National Scholar Updates

Rav David Bigman, Rosh Yeshiva of the Yeshiva Hesder of Maale Gilboa, will be the guest speaker at a breakfast program sponsored by the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals. The event will be held at Congregation Shearith Israel, 2 West 70th Street, in Manhattan, on Wednesday morning December 23. Services are at 7:15 am, followed by the breakfast at about 8:00 am. The program will run until about 9:15 am.

Rav Bigman's topic is: The Paradox of Spiritual Enlightenment.  Rav Bigman is well known as an outstanding scholar, thinker, author and lecturer. The Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals is working with Rav Bigman on a series of programs in Israel geared to Israeli teen agers, to give them a deeper insight into the grand teachings of Torah Judaism.

There is no charge to attend the breakfast program on December 23, but reservations are required. Please reply by email to [email protected].; or by calling the Institute office at 212 362 4764. This program is open only to paid members of the Institute, and attendance is limited. So please reserve your space right away to avoid disappointment.

In the spring of 2003, a handful of young people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who regularly attended the only Orthodox minyan in town, were looking for a change. I was among them, and like the others who had attended Darkhei Noam in New York or Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem, I was inspired by the possibility of praying in a minyan that was grounded in a commitment to halakha, but that created a prayer space that belonged to men and women alike.

Prior to our first prayer together, it was unclear how many people would show up, or how long the minyan might continue to function. Today, six years later, Minyan Tehillah is still around, and has continued to go strong ever since. As testimony to its feeling of permanence, the board conducted its first survey in the spring of 2008 in an effort to gain insight into who Tehillah's members are, what they like about the minyan, and in what areas they would like to see the minyan grow. The first part of this article draws on the survey results to provide a demographic description of the minyan, while the second part of the article discusses a number of challenges Tehillah faces as a minyan that works to negotiate a delicate line between Orthodoxy and feminism.

Tehilla's adult members number approximately 100, with slightly more marrieds than singles. Our minyan is relatively young, with the bulk of our members-some 70 percent- being between the ages of 26 and 34. Among the married people, about two-thirds have children, the overwhelming majority of whom are ages three and under. Tehillah holds services two Shabbat mornings a month and one Friday evening a month. We meet in a variety of spaces, which we rent from established Jewish institutions in Cambridge. Our decision not to meet every Shabbat is a pragmatic one as well as an ideological one. On the pragmatic side, it takes tremendous energy to organize a service each time we meet. This is in part due to the fact that we are a lay-led, relatively transient community, and in part due to the fact that we are thinly spread across Cambridge, with very few people living close to the synagogue where we generally meet on Shabbat mornings. In fact, the majority of our members live over a mile-walk away from this locale. Because we do not begin the Shaharit service without the presence of both ten men and ten women, each time we meet we work to get a commitment from twenty people to arrive on time-a difficult task, given the distance combined with the fact that a large portion of our minyan is composed of young families.

But there are also social and ideological reasons for not meeting each week. The Tehillah community overlaps very strongly with several other prayer communities in town. Indeed, almost all of our members regularly attend other minyanim in Cambridge on the weeks that Tehillah does not meet. The strongest overlap is with the Harvard Hillel Orthodox Minyan, and the next strongest overlap is with Cambridge Minyan, which is traditional-egalitarian. One of the reasons people are satisfied with Tehillah meeting only every other week, is because they are loathe to give up their connections with the other prayer communities to which belong.

Although Tehillah was started by a group of people who all identified as Orthodox and were all committed to a feminist mission, it has filled other sorts of religious and social needs as well. First, the spirited and intentional tefilla is one of the attractions of Tehillah. From the minyan's inception, great effort has been placed on creating a spiritually uplifting service; led by hazzanim who are well-prepared, who engage the kahal with lively tunes, and who lead the service with seriousness of purpose. Secondly, the minyan fills an important demographic niche in Cambridge for people who are no longer students or for those who want to be part a prayer community that is not affiliated with the university, but is their own. More than that, Tehillah is a creative project, run by people with tremendous energy, commitment, and imagination. In this sense, it offers a place for religious expression that is fresh, relevant, and meaningful-an aspect of tefilla that often feels absent in well-established and structured institutional life.

In short, Tehillah fills a number of complex needs for the variety of people who attend. It is a warm, open social space, which provides an environment that bridges the long-standing traditional American religious divide between Orthodox and Conservative. Yet, despite this innovation, Tehillah is also quite conservative (with a lowercase c). We have developed our own set of customs, and are relatively resistant to change. As a community, we are focused primarily on the prayer service itself, with almost no emphasis on social justice programs, or social events not linked to prayer.

With this background, I will turn now to discuss three of the pressing issues and challenges that the minyan currently faces. Perhaps the most complicated issue among them are questions surrounding halakhic authority and religious decision-making. Like other minyanim that are working to negotiate the difficult relationship between halakha and feminism (and which have been classified by the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance as "Partnership Minyanim"), Minyan Tehillah has not been sanctioned by widely recognized religious authorities. There are, of course, rabbis with Orthodox semikha who do support minyanim like ours, but they are on the margins of what is widely considered to be the Orthodox establishment. For this reason, some argue that it is illegitimate for us to call ourselves-or even think of ourselves-as Orthodox. "And why bother?" they may press, "Just join the Conservative movement; women can lead davening there."
I propose a two-part answer to this challenge. First, it is not un-Orthodox to address the spiritual needs of women-needs that are inherently defined by the cultural and social contingencies of time and place; that is to say-needs that are very different today than they were in the past. Secondly, what we have consciously done at Tehillah is to separate between contemporary Orthodox institutional life-on the one hand-and the Orthodox halakhic process on the other. While we may be marginalized from the first, we understand ourselves to be squarely within the parameters of the second.

This approach helps to resolve the angst-at least for some of us-surrounding questions about the legitimacy of our work. But it still leaves us with a very practical set of problems. How should ritual decisions be made, and who should be invested with the power to make such decisions? 
Classically, a community brings its religious questions to its rabbi. In our effort to address the spiritual needs of women, however, we are acutely aware of the fact that we are living in a time when women are able to receive the same level of religious education and knowledge as men, in institutions that are sanctioned by the Orthodox establishment. Yet the title Rabbi comes from passing an exam that women are simply not allowed to take.

There is a logical inconsistency here, which I believe has led to some loss of credibility for the office. We cannot help but ask: What does it really mean to be a halakhic authority and a community's religious leader? And if it need not necessarily be a Rabbi whom we turn to, then who, and based on what criteria? These are serious questions that we face at Tehillah and for which we have not yet come up with a definitive answer. 
Along these lines, there is another more subtle and vexing problem: One of the reasons that Tehillah is such a success is because it offers a prayer service that people refer to as meaningful. This is in contrast to a sense that can pervade established religious institutions, where the service may feel stale and impersonal. I think it is not a coincidence that at Tehillah the quest for personal relevance in tefilla is accompanied by a desire to be involved in the process of religious decision-making. Rather than handing over this responsibility to a religious authority who does the work and then provides an answer that must be passively accepted, there is an interest in being actively involved in the process: in the learning, understanding, and questioning that goes on when a halakhic decision is made. This approach calls for a new model or new way of thinking about religious authority.

The second pressing issue that Tehillah faces is that of gender, and its place in the service. Currently, gender plays a strong role in Tehillah. A mehitsa runs down the middle of our sanctuary, and we do not begin the service until both ten men and ten women are present. Women and men alike may receive aliyot and read from the Torah, however, when a woman is slotted to read from the Torah, only a woman may be called up for that aliya, and vice versa. In all of these examples we might say that male and female are separate but equal: The gender category is preserved, while still allowing both men and women to be full participants in the tefilla.

In the critical area of leading the service, however, this is not the case. Women are permitted to lead parts of the service, but not all, whereas men are permitted to lead all. For me, this difference is palpable each time I lead pesukei deZimrah for the congregation. When I get to the last paragraph, I cannot help but grapple with the fact that a man will-and must-take over from me because as a woman I may not lead Shaharit, although this same man may have led pesukei deZimrah in place of me. This transition is a difficult point in the service because it raises questions about what we are ultimately looking for. Are we looking to find a halakhic way in which women, like men, can be full participants in all parts of the service? That is to say, are we working toward erasing gender as a category? If this is the case than the current form of our service appears to be only one step towards fully egalitarian roles in the synagogue. Or are we looking to keep gender as a salient aspect of our prayer experience. I would suggest that some of us (myself included) do want to recognize our femininity (or masculinity) as an essential aspect of the way in which we address God and come together as a community. In this case, the key question is whether we might occupy the synagogue as women (or men) and pray as women (or men), while simultaneously being fully integrated in the synagogue service, and remaining within the parameters of halakha.

The third pressing issue facing Tehillah is the question of the minyan's sustainability and the place that it occupies within the wider Jewish world. We currently rent space from established institutions at a very low rate and we have no salaried staff. These factors allow our membership dues to remain nominal-which is critical for our relatively young, transient population.

The result of such low financial stakes is a tremendous amount of freedom and independence in making decisions and running our organization. On the other hand, this leaves us in a childlike position, where we are drawing on the larger local community's resources without being full contributors. And as long as we remain in this position, our feminist, Orthodox project cannot be fully realized. Right now there are some ten to fifteen Partnership Minyanim across the globe, but they are mostly all in urban centers and college campuses. I ask myself every Shabbat-where is my family going to pray if and when we leave Cambridge? For our project to be taken seriously, and for it to expand beyond the centers that it now occupies, we need institutional backing, educational resources, and professional leadership. As we move forward, the challenge will be to build and maintain communal infrastructure while still remaining fresh, innovative and meaningful.

It is hard to be a parent in today’s modern world. And it is harder to be a Jewish parent.

It is hard to be a parent because in today’s media-frenzied world it is almost impossible to keep up with the technology around which our children’s lives are centered. We know that our children are consuming all types of images and information from all types of media sources, and that much of the content is of harmful moral value. Yet it is extremely difficult for most adults to successfully supervise the myriad media channels of today’s youth and to stay informed of everything their children are digesting.

It is harder to be a Jewish parent because we feel like our religious lifestyle has failed us. To whatever degree that each family practices observance or tradition, we Jews have always had an unspoken contract with our God that assured us that the problems that happen “out there” don’t happen to us—especially not to our kids. Being part of the semi-insular and practicing Jewish community was supposed to come with a guarantee that everything would turn out all right for our families.

And so, when we suddenly realize that the bubble has burst and the wagons have uncircled, and everything out there is suddenly also happening “in here,” Jewish adults are faced with a profound and painful crisis of faith. Our contract with God and Judaism has been breached.

There are parents and religious institutions that see media as the enemy. They lament the influence that television, Internet, movies, music, and video games have on our children. They lament that media has enormous influential power. And they are correct. It does.

