But the same way, Rav Kook is not trying to write academic essays about Hegel and Schopenhauer or even worried if he is reading it correctly, Rav Shagar is not concerned with the secular fields of philosophy or psychoanalysis.

Rav Nachman

The second position that Rav Shagar looks at is the anti-intellectual position of Rav Nachman. Notice that Rav Shagar did not choose to consider the more intellectual or more cultural positions about secualr studies of of Maimonides, Vilna Gaon, Hirsch, or Reines. He chooses Rav Nachman because he wants to create a path to a deep relationship with God using the secular.

In contrast to Rav Kook, Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav identified any external wisdom or Greek knowledge as a deep threat and attacked those who connected the two. “Someone who, God forbid, learns books of research and philosophy introduces doubts and heresy into his heart […] therefore we do not find any person who was made fitting and God-fearing by books of research.”  (Sihot Haran 5) Rav Nachman “exhorted his devoted followers toward naiveté (temimut) as a way of life.” Rebbe Nachman proclaimed:“Fortunate is one who does not know at all from their books [=of research] and only goes naively… It is wisdom and great service to be like an animal,” meaning naiveté and simplicity.”

Rav Nachman limited the study of the world only to the true Zaddik. “In truth there is a great prohibition against being a scholar, God forbid, and against teaching books of wisdom, God forbid. Only the very great tzadik can enter into this.” This entering into heretical ideas is permitted to the Zaddik in order for him to extract the fallen souls that fell there into their traps, due to the knowledge and skepticism of the enlightenment.

[I am skipping over a section in the homily about language in Rav Nachman compared to Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin because Rav Shagar’s views on language deserve their own discussion.]

Rav Shagar turns to Rebbe Naḥman’s book, Likutei Moharan (I:19), where he teaches about three languages: the holy language, idolaters’ language, and the language of translation.  The first language, the holy language is entirely self –referential without any connection to the outside world as its own reality, which

 can be experienced through the practice of Bratslav or Ḥabad-style learning, with their various jargons, intuitions, movements, and deviation. This practice reveals that this is not study that refers to reality but study that itself becomes reality. It does not have an object, but rather exists in itself – existence as a Bratslav world or existence as a Ḥabad world.

The second language, the idolaters’ language of “the seventy nations” corrupts the covenant. According to Rav Shagar in his interpretation of Rav Nachman as anti-capitalist, anti-Neoliberalism and anti-instrumental, the language of the idolaters is about  capitalism, profit, and instrumentalism. “The will to conquer and control via the word leads to corrupted sexuality.” This language creates gaps between the self and world, between meaning and activity and between the individual and reality. This type of speech presents itself as beautiful, wise, and refined, but does not get to the core or a person.

Quoting Rav Nachman, Shagar accepts that “this is the language of the demon-scholar (shed-talmid hakham), who uses his linguistic aesthetics and rhetoric to create an impression on the other and dominate him via language:  (LM 1:28:1)”  Much of the cognitive gestures of American Torah uMadda would fall into this category.

In his essay on the disengagement that I posted last year, he followed this line of thinking and proclaimed that secular studies are corrupting and we have to do jihad against secular studies. But he wrote there following the idea of dispute in Rav Nachman combined with Franz Rosenzweig  that in the conclusion of the battle the secular should be integrated into a revitalized religious life.

The Third Langauge: Translation

The third language for Rebbe Naḥman is the language of translation, which is an instance of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that contains both holiness and the impure spiritual entities (kelipot), and between the holy and the idolaters’ languages. This knowledge can go for either good or bad depending on who uses it. One must eat the good of the tree and avoid the bad.  Rav Shagar when following this line of thinking, explicitly rejects the idea of a clean distinction between language and ideas. Language always unavoidably contributes something, so what language you use matters.

Rav Shagar portrays Rebbe Naḥman’s teaching on translation as effecting a change from a concrete language to a signifier of reality used to create holiness. The language of translation is born in the sin of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is not  the wholesomeness (temimut) of the holy language. Rebbe Naḥman teaches that, from this position, it can turn in one of two ways. “It can make you smarter (maskelet) or it can make you bereaved (meshakelet), knowledge of good or knowledge of evil.”

However, it is important to note that this is not “in a meager instrumental manner, rather the translation “illuminates the letters of the holy language.” A quest for holiness.

Rav Shagar on first thought said “This seems similar to Rav Kook’s Hegelian outlook” of an eternal spirit placed in new vessels. But then, Shagar reverses and says that “Rebbe Naḥman… does more than this. It also transforms the holy language itself, changing its primary sense.”  Making him a paradigm for transforming Judaism by grappling with the ambiguity of the Tree of Knowledge.

The interesting example given by Shagar is Rebbe Naḥman’s telling of fantastic tales “of kings and princesses, fantastic lands and wondrous creatures, including giants, spirits, men of the woods, and a prince made entirely of precious stones.”  For Rav Shagar, “Naḥman’s main purpose with his stories is to translate to transport the listener to a magical, mythical, world “from the days of yore.”  Rebbe Nachman takes stories without a “Jewish or religious characteristics at all” and uses them to serve God by exposing “the listener to a world of experiences, which is entirely disconnected from the religious experience and its normal, accepted, forms in the traditional Jewish world.”

In a lecture Rav Shagar gave in 1987 about Hasidic stories, on which I was asked to speak about this past summer, Shagar pointed out that in the 18^th century Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye used a ribald story from the Decameron to teach hasidut through finding a message in a adulterous story. Rav Shagar used the ribald story and its Hasidic retelling as a way to speak about the role of eros, sin, journeys, and confession as a way of meeting God. This is a good example of his idea of secular studies.  We use films, stories, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and anything else needed to wake people up for the needed teaching of Torah.

The goal is not to discuss secular studies or post-modernism or be intellectual. The contemporary goal of Greek wisdom is for the religious seeker to be exposed to new experiences that are not part of the current religious world- such as music, art, psychology, literature, India, movies, science fiction- and use the non-religious material experience to embrace a richer experience of the divine

Appendix: Excerpt from Lecture on Lekutei Moharan I 19

In the above lecture he quoted his own lectures on Rav NahmanLekutei Moharan I:19. The quote below from Rav Shagar in the hasidic lecture is important for this Chanukah homily.

Rav Shagar asks is this activity of translation ideal? And answers that we have no choice today. But he also says that academic language is generally not the language to be used for translated, rather we should seek items something that will help the holy language of Torah bloom.

Is translation less than ideal, only for those who have fallen to low places, or is it an ideal project? This question is irrelevant for us, who have no other option; we have no choice but to translate if we want to turn the Torah we learn into a Torah of life. Every person and student must ask himself what is his place. For example, we cannot study Rebbe Nahman’s writings the same way that Rav Koenig learned them and taught them in his lectures. If we tried to do so, we would just end up with a poor imitation that misses the whole point. On the other hand, it is possible that a Bratslav hasid would not feel the deficiency of staying in the world of the Holy Language. Furthermore, we must note that not all languages external to Torah are fitting to serve as a language of translation. Academic language is not necessarily a language of translation, because it is often superficial, and constrains the Holy Language rather than encouraging it to bloom. Every now and then, there is a flicker, but in general it cannot express the world of holiness.

Torah Umadda

A few words of his view of Torah uMadda, his relationship to the late 20^th century modern Orthodox idea of studying secular studies.

TL:DR Rav Shagar is not Torah uMadda.

Shagar’s approach is not a cognitive gesture of combining contemporary thought with Torah, nor is he just another interesting book to be discussed in a once a week class in Jewish thought. Some have been forcing Rav Shagar into their procrustean bed of the familiar by framing him in American terms as just the latest rabbi in long series of formulations of synthesis of Torah and secular knowledge. He is not.  Rather, he is offering a different approach to the observance of Judaism after being straightjacketed by the ideology of forbidding Western knowledge. Shagar’s approach does not fit the usually categories of a theology of synthesis nor a humanistic model.

Another misreading of Rav Shagar’s thought reads him as a Fundamentalist position of their own device. Some Evangelical Christian theologians, such as Stanley Grenz, claimed that postmodernism supported faith in religion since it destroyed foundationalism and through it denuded the critiques of religion. Therefore, one can be a firm Evangelical believer without worrying about critiques to religion. Therefore I was surprised to see one op-ed treat Rav Shagar the way Evangelicals treat postmodernism, as if Shagar was claiming in a postmodern age we don’t worry about questions and critiques to religion anymore and can just fortify our dogmatic Orthodoxy using postmodernism.

Rav Shagar, however, explicitly said that in our age without fixed answers one has a sharp choice. Either seeks greater certainty like the Hardal in Israel who have Fundamentalist certainty, or one has to be open to new ideas and accept the new paradoxes. The old synthesis approach is not applicable in our age. There is no compartmentalization of Torah and secular.

Another way of denaturing him is to say that just like in the past there has been Torah uMadda with Neo-Kantian categories, Hegelian syntheses, and Kierkegaardian faith, now we apply postmodernism for the cognitive gesture. However, it is not so simple. Unlike Modern Orthodoxy, Rav Shagar followers can, and do, study the Yoga Sutras, Derrida, Spinoza, and Talmud criticism in the beit midrash as part of the Yeshiva seder or they can study film making or critical Bible in the University. They have changed the study hall and the religious life. They have gone places that Modern Orthodoxy never went. They go headlong into the big questions, they just dont worry about answers or resolving contradictions.

If one applied his ideas to a United States day school, then one would change one’s school to go headlong into Hasidut, Agadah, Kafka, yoga, and Franz Rosenzweig for a month instead of Talmud and halakhah. One would also bring in experts to lecture on Biblical and Talmudic scholarship, who are not engaged in apologetics. Then, after that month, return to Talmud but bring questions of 21^st century meaning and values to the Talmud study.

Finally, to sum it up clearly. Rav Shagar used worldly knowledge to expand his life not create a text. He is in the person (gavra) and not a text (heftza).

The only recent current English article who understood and had insights into Rav Shagar was by Julian Sinclair, who was able to do because he spent time studying with Rav Shagar.

Happy Thanksgiving -Here are the links to  three of my prior posts in which I posted Thanksgiving prayers.  I am posting tonight to give everyone a chance to print out before the holiday. In future years, I hope to post a few more historic Thanksgiving day services from earlier in the century.

Service for Thanksgiving Day 1940 – Rabbi Joseph Lookstein (2014)

Rabbi Joseph Lookstein’s Thanksgiving prayer was exceptionally universal and was picked up from my blog by several widely read online sites as a wonderful universal prayer- ideal for Thanksgiving reading. Here is a pdf of just the service.Thanksgiving Service at KJ 1940

Service for Thanksgiving Day 1945 – Rabbi David de Sola Pool (2009)

Service for Thanksgiving Day 1905- In Commemoration of 250 Years of Jews in the US(2016)

There was a special convocation in 1905 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the settlement of Jews in the United States. It was held the Sabbath before Thanksgiving and the prayer was written by Rev H. Pereira Mendes of the Spanish- Portuguese synagogue of NY.

Elsewhere on the Web

1789 Sermon Gershom Mendes Seixas

There is also the historic sermon from 1789 at the start of the US by Rev Gershom Mendes Seixas 40-page sermon for the first national Thanksgiving (1789) or an easier to use version here.

To jump forward to contemporary prayers. Here are two contemporary prayers. 

A Thanksgiving Prayer by Rabbi Naomi Levy  of Nashuva in Los Angeles via RitualWell

A Prayer for Thanksgiving by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi via Opensiddur.org

Here are two sermons 50 years apart.

America, Bless God — A Thanksgiving Day Sermon by Rabbi Norman Lamm

THANKSGIVING SHABBAT 2011 by Rabbi Edward Feinstein Valley Beth Shalom with a Thanksgiving prayer or as she calls it, a kavannah, by Ina J. Hughes

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo of himself giving his baby daughter a century-old family heirloom, a kiddush cup, which he said belonged to her great-great-grandfather, also named Max. Nearby is a marble kitchen counter topped with two lit Shabbat candles and challah under a white cover.

“For shabbat tonight, we gave Max a kiddush cup that has been in our family for almost 100 years. Her great-great-grandfather Max got it after our family immigrated here and it has been passed down through our family ever since,” Zuckerberg wrote in the post. He felt strongly that he was following the tradition in his family. In this case, we have the observance of Jewish ritual with concern for the ideology, halakhah, or meaning. There is no concern whether one is technically Jewish, with God, or any concern about denominations. The observance itself is meaningful as traditional.

Zuckerberg’s approach has been documented is recently published study called Traditional Judaism: The Conceptualization of Jewishness in the Lives of American Jewish Post-Boomers by Ari Y. Kelman, Tobin Belzer, Ilana Horwitz, Ziva Hassenfeld, Matt Williams.  Jewish Social Studies, (Volume 23, Number 1, Fall 2017, pp. 134-167- requires subscription) I saw it because Matt Williams posted it on FB.

In the new study, they show that post-boomer Jews do not look at Judaism as a religion or as an ethnicity, rather as the pull of traditional practices, yet without any sense of being either voluntary or binding.

In 2000, Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, a demographer and a historian of modern Jewish religion respectively, wrote an important work called The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America, which showed that for baby boomers, American religion is now individualistic, a market place, focusing on personal journeys, spiritual moments, self-help, and the inner self. Cohen and Eisen conclude that Jewish life is entering the era of a breakdown of a grand narrative of Jewish peoplehood. Their refrain for the last seventeen years has been to proclaim that the denomination identity through belonging to a shul has broken down. Therefore, the sky is falling. How do we put people back into the post-war era of belonging to a synagogue?

Their focus on identity through religious denomination obscured the role of the non-religious aspects of Jewish culture in Jewish life such as Jewish literature, politics, summer camp, social action, Federation work, Sephardic culture, Yiddish, art, and family connections. Hence, someone who did not believe in theism or have a synagogue membership, but spent their time professionally and socially in Jewish life would still be listed as a “none.”

In this new study on Jewish traditionalism, the authors of the article limit their scope to ritual without connecting it to all those other forms of Jewish life. Nevertheless, they show that even those who keep religious ritual, go to synagogue, or pray may still be among the “nones.” Those post-boomers whom they studied referred to themselves as not religious, even when performing mitzvot as a ritual.

These post-boomers reject religion and  “described themselves explicitly as not  religious  typically associated  religion with wisdom or  expectations that came  from  a divine source  manifested in legal formulations.” For them, “Religion,  they held,  existed  “out  there,”  in the  realm  of the  divine, the  faithful,  the  biblical,  the  legal,  institutional, and  prescribed.” Those post-boomers whom they studied tended to offer a stricter definition of religious than  those who identified as religious.

The important point of the study is they they are not weak forms of the 1950’s which are petering out but a full affirmation of the ritual reconfigured to work and be meaningful for the 21^st century.

Both  the  1990  National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) and  the  2013 Pew report on American  Jews used  religion as a key indicator for determining whether a possible interviewee might  qualify for  inclusion in  the  study.   The  Pew Research  Center foregrounded distinctions between  “Jews by religion”  and  “Jews not  by religion,”

Despite  the  persistence of religion as a term  that  might  describe them,  on  the  whole American  Jews do  not  actively or regularly  participate  in  activities  or  institutions that  look  terribly  religious.  Just over one-quarter (26  percent) of American  Jews say that  religion is very important in their lives, whereas 56 percent of the general public makes that  claim.  American  Jews also attend religious  services with far less frequency than  do other Americans;  only 23 percent of Jews attend religious  services once  a month or more,  whereas  62 percent of Americans  in general claim to do so.

As incoming college  students, Jews were among  the  least  likely to score  strongly on  measures   of  both  religious  commitment and  religious  engagement,   scoring  in  the  single  digits,  alongside Buddhists,   Unitarian Universalists,  and  those  incoming students who  have  no  religious preference… Sociologist Nancy Ammerman found that Jews were also outliers in the use of theistic  and  spiritual  discourse”, in which only 30% used theistic language. The next lowest group was at 60%

The majority of those they interviewed described themselves as not religious. They avoided God language and public worship, but still performed ritual. Notice how much of their findings could also apply to those who do actually belong to synagogues, even to Orthodox synagogues.

Here are some of the vignettes they present:

Sam, who was involved  in  Jewish youth  groups through high  school,  explained, “I didn’t  really believe in what most people would call God,”  and  “I still very much  enjoy songs and prayers, the experience, and I still connect  to the  community, and  I still feel connected to friends  and  family, especially [those] who are  Jewish. That’s  a part  that  wouldn’t  be there without the religious  aspect, but to me, it doesn’t  feel religious  anymore.”

Jacoba  explained, “The religion itself means  very little to me. I wouldn’t  say that I’m a religious person at all; I would say that  I practice certain  observances,  but the  reason  I do them  is not  out  of belief  in God or belief  in halakhah [Jewish law], no. . . . It’s more  out  of being  part  of a community that’s very warm, and  being  part  of a family that  has some  positive attributes in itself, like having a day to rest and  hang  out with your family. I think it’s great.  And the  holidays can be lovely because  you spend  them  with family, so it’s really more  about  a family community for me, in terms of Judaism now.”

For Diana,  “Judaism  offers a lot of tools for us to discuss important things,  and  you were born into a family where this is the language that they have and these are the tools that you were born  into that you have that we can use to help talk about the universe, ethics, culture, identity, and let’s find out what this culture says about  those  things  and  how we can look at them,  and  then you can decide  what your place is in that and if you want to continue.

So how do these post-boomers explain what they do? They don’t. But they don’t like the expectations of established denominations.

Regardless  of whether our  interviewees  described themselves  as religious  or not  religious,  they all generally  rejected the  notion of a meaningful framework  emerging from their  understandings of faith, law, the  Bible, and  direct  divine intervention.

[T]hey referred to religion as something abstract,  judgmental, and irrational. They shared  a common sense that religion had limited authority over  their  lives, regardless of how  personally  meaningful they found it. To be not religious was to reject  the authority of rabbis and Bible, liturgy, Hebrew,  obligatory  laws, empty rituals, and unrealistic expectations of prayer and the like. Yet rejecting religion did not require them  to abandon Jewish rituals,  holidays,  or other practices that they called tradition.

Traditional Judaism

But they do like ritual. The performance of ritual is up. Once upon a time, when Marshall Sklare did his Lakeview studies of the 1940’s, he found that only 6% thought ritual was important to be a Jew. Now, ritual is seen as an important part of religion and for many the most meaningful part. This was already noted in Tom Beaudoin,Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (1998), that compared to the Boomers, post-boomers like ritual. The trends documented in the article help account for the success of methods of Chabad offering discrete ritual without asking for belief or commitment such as giving shumarah matzah to a non-kosher seder, or encouraging lighting candles without asking further question.

The point of the article is that their informants called what they do- “tradition” to describe  the  elements of Jewishness that  they incorporated into their lives. They themselves use that word “tradition.”

Michelle explained how she and her  fiancée  were “figuring  out”  how to incorporate Jewish ritual  in their  lives… [Lighting Shabbat  candles] would have meaning for me, I guess, not necessarily because it’s this religious thing. . . . We do want it. We are both into tradition and  sentiment and  family, and  that comes in hand with all this religious  stuff. You know what I’m saying? We’ll take it because  that’s the tradition, and we care more  about  it as a tradition, I guess.

Yair  offered  a similar  description of his observance of Yom  Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which for him included fasting but not attending synagogue.  “I don’t fast on Yom Kippur because of religious reasons  . . . I view it as a tradition.” With perfect  ambiguity.

Generational Connection

The  generational-connection trope  allowed  interviewees  to connect their  actions  and  beliefs to a past and to an envisioned future, as in the case of Zuckerberg above.

Sarah,   “Religion  is not  a way I connect to Judaism,  but  tradition is. So it’s the  sense of pride  for me to do things  that  are part  of tradition that has been  happening for generations. I feel like they’re  part  of carrying that  on to the  next  generation.”

I just  don’t  give any  thoughts to  things  like  biblical  stories,  [or] the [dietary] laws of kashrut. . . . I don’t  want to know what [Hebrew prayers] mean.  I hate  when  we translate them  into  English  ’cause  I don’t  like talking about  the “Almighty God” and all of that. But I really like lighting candles.  I really like celebrating Jewish holidays. I like those traditions. I like the idea that  people all over the world, for thousands of years, have done  these  traditions, that’s what they mean  to me. They don’t  mean  to me like whatever they’re supposed to mean  about  God.

Brian shared  one of the most illustrative stories of someone whose commitment to tradition rests not on religion but on his connection to the future.

To give you an  example, my girlfriend’s  not  Jewish. The  other day for Hanukkah, I decided to light the  candles.  She asked me, “Why are you lighting  the  candles?”  I said, “Well, it’s Hanukkah.” She’s like, “I know it’s Hanukkah, but you’re not really religious.” I said, “I want to do it for myself. I just want to know that I know the tradition, the ritual.  I want to do it for myself just to reinforce it.” I’m not  doing  it because  I want to make  sure that  God is listening,  that  He knows that  I care. I’m doing  it because  I want to be able to tell my kids, “This is how you light the candles on Hanukkah.” I guess that’s kind of how I look at it.

Despite the good-natured teasing of his girlfriend, Brian lit Hanukkah candles with all of the religious overtones and content intact, provided… that  he made  sense of his performance as tradition and  did not take the formulaic blessing or its theological content to heart.

Getting Together

Besides tradition, they also identified ritual with contemporary social and  familial  networks.

For Elizabeth,  the ritual  of a Friday night  dinner proved  especially appealing. Friday night  marks  the  onset  of the  Jewish Sabbath,  and Elizabeth  approached the  ceremonial dinner as an  opportunity for socializing and education but not for religion.

For us [her and  her  husband], a lot of it is educating our  friends,  both Jewish friends and our non-Jewish friends.  We are sort of that couple  that always has like people over for like Shabbat  dinners and  holidays,  and like I said, Jewish and  non-Jewish. It’s not  meant to be like an outreach kind of thing or try to make people religious because we’re not religious. It’s just like a way to sort of make  everybody stop for a second  and  put down their  phones and  like have a proper dinner and  have like proper conversation.

Penelope and  Sally pointed to their  affinity for synagogues  as important sites for connecting to Jewishness, though not necessarily  with religion. Both  women  described themselves  as not religious,  yet both  explained that they seek out synagogues  and  their communities when  traveling  for work. Penelope enjoys the  “cultural traditions” of Jewish life, “but  not  necessary  the  organized religion aspects of it.” Still, “when I go to places where I don’t  know anyone,” she said, “I still go to the Jewish community. That’s my way of meeting people.” Likewise, Sally, who used to travel for work a great deal, made a habit of going to synagogue  on Saturday mornings no matter where she  was.

I did continue to go to synagogue  in every city. I found some  beautiful temples. I still am close to people I met for one Shabbat  in the middle of the  country.  It really kept  me grounded. I was really grateful  for it. Just the feeling  of prayer,  not religious. . . . Not being  religious  but a celebration  with food  and  with music…

Penelope and  Sally approached synagogues  as centers for socialization,  for  grounding, and  for  finding   community while  away from home.  The  traditional elements and  established space  and  time  of synagogue  practice helped them  locate  Jewish connections in unfamiliar places.

Not Nones

The article argues that these younger Jews might be considered as religious “nones,” or excluded from demographic of Jewish life since they claim to be not religious, not synagogue members, and not theists. These Jews claim an affinity for religious tradition, but avoid religion as they define it. This opens up the bigger question of the very possibility of a Jewish “none.” The idea of faith and synagogue membership as defining belonging is very Protestant, but does not work for Jews (as well as Muslims, and Hindus). The article cites those who seek to differentiate Judaism from Protestant categories, but without the broader historical sense of historians or global sociologists who would show how much of this would apply in other ritual based faiths.

The study offers as a conclusion.

First, the  preference for the  language of tradition suggests that the  sociological  distinction between  Jews by religion and  Jews of no religion emphasized in studies  like the  1990 NJPS and  the  2013 Pew report creates  a sharp  distinction between  groups  that  are,  in reality,  more  fluid.

This argument against  the  use of religion as a meaningful way to understand distinctions among  American  Jews should  not  be taken as a case for the rise of secularism.  What appealed to so many of our interviewees  was not  an explicitly or independently secular  realm  of Jewish life but  a way of making  Jewish life enjoyable  and  meaningful. Casting such occasions  as traditional instead  of religious  allowed our interviewees to activate those associations  while disregarding any theological overtones or  moral  finger-wagging.

Similarly, their  almost total avoidance  of the term  ethnicity suggested  that  it had  even less significance  in their  conceptualization of Jewishness, insofar as they did not offer it as a meaningful or useful term  to describe  their  Jewishness.

Eisen & Cohen understands this quality of tradition to be problematic because it is a breakdown from the 1950’s-1960’s..  Eisen framing  it in between  “the way of being Jewish as determined by God and by age- old  authorities” and  that  epitomized by more  “fragmentary, variable,  and  individualized” engagements.”

Yet this study shows that despite Eisen’s imagined future, the tenacity  of tradition that  holds  a kind  of authority, albeit one  rather distant  from  the  external and  eternal kind  that  he seems to  both  imagine  and  prefer.

For post-boomers, tradition may offer  a way of conceptualizing “the  only authentic response to the past,” but it should  not be mistaken  for a weak version of a strong central  Jewish religious  authority. Instead, it should  be understood as a mechanism for retaining connections to Jews and  Jewishness over time, within which change is a reasonable expectation and adherence is flexible.

Our  interviewees  revealed  no  such  deal  and  expressed no  such tension. They  seemed  largely uninterested in “elites of the  center” and were quite willing to engage  with the authority of tradition, even when  it did  not  make  immediate sense  to  them…  The  inconsistencies that  so bothered Eisen,… did  not  seem  to plague  our interviewees, who were well aware of the contradictions and tensions inherent in almost any commitment—ideological, interpersonal, cultural,  or otherwise.  Tradition, in their  view, offers a way to accept  an authority that one already understands has no power to enforce itself.

Paradoxically, as Jews beyond ethnicity, ritual allow them to open up Judiasm beyond the tight bonds of organized religion. For example, Zuckerberg’s Shabbat candles, challah, and kiddish with his daughter and wife.

Our  interviewees, many of whom have non-Jewish parents, peers,  and  partners, offer no  such  connection between  the  traditions that  they embrace and their sense of a normative, ethnonational identity. Instead, tradition affords  a way of opening up the  exclusivity of ethnicity  and  easing the  limitations of religious  obligation. Rather  than  reinforcing a boundary, tradition offers a kind of cultural resource that  could  be shared  with everyone  in their  social circles, Jewish or not. Tradition offers  all  of  the  positive  valences—occasions  for  gathering, and structures for  socializing  that  are  often  associated  with religion— without  any of its prescriptive obligations or its limitations on who can participate. It is neither as commanding as their  notion of religion nor  as exclusive as associations  with ethnicity.

One final point, the authors note that this is not the traditionalism of Israeli mesorati who have a  ‘thick’ sense of ethno-national (Jewish)  identification.” Here they can be non-traditional and without the ethno-national identity.

I originally asked for a wide variety of responses to Rabbi Tucker’s book and my interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker.  We already received a nice series of responses so far. The first response was  by Dr. Malka Simkovich, the second response was by Yoav Sorek, the third response was by Rabbi Ysoscher Katz, and the fourth response was by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper. The fifth response was by Rabbi Professor Yehudah Mirsky. I sought diverse responses including ones from the OU and from a Sephardi perspective, they never arrived. However,  below is a sixth response from a Conservative movement perspective.

Last week, I received one from the Conservative movement written by Rabbi Prof. Pamela Barmash who is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Washington University in St. Louis. She received a B.A. from Yale University, rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is the author of Homicide in the Biblical World (Cambridge University Press). She is finishing a book on the Laws of Hammurabi. She has served as the rabbi of Temple Shaare Tefilah, Norwood, MA.  She has served on the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly since 2003 and has served on the Joint Beit Din of the Conservative movement since 2008. She has written many teshuvot for the movement.

