The Akedah, or binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1–19), [1] is a formative passage in Jewish tradition. It plays a central role on Rosh haShanah, and many communities include this passage in their early morning daily liturgy. Beyond its liturgical role, the Akedah is a religiously and morally challenging story. What should we learn from this jarring narrative with regard to faith and religious life?

It appears that the Akedah, perhaps more than any other narrative in the Torah, teaches how one can and should be extremely religious, but also teaches how to avoid religious extremism. In this essay, we will consider the ideas of several modern thinkers who explore the religious and moral implications of this narrative. Why Did Abraham Not Protest? Although the very idea of child sacrifice is abhorrent to us, it made more sense in Abraham’s historical context. Many of Israel’s neighbors practiced child sacrifice. It stands to reason that when God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham concluded that perhaps God required this of him. Of course, God stopped Abraham and went on to outlaw such practices as a capital offense in the Torah (Leviticus 18:21; 20:2–5). We find child sacrifice abhorrent precisely because the Torah and the prophets broke rank with the pagan world and transformed human values for the better. [2] In its original context, then, the Akedah highlights Abraham’s exemplary faithfulness. He followed God’s command even when the very basis of the divine promise for progeny through Isaac was threatened.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was deeply troubled by the morality of the Akedah. He maintained that nobody is certain that he or she is receiving prophecy, whereas everyone knows with certainty that murder is immoral and against God’s will. Therefore, Abraham failed God’s test by acquiescing to sacrifice Isaac. He should have refused, or at least protested. [3] However, the biblical narrative runs flatly against Kant’s reading. After the angel stops Abraham from slaughtering Isaac, the angel proclaims to Abraham, “For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me” (Genesis 22:12). God thereby praises Abraham’s exceptional faith and commitment. [4]

Adopting a reading consistent with the thrust of the biblical narrative, Rambam (Spain, Egypt 1138–1204) draws the opposite conclusion from that of Kant. The fact that Abraham obeyed God demonstrates his absolute certainty that he had received true prophecy. Otherwise, he never would have proceeded: [Abraham] hastened to slaughter, as he had been commanded, his son, his only son, whom he loved…. For if a dream of prophecy had been obscure for the prophets, or if they had doubts or incertitude concerning what they apprehended in a vision of prophecy, they would not have hastened to do that which is repugnant to nature, and [Abraham’s] soul would not have consented to accomplish an act of so great an importance if there had been a doubt about it (Guide of the Perplexed III:24). [5] Although Rambam correctly assesses the biblical narrative, there still is room for a different moral question. After God informs Abraham about the impending destruction of Sodom, Abraham pleads courageously on behalf of the wicked city, appealing to God’s need to act justly (Genesis 18:23–33).[6] How could Abraham stand idly by and not challenge God when God commanded him to sacrifice his beloved son?

By considering the Abraham narratives as a whole, we may resolve this dilemma. Abraham’s actions in Genesis chapters 12–25 may be divided into three general categories: (1) responses to direct commands from God; (2) responses to promises or other information from God; and (3) responses to situations during which God does not communicate directly with Abraham. Whenever God commands an action, Abraham obeys without as much as a word of protest or questioning. When Abraham receives promises or other information from God, Abraham praises God when gratitude is in order, and he questions or challenges God when he deems it appropriate. Therefore, Abraham’s silence when following God’s commandment to sacrifice Isaac is to be expected. And so are Abraham’s concerns about God’s promises of progeny or information about the destruction of Sodom. The Torah thereby teaches that it is appropriate to question God, while simultaneously demanding faithfulness to God’s commandments as an essential aspect of the mutual covenant between God and Israel. [7]

The Pinnacle of Religious Faith

Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) suggests that Abraham and Job confronted the same religious test. Do they serve God because God provides all of their needs, or do they serve God under all conditions? Both were God-fearing individuals before their respective trials, but they demonstrated their unwavering commitment to God through their trials. [8]

Professor Moshe Halbertal (Hebrew University) derives a different lesson of commitment from the Akedah. God wishes to be loved by us, but this is almost impossible since we are utterly dependent on God for all of our needs. We generally express love through absolute giving. When sacrificing to God, however, we always can hold out hope that God will give us more. Cain and Abel could offer produce or sheep to God, but they likely were at least partially motivated to appeal to God for better crops and flocks next year. What can we possibly offer God that demonstrates our true love? The Akedah is God’s giving Abraham the opportunity to offer a gift outside of the realm of exchange. Nothing can replace Isaac, since his value to Abraham is absolute. As soon as Abraham demonstrates willingness to offer his own son to God, he has proven his total love and commitment. As the angel tells Abraham, “For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me” (Genesis 22:12). Halbertal explains that Abraham’s offering a ram in place of Isaac becomes the paradigm for later Israelite sacrifice. Inherent in all sacrifice in the Torah is the idea is that we love God to the point where we are prepared to sacrifice ourselves or our children to God. The animal serves as a substitute. The Akedah thereby represents the supreme act of giving to God. [9] The ideas explored by Professors Leibowitz and Halbertal lie at the heart of being extremely religious. Abraham is a model of pure, dedicated service and love of God. Such religious commitment is ideal, but it also comes with the lurking danger of religious extremism. We turn now to this critical issue.

Extremely Religious without Religious Extremism

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) composed a classic work on the Akedah, entitled Fear and Trembling. He argued that if one believes in religion because it appears reasonable, that is a secular distortion. True religion, maintains Kierkegaard, means being able to suspend reason and moral conscience when God demands it. Kierkegaard calls Abraham a knight of faith for his willingness to obey God and sacrifice his son. Although Kierkegaard’s philosophy did not lead others to violence in the name of religion, it certainly is vulnerable to that horrific outcome. In his philosophy, serving God must trump all moral or rational concerns.

A fatal problem arises when the representatives of any religion claim that God demands violence or other forms of immorality. In a powerful article written in the wake of the terror attack on New York City on September 11, 2001, Professor David Shatz (Yeshiva University) addresses this urgent question.[10] He observes that in general, the answer for any form of extremism is to create a system with competing ideals for balance. For example, one may place law against liberty, self-respect against respect for others, and discipline against love. In religion, however, there is a fundamental problem: placing any value against religion—especially if that competing value can trump religion—defeats religious commitment. Professor Shatz suggests a solution. There is a way to have passion for God tempered by morality and rationality without requiring any religious compromise. One must embrace morality and rationality as part of the religion. The religion itself must balance and integrate competing values and see them all as part of the religion. This debate harks back to Rabbi Saadyah Gaon (Babylonia, 882–942), who insisted that God chooses moral things to command. In contrast, the medieval Islamic philosophical school of Ash‘ariyya maintained that whatever God commands is by definition good. [11] Kierkegaard’s reading of the Akedah fails Professor Shatz’s solution to religious extremism and is therefore vulnerable to the dangers of immorality in the name of God. In truth, Kierkegaard’s reading of the Akedah fails the narrative itself: God repudiates child sacrifice at the end of the story. Whereas Kierkegaard focuses on Abraham’s willingness to suspend morality to serve God, the narrative teaches that God rejects immorality as part of the Torah’s religion.

The expression of religious commitment in the Torah is the fear of God, which by definition includes the highest form of morality. [12] There must never be any disconnect between religious commitment and moral behavior, and Israel’s prophets constantly remind the people of this critical message. [13] Thus, the Torah incorporates morality and rationality as essential components of its religious system. It also is important to stress that people who act violently in the name of religion generally are not crazy. Rather, they are following their religious system as they understand it and as their clerics teach it. Such manifestations of religion themselves are evil and immoral.

Post-modernism thinks it can relativize all religion and thereby protect against the violence generated by religious extremism. In reality, however, post-modernism achieves the opposite effect, as its adherents no longer have the resolve to refer to evil as evil and to battle against it. Instead, they try to rationalize evil away. This position very meaningfully empowers the religious extremists. [14] Professor Shatz acknowledges that lamentably, there are negative extremist elements among some Jews who identify themselves as religious, as well. However, their attempts to justify their immorality with Torah sources in fact do violence to our sacred texts.[15] Such Jews are not extremely religious, as they pervert the Torah and desecrate God’s Name. Similarly, every religion must build morality and rationality into their systems so that they can pursue a relationship with God while avoiding the catastrophic consequences of religious extremism. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has observed, “the cure of bad religion is good religion, not no religion.” [16]

Conclusion

The Akedah teaches several vital religious lessons. Ideal religion is all about serving God, and is not self-serving. Because we expect God to be moral, the Torah’s protest tradition also emerges with Abraham’s holding God accountable. We may and should ask questions. Simultaneously, we must obey God’s laws in our mutual covenantal relationship. We aspire to be extremely religious, and Abraham serves as a paragon of the ideal connection to God, an active relationship, and faithfulness. The Akedah also teaches the key to avoid what is rightly condemned as religious extremism, using religion as a vehicle for murder, persecution, discrimination, racism, and other expressions of immorality. Morality and rationality must be built into every religious system, or else its adherents risk lapsing into immorality in the name of their religion.

One of the best means of promoting our vision is to understand and teach the underlying messages of the Akedah. We pray that all faith communities will join in affirming morality and rationality as being within their respective faiths. It is imperative for us to serve as emissaries of a different vision to what the world too often experiences in the name of religion, to model the ideal fear of Heaven that the Torah demands, and ultimately to sanctify God’s Name.

Notes [

1] The Hebrew root for Akedah appears in Genesis 22:9, and refers to binding one’s hands to one’s feet. This is the only time that this root appears in the entire Bible. [2] Rabbi Samuel David Luzzatto (Italy, 1800–1865) suggests that this legislation was in part an anti-pagan polemic, demonstrating that the Torah’s idea of love of God does not involve the immoral sacrifice of one’s child. [3] Kant was not the first person troubled by the moral implications of the Akedah. In the second century BCE, the author of the non-canonical Book of Jubilees (17:16) ascribed the command to sacrifice Isaac to a “satanic” angel named Mastemah, rather than God Himself as presented in the Torah. Evidently, the author of Jubilees was uncomfortable attributing such a command directly to God. Adopting a different tactic, a fourteenth-century rabbi named Eleazar Ashkenazi ben Nathan Habavli maintained that the Akedah must have occurred in a prophetic vision. Had the Akedah occurred in waking state, he argued, Abraham surely would have protested as he did regarding Sodom (in Marc Shapiro, Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History [Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2015, p. 70]). [4] See sources and discussion in Yonatan Grossman, Avraham: Sipuro shel Massa (Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 2014), pp. 300–301. [5] Translation from The Guide of the Perplexed, Shlomo Pines, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 501–502. [6] See especially R. Aharon Lichtenstein, “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha?” in Modern Jewish Ethics: Theory and Practice, ed. Marvin Fox (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1975), pp. 62–88. [7] See further discussion in Hayyim Angel, “Learning Faith from the Text, or Text from Faith: The Challenges of Teaching (and Learning) the Abraham Narratives and Commentary,” in Wisdom From All My Teachers: Challenges and Initiatives in Contemporary Torah Education, ed. Jeffrey Saks & Susan Handelman (Jerusalem: Urim, 2003), pp. 192–212; reprinted in Angel, Through an Opaque Lens (New York: Sephardic Publication Foundation, 2006), pp. 127–154; revised second edition (New York: Kodesh Press, 2013), pp. 99–122. [8] Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 48–49, 259. Cf. Michael V. Fox, “Job the Pious,” Zeitschrift fur die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 117 (2005), pp. 351–366. [9] Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 22–25. [10] David Shatz, “‘From the Depths I Have Called to You’: Jewish Reflections on September 11th and Contemporary Terrorism,” in Contending with Catastrophe: Jewish Perspectives on September 11th, ed. Michael J. Broyde (New York: Beth Din of America and K’Hal Publishing, 2011), pp. 197–233. See also Marvin Fox, “Kierkegaard and Rabbinic Judaism,” in Collected Essays on Philosophy and on Judaism, vol. 2, ed. Jacob Neusner (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003), pp. 29–43. [11] See Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 38. [12] See, for example, Genesis 20:11; 42:18; Exodus 1:17, 21; Deuteronomy 25:18. [13] See, for example, Isaiah 1:10–17; Jeremiah 7:9–11; Hosea 6:6; Amos 5:21–25; Micah 6:4–8. [14] For a chilling study of the virtual elimination of the very concept of sin and evil from much of Western literature, see Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995). [15] See especially R. Yitzchak Blau, “Ploughshares into Swords: Contemporary Religious Zionists and Moral Constraints,” Tradition 34:4 (Winter 2000), pp. 39–60. [16] R. Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science, and the Search for Meaning (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2011), p. 11.

Orthodox Judaism has a powerful, appealing, and sophisticated message for world Jewry—and for humanity at large. Basing ourselves on the divinely revealed Bible, the authoritative halakhic system, and a worldview rooted in compassion and justice, we have succeeded as a world religion for over 3,000 years. We have weathered physical and spiritual attacks from external enemies; and we have been victorious in sectarian battles within Judaism itself.

While other segments of Jewry stagnate or shrink due to assimilation, low birth rates, and defections from Judaism—Orthodoxy has proven to be remarkably resilient. It has created thriving communities, a positive birth rate, networks of schools, kashruth agencies, mikvaot, social service organizations, and so forth. Thousands of Jews have been attracted to an Orthodox way of life, and the “ba’al teshuva” schools and institutions continue to flourish dramatically.

With all its strengths and successes, though, Orthodoxy is being transformed into something more akin to a sect or cult than a world religion. The turn to the “right” has cast Orthodoxy into a dilemma. On the one hand, the growing Orthodox religious extremism stems from faith and spiritual vitality. It reflects an understandable rejection of the prevalent materialistic, hedonistic, and amoral/immoral values that pervade society at large. Right-wing Orthodoxy has chosen to insulate itself as much as possible from the corrosive forces of modern secular culture. By emphasizing strict religious observance and the centrality of Torah learning, it has sought to inure itself from what it perceives to be negative external pressures.

On the other hand, the turn to the right has manifested itself in some highly problematic features. The Hareidi (insular right-wing) communities are dominated by cult-like authoritarian leaders who control public opinion among their followers. Conformity is encouraged in thought, behavior, and manner of dress. People who are perceived to be threats to Hareidi values are vilified. The valid range of religious opinion, even within halakhic boundaries, has been sharply curtailed.

The Modern Orthodox community has largely been swept up in the move to the right. Its spokespeople are generally apologetic about the term “Modern Orthodox” and have tried alternative phrases such as Centrist Orthodoxy or Open Orthodoxy. An American organization that was avowedly proud of being “modern and Orthodox,” Edah, lasted less than ten years before closing its doors. In Israel, the Modern Orthodox are generally identified as Religious Zionists, although the two terms are not entirely synonymous. Israeli Religious Zionism is itself embroiled in a spiritual battle with Hareidism, and has ceded much authority to the Hareidi rabbinic leadership.

Yet, there are many thousands of Orthodox Jews scattered around the world who feel alienated by Hareidism and betrayed by Modern Orthodoxy. These Orthodox Jews share a vision of Judaism rooted in Torah and mitzvoth, a commitment to individual freedom and responsibility, a dedication to the highest ideals of social justice, and a responsive attitude to the challenges of the world.

This group of Orthodox Jews, in spite of the grandness of their religious commitment and vision, are relegated to the periphery of Orthodox life today. The “yeshiva world” is thoroughly dominated by Hareidi ideology. Whether in Israel, the United States, or other centers of Jewish life, key halakhic (Jewish law) and hashkafic (religious worldview) decisions are being made by proponents of the Hareidi viewpoints.

Halakhic authorities, known popularly as “gedolim” (great ones), are drawn almost exclusively from the Hareidi orbit. The Orthodox masses generally defer—whether willingly, sheepishly, or unwillingly—to Hareidi authorities in almost every area of Jewish religious life. The “gedolim” associated with Modern Orthodox institutions tend to present themselves in Hareidi terms. They may be more Zionistic and more receptive to secular studies, but—with a few notable exceptions—they have not fostered a clear independence from the dictates of the Hareidi world.

Whatever the historical and sociological reasons, the Orthodox pendulum has swung far to the right. Presumably, it will one day swing back; but meanwhile considerable damage is being done to Orthodoxy—and to the Jewish people in general—while Orthodoxy increasingly is being dominated by fundamentalist, obscurantist, authoritarian leaders and teachers.

We need a reasonable, intelligent, compassionate, and inclusive view of Orthodoxy—Classic Orthodoxy—that offers a legitimate Orthodox view of life different from that promoted by the Hareidi community. How can we achieve this?

As a prelude, let it be noted that Hareidim are not all the same; there is plenty of diversity within the Hareidi world. Let it also be noted that the Hareidim have as much right as anyone else to organize their communities as they see fit. Problems arise, though, when they impose their views on the rest of us and negate the legitimacy of differing views—even when the differing views are themselves soundly rooted in Jewish tradition.

In characterizing the negative features of Hareidism, the following list must be considered:

1. authoritarianism—relying on the rulings and opinions of cult-like leaders, whether those leaders are Hassidic rebbes, Lithuanian or Sephardic “gedolim,” or heads of yeshivot

2. conformity—following the “accepted” patterns of behavior and thought of the Hareidi world, with the subsequent constriction of valid religious options

3. fundamentalism—relying on the literal meanings of biblical and rabbinic texts, even when these texts contradict reason or the findings of science

4. obscurantism—relying on the traditional wisdom of Judaism as they understand it, and limiting exposure to new ideas and knowledge—especially if drawn from non-Jewish or non-religious sources

5. xenophobia—seeing the world almost exclusively in terms of Hareidism, with non-concern or even disdain for those who are not part of the Hareidi world

6. extremism—promoting the Hareidi worldview through extreme statements, suppression of those who dissent from the “establishment,” curses of enemies, and even physical violence

7. anti-Zionism or neutral-Zionism—refusing to recognize the religious significance of the State of Israel

8. restriction of women’s rights—insisting on a male-dominated social structure, and imposing restrictive “modesty” rules on females

These manifestations of Orthodoxy’s turn to the right are not mandated by the thousands of years of Jewish religious tradition. On the contrary, Hareidism should be viewed as a deviation from classic normative Judaism. It is time—well past time—to reclaim Orthodox Judaism.

Challenges of Modernity

The modern period has been extraordinarily difficult for the survival of the bearers of the Sinaitic Revelation. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered 6 million Jewish men, women, and children during World War II. One-third of world Jewry perished, and the other two-thirds were traumatized. Bastions of traditional religious life in Europe were wiped off the face of the earth.