But it is not the media channels themselves that are harmful, but rather the content they carry. The same channels and media tools that can intensely influence our children toward poor choices, can also equally influence our children for good. The influence of these media is established. The question is simply how that influence is put to use.

In this article, derived from a new workshop that my organization, In-Reach (www.In-Reach.com) is offering to Jewish communities across the United States, we will explore the relationship of teens and media companies, the impact of this relationship on the Jewish family, and how parents can successfully adapt their parenting techniques in order to reclaim influence in the lives of their teens.

***

Prior to starting In-Reach, which is a not-for-profit new-media Jewish youth organization, I worked for over ten years on the commercial side of the media industry, helping companies along the lines of AOL and MTV use the Internet to engage teenagers and make lots of money off of them. I also worked in the lifestyle branding business, a unique form of branding that centers around helping brands move beyond being simply popular, to actually becoming an emotional and identifying part of a person’s lifestyle and identity. Brands like this include Radio Flyer, Levis, Osh Kosh B’Gosh, and R. J. Reynolds.

It was my job over those years to understand on a profound level how media and kids relate to each other on an identity level, and to capitalize on that relationship in order to manipulate teens into becoming dollar transactions.

The teen market in the United States represents over 112.5 billion dollars in direct spending. That’s how much teens 14 to18 years old spend a year on the things they love to buy. In addition, teens are seen as primary influencers in adult spending on everything from electronics to computers to cameras, and even cars. This is because more and more parents rely on their teens to do the online research for these big-ticket items. This puts the value of the teen market, both direct and indirect, at well over 400 billion dollars.

Beyond the vast economic incentive, teens are very attractive to consumer companies for four highly unique reasons:

1. Teens are loyal spenders. Teens get into a brand and then they stick with it. Once they love a particular brand, very little innovation has to be invested on a product level for several years and the teen will still keep buying. So its “innovate once, sell repeatedly.” A good example is the many varieties of Nike Air sneakers, nearly all of them the same components rewrapped, and rewrapped again.

Adults, in contrast, will often reevaluate products and brand quality each time they return to make a new purchase.

2. Teens are cult spenders. Teens spend as groups. Get one popular teen into your product, and you could see your product go viral to a school, town, or even national market.

3. Teen cash is liquid. Teens don’t carry the burdens and financial responsibilities of adults. If they have cash, by and large it is there to burn.

4. Teens are on the narrow end of the “upside-down funnel.” Adults tend to filter the noise out of any media engagement. Our tastes are set, and we only seek those things that align with or fulfill our tastes. When an adult goes online, typically we go on for very specific information and then we get off. It could be news, sports scores, a Torah lesson, weather, and so forth. Anything else gets ‘x’ed out. This is also how adults see the world of ads, be those ads on buses or in print.  In advertising, we call this “the upside-down funnel.” Adults take in the commercial end as if they are at the wide end of the funnel, looking down the narrow-end to see what meets their narrow field of interest. Everything else gets filtered out.

Teens, on the other hand, have the funnel wide-end out to the world, with the narrow end in their mouths. Adolescents are just beginning to identify and define what will one day become their adult tastes. And just like a one-year-old must put every physical object in his or her mouth no matter what we tell them, teens must taste every adult experience for themselves. So when teens go online, they surf. Teens will spend hours clicking from link to link, thirstily drinking in endless hours of exposure to new ideas of what might make them hip or cool or simply more socially acceptable.

It is specifically due to the upside-down funnel that teens are being more and more frequently targeted for their parents’ big-ticket purchases, not as a second line of advertising, but as the first line! Parents are sending their kids to do the research, and kids are more susceptible to commercial manipulation. So much of today’s ad dollars for adult products are being redirected from parents to their children.

These five combined factors make teens an extremely attractive target-audience: Teens are worth over 100 billion dollars of direct spending, and hundreds of billions more of secondary spending. Teens are receptive. Teens are loyal. Teens spend en-masse. And teen money is there to spend.

The ultimate dream of any marketer is to be able to create a reflex-response by the consumer. That is, I, the seller, tap your knee; and you, the buyer, act by compulsion and buy my product.

With teens, two such hot-buttons exist: Their angst and their libido. Teen sexuality and issues of identity/acceptance are raw and unprotected. Poke either of those nerves and you can get teens to do most anything to cover up their insecurity.

And so it is these two buttons that industry goes after, and today’s commercial companies go after teens with impunity.

But before we can examine how commercial business is targeting our kids, we must first understand why these companies are so free to do so. Has something changed dramatically since the time when we were kids? If so, what is it, and what does it mean to us as parents?

***

Most parents will tell you that the gap between parents and teens is timeless. We reassure ourselves that our teens will turn out okay, because we did, and so did our parents. “The distancing between parents and their children during the adolescent years is a natural rite of passage,” people say, “and we needn’t give heed to the alarmists that say that today’s kids are more at risk than kids in the past.”

But this is not true.

Although the gap between parents and teens is timeless, the consequence of that gap has become much more serious.

There are three key factors that have changed the playing field dramatically, making the growth-stage of distance between parents and teens of greater concern than ever before. Those three factors are:

1. Push Technology
2. A Back Door for Learning and Questions
3. Standards of Content

[H2] Big Change 1: Push Technology

Push technology means that a company no longer has to wait for you to talk to them or voice interest in their product. They can talk to you whether you are interested or not. They can push their way into your world.

The best example of this is spam email. Today, most of us run the most advanced anti-spam filters available to end-users. It is built in to Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and nearly all popular email programs. Yet we all get spam offering us opportunities to enlarge various parts of our anatomy, or readily find exotic young women ready to fulfill all of our wildest fantasies.

Like viruses vs. anti-virus software, purveyors of spam are dedicated to finding ways around the software written to block out their emails to us. But unlike viruses, spam is motivated by overt monetary goals.

Most adults pay little heed to spam, deleting these emails with a bored yawn. But teens click on them with thirsty curiosity. These emails tap into the natural curiosity of any adolescent.

Think back twenty years to the then-equivalent of spam. That would be the Val-Pack coupons we used to get to our homes. But now imagine that Val-Packs were specifically addressed to your eleven-year-old child, with products like genital enlargers (along with pictures), and solicitations of nude foreign women available for purchase as mail-order brides. Such mail would not be tolerated for a moment! Legal action would be taken and townships and States would be up in arms!

Not so with Push Technology. Push Technology has placed images, ideas, and illicit values in front of our kids at highly impressionable young ages. It was not this way last generation.

[H2] Big Change 2: Back-Door Learning

When we were kids, if we did not like the values in our home, our school, and our synagogue, where were we going to go? To the library?

Sure, maybe you could get your hands on a dirty magazine, but that was about as radical as you could get until you were 18 years old and on your way to college.

Today, a pre-teen in the sixth, seventh, or eighth grade need only close the door to his or her room and turn on the computer, and he or she can run as far as their imagination and questions take them. And combined with the provocations of Push Technology, that might be pretty far from home.

We are no longer the gatekeepers of our children’s learning.  What we don’t discuss with our children, someone else will.

Once upon a time, when kids brought up certain age-inappropriate topics with parents, parents could lay down the law and tell their children that such subjects would have to keep until the child was older and more mature. Today, when we shut down a topic, we are simply shutting down our role in the discussion. Our children unplug us—and plug in online.

We don’t get to choose what subjects our children will and won’t explore. We only get to choose if we will be part of that exploration, or if we will be left out.

It wasn’t that way when we were kids.

[H2] Big Change 3: Standards of Content

Do you remember what used to earn movies an R rating? Do you remember when erotic attire, partial frontal nudity, full rear nudity, gross use of expletives, and strong sexual language were not allowed in mainstream media? Such was the standard less than twenty years ago. Today, material that was deemed inappropriate for children and teens just one generation prior is now freely syndicated over network television, FM radio, and in public street signage.

Consider the billboards for the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show on the sides of buses. The women depicted in various states of undress are the height of the art and business of eroticism, the sensuous science of the minimum coverings to leave on a person in order to ignite passion to take everything off. Women as undressed as these were once deemed inappropriate for the eyes of children under the age of 18, whether in magazine or movie. Today such images are street signage.

When I was a boy, I remember my brother sneaking me in to a Chevy Chase movie called Modern Problems that was rated R because they showed Chevy’s tush in the movie. Such nudity is now allowed on prime-time network television. So too, graphic language that earned Smokey and the Bandit part III an R rating in the early 1980s is also standard to many of today’s most popular teen (and adult) television programs.

The imagery and language that we were protected from by our society when we were kids is no longer taboo. A much lower moral standard of highly sexualized content is being mainstreamed into the eyes and ears and minds of our children through virtually every media channel.

How blessed were we that we were protected from such material when we were young and impressionable kids.

Put such mainstream content together with Push Technology and a back door for learning, and the timeless generation gap has become a very dangerous chasm.

It is this chasm that media companies exploit—and they exploit it ruthlessly. People accuse the media companies of being immoral because of their approaches to marketing to youth. But this is a confused assessment. Media companies are not immoral, they are amoral.

The driver of a publicly traded company is its quarterly projections and its sales against those projections. As a business with a bottom line that must be met, the question that is being asked is the best way to meet that bottom line and turn potential consumers into dollar transactions. Morality is a question left for the house of worship. In business, it is an amoral question of sales. And if it sells, use it.

As parents and as people of faith, we make a mistake when we begin to expect businesses to protect and limit the content that they share with our children. They won’t.  

It is up to parents to set the moral bar. Companies, like children, will continually test our limits. We can fight companies by lobbying and protesting loudly, and this can help (as it has in the past). But we can also learn to understand the language of media marketing, and in doing so discover how best to conduct our own interactions with our kids. Within the science of these media relationships are deeply understood psychological factors. And many of them are good news for faith-based communities and caring parents.

***

There are four strategies for successful youth marketing that pervade today’s media consumer industry. They are:

1. Cookie-Crumbing
2. Blurring the Moral Barometer
3. The Trojan Horse
4. Delegitimizing Role Models

As would be expected, these strategies are the combined product of our country’s top MBAs and social scientists, and incorporate the unique vulnerabilities of today’s teens, as we have enumerated in the ‘Big Changes’ above.

For the sake of this article, I will summarize them on a cursory level. In our parenting workshop we explore these media strategies at much greater depth.

[H2] Cookie Crumbing

Cookie Crumbing recognizes that there are those media outlets that parents supervise more closely, and those that parents supervise less closely. Although parents may pay attention to what their teens are watching on television or what music their teens are listening to, few parents will follow online to the web-communities and discussion groups that these programs and music artists spawn.

So while operating in the more exposed and parentally supervised media outlets, media companies are more careful in the way they position and feed content to kids. These programs, however, are designed to lead kids down a bread-crumb trail and into an online environment where teens can be more freely and aggressively manipulated.