In specific, she wrote a recent responsa for the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards entitled “Women and Mitzvot” asking the question:  “Are Jewish women responsible for observing the mitzvot from which they have traditionally been exempted?” To which she answers on behalf of the assembly: “We rule therefore that women and men are equally obligated to observe the mitzvot. We call upon Conservative synagogues, schools, and camps to educate men and women in equal observance of  mitzvot and to expect and require their equal observance of mitzvot.”

So the question in all of this for some of my readers is where is the push for egalitarianism among liberal Orthodox, Israeli liberal Religious Zionism and halakhic egalitarianism is different than the Conservative movement? This post will allow the reader to decide.

Particularly important is Rabbi Barmash’s special note about the role of women in society, in that, it touches on some of the prior responses that were posted here. It was an aside, a special note in the responsa, but the focus of our discussions here.

A Special Note

It is the case that learning to integrate the performance of mitzvot into our daily routines  takes time and reflective effort for all of us, both women and men. For those in our communities  who are in their beginning steps in the journey of mitzvot, and even for those of us who have  integrated many mitzvot into the path of our lives, it must be emphasized that we are all trying to  increase the holiness that mitzvot bring to our lives and that each mitzvah observed causes  holiness to suffuse our lives more and more. Each mitzvah allows us to walk another step in the  journey toward and with God. In the process of learning the observance of mitzvot, no one is  expected to learn to fulfill every mitzvah all at once.

For many women who grew up in a different atmosphere regarding women’s roles, the  call to observe mitzvot heretofore closed to them will be inspiring and deeply spiritual. They will  feel ready to fulfill many mitzvot, and they will eagerly learn new habits. But for some women  who were raised in a non-egalitarian or not-completely egalitarian atmosphere, it is  understandable that they may be hesitant to take on new mitzvot. Learning new mitzvot may be  challenging, and some women may find certain mitzvot daunting for a significant span of time.  However, it is the calling of our communities, synagogues, schools, and camps to teach men and  women to consider themselves equally obligated to fulfill mitzvot and to educate them equally in mitzvot.

Rabbi Pamela Barmash on Rabbi Tucker

I largely agree with Rabbi Ethan Tucker’s assessment of the unfolding of halakhah. I have written three teshuvot that I would like to bring into conversation with his interview.

In his discussion of the changing social status of women, Rabbi Tucker points to an analogous development in the assessment of the deaf. I wrote two teshuvot dealing with the deaf who use sign language, here and here.

I argue that the rabbinic categorization of the heresh (deaf-mute) together with the shoṭeh (mentally incapacitated) marginalizes the deaf.(Babylonian Talmud Hagigah 2b) By contrast, those with other physical disabilities are restricted only when their particular physical limitation prevents them from participating in a particular act: their impairment hinders them from specific practices. For the deaf-mute, their physical disability disenfranchises them completely. They are thoroughly excluded because their disability is associated with a mental incapacity, not solely a physical limitation. The rabbis categorized the deaf-mute in such a way because the rabbis were unable to determine their mental functioning. A person must have sound cognitive ability (דעת) in order to be a fully functioning individual in the realm of halakhah.

The ruling about the heresh arises from the rabbi’s inability to determine the mental function of a deaf-mute person as illustrated in Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 113a-b. Two questions are analyzed: 1) Terumah must be intentionally separated from other produce. The question arises as to whether terumah separated by a deaf-mute remained unconsecrated produce. 2) If a man had intimate relations with the wife of a deaf-mute, would he be required to offer the sacrifice of asham talui because the marriage of a deaf-mute was valid only according to special rabbinic enactment. A number of rabbis contended that if a deaf-mute separated terumah from other produce, even though he was prohibited ab initio from doing so, his separation of terumah could be considered valid ex post facto because it could be that he did so with the proper intention. Therefore, the terumah cannot revert back to unconsecrated produce. In regard to the second issue, the marriage of the deaf-mute, the rabbis were unsure about its source of authorization. If the deaf-mute were allowed to marry only by special rabbinic enactment, then another man who was intimate with the deaf-mute’s wife did not transgress a biblical prohibition and therefore did not have to offer the sacrifice of asham talui. However, some rabbis argued that the offender does need to offer that sacrifice because the source for the deaf-mute contracting a marriage might be the same as for all Jews because the deaf-mute has the same mental capacity as other Jews do, and no special rabbinic enactment was necessary.

Rav Ashi asked: What is Rav Eleazar’s reason [for not permitting the terumah that a deaf-mute has separated to revert to unconsecrated status and for requiring an asham talui for intercourse with a deaf-mute’s wife]? Is it obvious to him that the deaf-mute is weak in cognitive ability? Perhaps, he is doubtful as to whether [the deaf-mute’s] mind is sound [and therefore the deaf-mute can understand the proceedings and so his separation of terumah is valid and his marriage is not only valid according to rabbinic enactment] or not sound [and therefore the deaf-mute cannot understand the proceedings and so his separation of terumah is invalid and his marriage is at most valid through rabbinic enactment], though [in either case] his cognitive ability is always in the same condition [the deaf-mute’s mind is always in the same condition, unlike the mentally incapacitated who might be lucid at times].

Or perhaps, he has no doubt that the [deaf-mute’s] mind is weak and never lucid. [Rav Eleazar’s doubt] here is due to this reason: Because [the deaf-mute] may sometimes be in a normal state and sometimes be in a state of mental incapacity.

In what respect would this constitute any practical difference? [It makes a difference in respect to] releasing his wife by a letter of divorce. If you grant that his mind is always in the same condition,  his divorce [would have the same validity] as his betrothal.  If, however, you contend that sometimes he is in a normal state  and sometimes he is in a state of mental incapacity, he would be capable of valid betrothal, but he would not be capable of giving divorce [because he might be of weak mind at that time, in which case his divorce would be invalid]. What [then is the decision]? This remains undecided.

The confusion of the rabbis about the mental capacity of the deaf-mute extended to divorce. In extending a divorce, the deaf-mute must be in the same mental state as when the marriage was contracted.( Mishnah Gittin 2:6 ) If the deaf-mute were only intermittently impaired, the divorce could not be executed because it would be unclear whether at the moment of divorce the deaf-mute was lucid. The quandary the rabbis faced was that they could not determine the mental state of the deaf mute and, therefore, could not decide the questions before them.

Starting in the nineteenth century, significant advances were made in the education of the deaf-mute, and their soundness of their cognitive ability became evident. Nonetheless, the assumption that deafness was evidence of flawed intelligence continued to prevail in the general community. Sign language was maligned as a broken version of a spoken language. Only in 1960 did a professor of linguistics at Gallaudet University (then College), William C. Stokoe, Jr., publish the first analysis of a sign language as an ordered system governed by syntax.  In 1979, two linguists, Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi, demonstrated that sign languages are as complex, abstract, and systematic as spoken languages: they are controlled by the same part of the brain as spoken languages and are mastered in developmental stages like spoken languages.

A number of Jewish communities began to establish schools for the education of deaf children. Among halakhic authorities there has been a slow drift toward recognizing the cognitive ability of the deaf.

My teshuvot rule that 1) the categorization of the deaf-mute as mentally incapacitated is to be revoked and that they are to be considered completely lucid, and 2) sign language may be used in matters of personal status (such as weddings and divorces) and may be used in liturgy This is mandated by a new understanding of the cognitive ability of the deaf. Their social status has changed due to two factors: a transformation in the understanding of hearing people, who now comprehend that the deaf who use sign language have sound cognitive ability, contrary to the assumptions made in the past about them, and the increased educational and societal opportunities for the deaf.

An analogous developed has occurred with regard to women, the topic of another teshuvah of mine.  Cultural attitudes have shifted dramatically in society in general, and doors into business and the professions formerly closed to women are now open. Women participate in public life in ways unimaginable a century or two ago, or even a few decades ago. This is an intellectual and psychological transformation in how women perceive themselves and are perceived by others. Women are now seen as equal to men, in social status, in political and legal rights, and in intellectual ability by both men and women. A new world-view has resulted in new roles for women.

It must be emphasized that the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud did not doubt the intellectual abilities of women. Women were charged with responsibility for certain domestic mitzvot, mitzvot whose breach incurred serious consequences for the members of the household, including the (male) head of the household. Women were given responsibility for separating hallah from dough at home. (The mitzvah for bread baked outside the home was fulfilled by men, who served as professional bakers, and the Mishnah does mention dough prepared by herdsmen, such as in Mishnah Hallah 1.8) Women were given the responsibility for the preparation of matzah, and despite the seriousness of the preparations for Passover, they were not supervised by men. The (male) head of the household had the responsibility, according to the Mishnah, to make sure that food kept warm on the Sabbath was done without violating the Sabbath. The Talmud shows that women took care of this task, with many references to women knowing the many details on keeping food warm on the Sabbath.

Women were given responsibility for ritual tasks that took place in the home without any concern for any lack of knowledge, reliability, or intellect on the part of women, according to the Mishnah and Talmuds. At the same time, women did not serve in public ritual roles, nor were they required to perform the mitzvot to be performed by those of highest social standing.

The exclusion of women from public ritual roles was due to two principles. The first is that an individual who is not obligated for a specific mitzvah cannot satisfy the obligation of another individual who is obligated for a specific mitzvah.(Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3:8) The second is that social standing matters and that those of higher social standing would lose their dignity if some of lower social standing functioned on their behalf. In the case of the public reading of Scripture:

A minor may translate for an adult (who is chanting from Scripture in public) but it is beneath his dignity for an adult to translate for a minor.

(Tosefta Megillah 3:21)

The reader’s social status mattered: a woman or a minor was eligible technically but nonetheless could not represent the congregation, and to do so would infringe on the dignity of the congregation. A woman could not fulfill the obligation of a man because she had a lower social status.

Often, the discussion of women’s status vis-a-vis the mitzvot revolves on the traditional exemption of women from what were deemed time-triggered positive mitzvot. The problem with this exemption is that women were required to perform many time-triggered positive mitzvot. Moreover, many of the time-triggered positive mitzvot did not have to be performed in a narrow window of time. They can be performed at home, and a number of them require only a slight amount of time to fulfill. Women were exempted, for example, from hearing the shofar, a mitzvah that could be completed at any point during the day and one that does not take much time to fulfill.

Women were put into the same category as minors and slaves with an essential difference: minors could grow up and slaves could be emancipated, but women deemed to remain in the same social status.(Babylonian Talmud Bava Kamma 88a and Berakhot 47b)

Women were exempted because the acts of those who are subordinate to an earthly master honor God in a lesser way. It must be emphasized that the subordination of women was about their social status, about their place in the hierarchy of family and society.

When social customs change significantly, the changed social reality requires further unfolding of halakhah. I argue that women are now to be held as equally responsible for the mitzvot as men have been and that the social status of women entitles them to participate in public ritual and may fulfill mitzvot on behalf of others.

Other significant social changes need to be considered: if both men and women are now taking responsibility for infants and young children as well as for frail relatives and friends, it may be that they should be released from the mitzvot that interfere with care-giving for the duration in which they bear those duties. An essential principle of rabbinic tradition has been that an individual who is busy with one mitzvah is exempt from another.(Babylonian Talmud Sukkah 25a). Caring for the young and the elderly and frail are religiously significant tasks, and if a person is busy caring for those in need of care, s/he ought to be released from specific mitzvot that might interfere. It must be noted this exemption should be limited to that particular span of time when an individual care-giver is occupied with care-giving and that otherwise that care-giver would retain the responsibilities and privileges that he/she would otherwise have. This exemption would apply only to individuals during the time they are fulfilling a mitzvah and would not be applied across the board to them as a class. Care-givers would be included in the minyan because they still are obligated for prayer, even if at times they may be exempted. This exemption would be a powerful statement of the importance of care-giving.

Rabbi Tucker’s interview concludes with a discussion of a number of Conservative/Masorti movement teshuvot from the 1980’s, so I would also note a number of more recent teshuvot. The teshuvot of Rabbi Myron Geller and Rabbi Susan Grossman on women and edut (testimony) were approved in 2001, and Rabbi David Fine’s teshuvah on women and the minyan was approved in 2002.

Barmash’s own Summary of her Responsa (from the end of the Responsa)

Summary

The general exclusion of women from many mitzvot is based on the characterization of those mitzvot as positive and time-bound. A number of reasons have been devised for the link between this category and the exclusion of women from those mitzvot. However, it turns out that this category was devised for exegetical (formal interpretive) purposes, and only later was the category extended to other mitzvot from which women had already been excluded. It was never a generative principle.

Instead, women were excluded because they had subordinate status. They were exempted from the mitzvot that Jews are obligated to observe in the normal course of the day, week, and year because the essential ritual acts should be performed only by those of the highest social standing, those who were independent, those who were heads of their own households, not subordinate to anyone else. Only males were considered to be fitting candidates to honor God in the most fit way. The acts of those who were subordinate honor God in a lesser way and,therefore, women were excluded from them. Furthermore, social standing matters in relations between human beings, and those of higher social standing would lose their dignity if some of lower social standing functioned on their behalf. Women were endowed with ritual responsibilities for others inside the home because the rabbis thought that women had the intellect and reliability to do so. It was social status alone that determined whether women were exempted from certain mitzvot. Women were also not involved in public ritual ceremonies because of their position in social hierarchy.

The involvement of women in Jewish religious and liturgical life has changed significantly in the past century and even more in the past few decades. Jewish women are aspiring to the privileges and responsibilities enjoyed by Jewish men through the millennia. The halakhah has recognized that when social customs change significantly, the new social reality requires a reappraisal of halakhic practices. The historical circumstances in which women were exempted from time-bound positive mitzvot are no longer operative, and the Conservative movement has for almost a century moved toward greater and greater inclusion of women in mitzvot. In Jewish thought and practice, the highest rank and esteem is for those who are required to fulfill mitzvot.

For other reactions and responses to Rabbi Barmash’s opinion- see these links, especially for the discussion here one should see the abstentions and dissents.

Pamela Barmash, “Women and Mitzvot” YD 246:6.2014a

• Jeremy Kalmanofsky, “An Egalitarian Abstention” YD 246:6.2014b
• Loel M. Weiss, “Dissent on Women’s Hiyuvim” YD 246:6.2014c
• Reuven Hammer, “Concurrence on Women and Mitzvot” YD 246:6.2014d
• Daniel Nevins, “Concurring Opinion on Rabbi Barmash’s Responsum on Women and Mitzvot” YD 246:6.2014e
• Avram Reisner, “Mikhal bat Kushi Wore Tefillin: A concurrence to Women and Mitzvot by Pamela Barmash” YD 246:6.2014f
• Elliot Dorff, “A Concurrence with Rabbi Pamela Barmash’s Teshuvah: The Use of Principles in Jewish Law” YD 246:6.2014g
• Baruch Frydman-Kohl, “Women and Mitzvot: Abstention and Dissent” YD 246:6.2014h
• Joshua Heller, “Dissenting Opinion on Rabbi Barmash’s Responsum on Women and Mitzvot” YD 246:6.2014i

I will continue with my tribute to the work of Peter Berger as a theologian from a Jewish perspective. I dealt with question of theology and the sacred canopy in the first part- here. read that post first for the basic insight into his value for Judaism.  This second part deals with mysticism, interfaith miracles, and the return of non-pluralistic religion.

However, before I do that, a few topics came up in the FB discussion that are worth dealing with. First, someone asked, if he is a sociologist, then does he agree with Feuerbach’s reduction of religion to human projection? The answer is no. In fact, he is explicit in his rejection of Feuerbach, claiming the converse that the  world is a projection of God. The “World is a fragmented face of God.” He has been called a Christian humanist and a Lutheran Rabbi, reflecting about himself that  “I’ve always had a weakness for divinity”

Many sociologists, such as Bryan Wilson did not approve of Berger’s theology and sociology mix. Berger considered the functional sociology of the Chicago school as the human condition, while theology is outside of human condition. Berger sought faith, transcendence, hope and seeking a confrontation with God, he nevertheless considered institutional houses of worship as social in orientation, as following Durkheim. He considered most houses of worship and their followers as inauthentic and self-serving. At points, he even considers organized religion and socialization as Weber’s iron cage or as original sin.

Berger’s goal is to relativize the relativizers and show that atheism of Western sociological functionalism was itself a product of a narrow plausibility structure.  He rejected the late 1990’s Fundamentalism project thinking that the only people who don’t know that the ordinary public take their religion seriously are the sociologists.

Another thread thought that Peter Berger’s ideas were just Mordecai Kaplan’s sociological naturalism, but that misses Berger’s original ideas of the sacred canopy of existential meaning, his quest for transcendence, his thinking naturalism is reductionism, and his thinking that Jewish Centers are iron cages.  Berger’s writings have been positively used in the full spectrum of rabbinic seminaries, and as one FB commenter noted: to account for the changes in thought since the 1930’s someone else in the 1970’s should have updated Mordecai Kaplan’s ideas.

Mysticism

Berger’s views on India and mysticism were the parts that I felt the need to respond in a blog post. To understand his views on mysticism, we need to return to the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s, when a new series of books appeared- The Classics of Western Spirituality, which produced nicely edited translations of Western mysticism. The series included for the first time as part of the same set works by Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Native American authors. The idea was partly an outgrowth of the counter-cultural turn to mysticism of the 1960’s, but more importantly for its conceptual frame and the frame of the volumes of World Spirituality was a rejection of Peter Berger’s denial of mysticism in Western culture.

Berger, in his early writings present a sharp divide between two types of religion, the religion of Jerusalem or the religion of Banaras.  Western religion based on Jerusalem is a religion of divine confrontation. Eastern religion based on Indian culture is a religion of interiority.

Berger’s chapter in The Heretical Imperative “Between Jerusalem and Benares: The Coming Contestation of Religions,” posits two major forms of Divine encounter. A confrontation with the divine (epitomized in the West with the monotheistic tradition, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam); and the interiority of the divine, exemplified in the East with such religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. For Berger, these two forms of divine encounter are antagonistic to each other. Western monotheism has a transcendent God, while Eastern interiority have a merger into divine immanence in which human consciousness dissolves into a greater oneness.

Berger was not concerned with empirical studies of mysticism or religious experience, rather with theology. The Protestant theologians of the 20th century dialectic movement such as Karl Barth rejected “every form of mysticism as unbelief, it was converting God into an object. They considered it self-serving and not based on God’s demand.

Berger follows this theological trend in general, and in particular relies on the Protestant theologian Freidrich Heiler whose work Prayer A Study In The History And Psychology Of Religion. The latter work made a sharp distinction between prophecy and mysticism, or more specifically between Biblical prophetic prayer of confronting God and/or petition to God, as opposed to mystical prayer of enthusiasm and absorption into God. Heiler’s two groups are the proper Lutheran prayer as opposed to pagan and enthusiastic prayer such as German spiritualists or Shakers. Berger included in Western prayer two aspects -confrontation and personalist identity- corresponding to prayer in Soloveitchik and Heschel respectively.

It is important to note that this same distinction about prayer used by Freidrich Heiler was eagerly adopted by Jewish studies. Jospeh Heinemann in his Prayer in the Period of the Tannaim and the Amoraim, & Prayer in the Talmud  presented rabbinic prayer as prophetic and confrontational as opposed to the mythic-mystical prayer at the margins of the rabbinic world. Moshe Greenberg presented Biblical prayer as prophetic without myth or mysticism.

Actually, Jewish prayer may be neither of these categories, or at least has more than these two, in that it is also adoration, doxology, magic, theurgy, contemplation, and chant. There are many Jewish educators, and even Talmudists, who because of their lack of interest in theology are still stuck using only Heiler’s Protestant categories.

Berger accepted this dichotomy and globalized it as the West as prophetic and East as mysticism. Nevertheless, Berger does concede that there are Western mystics but says that we have to distinguish mode from content. There is a mystical mode in the West but Western mystics do not have oneness of reality, while Eastern religion can be faith without any mystical experience but their essence is oneness of reality even without the experience.

The Other Side of God

In order to investigate the divide between the religion of the East and of the West, Peter Berger hosted a series of seminars for several years, starting in 1978, called “Monotheism and the World Religions.”   The papers were published in 1981 as The Other side of God: A polarity in world religions.

Berger asked: how can we reconcile these mystical traditions with our firm monotheistic confrontation. Berger’s fellow-scholars criticize this theological dyad of confrontation and mysticism in the light of their own phenomenological research.  Among those invited to attend included Ewert Cousins, the general editor of the new Classics of Western Spirituality (and my doctorate advisor), as well as the quite young Jewish representations, Michael Fishbane and Arthur Green.

Michael Fishbane adapted this distinction to the Bible as similar the distinction of the nature worship of Baal and the goddess as opposed to the worship of the Biblical God.  He supports Berger in showing that the vision of Ezekiel was transcendent and not one of merger. Yet, he then boldly reversed the dichotomy by saying that the Bible exaggerates the battle of God and Baal. On the popular level, the people mixed the cults and practices. Nevertheless, the mythic element comes back, as a return of the repressed, in Midrash and Kabbalah. In the kabbalah, once again god-man- world become one. Kabbalah has the mythic and mystical aspects.

Arthur Green presented Hasidism as a mysticism outgrowth of Judaism in which there is indeed an interiority and absorption into God. Green presented Hasidism as beyond the strictures and institutions of Judaism. A direct outgrowth of their experiencing oneness with God in their minds and within the natural order. Green cites Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Epstein of Homel who clearly expressed their pantheistic view that “all is God” (als iz Got).

Parenthetically, Berger repeatedly misquoted this in the name of Rav Nachman and credits him with Chabad organizational zeal. “The famous Kabbalist Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810), corresponded with kindred individuals all over the Jewish world from his obscure locale in Ukraine.” Berger’s version compared Hasidism to the pantheistic heresy of the Islamic mystic al-Hallaj, in which, “that “everything is God”, an idea obviously blasphemous in Jewish law.” Nachman  of Bratzlav “wrote this sentence in one of his letters, but he did not dare to write it in Hebrew, the sacred language of Torah—so he wrote that one sentence in Yiddish.”

Fishbane established the approach of treating the Bible and Rabbis as mythic and both Fishbane and Green gave an emphasis to experiential God consciousness and mysticism to their studies of Kabbalah.

Ewert Cousins in his response to Berger used the medieval Neo-platonic tradition to show that a mainstream Western mystic such as Francis of Assisi had a unified vision with natural realm, a nature mysticism without pantheism or absorption into God. Cousins showed how Francis saw a divine plenitum in the world as a unity in the difference. For Cousins, the Neoplatonism tradition, long buried finds mysticism in the plurality of this world.. After the series of seminars, Cousins was the major drive behind the Classics of Western Spirituality and World Spirituality volumes. Only recently, have Jewish scholars such as Adam Afterman returned the study of Jewish mysticism to Neoplatonic concerns

Yet, Berger continued to treat Neo-Platonism as mythological more than Western, the way Protestant theologians such as Barth did in some of their writings. Berger understands Rudolph Otto’s sense of mysterium tremendum”/”ganz andere” as supporting the Western idea of confrontation and not the concept of mysticism.

Turning to Hinduism and my intest in Banares, there was a nice article by John Carmen on Hinduism as a theistic interiority and showing that the Bhagavad Gita presents a confrontation with God. Nevertheless, Berger never retracted his position to see Hinduism as devotion to a theistic God in which one seeks God help in prayer and to attain merit.  (See my forthcoming book for more on this.)

In his introduction to the volume, and in later essays, Berger treated Gershom Scholem as the reappearance of mythological forms in Judaism despite Judaism as being the most anti-mythological. He concludes that myth is a primordial human experience.  He places Eliade in the same group. Berger acknowledges that his own idea of a sacred canopy bears commonality with the mythic vision of Scholem and Eliade, but thinks the sacred canopy is meaning and plausibility, not myth.

Gershom Scholem saw mysticism as just a symbolic understanding of an ultimate reality, a universal phenomena that plays itself out in non-reducible languages and systems. However, in this case Peter Berger’s phenomenology, based on Alfred Schutz, can be more useful to explain diversity. Berger is willing to consider the various phenomena of mysticism, psychoanalysis, demonic possession, magic, ascents of the soul, meditation, as different plausibility structures. There are different and non-reducible ways to experience reality. Berger acknowledge the diversity of actual people. However, he speaks as an advocate for Western confrontational religion.

Unlike Scholem, Berger does not think that relgion should be reduced to its mystical core or “what William James called the “mysticism of infinity” in which self, world, and divinity merge in ecstasy.” For Berger, mysticism is only a relatively small area within the vast array of human religion.

Finally, as recently as this decade, Berger questioned the compatibility of Yoga with Western religion because they share different views of human destiny. Yoga is self-liberation and Berger’s reading of Western culture is a need for revelation and redemption outside the self. He acknowledges that many just do Yoga as an exercise but he asks “Could one say the Lord’s Prayer while sitting in the lotus position? Conversely, could one seek “emptiness” while receiving communion? The short answer is: One could, but it would be awkward.” Once again, Berger lacks a sense of Yogic Kabbalaists like Abulafia or Hindu theist yoga.

Interfaith to Seek Truth

Berger advocated a non-pragmatic motive for engaging in interfaith activity, which is, quite simply, to engage in a renewed search for truth. For him, “Obviously, such a statement contains an implicit theological assumption, one that is, broadly speaking, liberal. Which is to say, it will make no sense to any orthodoxy holding to the belief that, short of the eschaton , everything has been revealed that is going to be and therefore there is nothing new to be learned of religiously relevant truth.”

For Berger, this is the dialogue between Jerusalem and Benares, between the faiths that descend from the biblical tradition and the faiths of South and East Asia, which to him is the most promising and most challenging questions intellectually.

Nevertheless, Berger cautioned about interfaith and intergroup activities  that harmony will always come from a better understanding of each other. Intergroup tensions and conflicts are based on hard vested interests, on ancient and newly invented hatreds, and on emotional and ideological needs. However, he was in favor of pragmatic purpose in helping to reduce tensions through mutual understanding and empathy. But bearing in mind that it will not effect  the more determined bigots.

Despite being a sociologist and advocating that we have to acknowledge that, we live in an age of pluralism. Berger thinks that the pluralistic situation forces us to choose our religious belief, and every religious affirmation we then make is the result of choice, even if we choose this or that orthodoxy. It becomes very difficult to say innocently, “we believe”; even if we use such words, what we are really saying is, “ I have chosen to identify with this we .” At the same time, I must remain faithful to my own experience, even though I know this experience to be relativized by my historical and social location.

According to Berger, the first insight makes it impossible for him to be “exclusivist,” thinking his religious views are the only way. The second insight make it impossible to be a “pluralist.” Because relgious truths are contradictory or some of them are. They cannot readily be put together into a better picture like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; some of them belong to different pictures.

Berger sees three broad interfaith challenges. The first challenge to Western monotheism is the experience of the mythological matrix . Anywhere in the world, if one goes back far enough, one comes upon a worldview that can be described quite adequately as mythological, characterized by fluid, permeable boundaries between the realms of men, of nature, and of the gods. The radical rupture of this world that took place in ancient Israel and is at the root of the biblical tradition almost certainly served to reinforce these boundaries. He never did accept Michael Fishbane’s ideas.