Due to Arab animosity toward the newly established State of Israel, life became impossible for hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been living in Arab countries for many centuries. These Jews from Africa and Asia emigrated to Israel in vast numbers— and the traditional frameworks of their communities were shaken as they attempted to adapt to the new, secularized, modern Jewish State. If the State’s political and social “establishment” was largely composed of secularized Ashkenazim, its religious “establishment” was largely composed of Ashkenazic Orthodox rabbis. Whichever way the Sephardic newcomers turned, they risked losing the rich religious culture that had characterized their communities for generations.

While the Jewish people underwent these cataclysmic demographic changes, they also had to deal with disorienting sociological and spiritual changes. The process of modernity, already beginning in the late eighteenth century, led to a growing number of Jews who abandoned traditional religious beliefs and observances. Whether they opted out of Judaism altogether, or identified themselves with non-Orthodox patterns of life, millions of Jews stopped seeing themselves as heirs of the Revelation at Sinai. They became messengers who had forgotten their message—or who simply chose to quit being messengers.

Adherents of Jewish Orthodoxy felt embattled. How were they to maintain their beliefs and practices in a world that was increasingly non-religious, even anti-religious? How could they raise their children to be loyal to the Torah traditions when Jews were such a tiny minority in the world, and when so many Jews were moving away from religious traditionalism?

Two major approaches developed. The Hareidi view was that Orthodoxy had little chance of surviving in an open society; the forces of assimilation and secularization were simply too overwhelming. The best strategy was for Orthodox Jews to insulate their communities to the extent possible from the corrosive influences of the outside world. This could be accomplished by having adherents live in tightly knit neighborhoods, where Hareidim were a large percentage (preferably the clear majority) of residents; by maintaining a distinctive style of dress that separated Hareidim from other groups; by sending their children to Hareidi schools that sharply limited instruction in secular subjects; by not interacting in any official way with non-Orthodox movements or their leaders; by operating their own religious, social, and communal institutions so as to limit contacts with “outsiders”; and to use every possible sociological means to reinforce their beliefs and traditions. To be an “insider,” one had to conform to Hareidi standards. One who deviated in dress, practice, or belief was subject to being rejected, humiliated, and even physically attacked by Hareidi loyalists. It would be difficult for non-conformists to find spouses for their children among the fine Hareidi families.

The advantage of the Hareidi approach is that it generally has proven to be effective in maintaining a traditional way of life. People living within the system know that they are part of a larger Hareidi community that sees itself as God’s chosen group, that only they—through the wisdom and authority of their rabbinic leaders—are following the Torah of Sinai. The Hareidim have been growing in numbers, strength, and communal influence in Israel, and wherever they have communities in the Diaspora.

If the many thousands of Hareidim formed one ideal community characterized by perfect piety and righteousness, then perhaps the case for Hareidism would be more compelling. However, the Hareidim are fractured into many sub-groups, often at odds with each other. Rivalries and hatred among various Hassidic sects are rampant. The Lithuanian-style Hareidim have many bones of contention with Hassidic Hareidim. The Ashkenazic Hareidi “establishment” has fostered negative attitudes toward Sephardic Hareidim, even to the extent of limiting (or excluding) children of Sephardic background from their schools and not allowing their children to marry Sephardim. Sephardic Hareidim (a relatively new phenomenon) have their own share of rivalries among themselves and between themselves and the Ashkenazic Hareidim. The Hareidi press is notoriously vicious in its attacks on those it deems to be religiously deficient. In short, the Hareidi community is filled with all the strife, egotistical leadership, gossip, and backbiting that could be expected in any other human community. Hareidi leaders and political figures do not seem to be any more moral or honest than non-religious leaders and political figures.

For most Jews, including most Orthodox Jews, the Hareidi approach is not appealing. It is too narrow, too intellectually stifling, too authoritarian, too sectarian. So let us consider the Modern Orthodox approach.

In the Ashkenazic world, figures such as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch of nineteenth-century Germany and Rabbi Bernard Revel of twentieth-century America emerged as representatives of an Orthodoxy that retained its traditionalism but also its commitment to live in the modern world. Rabbi Hirsch’s motto was “Torah im derekh erets,” Torah with culture. He argued that the ideal religious Jew should be steeped in Torah knowledge and observance, and also be comfortable interacting with the “outside” world. The Torah personality was viewed as a pious Jew, who was well mannered and cultured, familiar with the intellectual currents of the time. Similarly, Rabbi Revel adopted the motto of “Torah uMada,” Torah and Science (or better, Torah and general knowledge). In founding Yeshiva College (later to become Yeshiva University), Rabbi Revel strove to implement his view that Orthodox Jews could be pious and learned Torah scholars, while at the same time being lawyers and doctors and businesspeople. Although Yeshiva College did produce students who went on to become rabbis, the large majority of graduates entered other fields. They functioned as Orthodox Jews in the professions, in the workplace, and in the public arena. They were ambassadors of a Torah Judaism that lived “in” the world, and that did not seek to isolate itself within sectarian confines.

In the Sephardic world, figures such as Rabbis Eliyhahu Benamozegh, Eliyahu Hazan, and Benzion Uziel reflected a worldview imbued with religious tradition, but at the same time open to general knowledge. Sephardim did not splinter into religious movements, but managed to maintain a traditional communal structure even as individuals adopted different levels of belief and observance. The Sephardic model, though, diminished in influence as Sephardim came increasingly under the sway of Ashkenazic models.

Moderation: Weakness or Virtue?

The Modern Orthodox perspective has been criticized by its antagonists as being unprincipled, wishy-washy, and religiously dubious. It has been charged with compromising with modernity, selling out on basic religious tenets, looking for the most lenient halakhic rulings. Yet, Modern Orthodoxy sees itself in quite different terms. It is highly principled, highly idealistic, and highly sensitive to the needs of the Jewish public. Indeed, it is the ideal expression of religious Orthodoxy.

A rabbinic teaching has it that the way of the Torah is a narrow path. On the right is fire, and on the left is ice. One who veers from the path is doomed to be burnt or frozen. The Torah way of life is balanced, harmonious and sensible. It imbues life with depth, meaning, and true happiness. To be fulfilled properly, it must maintain its balance on the narrow path.

Veering to the left freezes the soul of Judaism. It robs the Torah of warmth and harmony. Abandoning or watering down Jewish belief and religious observance is a turn toward ice, a spiritless charade of religion.

Veering to the right leads to the dangers of fire—excessive zeal, extremism, fanaticism. Losing the harmony of the true path of Torah, the extremists pursue a xenophobic ghettoized Judaism that is hostile to or suspicious of the outside world.

“Her ways are the ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace (Proverbs 3:17).” Classic rabbinic literature takes this verse as a descriptive view of Torah. The Torah way of life is characterized by kindness, harmony, and sweetness. The verse is also prescriptive: It reminds us that religious life must take into consideration the qualities of pleasantness and peace.

The Talmud (Yoma 86a) offers the insight of the great sage Abbaye, that the Torah’s commandment to love God entails “that the name of God be beloved because of you. If someone studies Scripture and Mishnah, and attends on the disciples of the wise, is honest in business, and speaks pleasantly to persons, what do people then say concerning him? ‘Happy the parent who taught him Torah, happy the teacher who taught him Torah; woe unto those who have not studied the Torah; for this man has studied the Torah—look how fine are his ways, how righteous his deeds.’ On the other hand, if a person studies Torah and yet behaves in an unpleasant, unrighteous manner, people will say: ‘Woe unto him who studied the Torah, woe unto his father who taught him Torah; woe unto his teacher who taught him Torah. This man studied the Torah: look how corrupt are his deeds, how ugly his ways.’”

Maimonides (Yesodei haTorah 5:11) notes that if a Torah scholar, known for piety, does things that make people talk against him—even though these things are not sins—he thereby profanes the Name of God. One’s conduct is expected to be impeccable, free from any taint of inappropriateness.

If the scholar has been scrupulous in his conduct, gentle in his conversation, sociable, and receiving fellow men cheerfully, without insulting those who embarrass him, but showing courtesy to all, even to those who treat him disrespectfully, and conducting his business affairs with integrity…traits for which he is admired and loved by all who desire to follow his example, he sanctifies the Name of God.

Pleasantness and peace matter. They are not peripheral adornments to the Torah way of life, but are essential and central ingredients. Without these qualities, Orthodoxy is false to its mission and misrepresents the ideal Torah way of life.

Moderation, good manners, gentleness in dealing with others—these are not compromise positions, but are the mainstream foundations of Torah Judaism. Those who live according to these ideals are in fact walking piously on the Torah path, avoiding the ice on the left and the fire on the right.

Rabbinic Responsibility: Talmidei Hakhamim Marbim Shalom BaOlam

The role and responsibility of rabbinic leadership is central to a discussion of the state of Orthodoxy. Let us consider several classic rabbinic texts that relate to our topic.

“Rabbi Elazar said in the name of Rabbi Haninah: Rabbinic scholars increase peace in the world” (end of tractate Berakhot). The hallmark of a rabbi must be the commitment to increase peace and harmony among the Jewish people and within society at large. Without this guiding focus, rabbinic scholars betray their responsibility.

How do rabbis go about “increasing peace in the world”? How is this general truism translated into specific action? The answer may be found in the commentary of the Maharsha on the closing passages in Berakhot and Yebamoth. The Maharsha states that rabbis are obliged to bring peace between the people of Israel and their God. By teaching Torah, the prayers and blessings, as well as by imbuing reverence and love of God, rabbis thereby lead Jews to find peace in their relationship with God. The rabbinic mission demands a spiritual outlook, an overwhelming desire to bring Jews closer to their God and Torah. This mission can only be properly fulfilled in a spirit of love, compassion, inclusivity—and much patience.

The rabbi must see himself—and must be seen by others—as a selfless religious leader who places the public’s interests before his own. He must not be a self-serving, manipulative bureaucrat who is more interested in advancing his own career than in serving the public in truth.

The Maharsha points to another rabbinic characteristic that results in increasing peace in the world. That is the application of halakha in a way that reflects understanding and sensitivity to the human predicament. Our talmudic sages, for example, offered lenient rulings in order to save women from suffering the plight of an agunah. They were willing to deviate from the technical letter of the law—even to be oker davar min haTorah (to uproot a Torah law)—when they felt this was necessary. Rabbi Yohanan taught in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Yehozadak: “It is proper that a letter be rooted out of the Torah so that thereby the heavenly Name shall be publicly hallowed” (Yebamoth 79a). The sages recognized overarching principles which guided halakhic rulings—principles such as sanctifying God’s Name; avoiding desecration of God’s name; making decisions based on the fact that the ways of Torah are pleasant, and all its paths are peace.

To increase peace in the world, rabbinical scholars must be sensitive to the needs of the public and must see themselves as integral members of the public. In addressing his rabbinic colleagues at a 1919 conference in Jerusalem, Rabbi Benzion Uziel underscored the responsibility of rabbis to lead the community “with words of pleasantness, and with love of each individual Jew.” Rabbis are not to isolate themselves in their study halls. “Let us walk on our path together with all the people and among the people, to love and appreciate, to learn and to teach the Torah of Israel in the presence of all.”

Kamtsa and Bar Kamtsa

The Talmud records a poignant story relating to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Although historians describe various political, sociological, and military explanations for the Roman war against the Jews, the Talmud—through the story of Kamtsa and Bar Kamtsa—points to a moral/spiritual cause of the destruction:

R. Johanan said: The destruction of Jerusalem came through Kamtsa and Bar Kamtsa in this way. A certain man had a friend Kamtsa and an enemy Bar Kamtsa. He once made a party and said to his servant, Go and bring Kamtsa. The man went and brought Bar Kamtsa. When the man [who gave the party] found him there he said, See, you tell tales about me; what are you doing here? Get out. Said the other: Since I am here, let me stay and I will pay you for whatever I eat and drink. He said, I won't. Then let me give you half the cost of the party. No, said the other. Then let me pay for the whole party. He still said, No, and he took him by the hand and put him out. Said the other, Since the rabbis were sitting there and did not stop him, this shows that they agreed with him. I will go and inform against them to the Government. He went and said to the Emperor, The Jews are rebelling against you. He said, How can I tell? He said to him: Send them an offering and see whether they will offer it [on the altar]. So he sent with him a fine calf. While on the way he [Bar Kamtsa] made a blemish on its upper lip, or as some say on the white of its eye, in a place where we [Jews] count it a blemish but they [the Romans] do not. The rabbis were inclined to offer it in order not to offend the Government. Said R. Zechariah b. Abkulas to them: People will say that blemished animals are offered on the altar. They then proposed to kill Bar Kamtsa so that he should not go and inform against them, but R. Zechariah b. Abkulas said to them, Is one who makes a blemish on consecrated animals to be put to death? R. Johanan thereupon remarked: Through the scrupulousness of R. Zechariah b. Abkulas our House has been destroyed, our Temple burnt and we ourselves exiled from our land. (Gittin 55b–56a)

The story tells of a host—apparently a wealthy man—who throws a party and wants his friend Kamtsa to be brought to it. The servant makes a mistake and brings Bar Kamtsa—a person the host despises. When the host sees Bar Kamtsa, he orders him to leave. Even though Bar Kamtsa pleads not to be humiliated by being sent away, the host is unbending. Bar Kamtsa offers to pay for whatever he eats, for half the expenses of the entire party, for the entire party—but the host unceremoniously leads Bar Kamtsa out of his home.

The story reflects a lack of peace among the Jewish community in Jerusalem. The antagonism between the host and Bar Kamtsa is palpable. The unpleasant scene at the party was witnessed by others—including “the rabbis”; obviously, “the rabbis” were included on the party’s guest list. They were part of the host’s social network. When Bar Kamtsa was ejected from the party, he did not express rage at the host. Rather, he was deeply wounded by the fact that rabbis had been silent in the face of the humiliation he had suffered: “Since the rabbis were sitting there and did not stop him, this shows that they agreed with him.” He might have understood the host’s uncouth behavior, since the host hated him. But he could not understand why the rabbis, through their silence, would go along with the host. Why didn’t they stand up and protest on behalf of Bar Kamtsa? Why didn’t they attempt to increase peace? Bar Kamtsa was so disgusted with the rabbis that he decided to stir up the Roman Emperor against the Jewish people. If the rabbinic leadership itself was corrupt, then the entire community had to suffer.

Why didn’t the rabbis speak up on behalf of Bar Kamtsa?

Apparently, the rabbis kept silent because they did not want to offend their host. If the host wanted to expel a mistakenly invited person, that was his business—not theirs. The host seems to have been a wealthy patron of the rabbis; he obviously wanted them included on his invitation list. Why should the rabbis offend their patron, in defense of an enemy of their patron? That might jeopardize their relationship with the host and could cost them future patronage.

The rabbis kept silent because they thought it socially and economically prudent for their own interests. They could not muster the courage to confront the host and try to intervene on behalf of Bar Kamtsa. By looking out for their own selfish interests, the rabbis chose to look the other way when Bar Kamtsa was publicly humiliated.

Rabbi Binyamin Lau, in his review of the rabbinical and historical sources of that period, came to the inescapable conclusion that “the rabbis were supported by the wealthy [members of the community], and consequently were unable to oppose their deeds. There is here a situation of economic pressure that enslaved the elders of the generation to the officials and the wealthy….The Torah infrastructure depended on the generosity of the rich.”

When rabbis lost the spirit of independence, they also lost their moral compass. They were beholden to the rich, and could not afford to antagonize their patrons. They remained silent even when their patrons behaved badly, even when their silence allowed their patrons to humiliate others. Bar Kamtsa was outraged by the moral cowardice of the rabbis to such an extent that he turned traitor against the entire Jewish people.

The story goes on to say that Bar Kamtsa told the Emperor that the Jews were rebelling. To verify this, the Emperor sent an offering to be sacrificed in the Temple. If the Jews offered it up, that proved they were not rebelling. If the Jews refused to offer it up, this meant that they were defying the Emperor and were rising in rebellion. Bar Kamtsa took a fine calf on behalf of the Emperor, and put a slight blemish on it. He was learned enough to know that this blemish—while of no consequence to the Romans—would disqualify the animal from being offered according to Jewish law.

When Bar Kamtsa presented the offering at the Temple, the rabbis were inclined to allow it to be offered. They fully realized that if they rejected it, this would be construed by the Emperor as a sign of disloyalty and rebellion. Since there was so much at stake, the rabbis preferred to offer a blemished animal rather than incur the Emperor’s wrath. This was a sound, prudent course of action. But one of the rabbis, Zecharyah b, Abkulas, objected. He insisted that the rabbis follow the letter of the law and not allow the offering of a blemished animal. He cited public opinion (“people will say”) that the rabbis did not adhere to the law and therefore allowed a forbidden offering. The rabbis then considered the extreme possibility of murdering Bar Kamtsa, so that this traitor would not be able to return to the Emperor to report that the offering had been refused. Again, Zecharyah b. Abkulas objected. The halakha does not allow the death penalty for one who brings a blemished offering for sacrifice in the Temple. Murdering Bar Kamtsa, thus, would be unjustified and illegal. This was “check mate.” The rabbis offered no further ideas on how to avoid antagonizing the Emperor. The offering was rejected, and Bar Kamtsa reported this to the Emperor. The result was the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and razing of the Temple. “R. Johanan thereupon remarked: Through the scrupulousness of R. Zechariah b. Abkulas our House has been destroyed, our Temple burnt and we ourselves exiled from our land.”

Rabbi Johanan casts R. Zecharyah b. Abkulas as the villain of the story. R. Zecharyah was overly scrupulous in insisting on the letter of the law, and he lost sight of the larger issues involved. He did not factor in the consequences of his halakhic ruling; or if he did, he thought it was better to suffer the consequences rather than to violate the halakha. Rabbi Johanan blames R. Zecharyah’s “scrupulousness” for the destruction of Jerusalem, the razing of the Temple, and the exile of the Jewish people. The moral of the story, according to Rabbi Johanan, is that rabbis need to have a grander vision when making halakhic decisions. It is not proper—and can be very dangerous—to rule purely on the basis of the letter of the law, without taking into consideration the larger issues and the consequences of these decisions. Technical correctness does not always make a halakhic ruling correct. On the contrary, technical correctness can lead to catastrophic results. To follow the precedent of Rabbi Zecharyah b. Abkulas is a dangerous mistake.