Another aspect of Cookie Crumbing is creating merchandise trails. Most of today’s teen entertainment icons have apparel lines, cosmetic lines, sporting-goods brands, and more.

Once upon a time a bad-boy band was only as bad as the band’s lyrics. Even if you liked Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones did not make any money if you chose to dress like him. Today, a great deal of the pop icons are manufactured specifically for their commercial appeal. They are a package meant to create a lifestyle concept in teen minds, and lead teens from the music into stores to make an array of purchases around the given image brand.

[H2] Blurring the Moral Barometer

There is a concept in Jewish spiritual philosophy regarding a person’s evil inclination. We are taught that our evil inclination does not tell us to do bad things, because nobody wants to feel bad about him or herself. Rather, the evil inclination blurs the lines between good and bad, until a bad thing can be rationalized as being acceptable, and then we are free to do it without feeling guilty.

Media companies get this. And it is central to their relationship with today’s youth.

It is hard to get teens to buy into superficial and hedonistic concepts of life and an array of supporting products, especially since most teens are hungry for much deeper forms of validation and connection. By blurring a teen’s innate values, the teen becomes much easier to manipulate.

MTV stands for Music TeleVision. Most adults know this. What most adults do not know is that today music content makes up less than 20 percent of MTV’s broadcast content. The other 80 percent is what is called “Reality Programming.”

Why? Because MTV is not about music. Music is the hook. But defining culture and selling product is the business.

And these programs are not like Survivor on CBS. A good example of an MTV reality program would be Tila Tequila, where sixteen guys and sixteen girls compete for Tila’s passion. Because, you see, Tila is not sure if she is a lesbian or heterosexual, so contestants compete to see which way they can “flip” her.

The Tila program is only aired after hours, when teens are not watching TV (supposedly). But on MTV.com, which over 65 percent of online teens visit, you can see the show twenty-four hours a day.

What does this have to do with music? Nothing. But it has everything to do with dictating values to young people and owning the conversation over what is hip and what is not, and what makes us, as people, worthy or unworthy.

[H2] The Trojan Horse

The Trojan Horse is when the media companies use parents to sell a lifestyle icon to their kids, and then cut the parent out of the conversation. Classic examples of this are Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake (‘N Sync), and Christina Aguilera, who were all marketed as graduates of Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club. These performers were healthy alternatives for parents to steer their children toward, representing family values and chasteness, and providing an alternative to the dark music world around us.

Today, all of these pop-icons are highly sexualized with myriads of consumer products ranging from perfume to tequila. And just in case you think that this is because their audiences grew up, Britney’s new line of apparel, just announced in March 2009 to be carried exclusively at Kohls, is for Juniors. The clothing line includes black lace thongs for eleven-year-olds.

The change-up in the lifestyle-icon’s image is done suddenly and according to specific timing. The icon is allowed to percolate in the home and earn central status and approval by the parents for their youngster. And once the marriage is solidly consummated, typically after a few patient years, bang! An overnight image-change manifests, and it is too late for the parent to undo the sell. Suddenly our child is being led in a very frightening and new direction, as we are helpless to intervene.

[H2] Delegitimizing Role Models

Here comes the good news. This component of media-strategy is actually based upon statistical facts that media companies are very aware of, but most parents are not.

Most parents believe that the primary influence in their teen’s moral decision-making is their teen’s friends. This is false. While the majority of adults believe this to be true, the majority of teens in the United States assign this influence to their parents.

In addition, 71 percent of teens in the United States would like religious leaders to be more active in addressing moral and high-risk issues. Most parents and rabbis do not know this. All media companies do. And so, delegitimizing role models is critical to their success, because an engaged parent or rabbi can undo the whole ball of wax, and all those careful marketing dollars can go down the drain.

This is why shows like Dawson’s Creek, Beverly Hills 90210, and The OC all reverse the roles of parents and teens. All important life-decisions are made by the teens on the shows, while parents are shielded and protected by their kids as being too fragile for many of these hard questions. Kids on these shows are very respectful in the ways they talk to their parents, and so our guard as parents does not go up. But the underlying message is: “You can’t talk to them. They are not capable of understanding. You are old enough and strong enough and wise enough to decide for yourself.”

***

As parents, we are surprised to hear that we are the primary influence in our teens’ moral decision making. It doesn’t seem that way! We know that our teens talk to their friends about so very many intimate topics that they simply do not broach with us. So how can this statistic not be a lie? The answer is that no one said that your kids talk to you the most. The kids are simply saying that your influence as a parent is primary, and that of their friends and others is secondary.

Deep inside, we all know this to be true. Even as adults, we still care deeply about what our parents think (or might think, if they knew) about the decisions we make. The judgment of our parents haunts us, and in some cases charms us. But it is always there. Whether our parents were good or bad, kind or cruel, their judgment and influence looms over us in every important life-decision we make.

“So great,” you say. “We have the influence, but our kids don’t talk to us! What good does that do?”

And here we come to the section on parenting. Because the first step is learning that the power still lies with you. Learning how to use that influence is something we all can achieve.

***

The first step in creating In-Reach was to learn what today’s Jewish teens are thinking, and to find new approaches to supporting them in their moral and ethical decision-making process. Teens in the Jewish community benefit from a strong support structure. Caring parents, private schools with top-notch teachers, guidance staff, and outreach volunteers and professionals surround our teens with love and offer them many caring lifelines for difficult life choices they may be facing.

But today there is a new outlet, the web, which teens turn to when they want to discreetly ask and answer questions. And when we think about the types of private questions teens might choose to ask online, it is obvious how important it is for us to have a Jewish outpost in cyberspace for these kids. As we have learned, if we are not present to answer these questions, someone else will answer them in our place.

And so, working with leading Jewish clinical experts including Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski and Dr. David Pelcovitz, In-Reach created an online, anonymous social networking system for Jewish teens, a site that actually doubles as a clinically based peer-counseling system. The portal, called TheLockers.net, has served over 10,000 Jewish teens from across the United States and Canada, has hosted nearly 3,000 therapeutically supervised peer-discussions, and has enjoyed more than 27,000 posts from its teen users. Eighty percent of teens who use TheLockers.net come from public schools, most of whom have limited Jewish backgrounds. Twenty percent of our users come from Jewish Day Schools, ranging from Orthodox to Reform.

All activity on TheLockers.net is supervised by specially trained moderators, using a patent-pending online clinical methodology that was developed by In-Reach. And TheLockers community is extremely popular among teens, with over 70 percent of teenagers that hear about the system becoming users of it.

For over five years we have had the privilege of listening to Jewish youth from across North America share the most intimate and private questions of their lives with us. The primary topics are questions of Judaism and morality. Yet issues have ranged from family, to social stress, to school, to peer pressure, to body image, to drugs and drinking, to sex.

As we listened to and supported Jewish teens of all denominations, we began to learn from the teens about how traditional approaches to parenting were and were not working in a digital generation. Parenting workshops were created, and our learning from the teens was synthesized with the feedback, reactions, and real world experiences of hundreds of today’s parents from across the country.

There are seven central principles that were found to be common to all successful relationships between today’s parents and today’s teens. These principles define and clarify the lens through which traditional parenting approaches may be evaluated for success in a modern era. Furthermore, they provide a priceless guide for any parent struggling to understand, heal, or strengthen their relationship with their teen.

These insights are available to the Jewish community via parenting workshops that In-Reach delivers nationally, and will soon be supported by a book that teaches the seven central principles of value-based parenting. In addition, readers of Conversations are invited to be in touch with us via email, at [email protected], if there are specific questions we may answer for you.

There are new truths we must accept as a community and essential questions we must answer as parents and teachers.

It is vital that we come to accept the following new realities:

• Although the gap between parents and teens is timeless, the consequence of that gap has become much more serious.
• We are no longer the gatekeepers of our children’s learning. If we are not able or willing to address the questions of our children in a meaningful fashion, they will discuss their questions with someone else.
• Absolutes will backfire. Strong-arm parenting and absolute religious rules only work on a hostage audience. Today’s youth have alternatives. To succeed, our answers must demonstrate meaning and value.

The questions we must ask ourselves as parents, teachers, and rabbis are as follows:

• If a teen is making a major life decision, would he or she feel comfortable to come to us while contemplating the decision?
• If the decision was already made, and it was the wrong decision, would he or she feel comfortable to turn to us during the fallout?
• Do we know what we believe regarding values and faith—and why we believe it?
• Do we share what we believe with our children, consistently and through meaningful conversation and behavior?
• In a world where all temptations and values are on the table, why would our kids choose Judaism?
• Given the choice again, would we? Why?

The world we grew up in has changed. Our children are faced with choices that we never had to make, and they are assaulted with foreign values that are confusing even to adults. It is essential that we understand how their world has changed, and respect the impact and consequences of those changes.

As a Masoretic tradition—a tradition that is based upon transmission from parent to child and teacher to student—our success as a Jewish community is measured by the ultimate choices our children make. By learning to parent and teach according to values, instead of rules, we can provide our children with a Judaism that is relevant to the questions upon which their modern lives revolve.

I'm smart, successful at my career, and fun to be with. I've worked out many of my "issues" in therapy. Here I am, eminently eligible and ready for a relationship, but somehow all of the guys I meet just aren't there yet. I feel like prescribing them a course of therapy, life-skills, and relationship-skills, and telling them to return in a few years, though hopefully I'll have found someone by then...
Sarah, age 27

I really want to get married and build a "bayit ne'eman b'yisrael" and all that other good stuff, but sometimes life gets in the way. I'm struggling really deeply with my conflicting sexual and religious needs, while trying to move forward in my career, and still make it to minyan-all this under the watchful and critical eye of my parents and community. Spending Shabbat with my parents is the opposite of relaxing. I wonder whether they would have gotten married as young and as happily as they did had they had the same challenges to contend with when single as I do.
Avi, age 31

I hesitate to take up my pen and write about the broad topic of Orthodox singles. It's a topic on which much ink has been spilt and to little effect. I generally confine myself to the topic of singles and sexuality/religious conflict, which has been much less explored and where there are perhaps more constructive things to be written. However, I want to write briefly about some of the broader challenges faced by singles and by the Orthodox community. The issues are manifold and complex-spanning the religious, psychological, phenomenological, existential, physiological, and halakhic realms, among others-and my goals are limited. If I can succeed in making you question your assumptions about singles, or in breaking some of the myths that you hold dear, and shaking your sense of certainty about anything relating to singles and their place in the community, then I will have done enough. Deconstruction is easy compared to reconstruction, but it often needs to come first-I leave the rebuilding to the future.