The second challenge of the religions of South and East Asia is their experience of Buddhist emptiness of nirvana, an-atta, shunyata, satori .  Here he learned something from his seminars from Ewert Cousins and Arthur Green, acknowledging those who “tried to reconcile the insights coming out of this experience with the monotheistic affirmations of biblical faith”such as Isaac Luria, the principal theorist of the Safad school of the Kabbalah…or Bonaventure, who sought to retain the speculations of radical Franciscanism within the fold of Catholic orthodoxy…”

Finally, Berger thinks there is the third challenge: the experience of other particular revelations because of the particularistic and historicized character of Israel’s understanding of God’s revelation. “ If God chose Israel, could He have chosen any other people and if so, how are these two elections related to each other?”  Speaking in a Judeo-Christian voice, Berger asks: “Is there any way in which a Jew or a Christian could understand God as speaking in the Quran?” He was the issue with Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s Dignity of Difference, the award winning first edition said yes. While the revised safer second edition removed those lines.

In conclusion, Berger writes about maintaining religious differences: “I am convinced that interfaith dialogue, while acknowledging areas of agreement, must also be frank in stating disagreements. In other words, it is as important to say no as to say yes .”

Lutheranism, and the Heretical Imperative

In my prior blog post, I noted that in his book The Heretical Imperative, he distinguished between the Orthodox deductive position and liberal reductive position, between the positions of a return to certainty despite modernity and the position of accepting the rationalism of modernity. Instead he advocates, a theological pluralism of always seeking to balance the extremes using social science.

However, in some of his later works, he surprises us by crediting his pluralism scheme directly to Lutheranism. On the orthodox side, Catholics have “the miracle of the Mass,” where the “transubstantiation” was supposed to occur.  On the other hand, there was the Swiss view of Zwingli  that the Eucharist was a simple memorial. These are the extremes of reductionism and deductionism, while only the Lutherans understand that the Eucharist, Christ is present in, with, and under the elements of bread and wine: neither transubstantiation nor a simple memorial, rather a balance.

Returning to our opening about Berger’s mixture of theology and sociology, for him the Church is a thoroughly human institution, with all the vices and follies of such an entity, possessing no intrinsic authority and certainly not the power of infallibility. God’s revelation is communicated in, with, and under an all too fallible institution.

In many ways this also fits, the middle range of contemporary Jews who treat mizvot not as supernatural nor as merely a symbol. Rather, they are the ways we come to God. Modern Orthodoxy is in its classic mid-20^th century form approached Berger’s Lutheran middle position. Moreover, even now when it leans more to the deductive side, it still rejects the miraculous for a Weber sense of rationality, or even Lutheran balance. Therefore, until the recent influx of magical ideas in Modern Orthodoxy, it avoided the miraculous in daily life.

Two years ago, I gave my talk on the “Varieties of Modern Orthodoxy” at a major University. They arranged for a Catholic professor to respond to my talk. She responded that modern Catholics share many of the issues of Modern Orthodoxy Jews, including that both combine their faith and secular studies. However, she added that Catholics have a third element besides the modern and the Orthodox, that of the miraculous.  For her, one must always balance faith with both modernity and with the miraculous. The Catholic Church has been supernaturalist in principle, but cautious in practice: Saints are expected to perform miracles, but these are juridical investigated and bureaucratically regulated; miracles outside these procedures are frowned upon.

This struck me because it was never a Jewish perspective. However, with the return of Neo-Chassidus and magical thinking to Modern Orthodoxy, it may play a bigger role in future thinkers.

However, what is noticeable is that in some issues like the origins of the BIble, Modern Orthodoxy is unlike Lutheran middle  rather closer to the Evangelical deductive. Right wing Conservative is closer to Berger. According to Berger’s “Lutheran view, in which the Bible is a collection of texts produced by human beings under specific historical circumstances, neither directly inspired nor inerrant. God revealed himself in, with, and under these contingencies of history.

Modern Orthodoxy has traditionally been closer to the Protestants who have been more wary of the supernatural: God speaks to us through the kerygma , the proclamation of the Word, yet keeps the miracles  of the past open. Modern Orthodoxy, in some ways, has a similarity to American Evangelical theologians (very non-Pentecostal ones) who have developed a doctrine called “cessationism”: Miracles have ceased because they are no longer needed, or after the canon was completed.

Pentecostals, New Age, and the turn to Ultra-Orthodoxy

Berger writing from a personal biographical perspective of Lutheranism has never been attracted to  Pentecostalism. But as a sociologist he have been fascinated by it. And furthermore, he sees that it improves people’s lives by providing comfort and community for people. It preaches a morality that encourages sobriety, discipline, and devotion to family. Those who do, begin to experience social mobility and will indeed improve their lives. Pentecostalism is itself a modernizing movement in the developing world.  This is an important point for those Modern Orthodox authors who have an animus against the more right wing Yeshivish or Chabad and do not see their value in modernizing, in social mobility, and in producing a disciplined life.

On the other hand, Berger originally supported the need to bring religion into the public sphere as part of conservative trend of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, founded in 1989 by Richard John Neuhaus. Yet, he subsequently broke with them over their obsessions with abortion and same sex relations.

On the other hand, Paul Heelas, one of the leading scholars of the new age movement, points out how Berger never really understood the turn to spirituality. scholars of 21^st century religion, note that Berger is not useful for dealing with the new age, therapeutic, and the immanence of religion in our lives. And Berger certainly has fewer insight to apply to the return to non-pluralist religion. Berger understood interiority- the lonely man of faith-  but not how people find God in social activities of helping other, of therapeutically helping themselves, in use of Asian religious ideas, in small groups, and in the arts. He could not see the current immanent form of religious humanism, in which the homeless religious mind found a new home in the immanence of daily life. Berger had too sharp of a sacred and profane distinction. He would not be helpful in understanding the plethora of new age and therapeutic forms of Chabad and yeshivish.

Modern Orthodoxy

Gerald Blidstein  notably compared Rav Soloveitchik’s constructivist  approach of  “world-building and world-perceiving” to “certain  facets  of  the  work of people like [Peter] Berger, [Clifford] Geertz, [Charles] Taylor,  [Michael]  Walzer,  and  others..”  An important point.

But by the time, Blidstein wrote those words, Modern Orthodoxy stopped caring and in an undereducated and frightened but belligerent way thought  Peter Berger was post-modern, and therefore oppose to religion. However, Berger himself had to clarify occasionally his own positon before the misreading of his pluralism and constructivism. Berger’s pluralism is a form of realism in which the modern believer has to have discernment to choose between the options and  not rely on dogmatic deductivism or reductionism. However, the word pluralism twenty years later by other thinkers meant that we have no truth or that all truth is just a subjective construct.

A different distortion seemingly common among Modern Orthodox is to misread Berger’s pluralism and heretical imperative as if he was the first to discuss the voluntary nature of religion after the Enlightenment and Emancipation, as if he is a liberal affirmer of individual conscience. (Get ready for a short screed.)

There is an Orthodox interpretation of Peter Berger, almost a meme, crediting him with the Enlightenment saying that we are all freethinkers today and not locked into a socially imposed religion, as were the pre-moderns. Therefore, these modern Orthodox think he is similar to the Hazon Ish’s statement that there is no heresy today because the social-religious framework cannot the taken as a given. The Hazon Ish notes that in Jewish modern life after the Emancipation if one chooses a non-observant life, it is not an act of deep rebellion. There also seems to be some sense in which these meme users think this misreading distinguishes themselves from Haredim.

However, the Hazon Ish is just responding to the 19^th century. Almost any thinker from Locke, Lessing, Hume, Jefferson, Mendelssohn, or Kant says we no longer have an established religion and follow our own conscience. Jews after the Enlightenment and Emancipation can choose to remain Jewish or to leave. Many 20^th century books on the modern Jew make a statement to that effect in the first chapter.

In contrast, Berger’s pluralistic choice is about the believer needing to forever be mediating and negotiating using current academic study. Berger was a firm conservative believer against freethinkers since they are giving up the needed pluralist negotiation and seeking of transcendence. For Berger the need to choose is not the decision to be religious or not. It is a philosophic position of a need to create a sophisticated faith- choice means sophistication and the need to apply critical methods, especially of sociology.  Think of his position as the need to affirm Torah Umadda or Tradition and Modernity, or a critical modern faith. Berger is not about autonomy and finding one’s “religious preference”. He is not Rabbi Eugene Borowitz and is against such liberalism. As noted above in the interfaith section, Berger simultaneously affirms that all choices are personal, but we then fully accept them as our Existential choose. Those who follow the meme comparing the Hazon Ish and Peter Berger are themselves guilty of not have a heretical faith informed by social science.

Conclusion

In conclusion, what was the attraction of Berger’s writings for Jews? In a Jewish context, his ideas were generally formulated his ideas as a tension to be negotiated, a hallmark late 20^th century of Jewish religious thought. Among the specific Jewish tensions are autonomy and rabbinic authority, between legitimation by personal choice or by Rabbinic tradition, between identity and status in a Jewish community, and critical studies and rabbinic tradition. Different Jewish denominations resolved the tension in different ways.

There were, however, Jewish critics of Peter Berger who bristled against his definition of Judaism as a religion and faith commitment, when they instead defined Judaism Jewish peoplehood or the Jewish historical experience, especially the Holocaust. Yet, the Reform movement even consulted Berger when they considered a campaign of outreach to non-Jews. (I did not deal with these aspects in this essay.)

Nevertheless, Berger remains the model for attaining clarity about a certain form of 1960-1985 form of middle point religion. Jews used Berger’s socio-theological faith as a way to show how to negotiate religious options in tension with each other.

Rav Kook described prayer as a means to “deepen our feelings of holiness and our sense of closeness to God.” It will be so intense that the “immediacy can be felt by others due to the “exalted sense of Divine immediacy.” And from the midst of all its influence upon the world in the past, present and future.”Rav Kook assures us that “When that prayer of the people of Israel comes, the entire world will be astonished at its glory and splendor, its strength and grace.  It will come from the midst of that perfect will that makes the entire world one bloc of holiness, that turns all of life into one chapter of supernal song, a new song, a song of Hashem upon the land of Israel, a song of Zion redeemed and filled with eternal redemption.” (Orot Hakodesh III, p. 227)

However, what happens when your prayer life and the prayer life of your friends and seemingly your entire generation no longer senses the promise described by Rav Kook? What does one do if the hope of a transformed reality through prayer has vanished? What if prayer does not seem to offer benefits and all one has is silence from the act of prayer leaving one without any hope?

To answer this problem, Rav Shagar turns to the thought of Jacques Derrida, the Algerian -born French Sephardi thinker, via a Hebrew secondary source, to respond to the current impasse of  prayer without hope.  (For links to our more than 17 prior posts on Rav Shagar,  see here, here. here, here, and here. We have once again to thank Levi Morrow for his first draft of a translation. Please let me know of any errors.

Rav Shagar acknowledges that for many their prayers are without benefit or hope. To offer a path of continuing to pray despite this lack of  hope, he finds a parallel to Derrida’s prayer as without hope in which Derrida nevertheless  says despite the despair and lack of hope, there is always a possibility of that one may be answered.

Shagar interprets the traditional Hasidic concepts of offering as prayer without hope. Shagar equates Derrida’s prayer without hope to Rebbe Nachman’s Void, the Halal Ha-Panui, which is seemingly empty without hope. However, according to Shagar, prayer has the possibility to cut through the void. In addition, God must be in His seeming absence. Not because of a holism in which everything is God, rather because there is always the possibility of breaking though the void. In the meantime, prayer is an imposibilty, yet we still pray.

Shagar compares the negative theology of Derrida to the negative theology of Maimonides and kabbalah. Yet, Derrida himself said negative theology was precursor to his concept of différance but clearly differentiated his thought from medieval thought in that medieval negative theology was still tied to a higher reality. Derrida was especially adamant that différance was not God.

In contrast, to the actual thought of Derrida, or his major interpreters, Shagar make Derrida into a mystic and treats deconstructionism as similar to the kabbalah. He also thought Derrida’s différance is God as a higher reality and it is our higher self in the transcendental and existential senses sthat Derrida rejected. In this, Shagar was probably just following the Israeli presentation by Michael Govrin, who combined her own kabbalistic views with those of Derrida in the same volume. Shagar’s usage of Derrida is basically a few unexplained quotes that are contextualized in his own Hasidic thought.

Shifting back to Rebbe Nachman, Shagar considers all prayer as a grace of God  and all the words are a grace in that they are not guaranteed in a natural way.  Here Shagar shifts Rebbe Nachman’s ideas of divine gift and divine miracle into the ideas of possibility, or even without hope.  There is no transcendence, we do not experience the promise of the Kabbalah or Rav Kook, only the possibility.

The essay ends on a more radical note claiming that God lacks independent meaning of our prayer or any transcendence. God is not outside standing above, rather God is  our deep self or in the language of Hasidut, it is the root of our souls. This harkening back to the end of the introduction to his work Kelim Shevurim (2002) where he reads Rav Zadok HaKohen in this manner. He concludes by identifying God with the Lacanian Real, thereby collapsing self, God and divine immanence. (see his Hanukhah homily for more on this.) Shagari s using Lacan’s  idea that at one stage of development the “I” is an empty signifier within the field of language and one enters via language into the symbolic order. In order essays Shagar identifies Torah with this self-creating symbolic order.

In the 1980’s Shagar used modernist existential themes to interpret the alienation from prayer. For example his student, Rabbi Dov Zinger, head of the yeshiva high school, Mekor Chaim has the students do Buber I-Thou dialogue with their classmates and then has them turn to God with the same I-Thou intimacy. Another student, Rabbi Benny Kalmanson of Yeshivat Otniel, reflects a more frustrated Existential moment by speaking of Elie Wiesel’s concept of the need to argue with God even if one does not belief or expect an effect. Prayer is like story telling it is a form of witness and memory. In this essay, we see Rav Shagar use of postmodern language from the last decade of his life.

It is worth noting that in all of his work Rav Shagar identifies with the breakdown not the solution. When Buber, Heschel, and Soloveitchik use Existentialism, they all see prayer and faith as an answer to the absurdity, meaningless, and futility of life. In contrast, Shagar accepts that our thrown situation is absurd, meaningless, and in this case hopeless. His goal is to explain this hopelessness and absurdity as our religious life, then to channel it back to a religious perspective.

To conclude as we started by returning to Rav Kook, one can still use the words of Rav Kook but now we can relate to them in a new Rav Shagar post-Derrida understanding. “When we pray to find our purpose in life and our path to serve God, such a prayer is an authentic reflection of the soul’s inner desires… prayers express our true inner will.” (Olat Re’iyah vol. I) Prayer, in this new reading, becomes the Lacanian Real and the inner self of Hasidut, both of them only a possibility.

Interlude on Prayers of Derrida as needed for this essay.

For those not familiar with Derrida, here are his ideas of prayer and atheism that will add to understanding this essay of Rav Shagar. If you wish, you can skip this interlude and go directly to Rav Shagar’s essay below.

Derrida, the “father” of deconstruction, was nothing like the stereotypical caricatures. The philosopher/theologian John Caputo in his many works especially for this essay The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997) presents a religious use of Derrida and in Caputo’s recent works (2011-2017) of the last few years, brings us a position that is similar to what Shagar is struggling to articulate this  essay.

Caputo writes on Derrida’s prayer:

The religion of Derrida, is quite paradoxical. He considered himself an atheist, but yet he would pray at least nightly, sometime to the point of tears. What is so interesting to me is not so much the atheism, nor the fine intricacies that Derrida went about to define his religion as a “Religion without religion” and who prayed to a “God without God.”But rather what has been so moving to me is the sincere humility Derrida went about his religion and prayers…

In short, Derrida realizes first and foremost, that he is human. and thus he is fallen and fallible. And the human tendency is to think that our world revolves around each one of ourselves. But yet, we know the world doesn’t revolve around us, and we are not the center of the universe. Thus prayer in a way, is a way Derrida seeks to rid himself of self. He wants to love people, and thus in prayer he attempts to repent of himself so that he won’t get in the way of love.

Thus, for Derrida,  prayer is not just a lifting up of God, but it is also just as much a repositioning of one’s self in relation to God as to not distort our view of God.

“My prayers have more than one age, one layer, in the same instant. There is something very childish, in the imagery, iconography of God as a stern grandfather and at the same time as a mother who thinks I am innocent, who is ready to forgive me. God is just and forgiving at same time. This is the childish layer of my prayers.

“On top of this layer there is another layer: my culture, a very critical, experience of religion, referencing the philosophers and scholars I have studied… In this layer of sophistication, I ask who is praying and who is receiving the prayer.

Thinking about the unnameable, etc.: it is a very skeptical prayer. Skepticism is part of the prayer. The suspension of certainty is part of the prayer.”

My assumption is I must give up any expectations regarding The One or the more than One to whom I address this prayer if this is still a prayer.”

There is at the same time some suspension of any calculation. I’m not hoping. It’s a ‘hopeless’ prayer. Hopelessness is part of what a prayer should be.There’s hope, calculation, economy.

Caputo on theism/atheism

Derrida has continually drawn attention to the “porous boundaries” between atheism and theism. He speaks of a certain type of “theism” that “at times so resembles a profession of atheism as to be mistaken for it,” as well as a certain form of “atheism” that has “always testified to the most intense desire for God.”

Derrida is drawing attention to the “structure of belief/unbelief” itself, as that which always underlies any particular claim, including atheistic and theistic claims. In this way, Derrida was avoiding and critiquing the “dogmatism” that applies equally to any “strong atheistic” or “strong theistic” claim that fails to honor the fact that whatever one believes, belief and unbelief are always inextricably linked.

Prayer and faith are based on  “trust,” in God and trust always demands a certain level of “risk.” In this sense that a confessing believer can admit that at times she “quite rightly pass[es] for an atheist.” (For more on this topic, see this NYT interview

Praying without Hoping 

Translation by Levi Morrow & Alan Brill  Here is a downloadable version of Praying Without Hoping in Word to create handouts for synagogue and classroom. At 1500 words it can be covered entirely in a single class. The original Hebrew is here The Redemption of the Postmodern- On the Messiah of the Matrix. This essay on prayer is an appendix at the end of a longer essay on the movie The Matrix. If you have suggested improvements to the translation, then please let me know

Both Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav and Jacques Derrida taught that prayer, as well as faith, are only possible through absolute renunciation, praying without hope or future.

Rebbe Nachman wrote: “This is when you pray without any intent for personal benefit, without thinking about yourself at all, as if you did not exist. Following the verse, ‘It is for your sake that we are slain all day long’ (Psalms 44:23).”^[1]  Derrida’s version: “Prayer does not hope for anything, not even from the future.”^[2]

Prayer without hope does not demand the typical religious self-sacrifice (mesirut nefesh), in which a person nullifies (mevatel) his self and his needs in favor of God. Rather it embodies self-sacrifice, in that the purest prayer is located in its impossibility, as total self-sacrifice, purposeless suicide.

[According to Derrida,] Prayer turns “to the other without future hope, only towards the past. It returns, without a future. However, despite this, you pray. Is this possible?” If this is so, we might ask: why, indeed, should you pray?

[Derrida answers:] Is it possible to pray without hope, not just without any request, but while renouncing all hope? If we agree that this prayer, pure prayer, cleansed of all hope, is possible, would that not mean that the prayer’s essence is connected to this despair, to this lack of hope? […] I can imagine a response to this terrifying doubt: even then, at the moment when I pray without hope, there is hope within the prayer. I hope, minimally, that someone takes part in my prayer, or that someone hears my prayer, or someone understands my hopelessness and despair. Thus, despite everything, there is still hope and future. But perhaps not. Perhaps not. At least perhaps. This too, in regards to the terrifying nature of prayer.^[3]

Prayer is empty mechanical speech, but in some form or another, it cuts through what Rebbe Naḥman called the void [lit. empty space] (haḥalal hapanui) thereby overcomes the gap, even though it remains in the negative space of complete silence:

It requires you to affirm two opposites, Aught (yesh) and Naught (ayin). The empty space comes from the contraction (tsimtsum), as if God had removed himself from that space, as if there was no divinity there, otherwise it would not be empty […]. But in the absolute truth, there must be divinity there despite this […] and therefore it is impossible to understand the idea of the void until the future yet to come.^[4]

Even though both of them recognize the impossibility of prayer, Rebbe Naḥman and Derrida do the opposite – they pray. Paraphrasing Maimonides’ statement that God “exists, but is not in existence,”^[5] Derrida and Rebbe Naḥman ask if the Naught cannot also be Aught? Is it possible to pray without hoping? Is it possible to despair of hope and thereby to receive it, as a despairing hope? Then there is a hope and a future, and someone hears my voice. The connection to Maimonides is not incidental. Derrida saw the idea of negative attributes, Maimonides’ negative theology, as the basis for deconstruction, and thus also for prayer. ^[6] Similarly for Rebbe Naḥman: “this is prayer, for when we call to God with the attributes of flesh and blood, and it is improper to describe and call to God with attributes and praises and words and letters.”^[7]

Some found Derrida’s statements about prayer incredibly shocking for “the philosopher who for years was considered the standard-bearer of anti-metaphysical radicalism, the guru of believers in materialism lacking any ‘beyond.’”^[8] Indeed, Derrida was forced to defend himself from criticism by thinkers including Jurgen Habermas, according to whom he was nothing less than a Jewish mystic.^[9]

Is this claim not correct? Derrida’s worldview is far from rationalist or anchored in philology. His deconstructive games sometimes seem, not coincidentally, like Kabbalistic-Hasidic homilies. He defended himself, claiming that his project was “a deconstruction of the values underlying mysticism,”^[10] and in this, he was correct. However, Habermas’ accusations are not wiped away or confronted by Derrida’s claim since the passage from deconstruction to mysticism is not just possible, but is, perhaps, obvious. Derrida’s project denied all positivity, but this goal clears the way for the mystical leap, for the hope “that someone takes part in my prayer […] At least perhaps.”

The difference between Derrida and the mystic is a matter of pathos. Someone once said that the mystic and atheist say the same thing, “nothing.” The difference is that the mystic says it with a capital “N,” with a feeling of tremendous freedom that breaks him loose from the constraints of reality. Meanwhile the atheist says it as a depressed and “terrifying possibility.”

Rebbe Naḥman and Derrida perhaps expressed better than others did the gap, the différance between the word and what we expect to accomplish.^[11]  The void is the source of the structural contradictions of reality itself, what Rebbe Naḥman called “the questions without answers.”  ^[12]

And yet they prayed?! This miracle happens in present tense. This moment has no external justification nor is it a result, rather an event. This is grace that is a possibility; a possibility for prayer without promise. “Prayer is when we call to God using flesh and blood qualities. He is then present for us in our calling to him. This is the grace of God. Without the grace of God, it would be improper to describe and call to God with attributes and praises and words and letters.”^[13]

The question becomes one of grace, and paradoxically this grace is dependent on the human renunciation of the will to transcend. Self-acceptance, giving up on transcendence, “is not true or false. It is, word for word, prayer.”^[14]

Self-sacrifice, suicide, is a condition for prayer because it liberates a person not just from the language, but from its logic as well. Prayer is therefore divine grace because it is impossible and yet occurs, or at least, perhaps occurs. This “perhaps” is important, because the “perhaps” elevates it to the realm of worldly possibilities; it therefore exists, if only as a possibility.

Perhaps someone hears and takes part with me in the prayer? Is this enough to create hope? I pray, but am I certain that I will be answered? No, I am not certain. I am also not certain that I will not, but the prayer does something. Someone hears. Who is this someone? We say “God,” but this word lacks any independent meaning. It is enough for me that “I” hear, but who is the “I” that hears? I believe in the deep “I”, an “I” with a transcendental horizon. This is what the Hasidim called the root of the soul. Where there is an “I” like this, there is God.

The problem of attributes that Rebbe Naḥman pointed to is the impossibility of language actually doing what it claims to do, actually making contact with the real/Real. If I understand God as something that exists outside of me, I have strayed from the Real. Yet, in truth, [Lacanian] psychological reduction of faith is possible when raised to the Lacanian Real.

Reaching the Real requires the human renunciation of the will to transcend itself, and only after this, it is correct to say that this “someone” is the “I”.

^[1] Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav, Lekutei Moharan, I 15:5.

^[2] Jacques Derrida, Guf Tefillah  tr. Michal Govrin (Tel Aviv: Mekhon Mofet Vekav Adom Keheh/Hakibuts Hame’uḥad, 2013), 87.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Naḥman of Breslov, Lekutei Moharan, I 64:1.

^[5] Rabbi Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, I:57, Unlike Maimonides, Derrida rejects the second part of Maimonides’ teachings, which believes in the knowledge of God, in the unity of the knower, the knowing, and the known, in the possibility of “if I knew him, I would be him,” which according to Derrida is simply death.

^[6] Derrida was not familiar with the theory of attribution from Maimonides himself. See Gidon Efrat, Derrida Hayehudi: Al Yahadut Kepetsa Ve’al Haguto Shel Jacque Derrida (Jerusalem: Ha’akademiah, 1998), 68.

^[7] Naḥman of Breslov, Lekutei Moharan, I 15:5.

^[8] Michal Govrin, “Setirah Petuḥah. Lelo Siyum, O Segirah,” Ha’aretz – Musaf Tarbut Vesifrut, October 22, 2004. The article was written following Derrida’s death.

^[9] Efrat, Derrida Hayehudai, 112.

^[10] Cited in Efrat, Derrida Hayehudi, 111.

^[11] In the language of Rebbe Naḥman: “There needs to be a separation, so to speak, between the filling and the surrounding. If not, then all would be one. However, through the empty space, from where God contracted his divinity, so to speak, and in which God created all of Creation, the void has come to encompass the world, and God surrounds all worlds, surrounding even the void […] and in the middle appears the void from where God withdrew his divinity, so to speak” (Rebbe Naḥman, Lekutei Moharan, I 64:2).

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Rebbe Naḥman, Lekutei Moharan, I 15:5. Based on this paradox of impossible prayer as the only possibility of prayer, the possibility of a miracle, Rebbe Naḥman and Derrida claim that they are the only people who really pray.

^[14] Jacques Derrida, cited in Govrin, Setirah Petuḥah.

Here is the fifth response to my interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker. The first response was  by Dr. Malka Simkovich, the second response was by Yoav Sorek, the third response was by Rabbi Ysoscher Katz, and the fourth response was by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper. Finally, we have a response by Rabbi Professor Yehudah Mirsky.

Yehudah Mirsky is Associate Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, and is on the faculty of the university’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He is the author of Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2014) and tweets @YehudahMirsky. He appeared on this blog in fruitful interview on his Rav Kook biography.

Mirsky reminds us that halakhah is law, with its implicit sense of obligation, power structures, and connection to justice. He cites Robert Cover’s indelible point that as law, the law is violent. “Legal interpretation takes place on a field of pain and death.”  And those interpretations have consequences. As Cover notes: “When interpreters have finished their work, they frequently leave behind victims whose lives have been torn apart by these organized, social practices of violence.”

For Mirsky, the issues of synagogue inclusion are connected to the injustices of a system that is not responsive to agunot, tolerates get refusal, and is many times unjust to women appearing before the rabbinical court.  Our directive should be to avoid cruelty.

In addition,  Mirsky declares: Jewish marriage and divorce on the one hand, and Jewish prayer on the other, are intimately connected.” In Israel, the private and legal realms have become muddled so that there is coercion even in the voluntary private realms. While in the diaspora,  “policing the boundaries of marriage and divorce is for traditional rabbis, as it is for traditionalists in other religious traditions, almost the only power they have left.”  Mirsky lays down a gauntlet for the opponents of egalitarian prayer to explain “why non-egalitarian prayer does not contribute – wittingly or not- to the terrible cruelties that the institution of Jewish marriage has tragically come to inflict in our time. ” In short, choose kindness over cruelty.