Yes, Rabbi Zecharyah b. Abkulas was overly scrupulous in his application of halakha, when other larger considerations should have been factored in. His narrow commitment to legal technicalities caused inexpressible suffering and destruction for the Jewish people. But is he the real villain of the story?

Rabbi Zecharyah was only one man. The other rabbis formed the majority. Why didn’t they overrule Rabbi Zecharyah? The rabbis surely realized the implications of rejecting the Emperor’s offering. They were even willing to commit murder to keep Bar Kamtsa from returning to the Emperor with a negative report. Why did the majority of the rabbis submit to Rabbi Zecharyah’s “scrupulousness”?

The story is teaching not only about the mistaken attitude of Rabbi Zecharyah b. Abkulas, but about the weakness and cowardice of the rest of the rabbis. The other rabbis were intimidated by Rabbi Zecharyah. They were afraid that people would accuse them of being laxer in halakha than Rabbi Zecharyah. They worried lest their halakhic credibility would be called into question. Rabbi Zecharyah might be perceived by the public as the “really religious” rabbi, or the “fervently religious” rabbi; the other rabbis would be perceived as compromisers, as religiously defective. They recognized that Rabbi Zecharyah, after all, had technical halakhic justification for his positions. On the other hand, they would have to be innovative and utilize meta-halakhic considerations to justify their rulings. That approach—even if ultimately correct—requires considerable confidence in one’s ability to make rulings that go beyond the letter of the law. Rabbi Zecharyah’s position was safe: it had support in the halakhic texts and traditions. The rabbis’ position was risky: it required breaking new ground, making innovative rulings based on extreme circumstances. The rabbis simply were not up to the challenge. They deferred to Rabbi Zecharyah because they lacked the courage and confidence to take responsibility for bold halakhic decision-making.

When Rabbis Do Not Increase Peace in the World

When rabbis lose sight of their core responsibility to bring peace into the world, the consequences are profoundly troubling. The public’s respect for religion and religious leadership decreases. The rabbis themselves become narrower in outlook, more authoritarian, more identified with a rabbinic/political bureaucracy than with idealistic rabbinic service. They become agents of the status quo, curriers of favor from the rich and politically well-connected.
When rabbis lack independence and moral courage, the tendencies toward conformity and extremism arise. They adopt the strictest and most fundamentalist positions, because they do not want to appear “less fervent” than the extremist rabbinic authorities.

When rabbis fear to express moral indignation so as not to jeopardize their financial or political situation, then the forces of injustice and disharmony increase. When rabbis adopt the narrow halakhic vision of Rabbi Zecharyah b. Abkulas, they invite catastrophe on the community. When the “silent majority” of rabbis allow the R. Zecharyahs to prevail, they forfeit their responsibility as religious leaders.

The contemporary Hareidization of Orthodox Judaism, both in Israel and the Diaspora, has tended to foster a narrow and extreme approach to halakha. This phenomenon has been accompanied by a widespread acquiescence on the part of Orthodox rabbis who are afraid to stand up against the growing extremism.

In the summer of 1984, I met with Rabbi Haim David Halevy, then Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv. He was a particularly independent thinker, who much regretted the narrowness and extremism that had arisen within Orthodox rabbinic circles. He lamented what he called the rabbinic “mafia” that served as a thought police, rooting out and ostracizing rabbis who did not go along with the official policies of a small group of “gedolim,” rabbinic authorities who are thought to have the ultimate power to decide halakhic policies. When honest discussion and diversity of opinion are quashed, the religious enterprise suffers.

The Orthodox rabbinic establishment in Israel, through the offices of the Chief Rabbinate, has had the sole official religious authority to determine matters relating to Jewish identity, conversion, marriage, and divorce. It has also wielded its authority in kashruth supervision and other areas of religious law relating to Jewish life in the State of Israel. This religious “monopoly” has been in place since the State of Israel was established in 1948. With so much power at their disposal, one would have expected—and might have hoped—that the rabbinate would have won a warm and respectful attitude among the population at large. The rabbis, after all, are charged with increasing peace between the people of Israel and their God; with applying halakha in a spirit of love, compassion, and understanding; with creating within the Jewish public a recognition that the rabbis are public servants working in the public’s interest.

Regrettably, these things have not transpired. Although the Chief Rabbinate began with the creative leadership of Rabbis Benzion Uziel and Yitzchak Herzog, it gradually sank into a bureaucratic mire, in which rabbis struggled to gain political power and financial reward for themselves and/or for the institutions they represent. The Chief Rabbinate is not held as the ultimate religious authority in Israel by the Hareidi population. It is not respected by the non-Orthodox public. It has scant support within the Religious Zionist camp, since the Chief Rabbinate seems more interested in pandering to Hareidi interests than in promoting a genuine Religious Zionist vision and program for the Jewish State.

Recent polls in Israel have reflected a growing backlash against the Hareidization of religious life and against the political/social/religious coercion that has been fostered by Hareidi leadership. Seventy percent of Jewish Israelis are opposed to new religious legislation. Fifty-three pecert oppose all religiously coercive legislation. Forty-two percent believe that the tension between the Hareidim and the general public is the most serious internal schism in Israeli Jewish society—nearly twice as many as those who think the most serious tension is between the political left and political right. Sixty-five percent think the tensions between Hareidim and the general public are the most serious, or second most serious, problem facing the Israeli Jewish community. An increasing number of Israelis are in favor of a complete separation of religion and State, reflecting growing frustration with the religious status quo. The Jerusalem Post (November 24, 2010) reported on a poll taken by the Smith Institute for the Hiddush Foundation in Israel: 80 percent of Israelis are dissatisfied with the government’s policies on religion and state. A significant majority favor a government coalition that eliminates the Hareidi religious parties. Clearly, the Orthodox rabbinate has not won the hearts and minds of many of the citizens of Israel, and has also alienated large segments of the Jewish Diaspora.

Narrow and Hurtful Policies

In 2006, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate declared that it would no longer accept the validity of conversions performed by Orthodox rabbis in the Diaspora, unless the rabbis were approved by them and adhered to their—Hareidi—standards. In one fell swoop, the Chief Rabbis disenfranchised their most reliable allies in the Diaspora, Modern Orthodox rabbis whose conversions had always been accepted in Israel in prior years.

The Hareidization process went further. Some Israeli rabbinic courts invalidated conversions performed by various Orthodox rabbis in Israel; invalidated conversions retroactively, even many years after the conversions took place; raised questions about the validity of conversions performed by Orthodox rabbis in the Israeli military forces; raised questions about conversions performed by Israeli Orthodox rabbis under the government’s own conversion authority. This undermining of the conversion process has had a chilling effect on Orthodox rabbis worldwide, who now either avoid performing conversions or feel compelled to follow the needlessly stringent views of the Hareidi rabbinic establishment. They fear that if they do not bend to Hareidi pressure, their conversions will not be accepted by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate and its rabbinic courts.

The Hareidi policies are demonstrably refuted by centuries of halakhic tradition. These policies represent a clinging to the narrowest, most xenophobic elements of rabbinic thought—and the setting aside of the vast corpus of mainstream halakhic tradition. It has been clearly shown that halakha allows for an inclusive, compassionate approach to conversion. Indeed, Israel’s first Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Benzion Uziel, gave far-reaching halakhic decisions that insisted on the rabbinic responsibility to perform conversions, even when it was expected the converts would not be fully observant of Jewish law. He had a halakhic vision that took into consideration the needs of the converts, the children of the converts, and the wellbeing of the Jewish people as a whole.

The currently prevailing policies of the Hareidi-dominated Orthodox rabbinic establishment are not only halakhically misguided, but serve to alienate large numbers of Jews and potential Jews from Judaism and the Jewish people. The rabbis who promote and enforce these policies are surely not increasing peace in the world, and are not applying Torah law in a way that is true to the spirit of pleasantness and peace. They inflict needless suffering on thousands of converts, children of converts, and potential converts. Instead of recognizing the historic obligation of drawing on the power of halakha to resolve the serious issues relating to conversion, the rabbinic establishment has become even more obstinate and obstructionist. And while the rabbinic establishment follows the mindset of R. Zecharyah b. Abkulas, much of the Orthodox rabbinate remains silent, afraid to lose its own perceived rabbinic credibility. Like the silent rabbis in the days of Bar Kamtsa, the rabbis look on at injustice—and do not object.

If the situation relating to conversion is problematic, the situation concerning agunot is also heartbreaking. Organizations such as Mavoi Satum and the Center for Women’s Justice deal on a regular basis with a rabbinic bureaucracy that not only does not solve the problem in a systemic way, but exacerbates the problem by causing many agunot to suffer unnecessarily. It is reported (and I have personally dealt with this phenomenon) that rabbis encourage agunot to pay off their husbands, or give up their rights, in order to receive a get (religious bill of divorce)—even if the husbands had been abusive and don’t deserve any “rewards” for their improper behavior. There are cases where agunot have waited years in order to receive a get. How can such women ever be repaid for their suffering, and for their loss of productive years of married life to a new husband? How can they—or anyone who knows of their plight—feel kindly toward the rabbinate? How many have been turned away from the Torah due to the injustices and humiliations perpetrated against agunot?

The rabbinic establishment can enforce prenuptial agreements; can implement various halakhic proposals to free agunot from recalcitrant husbands; can launch a serious and thorough educational program in every yeshiva on the sin of withholding a get or of blackmailing a wife into paying ransom to receive a get when a marriage has broken down; can see to it that the public is warned not to deal with recalcitrant husbands; can dismiss rabbinic judges who demonstrate insensitivity to agunot and/or who encourage women to pay off their husbands for a get. A strong, unequivocal commitment to solving this problem must be a priority responsibility of the rabbinic establishment. As long as this problem festers, the public is left to believe either that the rabbis do not want to solve the problem, or that halakha is incapable of dealing with this problem in a meaningful way. Every agunah case is an indictment of the halakhic system and the rabbis who claim to uphold it.

Reclaiming Orthodox Judaism

The Hareidi rabbinic establishment has thrived largely through its success in the political sphere. Because Israeli government coalitions have needed the votes of the Hareidi parties, they have had to cede certain benefits to the Hareidi establishment in return for those votes. The result is that Hareidi institutions receive substantial funding from the State; Hareidi yeshiva students are given exemptions from service in the Israeli military; Hareidi rabbinic figures are pandered to by political candidates seeking the Hareidi vote. Knesset bills that promote religious freedom, and that are seen as a threat by the Hareidi rabbinic/political leadership, are routinely killed. The Israeli political system, which the Hareidi parties have mastered so successfully, allows an unpopular minority group to wield a disproportionate amount of power. Although the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews are not Hareidim and disapprove of Hareidi religious coercion, the Hareidi stranglehold continues unabated.

Rabbi Haim David Halevy, writing in 1954, already warned against the reliance on political coercion to advance religion in the State of Israel. Although one could not completely discount the importance of religious political parties, Rabbi Halevy thought that “this is not the way of the Torah, and not in this way will we succeed.” Rather, the religious agenda must be based on persuasion, not coercion. We must teach Torah in a way that draws people closer to our religious observances and values. We must demonstrate that the ideals and practices of Torah Judaism represent the best fulfillment of human life for the Jewish people. Political coercion—even if it appears to be successful temporarily—ultimately evokes a strong backlash, and turns people further and further from the teachings of Torah.

As the Hareidi political power in Israel increased, so did its overall influence in Orthodoxy throughout the world. Instead of being viewed as a fringe group on the extreme right, Hareidim have become Orthodoxy’s most visible power brokers and opinion makers. Their institutions in Israel thrive on government-provided grants. Their institutions worldwide draw support from Jews—many of whom are not themselves Hareidi or even Orthodox—who feel Hareidim represent authentic Jewish religiosity.

The Hareidi community has provided a cadre of rabbis and teachers who staff Orthodox schools, supervise kashruth, control the rabbinic court system—and fill so many other roles in religious life. These personnel bring Hareidi teachings and values to their work, promoting a narrow, authoritarian, and obscurantist vision of Judaism. They follow the stringent halakhic rulings of their “gedolim”; they negate the halakhic authority of non-Hareidi scholars and teachers.

How can the situation be altered for the better? How can an intellectually vibrant, compassionate, and inclusive Orthodox Judaism assert its leadership and religious worldview? How can the Hareidization of Orthodoxy—with its concomitant negative consequences for the entire Jewish people—be stemmed? How can we reclaim an Orthodoxy that avoids extremism, authoritarianism, religious coercion, and unnecessary stringencies in halakha—an Orthodoxy that sees itself in a positive relationship with all Jews, Orthodox or not? How can we reclaim a halakhic/hashkafic program that promotes a grand vision of Judaism that sees Orthodox Judaism as a dynamic religious worldview, rather than as a narrow expression relevant only to a self-enclosed sect?

The answers to these questions will need to be found within the Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist community, which best represents the ideals we have been discussing in this essay. While not all Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist individuals think alike, just as not all Hareidi individuals fit the same mold, the essential components of an Orthodox religious renaissance are best manifested in the values and teachings of Modern Orthodoxy/Religious Zionism.

To reclaim Orthodox Judaism, we first need to transform the intellectual climate within Orthodoxy—to foster an intellectually vibrant, compassionate, and inclusive Orthodoxy that sees Judaism as a world religion with world responsibilities. We need to halt the slide to the right, and to battle fundamentalism, authoritarianism, and obscurantism in our homes, our schools, in our communal life. The Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist community must awaken itself to the challenges of our time, must organize and re-energize itself, and must engage in practical efforts to alter the negative features of the Orthodox status quo in Israel and the Diaspora.

Efforts to create a wiser and grander vision of Orthodoxy must entail active steps on the part of the Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist community:

1. The Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist community must re-assert its leadership in all areas of religious life; must create a religious climate that values commitment to the entire Jewish people in general, and to the State of Israel in particular; that fosters intellectual vibrancy, legitimate diversity of opinion, compassion, and inclusiveness.

2. The Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist rabbinic leadership must make a clear distinction between its vision of Orthodoxy and that of the Hareidi rabbinic leadership; must promote independence among its own rabbinic scholars; must not be intimidated by the spirit of R. Zecharyah ben Abkulas, but rather must have the courage to offer halakhic rulings that take into consideration the broad needs of the Jewish people.

3. Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist rabbis and teachers must take more active responsibility in schools, rabbinic courts, and in all areas that require Orthodox religious leadership. Rabbis and rabbinic judges must be appointed who are clearly dedicated to the State of Israel, and who seek to apply halakha for the benefit of the entire public, not just for their particularistic communities.

4. The Hareidi stranglehold on political/religious power bases must be broken loose. If the Israeli government, and private donors in the Diaspora, will cut funding to Hareidi institutions, this will lead to a dramatic reduction in their influence. If Hareidim have to support themselves and their own religious infrastructure, they will need to find gainful employment for their men and women, and train their children accordingly. The culture of “we are entitled to be supported by society” will be curbed.

5. Coalition governments in Israel must be formed that can operate successfully without depending on Hareidi political parties. As Hareidi political power in Israel wanes, Hareidism will become less attractive to Orthodox Jews both in Israel and the Diaspora.

6. The Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist community must recognize the responsibility to teach Torah Judaism in an intellectually open society; must not employ coercion—political or otherwise—to compel people to accept Orthodox teachings and practices; must be confident that the message of Torah is powerful enough to attract many minds and hearts, and that we need not fear competition in the marketplace of ideas.

7. The Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist community must demand that the State of Israel—and all Orthodox institutions in the Diaspora—recognize the validity of conversions performed by duly ordained and recognized Orthodox rabbis. Orthodox rabbis must be authorized to perform conversions according to their evaluation of each case, and to draw on the full range of halakhic opinion—not just the extremely rigid position imposed by the Hareidi rabbinic establishment. The Chief Rabbinate (or any other Orthodox rabbinic body) must not have the authority to invalidate any conversion performed by a Bet Din of Orthodox rabbis, nor may a halakhic conversion ever be annulled retroactively. The Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist rabbinate must become actively involved in guiding non-Jews who wish to convert to Judaism, helping them to achieve the goal of conversion if they genuinely seek to become members of the Jewish people.

8. The Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist community must demand immediate resolution of all current agunah cases, in Israel and the Diaspora, and must utilize every halakhic means to accomplish this goal. We must not be intimidated by those who take the approach of R. Zecharyah b. Abkulas, but must see the larger picture of what is at stake.

9. Finally, the Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist community must insist on the immediate implementation of policies that will address serious social and educational problems exacerbated by the current Hareidization of Orthodoxy in Israel and the Diaspora.

Some will argue that suggestions 7 and 8 will lead to disunity and to halakhic chaos. What, they ask, is the point of creating a group of converts or freed agunot whose halakhic status is rejected by the Hareidi “gedolim”? Won’t this cause more problems than it solves?

The answer is: we do not and should not cede halakhic authority to the Hareidi “gedolim” but should make responsible halakhic decisions within the Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist rabbinic leadership. If the Hareidim do not accept our rulings, that is their problem; this should not prevent us from doing what is right and proper. If Hareidim prefer to live in their sect-like communes and turn away our converts and freed agunot, the burden of responsibility and sin falls on them—not on us. We must remember that ancient Jerusalem was destroyed not only due to the narrow halakhic vision of R. Zecharyah b. Abkulas, but due to the acquiescence of the majority of rabbis who were afraid to stand up for a grander, more responsible vision.

Conclusion

In recent decades, Orthodox Judaism has become increasingly narrow, authoritarian, and sectarian. In this essay, we have discussed some of the negative ramifications of the growing Hareidization of Orthodoxy. We have argued that the Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist communities must energize themselves to reclaim Orthodoxy as an intellectually vibrant, compassionate, and inclusive lifestyle that has a meaningful message for all Jews—and for humanity as a whole.

While working to improve the spiritual climate in Israel and the Diaspora, we must concurrently foster specific policies that increase our representation in rabbinic roles, in lay leadership, in Jewish education—and indeed in general involvement in our societies. We must demonstrate our unflinching determination to resolve the halakhic controversies surrounding geirut, agunot, and other problems—by employing the full range of halakhic options, and by keeping in mind the ethical and national dimensions of our decisions.