We often hear mention of the "Shiddukh Crisis" or "Singles Problem" that currently plagues the Orthodox Jewish community. Various groups, organizations, synagogues, and individuals have given much thought to finding the "solution" or a range of "solutions" to this "problem." I don't want to enter into the fray of searching for solutions, partly because some of the "solutions" I've seen have been worse than the problem itself and have augmented the problem rather than solving it, and partly because I disagree with the entire construct of problem-solving that has been set up around Orthodox singles.

Let's start with some definitions: Many today would define the "Shiddukh Crisis" as the fact that today, more than ever before, large numbers of Jews are remaining single for longer, marrying later, or not marrying at all. This definition assumes that the mere status of married or unmarried is how we define success, and the quality of a person's married or single life doesn't matter to us. For many people, the "Singles Problem" is something that needs to be solved simply by getting everyone married as quickly as possible.

I want to suggest a different definition of the "Singles Problem": the crux of the crisis is, on the one hand, deeply personal, surrounding the individual issues that prevent people from either desiring or achieving a meaningful and committed relationship. And on the other hand, there is a wider communal dynamic in which the Orthodox community simply doesn't know how to include the unmarried individuals in its midst and often alienates singles, forcing them to either form their own singles communities or to leave Orthodoxy.

In this article, I want to focus on the intersection between the single and the community and on some of the myths that prevent mutual understanding.

Beginning the Myth-Breaking

The line between straining at truths that prove to be imbecilically self-evident, on the one hand, and on the other hand tossing off commonplaces that turn out to retain their power to galvanize and divide, is weirdly unpredictable. In dealing with an open-secret structure, it's only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative....
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 22

Before we can move toward a productive conversation about singles and their place in the community, I need to clear the ground from some of the many and often contradictory myths that currently prevail regarding singles. The very act of generalizing-of making statements that are relevant to "all singles" or "everyone"-does violence to the individual and his or her experience. Individuals come in different shapes and sizes; physically, emotionally, intellectually-and they relate differently to this period in their lives. We simply can't make any general assumptions about people. 
I have chosen five common myths that I want to break systematically, though there are many more. I begin with the sexual realm because I think that it is the proverbial elephant in the room, which often hovers in people's consciousnesses but is not mentioned in polite conversation. Since halakha does not permit pre-marital sex or any physical contact with the opposite sex ("negiah"), singles either are not sexually active, or their sexual activity is illegitimate. Therefore, they are either grappling with sexual denial or repression, or they are violating the halakha. Either way, their situation is one that the wider community cannot easily identify with. The prevalence of assumptions and dearth of real information about people's sexual beliefs and practices-the confusion between myth and fact-may contribute to suspicion mixed with awkwardness in interactions between singles and members of the wider community. In this vein the myths can be especially damaging.

Myth #1: Everyone is "shomer negiah" /No one is "shomer negiah."

These myths, though they contradict each other, are both quite prevalent within the Orthodox community. Each comes from a totalizing perspective that seeks to reduce all singles to the same experience so that we don't need to give the matter further thought. If all singles are shomer negiah, then the system works-everything is fine, there is no conflict to be reckoned with, and we need not concern ourselves with the personal toll that this halakhic observance may be having upon the individual. On the other hand, if no singles are shomer negiah, then there is also no conflict-singles simply don't care about the halakha and thus they aren't part of the community. Each of these totalizing perspectives is detrimental and each ignores the uniqueness of the individual and the fact that people are different and that they cope with singlehood in different ways. 
Although sex and sexuality are universal phenomena, they are experienced differently by different individuals and even by the same individual in different stages of life. For some, sexuality is a major challenge during the single years. For others, sexuality is a non-issue, or a minor issue. Some observe negiah with ease, others with difficulty, others not at all. Some are shomer negiah in some relationships and not in others or with some people and not with others. For others, the status changes with time. The endless permutations make stereotypes worthless. There are people who don't look the part who are completely shomer negiah, and people learning in yeshiva who visit prostitutes. A friend of mine recently asked two male friends of hers, of similar age and profession, what they were looking for in a wife in terms of her sexual experience-the answers they gave were diametrically opposed. One would only date women who had never touched men, because "If I waited, why couldn't she?" and the other would only date women who had had some physical contact with men, because, "I don't want someone who's not having sex just so that her ketubah [marriage contract] can say betulah [virgin] (which it can either way)." Leave the stereotypes behind and look at the person who is facing you.

Myth #2: Anyone who engages in premarital sexual activity is totally fine with it.

This myth is particularly damaging because it allows us to ignore the pain and conflict that many Orthodox singles are experiencing. Although there are certainly singles who are not conflicted about their premarital sexual activity, all of the singles with whom I have spoken have struggled very deeply with these issues-either overtly or beneath the surface-and while some eventually made their peace with the choices they made, others continue to struggle.

An extension of this myth is that those who engage in premarital sexual activity simply don't care about the halakha. Most of the singles that I have spoken with cared deeply about the halakha, and it was precisely because they cared so much about the halakha that they were thrown into such a deep existential conflict in its violation. However, the guilt surrounding premarital sexual activity is not purely due to halakhic violation. For many people feelings of guilt are a complex combination of many factors, the halakha being one, and communal or familial expectations and social pressures being another. For women especially, society's double standard of sexual behavior adds onto the halakhic layer the feelings of being "damaged goods" once one engages in premarital sexual activity, and raises questions about one's larger identity as a good girl, a good person, and a good Jew. Even those singles I spoke with who chose to leave the halakhic lifestyle retained a lingering sense of guilt and discomfort about their decisions in the sexual realm.

Myth #3: Singles are happy the way they are-they don't want to be part of the "broader Orthodox community."

"Community" means different things to different people. Here I am using this term in an intentionally ambiguous way, though on a basic level I am referring to the community that forms around a synagogue or a neighborhood. In either case, families are generally the building block of the community. Depending on the specific community, singles may have formed their own minyan, or in places with fewer singles, singles may be either invisible within the communal framework or may be full members of the community.

If we take this myth in the specific context of the community that forms around a synagogue, then the exact opposite is often true as well: Many singles feel so alone and isolated that they are often thirsting to be a part of the larger community, if only the community would let them. Especially in the absence of a spouse-who, among other things, provides a regular companion for Shabbat meals-singles often appreciate the sense of belonging or of being part of something larger than oneself.

However, not all singles want to be involved in the community to the same extent, and the community should be sensitive to the range of needs that individuals might have. Some singles might appreciate an invitation to a Shabbat meal, others might appreciate being set up, others might just want a smile and greeting after prayer services, and others might want a more active role on the synagogue board or on various committees. And beyond these concrete actions, there is the ineffable; the sense you get when the person in front of you is being perfunctory in conversation, scanning the room for someone else to talk to, the sense you get when "How are you" is a statement rather than a question. Married people: Be open to singles the same way you would be open to a new family that joins your community, and allow the situation and the person standing in front of you to guide your actions.

 Myth #4: Any attempt on the part of the Orthodox community to grapple openly and deal seriously with the challenges and conflicts that singles face will help to legitimize perpetual singlehood and make singles even less likely to marry.

In 2009, when the numbers of unmarried Orthodox Jews in their twenties, thirties, and forties have reached an unprecedented high, and when the percentage of Jews who end up never marrying is increasing, failure to confront the issue constitutes an act of burying our heads in the sand, and further alienating those singles who remain part of the Orthodox community. At this point, the question of legitimization of singlehood is almost moot, as the numbers speak for themselves, with the message that people are remaining single, with or without such legitimization. We as a community need to get over the fear of raising questions, and singles are just the tip of the iceberg here.

Several years ago, when single, I was part of a committee of both married and single individuals (which included rabbis and communal leaders) that was dedicated to thinking through the "singles problem" and trying to offer "solutions." Even after a couple of years of conversations, and countless suggestions, this committee was not able to take any definitive steps. We had finally realized the complexity of the issues involved and realized that the proposed "solutions" were merely band-aids that didn't get to the heart of the problem. At one point this myth surfaced and the committee began to question its existence-was the very fact of our open conversation going to somehow legitimize singlehood? Aside from the fact that none of this committee's deliberations were public, I felt impelled to point out in an email that, "To assume that communal pressure [for marriage] will help the matter is misguided.... Please trust me when I say that no amount of communal acceptance and welcome will ever make any of us forget that we are not your ideal and never will be until we are married with children" (1/2/05).

Sylvia Barack Fishman puts the issue in more extreme terms, which are perhaps reflective (or perhaps not) of the threat that the community construes in its singles: 
The question facing Orthodox communities today has some similarities to Jewish communal questions about how to treat intermarried families: Outreach activists urge inclusiveness-"why not accept the singles community as it is"-while others counter that total inclusiveness would be tantamount to legitimating singleness as an alternative lifestyle for Orthodox Jews. Thinking about the treatment of Orthodox singles thus demands coming to terms with deep philosophical, sociological, and communitarian issues. (Gender Relationships in Marriage and Out, p. 111) 
Perhaps the extremity of the comparison is illustrative of how deeply threatened the community feels by the existence of singles.

 Myth #5: The sexual restrictions of yihud and negiah have the teleological purpose of ensuring that people have only one sexual partner in life (namely, their spouse); these halakhot are rooted in an awareness of the psychological and spiritual damage that even casual premarital physical contact can cause.

This myth is perhaps the most detrimental myth of all, in that it breaks out of the communal sphere and speaks to each and every single who has ever had even accidental physical contact with a member of the opposite sex, and tells them that they will suffer for this act and it will impact their ability to form a happy marriage; how much more so the individual who has had intentional sexual contact. This idea comes from those popular Jewish authors who, in their quest to convince teenagers to become shomer negiah have-without any use of Jewish texts and sources-read their own pop-psychology into this law.

Although I cannot fully break this myth in the context of the present article, suffice it to say now that the existence of biblical polygamy, concubines, and prostitutes-categories that are all difficult to reconcile with Judaism as we currently live it-and, on a more normative plane, the encouraging of remarriage for those who have been widowed or divorced, serve to dispel the notion that lifelong monogamy is the root of these prohibitions. There is no authoritative source that I am aware of that discusses the psychological or spiritual damage that will ensue upon violating these restrictions, any more than the spiritual damage that results from any sin that can be healed through repentance. In fact, a cursory reading of Maimonides (Hilkhot Issurei Bi'ah, chapter 21) and the Shulhan Arukh (Even haEzer 25, Orakh Hayyim 240) reveals a very different root to these prohibitions, which is perhaps more disturbing to our modern sensibilities; namely, a striving for asceticism, even within marriage!

To promulgate myths of this nature under the banner of "Judaism," "Torah," and "halakha" has a detrimental effect because it compounds the guilt and anxiety of many singles who are committed to Judaism but for psychological, emotional, or physiological reasons are not observing all of the sexual restrictions mandated by halakha. Although there is certainly value in encouraging abstinence among teenagers, we cannot achieve this at the price of being dishonest about Judaism and halakha.