Communal Prayer and the Meaning of Law and Dignity, or, Counting the Agunah who is Always in the Room

Yehudah Mirsky

As I once told Ethan Tucker, I regularly have a running conversation with him in my head – as he challenges us to think harder and more clearly about halakha with rare creativity and sensitivity. I haven’t yet had the chance to read the new book he’s written with Micha’el Rosenberg (indeed, Amazon has already run out of copies!), though I’m confident it is  an important intervention in contemporary discussions. My comments, then, are limited to his post at this blog,

Rabbi Tucker is admirably open about his position and presuppositions, and I will try to be here. My own practice, since the early ‘90s and the founding of the (sadly now late) Kehillat Orach Eliezer, is to belong to and participate in partnership and traditional egalitarian services as often as possible (and when those are unavailable I generally go to Orthodox services).  I am in very deep sympathy with his arguments and conclusions, but wish to suggest that the meaning of legal obligation and claims of human dignity he puts forward run even deeper than he suggests. There is, in other words, an elephant in the room, as I hope to make clear below.

His argument that “(w)e are not coming with an outside critique of halakhah.  Instead, we are trying to apply halakhah’s internal logic to a changing reality” is bracingly refreshing,. It offers a way out of regularly unsatisfying arguments over ‘meta-halakha’ and the like, which effectively lock participants into rigid positions of Legal Realism and Legal Formalism, neither of which do justice to the history and reality of halakha, or for that matter of most any legal culture.

In looking at the internal logic of the halakhah, he argues that gender was for Hazal, not about sheer biology, at least not when it came to communal prayer, but rather a proxy for other categories: honor and dignity, and maximal obligation in mitzvot. One of the many virtues of this approach is that it can make sense of why excluding women from communal prayer made sense for a long time, even if we conclude that it no longer does, as modernity has shifted the ground under so many things, to the point of creating Orthodoxy as a self-conscious ideology of resistance to change. (I’ve written at greater length about the socio-historical dimensions of Orthodoxy’s emergence and my understanding of the theological reach and limits of that emergence.)

In truth, gender does seem more essentialized than that in Rabbinic literature, certainly when it comes to theology and utterly when it comes to Kabbalah. Indeed, one way of framing the deepest divides between the Jewish philosophic and kabbalistic traditions is whether God can in any ways be discussed in terms of gender at all. 

Rabbi Tucker’s starting point of gender being, when it comes to prayer, not an immanent category but a proxy or signifier for issues of obligation and dignity is prima facie reasonable, and squarely within a formal-rational understanding of the halakhic process.

I will first say a brief word about the legal freight of the very term “obligation,” and then move to my core points, about the legal meaning of human dignity.

I suspect I am not alone in sensing that to many non-orthodox critics of Orthodox prayer (and of Orthodoxy in general) fail to understand that Orthodoxy, takes religion as law. Halakhah is for Orthodoxy as it was for pre-modern Judaism, as Prof. Gerald Blidstein so well put it, “the normative structure undergirding Jewish life in both its private and public dimensions.”  Because halakha is law, it has, or at least works towards, the internal morality and coherence of law. (Gerald J. Blidstein, “Halakhah – The Governing Norm,” Jewish Political Studies Review 8:2 (1996), 37).

In other words. someone who is not obligated in a mitzvah cannot help another person fulfill that obligation, the same way that under the laws of the United States the Postman can’t write you a parking ticket and you can’t be arrested by a diplomat from the State Department.  In this light, reckoning with degrees of male and female obligation, makes eminent legal sense.

For non-Orthodox Jews (and for many Orthodox laypeople too, one suspects), Judaism is not about law, but about “religion,” that distinctively modern Western notion that our relationship to transcendence is something that exists outside or alongside law, and takes shape under the rubrics of “community,” “ritual,” and “ethics” – all terms which, whatever their premodern antecedents, mean very different things now than they did in the many centuries when people’s primordial, civic and transcendent identities were knotted more tightly together. (I go into this a bit more here and with specific reference to Israel and Zionism here).

One of the myriad changes wrought by modernity and its disestablishment of organized Jewish community, is its changing the very existential stance and meaning of communal prayer, from something utterly continuous with the socio-political and legal life-world to a privatized space, standing as an alternative to the life-world shaped by law. Indeed, for those to whom Judaism means ethics and ritual, the exclusion of women, not to mention the fine distinctions of devarim she-bi-qedushah and eyno metzuveh ve-‘oseh, make little sense. But if halakha is law, then those distinctions make all the sense in the world.

Thus, a key claim of Orthodoxy, and indeed of the word halakha, whoever employs it, is that whatever else Torah is, it’s law. Indeed, in some ways Orthodoxy’s problem is that it sees halakha as law, but not all the way down. I say that because to take halakha seriously as law, means, at the very end of the day to see it as being about the legitimate use of force, or at the very least, of other means of coercion and social control. As my late teacher, Robert Cover put it in his less-well-known but important essay, “Violence and the Word”: “Neither legal interpretation nor the violence it occasions may be properly understood apart from one another.”

The idea that a quorum of adult males constitutes the public and coercive face of community seems to me implicit in the very proof texts used to establish it, at BT Megillah 23b. The word edah is the very word used in Mishnah Sanhedrin 1:6 to establish the quorum necessary to inflict capital punishment. This linkage seems not merely semantic but essential.  Minyan is the public face of the community at prayer. Minyan is the public face of the community enforcing its boundaries.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room when it comes to the role of women and communal prayer and that is the structure of Jewish marriage.  If communal prayer is indeed communal, it is all about the community and its boundaries, and not only in public, in synagogue and on Shabbat mornings. Communal prayer is inextricably connected to Jewish marriage.

To disallow egalitarianism in the synagogue is to disallow it under the chuppah and ultimately in the beit din.  The most potent female figure in the moral universe of communal prayer is, to my mind, not the ba’alat tefillah or kriyah, but the agunah,  potential or actual. The way we structure our community in prayer will further chain her or help set her free.

In other words, the moral claims of egalitarian prayer arise not only from women’s legitimate concerns for spiritual self-expression, but from what is in many ways the only thing that matters, and that is the avoidance of man-made cruelty.

Now, part of being human means that we cannot ever fully be rid of our abilities to inflict cruelty on one another.  I regularly tell my students that I often hope that future generations will find it as hard to understand how we lived with our moral failings today as we find it hard to understand how people lived for so long with slavery.  Nevertheless, the humbling knowledge of our own inevitable moral inadequacy is no reason to give up trying to minimize as best we can the cruelties we can avoid. The attempt to avoid man-made cruelty in our processes of governance and law is itself the deepest meaning of human dignity, and whatever kavod ha-tzibur may be, the avoidance of organized cruelty is surely a part of it.

I freely declare that much of what has driven me to egalitarian services over the years is the recognition that at the very end of the day the system that excludes women from the public space and public speech-acts of communal prayer is the system that runs roughshod over them in court. And in matters of domestic relations regularly treats them with great cruelty.

Jewish marriage and divorce on the one hand, and Jewish prayer on the other, are intimately connected. The cord connecting the two is that both take the form of law. This relationship is regularly muddied in both Israel and the Diaspora, each for its own reasons.

A key feature of the State of Israel, and the source of many of its dilemmas, is its being a nation-state created to answer the problems of both sovereignty as well as the crisis of modern Jewish community. As a result, the lines between the state, as the monopolist of legitimate coercion, and community, as an essentially voluntary association, are regularly, and hopelessly, blurred. Rabbinic authorities regularly wield a coercive power to which much of the citizenry has hardly given informed consent.

(See on this Rivka Lubitch’s extraordinary new book recounting her nightmarish experiences as a to’enet rabbanit working with agunot, converts and others in Israel’s regularly Kafkaesque rabbinic courts. But is also certainly true in Diaspora communities, as many of us who have been involved in one agunah situation or other can attest. I do think pre-modern halakhists, for whom evidentiary issues predominated, were regularly more morally responsive to the dilemmas of igun, than their modern successors, but that is for another time.)

In the contemporary diaspora halakha is the circumscribed dance of a community nestled in the larger framework of the liberal state – indeed what makes today’s diaspora communities distinctly modern is precisely their lack of the corporate identity, and regularly coercive frame, of the pre-modern kehilla.

Diaspora communities are voluntary and their power of suasion is a mix of the social and the spiritual, therefore we can lose sight of the arenas in which coercion is still central to the enterprise. Indeed policing the boundaries of marriage and divorce is for traditional rabbis, as it is for traditionalists in other religious traditions, almost the only power they have left.  (I am indebted for this observation to Prof. Frank Vogel, formerly of Harvard Law School.)

Which is another way of saying that I understand why egalitarian prayer is genuinely and understandably threatening to many observant Jews. Especially when pursued – in partnership minyanim – by people who know what tradition is, who are committed to it, and who cannot simply be waved away as lukewarm Jews.  Because, indeed, once women are treated as equals in the form of communal structure of prayer they can only with much greater difficulty be unequal in the communal structure of law.

We are by now deeply inured to the privatized nature of prayer in the modern world, including its being encapsulated in this category called “ritual.” Prayer is of course ritual, as we understand it, and is deeply expressive, indeed the claims of self-expression regularly twist and press against the necessary conformities of public prayer. As Rav Soloveitchik so powerfully wrote so often, we regularly turn to prayer, and prayerful community, precisely as a haven from the relentless and regularly terrifying daily pursuit of getting and spending and accumulating power. (See, for instance, his essay, “Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah.” )

But in as much as prayer is about halakhic community it is also about power, much as we might wish it were not so.

I certainly don’t mean to argue that gender’s place in Judaism starts and ends with the problem of igun or that legal equality and its corollary of egalitarian prayer do or should exhaust the range of religious experience.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Maimonides call to imitatio dei itself implies a spectrum of religious life embracing both sides of the gender divide and going beyond them as well, though what I’ve called “a shtiebel of one’s own.”  But once the shtiebel is no longer just one’s own, but of the community, we must be aware of the ways we are talking about boundaries and power.

I see power at work in many places, but not anywhere and everywhere, nor do I think the power entirely defines and circumscribes the range of human action, choice and freedom. I am not a disciple of Michel Foucault, for whom power is so all-encompassing that escape is impossible. I do not believe escape is impossible and we can choose our lives. But in order to do so we need to understand the ways in which power shapes and determines our lives and especially our religious lives.

While I am very much in agreement with Rabbi Tucker, and see his overall project as a vital contribution to the renewal of Torah in our time, I urge on him, to be frank, a more suspicious hermeneutic of halakha, and not only because the texts we are studying have all been written by men.  I say this because Torah is too precious to be deformed and be made an instrument of cruelty as it has so often been, and is today, precisely through the renewal of Jewish sovereignty.

Rabbi Tucker’s powerfully attractive stance as a student and practitioner of halakha assumes someone who not only stands before law but also is analytically prior to the law, with their own moral and religious judgments.

I envision someone with commitments, including moral commitments, some of which are shaped by tradition, and some of which we come to by ourselves, given this historical moment in which we find ourselves caught up. Now one could assume human being are constructed entirely by the tradition.

Indeed, some forms of Orthodoxy have been very busy trying to construct that very kind of person, or at least the idea of that kind of person. But it is unclear if such a person actually exists. And even if such a person does exist, he or she must, when faced with the suffering of other human beings, make a decision.

Invariably a person must choose to be cruel or choose to be kind. The law we hope will guide us to choose kindness. At least not affirmatively to choose cruelty. Those are the stakes of egalitarian prayer – and the challenge for its opponents is to answer how and why non-egalitarian prayer does not contribute – wittingly or not- to the terrible cruelties that the institution of Jewish marriage has tragically come to inflict in our time.

Here is a fourth response to my interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker. The first response was  by Dr. Malka Simkovich. The second response was by Yoav Sorek and the third response was by Rabbi Ysoscher Katz. The fourth response is by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper. I would have liked also responses from the left/progressive side or a non-polemical one from the Haredi right, but as of now it has not appeared.

Rabbi Aryeh Klapper is Dean of the Center for Modern Torah Leadership which organizes many programs including his long running Summer Beit Midrash Program. More of his articles and approaches to topics can be found at his website by topic from a pull down menu including the topics of : gender, halacha, and halakhah and public policy. Klapper’s approach is that of  treating the halakhah as a system of law and authority to which he applies his own talents of what the Talmud calls “up-rooter of mountains” (oker harim), the ability to interpret the text as clay in the hands of a potter.

Rabbi Klapper was part of the panel discussion and public conversation for the release of R. Ethan Tucker and R. Micha’el Rosenberg’s Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law along with R. Judith Hauptman and R. Joanna Samuels. (June 13, 2017)- Full recording here.  Rabbi Klapper’s talk on that panel will be published in a forthcoming issue of the JOFA Journal.

Klapper’s reservations about Tucker’s approach revolve around his rejection of legal originalism or the quest for a stable original intention or the original reason for the command.  Klapper avoids originalism in the context of halakhah because he thinks that it weakens commitment to observance, as well as the fact that mitzvot are multivalent over times and places and that  mitzvot may have many reasons, or embody a balance of values.

Klapper’s own approach is to treat a particular law as a chok, a law without a reason, when it seems to present an irreconcilable conflict with our values, thereby creating space for practical solutions in the application of the law. He is worried  about disparaging those who have lived honestly without achieving such resolution of values and halakhah. Based on prior practice of the halakhah, he refers to the new approaches as “identitarian” rather than egalitarian.

Even though, he opened by stating that he was going to work within Rabbi Tucker’s need to reduce submission and tension, by the end of the response Klapper advocates living with tension and a less than ideal relationship, the same way we tolerate faults in spouses and friends.

At the end of the aforementioned panel at Hadar, Klapper mentioned that a legal authority has great power of interpretation but needs authority going so far as to say that a rabbi could permit swine flesh by interpretation. When asked: how could it be permitted? He answered: pigs were genetically very different than the chazirim mentioned by the Torah.  One could find distinctions in  morphology, behavior, social significance, etc.  In context, Klapper’s point was that without authority, anything is possible. For him, this was parallel to Rabbi Tucker’s move regarding women. It is all in the hands of the authority of those who accept the law as it is practiced. His answer was seemingly tongue in cheek or for the rhetorical effect, yet it shows how he approaches the issue differently than Rabbi Tucker’s earnest application of rabbinic values.

Are Rabbis Klapper and Tucker speaking to two different communities, two ends of the same community, or one single community? Does it even matter?

As a side point, Rabbi Klapper asked rhetorically in this response as an obvious incorrect approach “about limiting minyanim perhaps only to the wealthy, or the graduates of exclusive colleges.” However, in this entire thread of discussion from all the respondents there does seem to be unacknowledged issues of class and education that are worthy of exploring.

Rabbi Aryeh Klapper- Response to Rabbi Tucker

Rabbi Tucker’s humility is evident in his recommending me as a respondent despite, or because of, the “sharp critiques and criticisms” he thanks me for in the book’s Introduction.  I fear that I will not disappoint; but I want to preface my comments with as clear a statement as I can of personal appreciation.  No matter how strongly or deeply we disagree, it is a great pleasure and privilege to know him.

My focus here is not on the book, rather it will be on Rabbi Tucker’s treatment in his interview of the interrelationship among halakhah, autonomously derived values, and rationales for mitzvot.

I argue in response that the costs of his method should outweigh its gains even for those who fully agree with his values and fervently welcome his halakhic outcomes. Those costs are shown in least two areas.  First, in order to salvage contemporary halakhah for his values, he binds halakhah throughout history to an ethic of social exclusion.  Second, he radically devalues the lived experience of past and present observant Jewish women and men.

I will try to conduct the discussion on Rabbi Tucker’s terms, that is to say without any of what he describes as “bludgeoning our values with the formal discipline of submission”, or “hiding behind the Torah’s authority in order to dodge the conflict”, or “overruling a position with the force of more precedents on my side or with my presumed ethical superiority”, or even “valorizing the conflict between morality and Halakhah”.

This does not mean that I agree with these harsh characterizations.  Indeed, it seems to me that Rabbi Tucker’s concept of “making our ears into hoppers” should encourage a fuller and fairer hearing for the undeniable thick strands of our tradition that he portrays so unsympathetically.

Halakhah and Legitimization 

Please note that each of the core terms above in my preface- autonomously derived values, rationales for mitzvot, and halakhah –  should be more tightly defined.  We should really provide separate treatments of

1. values derived via practical reason, values derived by pure reason, and values derived by intuition;
2. rationales for specific Torah commandments (=taamei hamitzvot), rationales for halakhic principles, and rationales for halakhic details;
3. halakhah as a practical legitimization or delegitimator of human actions, and halakhah as a source of philosophic truth or inspiration etc.

However, for the purposes of this discussion, I insist only the distinction between halakhah in its role as the practical legitimator or delegitimator of human actions, and its other roles and purposes.  In this essay, the unqualified term “halakhah” will refer only to that first role of legitimation.  For example, it will not include the formal legal outcomes of discussions about the Laws of Meal Offerings, so long as those rulings have no practical contemporary legal effects.

Halakhah is a legal system that simultaneously claims Divine authority and at the same time recognizes its own fallibility. In other words, it acknowledges that the law is not always what it should be.  However, as within any legal system, an action’s legitimacy is determined by reference to the law as-it-is, not the law as-it-should-be.  This is so even if one agrees that the law should be changed by contemporary authorities.

Let us begin from halakhah’s explicit internal validation of autonomously derived values.

The Talmud derives that there are three sins that one must die rather than commit: avodah zarah, giluy arayot, and shefichat damim (Sanhedrin 74a). How does the Talmud derive these points?

Avodah zarah is derived from Deuteronomy 6:5: “You must love G-d with all your heart and nefesh” – even if He takes your nefesh/life.

Giluy arayot is derived from the explicit analogy between adulterous rape and blood shedding in Deut. 22:26.

What is the source for shefikhut damim/bloodshedding, so that it can become the basis for gilui arayot?  There is no Biblical source. There is only the argument, in Rava’s formulation: “What have you seen that makes your blood redder than his?!”.

Since the Torah’s analogy between gilui arayot and bloodshedding can be properly interpreted only on the basis of Rava’s reasoning, this passage not only validates autonomously derived values, it declares that Torah cannot be understood properly except in the context of such values.

Rava’s principle also appears to contradict Rabbi Akiva’s authoritative interpretation (Bava Metzia 62a) of Leviticus 25:36: “And your brother shall live with you” – your life precedes your brother’s.  The Talmud does not raise this issue, but all later halakhah is compelled to distinguish the cases.  But this distinction is beside the point; the fact that Rabbi Akiva is not used to delegitimate Rava demonstrates that autonomously derived values can even overcome a strong textual challenge, and compel a reconciliation between text and values.

Values

At the same time, how can we develop our values properly other than by studying Torah?  Do we not have the obligation to put Torah at the core in developing, refining, and sometimes reconstructing our moral intuition and reasoning?

Let us assume that we should resist the temptation to idealize this sometimes tempestuous dialectic between the study of Torah and values. Rather, we should instead try to harmonize halakhah and values.

The question is what we do in the interim, when we individually or collectively experience unresolved conflict between halakhah and our autonomously derived values.

The fully integrated religious life may be a noble aspiration, but there are many ways to go astray in the attempt. We should be very wary of personal claims to have achieved it (and also of daas Torah claims that others have achieved it).

We must be clear that genuine integration does not involve reducing halakhah to ethics.  There are legitimate grounds of autonomous value other than ethics, such as morality and holiness.  These can conflict with each other as well as with halakhah, therefore any halakhah may reflect a balance among those separate grounds of value.

Conflict between halakhah and values can happen either on the level of practical outcomes, or on the level of fundamental values.  In the former case, my values lead me to think that the halakhah as-it-is is wrong, even though it was instituted for proper purposes. The disparity is either because of a mistaken policy decision in the past or because circumstances have changed.  In the latter case, my values lead me to think that the values embodied by the halakhah were wrong from the start.

Rabbi Tucker argues that with regard to gender, he has no remaining conflicts on the second level – his values and those of the halakhah are in perfect accord.  Nor does he express interest in challenging the policy judgments of the past halakhic tradition.  He contends, however, that because of changed circumstances, the halakhah no longer properly expresses its own values, and therefore it must be adjusted.

But how can one reliably know what the halakhah’s values are, if its mandates no longer express them accurately?  Won’t you end up changing halakhah to match your preconceived notion of what its values should be?

Rabbi Tucker responds to this question by adopting an originalist approach to explaining mitzvot and halakhah.   He provides rationales that make sense in a speculative reconstruction of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual universe in which a specific obligation arose.

(He does not raise the thorny question of when a mitzvah is supposed to have arisen.  But it seems to me that an originalist approach must be very subject to the position one takes about the dating and composition of the Torah, and of the provenance of other elements of halakhah.)

Originalism 

I am not a fan of originalism in the context of halakhah, for four reasons.

My first ground is pragmatic.  In my experience, originalism tends to weaken rather than strengthen contemporary commitment to observance.

One lesson I learn from Maimonides’ efforts in the Guide of the Perplexed at providing originalist rationales is that they tend to make mitzvot feel obsolete.  Maimonides himself generally avoids using those rationales to frame specific halakhic rulings.  We should not model our tzitzit on the specific forms used by ancient idolatrous priests, even if we are convinced that tzitzit were initially intended by the Torah to visually mark us as “a kingdom of priests”.  Similarly, very few Jews feel religiously bound to eschew pork because pigs once carried trichinosis.

I have three other grounds for rejecting originalism in principle.

1) mitzvot may have different purposes in different times and places.

2) mitzvot may have many reasons, or embody a balance of values.  (For example: We wear tzitzit as did idolatrous priests, because we are a kingdom of priests, but we don’t wear shatnez, because – wait for it . . . that’s what idolatrous priests wore.)

3) mitzvot may accumulate meanings as a result of their practice over time.

I prefer to conceive of taamei hamitzvot in the following terms:

(1)   Each mitzvah or practice has a complex set of purposes

(2)   The specific forms of mitzvot often reflect a delicate balance among competing values (3)   Some purposes for some mitzvot will be relevant or intelligible only to some communities at certain points in history

Furthermore, when social change makes the generally accepted import of a mitzvah less intelligible, Halakhah and halakhic societies rarely react by changing the law.  Instead, our job is to infuse the sociologically antique meaning into the mitzvah.

Take shofar as an example. Many rationales have been offered over time for the mitzvah of shofar.  The two for which we have the best originalist evidence (i.e., clear parallels in Tanakh) are: (1)  To announce the coronation or at least arrival of a king  (2)  To raise an alarm.

I think it is clear that if the mitzvah were given today, with the same intent, we would use either a brass band or artillery to fulfill the former reason, as we do at the arrival of a president, and an air raid siren to fulfill the second reason.

Yet I presume that Rabbi Tucker agrees that one cannot fulfill the mitzvah today without an animal’s horn.  Why not?  The Torah says only “teruah”, and gives no explicit instructions about a specific instrument.  If one is not to resort to formalism, one must say that the ram’s horn has acquired a significance over time that is distinct from the originalist meaning.

Note also that if the mitzvah is intended to fulfill both originalist purposes, no contemporary practice could likely fulfill the obligation.  On a superficial level, this is because we do not use marching bands to raise alarms, or sirens to inaugurate presidents.  On a deeper level, this is because the president’s arrival does not arouse fear that we will soon be on trial for our lives.  Therefore, the two purposes are not compatible in contemporary semiotics, whereas they were once identical.

With this introduction, we can turn to the question of whether it remains true that only males can blow the ram’s horn in order for their fellows to fulfill the mitzvah of hearing it.  I think it is clear that the mode of analysis above creates a very strong predisposition against changing the law in this regard, even if the meaning of gender-distinction has changed in exactly the way that Rabbi Tucker postulates.  We would instead seek to carry out the mitzvah as before while preserving the historical significance of gender in our minds and souls, as we preserve the significance of animal horns.

This approach has the advantage of humility.  If we are wrong about the reason, we still preserve the formal practice, and sometimes our hearts are drawn after our actions.

Rabbi Tucker’s response must be that the cost is too great, because continuing the gender requirement for the shofar-blower offends his autonomously derived values in a way that using the horn of an animal does not.  So here, it is necessary to make our aspiration a reality, and move the halakhah to match our values.

I think we should be very conscious of three dangers in such efforts at integration of our values and the halakhah. Two of these are apparent and mirror images of each other.

(1) We might fall into self-fufillment and constantly see in Torah only a reflection of our own image.

(2) We might develop an akeidah complex, in which we think that the goals of serving G-d with all our heart and soul can be achieved only through submission to religious mandates that violate our moral reason and intuition.

Rabbi Tucker is aware of, but not cowed, by the first danger, and hyper-alert to the second. I think that Rabbi Tucker overreacts to the second risk.

My Opinion: chokifying and  respect for the past

I prefer two alternative approaches to his concern lest we overvalue submission.

First: one can preserve the conflict by assigning mitzvot to a category of laws with no humanly intelligible purpose (hukim), a “chokifying” of the mitzvah.  There is no reason to suspect that this will result in our preferring unintelligible mitzvot over the intelligible. This approach creates space for many less radical approaches to reconciling the halakhah that one practices with one’s values. (For more on his idea of chokifying, see here, here, and here).

Second: even if one holds that reconciliation is the ideal, that does not justify disparaging the profound religious experiences of those who live and have lived honestly without achieving such resolution.

Sacrifice and Conflict 

We should not go through life looking for ever-greater opportunities to offer our values up as a sacrifice to G-d, in order to ensure that our motives are purely submission to His service.  Rabbi Yisroel Salanter might have said: Each time we set out to sacrifice our own ruchniyus (spiritual needs or desires), we end up being sacrificing someone else’s gashmiyus (physical needs or desires).

But every serious observant Jew lives with some degree of conflict between their religion and their independent sense of right; we have all eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  G-d’s choice to express His Will in the form of law, and for that law to become a national-collective religious enterprise, means that there must be enormous value in obeying the system’s outputs even when one disagrees with them.

Another way to frame the issue is that the ideal Jew lives in a deep and joyous relationship with G-d and Torah.  Relationships build over a lifetime; joy does not require perfect agreement; and genuine relationships can require you to find meaning in things that fulfill your friend or spouse or parent’s values rather than your own, even when those choices are painful, and even though you surely do not seek them out.

It must be noted that this discourse is once again being conducted largely among men.  For those interested, a model of the discourse I think is needed can be found by reading my article on Tzeniut, found here, and then Miriam Gedwiser’s beautiful, powerful, and challenging response. The dedicated can go on to this longer article by Miriam Gedwiser.

3) A third danger, lying between the extremes of imposing self-values and submission to incorrect values, is that in the attempt to integrate values and halakhah, we may end up reading a hybrid morality into and then out of Torah that conforms neither to the text nor to our souls.  This risk inheres in all efforts at integration, but I think Rabbi Tucker’s method exacerbates it.

Rabbi Tucker’s method requires a contextual morality, and ironically ends up binding prior halakhah to a speculatively reconstructed premodern morality.  His readings of the Rebellious Son and the Akeidah leave room for the halakhic Jew to condone the execution of disobedient children (in cultures where parents are sort of like contemporary police), and perhaps even human sacrifice (in non-Jewish cultures which find human sacrifice meaningful).

More immediately, his halakhah prioritizes the dignity of ritual over the dignity of human beings.  He confirms that social inferiors should not be allowed to play prominent roles in public liturgy etc.; it is just that contemporary Orthodoxy has incorrectly identified women as a socially inferior class.  Perhaps only the wealthy, or the graduates of exclusive colleges, should count to Modern Orthodox minyanim today, albeit regardless of gender, because of kavod tzibbur.  This to me does not seem a moral improvement.

These difficulties seem endemic to the method.

Many of the issues raised here hark back to intense conversations Rabbi Tucker and I had twenty-five years ago at Harvard Hillel; some of them take me back even further, to conversations with my dear friend Rabbi Elisha Anscelovits when we were students at Yeshiva University.  I am glad that some elements of those conversations will now have a broader audience.