The ways of the Torah are ways of pleasantness; all its pathways are peace. Orthodox Judaism must cling to this principle, and demonstrate to itself and to the world that the Torah way of life is sweet and beautiful, and that Torah scholars indeed increase peace and harmony in the world.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the situation of American Orthodoxy, see Samuel Heilman, Sliding to the Right, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006.
2. For a discussion of the struggles within nineteenth-century European Orthodoxy, see Adam Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2005.
3. For serious discussions of the Hareidim, see Amnon Levy, he-Hareidim. Keter Publishing House, Jerusalem, 1988; and Samuel Heilman, Defenders of the Faith. Schocken Books, New York, 1992.
4. See my books Voices in Exile: A Study in Sephardic Intellectual History, Ktav Publishing House, Hoboken, 1991; and Foundations of Sephardic Spirituality: The Inner Life of Jews of the Ottoman Empire, Jewish Lights, Woodstock, 2006.
5. Benzion Uziel, Mikhmanei Uziel, Tel Aviv, HaPoel HaMizrahi, 5699, p. 329.
6. Binyamin Lau, Hakhamim, vol. 1, Jerusalem, Beit Morashah, 2006, p. 263.
7. As reported in the “Israel Religion and State Index, Spring 2010,” published by Hiddush.
8. See my book, Choosing to Be Jewish: The Orthodox Road to Conversion, Ktav, 2005; and my article “Conversion to Judaism: Halakha, Hashkafa, and Historic Challenge,” in Hakira, vol. 7, Winter 2009, pp. 25–49, reprinted in this volume; Zvi Zohar and Avi Sagi, Giyyur veZehut Yehudit, Shalom Hartman Institute and Mosad Bialik, Jerusalem, 1997; Zvi Zohar and Avi Sagi, Transforming Identity, Continuum Press, London and New York, 2007. See also the monumental volumes of Rabbi Haim Amselem, Zera Yisrael and Mekor Yisrael, Jerusalem, 5770, where he cites an impressive array of halakhic authorities throughout the ages whose writings foster a much wider and more liberal view on conversion than that current among the Hareidi rabbinic establishment of today. Rabbi Amselem also published an important pamphlet demonstrating the halakhic objections to invalidating a conversion performed by a halakhic Bet Din, Libi leHokekei Yisrael, Jerusalem, 5770.
9. See my book, Loving Truth and Peace: The Grand Religious Worldview of Rabbi Benzion Uziel, Jason Aronson, Northvale, 1999, chapter 7.
10. Bein Yisrael le-Amim, Jerusalem, 5714, p. 82. See a fuller discussion of Rabbi Halevy’s views on religious coercion in Marc D. Angel and Hayyim Angel, Rabbi Haim David Halevy: Gentle Scholar and Courageous Thinker, Urim Publications, Jerusalem, 2006, pp. 72–75.

Holiday Reader

For Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Succoth

Prepared by Rabbis Marc and Hayyim Angel

For

The Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals

Eyes Open, Eyes Shut: Thoughts for Rosh Hashana

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

Paul Gaugin, the famous 19th century French artist, commented: “When I want to see clearly, I shut my eyes.”

He was referring to two different ways of perceiving reality. With our eyes open, we see surface reality—size, shape, color etc. But with our eyes shut, we contemplate the context of things, our relationship to them, the hidden meanings.

With our eyes open, a dozen roses are 12 beautiful flowers. With our eyes shut, they may be full of memories and associations—roses given or received on our first date; roses at our wedding; roses growing in our childhood home's back yard; roses on our grandmother’s Shabbat table.

How we see fellow human beings is also very different with open or closed eyes. With our eyes open, we see their physical features. With our eyes shut, we remember shared experiences, friendships, happy and sad moments. When we want to see clearly—comprehensively—we shut our eyes.

Mircea Eliade, a specialist in world religions, has written in his book, The Sacred and The Profane, about the pagan view of New Year. For them, human life is a series of recurring cycles, always on the verge of chaos. On New Year, people descend into this primordial chaos: drunkenness, debauchery, chaotic noise.

The Jewish view is radically different. For Jews, reality isn’t a hopeless cycle of returns to chaos, but a progression, however slow, of humanity. Rosh Hashana is not a return to primeval chaos, but a return to God, a return to our basic selves. Our New Year is observed with prayer, repentance, solemnity, and a faith that we can—and the world can—be better.

The pagan New Year is an example of seeing reality with open eyes. Things really do seem to be chaotic when viewed on the surface. Humanity does not seem to improve over the generations. We always seem to be on the verge or self-destruction.

The Jewish New Year is an example of viewing reality with our eyes shut, of seeing things more deeply, more carefully. While being fully aware of the surface failings of humanity, we look for the hidden signs of progress and redemption. We attempt to maintain a grand, long-range vision. This is the key to the secret of Jewish optimism. While not denying the negatives around us, we stay faithful to a vision of a world that is not governed by chaos, but by a deeper, hidden, mysterious unity.

The problem of faith today is not how to have faith in God. We can come to terms with God if we are philosophers or mystics. The problem is how can we have faith in humanity? How can we believe in the goodness and truthfulness of human beings?

With our eyes open, we must view current events with despair and trepidation. We see leaders who are liars and hypocrites. We see wars and hatred and violence and vicious anti-Semitism. We are tempted to think that chaos reigns.

But with our eyes shut, we know that redemption will come. We know that there are good, heroic people struggling for change. We know that just as we have overcome sorrows in the past, we will overcome oppressions and oppressors of today.

Eyes open and eyes shut not only relate to our perception of external realities, but also to our self-understanding. During the season of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, we focus on penitential prayers. We confess our sins and shortcomings. But as we think more deeply about our deficiencies, we also close our eyes and look for our real selves, our deeper selves, our dreams and aspirations.

Rabbi Haim David Halevy, late Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, noted that the high holy day period is symbolized by the shofar. The shofar must be bent, as a reminder that we, too, must bow ourselves in contrition and humility. But shortly after Yom Kippur comes Succoth, with the lulav as a central symbol. The lulav must be straight, not bent over. The lulav teaches us to stand strong and tall, to focus on our strengths and virtues. The holiday season, then, encourages us to first experience humility and contrition; but then to move on to self-confidence and optimism. Our eyes are open to our shortcomings; but when we shut our eyes, we also can envision our strengths and potentialities.

Rosh Hashana reminds us to view our lives and our world with our eyes open—but also with our eyes shut. We are challenged to dream great dreams, to seek that which is hidden, to see beyond the moment.

Rosh Hashana is a call to each individual to move to a higher level of understanding, behavior and activism. Teshuva—repentance—means that we can improve ourselves, and that others can improve, and that the world can improve.

This is the key to Jewish optimism, the key to the Jewish revolutionary vision for humanity, the key to personal happiness.

Changing the Channel: Thoughts for Rosh Hashana

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

In his short story, “The Last Channel,” Italo Calvino portrays a man who has been deemed to be insane. When this man watched television, he kept clicking his remote control button without watching any program for more than a few seconds. At some point, he started to take the remote control panel outside his house. He clicked it at buildings, stores, banks, neon signs, and at people.

But this man claimed that he was not at all deranged. In his defense, he stated that he kept clicking the remote control button because he did not like what he saw! He was looking for the “true” program, a program without drivel and artificiality and hypocrisy. He asserted: “There is an unknown station transmitting a story that has to do with me, MY story, the only story that can explain to me who I am, where I come from and where I’m going.”

This man flashed the remote control button because he was looking for the “real” program, the “real” city, his “real” self. He wanted to turn off the chaos and senselessness around him and was certain that if he kept clicking the remote button he would at last find the “right” channel.

While the man in Calvino’s story seems to have crossed the line between sanity and insanity, his desire for self-understanding and for the perfection of the world were not insane at all. Don’t we all wish we had a remote control button that we could click and make everything right, find the “real” picture, the “real” world that makes sense to us. When we confront lies and hatred, violence and injustice, hedonism and meanness—wouldn’t it be nice to have a button to click to change the channel to a better picture?

In some ways, the shofar of Rosh Hashana serves as our remote control button! It evokes a world yet in progress, a vision rooted in antiquity, fixed in the present, and arching into the distant future. It alludes to a “real” world, a finer world.

The original shofar dates back to the story of the Akeidah, when Abraham was called upon to bind Isaac on a sacrificial altar. The story teaches that God does not want child sacrifice. We are to demonstrate our faith not by murdering our children but by strengthening them in life. At the end of the episode, Abraham noticed a ram caught in the brambles by its horns. He offered the ram as a sacrifice in lieu of Isaac. The shofar blown on Rosh Hashana evokes memories of the Akeidah.

At the conclusion of the Akeidah narrative, the Torah informs us that Abraham and his retinue “rose up and went together to Be’er Sheva.” Why is this detail provided? Why do we need to know where Abraham went after the Akeidah?

If we look at the passage just before the recounting of the Akeidah, we find that “Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Be’er Sheva, and he called out there in the name of God Lord of the Universe.” The Akeidah was a setting of trauma, terror, spiritual confusion. Such a crisis could have broken anyone. But Abraham clicked his remote control button. He went back to Be’er Sheva and reconfirmed his faith in God Lord of the Universe. He found inner serenity, the power to transcend the vicissitudes and trials of life. He clicked on to a better channel! When faced with overwhelming crisis, it is right and proper to return to our starting point, to our essential selves, to our rootedness in our faith. The shofar prods us to seek a firm and grand framework for life.

Just as the shofar harks back to the Akeidah story, it also reminds us of the Revelation at Mount Sinai. That dramatic occasion was accompanied by “thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the sound of a shofar exceedingly loud.” The voice of God was heard by the trembling assembly. But we might ask: with all the thunder and lightning and voice of God, what need was there for the sound of a shofar?

The shofar’s essential sound is a teruah. The Torah refers to Rosh Hashana as Yom Teruah. The shofar is alluding to something mysterious and profound.

A teruah is a sound without words, a crying plaintive sound that does not verbally articulate anything. The shofar is symbolic of human feelings and thoughts that are too deep for words. The teruah transcends glibness; it pushes away banalities and pretenses. In a sense, it is a remote control button that allows us to penetrate beyond surface successes and failures, prompting us to think more carefully about our lives, about the world we live in. The teruah is the sound of self-understanding…and the sound of protest against an imperfect world and an unjust society.

And yet another symbol: the messianic age will be introduced with the sounding of the shofar. The shofar calls to mind the utopian vision of Judaism. We do not believe humanity is condemned to live forever with injustice, corruption, hatred and war. We may look at our contemporary world and be overcome with discouragement. The shofar reminds us: click the remote control button! A better time will surely come, redemption will emerge, a messianic age beckons to humanity.

The shofar suggests a grander, truer vision of who we are and who we can become. It cries out to us to keep striving for a better society and a better world. It invites us to strengthen our faith in the Almighty…and in ourselves. One day, we will find the right channel.

Shofar So Good: Thoughts for Rosh Hashana

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

The Shofar plays a central role in the Rosh Hashana liturgy and invariably is one of the highlights of the synagogue service. Its primordial sounds are meant to awaken us from spiritual slumber; and to evoke thoughts and emotions relating to the Akeida story, the Revelation at Sinai, and the Messianic Redemption.

The laws relating to the ritual propriety of a shofar can be understood to convey moral lessons. A shofar must be fashioned from one horn; a shofar that is patched together using different pieces of ram's horn is not kasher for use. The moral: we need to be "whole" human beings, true to ourselves, strong with personal integrity. If we are merely a patchwork of other people's ideas and values, we are not fulfilling our responsibility as autonomous human beings.

The shofar is not to be plated with gold in such a way as to alter its authentic sound. The moral: we are not to allow material prosperity to falsify our authentic voices. Nor are we to be impressed by wealthy individuals whose "voices" have been altered by their riches e.g. who arrogate to themselves rights and privileges simply because of their wealth. A person's human worth is not to be determined by how much or how little "gold" he/she has.

If the sound of the shofar is the result of an echo i.e. the person blew the shofar in a cave or through a microphone, then this does not satisfy the religious requirement of hearing the shofar. The moral: we need to concentrate on the real thing, not on echoes or artificial magnifications. The shofar serves its role not by how loud a noise it can make, but by how natural and authentic a sound it emits.

The shofar is supposed to be bent over into a curve. The moral: we are to be contrite when we come before the Lord, bowing in humility and with honest recognition of our weaknesses.

Thus, the shofar is imbued with important symbolic messages to help us be better human beings and more devoted Jews. May we all be sensitive to the messages of the shofar. May we all be blessed with a meaningful holiday season. May the Almighty bless us and our loved ones with a year of good health and happiness, peace for America, Israel, and the world.

Deeper Meanings: Thoughts for Shabbat Teshuva and Yom Kippur

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

Eleanor Roosevelt once noted: “Do not hesitate to do what you think you cannot do. Dare to reach beyond your perceived limits. Do not let yourself be trapped within the narrow confines of narrow thinking. Do not let past defeats and failures drag you down."

Yom Kippur is the ultimate day of Jewish optimism in our ability to grow, change, and redefine ourselves. It is a day to cleanse ourselves of our past failings and sins, and to
imagine ourselves beginning a new phase in our lives.

Yom Kippur aims at our spiritual selves. It calls for a transformation in the way we see things and the way we experience things. It wants us to confront reality more clearly than we have done in the past. Young or old, this is a time for renewal and re-invigoration.

There is a famous story about a shohet (ritual slaughterer) who came to a new town and wanted to be employed by the community. As was the custom, he came to the town’s rabbi and sought approval. The rabbi asked the shohet to demonstrate how he prepared the knife for the slaughter of animals. The shohet showed how he sharpened the knife; and he ran his thumb up and down the blade checking for any possible nicks. When he completed the demonstration, he looked to the rabbi for validation.

The rabbi asked: “From whom did you learn to be a shohet?”

The shohet answered: “I learned from the illustrious Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov.”

The rabbi replied: “Yes, you have performed the task of sharpening and checking the knife very well. However, you did not do so in the manner of the Baal Shem Tov. When the Baal Shem Tov checks the knife, he always has tears in his eyes.”

Yes, the shohet had learned the technical skills of his trade—but he did not plumb the depths of his work. He had not internalized the emotional, psychological and spiritual elements that were the hallmark of his teacher. He was technically proficient—but he had no tears in his eyes.

Religious life (and life in general!) can sometimes be technically correct; but at the same time it might be missing the inner spiritual content, the tears in the eyes. A synagogue service might be conducted with great accuracy, and yet fail to produce a real religious experience. A person might fast and pray all day on Yom Kippur, and yet be exactly the same person at the end of the day as he/she was at the beginning of the day.

If Yom Kippur is observed without our realizing the deeper significance of the moment, then it is just another lost opportunity.

Yom Kippur offers us purification, a fresh start, a revived spirit. It reminds us of who we are and who we can yet become. It dares us to transcend our past limits. If we experience Yom Kippur deeply and clearly, we will face the adventure of life with renewed strength and wisdom.

The MIshnah (Taanit 4:8) quotes Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel that Yom Kippur was one of the two happiest days on the Jewish calendar (the other being the 15th day of Av). We should draw on this spirit of optimism as we observe Yom Kippur, recognizing that this day offers us a unique gift: the gift of personal renewal.

Thoughts for Shabbat Teshuva and Yom Kippur

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

Although we popularly refer to the upcoming fast day as Yom Kippur, the Torah calls it Yom haKippurim—the day of atonements (in the plural). The plural form reminds us that there are many roads to atonement. Each person is different and is on a unique spiritual level; each comes with different insights, experiences, memories. The roads to atonement are plural, because no two of us have identical needs.

This season of Teshuvah and Kapparah—repentance and atonement—provides us with a special challenge and opportunity. We are granted a yearly period of time for intense evaluation of our lives. This period should serve as a springboard to deeper understanding and personal growth.

The first step in the process of spiritual renewal is to become humbly aware of our frailties. No matter how successful we think we are, we are mortal! We have limited physical capacities and a limited time of life on this earth. Aside from our physical limitations, we have moral and religious shortcomings that must be confronted. The Spanish thinker, Ortega y Gasset, suggested that a person grows only after confronting deep existential crisis. “These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.” The first goal of this season is to feel “shipwrecked.”

But when we do “come up against our own reality” we often reach a point of perplexity. How are we to make ultimate sense of our lives? How are we to understand the vagaries of human existence—disease, wars, injustice? How are we to deal with all the social and professional pressures? How can we cope with problems in our families and communities? How can we advance beyond the quagmire of fear and self-doubt?

The famous Hassidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk once asked: Where is God? And he answered: Where ever a human being lets Him in! If we want to feel the presence of God, we need to open ourselves to that experience. The season of Teshuvah and Yom haKippurim is a time to restore our relationship with the Almighty, to express our perplexities. This genuine experience of relationship with God gives us the inner strength to cope with our problems and perplexities.

A further step in the process of Teshuvah and Kapparah is balancing the feelings of alienation and belonging. We say to the Almighty: ki ger anokhi imakh; toshav kekhol avotai, I am a stranger with You, a sojourner as were all of my ancestors. What does this mean? I feel as though I am a stranger, alienated from God; there are barriers between me and You. But I want to be a sojourner, a permanent resident in Your presence, not a stranger or a passing visitor. I want to come home to the teachings and traditions of my ancestors who have maintained faith and courage for the past 3500 years.

A parable: A person tries to cut down a tree with a dull edged saw. He works very hard but makes little progress. A passerby sees this and asks: why don’t you sharpen the saw? The person responds: I don’t have time, I can’t stop working, I need to cut down this tree. The passerby says: But if you would stop working for a few minutes to sharpen the saw, you would actually save time and effort, and you would better be able to accomplish your goal! The person replies: No, I don’t have time to stop working, I must keep sawing.

Without the proper tools, we exert great energy but achieve inadequate results.

In spiritual life, too, we need proper tools. If we work with old habits, with stubborn attachment to stale and futile patterns, we will not grow. We need to think more clearly about our goals and how we can best attain them. Yom haKippurim provides a day when we take off from our usual routine. It is an entirely different kind of day from any other day of the year. It is a time to sharpen ourselves spiritually; to humbly face our limitations; to cope with our perplexities; to seek atonement and purification, to return to our spiritual core.

The season of Teshuvah and Kapparah provides us with a unique spiritual opportunity. Happy are they who can experience this season with an acute mind and alert spirit.

Thoughts for Yom Kippur

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

Fasting and praying are important ingredients of Yom Kippur and are signs of repentance for our transgressions against God. But, as is well known, Yom Kippur does not provide atonement for sins committed against human beings.