A corollary of this myth is the assumption that there is no difference between teenagers, and those in their twenties, thirties, and forties who are single. Not distinguishing between adolescent sexuality and adult sexuality reflects a failure to see singles as adults who, among other characteristics, are also fully developed sexual beings, with needs and desires that are substantively similar to those of their married counterparts. There is nothing natural about being a "40-year-old-virgin"-and the halakha itself recognized this and therefore encouraged early marriage. Even if halakha today constrains us from endorsing premarital sexual activity, we as a community need to adopt a more empathetic and understanding stance to those who engage in it; the thirty-year-old woman who is physical with her serious boyfriend is different from the adolescent whose hormones have overtaken him. It is time we stop infantilizing singles under the banner of halakha.
***

The topic of singles in the Orthodox community is complex and is comprised of many different issues and questions, which are often lumped together into the same category. There are the personal crises that individuals are forced to navigate, the interpersonal issues involved in the process of seeking out and building intimate relationships, the family dynamics that arise during singlehood and the wider communal issues, as well as the religious and sexual issues, to name but a few. We are still a long way from fully understanding any of these issues, let alone knowing how to address them. However, I hope that this exercise in myth-breaking will have helped clear the way toward increasing understanding between singles and the broader community and toward opening the conversation.

Jonathan Kolatch's most recent books are China Mosaic and At the Corner of Fact & Fancy. His articles on the Far East, the Middle East, the American rural scene and medicine have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. This article appears in issue 9 of Conversations, the journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals.

Before questioning the usefulness of the word “Orthodox,” let’s first acknowledge the need that this term serves. Congregations, like individuals, find benefit in affiliating with congregations of similar direction. Such affiliation provides the weight of numbers when larger issues, such as intermarriage and conversion, separation of church and state, recognition of homosexuals as congregants, and political positions on national and international issues, need to be addressed. Umbrella organizations also facilitate the establishment of religious standards for prayer, the ordination of rabbis, and the certification of teachers. They streamline fundraising. So, inevitably, groups such as the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, and the Union for Reform Judaism have come into being. The assumption that all individuals whose congregations are served by one of these umbrella organizations subscribe to the general standards of that organization is false.

That said, when used to categorize individuals, the word “Orthodox” (and its cognate, “religious”), its flavor of piety notwithstanding, is often a troublemaker: In the misconceptions it generates, in the provocation and divisiveness it engenders. In English or in its Hebrew equivalent, dati, it often conveys unintended meanings.

The term Orthodox is misleading because it hints at a uniform standard of religious conduct that, in reality, does not exist. When used to enforce exclusivity—the holier-than-thou phenomenon—it can become haughty, condescending, downright mean: ‘I am more Jewish than you.’

My brother, who is not at all ignorant when it comes to things Jewish, but who grew up in a Conservative home, with somewhat limited contact with Orthodox Jews, asks frequently if A or B is Orthodox, citing some degree of observance or dress. I, who belong to an Orthodox synagogue and have more extensive contact with Orthodox Jews—both in the United States and in Israel—am hard pressed to provide a sharp answer.

Outer appearance parameters vary too greatly to be instructive: head covered or not (yarmulke in all its forms or black hat for men; kerchief, hat, or wig for women); beard or clean shaven; tsitsith (prayer fringes) for men (worn inside one’s pants, outside, or not at all); slacks or floor-sweeping dress; how much of a woman’s arms are covered.

Is a man with an untrimmed, straggly beard more Orthodox than one who keeps his beard well groomed? What about a woman who doesn’t cover her head, who wears pants, who exposes her shoulders? Can she still be considered “Orthodox”?

Over the past winter, I spent a few days at Kibbutz S’de Eliyahu, an established Orthodox kibbutz in Israel’s Jordan Valley. Confused by the menagerie of women’s attire at the kibbutz, put this question to Beni Gavrieli, a transplanted American, with Conservative roots, who has lived at the kibbutz for two decades and has adapted to the Orthodox way of life. He proved sensitive to the question.

Beni told me that at S’de Eliyahu you find four types of women: those who cover their heads and wear long skirts, those who don’t cover their heads and wear long skirts, those who cover their heads and wear pants, and those who don’t cover their heads and wear pants. What is the conclusion? That women who don’t cover their heads and wear pants are not Orthodox? That S’de Eliyahu is not a religious kibbutz? That, when it comes to dress, Orthodoxy has no definable criteria? Nadia Matar, the noted Israeli activist and founder of Women in Green, an observant Jew by all standards, keeps her head uncovered at home, and, perhaps in deference to others, dons a baseball cap when she leaves the house.

An Israeli cousin with an Orthodox pedigree (graduate of Netiv Meir Yeshiva High School in Jerusalem and the hesder religious study-army service program), told me that the kerchief that Orthodox women wear on their heads “looks like a rag.” A year later, he got married. And what does his wife wear on her head? Right.

The unattractive (some call “dumpy”) dress of religious women, as much as anything, molds the negative image that the non-Orthodox (Jew and Gentile) carry of Orthodox Jews. Before meeting my cousin’s wife, from her picture alone, I had this same gut feeling of unworldliness. It turns out that she has two university degrees and is well traveled. I wonder whether her dress is out of choice or out of a need to meet standards of family and friends.

Whether or not one wears a yarmulke at all times is one of the most reliable outer dress indicators of whether a man is Orthodox. And if you are a perceptive observer, you can draw useful conclusions about the religious inclinations of the wearer by what sits on his head (broadcloth yarmulke, knitted yarmulke with bobby pins or clips, large knitted yarmulke, black yarmulke without pins, hats—black and otherwise).

But all who tend toward an observant lifestyle do not wear yarmulkes full time. Many take their skull caps off when not praying. Orthodox lawyers sometimes go bareheaded in court so that their religious preference does not influence the proceedings. Other times, people are just inconsistent. Some eat with their heads covered on the Sabbath, but not on weekdays or when eating out. A Reconstructionist rabbi I know puts on a yarmulke whenever he goes into a kosher restaurant, but not when he goes into a non-kosher restaurant. If at my Orthodox synagogue all who removed their yarmulkes after prayers (and by common perception are not Orthodox) were disqualified, there would be no minyan (quorum) at many weekday services.

Nowadays, particularly among rabbinical students, there are Conservative Jews who walk around with knitted yarmulkes on their heads all the time. They would bridle at being described as Orthodox. Yet, in behavior, if not in philosophy, they differ little if at all from Orthodox Jews.

♦ ♦ ♦

The degree of Sabbath observance is usually very predictive of whether or not one is Orthodox. Those who call themselves Orthodox Jews do not use electricity on the Sabbath; they don’t answer the phone, watch television, or listen to the radio; they don’t write or use computers. But you don’t know what they do in their own homes when no one is watching. The wife of a cousin in Israel once told me that occasionally her husband, who prayed daily, and was very careful with what he ate when traveling overseas for his work, would flip on the light by his bed on Friday night to read. Is he alone among those who call themselves Orthodox?

And there are practical considerations. My late uncle, an Orthodox Jew, who at the most inopportune moments could be seen drifting into a corner to pray and kept his head covered at all times, routinely returned home after dark on Friday afternoon in the winter. He ran a small business and could find no alternative. Many religious Jews fit into that category.

♦ ♦ ♦

With Sabbath observance, eating kosher food is certainly the most instructive parameter of being a religious Jew. But what does keeping kosher mean?

Even if you were given free access to poke around in someone’s kitchen and cupboards, you might come away with the wrong conclusion.

Orthodox kitchens customarily have two sinks, to maximally separate meat and dairy. But some families who live in small spaces suffice with one sink and separate sink boards. Others use one sink and two drainboards. Some don’t worry about sinks and drainboards.

It is usually permissible for drinking glasses to be used interchangeably for meat and dairy. But what about glass plates, which are no more absorbent?

Some of the food in the pantry or refrigerator you are exploring might lack kosher certification, but be perfectly kosher. The manufacturer might not be willing to be blackmailed by the certification agency. Or the foods—tea, coffee, spices, pasta, oils, sugar, salt, frozen vegetables—might be intrinsically kosher and the household unwilling to submit to nonsensical certification, which stretches to aluminum foil, wax paper, and plastic bags. And there is the concept of glatt kosher, which has no halakhic or logical basis. You cannot be more kosher than kosher.

Where and what Orthodox Jews eat outside of their homes often tells little about their Orthodoxy. There are those who will not eat in a kosher certified restaurant that is not Sabbath-observant, oblivious to the fact that it is the food that is being certified, not the restaurant or its workers. Some religious Jews will eat cold food in a restaurant serving non-kosher food; some will only eat salads; others will eat fish. Some will have a cup of coffee and no more. An Orthodox lawyer friend of mine, the former president of a prominent Orthodox congregation, will not eat in Fine & Schapiro, a noted kosher restaurant in Manhattan with a letter of certification in the window, because the restaurant is open on Saturday. But he will order a tuna fish sandwich in a non-kosher restaurant. The patterns of compromise and inconsistency are endless.

♦ ♦ ♦

Understanding the wide variation of Orthodox practice is crucial because the larger American Jewish population, not to speak of non-Jews, cannot differentiate between shades of Orthodoxy. The image that they carry of Orthodox Jews is of the narrow, judgmental, uncompromising, holier-than-thou segment that sees itself as the savior of the Jewish people.

No one knows what percentage of Orthodox Jews falls into this “holier-than-thou” category. But they are sufficient to blur the image of observant Jews. Such holier-than-thous will take pains to straighten the tefillin on the head of a visiting parishioner, claiming that it does not meet the hairline criteria; remove the light bulb from the refrigerator of a home that they are visiting before the onset of the Sabbath; scrutinize the mezuzot on doorposts and comment if they do not contain real parchment; turn an upward pointing etrog (citron) downward just as someone is reciting the lulav benediction on Sukkot. They are boorish, intolerant, unable to look you in the eye as equal Jews. Their way is the only way.

In our family, my father, whose name is known to many of all religious stripes for his best-selling, non-judgmental books on Judaism, was uninvited from taking part in the wedding ceremony of his niece at the last moment because, as a Conservative rabbi, he was deemed insufficiently Jewish.

Surprisingly, in my experience, the holier-than-thou attitude is more common among a segment of the American Orthodox population than among those who call themselves religious in Israel (and know on average a great deal more about Jewish religious practice than their American cousins). Perhaps it is the siege mentality of being a remnant minority in a sea of non-Jews.

♦ ♦ ♦

You can’t delve very far into a discussion of religious practice without confronting the question of consistency. Few Orthodox Jews fulfill all of the religious duties they think they should all the time. Inconsistency is what makes Orthodoxy such an elusive concept.