Other Gender Discussions with Rabbi Tucker

Readers may be interested in two efforts to share other elements of those conversations with Rabbi Tucker.

1) In a response to Rabbi Tucker’s article on Women and Tefillin several years ago, I took strong issue with his claim that women can be full citizens only in a halakhah that eliminates gender as a relevant category, and that past gender distinctions can only be understood in terms of women’s incomplete citizenship. I highlighted what seemed to me a failure to consider non-sexist rationales for specific halakhot:

“Failure to imagine the hava amina – to treat one’s own position as unproblematically peshitta (so obvious that it goes without saying) –  results in a vicious cycle: texts are read exclusively through the lens of ideology, and then cited as evidence for that same ideology”,

and a failure to respond religiously to the reality of gender differences:

“religion must take into account and ideally channel the differences between male and female experiences, rather than denying them”.

Raphael Magarik, (a student of both Rabbi Anscelovits and Rabbi Tucker at Yeshivat Maale Gilboa & Yeshivat Hadar, now a PhD Candidate in English, University of California, Berkeley)  critiqued my critique here, and I responded here.

2) My forthcoming review of Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law (JOFA Journal) states that

The quality and humility of Rabbi Tucker and Rabbi Rosenberg’s work can serve as a model for private and public halakhic conversations about such issues.  But despite my deep personal appreciation of its authors, this book does not succeed in gaining practical halakhic legitimacy for gender-identical, or “identitarian,” prayer services.  

My central point is that the personal and communal authority to change halakhah to what it should be rests solely with those who accept the authority of halakhah as it is.

Nothing I have written here, or previously, is intended to deny the reality of the challenges Rabbi Tucker raises, or the value of his effort to create a systematic and authentically halakhic response.

We agree that a halakhic system, which speaks to only a minority of Jews, and commands the allegiance of even fewer, has failed, regardless of where one puts the blame.  We agree that the solution is not to abandon halakhah, but rather to seek to expand its constituency.  We agree that this requires thinking systematically about halakhah. These are no small things.

I look forward to his response, and to ongoing conversation, with gratitude and appreciation for the past, and in recognition of the ways in which my own thinking on these issues has been developed and deepened by engagement with Rabbi Tucker.

Here is a third response to my interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker.  The first Response was by Dr. Malka Simkovich. The second response was by Yoav Sorek.  The third response is by Rabbi Ysoscher Katz, chair of Talmud at YCT and Rabbi/posek of the Prospect Heights Synagogue

Rabbi Ysoscher Katz received ordination from Rabbi Yechezkel Roth, dayan of UTA Satmer. Rabbi Katz studied in Brisk and in Yeshivat Beit Yosef, Navaradok for over ten years. He is head of Talmud study at YCT . For a full presentation of his views, see his statement called “Torat Chaim ve Ahavat Chesed” as well as here and here.

Rabbi Katz, while respecting the great learning and erudition of Rabbi Tucker, finds himself on the other side of a divide from the latter’s position. Katz rejects seeing Biblically mandated laws and concepts as subject to social and historical contextualization. For Katz, gender roles is part of the halakhic understanding of the Bible, In addition, Katz does not think we can ever extract the original value behind Jewish law in an act of retrieval of original values.  We only have the flexibility of the halakhic system with which to work.  Katz finds the concept of intuiting the divine moral direction, using the text as a moral compass, as, at best, conjecture. Finally as a coda, Katz declares that he is worried that changes weaken the integrity of the religious fabric that holds the community together. He is worried about questions of reverence and the community as being able to withstand challenges. Katz sees the embrace of progressive social idea predominately as a way of bring a religious message to a broader array of people.

Rabbi Ysoscher Katz’s Prospect Heights Shul recently hired a woman as “Rosh kehilla” Michal Kohane, a Maharat-in-training.

Demarcating God’s Presence and Interpreting His Words

Rabbi Ysoscher Katz

Rav Ethan is an important contemporary thinker and teacher of Torah. To use a common paraphrase of the gemara in Avodah Zara (5.): הוא הגבר אשר הקים עולה של תורה; Rav Ethan’s unique Torah is responsible for bringing many people closer to Torah and yiddishkeit. It is a real merit to dialogue with him.

Before I start, please allow me to mention two things:

• I do not represent any organization or institution. I speak only for myself.
• The interview provides tremendous insight into Rabbi Tucker’s thinking. I encourage the reader to also read the linked essays on women and tefilin and women as rabbis. They nicely compliment this interview. Combined, they provide a fuller understanding of Rav Ethan’s well thought out and beautifully articulated Halakhic philosophy, along with its theological underpinnings.

With that I will begin.

Even though some people conflate my approach with Rav Ethan’s, they are very different. While there is overlap in our respective philosophies, at a certain point our approaches diverge. My method exists on a continuum of what Modern Orthodox pesika has always done, but I am limited by the parameters of that philosophy. Rav Ethan traverses those parameters, suggesting an approach which is of a whole different magnitude.

Modern Orthodox psak is informed by a belief in a halakhic system that is in dialogue with contemporary norms. While poskim might differ on the specifics of that philosophy or how broadly to apply it, they all endorse the basic ethos of reconciliation, as best as possible, between these two value systems; halakhah and modernity.  Much of what Rav Ethan says in his book Gender Equality And Prayer In Jewish Law operates on that continuum. He too attempts to resolve the conflict between traditional exclusionary attitudes and modern notions of egalitarianism. However, in order for his argument to work perfectly, he ultimately needs to make a Halakhic leap from the outer limits of Modern Orthodox philosophy of psak towards a place where it, in my opinion, cannot go.

Egalitarianism

Rav Ethan needs to embrace a robust egalitarianism which encompasses the entire Halakhic corpus, one that believes that every gender based distinction in Halakhah is sociological, not biological. According to Rav Ethan, whenever we encounter a gender based distinction, in Chazal or the Torah, it is not about women per se, but instead is referring to someone who is part of a trio of individuals “known to be adjunct or second-class citizens in the larger Greco-Roman world in which the Sages lived” (the other two being minors and slaves). It is not gender essentialist and would therefore not apply to the women of our time.

Consequently, when the Mechilta says that women are exempt from wearing tefillin because the word בניכם (Devarim 11:19) means sons, not daughters, or when some poskim say that women do not count in a minyan because the word בני that is used in the context of devarim she’be’kedusha (Va’yikra 22:32), that distinction no longer applies. Similarly, when Chazal infer from the biblical gendered language used in the context of Jewish monarchy, שום תשים עליך מלך (Devarim 17:12), that a woman cannot serve as a queen (“מלך ולא מלכה”), that distinction also no longer applies today. Again, the origins of this gendered distinction was sociological; women at the time were “adjunct and second-class citizens.” Today’s women are culturally equal and accordingly not subject to the biblical exclusion.

While I am in agreement with Rav Ethan’s overall feminist critique of gendered observance, I am unable to accept his all-encompassing dismissal of the category of women in modern times. Instead I believe that we need to apply it in a more limited fashion. An egalitarian critique, in my opinion, is legitimately applied to de’rabanans, but de’oraita based distinctions, which are derived from the Torah’s gendered language (בניכם ולא בנותיכם, אנשים ולא נשים), are immune from such critique. When God makes those distinctions, it is perhaps capricious (descriptively speaking), but is certainly not discriminatory-in a moral sense. God’s words are eternal and transcend cultural influences or human values. To import a cultural based definition of women in the Rabbinic context to its appearance in the Torah is a conjectural leap. The latter’s speech is obviously informed by contemporary norms, the former’s is not, at least not according to conventions of traditional biblical theology.

Rav Ethen goes from women in Chazal, to gendered language in the Torah. While rabbinic women can easily be explained as referring to a sociological construct, it is much harder to make that claim about verses in the Torah where the gender-specific language is solidified in Midrash Halakhah.  These drashot, from a traditional perspective, are merely interpretive, revealing what the text means when God uttered those formulations.

While Rav Ethan indeed provides multiple proofs for the claim that rabbinic categories are culturally subjective, none of them, however, are categories with a specific basis in the Torah. (Rav Ethan, in his various writings, has employed different examples to prove his claim. He either mentions “nochri” “cheresh” (Gender Equality And Prayer In Jewish Law P. 145, n. 80) “the obligation to air out once a month found books,” (in the interview with Dr. Brill) or “the inability of women to offer things for sale at the market” (in the above linked essay on women as rabbis). The common denominator in these examples is that they are all rabbinc concepts or formulations, none of them is predicated on an explicit biblical formulation.  

Practically then, in the context of Jewish monarchy, according to the drash adopted by the Rambam, women are excluded, by divine decree (or perhaps even divine caprice or whim) from any authoritative position. Those terms (מלך ולא מלכה, or the comparable case of tefillin or minyan, where women are excluded because it saysבניכם  or בני respectively), uttered by God, are clearly about essentialist gender and not about a subjective social construct.  The Torah exists outside of a particular social construct. This, essentially is the idea behind concepts like גזירת הכתוב, לא דרשינן טעמא דקרא, or מה אעשה ואבי שבשמים גזר עלי. They imply that God’s commands can be capricious, and that we cannot know definitively the purpose, reason or intent of Biblical commands or their seemingly arbitrarily imposed boundaries, gendered or otherwise.

Can We Know the Divine Will?

Rav Ethan believes that mankind can (and is perhaps even obligated to) discern and fully comprehend the Divine will, to “know what God wants from us.” That ability is partially attainable because of the “kernel of prophecy” embedded in the “Halakhic instincts” of “the Jewish people.”

A corollary of this confidence in humanity’s ability to comprehend God’s inner workings is the assumption (attributed to my dear friend Rav Elisha Anscelovits) that we can definitively “identify what a mitzvah or practice is about, what are the values that are guiding it.” Rav Ethan consequently sees “as problematic an aversion to seeking out reasons for mitzvot.”

Beyond expressing discomfort with those who refuse to say definitively why God wants something, Rabbis Ethan and Elisha also reject the traditional notion that Halakhah is “like an electric fence.” They instead believe that its purpose is to function as a “compass.”

I am uncertain about the theological postulates which provide the framework for Rav Ethan’s Halakhic philosophy. The ability to negate biblical categories which are incompatible with contemporary norms is informed by a belief in our ability to “know what God wants” and that we can “identify what a mitzvah or practice is about, what are the values that are guiding it.” (Rav Ethan and Rav Elisha would argue that He is presumably guided by our value system and therefore “wants” a religious life that is universally egalitarian). I believe that such a level of certainty about the will of the ineffable is impossible.  We can be certain about what He wants us to do, but extrapolating from that what it is that He really wants, is at best conjectural.

The sources that express this unbridgeable gulf between His will and our capacity to decipher it are innumerable.  One, however, is particularly evocative. It expresses the idea with brevity and precision. Chazal tell us in masechet sukkah (5.)  that the Shekhinah perpetually hovers ten cubits above earth, never descending completely. The gap between God and mankind is indeed small and our charge is to continuously shrink it. Yet, despite our best efforts, Chazal tell us, the gap will never be completely closed.

While the statement is primarily mystical, its implication for psak is dipositive. There will always be a categorical difference that separates God from us, our values, and sociological categories. It is noteworthy that they use the Shekhinah aspect of the Divine. Shekhinah in kabbalah represents the immanent aspect of God, the one that interacts with our world. For them, even an immanent God remains somewhat aloof and unattainable. Denying the gap is akin to anthropomorphism. It sees God and mankind functioning on a level playing field. He is lowered to this world, made to conform to our moral and ethical constructs.

Parenthetically it is worth noting an informative similarity. Rav Ethan says that his belief in our ability to discern the divine will is informed by a modicum of contemporary prophecy. He believes that there are traces of “prophecy” in our “Halakhic instincts.” This notion has echoes in 11^th and 12^th century Ashkenazi poskim’s disproportionate reverence for minhag. The Rishonim’s exaggerated awe for their communities’ cotemporary practices, to the point where they have the ability to challenge the authority of codified Halakhah, is understood by many to be informed by a belief in the inherent sanctity of their community. Their martyrdom during the persecution of the Crusades sanctified their practices and intuitive behaviors, infusing them with the power to force the Rishonim to reevaluate assumed norms and established textual interpretations. Ultimately, those Rishonim, like Rav Ethan, attributed transcendental value to the practices and intuitions of the observant community.

The comparison is informative in the breach. While Rav Ethan allows the communal “prophecy” to challenge established norms which have their basis in the biblical texts, the Rishonim limited that power to the Rabbinic realm. Rabbeinu Tam and others in the group of Ashkenazi poskim who gave Halakhic credence to their contemporaries’ behavioral traditions, drew the line at biblical norms. Communal practices indeed have the power to make us reexamine assumed Rabbinic laws and requirements, but never where they allowed to upend established biblical norms.

(Another pillar of Rav Ethan (and Rav Elisha’s) Halakhic philosophy is the claim that the purpose of the Rabbinic project is to serve as a “compass,” not as a “fence.” It is my sense that such claim would be counterintuitive to most traditional learners. The general impression is the exact opposite, that they see their role as gatekeepers, not as guides. To fully explore this additional disagreement is beyond the scope of this essay. I hope to address it more in depth at a future time.)

Conclusion

Rejecting Rav Ethan’s two fundamental postulates makes it impossible for me to embrace his all-encompassing negation of gender differences, regardless if the source is biblical or rabbinic. I believe that certain gender-based Halakhic distinctions, because of their biblical origin, will (unfortunately) continue in perpetuity. It will, of course, always trouble us, but we will never be able to change that. Our religious mandate, instead, is to, subserviently, accept the burden of divine capriciousness. Rav Ethan’s attempt to alleviate that burden, cannot work because we disagree on the fundamentals.

Postscript on Community

Rav Ethan’s sefer highlighted for me an oft-repeated critique of the entire progressive enterprise. After 183 pages on the Halakhic legitimacy of a robust religious egalitarianism, he spends a scant two pages exploring its sociological implications. This discrepancy is not unique to Rav Ethan, it is true for all of us who are involved in this project. We pay insufficient attention to the socio-religious implications of such drastic changes, introduced at such a fast pace.

The modern religious landscape has been radically transformed in a mere fifty to sixty years. Such rapid change will obviously cause major socio-religious convulsions. We, therefore, need to remember that we are not just rabbis, responsible for our communities’ intellectual growth. Rather, we are also pastors who have been entrusted with our congregant’s spiritual wellbeing. We, therefore, cannot afford to merely focus on the intellectual aspects of the feminist critique, we also need to ensure that these changes are implemented with caution and sensitivity. These changes, if done wrongly, could potentially rent the religious fabric that sustains our communities.

Reverence for tradition is what scaffolds our communities’ infrastructure. When that is gone, the communal edifice falls apart, leaving our congregants exposed and religiously vulnerable. That is a price we currently cannot afford. Our immunity to the potent anti-religious elements that envelop us everywhere we turn are weak and depleted. It would be difficult to justify the progressive agenda if the end result of these changes is a depletion in our religious antibodies instead of an increase.

The real goal of this intellectually challenging and emotionally draining project, at least for me, is to provide an all-encompassing religious arena whereby everybody, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation, feels that they have optimal access to a robust and comprehensive spiritual life. For me, progressiveness is merely a platform which allows a broader array of people to grow religiously, and spiritually excel.

Last week, I posted a widely read and discussed interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker. This week, I will be posting several diverse responses.  The first Response was by Dr. Malka Simkovich. Here is the second response by Yoav Sorek. Rather than just looking at technical details, Sorek thinks such decisions need to be grounded in bigger questions of family and society.

Yoav Sorek is the Editor in Chief of the Shiloach Journal of for Policy and Thought (Tikva Fund). He created the Musaf Shabbat section for the Makor Rishon newspaper and was its editor for seven years. He is the author of The Israeli Covenant (Hebrew) and has published numerous articles on Judaism, Zionism and public policy. He is a graduate of Mercaz yeshivas and holds a BA and MA from the Open University in Jewish History. . Yoav is currently pursuing doctoral studies at Ben Gurion University.

In theory, Sorek agrees with Tucker’s method and his conclusion, however is unsure on issues of whether the laws are based on discrimination and not a Jewish vision of the family. Sorek’s views of halakhah compared to others is shown on this report of a panel at Yeshivat Siach Yitzhak that he was on seven years ago in which he spoke alongside Rav Eliezer Melamed, Rav Baruch Gigi, Rav Shlomo Dichovsky and Rav Yair Dryfus. As reported by Tomer Persico. (article is in Hebrew), Sorek stood out on the panel for advocating changes to the halakhah to respond to the major changes of the last century. Halakhah, for Sorek, should not exclude the majority of the Jewish people. On the other hand, he is an active social conservative editing a Tikva Fund publication.

Beyond Technical Details:What about the Family?
Yoav Sorek

I cannot recall any previous experience in which I read a conversation about Halakha and enjoyed it so much. Reading Rabbi Tucker, on the background of the contemporary discourse of halakha, was extremely refreshing. His attitude is not only brilliantly articulated but first and foremost very precise, and deeply loyal to the essential basics of halakha. This is a manifesto of a real talmid hakham

He is a true Talmid Chachm – like the one he mentioned, Dor Revi’i (Rabbi Moshe Glasner, the great-grandson of the Hatam Sofer), of whom I am writing my PhD dissertation. Glasner is relevant in another aspect also: He was probably the first modern Jewish scholar to promote post-denominationalism. After defending the concept of Orthodox separatism in his middle days, he powerfully went beyond it in his last years – believing that when and where there is no danger of assimilation there is no justification to the creation of separate communities.

Nevertheless, as to the topic discussed in the interview, I don’t accept Tucker’s position easily.

I understand his case: when dealing with American Orthodox discourse, Tucker finds himself confronting Jews who believe morally in egalitarianism, but believe that the Halakha can’t adhere to it because of formal considerations. We believe in X, but we can’t touch the Halakha that says Y. Justly, Tucker argues against this approach, which turns the rich and meaningful halakhic tradition into a mere formalistic and stagnated position. Halakha should not challenge our moral believes; it should cultivate them.

As Tucker beautifully articulates, halakha should never be isolated from values. Learning halakha contains the mission of listening to the values that Jewish law echo – which can differ from that we collect from the surrounding zeitgeist. Nevertheless, maybe this is the case here. Maybe, the halakhic rulings cited by Tucker are not merely a reflection of the social and economic status of women in the age of the Sages, rather they contain values that we should learn from.

Tucker is so captured in his egalitarian approach, that he does not really consider its own biases. For Tucker, there are only two possible explanations to excluding women from the minyan: The first is their social status at ancient times, and the other is their “xx chromosomes” – a code that represents a discriminating approach. I believe that Tucker is right and that many of the halakhic rulings towards women are a function of their legal and economic status in ancient times; but I believe that this is not the full picture. Halakha thinks that men and women are not identical, and sees them as having different roles in a way that is essential for family and society. God could have created humanity as a single sex. He did not do so.

Where should we draw the line? Which rulings are based on social status and which have to do with the positive differences between men and women? I don’t know. I think this is one of the biggest challenges that are on the table of this generation’s sages. My personal tendency is to count women for minyan, and I think this will become natural; but I am not sure.

Take just one application: a minyan is not just an instrument to allow certain rituals; it is the core of a Jewish community, or edah in halakhic discourse. While we were counting only adult men, we needed ten Jewish household to create a community. If we will count the women also, then we can be satisfied by five. This is a huge change, which is far from being technical. By counting two adults in every family, we reconstruct the meaning of a Jewish family or household. If until now the family was treated up to now as an organic unit, it is now closer to be an umbrella of two adults who share some kids.

I acknowledge that this is the real world we live in. A world of individuals who share their lives, rather than the old world where the family was the basic unit of society. However, isn’t this change destructive to the concept of family? Is it not worth it to consider the that Jewish tradition conserves a different approach to family worth consideration? Do we accept automatically the attitude that treats traditional institutions as oppressive and ignore their benefits?

When we ask about egalitarianism and family, we should not just focus on the technical question of who will stay with the kids. This is not the point (and men can do stay with the kids just like women). The question is what is a family? Does it have any structure? Is there a “head of the family”? Is hierarchy only a bad word, which represents power – or is it also a key for responsibility, accountability and division of labor? These questions are hard to hear for a liberal ear geared toward egalitarianism. However, I think that when learning Torah we should be open for also for these questions.

Because of these considerations, I am not rushing to create egalitarian minyanim– although I can hardly question their halakhic legitimacy. I am afraid that we have not yet really thought through all of the consequences, and we never investigated the question of where differences are discriminating and where they are real and good. This is a huge challenge which I would like Rabbi Tucker, as well as other brave and devoted Torah scholars, to take upon themselves. I will be more than happy to take part.

Tucker’s attitude towards Halakha is loyal and precise, more classic than classic, in the best meaning of this term. Is he also ready to question his liberal egalitarian preconceptions?

Last week, I posted a widely read and discussed interview with Rabbi Ethan Tucker. This week, I will be posting several diverse responses.  Today’s response is by Dr. Malka Simkovich, who first points out a different set of Rabbinic texts than Tucker used, ones that talk about the family, mothers, and feminine qualities. She also points out the practical issues. Then she reaffirms the need for more female voices in the discussion.

Malka Z. Simkovich is the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and Director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in Second Temple Judaism from Brandeis University. She has an M.A. degree in Hebrew Bible from Harvard University and a B.A. in Bible Studies and Music Theory from Stern College of Yeshiva University. Her research focuses on universalist Jewish literature that was written in the late Second Temple period. She recently published  The Making of Jewish Universalism: From Exile to Alexandria (Lexington Books, 2016). She is currently completing a book on Second Temple Judaism that will be published by the Jewish Publication Society.

This response is not about the distinction between leadership and minyan, rather seeks to open the discussion to a broader range of issues.  I note that this essay, in contrast to Tucker’s, speaks more of system then values, responsibility than what God wants, and more about the family and private space than ritual space.

What do Observant Jewish Women Want?

Malka Z. Simkovich

Rabbi Tucker’s arguments rest on his conviction that the essential biological difference between men and women did not interest the early rabbinic formulators of halakhic practice. According to Tucker, the rabbis did not see an innate difference between genders that led them to put foundational proscriptions for men and women into place. Instead, Tucker notes, halakha was once motivated by interests in preserving “class and power.” Now that women’s positions of class and power have changed, halakhic practice must change too.

The assumption that halakha was formulated based on interests in preserving class and power is where Tucker and I disagree, and this disagreement may have substantive ramifications. If Tucker is correct, then one may naturally (and correctly, I think) argue that we need to look within the halakhic system to make changes that accommodate the changes we have seen in women’s social standing. But I don’t think any of these categories—biology, class, or power— is the main driver of the halakhic system. I think the rabbis were more concerned with preserving a stable social organism that depended on a traditional family structure with a husband and wife at the core.

Innumerable statements in rabbinic literature testify to the rabbis’ sense of responsibility when it comes to protecting and nurturing familial stability. When the rabbis ruminate in Genesis Rabbah 17:2 on what living without a wife can be compared to, for example, they are not praising a wife as one would praise an obedient servant or dutiful employee. Rabbi Joshua’s statement that a man who has no wife “lives without goodness, assistance, blessing, or atonement,” or Rabbi Levi’s statement that a man who has no wife is “without life,” can certainly be read through feminist lens that highlight the male-centricity of the rabbinic psyche, which perceives the religious experience mainly through masculine lenses. But these statements should also be appreciated for how they underscore the rabbinic belief in the cosmic necessity of marriage, the foundational connection in the marital relationship that lays the groundwork for everything else that is blessed and good.

Even the mandate in Tanakh to honors one’s parents, which is so developed in rabbinic literature, has the familial ideal in mind.  When we are told in the Talmud (b. Kid. 31b) that Rabbi Tarfon bent down so that his mother would step on him to more easily get in and out of her bed. In the story, Rabbi Tarfon physically and psychologically lowers himself to honor his mother, to allow her the senior status that her motherhood invites–and demands. We are told in the same passage that when Rabbi Joseph heard his mother approaching, he would say to himself, “I will stand before the approaching Divine Presence.” What accounts for the extreme acts of respect that these rabbis paid their mothers? It seems that underlying the emphasis on preserving and honoring parents, especially mothers, is an acknowledgment that they have had a hand in the divine act of human creation. The very act of determining how family units should live and function, moreover, required the rabbis to acknowledge how vital women were to the social system that they were creating.

Much of halakha regards family law and is based on, or hopes for, community units that comprise family units which comprise individual units. When the family unit is threatened, the halakhic system is threatened. Demanding that both husband and wife participate equally in ritual law, therefore, may have been regarded as threatening to the family unit. I am not arguing that the concept of a stable family unit needs to remain static throughout the centuries, but noting that the ideal of familial stability motivated the rabbis.

Anyone who wonders whether the halakhic system rests on the ideal of a traditional family structure should ask a single or gay friend who affiliates with the orthodox community to relay their experience of seeking to participate in public ritual life. While many congregations are moving towards finding ways to include those who do not participate in a traditional family unit, most orthodox communities are not sensitive to how isolating it is to live as an orthodox Jew outside of a traditional family. Perhaps our goal, then, should be to ask whether we can change the concept of what a stable family unit looks like.

My second point regards Tucker’s argument that he is not seeking to change halakha, but trying to “apply halakhah’s internal logic to a changing reality.” I appreciate the effort to look for spaces in halakha for women to participate alongside men, should they choose to. As the years go by, attending synagogue becomes more of an outsider experience for me. The pain of being on the outside looking in grows more acute, rather than more faded. I want my daughters to have the opportunities to participate in ritual life that I do not have. I am wary, however, of innovators’ claim to be inheriting, rather than innovating.  Yet the rabbis, who revolutionized Jewish law and made it normative, claimed in the first chapter of Abot that they were simply inheritors of an ancient tradition and nothing more. I suppose that there is nothing more “rabbinic,” then, than making major changes and arguing that you’re not making any change at all. Still, I find the insistence that the halakhic system is being preserved here rather than being remodeled unsettling.

One final point. I follow discussions about women’s ritual participation on social media and in print with interest, but also with detached bewilderment. The majority of these discussions are occurring between men, despite the fact that we are fortunate today to have plenty of women who are knowledgeable in rabbinic literature. I suspect that despite their scholarship, many women scholars have not imbued themselves with the authority to engage in these conversations as overseers and protectors of the halakhic system. I’m afraid that the most important question, Freud’s question, gets overlooked in these discussions: What does a woman want?

Unfortunately, this question has already been answered in the Haredi community in a way to shut women out. I’ve been told myself multiple times that if women were obligated to attend minyan three times a day, they would not be able to fulfill this commandment. Women don’t want, so the argument goes, full ritual equity and obligation. Despite the problems with making such presumptions, we must take into account the following question: is your equality my equality? Or is it simply placing a major burden on women, who—let’s face it—are often mothers who are doing the majority of the carpooling, laundry, cooking, and cleaning?

Again, I refuse to use the above questions as a means to justify denying women opportunities. I believe that we should seek (and perhaps create) equality and opportunity within the halakhic system. But I also want to take a step back before we move forward. Has anyone asked women what they want? Certain aspects of equal ritual participation seem intuitive, at least to me. I would love to see women being more active as leaders in the ritual sphere. But I also know that some of my friends who “have it all”—my friends who have small children and big careers—are struggling to get everything done, and struggling to find gratification in every part of their fractured lives. Or maybe that’s just me.

My suggestion, therefore, is two-fold: first, we must put women at the foreground of these conversations. Second, we should increase communal and religious elasticity for both men and women by offering more space for men in the household sphere and more space for women in the public, ritual sphere. I emphasize that this space should be offered rather than required.