Maimonides teaches (Laws of Repentance, 2:9): “Repentance and the Day of Atonement only atone for sins between human beings and God, but interpersonal sins are never forgiven until a person has made restitution and appeased the one whom he has wronged….Even if he merely belittled a person with words, he must appease him and go to him until he is granted forgiveness.”

Rabbinic tradition has it that a person can expect to be judged by God with the same standard of judgment that a person applies to others. If one is mean-spirited and unfair in treatment of fellow human beings, these same qualities will be applied by the Heavenly court.

The Haftarah on the morning of Yom Kippur is drawn from Isaiah, where the prophet reminds the Israelites that God wants purity of behavior, compassion to the poor and downtrodden. God rejects outward shows of piety and insists on genuine righteousness. God chastises those who “bend their heads as a bulrush and spread a couch of sackcloth and ashes” when in fact they conduct their lives immorally. “Will you call this a fast and a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose, to loosen the fetters of wickedness, to undo the bonds of the yoke, sending the oppressed free and breaking every yoke? Is it not to break your bread for the hungry, and that you bring to your house the outcast poor…?”

It is said of the great 16th century sage, Rabbi Isaac Luria, that he would not recite his afternoon prayers until he first paid his workmen for their days’ labor. He reasoned: how can I appear before God if I do not meet my moral obligation to pay my workers on time? It is hypocritical to mouth pious words to God while at the same time being guilty of improper behavior and slander toward one’s fellow human beings.

It is customary among pious Jews to pay their debts on time, and certainly in advance of Yom Kippur. It is customary to make peace with those whom one has mistreated, disrespected, maligned or betrayed. It is customary to increase charitable contributions to those institutions that foster proper Torah values and that provide assistance to the needy.

Maimonides provides another very important lesson in his Laws of Repentance (2:10): “It is forbidden for a person to be cruel and to withhold forgiveness. Rather, one should be easy to pacify and difficult to anger. When a sinner asks forgiveness, one should grant it with a full heart and willing soul. Even if the other had sinned greatly against him and caused him much anguish, he should not take revenge or bear a grudge.”

Yom Kippur can be just another external show of piety; or it can be a transformative occasion. The decision is ours to make.

Am Yisrael Hai: Thoughts for Yom Kippur

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

Some years ago, my wife and I visited Rome. Among the historic sites we visited was the Arch of Titus--a monument to the Roman conquest of Judea in 70 C.E.  The Romans destroyed Jerusalem, razed the Temple, killed and enslaved many thousands of Jews--and sent our people into an Exile that lasted until the rise of the State of Israel in 1948.  On the inner wall of the Arch of Titus is a depiction of the Roman victory over the Jews, with the Romans carrying off the Menorah which had graced the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

This is a somber "tourist attraction" for Jews, recalling one of the most horrific times in the history of our people. How painful to see enemies gloating over our downfall! How heart-wrenching to see our Menorah carried off into captivity!

The day we visited the Arch of Titus, we saw a small bit of grafitti which someone had managed to write onto the monument. We obviously do not condone grafitti, but I confess that we derived some inner satisfaction from this particular grafitti. It was written in Hebrew letters, and it said: Am Yisrael Hai, the people of Israel lives.

The great Roman Empire declined and fell, and is no more. The Jewish people are here, alive and well. The Arch of Titus in its arrogant glee over the destruction of the Jews has, in fact, become a symbol of the decadence of the Roman Empire and the ultimate victory of the Jews. Titus, and his Empire, are long gone; the Jews are here: Am Yisrael Hai.

A central feature of the Yom Kippur synagogue service is the description of the rituals performed in the holy Temples in ancient Jerusalem. These structures served as spiritual centers for the people of Israel. They symbolized the unique covenant between God and Israel.  The Temples do not exist today; yet, when we read about the services that were conducted in them--we feel the power of the words: Am Yisrael Hai.

The people of Israel has found a way of living and flourishing and transmitting our teachings through the generations--even without these physical structures. Instead of animal sacrifices, we have prayers; instead of a central Temple, we have synagogues; instead of priestly spiritual leadership, we have Torah scholars.

We have not forsaken our covenant with God, nor has God abandoned HIs people Israel. While all of our ancient enemies have vanished, we continue to tell our story, to live and to build.

The Talmud reports that Rabbi Elazar ben Yosei visited Rome during the period following the Bar Kokhba rebellion in the second century C.E.  Rabbi Elazar, aside from being a Torah sage, was well-versed in Roman culture; he served as a diplomat of the Jewish people to the government of Rome. While in Rome, Rabbi Elazar saw some of the artifacts that the Romans had stolen from the Temple in Jerusalem.  “I saw the Parokhet (the curtain that covered the ark in the Temple) in Rome, and on it were several drops of blood from the Yom Kippur offering.” (Yoma 57a)

What was Rabbi Elazar thinking at that moment, when he stood face to face with a tangible vestige of the Temple, when he saw the drops of blood recalling the awesome Yom Kippur Temple ceremonies? What was he thinking at that moment, when he was serving as a representative of the remnant of Israel that had recently been vanquished by the mighty Roman Empire?

I imagine that Rabbi Elazar may have been thinking: Od Avinu Hai, Am Yisrael Hai. The God of Israel lives, the people of Israel lives--and we will ultimately prevail in bringing our message of ethical monotheism, compassion and justice to the entire world.

And that is the faith that has carried us through the generations. And that is the faith that will carry us into the future, proudly and confidently.

Happiness: Thoughts for Succoth

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

The Torah informs us that the festival of Succoth commemorates God’s providence over the Israelites during their years of wandering in the wilderness. An old question is: why was this holiday scheduled to begin specifically on the 15th day of Tishri? The dates for Pessah (15 Nissan) and for Shavuoth (6 Sivan) are clearly linked to historical events—the day of the Exodus and the day of the Revelation at Mount Sinai. But the wandering in the wilderness was ongoing for 40 years, with no particular historic connection to Tishri 15?

Rabbi Haim David Halevy, in his Torat Hayyim al ha-Moadim, suggests that the Tishri 15 date was specified by the Almighty so as to be parallel to the Nissan 15 date of Pessah. Since the Exodus from Egypt is so central to Jewish thought and observance, Pessah and Succoth were set exactly six months apart, to the day, in order to ensure that we experience the power of the Exodus on a regular basis every six months.

The great 18th century sage, Rabbi Hayyim Yosef David Azulai (known popularly as the Hidah), offers a different explanation in his Midbar Kedeimot. He notes that the lives of our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob overlapped for fifteen years. When Abraham died, his grandson Jacob was 15 years old. In rabbinic tradition Abraham is identified with Pessah, Isaac with Shavuoth, and Jacob with Succoth. (See Tur O.H. 417). Because of the merit of these extraordinary 15 years, the holy days of Pessah and Succoth were both set for the 15th of the month.

The Hidah is alluding to something deeper than the clever confluence of numbers. He suggests that the 15 years of shared lifetime among Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were a period of extreme happiness for the world. These three luminaries literally changed the course of history and brought humanity to a better understanding of the One God. Succoth, which is known in our tradition as the season of our happiness (zeman simhateinu), commemorates the extraordinary happiness and enlightenment that emerged at the founding of our nation.

Since Pessah (symbolized by Abraham) and Succoth (symbolized by Jacob) both occur on the 15th day of the month, this highlights the special link between grandfather Abraham and grandson Jacob. When grandparents and grandchildren share ideas and ideals, this is a sign of continuity, love…and genuine happiness. When there is a “generation gap,” there is sadness and alienation. Just as Pessah and Succoth are linked together by sharing the date of 15, so Abraham and Jacob are bound together by their shared 15 years of life.

Pessah and Succoth celebrate the Exodus from Egypt in ancient times. The relationship between Abraham and Jacob suggests the key to the future redemption of Israel—when the traditions are shared, loved and experienced by the generations of grandparents and grandchildren. A teacher of mine once quipped: Who is a Jew? Someone with Jewish grandchildren! While this is not an objectively true statement, it underscores a vital principle in the Jewish adventure: the importance of transmitting our teachings and values through the generations.

The genuine happiness that derives from family and national continuity does not just happen by chance. It is the result of deep devotion, strong commitment, and many sacrifices. There is a vast difference between happiness and amusement. Happiness entails a genuine and deep sense of wholeness. It is not attained casually. Amusement, on the other hand, is a passing sense of enjoyment. It is shallow and ephemeral. We laugh at a joke, we enjoy watching a sports event—but these amusements do not touch our souls in a lasting way. Happiness is achieved through active and thoughtful involvement; amusement is essentially a passive experience in which we sit back and wait to be entertained. Succoth, the festival of our happiness, reminds us to strive for genuine happiness, to be committed to transmitting our traditions through the generations, to distinguish between real happiness and shallow amusement.

Thoughts for Succoth

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

Interesting insights about Succoth have come from the pen of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), the First Earl of Beaconsfield. Disraeli was of Jewish birth, whose family had been associated with the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation in London. Although his father had Benjamin baptized to Anglicanism at age 12, Disraeli never denied his Jewish roots. He rose to become the first—and thus far only—British Prime Minister of Jewish ancestry.

Anti-Semites never forgave Disraeli’s Jewishness and constantly identified him as a Jew in spite of his conversion to Anglicanism. In response to a vicious anti-Semitic comment made in the British parliament, Disraeli famously retorted: “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the Right Honourable Gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”

Disraeli writes about Succoth in his novel, Tancred, originally published in 1847. Tancred was a young British nobleman who had a spiritual longing to visit the Holy Land. When he arrived, he spent time with a Jewish family and became acquainted with Jewish religious life. His visit coincided with Succoth, and he was told that this is a great national festival celebrating the harvest. He was shown the lulav and etrog, symbols of the autumn harvest. Tancred was deeply impressed.

Disraeli writes: “The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist, but the eternal law enjoins the children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that persist in celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards. What sublime inexorability in the law! But what indomitable spirit in the people!”

Disraeli notes that it is easier for “the happier Sephardim, the Hebrews who have never quitted the sunny regions that are laved by the Midland Ocean,” to observe the festival, since they can identify with the climate and setting of the early generations of Israelites who celebrated Succoth. “But picture to yourself the child of Israel in the dingy suburb or the squalid quarter of some bleak northern town, where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes. Yet he must celebrate the vintage of purple Palestine! The law has told him, though a denizen in an icy clime, that he must dwell for seven days in a bower….”

He continues with a description of the ignominies which Jews suffer in their ghettos in Europe “living amid fogs and filth, never treated with kindness, seldom with justice....Conceive such a being, an object to you of prejudice, dislike, disgust, perhaps hatred. The season arrives, and the mind and heart of that being are filled with images and passions that have been ranked in all ages among the most beautiful and the most genial of human experience; filled with a subject the most vivid, the most graceful, the most joyous, and the most exuberant…the harvest of the grape in the native regions of the vine.”

The downtrodden Jews, in observance of Succoth, find real joy in life. They decorate their Succahs as beautifully as they can; their families gather together to eat festive meals in the Succah. The outside world may be cruel and ugly; but their inner life is joyous and noble. Their external conditions may not seem too happy, but their internal happiness is real.

The Jews, while remembering the glories of the Israelite past, also dream of the future glories of the Israelites when their people will be restored to their ancient greatness.
Disraeli points to an important truth: happiness is essentially an internal phenomenon, a matter of one’s attitude and interpretation of reality. External conditions are less vital to genuine happiness than one’s internal state of mind.

By celebrating Succoth over the many centuries of exile, the Jewish people was able to maintain an inner strength and happiness, a vivid sense of the past and a powerful vision for the future. We are fortunate today to be living at a time when the sovereign State of Israel has been re-established. We may celebrate Succoth with the added joy of knowing that our historic dreams have begun to be realized.

We have regained our vineyards…we must aspire to the day when we may enjoy our vineyards in peace and security, free from the threats and hatred which continue to be aimed against our people. “A race that persist in celebrating their vintage…will regain their vineyards.” A people who persist in dreaming of a messianic era will ultimately see that dream fulfilled.

Succoth: Transience and Permanence

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

Sometimes it takes a crisis to remind us of the transience of life. It might be an illness, the death of a loved one, an accident, a shocking and tragic news report. At these crisis moments, we suddenly and starkly remember that we are mortal, that life on this earth is temporary.

When people confront their own mortality, they often come to the realization that time is precious; that life is too valuable to be frittered away on nonsense; that it is self-destructive to engage in petty feuds or egotistical competitions. It can take a crisis to help us live on a higher, happier level. Facing the transience of life, we take our living moments more seriously.

Succoth is a festival tuned in to the issue of life’s transience. The succah is a temporary structure, reminiscent of the wanderings of the Israelites in the wilderness in ancient times. It doesn’t have a roof, reminding us that we are subject to the vicissitudes of nature. The lulav, etrog, aravot and hadasim remind us of the harvest, of the recurring cycles of nature, the cycles of birth, growth, decline and death.

Interestingly, Succoth is known in our tradition as Zeman Simhateinu, the time of our rejoicing. On one level, this refers to the rejoicing of the harvest. On a deeper level, though, it may be alluding to the joy and inner freedom we attain when we confront the transience of life.

If we sulk in gloomy thoughts of the ephemeral quality of life, we can become grim and depressed. Succoth teaches that thoughts of life’s transience actually lead to happiness—not self-pity. It is our very mortality which provides the intensity and excitement of life.

That being said, we are strengthened when we turn our minds from human mortality to God’s eternality. There is an all-encompassing, undying Power that embraces and transcends all time and all change.

In Psalm 121, the Psalmist muses: “I lift my eyes unto the mountains, whence comes my help? My help is from the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth.” Why does the Psalmist look to the mountains? What do mountains have to do with the Psalmist’s call for help?

Most natural phenomena reflect change. The sun rises and sets. The moon goes through its phases. The stars sparkle at night, but are not visible during the day. Oceans, rivers and lakes are in constant motion. Mountains, though, are steady and unchanging (at least to the human eye). The Psalmist is crying out for help, and is seeking an image of something with permanence, something that can be depended upon: mountains.

In a similar vein, one of the names attributed to God is Tsur—Rock. In turning to the Lord, we seek an image of something powerful and unchanging.

While Succoth highlights the transience of life, it also turns our thoughts to the Eternal God who is not transient. The succah recalls the wanderings of the Israelites—but also the Divine Providence that watched over them for forty years. The lulav and etrog remind us of the changing seasons; but also of the Eternal God who created nature and the natural rhythms. We wave the lulav and etrog in all directions, as a symbol that God’s presence is everywhere, all-encompassing, and complete.

There is a story of a man who was given one wish by God. The man said: “I don’t want to die suddenly. My wish is that You give me fair warning before I die.” God agreed to this request.

Years later, the angel of death came to the man and said his time had come. The man objected, and called out to God: “But You promised that I would not die suddenly. You agreed to give me warning before I would die.”

God replied: “I gave you plenty of warnings. Look at your hair; it is all gray. Think of how your body has weakened and declined over these past years, how you walk so slowly, how your hands tremble when you write. All of these were warnings. You are not dying suddenly.”

The man bowed his head, and gave himself over to the angel of death. He realized that he had been given many warnings, but had never taken heed.

Succoth reminds us to pay attention to the warnings, to keep things in perspective, to appreciate the transience of life and the Eternity of God. It is the time of our rejoicing in the beauties of life, and the meaning of life.

Religion: Public and Private: Thoughts for Succoth

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

Most of our religious observances are indoors--in our homes, in our synagogues. We generally do not like to create a public spectacle of our religious experiences, but we behave modestly and try not to call attention to ourselves as we perform mitzvoth.

There are some exceptions to this. On Hanukkah, it is a particular mitzvah to publicize the miracle by placing our hanukkiyot where they can be seen by the passers-by. Succoth also has some aspects of taking our religious observances into the public square. The Talmud records the custom in ancient Jerusalem where people carried their lulavim into the street when they went to synagogue, when they visited the sick, and when they went to comfort mourners. Even today, many Jews carry their lulavim in public. When it comes to the succah itself, this structure is generally in view of the public: it's built on a patio, or yard, or courtyard etc. i.e. where Jews and non-Jews can see it

Although so much of our religious life is indoors--in the private domain of family and friends--we are sometimes obligated to make a public demonstration of our religious commitments. On Hanukkah, we want to remind the entire world that the Jews heroically defended themselves against the Syrian Hellenists and won independence for the Jewish people. We want everyone to know that, with God's help, we were victorious against powerful and far more numerous enemies.

On Succoth, we also want to convey a message to the general public. The lulav and etrog are symbolic of weapons; they indicate that we are proud of our faith and we are prepared to fight for the honor of our Torah and for our people. The succah is a symbolic statement that although we wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, God's providence protected us, and we ultimately entered the Promised Land. The public demonstration of these mitzvoth indicates our pride and commitment in who we are and what we represent. If we have respect for ourselves and our traditions, we can expect that the nations of the world will also come to respect Judaism.

Sometimes it is necessary for us to stand up in public on behalf of our faith and our people. When Jews betray their faith and their people in public, this undermines the entire Jewish enterprise. If Jewish storekeepers open their shops on Shabbat and holidays, why should non-Jews respect our Sabbath and holy days? If Jews ignore the laws of kashruth, why should non-Jews respect our dietary laws? If Jews don't live up to the high standards of Torah ethics, why should non-Jews admire the Jewish way of life? If Jewish political figures hold press conferences and public meetings on Jewish holy days, why should non-Jews show any deference to our holy days?

Succoth is an important reminder that being Jewish also entails a public stance, the courage to be who we are and stand for our traditions without embarrassment or apology.  If we do not stand up for ourselves, who will stand up for us? And if we do stand up for ourselves, we will be worthy heirs of a great people who have given so much--and have so much more to give--to our world.

Lies, Cries, Arise: Thoughts for Shemini Hag Atsereth

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

The Psalm associated with Shemini Hag Atsereth/Simhath Torah seems to be a strange choice. It is Psalm 12, a Psalm that Martin Buber has described as a prophecy “against the generation of the lie.” The Psalmist cries out: “Help, O Lord, for the pious cease to be…They speak falsehood each with his neighbor, with flattering lip, with a double heart they speak.” The generation is led by oppressors who say “our tongue will make us mighty,” who arrogantly crush the downtrodden.