If a practicing Jew expects others to be tolerant of his religious customs, which are not adhered to by most Jews, he cannot refuse to eat in a friend’s home because it is not kosher while routinely eating a dairy sandwich in a non-kosher coffee shop. He cannot be absent from work on religious grounds one Sabbath and show up for work on the next. Onlookers get confused. Jews are as susceptible to this confusion as non-Jews.

My frequent trips to China and Japan over many years frequently put me face-to-face with this dilemma. My travel purpose is to mix with the people and see how they live. No daily activity is more important to Chinese than eating. Whether at home or in a restaurant, you can’t interact with Chinese very long without eating. I have explained hundreds of times what “kosher” means, without using the word. Often, that leads to differentiating between kosher and Moslem halal practices. Asians have a hard time understanding all these distinctions, but go a long way toward accommodating them. When the chief chef at a Chinese sports camp heard that potatoes were okay, potatoes baked in their jackets appeared every night at the table. A Tibetan woman made me a special cornmeal cake that she had milled herself.

From time to time, I meet up with some of these Chinese friends in larger Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, which have safer eating alternatives: vegetarian restaurants, which are close to 100 percent kosher without the certification. Why I eat vegetables and noodles at a sports camp in Kunming but would prefer a vegetarian restaurant in Beijing often confuses them.

My uncle, who has read my writings, asks with more than a little annoyance why, if I eat vegetables at a non-kosher restaurant in China or Japan, I insist on kosher or vegetarian restaurants back home. My answer is that here I have a choice.

There are two active Jewish concepts embedded in inconsistency that merit attention: mar’it ayin, how things appear to an outside observer; and b’farhesia, in the public domain.

Invoking mar’it ayin, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein ruled that a Harvard student could not participate in his graduation exercises on Shavuot because, although walking to the ceremony incurred no desecration of the holiday, it might appear to others that he drove to the ceremony. Rabbi Joseph Caro, the compiler of the Shulhan Arukh, ruled that “milk” made from almonds could not be served at a meat meal, because it might be misconstrued as mixing dairy with meat. Walking in the street in work clothes on the Sabbath, though no work is being done, would fall into this category. The implication is that behavior which with certainty will go unobserved is less objectionable according to Jewish law than public actions.

B’farhesia refers to actions performed in the public domain. Though the opposite may be expected, transgressions, Sabbath or otherwise, that are committed in one’s own domain, out of public view, and thus shame-proof, are no less contrary to Jewish law than the same prohibitions performed in public. Nevertheless, many religious Jews continue to make the distinction between private and public domain.

♦ ♦ ♦

The argument here is that if the word Orthodox were to be purged from the lexicon, and every person stood tall beside his own persona, we would have a more cohesive Judaism. That is why, when asked if I am Orthodox, I respond that I am observant, which allows for more differences, without a need to specify them. When they prospect over-intrusively for details, I paraphrase in Hebrew from the words of the havdalah prayer that ends the Sabbath: “Ani mavdil bayn kodesh leHol, I differentiate between the sacred Sabbath and the secular workweek.” That usually quiets them.

The term “Modern Orthodoxy” is a broad label applied to a wide spectrum of religious observance and a variety of philosophical stances. Yet despite this inclusivity, Modern Orthodoxy currently finds itself at a crossroads in which its borders and central message are being reconsidered and redefined. Leaders are reexamining the boundaries of what is deemed permissible by halakha in realms such as conversion, kashruth, and rabbinic ordination. Furthermore, both clergy and laypeople alike are looking for innovative ways to re-imagine Modern Orthodoxy from the inside through new approaches to prayer and spirituality, while at the same time maintaining their scholarly commitment. My purpose in writing this article is relatively simple: I hope to spark an ongoing conversation that focuses upon the question of how Jewish mysticism may aid in revitalizing Modern Orthodoxy. Or, to reframe the question in terms of a hypothesis: Although facets of the classical Jewish philosophical tradition have already been chosen as a banner for the re-invigoration of contemporary Orthodoxy, I intend to demonstrate that our kabbalistic and mystical literature will be an equally rich source for this process of intellectual and spiritual rebirth.

It cannot easily be denied that an overwhelming number of the great Jewish spiritual leaders of the twentieth century have used mystical thought in their quest to make religious life meaningful for a modern Jewish community. Among these are influential traditional thinkers such as Abraham Isaac Kook, Hillel Zeitlin, and Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as well as Shlomo Carlebach, Michael Fishbane, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. The broad list includes many leaders outside of the Orthodox world as well, for other Jewish movements have also embraced mystical ideas as a compelling and additive component of modern religious thought. More liberal thinkers such as Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Arthur Green have sought to bring the study of mysticism to the front of a vibrant contemporary Jewish theology. Over the past hundred years leaders across nearly all sectors of modern Jewish life have promoted Kabbalah to the foreground as a potent catalyst for spiritual renewal.

Despite this increase in popularity, Kabbalah has a somewhat besmirched and Janus-faced reputation. On one hand, many contend even now that Kabbalah is intellectually flaccid, conceptually irresponsible, and even quite dangerous to conventional notions of God and Torah. Kabbalah’s prominent position is undoubtedly in some part due to an approach favored by some contemporary institutions that warp the tradition by de-contextualizing its teachings and projecting them through a business model using post-modern philosophy. These facile portrayals of mysticism should not be conflated with the authentic Kabbalah as taught by the traditional leaders mentioned above.

There is no reason to assume that immersion in Kabbalah necessarily makes one more likely drift into antinomianism and heresy. While it is true that some Jewish mystics such as the infamous Shabbatai Tzvi have indeed done so, a great number of our outstanding talmudists and halakhic commentators—from Ramban to the Vilna Gaon—were undeniably steeped in the language of Kabbalah as well. Surely for them mysticism and law were not two competitive modes of thought, with the latter precipitously seeking to mitigate the anarchical hazards of the former. In their eyes halakha and Kabbalah were fused in an organic and complementary system that simultaneously ensures ritual observance while promoting spiritual engagement. Indeed, mystical texts often display a strong legal conservatism, and their authors are so preoccupied with cultivating inner piety by providing halakhawith infinitely deeper shades of meaning. Kabbalah is only truly dangerous when heedlessly removed from the framework of tradition.

On the other hand, Jewish mysticism is sometimes criticized for being xenophobic, or esoteric to the point of obscurity. However, nuanced and careful readings of mystical texts will prove that much of Kabbalah’s wisdom is neither arcane nor antiquated, but must simply be framed in such a way that allows it to be a relevant resource for contemporary Jewish thought. Another often-levied charge against the study of mysticism is that although Kabbalah is true and authentic (at least in some way), we are a generation of such low stature that we lack the spiritual fortitude, and even the permission, to involve ourselves with its ideas. I believe that we who straddle the worlds of modernity and tradition cannot afford to maintain this position, for it will totally preclude drawing religious inspiration from any part of our mystical tradition. In sum, regardless of the accusations of its detractors, the study of Kabbalah may indeed be a potent force in the revitalization of Modern Orthodoxy, for it will only foster rigorous intellectual engagement, further strengthen traditional halakhic commitment, and profoundly broaden our own religious experience.

The Mandate for Intellectual Creativity

Modern Orthodoxy historically has prided itself on demanding a relatively high level of intellectual engagement of its adherents. In order to retain the vibrancy of this tradition, we must continue to originate new works of scholarship that are both spiritually meaningful and intellectually compelling. If this creative flexibility and openness is not sustained, even Modern Orthodoxy will not remain immune from lapsing into blind reliance upon routinized dogma. An ossified and formulaic ideology will not captivate the minds and hearts of the next generation, nor will it strengthen their resolve to commit themselves to a system of life founded in observance of halakha and mitzvoth while surrounded by a society that does not require this of them a priori. We must not only reiterate the wisdom of the sages who came before us, but continuously seek new ways to refine and rearticulate our intellectual heritage in a manner that speaks to our own contemporary experience.

Kabbalistic literature demonstrates a bold interpretive approach that is intrinsically creative. The mystical exegete has license to break open scriptural texts and recombine them in such a way that they reveal new religious messages, a method very much akin to that of the ancient ba’alei haMidrash. Verses are scrutinized on a microcosmic level for the tiniest inconsistency or ambiguity, which the kabbalist then uses to elucidate a point regarding a spiritual truth that may be either cosmic or personal. The paradigm of scriptural interpretation qua dramatic act of innovation is repeatedly exemplified in Sefer haZohar, the foundational text of Jewish mysticism. As the chronicle unfolds, R. Shimon bar Yohai and his compatriots interpret verse after verse in the manner mentioned above, and through their homilies it becomes clear that they believe all existence is sustained through the efforts of the talmidei hakhamim who ceaselessly engage in Torah study. However, in order to re-infuse the world with vitality, their learning cannot be simple repetition or rote memorization of preexisting texts or concepts. Scholars must rather constantly offer fresh and dynamic interpretations of biblical passages. The Zohar even expresses creative engagement with Torah as the ultimate act of imitatio dei: God’s creation of the world through speech is mirrored by a scholar’s innovative exegesis of the words of the divine text.[i][DEA1]

The early Hassidic masters were also keenly attuned to this need for constant and creative reengagement with the traditional corpus. Their teachings are vibrant and daring, and perhaps even more importantly, their interpretive process itself often demonstrates the supple flexibility with which they treat our textual canon. Early Hassidic works generally present multiple, and at times even contradictory, explanations for the same verse, each one of them targeted to articulate a unique spiritual point. In this exegetical method, and in the teachings generated through it, the overarching rule is clear: There exists an unending obligation for individuals to constantly plumb the depths of Torah and bring out ideas that have hitherto remained unexpressed, and that address the particular needs of that generation. We shall find this mandate for interpretive innovation clearly elucidated in the following passage from Degel Mahaneh Ephraim, an important collection of homilies attributed to the R. Moshe Haim Ephraim of Sudilkov (d. 1800):[ii]

“This is the book of the descendents of man.”[iii] Let us begin with what I have said about the verse “Moses diligently inquired about the goat of the sin-offering.”[iv] There is a tradition that “diligently inquired” (darosh darash) is the halfway point in the words of the Torah,[v] but the significance of this is not yet clear.