As a postscript, I will add that after writing the above comments, I made note of some responses to Tucker’s piece on Facebook.  I want to specifically address Sarah Rindner’s important point there that the experiential aspect of Judaism within the home has always been where women have shone as partners alongside men (and often, I would venture to add, more than partners). Rindner indicates that by emphasizing that Jewish women should practice Judaism alongside men in the public sphere, Tucker actually runs the ironic risk of erasing a particular space that has been made for women to function as educators and leaders. If I understand her correctly, I believe that Rindner’s point correlates with my argument above regarding the rabbinic concern for protecting the family unit.

While I am not certain that Ridner’s point was fully addressed by Rabbi Tucker, I was heartened to see that Tucker clarified in his response that the goal of his book is to “open up possibilities, [and not to] dictate anything to anyone who doesn’t want it.” If this is the case, then I assume he would agree that our priority must now be to bring women into the foreground of this conversation and consider what they actually want. We should also prepare ourselves for the consequences of offering these possibilities, which may be that observant Jewish communities will continue to grow more fractured and less cohesive, as men and women forge new paths in prayer worship which involve women in different ways and employ increasingly varied structures.

I am open to Tucker’s ideas, and appreciate that he is galvanizing an effort to formally include women into the sphere of public ritual. I especially appreciate and enthusiastically agree with his point that “the moment we isolate halakhah from values, the word of God from what we think is right…we create a halakhah that is amoral, valueless and all about discipline.” But I want to hear more from Rabbi Tucker and others about why equal ritual participation is a goal in itself. I would prefer to see equal religious gratification as a goal in itself. This gratification should be used as an umbrella category which can include equal ritual participation, but does not demand it.

Rabbi Ethan Tucker is President and Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar. Rabbi Tucker also directs Mechon Hadar’s Center for Jewish Law and Values. Rabbi Tucker studied at Yeshivat Maaleh Gilboa of the Kibbutz Hadati movement. Tucker was  ordained by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. He earned a B.A. from Harvard College and a doctorate in  Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Rabbi Tucker recently published together with Rabbi Micha’el Rosenberg a book on egalitarian prayer called  Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law (Urim Press, 2017). The book starts with the assumption that gender equality has spread even among the religiously observant traditional communities necessitating  a need to re-examine old questions.  The book presents the wealth of Jewish legal material surrounding gender and prayer as a resource for grappling with these issues. The book presents the texts on both sides of the issues, letting the texts speak for themselves. The goal of the book is not to decide law as much as clearly analysis texts.As one Amazon reviewer, aptly evaluated the book: “Whether a reader agrees with the two rabbis who authored the book or not, he or she will find a wealth of information in the book that will prompt thought.”

The presentation of the texts in the book show the use of the scholarly approaches to Rabbinics as well as the many contemporary articles on the issue. However, one of the innovations of the book is the integration of these academic writings into the textual method of the Yeshiva allowing these ideas to enter the rabbinic study hall, the beit midrash.

This interview is on the broad theological premises of Rabbi Tucker’s approach allowing the reader to see his method, which focuses on values of the halakhah. His approach is to attempt to listen to what the tradition says and then to think about what tools we might have for responding to tensions between ourselves and the texts.  Tucker honestly wants to listen to the many voices in the texts and see where that takes him. Since the book does not advocate a specific halakhic position, he is free to show the complexity of the system.

In the book, Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law as well as in the interview, Tucker opens up the possibility that the root of the obligation gap in rabbinic sources is in fact about social status in a society where women would be compared to slaves and minors. Today, in Tucker’s reading, the rabbis would not have made this comparison.

Tucker explicitly rejects approaching the Rabbinic texts with an agenda to find a leniency or starting with what one desires to prove before one starts. In addition, Tucker does not believe in the “adjustment of the law” as in liberal approaches.  In fact, he states that the entire language of “halakhic change” and “authority and innovation” as anathema to the project of the book. However as amply displayed in the interview below, this leads to a certain amount of passive voice of implying that choices need to be made, law has to be adjudicated, and decisions need to be made, but purposely without discussing how this relates to issues of authority and normative halakhah.

Noticeably, Tucker actually makes an argument about the rebellious son (Ben Sorer uMorer) that justifies the original law in its original context.  He rejects the idea that the rabbis saw some divine laws as  immoral and sought to marginalize them, as claimed by many liberal approaches.

During the 2015-2016 cycle of Torah readings, Rabbi Tucker sent out a phenomenal weekly Torah email, where he developed each week a different topic clearly showing his approach and explaining it fully,  The essays and the source sheets are available here. They are worth reading and I look forward to seeing those essays as a  book. The publication of these weekly classes will provide a seminal theology and theory of a halakhah concerned with values. I posted about some of these sheets when they came out. In contrast, this book on prayer is more of a hundred-page worksheet of sources, which only begins to touch on bigger questions and  without an explicit presentation of his theory.

At times, Rabbi Tucker’s approach can seen  to be addressing a specific audience with specific reactions to their prior teachers-especially on topics of submission, community, and rationality- offering a needed corrective. (For example, the era whose religious approach was already mediated by the modernism of Peter L Berger may not see the dichotomies the way he sees them). But for many, his is the voice that resonates with them as offering the answers to their religious quest. For those who want to see how Rabbi Tucker was presenting these ideas six years ago, see this write-up of his local talks, which gives the earlier kernel of these ideas.

The interview below is on his meta-halakhah, not his actual legal positions or on the way he understands specific texts.

1. What is new in the book about  Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law  that is not already in the many volumes on the topic? (See appendix at end of interview for prior literature)

Well, the book indeed stands on the shoulders of prior efforts. I would say the original contribution of the book is twofold.

First, it brings together scattered discussions in one place.  The important book Women and Men in Communal Prayer—despite its title—focuses only on Torah reading.  The Frimers have addressed the topic of minyan over the years, but have mostly been focused on women’s prayer groups (that omit or modify parts of the service that require a quorum) and Torah reading.  The Conservative movement dealt with these various issues in a series of responsa over the years, but there was never a unified presentation of the whole.  We tried to unify the major discussions around prayer, Torah reading and minyan in one discussion.

Second, I think we are unusually transparent in our discussion, though that is obviously for the reader to decide.  Let’s not be coy—we obviously have a perspective on this topic.  Nonetheless, we didn’t want the book to be simply an advocate’s manual.  Rather, we wanted to lay out the issues at stake and to give credence to egalitarian & non-egalitarian positions and how they could be substantively, not just formally, grounded in the sources.  Earlier treatments of the topic, in our experience, are either advocacy pieces that are happy to ignore or steamroll over troubling evidence to the contrary, or seek to shoot down any legitimacy for an egalitarian position whatsoever.  We have tried to locate the underlying values in the texts we studied such that the debates over gender and prayer are actually substantive debates about gender and prayer rather than arguments about halakhic authority and formal precedent.

2)      Can you explain your basis for gender egalitarianism? 

I think one of the most interesting things about the book is how we often maintain two arguments in parallel for a gender-equal practice in the synagogue.  We are trying to listen to what the tradition says about gender and prayer and then to think about what tools we might have for responding to tensions between non-egalitarian ritual and our increasingly gender-equal reality.

We don’t have an agenda on this topic that stands independent of the rabbinic corpus and the halakhic tradition. In short, when you explore this topic you find that the halakhic tradition provides two main pathways for thinking about the significance of gender in the context of communal prayer: 1) notions of honor and dignity, 2) maximal obligation in mitzvot.

The honor/dignity frame turns us towards a discussion of what is now dignified in terms of gender norms and whether that is different from earlier points in time.  We make the case that those standards have shifted and thereby so has the halakhah, which is internally concerned with these sociological categories.  However, we also create space for those who claim these concerns have not shifted and that gender equal participation in communal prayer might continue to lower the dignity of the service.

Some sources point to an obligation gap in mitzvot as the source of gender hierarchy and exclusion in communal prayer.  We try both to show that this is only one branch of the tradition and need not box out the honor/dignity frame, while also taking it seriously as a legitimate and even somewhat compelling way of thinking about our topic.

In this context, we engage the possibility that the root of the obligation gap in rabbinic sources is in fact about social status (a bolder category than honor/dignity).  We argue that this too must be reevaluated in a society where women would never be compared to slaves and minors (as they have been, without angst or embarrassment, in most earlier patriarchal societies).

3)      How can the law be adjusted for gender egalitarianism?

This is perhaps the most important point in our approach to halakhah. We don’t really believe in the “adjustment of the law.”  In fact, that whole language of “halakhic change” and “authority and innovation” is somewhat anathema to the project of the book.  We are not coming with an outside critique of halakhah.  Instead, we are trying to apply halakhah’s internal logic to a changing reality.

Think of halakhah as an eternal light refracted through changing lenses of reality.  You place a light bulb on a roadway with a red lens and all drivers know to slam on the brakes.  Take the same light and put a green lens in front of it, and the same law-abiding drivers floor the gas pedal.  This is not a shifting law, but a shifting reality.  Our claim is that the halakhah never cared about biology per se when it came to public prayer.  Rather, gender was a proxy for other categories of significance, categories that are themselves grounded in social realities.  A shifting response to gender and prayer may then actually be a more faithful fidelity to the underlying values of the halakhah.

4)      How do shift in categories work, especially in regards to gender?

The notion of a category shift is that an object or type of person might signify one thing in the context of one reality and something entirely different in another.  Here are two examples: Mishnah Bava Metzia states that if you find someone’s lost sefer, you must read it or at least roll it once a month.  The commentators make clear that this is because scrolls, when left in one place for too long, begin to decay through trapped moisture and other materials.  Only by rolling them and getting air into them are they kept in good condition, and one who finds a lost object must keep it in good condition until it is returned to the owner.

By contrast, the same Mishnah says that one who finds a glass object should not even touch it, since doing so could only risk its fracture.  Now, in medieval and later times, the word sefer comes to refer not to a scroll, but to a codex.  Same word, similar cultural function of reading recorded information, but completely different technology.  If one were to apply the Mishnah’s rule of reading a lost sefer once a month to what we call a book, one would only weaken the binding!  Thus the sefer of today plausibly jumps from the “use it to keep it in good shape” category to the “don’t touch it!” category.  The value is the same: preserve the lost object for its owner, but that eternal value is filtered through shifting realities and language.

Another example: the heresh—a deaf person—is exempted from a range of mitzvah obligations and thus disqualified from performing various rituals for others.  But the Talmud already points out that these exemptions (and corollary disqualifications) only apply to a deaf-mute.  Even though a deaf person who can speak is commonly called a heresh, a speaking deaf person is not in the legal category of exemption.

The Talmud even backs this up with a textual basis/derivation: Much of the time when the term heresh appears in early sources, it is matched up with shoteh (a mentally incompetent person) and katan (a minor).  The Talmud argues that this juxtaposition is substantive: these three types of people are instantiations of the more general category of those who lack da’at, basic mental competence and responsibility for one’s actions.  By their speech, speaking deaf people reveal their mental competence and are thus plainly obligated in all mitzvot.  When we come to consider contemporary deaf-mutes who speak sign language, it is thus highly plausible—if not self-evident—to suggest that they possess da’at and thus shift categories from exempt to obligated.  Again, nothing has changed about the law—it was always about da’at and always will be—but the mapping of deaf-muteness onto lack of da’at has been destabilized and perhaps vitiated.

This is the same sort of process that can be argued for around gender.  In many areas of ritual law and practice, women are treated as exempt, marginal or excluded.  But they are almost always so classified along with slaves and minors.  This forces us to ask: what does the word ishah signify in those sources?  Is it a term pointing to those with a certain chromosomal and biological makeup?  Or is it one member of a set of three (women, slaves and minors) known to be adjuncts or second-class citizens in the larger Greco-Roman world in which the Sages lived?

Until recent decades, it was self-evident that those with XX chromosomes, as a class, were subordinate in all kinds of ways.  The category shift argument—proffered already several years ago by Rabbi Yoel bin Nun and developed further by me in a recent essay—suggests that the Sages’ original intent in these halakhot that speak about women, slaves and minors was never about biological sex per se, it was about class and power.  Now that those variables have shifted dramatically in our society, women shift from exempt to obligated.  The halakhah stays the same: those with power must subordinate themselves to serve God.  And this is the key point: according to the category shift argument, maintaining an exemption from mitzvot for contemporary women because of their biology actually risks failing to direct them to fulfill their Biblical obligations in a range of mitzvot!

5)      Can we have egalitarianism without adjuncts taking care of the family?

This is a great question, and I am frankly not sure what the answer is.  I have tried to play this out in an essay as well.

My general principles are as follows: 1) The nature of the Torah’s vision of mitzvot is democratic.  It is not a system where a select group of priests do the mitzvot; it is a vision of a mamlekhet kohanim.  We should therefore be generally biased towards more obligation not less.  And if the Torah assumes that people are meant to have children, it must be that care for a family can be fully integrated into an obligated life.  2) There is no question that mitzvot often require the support of others, or a kind of focus and presence that can be hard to attain unless someone else is creating that space for you, particularly in contexts where small children need to be cared for.  3) We can usually hit the right balance here by recognizing that most mitzvot can be performed by all without any real difficulty.  Let’s be honest: most positive mitzvot take a few seconds to perform and can be done even when caring for children.  We are mostly talking about the time consuming practices around public prayer and ritual.

A close look at rabbinic precedents on sharing obligations with more limited resources reveals some interesting models.  In some cases, balancing broad obligation was accomplished in shifts—the way all traditional communities handle the obligation of megillah, where there was never understood to a non-obligated class of adults.  In other cases, we find that participation can indeed be divided up, but the set of adjuncts is shifting, rather than permanent and essentialist.  For instance, even if all adults count in a minyan, they can’t all go at the same time.  [Truth be told, this was always understood in terms of the division between the older/retired/batlanim class and the working family units, but that is another story.]  But one can go while the other cares for the child, without making this essentially about gender.

I think this approach can get us where we need to go.  But we do need to have some culture shifting here, no question.

6)      What is unique in your method of learning? How can you look for a reason for a Tannaitic source or an early medieval commentary and then use the reason or value outside of its reception in the tradition?

Well, I don’t think we think of ourselves as using any sources outside of their reception in the tradition.

As we engage gender, we are trying to find reasons and values in our sources and to understand them.  We are actually deeply invested in understanding those sources within their reception in the tradition.  In fact, we probably make some of our readers uncomfortable when we seem to justify and explain why it might have made sense to exclude women from minyan!  We take seriously the notion that there have been and still are human societies where enfranchising women in a given activity is perceived as lowering the honor or seriousness of that activity.  While we might lament that, seek to change those realities or even preach against them, it might be that until we do, the halakhah’s concerns around honor indeed argue for a less than egalitarian regime.  We don’t think that is true of the world we are writing for, but this openness to multiple realities and to the underlying concerns of our sources is a feature of our work.

Our innovation, such as it is, is being willing to take that value-based consideration into what we see as a different reality.  But our fundamental claim—as is the claim of anyone engaged in traditional psak—is that if R. Tam or the Meiri or the Levush were to confront our reality, they would say exactly what we are saying.  (Provided, of course, that they agreed with our assessment of reality, which they might or might not have.)  So, to the extent there is something unique, it is maybe only in light of more recent tendencies towards a hyper-formalism in psak halakhahin the modern period.  But—using an example for those who have read the book—the way we talk about minyan and gender is virtually identical to how the Beit Yosef talks about a minor leading Arvit when he builds off of the Ra’avad’s value-based analysis of the Mishnah that seems to prohibit that.

7)      Are you uprooting the Shulkhan Arukh and Ahronim?

We are not interested in uprooting anything.  If we say a minyan can be gender blind, even though the Shulhan Arukh clearly does not, we are not uprooting the Shulhan Arukh.  We are claiming that when the Shulhan Arukh excludes women (along with slaves and minors) from minyan, he is not talking about biology, but is expressing, in shorthand, a value category that is either about social gravity or obligation in mitzvot (which is itself plausibly about social gravity of a higher order).

8)   How can our values influence our understanding of the tradition?

Another big question. My overarching approach is to insist that there is only one conversation: What does God want of me?  The moment we isolate halakhah from values, the word of God from what we think is right, we create religious and moral Frankensteins.  We create a halakhah that is amoral, valueless and all about discipline.  And we create a morality that is prone to being trapped in an echo chamber of self-righteousness.

A deep process of Talmud Torah is one in which two things happen in parallel:

(1) I listen deeply to the tradition and to what the tradition is saying and I challenge my preconceptions.  The values I came to the table with may only be a part of the story; they might even be wrong.  But I don’t bludgeon those values with the formal discipline of submission; instead I open myself up to being persuadedby the sources of our tradition.  This has to be an exercise in intellectual and moral curiosity and humility and is, to my mind, what any true learning is about.

(2) My deeply felt moral instincts come from somewhere, and when they stubbornly persist even in the face of honest listening to the tradition, they can be presumed to be of some worth. Our Sages said about the Jewish people: If they are not prophets, they are descended from prophets.  There is some kernel of prophecy that the Jewish people retain in their halakhic instincts even in our own time.  A true journey into the discourse of values and morality then searches the tradition for sources and perspectives that capture these values in the distinctive language of halakhah.  Sometimes a person can do this on their own, but usually they need a guide, someone who knows the territory of the rabbinic canon and who can show them the way.

The overarching goal is simple: the telos of the conversation is eliminating the perceived gap between morality and halakhah.  Angst about the conflict between the two is not to be valorized; it is an opportunity to strive for synthesis and resolution.

9)   You use the Dor Revi’i  to increase the role of ethics in our halakhic understanding. How?

The Dor Revi’i is a remarkable and fascinating Talmudic commentary by R. Moshe Glasner, the great-grandson of the Hatam Sofer.  He was an early 20^th century figure steeped in deep traditional learning and asking fundamental questions about Torah.  (He was also one of the early religious Zionists.)  He is, to my mind, one of the most powerful voices for insisting on a unified conversation that incorporates our internal normative Jewish tradition and the larger framework in which the Torah embeds that tradition: the human project of stewarding God’s physical and moral world.  You can read more about him here.  I think there are some who “disagree” with the Dor Revi’i who don’t understand him, taking him to mean that universal standards of morality always trump halakhah when the two come into conflict.  I think that is incorrect.  The Dor Revi’i would have defended circumcision tooth and nail, even if he lived in an environment hostile to it as a form of barabarism.  What he would have done, however, would be to argue for circumcision’s fundamental morality within the terms of an ethical discourse, bringing the Torah’s unique perspective to the conversation.  He would not have hidden behind the Torah’s authority in order to dodge the conflict.  That distinction is critical, in my view.

Others oppose his way of thinking because they have come to see a willingness to follow seemingly immoral halakhot as the acid test of true religious devotion.  I have written about this view in the context of the Akeidah.  I think it is a misreading of the Akeidah—Avraham would not have understood the command to sacrifice (not murder!) his son as unethical—and is a very dangerous blueprint for religious life.  It buys religious obedience in the short term at the expense of the proper internalization of the values of the tradition in the long term.  Rulers who ultimately rule based on power and authority are generally considered tyrants, whose rule we escape at the fist plausible opportunity.  I don’t (want to) relate to either God or the Torah in that way.

10)   How does the study of the rebellious son help us in this ethical quest?

The rebellious son is, in my mind, one of the most misread passages on this topic.  A number of contemporary scholars see it as a classic case of a Biblical law that the Rabbis found to be immoral.  They then set to work marginalizing the law and killing it through the death of a thousand qualifications.  The law is perceived as immoral because of its execution of a juvenile, its punishment of a disposition more than a crime already committed. The famous statement of at least one Sage that “the case of the rebellious son never came to pass and never will” is taken by some as a defiant program for eliminating this blight of unjustice on Jewish law.

I think this is all wrong, and my critique is great example of playing out the method I described above.  If we really listen, and I mean really listen, to the text and context here, I think we emerge with something quite different than the above reading.

First of all, it is noteworthy that I know of not a whimper in rabbinic sources about the law that says one executes a child for cursing their parents.  I think it is very difficult to claim that Hazal were bothered by the death penalty served up to the rebellious son; they are silent in too many other parallel places where improper use of words alone condemn a person to death.  We then have to be honest that we engage in this sort of “pre-crime” enforcement all the time in areas where we are worried the basic structure of society is at stake.  If you walk on to a plane with a firearm—even though you never picked it up, threatened anyone, much less fired it—you can be locked up for 20 years.  Further probing of context should lead us to recognize that the Torah is operating in a framework in which there is no strong central government, no meaningful monopoly on violence in the hands of the state and the death penalty is a basic tool of discipline in a more unruly and violent society.  A child disobeying a parent in earlier generations is more like the assassination of a police officer in our own than we might at first realize or be comfortable admitting.  All of these hard questions and openness to learning have to be a part of the process.

Second, we have to be careful not to project our own—reasonable and moral!—misgivings about applying this law today onto those of earlier times.  Indeed, a close reading of the passage where Hazal “eliminate” this law reveals nothing of the sort.  The Maharsha (R. Shmuel Edels, Poland, 16^th c.) has a great reading of that passage.  The Talmud’s formulation is: “Can it be that because this young man ate some meat and drank some wine that his father and mother will take him out to execute him?  Rather, this case never happened and never will.”  Maharsha notes the presence of the father and mother in this depiction; indeed, it is unusual that the Torah itself involves them in the due process required to execute the boy.  He sees the Talmud as noting that, once the father and mother need to sign off on the execution, there is no way any parents will actively participate in the execution of their own child.  This is not a moral critique of a law, rather a clear-eyed view of the reality of the law’s application. (In addition, perhaps the Torah’s sense that only a child whose parents have completely given up on him is really the sort of threat we should be dealing with in such an extreme way).  Beautifully, the Maharsha goes on to say that the law was nonetheless taught because of the deep values to be learned from it.  Adolescents can be dangerous and parenting is serious business.  Parents should approach their work as a life-and-death responsibility, because if their child indeed becomes a threat to society on their watch, they bear responsibility.

11)      What is the influence of your teachers at Yeshivat Kibbutz Hadati?

Rav Elisha Anscelovits taught us many things, but I will highlight two:  1) Never be afraid to try to identify what a mitzvah or practice is about, what are the values that are guiding it.  He goes further, which is essentially to reject as problematic an aversion to seeking out reasons for mitzvot.  When we both first encountered R. Elisha, we still had unreformed instincts to treat halakhah as a set of boundaries and rules, a kind of formalistic game, as opposed to a force for purpose and meaning.  R. Elisha helped us start treating halakhah less like an electric fence and more like a compass.  2) Never dismiss any source you come across.  Try to understand it on its own terms and generally don’t just overrule it with the force of more precedents on the other side or with your presumed ethical superiority.  If you really believe in the multivocality of halakhah, if you really take seriously the gemara’s injunction of aseh ozneka ka’afarkeset—make your ear like a hopper—then you have to account for all views that arise.  We hope that comes through in our effort to give full voice to the non-egalitarian sources we analyze throughout the book.

We also feel a great debt to Rabbi Bigman, not only for creating the yeshiva where we spent many years of happy study, but also for the wisdom he shared with us from his many years as a communal rav.  Rabbi Bigman’s psak is always so intrinsically humble and grounded in the facts of the people standing in front of him.  This book, by its nature, had to make general pronouncements.  But I hope we have done our teacher proud by trying to retain a humble tone that recognizes that any analysis of halakhic texts, no matter how correct, may also be bound to a certain audience with certain boundary conditions.

12)   How are you different than the Conservative Judiasm of the 1970’s and 1980’s whose egalitarianism declared women rabbis as obligated as men. And how are you different than Open Orthodoxy’s quest to read between the lines to create leniency?

Let me back up for a moment and acknowledge that none of the process we went through in this book would have been possible without those earlier iterations of the conversation.  Speaking personally, I am indebted to my rav hamuvhak, avi mori, R. Gordon Tucker, who not only taught me Torah from a young age but also went through his own journey on this topic.  He was educated and raised in observant, non-egalitarian environments in his youth and davened and practiced that way throughout college.  He arrived at JTS around the time when the issue of women’s ordination—and corollary ritual roles—was being taken up and he quickly became an advocate and a leader on that front.  It is hard to imagine how I could have arrived at my own thinking on this matter without his influence over the years.

But a closer look at the debates and arguments tossed around in the early 1980s in the Conservative movement around this topic did not really embrace an egalitarian regime of obligation.  Nor was it really a values-based discussion at all.  The most prominent papers written in favor of a more egalitarian approach were those of R. Mayer Rabinowitz, who argued that the widespread availability of siddurim rendered the formal requirements for the sheilah tzibbur obsolete, and that of R. Joel Roth, who suggested that women could electively obligate themselves in mitzvot.  These were what I would call classic workarounds: they took the exemption and exclusion of women for granted, but then pondered whether there was a way to end-run around it.  There was no claim that the underlying categories behind the gendered halakhot needed to be mapped differently onto contemporary women, much less that contemporary women might be fully obligated just by dint of their social status!  This, it seems to me, is one aspect of our own analysis that is dramatically different from those earlier efforts.

I can’t speak for Open Orthodoxy—I am not even sure what that delineates anymore—but I see what we are doing as part of a larger conversation about the interaction of a gender equal world with a rigorous commitment to and grounding in the halakhic canon.  I have heard a number of people say that they can buy the conclusions of part I of the book—full equality of leadership of the service—but not part II—full equality of citizenship through minyan.  I am not sure that is a truly principled distinction, it might just be the right next step for a whole set of communities.  I also think the category shift approach is still sinking in.  When I first taught it myself 15 years ago, I thought it was crazy and no one in the audience would buy it.  I now find that for more and more people it is the only intuitive way to think about it.  I think those of us who are honest here should recognize that there is a process at work on a spectrum.  My own bias is to see allies everywhere, not competitors or rivals.  We’ll see if I am naïve or prescient in the long run.

13)   At various points you have defined yourself in three different way: as following the 19^th century Rav Bamburger about keeping the community in tact as a whole, other times as non-denominational, and other times as kibbutz Hadati? How do these relate and how does it not matter?

I think these all tie together for me, and the unifying element is taking responsibility.  Rav Bamburger remains a powerful model for refusing to relinquish a covenantal vision for the entire Jewish community; that continues to motivate me in deep ways.  The most powerful (and perhaps scary) dimension of a multi-generational covenant is that it binds everyone.  That means that every Jew is the addressee of the Torah’s mitzvot, whether they acknowledge this or not.  And a key corollary of this: every Jew is the Torah’s constituent and the Torah is accountable to them.

In many ways, I see a non-denominationalism as the American-Jewish translation of that attitude.  Yes, many communities and even religious leaders might say that they have no interest in Torah or mitzvot, only peoplehood and Jewish identity.  But a covenantal vision of Torah doesn’t really have the luxury of simply letting people opt out and then reaping the rewards (such as they are) of a smaller, tamer, more monolithic constituency.  Instead, we must ask ourselves:  How do we create a vision for Torah and mitzvot that is not that of an interest group but of a vision for national destiny and purpose?  And that will also require some respectful persuading of fellow Jews as part of that process.

Kibbutz Hadati and the wing of religious Zionism it represents captures this as well: We have to take responsibility for the entire Jewish enterprise in the modern world and we must insist that secular politics alone cannot be the answer.  I think the most interesting parts of religious Zionism in Israel right now are asking how the instincts of many self-described secular Jews are woven into a covenantal framework for all Israelis.  See Yoav Sorek’s latest book, Haberit Hayisraelit for a great example of this sort of conversation.

I think these different strands also have in common a certain irresponsible disregard for realpolitik.  That is sometimes a weakness, but the payoff in the integrity of the larger project is worth it to me.

I always admired the works of the sociologist Peter Berger as a formulation of religious commitment under the conditions of modernity.  Berger died two months ago and deserves a Jewish retrospective. I wavered if I should write the respective, hoping that someone else would write it first.