Buber comments: “They speak with a double heart, literally ‘with heart and heart’…The duplicity is not just between heart and mouth, but actually between heart and heart. In order that the lie may bear the stamp of truth, the liars as it were manufacture a special heart, an apparatus which functions with the greatest appearance of naturalness, from which lies well up to the ‘smooth lips’ like spontaneous utterances of experience and insight.” (Good and Evil, New York, 1953, p. 10)

The Psalmist is not merely condemning his “generation of the lie,” but other future generations that also will be characterized by lying, bullying, oppressing; that will be led by smooth talking and corrupt demagogues. But the Psalmist turns prophet in proclaiming that God will arise and protect the victims of the liars. Truth will prevail. “It is You, O Lord, who will guard the poor, You will protect us forever from this generation.” And yet, the Psalm ends on a realistic note: “But the wicked will strut around when vileness is exalted among humankind.”

Although God will ultimately redeem the world from the “generation of the lie,” this will not happen right away. As long as people submit to the rule of the wicked, the wicked will stay in power. In the long run, God will make truth prevail over lies. In the short run, though, it is the responsibility of human beings to stand up against tyranny, lies, and arrogant smooth talking liars. If the wicked are not resisted, they will continue to strut around and feel invincible.

What does this Psalm have to do with Shemini Hag Atsereth/Simhath Torah, known in our tradition as Zeman Simhateinu, the time of our rejoicing? On a simplistic level, the Psalm might have been chosen because it opens with Lamnatseah al ha-Sheminith, to the Chief Musician on the Eighth (the “eighth” being a musical instruction). Since it mentions eight, it is thus connected with Shemini Hag Atsereth, the eighth day closing festival.

It would seem, though, that our sages must have had something deeper in mind in choosing Psalm 12 to be associated with this festival. In the Amidah of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, we include prayers asking the Almighty to inspire awe in all His creations and to have humanity acknowledge Him as Ruler of the universe. We pray for a time when “iniquity shall close its mouth and all wickedness vanish as smoke when You will remove the rule of tyranny from the earth.” On Succoth, our ancestors offered 70 offerings in the Temple, symbolically praying for the well-being and harmony of all humanity (understood by the rabbis to be composed of 70 nations). Psalm 12 is an appropriate continuation of these themes, and is a fitting reminder at the end of the holiday season that we depend on God to bring truth and peace to humanity.

But Psalm 12 adds an important dimension. Although we certainly must pray to the Almighty for redemption, we also bear responsibility for the sad state of human affairs. Prayer alone isn’t enough to solve our problems. We need to muster the courage to stand up against lies and tyranny, to uproot “the generation of the lie.”

Throughout the world, we see examples of simple people rising up against harsh and powerful tyrants. They risk their lives, their livelihoods, their families—but they have reached the breaking point where they can no longer tolerate the unjust tyrannies under which they live. Many suffer and die in the process—but ultimately, it is hoped that the masses of good people will prevail over the dictators and demagogues. People in power rarely cede their power peacefully and gracefully. The entrenched powers will do whatever they need to do to maintain their control.

Fortunately, we live in free societies. Although we certainly have our share of imperfect rulers and leaders, we also have a system that allows for change and peaceful transition. The people can take control by voting, by peaceful protests, by peaceful strikes. Many people are not willing to stand up and be counted. They are happy to pray for God to bring peace and truth to the world. They are comfortable letting others take the risks of fighting the establishment’s power base. Psalm 12 comes at the end of the holiday season to remind us: yes, God will make truth and justice prevail; but in the meanwhile, evil will persist as long as we let it persist.

Unless we are willing to stand up against the tyrants and demagogues, they will continue to crush us. They will continue their lies and p.r. spins and political manipulations. The concluding lesson we should take from this holiday season is: building a true, just and moral community and society depends on us.

Thoughts for Shemini Hag Atsereth and Simhat Torah

By Rabbi Marc D. Angel

On August 21, 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” one of the world’s most famous paintings, was stolen right off the wall of the Louvre museum in Paris. The crime wasn’t discovered until the next day. The Louvre was closed for a week due to the police investigation.

When the Louvre was re-opened, a line of people visited the museum to stare solemnly at the empty space on the wall where the “Mona Lisa” had once hung. One visitor left a bouquet of flowers. Indeed, until the painting was ultimately returned to the Louvre on December 30, 1913, throngs of visitors came to the museum to gaze at the blank wall! More people seem to have come to see the blank wall than had come in the previous two years to see the actual painting.

What motivated so many visitors to come to see the blank wall?

Perhaps it was sadness at the loss of a great art treasure.

Perhaps it was due to regret. Why hadn’t we come to see it more often while it was hanging? Why was security at the museum so lax?

Perhaps it was concern for the future. Will the “Mona Lisa” ever be found and returned?

Whatever the motivation, thousands of people came to the Louvre to stare at an empty space.

I think this episode can be understood as a parable of life.

Our lives are a collection of pieces of art—our family, friends, experiences, careers, successes.

We come to a blank wall: failures, losses.

We are struck with sadness. We have lost possibilities, opportunities, relationships.

We are struck with regret. We could have and should have done better with our lives.

We are concerned for the future. Can we restore our losses, or can we at least learn to live with our losses and failures?

We have come to the closing days of our holy day period. Rosh Hashana is a time to tour events of our past year and to re-examine the artwork of our lives. Yom Kippur is a time to recount sins and errors and to think about what we could have done better. Succoth is a time to celebrate our accomplishments in a spirit of happiness.

Then we come to Shemini Hag Atsereth—a blank wall. This is a holiday with no frills, no shofar, no fasting, no lulav, no succah. The blank wall symbolizes our sadness, regrets, possibilities, hopes, and aspirations.

After what we have experienced during the holiday season, we now reach a blank wall; we are called upon to start working on our new masterpiece—the life still ahead of us. It is time to rally our strength, our wisdom, our sensitivities to the needs of others.

The “blank wall” attracts us because it is latent with opportunities, it opens new challenges, it calls on us to imagine what we can be and what we can create in the year and years ahead.

It is fitting that Simhat Torah is associated with Shemini Hag Atsereth. This is a reminder that the art of the blank wall can be meaningfully restored if we ourselves rejoice in our Torah heritage. The spiritual power of Torah has infused the Jewish people for thousands of years—and it has the power to help each of us develop our lives into a new, beautiful masterpiece.

Above Tragedy: Thoughts for Simhat Torah

by Rabbi Marc D. Angel

We have spent many months reading about the life of Moses. Today, in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Torah, we read about his death—a very agonizing scene. Moses, the great leader, teacher, and prophet, climbs to the summit of Mount Nebo and looks out over the horizon at the Promised Land. As he stands silent and alone, God tells him: “You are beholding the land that I have promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob saying, ‘I shall give it to your descendants.’ See it with your eyes. You shall not cross into the land.”

What thoughts must then have tortured Moses! What anguish must have filled his soul! To dream, to work a whole lifetime for something and then to be told in final terms that your hopes would never be realized…Is this not the heart of tragedy?

Most commentators seek a reason for such a tragic ending to Moses’ life. They look for a sin committed by Moses to explain his punishment. Some say it was the breaking the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Others suggest that it was his striking the stone with his staff, rather than speaking to it.

I could never understand these commentators. Certainly, Moses sinned; but which human being has never sinned? Moreover, his sins were really not serious. He had good reason to be enraged when he found his people worshiping the golden calf. And the difference between striking the stone and speaking to it is, after all, insignificant. The event was still miraculous. Certainly, Moses did so many great things for which he deserved reward. He was the only human being to see God “face to face.” He was the greatest prophet, the greatest teacher, the most dedicated leader. Certainly, he was worthy of entering the Promised Land.

Moses was not being punished for a sin. Rather, the Torah is describing in a very vivid way something about the human predicament. Death is a built-in part of human existence. Though we may have noble ideals, though we may work hard, we cannot expect to fulfill all of our ambitions. Moses, perhaps the most ideal character in the Bible, was plagued by being mortal; and great mortals simply cannot realize all of their hopes. This is a profound truth of the nature of humankind.

Today, we are also introduced to another biblical character, Adam. I think it is very ironic that the birth of Adam and the death of Moses are juxtaposed in today’s Torah readings. Adam was given paradise. He was a man who had no dreams or ambitions, for he had everything he wanted. He was complacent, satisfied, and untroubled by ideals.
Existing in such a state, though, is problematic, because there is no motivation for living. If there is no place for one to advance, he must fall back. And so, Adam fell. But whereas Moses was a tragic hero, Adam was just plain tragic. Whereas Moses had lived his life working toward a dream so that when death came it tragically cut off a living force, Adam never knew the value of life; his fall from paradise is far less climactic.

Ultimately, being mortals, we each have the choice of being either tragic heroes or simply tragic. In which category do we belong?

Unfortunately, many of us are satisfied with ourselves, with our wealth, with our social position. We are especially complacent in the realm of our religious attainments. We think we practice our religion properly and do enough mitzvoth.

Today, on Simhat Torah, we completed the reading of the Torah. We could have said that we have finished our study, we are content. But we did not do these things. We began immediately to read Bereishith. We started the Torah all over again. We know that we will never fully comprehend the Torah or fully realize its sacred dreams—but we move forward and onward. We cannot rest from the Torah; to rest is to become tragic.

As Jews, therefore, we are part of a tradition that not only thrives on noble ideals, but which loves noble actions. Like Moses, we should seek to keep our religious ideals and practices on fire within us, so that they give light not only to ourselves but to all who come near us. We should devote our lives to attaining religious perfection for ourselves and for our society; and though we may never enter the Promised Land, we will be able to stand on a summit and see our dreams realized in the future through our children. We may never walk into the land, but we will have led an entire generation to the point where they can enter.

Extremely Religious Without Religious Extremism:

The Binding of Isaac as a Test Case for the Limits of Devotion[1]

By Rabbi Hayyim Angel

Introduction

The Akedah, or binding of Isaac (Gen. 22:1–19),[i] is a foundational narrative in Jewish tradition. It plays a prominent role on Rosh Hashanah, and many communities include it in their daily morning liturgy.

The Akedah is a religiously and morally challenging story. What should we learn from it with regard to faith and religious life? Perhaps more than any other narrative in the Torah, the Akedah teaches how one can and should be extremely religious, but also teaches how to avoid the dangers of religious extremism. This essay will consider the ideas of several modern thinkers who explore the religious and moral implications of the Akedah.

Why Did Abraham Not Protest?

Although the idea of child sacrifice is abhorrent to us, it made sense in Abraham’s historical context. Many of Israel’s neighbors practiced child sacrifice. When God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham may have surmised that perhaps God required this of him. Of course, God stopped Abraham and went on to outlaw such practices as a capital offense (Lev. 18:21; 20:2–5). We find child sacrifice abhorrent precisely because the Torah and the prophets broke rank with large segments of the pagan world and transformed human values for the better.[ii]

In its original context, then, the Akedah highlights Abraham’s exemplary faithfulness. He followed God’s command even when the basis of the divine promise for progeny through Isaac was threatened.[iii]

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was deeply troubled by the Akedah. He maintained that nobody is certain that he or she is receiving prophecy, whereas everyone knows with certainty that murder is immoral and against God’s will. Therefore, Abraham failed God’s test by acquiescing to sacrifice Isaac. According to Kant, Abraham should have refused, or at least protested.[iv]

However, the biblical narrative runs flatly against Kant’s reading. After the angel stops Abraham from slaughtering Isaac, the angel proclaims to Abraham, “For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me” (Gen. 22:12). God thereby praises Abraham’s exceptional faith and commitment.[v]

Adopting a reading consistent with the thrust of the biblical narrative, Rambam draws the opposite conclusion from that of Kant. The fact that Abraham obeyed God demonstrates his absolute certainty that he had received true prophecy. Otherwise, he never would have proceeded:

[Abraham] hastened to slaughter, as he had been commanded, his son, his only son, whom he loved…. For if a dream of prophecy had been obscure for the prophets, or if they had doubts or incertitude concerning what they apprehended in a vision of prophecy, they would not have hastened to do that which is repugnant to nature, and [Abraham’s] soul would not have consented to accomplish an act of so great an importance if there had been a doubt about it (Guide of the Perplexed 3:24).[vi]

Although Rambam correctly assesses the biblical narrative, there is still room for a different moral question. After God informs Abraham about the impending destruction of Sodom, Abraham pleads courageously on behalf of the righteous people who potentially lived in the wicked city, appealing to God’s attribute of justice (Gen. 18:23–33).[vii] How could Abraham stand idly by and not challenge God when God commanded him to sacrifice his beloved son?

By considering the Abraham narratives as a whole, we may resolve this dilemma. Abraham’s actions in Genesis chapters 12–25 may be divided into three general categories: (1) responses to direct commands from God; (2) responses to promises or other information from God; and (3) responses to situations during which God does not communicate directly with Abraham.

Whenever God commands an action, Abraham obeys without as much as a word of protest or questioning. When Abraham receives promises or other information from God, Abraham praises God when gratitude is in order, and he questions or challenges God when he deems it appropriate. Therefore, Abraham’s silence when following God’s commandment to sacrifice Isaac is to be expected. And so are Abraham’s concerns about God’s promises of progeny or information about the destruction of Sodom. The Torah thereby teaches that it is appropriate to question God, while simultaneously demanding faithfulness to God’s commandments as an essential aspect of the mutual covenant between God and Israel.[viii]

The Pinnacle of Religious Faith

Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz suggests that Abraham and Job confronted the same religious test. Do they serve God because God provides all of their needs, or do they serve God under all conditions? Both were God-fearing individuals prior to their trials, but they demonstrated their unwavering commitment to God through their trials.[ix]

            Professor Moshe Halbertal derives a different lesson from the Akedah. God wishes to be loved by us, but pure love of God is almost impossible, since we are utterly dependent on God for all of our needs. We generally express love through absolute giving. When sacrificing to God, however, we always can hold out hope that God will give us more. Cain and Abel could offer produce or sheep to God, but they likely were at least partially motivated to appeal to God for better crops and flocks next year. What can we possibly offer God that demonstrates our true love?

            Through the Akedah, God gives Abraham the opportunity to offer a gift outside of the realm of exchange. Nothing can replace Isaac, since his value to Abraham is absolute. As soon as Abraham demonstrates willingness to offer his own son to God, he has proven his total love and commitment. As the angel tells Abraham, “For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me” (Gen. 22:12).

Halbertal explains that Abraham’s offering a ram in place of Isaac becomes the paradigm for later sacrifice. Inherent in all sacrifice in the Torah is the idea is that we love God to the point where we are prepared to sacrifice ourselves or our children to God. The animal serves as a substitution. The Akedah thereby represents the supreme act of giving to God.[x]

The ideas explored by Professors Leibowitz and Halbertal lie at the heart of being extremely religious. Abraham is a model of pure, dedicated service and love of God. Such religious commitment is ideal, but it also comes with the lurking danger of religious extremism. We turn now to this critical issue.

Extremely Religious Without Religious Extremism

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) composed a classic work on the Akedah, entitled Fear and Trembling. He argued that if one believes in religion because it appears reasonable, that is a secular distortion. True religion, maintains Kierkegaard, means being able to suspend reason and moral conscience when God demands it. Kierkegaard calls Abraham a knight of faith for his willingness to obey God and sacrifice his son.

            Although Kierkegaard did not advocate violence in the name of religion, his view is vulnerable to that horrific outcome. In his philosophy, serving God must take precedence over all moral or rational concerns. A fatal problem arises when the representatives of any religion claim that God demands violence or other forms of immorality.

In a powerful article written in the wake of the terrorist attack on New York City on September 11, 2001, Professor David Shatz addresses this urgent question.[xi] He observes that in general, one must create a system that balances competing ideals in order to eliminate ideological extremism. For example, one may place law against liberty, self-respect against respect for others, and discipline against love. In religion, however, there is a fundamental problem: Placing any value against religion, especially if that competing value can prevail over religion, defeats religious commitment.

Professor Shatz suggests a way to have passion for God tempered by morality and rationality without requiring any religious compromise. One must embrace morality and rationality as part of the religion. The religion itself must balance and integrate competing values as part of the religion. This debate traces back to Rabbi Saadiah Gaon, who insisted that God chooses moral things to command. In contrast, the medieval Islamic philosophical school of Ash‘ariyya maintained that whatever God commands is by definition good.[xii]

Kierkegaard’s reading of the Akedah fails Professor Shatz’s solution to religious extremism and is therefore vulnerable to the dangers of immorality in the name of God. In fact, Kierkegaard’s reading of the Akedah fails the Torah itself: God stops Abraham, and then repudiates child sacrifice in the Torah. Whereas Kierkegaard focuses on Abraham’s willingness to suspend morality to serve God, God rejects immorality as part of the Torah’s religion. The expression of religious commitment in the Torah is the fear of God, which by definition includes the highest form of morality.[xiii] There must never be a disconnect between religious commitment and moral behavior, and Israel’s prophets constantly remind the people of this critical message.[xiv] Thus, the Torah incorporates morality and rationality as essential components of its religious system.

In a similar spirit, Rabbi Shalom Carmy maintains that the Akedah teaches religious passion without fanaticism, and that even when a God-fearing individual keeps God’s commandments, he or she remains responsive to the validity of the ethical.[xv]

It also is important to stress that people who act violently in the name of religion generally are not crazy. Rather, they are following their religious system as they understand it and as their clerics teach it. Such manifestations of religion themselves are evil and immoral. Postmodernism thinks it can relativize all religion and thereby protect against the violence generated by religious extremism. In reality, however, postmodernism achieves the opposite effect as its adherents no longer have the resolve to refer to evil as evil and to battle against it. Instead, they try to rationalize evil away. This position empowers the religious extremists.[xvi]

Professor Shatz acknowledges that, lamentably, there are negative extremist elements among some Jews who identify themselves as religious. However, their attempts to justify their immorality with Torah sources in fact do violence to our sacred texts.[xvii] Such Jews are not extremely religious, but rather pervert the Torah and desecrate God’s Name. Similarly, all religions must build morality and rationality into their systems so that they can pursue a relationship with God while avoiding the catastrophic consequences of religious extremism. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has remarked, “the cure of bad religion is good religion, not no religion.”[xviii]

Conclusion

The Akedah teaches several vital religious lessons. Ideal religion is about serving God, and is not self-serving. We aspire to be extremely religious, and Abraham serves as a paragon of the ideal connection to God. The Akedah also teaches the key to avoid what is rightly condemned as religious extremism. Morality and rationality must be built into every religious system, or else its adherents risk lapsing into immorality in the name of their religion.