In answer we can say that the Written Torah and the Oral Torah are one, as is known. They are totally indivisible from each other, for one cannot exist without the other.  This means that the Written Torah reveals its hidden mysteries through the Oral Torah; the Written Torah without the Oral Torah is incomplete. It was only half of a book until the Sages came and expounded (darshu) the Torah and revealed things that had previously been sealed. At times they even uprooted something in the Torah, as in the case of lashes, where the Torah assigns the number forty but the Sages subtracted one.[vi]  All of this was made possible because of their divine inspiration, which gave them the ability [to interpret it in this manner]. The completion of the Written Torah depends entirely on the Oral Torah.  Therefore one who denies that the principle kal veHomer is from the Torah, or disagrees with a statement of the Sages is like one who denies the Torah of Moses itself.[vii] All depends on the interpretations (derashot) of the Sages, and they are the essence of the completion of the Torah …

… and so it must be in every age that the interpreters complete the Torah, for the Torah is expounded in each generation corresponding to the needs of that particular time, according to the root of the soul of that generation. The Blessed One will enlighten the eyes of the sages of the generation with His holy Torah, and one who denies this is also likened to one who repudiates the Torah.

The nature of the “descendents” mentioned in the original verse, although not explicitly identified in this passage, is unmistakable: they are the novel reinterpretations brought forth in each generation. It is our obligation to complete the Torah anew in every age by means of our creative engagement with the text, and the R. Moshe Haim Ephraim demands that the sages of each and every age make the biblical text eternally relevant through their innovative interpretations. In other words, they must offer some sort of new spiritual message that speaks to each generation beyond the strictures of its literal interpretation. This creativity is the lasting intellectual progeny of mankind, which complements and even completes the Divine component of our inherited wisdom.

As if to preempt the assumption that we share the same unlimited freedom as the early Sages, he cautions us against this by condemning any and all dissent from their rulings. Creative interpretations of Torah are necessary, but they do have limits. However, he levies this warning against the other extreme as well, saying that one who challenges the need for reinterpretation and the authority of each new generation is equally guilty of denying the validity of Torah itself. It is clear that a balance must be struck between these poles, but if we becomes paralyzed with fear and refuse to reinterpret the Torah, our reticence will prevent us from fulfilling what R. Moshe Haim Ephraim argues is among the central precepts of our faith.

            Recognizing this approach to interpretation will be essential for Modern Orthodoxy in the years to come, since it will allow us to respond with great flexibility to the challenges of modernity, searching within our canon for ways to rearticulate its core ideas in a manner both intelligible and relevant to our lives. Furthermore, this passage does not suggest that we simply have the freedom to reexamine if, and only if, the spirit so moves us. Rather, it spells out an unceasing obligation that demands that we maximize our creative potential by constantly reinterpreting the Torah in a manner that is specifically applicable to our day.

The Question of Gender

It is clear that the question of gender roles will remain a central issue for Modern Orthodoxy in the coming decades. The recent controversies over new possibilities in female religious leadership only confirm this fact. Noting this, I submit that the literature of our mystical tradition has much wisdom to bring to the discussion as well. There are important trends in Kabbalah that present a finely balanced approach to the relationship between male and female, in both cosmic/symbolic and personal/physical terms. This fact should not be overshadowed by other mystical elements that display pre-modern conceptions of gender bordering on what we might today call misogyny, for such a pejorative reading would be obtusely anachronistic. Furthermore, these same ideas are found within core rabbinic and halakhic literature as well, and they must equally be dealt with by any member of Modern Orthodoxy committed to our textual canon. In the following example, taken from the Hasidic classic Avodat Yisrael by the Maggid of Kozhnitz (d. 1814), we shall see that mystical texts may indeed have salient voice in the reexamining of gender roles as Modern Orthodoxy continues to evolve:[viii]

There are times when a woman has no desire to adorn herself and unite with her beloved.  And yet, because of her profound understanding of her husband and her deep longing to bring him happiness, she dresses herself up and smiles at him, to the extent that it seems to him as if she is beckoning. Her true intention in this is not for herself, but rather to gladden the heart of her husband.

In these moments she feels awful and upset on account of some external difficulties or frustrating events. If only her husband understood the entirety of what lies within her heart and the greatness of the love hidden within her bosom, demonstrated in concealing her anguish and resolving to bring happiness to her husband. Certainly because of this, his love for her will be increased a thousand times! If it were within his power to put all to right and sweep away her suffering and the worries of her soul, in an instant her husband would do all that he could.

The same dynamic holds true with Keneset Yisrael and her Beloved. If she suffers for any reason, or is afflicted by some evil decree, she nonetheless gathers her strength and adorns herself, doing what her Husband asks of her by rejoicing with him on Shabbat and holidays, and during the time of prayer or the performance of a mitzvah. When the blessed Creator, who knows and understands all thoughts, sees that she has turned aside from the sorrows of her heart, His love burns within Him like the pillars of fire. He understands the embitterment of her soul, and is infinitely capable of triumphing over and subduing all of her enemies. This is the meaning of: “Who is a proper woman? The one does the will of her husband!”[ix] In other words, she brings the will of her Husband into reality.

This passage rearticulates familiar categories of male and female in a tremendously innovative way, suggesting a conception of gender in which the relationship between the two is nuanced, balanced, and in many ways equal. While there are other excurses within kabbalistic literature that invert or challenge notions of gender more fundamentally, I have nevertheless selected this text precisely because it does invoke traditional imagery to convey a spiritual message of both personal and national relevance. It will be impossible for Modern Orthodoxy to fully shed the gender distinctions codified by our rabbinic heritage, and although sufficient reinterpretation will allow women an increasingly active role in public religious life, completely eradicating the differences between male and female would run contrary to how Modern Orthodoxy understands its connection to tradition. This excerpt thus demonstrates a way in which traditional allegories may be reread in such a way that they speak to our present generation. 

The passage is interesting because of its implicit approach to reading rabbinic texts as well as its explicit content. The Maggid of Kozhnitz has presented us with a brilliant reinterpretation of a dictum that seems to praise women for pure obedience. He universalizes and expands the phrase away from its literal meaning by invoking the well-known allegory of man and wife as stand-in for the relationship between God and Israel, thereby reading the original statement against the grain. The power dynamic between male and female has still not been completely leveled, since it is the husband alone who seems capable of easing the sorrows of his wife. However, the radical core of the Maggid’s teaching only becomes truly clear from the model relationship in the final lines: through her reflexive ability to overcome her own grief and then take active steps to reconnect to her beloved, “a female” (which after the metaphor cannot refer only to physical woman) is able to spark her “husband” (which must also be understood non-literally) into realizing his potential love and compassion. The reader is left with the conclusion that any relationship, both bein adam leHaveiro and bein adam laMakom, of real depth and lasting connection demands of one an extraordinarily high degree of selflessness.

It is not impossible to view even the Maggid’s reading of the text as another negatively charged expression of passive power, in which the female is forced by her lack of agency to use coercion in order to accomplish her desires. Yet had he wished to convey this, the author would simply have stayed much closer to the original midrashic statement. I would argue that the thrust of the Maggid’s message, as well his innovative exegetical maneuver, represent a manner of forging a new conception of gender in which old categories are retained, but the nature of the dynamic between the two has been creatively updated and entirely reframed.

The Wisdom of Hakhamei Sepharad

            Revisiting the kabbalistic tradition as a source for contemporary spiritual renewal will also help to broaden the intellectual spectrum of Modern Orthodoxy by including and reintroducing forgotten works of Sephardic sages. Books of non-Ashkenazi provenance do enjoy a higher status within Modern Orthodox circles than they do in the Hareidi world, which to a large degree has continued the tradition of Eastern European yeshivot that decries the study of any non-halakhic texts altogether (both Sephardic and Ashkenazi alike). However, it is my contention that much of the vast literature of the Sephardim, and especially those works which deal explicitly with kabbalastic themes, has been quite underrepresented in the general Modern Orthodox canon. Though the legal works of such classical Iberian Rishonim as the Ramban, Rashba, Ritva, Ran, and the great Rambam are accorded a high degree honor, the insightful and variegated treatises of a great many other important Sephardic authorities continue to lie fallow.

Within this oft-overlooked corpus I would include the works of R. Meir ibn Gabbai, Moshe Alsheikh, Haim Yosef David Azulai (the Hida), and Hakham Yosef Haim (the Ben Ish Hai), to name only a few. All of these important writers and leaders are united by their central focus on Kabbalah as a meaningful and spiritually powerful system of religious experience and discourse, and I suggest that the seeds for spiritual revitalization may yet be found within their fertile yet neglected pages. Let us turn to a selection from Ibn Gabbai’s sixteenth-century magnum opus Avodat haKodesh to illustrate this point:[x]

The highest wisdom [the sophia of God, which is the second sefirah] contains as the foundation of all emanations pouring forth out of the hidden Eden the true fountain from which the Written and the Oral Torah emanate and are impressed [upon the forms of the celestial letters and signatures]. This fountain is never interrupted; it gushes forth in constant production. Were it to be interrupted for even a moment, all creatures would sink back into their non being … that great voice sounds forth without interruption; it calls with the eternal duration that is its nature; whatever the prophets and scholars of all generations have taught, proclaimed, and produced, they have received precisely out of that voice which never ceases, in which regulations, determinations, and decisions are implicitly contained, as well as everything new that may ever be said in any future. In all generations, these men stand in the same relationship to that voice as a trumpet to the mouth of a man who blows into it and brings forth a sound. In that process, there is no production from their own sense and understanding. Instead, they bring out of potentiality that which they received from that voice when they stood at Sinai.

This text provides a more nuanced counterpoint to the broad interpretive dynamism found in the passage from Degel Mahaneh Ephraim. Like his Hasidic counterpart who was to write nearly four centuries later, Ibn Gabbai declares that interpretation of Torah is no stagnant act of dry repetition, but a flexible process that remains necessarily fluid because the Torah itself is constantly evolving. However, Ibn Gabbai carefully qualifies this seemingly unbounded interpretive license by explaining that a talmid hakham is not the originator of even the most innovative reapplications of Torah, since all interpretation has its source in an all-encompassing but unarticulated potential revealed at Sinai. The role of scholars across generations is rather to select which of these teachings must be actualized at any given moment. In other words, it is our task to reify, not to invent ex nihilo.

Despite relocating the origin of all interpretive innovation back to the Divine, Ibn Gabbai is not arguing a conservative position in which creative exegesis is forbidden.  Human scholars have a clear responsibility to reengage with the ever-expanding font of Torah and breathe new life into it by rearticulating its teachings in a perpetually relevant manner. His qualification that all later interpretation has its source in God’s revelation therefore does not preclude our efforts at innovation, but rather reinforces our gift (and perhaps even mandate) of creative license: the boundaries of authoritative interpretation have been greatly expanded to include even novel ideas not explicitly included amongst the traditions specifically enumerated at Sinai.

The Gift of Religious Language

Fostering spirituality is another prominent concern of Modern Orthodoxy. While this particular mode of religious thought is not necessary (or even compelling) for all, I believe that imbuing the next generation with a strong sense of traditional spirituality is now essential for ensuring the continuity of Modern Orthodoxy. Gentile philosophy is no longer the greatest menace to religious commitment, as it was in the first half of the twentieth-century. The newest existential threat facing Modern Orthodoxy is that ours is a generation of individualistic seekers driven to find personal spiritual expression in their religious lives. Without the flexibility to do this within the pale of Orthodox Judaism, these individuals will necessarily explore options outside the framework of our tradition.