However, one morning, a few years ago, I woke up to discover that Peter Berger, someone whom I only knew from afar, quoted one of my articles approvingly as a springboard to discuss contemporary issues. This compliment was the momentum that resolved my indecision.

Berger praised my article for its noting the greater Jewish openness to Christianity today and how the thinkers in the 1960’s “era of dialogue” did not actually know anything about Christianity. This is unlike today where there are Jews deeply knowledgeable about Christianity, and vice-versa.  Berger singles out my statement that differences internally between certain Jewish theological positions may be greater than between Jews and Christians of like mind.

However, Berger always elided the differences between Judaism and Christianity.  I always wondered about that. I knew that he came from a Jewish family that converted to Lutheranism in 1938 when he was nine years old. However, my big surprise discovered while writing this blog post is that his family survived the Holocaust by fleeing to British-mandate Palestine until 1946. How did he spend the years?  I wonder what occurred during those years. . Berger came of age as a Jewish refugee in mandate Palestine, meaning he certainly knew basic Jewish life and practices. Surprisingly, I have not found any popular or scholarly article discussing this aspect of his life.

UPDATE: I was notified by a colleague of Peter Berger’s who saw this post that he wrote an autobiography, which was only published in German Im Morgenlicht der Erinnerung: Eine Kindheit in turbulenter Zeit (2008)  There are only 8 libraries in US that have a copy of this rare volume, yet a full copy is available online. It has not been distributed and has not made it into the secondary literature. In the volume, Berger describes how his family converted to Anglicanism for potential visa and immigration opportunities They then fled to Haifa where they assumed they would quickly get a visa to the Americas, instead they were there for eight years. When he first arrived he went to a Jewish school that used Hebrew and uncomfortably wanted to call him Yakov. Berger claims his remembers little of this Hebrew. Originally, people did not know that his family was Christian, but when people found out they shunned the family. The family was aided by other Christian Jews who found his father a job and found schools for the young Peter. He went to a Swiss mission school that instructed in German and socialized the students in traditional Lutheranism including pious visits to the Christian sites in Jerusalem. There Berger adopted their German Lutheran piety as his own. Berger was later rejected from Haifa Reali High School because of his faith and instead attended an Anglican Secondary school.  Haifa is where he first encountered Bahai, the topic of his Ph.D. thesis. The book also describes his encounter with Zionism and with American Jewish congregations upon arrival in the US.

Berger correctly credited me with bringing the gap between “intellectual religion of the books and the lived religion of the pews,” as reflected in the Saadyah dyad in the title of this blog (intellectual beliefs and lived opinions). His reading of my article shows his insight into authors he never met. However, the attempt to hold both aspects at the same time is the hallmark of Berger’s own thought. In this review, I will deal only with his theology and not his sociology; his religious vision moving from critique of suburban religion to explaining the existential value in religion, to developing his own deeply committed religious humanism.

(This is a first draft of some first thoughts on his theology growing out of decades of teaching his work. The post is subject to change. If anyone has any further Jewish applications of his thought, then let me know. maybe I should do one of these for Derrida, Zygmunt Bauman, or Tzvetan Todorov)

Peter Berger was born in Vienna on March 17, 1929, arriving in the United States shortly after World War II ended. In 1950, he produced a thesis on Puerto Rican Protestants in East Harlem; for his doctorate four years later, he focused on the Bahai movement in Iran. Berger served in the Army for two years in the mid-1950s and taught at schools including Rutgers University and Boston College before landing at Boston University in 1981. Four years later, he founded that university’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, where he served as director until 2009.

The Noise of Solemn Assemblies

Berger finished his PhD in 1954. Before he embarked on his steady stream of sociological works. He produced a youthful work in 1961 of his struggle between his committed belief in Lutheranism based on the philosophic works of Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, which demanded full commitment to a higher revelation and the lightness of the typical suburban congregation. This 1961 jeremiad, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America is the work I think of most often when looking at Modern Orthodoxy.

Taking his cue from Amos 5:21 “I hate all your show and pretense–the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies, “Berger finds suburban religion as entirely this-worldly and social without a sense of the transcendental, more concerned with political and social identity, a hypocritical solemn assembly.

Berger saw religious institutions as dedicated to American culture, sensible, tolerant, far removed from the fierce piety of Kierkegaard. Years later, Berger himself admits: “It is hardly surprising that I had difficulties coming to terms with it.” The suburban congregation was not a locale for desperate leaps of faith, rather it was the worship of the goodness of America. He “was not prepared to worship it or to equate its morality with Christian faith.” Berger quotes his contemporary colleague John Murray Cuddihy who called it the “Protestant smile.” Put sociologically, he declared the principal function of these churches was to legitimate the middle-class culture of America, to certify that the latter was indeed “OK.” They condemned or sought to explain the deviants such as the divorced, the socially rebellious, or those who left the faith, but they avoided commenting on the religious nature of marriage, community, and faith.

This analysis is of the same cloth as that of his contemporary Rav Soloveitchik, who from 1956 -1970 also worked on the tension between the happy unreflective materialism of Adam I and the Kierkegaardian faith of Adam II, especially in his Lonely Man of Faith. Soloveitchik, like Berger, coming from his study of Buber, Barth, Brunner, had abstract ideas of the covenantal community, the covenetal nature of marriage, and of faith, but these ideas hit the wall of the actual suburban Jewish congregation. However, Soloveitchik ideally envisioned repentance (teshuva) and halakhic observance as overcoming this cultural religion bringing one to the transcendental, yet empirically most of those who followed him only produced a world of Adam I, happy congregations of the communal. Followers of Soloveitchik, not Soloveitchik himself, saw the very act of joining the solemn assembly of a modern Orthodox congregation and following its norms as somehow overcoming the lightness of modern religion. Berger, in contrast, provided the sharp and personally pained observations that transcendence was missing in the life of most congregants..

Berger encouraged us to look for “signals of transcendence,” moments that pointed to an “otherness which lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life.” A Rumor of Angels 1969. Heschel, Soloveitchik, Buber, and most religious Existentialists offered similar advice.

In 1963, Berger published his classic Invitation to Sociology  presenting sociology as a form of humanism able to teach tolerance and compassion as well as an ethic of responsibility. Social thought sharpens our religious and theological thinking. Among Jewish thinkers, there were few that fit this plan except for   Will Herberg who was already creating a sociological theology in the 1950’s and Arnold Eisen in the 1990’s. Are there others?

The Sacred Canopy

His most famous work was The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967), a classic assigned in many university religion classes and which offers important insights into modern religion, especially the ideas of worldview, sacred canopy, plausibly structure. If you never read this work, then you should immediately do so.

For Berger, in the modern age we are constantly forced to choose how to interact with the world and shape it. We want our choices to be stable, but since society is always in a state of change, it does allow the stability. Religion’s main project is to create this sense of stable predictable order and to make all of us believe in it, although in fact it is always an illusion. More importantly, society wants us to believe that those choices are not really choices. Society wants us to act as if they are necessary and inevitable; as if they are an objective reality beyond our ability to change.

Religion is the means of objectifying a stable nomos based on a fixed pattern of the cosmos, society, or in the contemporary orthodox Jewish case, the halakhah. Berger calls the interaction by the term “externalization” and the creation of stable products as “objectivating,” which means teaching us (especially when we are children) to make the same choices repeatedly as we externalize ourselves.

The ultimate threat for the religious person, however, is to lose the nomos altogether and be plunged into the chaos of anomy. Therefore, whatever we practice today as Jews is generally presented as in continuity with the past, as outside of the rapid changes of history and society, and as inviolable. Religion denies reality beyond the nomos of the community. A group of people who maintain a body of knowledge, along with the institutions they have created, is called a “plausibility structure,” which according to Berger offers a sacred canopy for understanding our lives. The nomos will seem plausible as long as it is supported by a strong plausibility structure. Since society wants to maintain its nomos, it will try to exclude or destroy every alternative nomos. Hence, Jewish ideas such as tradition, peoplehood, and mesorah are essential to maintain the stability.

Three take-away ideas from Berger’s thought. The issue of plausibility structure and reason, the disbelief in the sacred canopy, and the nature of the structure itself.

The first is that according to Peter Berger people do not decide if a religious system is logical or if the dogmas make sense or if they can be defended. Rather, they decide if it offers a working sacred canopy providing a safe worldview that makes sense of their life. People become Evangelical or Orthodox because it offers a sacred canopy, a worldview to live within its system. Religious claims are not about whether its tenets are true or false, rather people adopt an entire sacred canopy, an entire system, if it makes sense and grounds the world they live within. Peter Berger discusses how Eastern European Jews who came to the United States lost their sacred canopy. The supernatural world of the shtetl made little sense in scientific and educated America. The American forms of Judaism had to create new sacred canopies with new plausibility structures.

By extension, when people leave Orthodoxy today, it is not because of a specific doctrine; rather the sacred canopy no longer corresponds to reality. It is not an issue of defending a specific doctrine or belief, nor is it a minor repair to an idea or practice. Rather, the entire canopy no longer works since it lost its plausibility. However, as long as it still works, then no specific problem necessary matters. Answering up questions on small points or defenses on a given topic of belief do not work since people choose an entire sacred canopy. As long as it works, then minor issues don’t matter and when it cracks then the entire canopy gets replaced.

Conversely, when someone does become orthodox, it is because the sacred canopy of the family values and Shabbat observant lifestyle makes sense as a way to create an ordered reality, not because of cogent doctrine.

Second, the moral qualities of a sacred canopy are deeply important. If clergy turn out to be involved in scandal and corruption, logically, that should not tell us anything about the truth or falsity of religious truth claims. However, emotionally most of us do judge a nomos by its plausibility structure, for they are the people who represent the nomos to the public. When the plausibility structure is called into question, this can lead to both denial and changes in the nomos. Nevertheless, for many in an open society, it leads to them finding a new nomos, a new sacred canopy- leaving their denomination. The similar moral issues of politics, child abuse, or economics can also lead to the shattering of the sacred canopy.

Third, despite  widespread  acceptance  of  Peter  Berger’s   cultural  framework,  theories  of Torah  u-Madda continue  to  use  nineteenth  century  understandings in which Judaism and the world around it are separate cultures.. For  example, many modern Orthodox authors assumes  culture is produced by the surrounding non-Jewish society, in that the cultural elements of philosophy, medicine, literature, or entertainment are outside Judaism. Modern Orthodox Jews can decide to accept  or  reject these eleemnts. In Peter  Berger’s  terms, we live  in  a  single  cultural worldview and create as much “sacred canopy” as needed to maintain the plausibility structure, the coherent nomos. The encounter with “western secular  culture”  is from  Berger’s  perspective  not  an encounter  with  an  outside body of knowledge, rather a  Jewish  plausibility  structure of Torah uMadda or Shadal’s Jewish humanism, or Israeli Religious Zionism. The acceptance of   secular studies , professional life, and  popular culture by Modern Orthodoxy is part of the construction of their sacred canopy of  Judaism. Berger  discusses explicitly the  Jewish  encounter  with  modernity  as  the  breaking  of the  Eastern  European  Jewish sacred  canopy  in  the  move  to America, and the subsequent need to reformulate a new Jewish sacred  canopy.  Hence, the secular studies in Modern Orthodox was itself part of its formulation.The current lack of a need for secular studies above a high school level or for career purposes is itself part of the construction of today’s Orthodoxy.

Berger’s view of religion is existential in that we each construct our own plausibility structure, our own sacred canopy and if we choose not to then it is an act of Existential bad faith, a lack of authenticity and not taking responsibility for choices. Even though he is a sociologist, he has little tolerance for those who just go with the flow of their friends and community.  Berger’s thought opens up the abyss between ideals and community, or between modern Orthodox (or any other movement’s) theology and the lightness of the community members.

The Heretical Imperative

The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1980) was his theology of humanism in an age of pluralism and choice. The book made a lasting impression on many as a clear theological definition of the modern believer as educated humanist.

The main thrust of the book is that we now live in an age of pluralism, in which modern people naturally question ideas and their sacred canopies and do not just accept them by fate. Today, we choose our sacred canopy. Berger reminds us that the original etymology of the heretical (hareisis) is “to choose.“ the taking of a choice. For Berger, the necessity of choice becomes the virtue of choice. Hence, the title means the imperative to choose. By “the heretical imperative”, Berger means this radical necessity to choose.

Berger discusses three possible responses to the modern religious crisis:

The first of these involves the reaffirmation of embattled tradition, or in other words neo-orthodoxy, especially the path of Karl Barth. One reaffirms the tradition as the one true tradition avoided the new condition. This approach is higher influential in Jewish Orthodoxy. Berger points out that neo-orthodoxy can never have the pristine innocence of simple orthodoxy.

The second possible response to the modern situation is “reductive,” best exemplified by Rudolf Bultmann. This approach allows one to create naturalistic and reforming versions of religion acquiescing to the modern condition, which for Berger entails excessive concessions to it. Many rabbis who turn Judaism into pop-psych, pop-culture, or social utility fall into this category even if they are observant.

The third and final possible response discussed by Berger, and for him the only valid one, is to be open to the human experience of faith. A religion that is open to the changes in society and knowledge and to the fact that we are choosing this affiliation. In many ways, it is a new form of humanistic religion.  Whereas, Shadal said nothing Jewish is foreign to me, implying that there is a fixed body of humanistic knowledge. For Berger, this need to be modified in that we are ever needing to confront the changes of society and ever widening circles of knowledge

Berger advocates a “mellow certainty,” a moderate position. A historically oriented approach within a tradition, with the understanding that one cannot simply swallow the tradition but has to enter into a reasonable dialogue with it.  We can associate this position with William James or Charles Taylor.

Elsewhere, he quotes his colleague Adam Seligman who uses the term “epistemological modesty.” Epistemological modesty means that you believe certain things, but you’re modest about these claims. You can be a believer and yet say, I’m not really sure. I think that is a fundamental fault line. For him this is the greater dividing line than between faiths, rather it is between those who pretend we are not making choices and those who are.

For Berger, the basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude.  However, for him, it is not a pluralism as much as I make a decision based on what is known to me. Berger stated that modern individuals are, or ought to be free and are responsible for their own. An individual’s subjective experience of the world is “real” by definition and they possess certain rights over and against collectives.  (In contrast, postmodernists do not have individual subjectivity as much as a self that is constructed by situation and society.)

Berger’s stress on individual experience of choice is reflective of modern consciousness, which turns religion into a private act, essentially individualistic and experiential. Berger welcomes the pluralism of perspectives resulting from secularization. Since all thought, including modernity itself, is shaped by plausibility structures, no thought has a cognitive privilege with reference to any other thought. The theologian Van A. Harvey (1973) in an widely-read important review of Berger pointed out: “Berger’s own attempts at theology are a reflection of this crisis rather than a cure for it because his own theology itself has no norms or criteria that govern his statements. It simply is a reflection of his own personal sensibility.”

Berger emphasizes a middle approach that balances religious submission with an awareness of the modern condition, historicism, and contingency. He represents the modernist religious situation, especially the strategy of collective bargaining in which an “internal dialogue goes on within the believer, or within the community of believers.” The believer says to himself, “There is no way of holding on to the miracles, but we won’t give up on the revelation.”

Personably, Berger rejects the notion of a decisive revelation in Christianity but retain the notion of the Biblical God. He needed to maintain this pluralistic condition and found the negotiation that worked for him.   Or the observant Jew who may accept the State of Israel as messianic but not Chabad messianism, or she accepts the efficacy of prayer but not the Breslover conversation with God. It is a constant mediation and bargaining between the modernity and the belief.  (if one is actually interested in the Hasidut, then see my follow-up post on Berger and mysticism.)

Several modern Orthodox authors in the 1980’s and 1990’s used Berger’s qualities of the modern condition -autonomy, independence, and self-aware choice as their definition of Modern Orthodoxy. One author even directly associated the ideas of Peter Berger with Rav Soloveitchik. However, Berger’s approach is much more dynamic, individualistic, and accepting of the historical and social sciences. While, in my opinion, Rav Soloveithcik and Modern Orthodoxy was more Barthian, tradition bound, and collective. Even now, there is still a core of intellectual Modern Orthodoxy who understand Rav Soloveitchik’s Existentialism in Peter Berger terms, even acknowledging the influence of Berger’s definitions of modernity, autonomy, and pluralism on their Torah uMadda thinking, yet not seeing Berger’s differences from their perspective.

For example, as an existentialist, Berger places the legitimation of the community’s practices in personal choice, not denomination, gedolim, community, or tradition. If there is a tension between the tradition and the personal choice, then one must personally resolve the tension. However, a modern Orthodox author who finds a place for personal choice is their Orthodoxy is not the same as the fundamental sociological question of legitimization.

The tension of autonomy and tradition was a widely used phrase of 1990’s Modern Orthodoxy. The first Orthodox Forum was actually on personal autonomy and rabbinic tradition as a way of staking out a modernist claim. In the volume, Lawrence Kaplan advocated for greater autonomy and a virtue of individual decision-making. (Already a harbinger of things to come, one of the papers claimed that autonomy and creativity was to be limited to Roshei Yeshiva and Torah study). A similar question was asked in an Israeli volume  Between Authority and Autonomy in Jewish Tradition, eds. Avi Sagi & Zeev Safrai [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1997) Twenty years later, a different Orthodox Forum returned to ask a new generation about autonomy.  Yet, individual autonomy and acting according to the dictates of their conscience is still used by older observers to discuss Modern Orthodoxy in recent discussions.

The question is who is observant and Orthodox with a vision closest to Berger’s vision. Are Shadal, Levinas, Benamozegh, Hartman, or Boyarin closer to Berger’s vision? The question today is if one were to follow Peter Berger, then can Torah be open in the same way to new horizons of knowledge, of secularism and of society? Can one combine Torah with the pluralistic condition including the critiques of history and sociology? If one is already a furnished soul possessing all of the answers via the tradition, then Berger would see it as a retreat from the modern condition. Or maybe there does not have a Jewish equivalent to Peter Berger. There are enough educated lay people in the Jewish congregations who feel close to Berger’s existentialism and his heretical imperative who just use his thought by which to process and conceptualize their Torah.

I was recently at a wedding in which the person sitting next to me, an educated committed open Modern Orthodox person, pondered how the modern Orthodox world wants their children open to the world but not too open. In terms of Peter Berger, we can see that statement as  showing simultaneously that education is the key to being socialized into a community with its given plausibility structure. Nevertheless, the education should only be pluralistic enough to function in the world and attain professional success, but it should not be too open so as to break the current plausibility structure.  The education should not remove the taken-for-granted certainty provided through socialization in school.  Hence, Jewish day schools have a crucial function to both give a plausibility structure and at the same time to prevent Berger’s pluralism.

Some fault Berger for not depicting Judaism correct in his books. However, it is less accurate to fault Berger for not doing justice to Judaism because he also he does not do full justice to Islam, Catholicism, or Asian religions. He does focus at all on institutions, tradition, ritual,  authority, or study; today he would be read in conjunction with Talal Asad and others who see religion as law and authority

Later Essays

His later essays fill out many other aspects of the theological positions make up Berger’s worldview, which combined both liberal and conservative elements.  He became one of the main intellectual figures in the neoconservative movement along with his friend and First Things founder Richard J. Neuhaus.

Among the many notable points of Berger’s later work is a sustained rejection of the sociological thesis of secularization; most recent obituaries mentioned this point. His earlier works followed the majority of sociologists and assumed that religion was in decline before secularism. By the 1990’s, Berger firmly rejected that position and believed that religion was not declining or dissolving into obscurity in an increasingly secular world. Rather, religion was holding fast and even growing in some places, offering an increasing number of ways for human beings to find solace in a frightening world.  Nevertheless, rather than a reaffirmation of tradition, for Berger “Modernity is not characterized by the absence of God,” he wrote in a 2008 essay for the journal First Things, “but by the presence of many gods.”He critiqued the Fundamentalist project of the University of Chicago and even the use of the word fundamentalist as created by people who have no sense of the actual beliefs of the people.

For Berger, religion is an enduring quality and is ever returning. He often repeated that he expected a great revival in secular Scandinavia since transcendence always returns. He noted often, that the more colorful eruptions of transcendence have occurred in those places where secularization has been most aggressively enforced.  The children of the most orthodox secularists and enlightened modern homes have children who become members of Iskcon or returnees to orthodoxy (baalei teshuva).

On the other hand, the formerly pious world of rural America, which were once a bastion of religious commitment, are now in decline as portrayed in the book Hillbilly Elegy. They are now a main group of the growing number of “Nones”, without religion. Their sacred canopy was lost, in that it no longer sheltered them in their current decline and hence they gave up religion. However, for Berger they are a group that is likely to return once there is a new religious configuration speaking to them.

Second, he rejected the widespread concern about a supposed rampant individualism in the U.S., or the prevalence of an “autonomous” self.  For him, “The assumption made by Robert Bellah and Putnam that community in America has been falling apart is empirically questionable. It’s amazing to what extent Americans do in fact participate in every kind of community you can imagine–and give money and time and so on.  I don’t think Americans are all that individualistic.”

Third, he thinks that the problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance through the psychologizing of religion, as a therapeutic agency, and through the politicizing of religion. From his point of view, those who make their religion about culture will eventually lose their members because do not need the congregation if it lacks religious substance.

Fourth already in the 1990’s, Berger noted that the United Sates was breaking into two middle classes, a bourgeoisie, centered in the business community and a new middle class, based on the production and distribution of symbolic knowledge, whose members are the increasingly large number of people occupied with education, media, therapy and social justice.  Many of these people are on payroll, employed in bureaucracies or dependent on state subsidies. The new middle-class culture understood itself as “emancipatory” or “liberating” as against the traditional bourgeois virtues, most visible in the areas of sexual .and gender behavior. For Berger, this creates two conflicting middle class approaches to religion. Many of the issues dividing Modern Orthodoxy can be linked to this distinction of two cultures.

A Weak Skeptical Pluralistic Faith

If Berger advocates a pluralistic softer faith, then how can one build institutions on such a fragile basis? According to his own theories, there is a sociological need for institutions to preserve the faith. Viable institutions require a strong foundation of taken-for-granted verities, which exude an air of self-assured certainty that the pluralistic lack. If one constructs institutions on the basis of skepticism will these institutions not be extraordinarily weak, associations of individuals with no deep commitment? Can such institutions survive?

According to Berger: Yes, such institutions may be “weak”; the commitment of their members may be rather unreliable; but, yes, they can survive—and sometimes they show a surprising vitality.

Can permanent reflection be institutionalized?” By “permanent reflection”, he meant precisely the sort of skepticism and self-questioning that is created when the world is no longer taken for granted. Yes, such institutions are possible, but they differ from the older institutions built on the foundation of taken-for-granted verities. Such institutions are, by definition, voluntary associations. The same voluntariness by which people choose to join them may later allow them to leave. In this sense, these institutions are “weak.”

According to Berger, one  can convey values to children without pretending a fanatical certitude about them. There is a viable middle ground between fanaticism and relativism, in which one can build a community of people who are neither fanatics nor relativists.

The reason for his conclusion as to why a moderate faith will survive is his personal theological belief that at the core of his Christian tradition is truth, and this truth will reassert itself in every conceivable contestation. To be sure, he acknowledges, that no one who honestly enters into such a contestation emerges the way one entered; if one did, the confrontation was probably less than honest. In the act of reflection, every honest individual must be totally open, and this also means open-ended. Berger’s faith allows him to affirm that the church will survive until the Lord returns.  Jews, on the popular level, usually dont have such confidence and predict the downfall and death of Torah unless one capitulates to ignoring the modern condition.

Seeking Certainty

Does everyone have this pluralism? Can people retreat back into the position of certainty? Berger acknowledges that some seek refuge in the certainty of institutions and the tradition. Others, seek for certainty on the basis of an absolute understanding of the biblical text.  And third, one can seek certainty on the basis of one’s own religious experience, especially in the ever present the American revival movements.

Nevertheless, Berger always assumed that pluralism was our modern condition. For Berger, to pretend that one has certainty, in most cases, is a self-delusion. He never fuller appreciated the return of Christian Evangelicals and Orthodox Judaism in the 1990’s and first decade of 21^st century who sought certainty, eternal values, textual and institutional absolutes.  (I posted a few years ago about how he was just discovering the paranoid style of contemporary Judaism, which focuses on the Holocaust.)

Some Centrist modern Orthodoxy authors decry the contemporary condition of pluralism and choice, a key feature of 20^th century modernism from Virginia Wolf and William James onward to the existentialists as what they polemically and pejoratively mislabel as post-modernism relativism.

When looking at 21^st century congregations, Berger saw that the face of suburban congregants “now has a set and sour mien, an expression of permanent outrage,” in which a Protestant scowl has replaced the Protestant smile. Feminism more than anything else has set this tone in recent years for the displeasure among believers. According to Berger, this grimly humorless ideology has established itself as an unquestioned orthodoxy throughout the mainline churches. They still do not have transcendence or a serious relationship with God, but they have replaced their pleasantness with disdain for others, especially on gender issues.

Berger’s student James Davison Hunter wrote the classic Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991), showing how the United States divided into conservatives and progressives, in which Evangelicals and Orthodox Jews are on one side and Liberal Christians and Jews are on another. In 1991, this was a new alliance limited to a few hot issues such as abortion. A quarter of a century later, a large plurality of Modern Orthodox has taken on much of the politics, values, theology, and style of the Evangelicals proving Hunter’s thesis.

In sum, Berger always held both his ideal belief in faith, piety, and personal commitment as a benchmark by which to judge sociological patterns. He was both a believing theologian and descriptive sociologist. As noted by many, the various positions Berger assumes and identifies are not always in perfect harmony with each other and sometimes they seem to operate at cross-purposes. Many faulted his sociology for having an implicit theology and conversely many faulted his theology for its sociological orientation.  Yet, this was the attraction of combining Existential theology with the lived religion of the pews useful for many clergy and religious thinkers to  make sense of the tensions of their religious communities.

To be continued with a follow-up post covering Peter Berger on Eastern Religions and Mysticism

The students and colleagues of Rav Shagar each developed different aspects of his thought. Rav Yair Dreyful, his co-founder of Yeshivat Siach Yitzhak emphasizes the emotive and personal existential value of Torah and mizvot. Some of his students, emphasize the need to re-integrate mysticism and meditation, of Rebbe Nachman, Chabad, Zohar, Rav Zadok, and Rebbe  Kalonymus Kalman Shapira. Others prefer intellectual discussions of post-modernity, language games, paradox, and Israeli society. Some of his students learned from him a need to be open and found paths in psychotherapy, poetry writing, film-making, and scholarship. Yishai Mevorach, one of the editors of the Rav Shagar’s writings, looked where he was pointing and went forward into the chaos.

Mevorach recently published a book called Theology of Absence: On Faith after Chaos (Resling Publishing, 2016) 171 pp, [Hebrew] where he is developing a post-secular, post-modern theology from Rav Shagar. (Resling publishes translations of works of literary and philosophic theory.)

Yishai Mevorach was born in Gush Etzion and after two years in Yeshivat har Etzion switched to become a devoted follower of Rav Shagar. He teaches in various locations.  Mevorach is in the midst of writing a trilogy about faith after the abyss. This book was the first; the second book will appear next year.  He is also still involved in editing Rav Shagar’s homilies.

Below is an interview with Mevorach based on his Hebrew book. We have to thank the translator Rabbi Josh Bolton, director and Senior Jewish Educator of the Jewish Renaissance Project at Penn Hillel. A graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Rabbi Josh also holds and MFA in poetry from UMass, Amherst. His new book, 100 Suggestions for Seekers and Spiritual Activists, Alternadox Press (forthcoming).