            One of the best means of promoting our vision is to understand and teach the underlying messages of the Akedah. We pray that all faith communities will join in affirming morality and rationality as being integral to their faiths. It is imperative for us to serve as emissaries of a different vision to what the world too often experiences in the name of religion, to model the ideal fear of Heaven that the Torah demands, and ultimately to sanctify God’s Name.

Notes

Introduction

One of the great rabbinic lights of the twentieth century was Rabbi Benzion Meir Hai Uziel (1880–1953). Born in Jerusalem, he served as Chief Rabbi of Tel-Aviv from 1911 to 1921, and then was Chief Rabbi of Salonika for two years. In 1923, he returned to Israel and assumed the post of Chief Rabbi of Tel-Aviv. From 1939 until his death in 1953, he was the Sephardic Chief Rabbi, the Rishon le-Tzion, of Israel. He served as Chief Rabbi during the founding of the State of Israel and wrote extensively on the halakhic ramifications of the State and the staggering changes in Jewish life it would bring.

            Rabbi Uziel believed that the purpose of the State of Israel on the world scene is to serve as a model nation, characterized by moral excellence. Just as individuals are religiously required to participate in the life of society, the Jewish people as a nation must participate in the life of the community of nations.

Tanakh and rabbinic Judaism have a universalistic grand vision that sees Judaism as a great world religion. Unfortunately, too many religious Jews overemphasize the particularistic aspects of Judaism, and lose sight of the universalistic mission of the Torah. We cannot be a light unto the nations unless nations see that light through Jewish involvement.[1]

Rabbi Uziel stressed the need for Jews to remain committed to Torah and the commandments. If Jews abandon their commitment to Torah, then they no longer are united under their national charter. Any vision not solidly rooted in the Torah and halakhah is untrue to Jewish experience. People who speak about “Jewish values” without commitment to Torah and halakhah misrepresent the Torah.[2]

            Simultaneously, Rabbi Uziel was absolutely committed to Jewish unity. In 1948–1949, he joined many other rabbis to protest against Shabbat desecration in Israel. At a large rally, Rabbi Uziel gave an impassioned speech urging Shabbat observance. After the rally, he hailed a taxi to take him home. In those days there was a fuel shortage in Israel, so Israeli taxi drivers were allowed to drive only six days a week. On one’s windshield, a sticker would indicate which day the person would not drive. The particular taxi that Rabbi Uziel hailed did not have a shin (for Shabbat), meaning that this driver drove on Shabbat. Some of Rabbi Uziel’s followers were shocked that he would ride with this Shabbat-desecrating driver, especially only minutes after he spoke so passionately in favor of Shabbat at the rally. Without flinching, Rabbi Uziel got into the taxi and said, “I do not excommunicate any Jew personally, even if he is a Shabbat desecrator.”[3]

            Rabbi Uziel craved peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors. In 1921, a group of Arabs were attacking Jews. Rabbi Uziel appeared, dressed in his rabbinic garb, and told the Jews to hold their fire. He then walked out and spoke to the Arabs in Arabic. He reminded them that the land had been desolate and disease-ridden for centuries, and now Jews were dramatically improving conditions as they rebuilt their homeland. These were all signs of God’s providence, and the improved conditions would benefit everyone.

Rabbi Uziel then addressed the Arab attackers: “Our cousins! Our mutual ancestor, Abraham, father of Isaac and Ishmael, when he saw that his nephew Lot felt constricted and complained that they could no longer live together… said to him: Let there be no feud between me and you nor between my shepherds and your shepherds, for we are brothers. So, too, do we say to you: The land will carry us all, will sustain us all. Let us stop the feuds between us. We are brothers.” For that moment, Rabbi Uziel won the day, and the Arabs stopped their attack.[4]

In 1939, when Rabbi Uziel was appointed as Chief Rabbi, he gave a radio address calling for peace and unity in the nation. He then addressed the Arab population:

We reach our hands out to you in peace, pure and trustworthy. We say: The land is stretched out before us, and with joined hands we will work it; we will uncover its treasures; and we will live on it as brothers who dwell together. Know and trust that the word of our God will rise forever. Make peace with us and we will make peace with you. Together all of us will benefit from the blessing of God on His land; with quiet and peace, with love and fellowship, with goodwill and pure heart we will find the way of peace.[5]

            Rabbi Uziel was an ardent religious Zionist who believed that rabbis had to apply halakhah in ways that would allow the fledgling State of Israel to thrive. When there were halakhic debates, he relied on lenient opinions when they would build industry and serve society. For example, he permitted grafted etrogim (citrons) grown in Israel since he wanted all Jews to use Israeli etrogim on Sukkot. He similarly relied on a minority halakhic opinion to permit milk from cows who receive inoculations to prevent stomach disease. If he did not rely on those permissive opinions, the cows would be considered terefah, non-kosher, and there would not be a dairy industry in Israel.

Of course, Rabbi Uziel found halakhic precedents for his permissive rulings, and relied on those positions in order to protect Israeli agriculture. He was not always lenient in his halakhic rulings, but in the case of building the State of Israel, Rabbi Uziel had a clear value system that guided his decision-making to the extent that he could improve life in Israel within the parameters of halakhah.[6]

Rabbi Uziel and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook[7]

            It is instructive to contrast the rulings of Rabbi Uziel with another exceptional rabbinic leader of the early twentieth century, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Israel.

            Rambam espoused a non-essentialist understanding of a Jew. There is nothing inherent in a Jewish soul that distinguishes it from a non-Jewish soul. Jews are a covenantal nation with a unique set of laws from God in the Torah, and also are part of the community of nations. There is no room for racism, since all humans are created in God’s Image, and all people are part of one family.[8] In contrast, some Jewish mystical teachings espouse an essentialist position, maintaining that Jewish souls are fundamentally different from (and superior to) non-Jewish souls.[9]

Aside from the possibility of negative attitudes toward non-Jews that the essentialist position often promotes, it also has practical halakhic ramifications. For example, someone asked Rabbi Kook in 1931 whether Jews can perform autopsies in medical school since this process will help them save lives when they become doctors. Halakhah generally prohibits the desecration of a human body, but perhaps this concern should be waived on account of the future saving of lives. Rabbi Kook ruled that medical schools should obtain bodies of non-Jews. He argued that even though everyone is created in God’s Image, this Image is particularly manifest in Jews because of the holiness of the Torah. Jewish attachment to the Torah not only characterizes the Jewish soul but also infuses a Jew’s body with additional sanctity.

Rabbi Uziel vehemently disagreed with Rabbi Kook’s ruling. Autopsies for medical school are not a desecration of human bodies if the cadavers are treated with care and the purpose is to help save lives. When asked whether it was preferable to use non-Jewish bodies, Rabbi Uziel retorted, “Certainly this should not even be said and more certainly should not be written, since the prohibition of desecration stems from the humiliation caused to all humans. That is to say, it is a humiliation to desecrate the body of a human being—created in the image of God.”

Rabbi Uziel thereby advanced two arguments: An essentialist position is fundamentally wrong, and an essentialist position is shameful to publicize in any forum.

            In another discussion over the interface between Torah and democracy, rabbis debated whether women were halakhically permitted to vote or hold public office. Rabbi Kook ruled in the negative, insisting that this behavior was immodest and would threaten Jewish family values and morality. Offering a broader context for Rabbi Kook’s ruling, Dov Schwartz explains that Rabbi Kook opposed women’s voting and holding office since the British government recognized the right for a Jewish homeland based on the authority of Tanakh. Rabbi Kook insisted that Jews had to behave according to Torah values—not only because that is God’s will, but also because it was essential for continued British recognition of Israel. If Jews are not behaving modestly in accordance with Torah values, opponents of Israel would argue that Jews do not deserve their homeland.[10]

            In contrast, Rabbi Uziel maintained that women may vote and hold office. We allow interactions between men and women in so many public areas, so there is no valid halakhic argument for the absolute separation of the sexes specifically in the realm of voting. Additionally, women should be allowed to vote for the people who will make the laws that they must obey. In terms of women holding office, classical sources indicate that halakhic objections to women holding positions of authority (serarah) apply only when the community objects to women holding office. However, if women are democratically elected, that means that the public accepts them.[11]

Conclusion

            Before he died, Rabbi Uziel composed a spiritual testament, describing his ultimate life goals:

To spread Torah among students, to love the Torah and its mitzvot, to love the land of Israel and its holiness, to love absolutely every Jewish man and woman and the people of Israel in its entirety; to love God, the Lord of Israel; to bring peace among all Jews physically and spiritually, in their words and actions, in their thoughts and in the ruminations of their hearts, in all their steps and deeds, at home and in the street, in the village and in the city; to bring true peace in the house of Israel, to the entire congregation of Israel in all its subdivisions and groupings; and between Israel and their Father in heaven. These goals are actually only one, since they stem from one source, namely the Torah of the living God and the King of the universe, Who is the King of Israel and its Holy One Who gave the true Torah to His people, a Torah all of whose ways are pleasantness and all of whose paths are peace.[12]

How the Torah Broke with Ancient Political Thought[1]

by Joshua Berman

For some, the proposition that the Torah needs to be understood in its ancient context seems to diminish from the sacredness and divinity of the text. However, it is precisely through appreciating the Torah in its ancient context that we can arrive at a set of illuminating insights into how the Torah stands out from that context and reveals its divinity, particularly in its approach to political thought.

In ways that were astonishingly new and counterintuitive, and in ways that served the purposes of no known interest group, the political philosophy of the Torah rose like a phoenix out of the intellectual landscape of the ancient Near East. Throughout the ancient world the truth was self-evident: All men were not created equal. It is in the five books of the Torah that we find the birthplace of egalitarian thought. When seen against the backdrop of ancient norms, the social blueprint espoused by the Torah represents a series of quantum leaps in a sophisticated and interconnected matrix of theology, politics, and economics.

Equality: A Brief History

To appreciate the claim that the Torah represents the dawn of egalitarian thought, let us set the idea in historical perspective. It is only in the European revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that we find the rejection of the privileges of rank and nobility that resulted in the delegitimation of entrenched caste, feudal, and slave systems. Greece and Rome had known their respective reformers, yet nowhere in the classical world do we find a struggle to do away with class distinctions. Nor do we find this articulated as a desideratum by any of the ancient authors in their ideal systems. “From the hour of their birth,” wrote Aristotle, “some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”[2] It was assumed that some would be rich and that many, many more would be poor—not simply because that was the way things were, but because that was the way things were actually supposed to be. Justice, for Aristotle, meant that equals would be treated as equals and unequals as unequals. The Greeks and Romans possessed an overwhelming belief in the harmony of various classes.

The medieval mindset, too, believed that an ordered society was one in which each socioeconomic class performed its tasks for the common good. Social stratification was likewise endemic to the empires and lands of the ancient Near East. Nowhere in the region is there articulated the ideal of a society without class divisions founded on the control of economic, military, and political power. It is not merely that the notion of social mobility was unknown to the ancient world; it would have been unthinkable. These cultures believed that the only way that a society could function was if everyone knew his or her station in life. The modern ideas of free choice and equal opportunity would have struck them as surefire recipes for anarchy and chaos. It is in the books of the Torah that we find the world’s first blueprint for a social and religious order that seeks to lessen stratification and hierarchy and to place an unprecedented emphasis on the well-being and status of the common person.

Religion and Class in the Ancient World

The Torah’s revolution of political thought begins with its theology. The attempt to treat things political as distinct from things religious is a thoroughly modern notion; in not a single culture in the ancient Near East is there a word for “religion” as distinct from “state.” To appreciate the ancient mindset and the conceptual default settings that it supplied, imagine that we are archaeologists digging up an ancient culture called “America.” Deciphering its religious texts, we discover that the paramount god of the pantheon bore the title “Commander in Chief,” resided in a heavenly palace called “White House,” and would traverse the heavens in his vehicle, “Chariot One.” We further discover that Commander in Chief had a consort known as “First Lady”—herself a goddess of apparently meager powers, yet assumed by some to be a barometer of desirable values and fashionable dress. In the heavens was another palace, this one domed and populated by 535 lesser, regional deities, who routinely schemed and coalesced into partisan groupings, and who were known, on occasion, to have been able to depose the Commander in Chief.

Put differently, what we would discover is that the institutional order “down below” manifests the divine order of the cosmos “up above.” This phenomenon, wherein the political structure of the heavens mirrored that of the earthly realm, was widespread in the ancient world, and it is easy to see why. Political regimes are, by definition, artificial, constructed, and therefore tenuous. Always implicit is the question: Why should he reign? The imposed institutional order can receive immeasurable legitimation, however, if the masses underfoot believe that it is rooted in ultimate reality and unchanging truth, that the significance of the political order is located in a cosmic and sacred frame of reference. Ancient religion is the self-interested distortion that masks the human construction and exercise of power.

For example, we find that Enlil, the chief god of the Mesopotamian pantheon, utterly resembles his earthly counterpart, the king. Enlil, like his earthly counterpart, rules by delegating responsibilities to lesser dignitaries and functionaries. Like his earthly counterpart, he presides over a large assembly. He resides in a palace with his wives, children, and extended “house.” Generally speaking, the gods struggled to achieve a carefree existence and enjoyed large banquets in their honor. Like kings, gods needed a palace, or what we would call a temple, where they, too, could reside in splendor in separation from the masses, with subjects caring for them in a host of earthly matters.

If a god wanted something—say a temple repaired, or the borders expanded—he communicated through various agents with the king, and the king was his focus. The gods never spoke to the masses, nor imparted instruction to them. Within ancient cosmologies, the masses served a single purpose: to toil and offer tribute. They were servants, at the lowest rung of the metaphysical hierarchy. The gods were interested in the masses to the extent that a baron or feudal lord would have interest in ensuring the well-being of the serfs that run the estate and supply its needs. Servants, no doubt, play a vital role in any monarchical order, but it is an instrumental role. From an existential perspective, it is a decidedly diminished and undignified role.

Religion and Class in the Torah

By contrast, the Torah’s central accounts—the Exodus and the Revelation at Sinai—preempt claims of election and immanent hierarchy within the Israelite nation. The Exodus story effectively meant that no member of the children of Israel could lay claim to elevated status. All emanate from the Exodus—a common, seminal, liberating, but most importantly equalizing event. Although we normally think of the Revelation at Sinai in religious terms, its political implications are no less dramatic, and constitute the bedrock of the Torah’s egalitarian theology. Elsewhere, the gods communicated only to the kings, and had no interest in the masses. But at Sinai, God spoke only to the masses, without delineating any role whatever for kings and their attendant hierarchies. The ancients had no problem believing that the gods could split the seas, or descend on a mountaintop in a storm of fire. Nevertheless, the stories of the Exodus and Sinai necessitated an enormous stretch of the imagination, because they required listeners to believe in political events that were without precedent and utterly improbable, even in mythological terms. Slaves had never been known to overthrow their masters. Gods had never been known to speak to an entire people.

The pact or covenant between God and Israel displays many common elements with what are known in biblical studies as ancient Near Eastern vassal treaties, which were formed between a great king and a weaker one. In these treaties, we typically find that the more powerful king acts on behalf of a weaker, neighboring king; sensing an opportunity to foster a loyal ally, he may send food during a famine, or soldiers to break a siege. In return, the lesser king demonstrates his appreciation to the powerful one by agreeing to a series of steps that express his gratitude and fealty. In these treaties the vassal king retains his autonomy and is treated like royalty when he visits the palace of the powerful king. Having been saved from Egypt by God, the children of Israel sign on at Sinai to a vassal treaty as sign of fealty, becoming junior partners to the sovereign king, God. The theological breakthrough of the Torah was the transformation of the metaphysical status of the masses, of the common person, to a new height, and the vitiation of nobles, royalty, and the like. The common man, in short, received an upgrade from king’s servant to servant king.

Yet no less significant is the Torah’s call that these stories should be promulgated among the people as their history. The point requires a note of context for us as moderns. Although there are over one million inscriptions in our possession from the ancient Near East, there is nowhere evidence of a national narrative that a people tells itself about its collective, national life, of moments of achievement or of despair, recorded for posterity. Stories abound in the ancient Near East—but they revolve around the exploits of individual gods, kings, and nobles. The most important audience of these materials was the gods themselves—as witnessed by the fact that these texts were often discovered in temple libraries, buried, or in other inaccessible locations. Myths were recited to remind the gods of their responsibilities. Details of a king’s achievements on the battlefield were to constitute a report to a deity about the king’s activities on his or her behalf; they were not composed for the masses. The Kadesh Inscriptions of Rameses II were the exception that proves the rule: Those inscriptions were not only textual, but pictorial; and they were not only carved on stone, but copied and disseminated via papyri. However, most inscriptions of royal activity in ancient times were limited to monumental structures in writing that was inaccessible to the common person.

We may take a page from the history of technology of communication to understand the implication of the Torah’s call to promulgate the accounts of Israel’s early history. The distribution of printed texts in the early modern period is said to have occasioned the birth of modern citizenship within the nation-state. The vernacular languages that were now fashioned and standardized led to the creation of newspapers and novels designed for a mass readership comprised of people who were in disparate locales but could now envision themselves as a public sharing a common heritage, destiny, and range of interests—religious, social, and political. People could now imagine themselves as a political collective, and thus was born the political “we.”

It is in the Torah that we see for the first time the realization that the identity of a people may be formed around an awareness of its past. Indeed, the Hebrew Bible is the first work of literature before the Hellenistic period that may be termed a national history. Moreover, the Torah displays an attitude toward the dissemination of texts among the populace that is in sharp contrast to the relationship between texts and society that we find elsewhere in the ancient Near East. It is a contrast, further, that is a reflection of the egalitarian agenda that the Torah seeks to pursue, over against the entrenchment of class distinctions. In an age and place such as our own, where literacy is nearly ubiquitous, access to texts of many kinds and the knowledge they bear is unfettered and, in theory, available to all. But in the ancient world physical access to written texts and the skills necessary to read them were everywhere highly restricted. Indeed, in the cultures of the ancient Near East as well as of ancient Greece, the production and use of texts was inextricably bound up with the formation of class distinctions: Those who possessed the capacity to read and write were members of a trained scribal class who worked in the service of the ruling order.