Kabbalistic writings can give us an authentic Jewish spiritual vocabulary for articulating an entire type of religious awareness with God that simply cannot be adequately expressed in halakhic terminology. These mystical texts often delve into the personal spiritual experience of individuals who sought to articulate an extra-legal experience of the Divine, grappling with the almost impossible task of siphoning their encounter into the written word, and drawing upon these works will certainly enrich our own ability to discuss this rather sublime kind of piety. Examining the following excerpt from the Zohar, and a medieval commentary that builds upon the ideas within it, will be helpful in illustrating this point:

Rabbi Yehuda opened: “Her husband is known throughout the gates, as he sits among the elders of the Land.”[xi] Come and see! The Holy Blessed One withdrew in His glory, for He is hidden away and sealed far above. No one who has since entered the world, nor anyone who has been here since the day of its creation, is able to grasp His wisdom; no one is able to comprehend Him.

Since He is hidden and sealed away, and He withdrew higher and higher, none of those above or below are able to cleave to him, until they say: “Blessed is the Glory of the Lord from His place.”[xii] The ones below say that he is above, as it is written: “His glory is upon the heavens.”[xiii] The ones above say that he is below, as it is written: “Your glory is upon the entire earth.”[xiv] Until all those who are above and below say: “Blessed is the Glory of the Lord from His place.” He is unknown, and there are none able to grasp Him, and yet you say, “Her Husband is known throughout the gates”?!

Certainly “Her Husband is known throughout the gates (she’arim)!” This refers to the Holy Blessed One, for He is known and may be cleaved to according to the extent that one imagines (mesha’er) Him within the heart, each according to his ability to cleave to the spirit of wisdom. He is known in the heart to the extent that He is imagined there. In this way “He is known throughout the gates” - in these contemplative reflections. Yet for Him to be known as is fitting [is impossible]—nobody is able to cleave to Him or to know Him.[xv]

In his monumental commentary to the Zohar entitled Ketem Paz, R. Shimon ibn Lavi (North Africa, sixteenth century) explores the implications, both cosmological and personal, of this remarkable passage:

Rabbi Yehuda explains that no being has ever been created that is able to understand His wisdom, nor did the Holy Blessed One ever bring such a one into this world. Certainly not one who is able to grasp His essence! He is deep beyond all depth, and who is able to find Him? [Succeeding in] the quest for Him is impossible for the created beings, both upper and lower, until all exclaim, “Blessed is the glory of the Lord from His place!” …

… Perhaps Rabbi Yehuda holds that their quest spurs onward the movement of all the heavenly arrays, cycling around and around. To seek and never apprehend seems to the creations like utter foolishness, as one who says that if the intent of their rotation was [solely] to succeed, after the first or the second time that they are unable reach it they will believe that the quest will always be in vain.

 Yet those who truly experience longing never refrain from the search even if they do not succeed. This is like the desire of the lover for her Beloved, as it says, “I will arise and circle about, in the town, in the markets and the streets. I shall seek the One whom my soul loves; I have searched and not found.”[xvi] Notice that the verse speaks in future tense, “I shall arise and circle about … I shall seek” - this means that she will not hold back from the seeking Him, for the journey is her life.Such is the longing of the supernal beings and their eternal search, for it is their sustenance and their very existence. Even if they cannot succeed in apprehending Him, through their quest itself [to gaze upon] the face of the Master they offer praise, greatness and glory to the One for whom they searching. He is [the source of] their existence, and that of all the created beings below.

In explaining this matter well, one may raise the question: if it is not within the power of any who seek God to comprehend even His place, how then could Solomon, who was the seeker and the quester par excellence, as well as the wisest of all men, write “Her husband is known throughout the gates” about the Woman of Valor, who alludes to the upper Assembly of Israel? Rather, certainly “Her Husband is known throughout the gates (she’arim)!” This refers to the Holy Blessed One, for He is known and may be cleaved to according to the extent that one imagines (mesha’er) Him within the heart. One must say that although achieving [the quest] is inherently withheld from them, He can indeed be comprehended by His creations, each according to their understanding and contemplative imagining of Him.[xvii]                

The text of the Zohar is struggling with the seeming contraction between a scriptural verse and our own religious experience. When read in the symbolic manner of the Zohar, Proverbs 31:23 implies that an imminent God (the divine Husband) may be known and understood, but in reality all of creation encounters Him only as a transcendent Being completely removed from the worlds He has formed. Even the angels are unable to find Him or grasp His magnitude. In an attempt to solve this paradox, Rabbi Yehuda explains that while God cannot be restricted to a specific location, He may be known through (and only through) our mystical contemplation and reflection.

This Zoharic passage is a relatively clear articulation of our inability to comprehend the divine. In his commentary to our text, however, R. Shimon ibn Lavi deepens R. Yehuda’s homily by explaining that it is this permanent and eternal quest to apprehend God that sustains the universe. The endless journey is only possible because of the aforementioned paradox, since if we were truly able to grasp God, the search would immediately terminate and creation would lose its source of constant renewal. Yet neither are we allowed to desist from the journey to find Him simply because it can never be successfully completed; the greatest of value lies in the perpetual quest itself. A profound message of cosmic significance about the personal religious experience of a mystic search for God has thus been built upon an ostensible paradox between a biblical verse that suggests divine immanence, and the experiential truth of His total transcendence.

Without becoming too embroiled in the discussion of the relationship between linguistics and cognition, it is even possible that the very absence of such mystical language effectively precludes many spiritual experiences ab initio. More specifically, the inability to articulate or describe a particular concept in words may mean that one simply cannot experience it. If access to authentic Jewish mysticism is denied to those individuals who do not view halakhic study and philosophical rationality as the only modes of fulfilling religious practice, our numbers will necessarily hemorrhage to any and all other movements that have chosen to include Kabbalah within their curricula.

Conclusion

The argument put forward in the preceding pages, and the conversation for which I’ve implicitly and explicitly called, are not intended to be directives mandating a programmatic restructuring of Modern Orthodoxy along mystical and kabbalistic principles. Such an ill-advised reform would surely be unsuccessful, nor would it be necessarily desirable even if it were tenable. Indeed, in order to embrace elements of the mystical tradition, Modern Orthodoxy need not renounce the flagship ideology of synthesizing the benefits of modern intellectual thought with the rich wisdom of our heritage. Nor do I intend to make it seem as if Modern Orthodoxy has systematically or intentionally purged mysticism and mystics from amidst its ranks. Yet to ignore completely the wisdom of this spiritually compelling and perpetually relevant literature will risk alienating a valuable segment of the committed religious population. We should make a place for individuals who do not wish to join a particular Hasidic group, believing instead in a broader spiritual application for mystical teachings, but who hold this ideal in tandem (and not necessarily in tension) with an unwavering fidelity to halakha. In doing so we may even attract people dissatisfied with their present communities by providing a unique fusion of openness to modern philosophy and scholarship with a commitment to traditional spirituality.

I do share the trepidation of many about indiscriminately bringing kabbalistic praxisinto Modern Orthodox ritual life. Promoting the recitation of esoteric mystical formulae will not likely accomplish any of these goals, nor would kabbalistic asceticism integrate well into contemporary society. However, I suggest that our times necessitate the bringing of the study of mystical texts into the curricula of our institutions across the board. Introducing these works will give us the vocabulary to open up and express an entire category religious experiences that had been previously sealed. Courses in pastoral care and public speaking have been adopted by many Modern Orthodox seminaries in an attempt to answer the need for a new model of religious leadership. In this vein, we must also train teachers and rabbis who can read kabbalistic and Hasidic texts with the same fluency that they tackle medieval or modern philosophy.

Though pietistic works like Nefesh haHaim and the existentialist-philosophical treatises of Rav Soloveitchik do certainly cover similar ground, our rich kabbalistic heritage has a wealth of material that only a literature composed over the span of a millennium can offer. Jewish high school students should also be offered courses in classical mystical thought, at least as an elective. Young adults of this age certainly have the maturity to begin addressing issues such the approach to prayer, gender roles, personal religious experience, and the dialectic between tradition and innovation, from a mystical perspective, provided that the texts are carefully chosen and taught.

It is true that many kabbalistic and Hassidic books are written in a terse and complicated style of Hebrew, employing symbolic language that can be quite difficult to decipher. However, this should not deter anyone for whom reading them in the original might present a problem from exploring these texts: over the past several decades an increasing number of mystical books have become available in English. These translations, which are often accompanied by a helpful commentary and explanatory notes, are an indispensible resource for any leaders wishing to teach kabbalistic texts in their synagogues or schools to an audience whose command of Hebrew may not otherwise be sufficient. However, selecting the right translation (and the right primary source) must be done carefully, since the quality of the work can vary widely. Some tend to be over-literal to the point of unintelligibility, while others are clearly literary recasting or summaries only loosely based on the original text. Yet a substantial number of the contemporary translations strike a careful balance between these poles, and are extremely valuable for the English-reading sector of our religious community. 

Many literary treasures of the Hassidic library have been translated, at least in part, although there are still many others waiting to be rendered into English. Scholars such as Louis Jacobs,[xviii] Norman Lamm[xix] and Joseph Dan[xx] have collected and translated anthologies of Hasidic thought along with their own commentary and analysis, and the great variety of the selections in these books demonstrates the thematic and conceptual breadth of Hasidic literature. In addition to a smaller collection of Hasidic sources on the subject of prayer, Arthur Green has published several volumes of English translations that are each taken entirely from the works of a single Hasidic master.[xxi] Similarly, many important teachings from the mystically infused works of Rav Kook have been rendered into an aesthetically pleasing English that authentically reflects the original writings.[xxii] It is interesting to note that the Chabad and Breslov Hassidic groups have both undertaken the task of creating bilingual editions of their own mystical works clearly intended for a broader audience; though certainly not unbiased, the translations are often very helpful.[xxiii] Finally, Daniel Matt is in the process of translating the entire Zohar, and while even in English this text remains difficult to study without a teacher, Matt’s poetic translation grants the reader access to much of the linguistic beauty and interpretive creativity that characterize the original Aramaic.[xxiv][xxv]

Mystical literature has much wisdom to offer that will neither threaten nor supersede faithfulness to halakhic study. Indeed, Kabbalah will compliment this by providing us access to an altogether different mode of religious experience and discourse. Let us make room within the variegated spectrum of Modern Orthodoxy for individuals devoted to both halakhic observance and the earnest quest to encounter God’s presence in this world. These are, after all, the core values to which we are committed.