The most exciting part of this book is that it is a reflection of what is considered legitimate discussion and free exchange of ideas in the world of Rav Shgaar’s students and within certain parts, albeit rarified and narrow, of the religious Zionist world.  Mevorach has a really good collection of lectures and shiurim on Youtube, they are worth listening to, including one on Rav Shagar’s views about the first and second Temples. In the shiur, the First Temple represents certainty and the cherubs on the Ark behind the curtain, while in the Second Temple there is nothing behind the curtain, grasping toward the unknown.

Mevorach follows his teacher Rav Shagar in looking for new modes of study and new juxtapositions in Torah and new methods of study beyond what he considers the spiritual dryness of the Yeshivat Har Etzion method. He is original in formulating this as post-secular, in that the secular has already won. We now live a faith that bears both deep Godliness and simultaneously deep acknowledgement of the post-secular condition. Mevorach uses models of Torah after the destruction, Torah from the abyss, and Torah as post-Holocaust. Those who want to deny this condition are psychologically seeking a fundamentalism even if they live a modern life. At one point in the interview, he sees this need for Orthodoxy as the castration anxiety from the fear of losing the guarded object.

What is Torah in this new era? Mevorach gives theme and variations ranging from considering Torah as our linguistic discourse, to our existential commitment of love, to our surplus enjoyment and jouissance, in the language of Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan.

Other points, he frames this attachment in more minimal terms of the sign of circumcision, our naming ourselves Jews or the remnant that remains after everything, the way Freud identified with Judaism. Rav Shagar himself played with these ideas, in claiming that Jewish  nationalism  is  a  world  unto  itself –based on a citation from Zizek that the  Jews  “have  no  place  in  the  order  of  nations,” which for Shagar meant represents  the remnant, the sheerit, a particularistic,  of  attachment  to  the Jewish people and the  land. (Shagar, BeTzel  HaEmunah 126, edited by Mevorach).

Mevorach’s book is short, only 177 pages total, and a quick and enjoyable read. But only for those comfotable with Lacan, Derrida, Zizek, and Rosenzweig as well as the requisite knowledge of Talmud, Rav Zadok of Lublin and Rebbe Nachman. The first chapter jumps right into his thesis of a post-secular condition and the third chapter deals with the premises of the thesis surrounding Torah as described in this interview. When I asked Mevorach why he did not place chapter three first, he said that in an earlier draft it was first. You may want to skim it before the first chapter, and then read it in its current sequence. The second chapter was its own post-secular homily on love in Torah. The last part of the book on prayer as a simple necessity as a surplus of being was a good application of current theology to Torah. The book returns a humanism and an engagement with critical thought that many of the interpreters of Rav Shagar lack. Overall, Mevorach is quite optimistic and passionate about his project and its positive potential for a meaningful and energized Torah.

The book received a glowing review as a “celebration” and  “true and direct interpretation,” yet another review claimed he misread Rav Shagar and Rav Zadok but the review spends most of the review arguing about his application of Zizek. But notice, how telling is it that we now have a group of teachers of Torah that get  into public disputes over Zizek. As one comment on the review asked: “Who are the intended readers of such a review and this discussion?”

For those not familiar, here a few technical words that will help one in this interview. One should properly study these thinkers, but as a help to reading the article here are a few points as used in the interview. Bear in mind that Rav Shagar read Eric Santner’s  On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (2001), which put Franz Rosenzweig in dialogue with Jacques  Lacan connecting two thinkers who originally had no intrinsic connection. (Free free to skip the next few paragraphs and get right to the interview if you wish.)

Loosely based on Franz Rosenzweig: Existence means the true existence of the subject confronting his or her human condition directly. It does not mean as it often does in the Jewish world, the deep points of experience or connection found in prayer or human life. Rather, we are being who have to confront our finite existence and the horizons, in this case post secular, in which we live.  For example, Rosenzweig created an institution of adult education, a lehrhaus, where the goal is not to start with expertise or erudition but with a confrontation of the human condition, including finitude and secularism.  “A learning, no longer out of the Torah into life, but out of life, out of a world that does not know about the law, back into the Torah.” For Mevorach, we are creating Torah out of the depths of the post-secular condition.

The second concept needed for this interview are the 1970’s ideas of the French psychoanalyst Jacques  Lacan in which we use pieces of language and culture as a signifier, which is a sign without any referent. It does not refer to anything; rather absence is its fundamental feature.

Lacan thinks we recognize a signifier by reference to its place among other signifiers. For example, if we take a signifying system such as the Dewey decimal system in a library, I know that a book should be at a certain place on a shelf even if that place is empty and the book is not there. What Lacan calls here “the place where it has been effaced” remains even if the book itself is missing. For Mevorach, our Torah study is like the system by which we understand everything.

The third term needed for this interview is the concept of surplus and excess as well as the concept of remnant, as found in the thought of Lacan and Zizek.  The former term is what Mevorach seeks in religion and the remnant is what Mevorach thinks we have. For Lacan a surplus is always produced of jouissance-, an enjoyment that has no value but exists merely for the sake of the enjoyment. The remnant is what is left over after our signifiers, a residue, or remnant of the symbolization process.For example, when looking at an old photograph we are being touched by the remnant of the self, and this left over remnant.

Žižek talks about excess as surplus enjoyment, or what Lacan called jouissance. For Zizak, excess always corresponds with some lack, which creates a fetish as a substitute for something missing that saves us from having to confront the full impact of it’s absence. The power of any ideological structuring of reality lies in it’s ability to transform the source of its weakness, whatever is lacking, into a source of strength, its “excess”.

Interview with Yishai Mevorach

Translated by Rabbi Josh Bolton, revised and edited by Alan Brill

1. What was your vision in editing Rav Shagar’s lectures?

This is actually a difficult question for me because I don’t know to what extent I had a clear vision at the start of the whole project. The work was done with a lot of uncertainty. Uncertainty as to whether I would edit it correctly, and an even greater uncertainty as to its reception and even whom its readership would be – a readership not even really “born” as I edited the books.

I can say that my original motivation was to be in touch with that important moment in my life in which I met Rav Shagar.  The editing the books was a type of havruta with Rav Shagar.

While he was still alive, I merited to sit and listen to his Torah. After his passing, fulfilling his request that his writings be published, a number of us were brought in to do this work. I was given the opportunity to create new juxtapositions (tzerufim hadashim) with Rav Shagar – even after he had passed. This task was something different from just editing. It was a type of cleaving (devekut) between two souls. To a certain degree, it was an experience of spiritual conception and I don’t possess an adequate enough perspective to describe its meaning for me – and for him.

As I worked, the words of Rav Shagar stood before my spirit: “It is impossible to grasp religion without its mystical core. Not mysticism in the sense of a “mystical experience” – but a mysticism that overwhelms one’s entire existential reality”. A type of “solid point” as he would say, which necessitates religious existence.

Again in his words, “To understand oneself in a radical way”. That is to say, there is no possibility of grasping religion without its radical core. It is impossible to engage religion without tapping into the radical foundation that enables and necessitates the mystical engagement. Religious engagement is a radical act, connected to the religious situation of “the surplus or excess.”

All this was included in my intentions as I edited the work – to implant Shagar’s radical foundation into the Religious Zionist world, with the understanding that this may be the only possibility for its revival.

2. Can you tell the story of how you left Har Etzion and came to Rav Dreifus?

I had begun studies at Yeshivat Har Etzion where I learned for two years, completely immersing myself in a life of Torah. Nevertheless, during that whole period and especially after my entering the army, I felt like the Torah I was learning had become secondary or incidental to my life.

I’ll be more specific. The Torah offers great assurances for this life. Rebbe Nachman describes this “double portion” (pi shenayim) in several teachings. However, the musar and religious books (seforim) that I was studying did contain the elevation and tension as promised in the texts that I was beginning to explore, but it was not being taught to me.

I felt emptiness and disappointment. It made no difference how hard I attempted to learn Torah, even with a totality akin to the manner of Hasidut (in its original sense), I still never tasted that “God is Good”(Psalm 34:9). I want to emphasize that I have never sought any type of spiritual experience. I have only sought an elevation in my life of faith, such that the Torah would be a catalyst to challenge my religious life through unexpected magnitude and elevation.

During my army service, began to feel like very little stood between me and pursuing a life outside the Torah world. Truthfully, it made me very sad. So when I finished my service, I really didn’t know what direction to take. Back to Har Etzion? Somewhere else? My sense at the time was that there were no other places for me outside Har Etzion, so I had resigned to return there and basically to wait for the flickering flame of Torah to die out.

Yet. three years earlier, I had been present for one single shiur of Rav Shagar’s – a fact that changed everything for me. I didn’t understand a single word he had said and actually his lack of charisma left me with a sense of discomfort. Nevertheless, for some reason as I sat in this shiur I knew with certainty that I was going to be his student. It’s that experience that brought me three years later to stand at the doorway of Yeshivat Siach, the yeshiva of Rav Shagar and Rav Yair Dreifus.

Rav Dreifus greeted me, sitting me down for a conversation that I remain grateful for until this day. As we spoke, I described to him my feelings of emptiness and disappointment with my studies until then. That I had not found my place in the Beit Midrash. Rav Dreifus lowered his gaze and told me how he completely understood all the things I was describing. However, he asked that I try Yeshivat Siach for one month. If it did not work, then he would give me a blessing to pursue a life outside of the Torah. Nevertheless, he was certain, so he claimed, that Rav Shagar would change my life – which is indeed, what happened.

In retrospect, I believe that what changed my life was encountering the radical core, which Rav Shagar made possible. Not a radicalism in the sense of radical content like the Torah of Ishbitz or Rebbe Nachman. Rather, the radical quality of religious existence. A quality found in the teachings of Rav Shagar.

3. Why is the passage from Rav Shagar’s, “Remnant of Faith (Shaarit HaEmunah)” describing faith as “excess” or “surplus” so important in his thinking and in yours? 

This question is at the foundation of my entire book and touches on something essential in the thought of Rav Shagar. I contend that our faith today exists in a modality of “what remains”, or surplus.

Various scholars describe our period as “post-secular”; a period in which religion and religious faith have found their way back to the center of the stage after the secularism of modernity. Nevertheless, this faith comes after secularism. It is not the same religion and knowledge that once was dominant in the world, taken for granted, and at the core of human identity. Rather, what we are talking about today is a religiosity that has appeared in the world even though God had already died in – a religion that has appeared as a ghost.

The post-secular age does not mean that people who were discrediting religion and scorning faith are now suddenly donning tefillin, observing Shabbat, and praying for the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Rather, post-secular means that people are sobering up to the reality that for some reason the project of secularism did not necessarily succeed. What was thought to be a reliable solution, ended up leading to the stubborn return of a repressed religiosity.  After science and technology completely dominated the reality of life, and after the smoke of the chimneys of Auschwitz and Maidanek, religious faith should have faded into nothingness – and in some ways it did. Nevertheless, we find that it constantly remains, though in a different form.

Today, accord to Rav Shagar, faith is present as “a psycho-theological symptom of unexplainable stubbornness”. It is in this spirit that one can read the works of Rav Shagar. They were written in the state of being of the Tribe of Dan, the tribe that according to tradition was comprised of the stragglers who traveled toward the rear in the journey from Egypt to the Land of Canaan. The rabbis of the Talmud teach that the tribe of Dan collected all the stragglers and all the lost items of the tribes that proceeded them in the journey. One might say, the tribe existed in a modality of “what remained”; of “remnants” – a “remnant of faith”.

4. What does it mean to be “Orthodox but not Orthodox”

This expression “Orthodox but not Orthodox” is an expression of Rav Shagar’s from his essays, “On Translation,” “Multiple Worlds,” and “In the Doorway of Academia”.

In these essays, Rav Shagar tries to conceive of a religious existence that is not wrapped up in the attempt to guard an object of faith as an object. For just as one tries to guard that object it slips from the hands of the believer for any variety of reasons: outside influences, the evil inclination, secularism, and other various forces.

Rav Shagar attempted to describe a believer who does not guard against anything. He wrote, “[This religiosity] is in tension with the impulse within religious society to “guard [or keep]” the [observance of the] kippah, prayer, tzitzit, tefillin, etc. – an attempt to change religiosity into something artificial, lacking a spine and independence, which is one of the reasons for spiritual superficiality within the religious community. Religion that conceives itself as a manager in a battle for survival is a religion that lacks roots and depth”.

If this is true, then who is the believer who does not guard against the object and objects of faith? Rav Shagar envisioned a believer who regards these deeply imbedded objects as a type of “remnant”. That is, they are not elements added to the believer’s life, but rather are elements that are impossible to erase from his experience. No matter what he becomes, they remain within him. This is a believer who sees faith and the commandments as a surplus of his being, and as such, they are constantly present, wherever he goes. Therefore, the verse states, “For what great nation is there that has a God so close at hand as is Hashem our God whenever we call upon Him?” (Deut 4:7).

Even when the believer passes through experiential contexts (outer and inner) that reject religion, he remains entirely religious. He is not a particular type of religious person – he and the religious experience are one.  As Talmud Kiddushin speaks about a scholar for whom the Torah is “his Torah” – that is to say, there is no space between him and Torah/Faith.

Here Franz Rosenzweig’s idea comes to mind: “The word believing does not here mean a dogmatic self-commitment, but a total obligation embracing the entire person. In this sense, the heretic too can be a believer, and the Orthodox an unbeliever.” (Letter to Rosenheim)  The nearness of the subject to faith causes faith to include also its negation in the lack of faith, though faith remains ultimately inerasable. Elsewhere, Rosenzweig portrays the authentic religious person as both “disbelieving child of the world and believing child of God in one” (Star of Redemption 297.)

If this is so, a religious existence stands before us that is gripped by faith and the commandments, but does not grasp them. This is the difference between the Orthodox and the “Orthodox but not Orthodox.” The Orthodox grasp the objects of faith as objects, while the “Orthodox but not Orthodox” are gripped by them, and they do not release him.

Parenthetically, from a psychoanalytic perspective, this religious existence is in opposition to the usual tune of religious believers, the tune of persistent fear of loss of the object of faith.  Think of it as a fear of a castration (one formulated by Freud, the father of secularism) of the guarded object: faith. This fear of castration emerges because this religious perspective conceives of faith as just another object to be grasped. There is a fear of losing the additional object, which in reality does not belong to the individual in the first place.

Rebbe Nachman would refer to this relationship between this kind of believer and the object of faith as “another thing”. Faith becomes another thing, another object, which I grasp very tightly so that it does not slip away or disappear. I must present a claim of ownership. From this perspective, religion falls into an uncompromising and violent fundamentalism. Opposed to that relationship, Rav Shagar suggests another possibility in which faith exists as “a bit more” – an excess. Not as another object but rather as something extra in my being. This is a faith that does not work to guard itself because, in any event, it exists.

The difference between an existence that grips and an existence that is gripped seems at face value to be small and insignificant. The generational struggles between the various Jewish denominations – liberals and conservatives – have left us with the mistaken perspective that the place of meaning from a religious perspective is in political questions of “yes mechitza” or “no mechitza”, the position of women (yes or no), and many other things that distract us from questions of greater significance.

Definitely, there will be a political difference between the Orthodox and the “Orthodox but not Orthodox”. But this difference is less important than the essence of their different points of relationship to the world in general and to the religious world in particular.

5. How is the Torah a doorway to God in the postmodern age? How does Rav Zadok haKohen fit in?

From a certain perspective, I think this question might be leading us in the wrong direction. The basic assumption of the question is that the Jew requires a doorway in order to enter towards God. This assumption is founded on a particular theological conception and I would go so far as to suggest that the Jew has no need for a doorway because he is already there with God. In this sense, the Torah is not a doorway, rather it is something else that sustains our religious existence. The question is whether this “something else” is unique to the Torah or not. I don’t think that Torah is the only doorway – but for me it is the most meaningful one, and in that sense it is singular.

I will explain, having already arrived at a postmodern perspective. An individual is not a singular coherent existent or being, developing from the inside out. Rather, being is decentralized and begins from without.

The individual and the world are composed of many “letter permutations” (according to the language of Hasidut) of a symbolic order. These permutations create a system of identity for the innerness of the subject. [AB- Lacan argues that the subject is “the subject of the signifier”.] The individual is a creation of discourses and utterances, which compose who he is. In connection to our subject, we can say that faith in God is not born from the recognition or experience of the subject, but rather comes about as a result of the discourses and realities from which a person is composed.

As Jews the matter is clear to us because first of all, God has a name and he is identified with this name. Secondly, faith as a name is engraved into our bodies – through circumcision; and even more so, through our origin. As the verse states, “My people, upon whom My name is called” (Chronicles II 7:14).

Faith, the divine encounter, is within the very letters that sustain our being as Jews. This is the deep essence of Hazal’s statement, “Israel – Even if he sins, he is still Israel”. God and faith in God are not concepts – Name and names are engraved in the Jews existence.

The Torah for me is not a doorway, it is a language, a discourse – the words and names that are bound to my body. As Levinas’ writes concerning this point, the Torah is “the first words, spoken, words that had to be spoken in order to give meaning to human existence, and these words were spoken in a form open for interpreters to reveal their deeper dimensions”(Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo by Emmanuel Levinas). What is the meaning of Levinas’ statement here? What does it mean that the Holy Scriptures are “the first words”? Is this a historical statement akin to “the Torah proceeded the world”? Or let us ask further: Levinas states that the Torah is what imbues life with meaning. Does he mean essentially that the Torah is the reason for the creation of the world? Anyone who is familiar with Levinas would know that is not what he means to suggest. What he means is that consciousness in the religious dimension anticipates reality from an analytical and not an historical perspective. The religious dimension is ascribed a priority over reality, over “what occurs”. As Jews, the religious dimension is placed before our own existence. It is engraved within our origin.

This is addressed in the second part of your question concerning Rav Zadok. He is one of the thinkers who reflects deeply on this issue of faith as “name”. For example, his beautiful statement in Tzidkat Hatzaddik: “The essence of Judaism is in the calling of the name Israel”. It is a radical statement. The essence of Judaism is the very naming of a person as Israel. Judaism is not keeping the commandments, or faith, or beliefs. Rather, only my being “ba’al shem”, having the name of Israel.

6. What are “tzerufim chadashim” —new letter permutations?

“New letter permutations” is a concept that Rebbe Nachman (and following him Rav Shagar) dealt with at great length. Rav Shagar believed that religious language has the capacity to change its permutations, the way letters can be rearranged. Primarily, these permutations can interweave themselves and jumble themselves, creating new permutations and fashioning new vessels for the divine presence in this world.

And so sometimes language that is misconstrued as flawed or confused may in actuality be a new type of vessel, one conveying a different divine presence in reality. In his writings about these emerging permutations, Rav Shagar spoke about new and provocative religious images, ones that cause us to reconsider the assumptions we hold with regard to what we consider religious or not. In the same vein, Rav Shagar also experimented by integrating philosophical and scholarly modalities into his own Torah study, which he shared with his students.

“Letter permutations” is a concept from classical Kabbalah teaching that the individual and entire world are composed of letters. In the words of Rebbe Nachman, “Everything contains various permutations of letters through which everything comes into being”. The Kabbalah scholar Yosef Avivi claims that one of the Besht’s main innovations to Lurianic Kabblah was that while Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria) spoke of divine sparks of light that are scattered throughout existence bringing everything to life, the Besht spoke of scattered letters.

For example, the Admor Ha’Zaken (Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liady) writes in Sha’ar Yichud Ve’haEmunah concerning the verse in Psalms (119: 89), “Forever, O LORD, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens”. He cites the Besht who explains the verse as, “The words that you spoke.”   Is the “heaven in the midst of the water” (Genesis). The words and the letters of the Torah stand firm in the heavens and are forever enclothed in all the heavens giving them vitality.

Unlike sparks of light, every letter is different. A reversal of their order can cause changes in meaning and bring about dissonance. When the inner order of the letters is arranged optimally the inner life force corresponds. But when that order is flawed, then, in the words of Rebbe Nachman, “they are mixed up into alternative permutations”. That is to say, the words create a different unique type of life force, thereby forming the matter into something different. This is important to note because I think we are wrestling with something of great depth.

In the classical Kabbalistic concept of sparks of light, the flow (shefa) of divine light remains identical in every moment and place. Only the garment changes. That is to say, the sparks bring life both to the world of holiness as well as to the world of impure shells (klipot). A spark forever remains a spark, for light is light. The divine flow (shefa) of letters is essentially different. Not only can the letters change, the life force itself can also change. If a flaw is present in letter permutations causing them to be mixed up and disrupted, then we have a damaged divine flow (shefa). There remains the divine flow (shefa), but it is damaged. The dichotomy between perfect divine light and damaged shells (klippot) is shattered. After the innovation of the Besht, the divine life force itself can function flawed, mixed up and disordered.

If we push this just a bit more, we can see that before us is an analysis of religious language more generally. Religious language can exist in a flawed way, yet nevertheless function as a religious language. According to Rebbe Nachman, it still conveys divine flow, but of “shattered letters”.

We can apply these concepts in describing the religious subject as composed of permutations of letters, only now the letters are creating an “identity fusion” making the person one with them.  The subject’s own permutations of letters may create a sense of disorder and confusion, yet do not fully prevent the person from being a vessel for the religious divine flow. Perhaps this the situation for the “Orthodox-non-Orthodox”, who knows?

7. How does the Torah have infinite deconstructive meanings? What are we looking for when we create new Torah?

There is a letter attributed to Nahmanides entitled, “Discourse on the Inner Meaning of the Torah”, in which he responds to a student’s question: What is the inner essence of the Torah?The Ramban’s answer is surprising. We would think that a kabbalist like the Ramban would answer that the inner essence of the Torah was some type of mystical experience. But the Ramban chooses a different path.

For him, the inner essence of the Torah is the fact that it is without vowels, for, “if the Sefer Torah included vowels it would have a limit and a measure (like things of matter have known forms) and it would not be possible to interpret it except according to the particular vocalization of a word. But because the Sefer Torah includes multiple possibilities of meaning and because in each and every word there is an abundance of connotation, it was composed without vowels, permitting its maximum interpretation”. That is to say, the essence of the Torah is that it is composed without vowels, creating the need to return to interpret and to bestow meaning.

Afterwards he comments: “Always pursue her, and be concerned over what you do not understand and happy with what you do understand. For thus it is written, ‘It is no empty thing for you’ (Deut. 32:47). The Torah is not empty beyond its simple meaning. The Torah has a soul that God breathed into it, and this soul is its essence. If you find emptiness in the Torah it is only on account of your own short comings, as the verse states, ‘It is no empty thing for you”.  As the rabbis have interpreted, if it is empty, it is on account of you.”

In other words, the essence of the Torah and what defines its soul is its constant shedding of signified reading of the signs. Therefore, this essence, that which is the “root and essence of faith,” according to the Ramban, is not some specific content but rather its structure of linguistic dynamism.

For the Torah commentator, Rabbi Bahye ben Asher, this issue is even more pointed:

The Sefer Torah is composed without any vowels in order to allow each individual to interpret in a way that he desires. Letters without vowels can carry multiple intentionality and be divided into several sparks of light. Thus, we do not vowelize the Torah, for the meaning of any word with vowels is limited to a single matter, but without vowels, many wondrous and awesome things can be inferred.

The Torah as an unvoweled text invites a multiplicity of interpretations, issues, intentionality, and differentiations. To vowelize and punctuate the Torah would constitute a type of violence against the text, constricting it in the direction of particular understandings and definitions. Vocalization reveals itself as an attempt to domesticate and tame the savage creativity hidden within the restless text of the Torah.

Another Kabbalistic-Hasidic tradition related to the vocalization of the Torah describes the Torah as initially composed of a “mound of unarranged letters” (“tel shel otiot”); Or, in the language of the Ba’al Shem Tov, “All the words of our holy Torah were jumbled in a mixture.” Only later was the Torah separated into words when it came to earth: “The meaning of its order – according to the ways of the world”. This description of the Torah as being founded on a mixture of letters (or, more intensely, a “ruins of letters”, which is what tel actually means), suggests that there is something within the Torah that stands in tension with the meaning we ascribe to the Torah; in tension with its meaning and understanding. In other words, the heart of the Torah is [in the language of Lacan] an enigmatic signifier, a “mound of letters”.

The truth is that these traditions that touch upon the text of the Torah are related to the questions you asked previously. When I speak about the “name Israel” or about the names and syntactical elements that are engraved in my being, I can understand it two ways. Either as a signified particular verbal definition, which one could refer to as a Haredi perspective: a perspective that suggests that it possesses the specific understanding of the substance of the “name Israel” already with assigned vowels and vocalization.

Or, and in contrast, in the spirit of the esoteric sages I referenced, it’s possible to see that the name “Israel” does not in fact possess assigned vowels and vocalization. The name requires every individual to come and give it vocalization and meaning – a vocalization and meaning that the name constantly shakes off because the Torah does not permit itself to be ensnared by specific meaning. The Torah constantly creates tension with regards to the existing vocalization. That is to say, the name Israel creates a type of fundamental tension that demands a solution.

Of course, a more radical possibility exists, in which this name that appears as a “mound of letters” may also be a destructive foundation that has played out in the lives of Jews– both religious and secular – destroying all frameworks, destroying all that one thought he or she understood about this life.

The non-esoteric Torah considers anything that rejects or challenges its immutability as a something bad that a believer must guard against and resist.  However, the Kabbalist, person of secrets, internalizes that the Torah enforces itself, even the elements of destruction within it. The mixture and jumble are present in the very heart and structure of the Torah.

In one of the chapters of my book dealing with the Torah as an unvocalized text, I cite Freud in the introduction to the Hebrew edition of “Totem and Taboo”:

Anyone reading this book cannot easily place himself in the spiritual position of the author, who doesn’t understand Hebrew and is totally alienated from the religion of his forefathers…but who nevertheless never denied his belonging to his people and felt that his essence was Jewish and never sought it to be otherwise. Were they to ask him: What yet remains Jewish within this, considering you have given up on connection with your people? He would answer: A great deal remains, apparently – the essence.

Freud has no connection at all to the religion of his fathers, he is alienated from the national ideals, and nevertheless he feels that the essence of Judaism is within him. He is unable to know what it is and he is incapable of explaining it – but he is a Jew. He is a Jew even though his Judaism completely contradicts his identity: the identity of a Viennese scholar without religious (or any particular context), a man of the entire world.

Freud’s Judaism is nothing other than a disorder – a mound of letters – rejecting his identity.

He embodies what we could call “The Non Jewish Jew”. Judaism is present as a subversive foreignness within the Not Jewish. Therefore, it is understandable why Freud wrote his introduction in the third person. It was impossible for him to have written it in the first person because it attends to the stranger in his world. Following the emergence of a “remnant of Judaism”, he becomes a stranger in relation to his own self.

8. Why is Franz Rosenzweig so important for today?

Rosenzweig’s personal story, out from which his ideas emerge, enables us to build anew the religious world as “what remains”. Rosenzweig lived within an assimilated family, far from Judaism and actually quite close to the Christianity of his friends’ lives. And yet through the arch of his life, he experienced a return to Judaism.

What is so interesting about this return is that it never erased his perspective as an assimilationist. He had returned to a Judaism that had dissipated and yet nevertheless remained. Rosenzweig was never a returnee (hozer ba’teshuvah) who gave up on the fundamental experience of his life without Judaism. In some sense he never gave up on the “death of Judaism” all the while returning to it. He possessed a “remnant of faith” (as discussed in question 3). He never disregarded the “Death of God” even while God penetrates into his life. This dimension in Rosenzweig’s thought, found primarily in his letters, contains great contributions for those of us trying to sustain a religious, post-secular experience.