Writing in the ancient Near East was originally a component of bureaucratic activity. Systems of writing were essential for the administration of large states. Indeed, the elite in these cultures had a vested interest in the status quo, which prevented others from gaining control of an important means of communication. Far from being interested in its simplification, scribes often chose to proliferate signs and values. The texts produced in Mesopotamia were composed exclusively by scribes and exclusively for scribal use—administrative or cultic—or for the training of yet other scribes.

The Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody notes that a culture’s willingness to disseminate its religious literature inevitably reflects an emphasis on the individual within that culture.[3] The comment sheds light on the Torah’s agenda to establish an ennobled egalitarian citizenry, as we are witness to an impetus within the biblical vision to share the divine word with the people of Israel. Moses reads the divine word to the people at Sinai (Ex. 24:1–8). Periodically, the people are to gather at the Temple and hear public readings of the Torah (Deut. 31:10–13). It is telling that the Tanakh never depicts kohanim or scribes as jealous or protective of their writing skills, as is found in neighboring cultures.

In sum, we have seen something remarkable about the most basic, familiar aspects of the Torah. The idea of covenant; the story of the Exodus; the fact that the Torah is a written, publicized text—these are as significant politically as they are religiously. They each point to the equal and high standing of the common person in Israel.

The Torah’s Radical Conception of Political Office

Turning from theology, we see that the Torah radically revamped regnant notions of political office and the exercise of power. What is most striking about the Torah’s statements on political office are two radical ideas about how these offices are to be governed. First, we are witness here to the transition from the law of rule to the rule of law. Elsewhere in the ancient world, the kings composed and promulgated law, but were above it, not subject to it. Before the thinkers of Athens came along, the Torah arrived at the notion of equality before the law. All public institutions in the Torah—the judiciary, the priesthood, the monarchy, the institution of prophecy—are subordinated to the law. Moreover, the law is a public text whose dictates are meant to be widely known, thus making abuse of power more obvious and safeguarding the common citizenry.

Second, we may see that the most important body of authority in the polity envisioned by the Torah is none other than the people themselves. The Torah addresses the fraternal and egalitarian citizenry in the second person, “you,” and charges them with appointing a king—if they desire one—and appointing judges. Put differently, the Torah specifies no nominating body for appointing leaders or representatives. Rather, the collective “you”—the common citizenry—bears ultimate responsibility to choose a king and to appoint judges. From American history we know how unthinkable it was only a few generations ago for many to contemplate the notion that persons of color or women should play a role in choosing who rules. For the royal monarchies of the ancient Near East, the notion that the masses—who elsewhere were serfs and servants—would hold any sway over those that ruled them was equally unfathomable.

If the people did elect to have a king, the Torah was determined that he should be but a shadow of what a king was elsewhere. Elsewhere kings played central roles in the cult. In the Torah he plays none. Elsewhere, the king aims to build a strong army. The Torah calls for him to have a limited treasury and to forgo a cavalry (Deut. 17:16–17), limitations that would leave him commanding only a small army. Moreover, were a royal chariot force to serve as the backbone of the nation’s defense, it would inevitably emerge as an elite military class. The great jurist of Athens, Solon, extended preferred status to the members of the cavalry over other citizens. But what confers status in the Torah is citizenship in the covenantal community, and this is shared by all. Elsewhere, the king would consolidate his power through a network of political marriages. The Torah forbids the king from taking a large number of wives (Deut. 17:17).

Finally, we see in the Torah a page in the history of constitutional thought, one that would not be written again until the American founding. It pertains to a highly advanced notion of the separation of powers. Classical Greek political thought had already understood that in the absence of a strong center in the figure of a monarch or a tyrant, factionalism threatened the stability of the polity. It was inevitable that the population would contain rich and poor, nobles and commoners. The absence of homogeneity led classical theorists to balance power by ensuring that each faction within society would receive a share of the rule. Yet, the balance of power was not a balance of institutions of government, as we are accustomed to today. Rather, the balance was achieved by allowing each of the socioeconomic factions a functioning role within each seat of government. Thus, in Roman jurist Polybius’ conception, the legislative branch of government in the republic was to consist of two bodies—the senate for the nobles and the assembly for the commoners—with each institution permanently enshrined in law.

The notion that the effective division of power was predicated upon its distribution across preexisting societal seats of power was one that would hold sway throughout most of the history of republican thought, from Roman theorists through early modern thinkers. It is central even to the thinking of Montesquieu, the father of modern constitutional theory, who is credited with proposing the separation of powers into three branches—executive, legislative, and judiciary—in his 1748 work, The Spirit of the Laws. Looking at the English model of his day, Montesquieu held that the legislative power should consist of a body of hereditary nobles and of a body of commoners. He saw hereditary nobility not as a necessary evil, nor even as an immutable fact of life, but rather as a boon to effective government. The nobility, with its inherent wealth and power, would serve as a moderating force within government against the abuses of the monarch. Moreover, the fact that the nobility’s strength was derived from its own resources would endow its members with a sense of independence. This, together with developed education and time for reflection, would enable the nobles to contribute to effective government in a way that members of the lower classes could not. Montesquieu could not conceive of a classless society and a regime in which the division of powers was purely institutional and instrumental, where the eligibility to hold office was independent of class.

Here the Torah stands distinct. For the first time in history we see the articulation of a division of at least some powers along lines of institution and instrument rather than of class and kinship, where office legitimizes preexisting societal seats of power. Anyone who is “among your brethren” (Deut. 17:15) is eligible to be appointed king. Moreover, the king is appointed by the collective “you” that we mentioned before. How that selection occurs, apparently, is an issue that the Torah deliberately left open so as to imply that there is no body that a priori has a greater divine imprimatur than any other. In this sense, the Torah’s notion of offices that are entirely institutional and instrumental is an idea that would again appear only with the American Founding Fathers.

The same is true with regard to the judiciary, as outlined in the book of Deuteronomy. Anyone may be appointed judge, and no less importantly, anyone, in theory, is eligible to participate in the process of appointing judges (Deut. 16:17). One could have thought of any number of bodies that could have been charged with appointing judges: the king, the prophets, the kohanim, or other judges. But the Torah insists: “Judges and officers you shall appoint for yourself” (16:18). The appointment of judges is mandated with the sole purpose of achieving the execution of justice, rather than the assignment of office to perpetuate the standing of a noble class. As Montesquieu noted in the eighteenth century, it is critical that the people appoint judges, so that they have faith in the justice that is meted out. The only source prior to Montesquieu to arrive at this insight was the Torah.

God the Economist

The Torah understood that in order to create an egalitarian order, it would also need to re-envision the economic structure of society, for without equity, there is no equality. What the Torah proposes is the Western tradition’s first prescription for an economic order that seeks to minimize the distinctions of class based on wealth, and instead to ensure the economic benefit of the common citizen.

A ubiquitous feature of the socioeconomic landscape of the ancient Near East was the threat faced by the common person of falling into irreversible insolvency. Social stratification would emerge as the common people would have to sell off their farm animals, their land, and even their own freedom to repay debts. Famine, drought, or war could lead to precisely the kind of economic landscape we witness in the account of Egypt under Joseph, in Genesis 47. The Torah sought to remedy this through radical legislation on several fronts. Elsewhere, the norm was that land was owned by the palace and by the temple. The Torah, in contrast, knows of no land holding for either king or cult. Instead, nearly the entire land is given to the people themselves, in an association of free farmers and herdsmen, subsumed within a single social class. The idea that wide tracts of available land should be divided among the commoners was unprecedented. Perhaps the most famous example of such an initiative from modern times is the American Homestead Act of 1862. With the Great Plains open to mass settlement, nearly any person 21 years of age or older could acquire, at virtually no cost, a tract of 160 acres that would become his after five years of residence and farming. For millions of new arrivals and other landless Americans, the Homestead Act was an opportunity to acquire assets and to bring equality of economic standing in line with equality before the law.

The Torah also took specific aim at the institution of taxation. Elsewhere, taxes to the state and to the cult were deeply integrated. In the Torah, no taxes are specified for the state. Of course, no regime would be able to function without taxing its populace—but the Torah apparently envisioned that taxes would be levied without sacral sanction, as was so prevalent elsewhere. God would not be invoked as the tax collector. Moreover, far less surplus is demanded from the people of Israel for the Temple than was customary in the imperial cults of the ancient Near East.

Whereas elsewhere cultic personnel controlled vast tracts of land, the Torah balances the status that these groups maintain in the cult by denying them arable lands of their own. They are dependent upon the people they represent for their subsistence, and in some passages are even grouped together with other categories of the underprivileged. The Torah further legislates that one type of tax—the ma’aser ani—should not be paid to the Temple at all, but rather distributed to the needy—the first known program of taxation legislated for a social purpose (Deut. 14:28–29).

What is most remarkable about the Torah’s economic reforms is the manner in which the new economy is incorporated into a new measure of time. Elsewhere in the ancient Near East, the calendar was based upon readily perceptible astronomical rhythms: The counting of days stems from observing the rising and setting of the sun; of months, from observations of the waxing and waning of the moon; of years, from observing the seasons and position of the sun. The ancient Near East, however, knows no calendar that incorporates the notion of a week. The week is the invention of the Torah, and is rooted, of course, in the Torah’s account of Creation, in which God worked for six days and rested on the seventh. The result is that throughout the Torah the Shabbat principle determines the schedule of the laws of social welfare, and serves as a great equalizing force between haves and have-nots. Shabbat day is a day of rest for all. In the seventh year—the Sabbatical year—the field lies fallow and is available for all to enjoy, and debt release is enacted. Time itself is marshaled in the establishment of the egalitarian agenda.

A Revolutionary Document

What power interest could have been served by this program? We have already seen that it was a program that favored neither the king, nor the rich, nor the priesthood. Prophets are hardly mentioned in the Torah, and the criteria set out for validating an individual as a prophet are exacting in the extreme. Sages or philosophers are nowhere mentioned at all. No immediate candidate jumps out of the pages of the Torah as the interested party in the formulation of this new egalitarian order.

Throughout the ancient world, the truth was self-evident: All men were not created equal. They saw the world they had created and, behold, it was good. It was good, they deemed, because it was ordered around a rigid hierarchy, where everyone knew his station in life, each according to his class. For the first time in history, the Torah presented a vision to the masses in which the gods were something other than their own selves writ large, a vision with a radically different understanding of God and humanity. It introduced new understandings of the law, of political office, of military power, of taxation, of social welfare. It conceived in radically new ways the importance of national narrative, of technologies of communication, and of a culture’s calibration of time. What we find in the Torah is a platform for social order marked with the imprint of divinity. Within the annals of political thought it is difficult to think of another document that revolutionized so much in such anonymity, and with so little precedent to inspire it.

Of course, these notions of equality are but early precursors of our more developed notions of equality today. Yet, the Torah instructs us with the implicit understanding that society changes, and with it, the form in which we fulfill God’s will. We can marvel at how utterly removed the Torah’s political thought was from the prevailing spirit about such things in ancient times. And, at the same time, we can appreciate that without believing that we are limited to the notion of equality as it had been expressed in those ancient times. Rather, the Torah serves as an inspiration for the further elaboration of those ideas as times change and events warrant so doing.

A commercial house has collapsed; a savings fund has sunk; a me­chanics' bank has burst, a life insurance company has become in­solvent.... Men noted for their self possession appear bewildered. You asked for the reason of so painful a change, and the invariable answer was: "The stringency of the money market, brought about by unforeseen failures among us and abroad. That is enough to upset people's minds."

But for the Victorian language, this might have been written in 2008. In fact, it was declaimed in the Fall of 1893, and is the beginning of a sermon by Sabato Morais, minister of the Por­tuguese Jewish congregation Mikveh Israel in the city of Philadelphia. Morais is mainly remembered today as the Founder and first President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, but his place in American life has been somewhat neglected. The reason for this may be the fact that he cannot quite fit the role of hero of any of the major branches of American Jewish life today, Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. Orthodox as he was in practice, he does not fulfill the role model of the talmudic sage, and has about him a somewhat assimilated air at which the strictly Orthodox might well look askance. For the Conservative, he is insufficiently innovative, too unwilling to take religious risks. And of Reform he was a lifelong opponent. Max Nussenbaum justly called him a “champion of Orthodox Judaism” in his 1964 doctoral dissertation at Yeshiva University.

Morais was born in Leghorn, Italy in 1823 to a family of Sephardic Port­uguese-Jewish descent, the third of nine children and the oldest son. His native language was Italian, and he acquired also a good knowledge of Spanish and French early in life; a great many of the two thousand extant letters addressed to him are in Italian. He was a favorite pupil of Abraham Baruch Piperno, one of the Jewish sages of Leghorn, and at the age of twenty-two was an applicant for the post of Hazzan, or cantor to the Sephardic congregation of London. The Hazzan among the Portuguese Jews was not required to have the quasi-operatic voice favored by the Ashkenazic German and Polish Jews. A sweet voice sufficed, but he was expected to have an intimate knowledge of the complex Jewish liturgy of which every word was individually chanted, and in particular to learn the tradition of his congregation so that he did not deviate from it in the slightest degree. He also had to have a high degree of expertise in the reading of the sacred scrolls. Such memorization normally took years of devoted effort, and few individuals had the skill and patience demanded. The young Morais was unsuccessful, since his lack of English told against him, but he made a great impression even so. The following is an excerpt from a letter sent by the authorities of the English congregation under date of November 18, 1845 to his Italian mentors, couched in the typical Victorian epistolary style:

The departure of Mr. S. Morais demands from us our best acknowl­edgment to you for having recommended to our notice so worthy, deserving an individual, for although he has not been the suc­cessful candidate for the office to which he aspired Justice claims of us that we should bear testimony to the very great satisfaction he af­forded the congregation on the occasion of his public trial, and that he has from his general conduct and unassuming manners whilst here entitled himself not only to the regard of those who were interested in his favor but of all without exception.... he would do credit to any appointment which could be conferred upon him.

The London community did not forget him. A year later, a position opened for a teacher in their orphan school and they invited the young Italian to fill the post. He did so. In London he got to know and admire the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, and when the latter wished to travel to Europe in 1847, Morais lent him his passport so that Mazzini might avoid detection by the continental police. Of course, there were no photographs in those days. He soon developed a full command of the English language, and was prepared when a call came from the Philadelphia congregation in 1850. The following year, Morais went to Philadelphia, where he served congregation Mikveh Israel for forty-seven years until his death in 1898. He became a much loved figure, and was in the habit of instructing young people without charge in Hebrew language and literature, as he had been instructed himself. Three of his pupils, Solomon Solis-Cohen, Cyrus Sulzberger and Cyrus Adler became prominent community leaders. All wrote to him and of him with warm affection.

Adler, who was a founder of the Jewish Publication Society, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the American Jewish Committee, and who served simultaneously as President of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and Dropsie College in Philadelphia, wrote to him in 1887:

The more the boys [of JTS] know you, the better for them ... I will receive a Ph.D. degree next Tuesday, an end impossible but for the help which you have given me from boyhood and which I never think of but with gratitude.

Solis-Cohen addressed him: "Dear friend and teacher" and signs: "affection­ately your pupil." A San Francisco admirer sent his "respect and affection" to "my earliest friend in this country."

In everything he writes and does, Morais comes across as a warm, loving, emi­nently humane individual with self respect, yet remarkably free of egotism for a man in public life who was the recipient of much honor, including an honorary degree from the University of Pennsylvania. At no time does he bask in his Sephardic ancestry, as some of his brethren were wont to do, nor does he lay stress on Sephardic tradition in his addresses. Morais looked upon him­self as a Jew without qualifiers, one who revered and loved the Jewish tradition and desired greatly to perpetuate it.

Clearly he came from a close, loving family, and its impress stayed with him all his life. Among a vast family correspondence, an extant letter from his father in Italian, written shortly before his death reads: "If I do not write to you it is not of my volition, but I suffer from irregularity of the pulse ... I send you all my paternal benediction."

Morais’ considerateness is attested to by his finding time to send some stamps for the collection of a little great-niece, who responds with a charming letter in French. All sorts of unfortunates direct their appeals to him: a tu­bercular youth in the state penitentiary, a Corfiot woman seeking the vanished son of a friend, an Italian transient in the Pennsylvania hospital suffering from "a small mental aberration." Morais threw nothing away. Referring to this epistolary flood he writes in 1894:

To acknowledge numerous letters is also a task not infrequently irksome. Still, in order not to appear rude, I have imposed upon myself the obligation of invariably answering them all, either verbally or in writing.

Morais was conscious of walking a tightrope vis-a-vis the public.

If he [the minister] is modest and reserved, he is styled unsociable; if he is accessible and easy, he is charged with too great a familiarity. If he is sincere and open, he is taxed with imprudence. If he denounces public transgressions he is too austere; if he deems it expedient to barely hint at them he is pusillanimous ... however elevated may be the character of the minister of religion, it is shapen in a human mould.

On a number of his addresses he writes self-deprecatory notes, for example, "Like all my early lectures it is faulty in diction and ideas." On another address he writes in Hebrew "I regret having composed it." Not infrequently he recycles old material; thus one is marked "altered, abridged, and corrected from an old lec­ture delivered twenty years before." Morais was also aware that his lectures, eloquent though they were, did not give universal satisfaction.

During nine months of the year, I give weekly instruction from this pulpit ... When the summer season begins, I generally cease speak­ing in the vernacular, and confine myself to the reading of the estab­lished ritual. That some would prefer my following the last named course at all times, I have reason to believe.

Despite Morais' polish and discretion, not too many years passed before he got into hot water in Philadelphia. In 1858 the Jewish world was shocked by the news that an Italian Jewish child, surreptitiously baptized by his nurse, had been kidnapped and taken off to be raised as a Christian. Appeals to the Pope met with the response: Non possumus, We can do nothing. The baptismal waters could not be wiped away, and Edoardo Mortara must be raised as a Christian despite his parents' pleas. Appeals were then made to the President of the United States to intervene and use his influence. The President refused, on the ground that this was an internal matter of a foreign power, involving foreign nationals. On the next Sabbath, when the point in the service was reached when the traditional prayer was recited for the President and the U.S. government, Morais pointedly omitted it. Apparently he felt that a President who would not stand up for civil rights was not worth praying for. The congregation was scandalized. The adjunta, as the governing body of the synagogue is still called, met the very next day and demanded that he restore the prayer for the government, whether he agreed with their actions or not. On December 2, 1858, A. Finzi wrote him a letter marked "strictly private" alluding to "your refusal to recite the prayer for the members of the Government as you have hitherto done." He demonstrates rather tediously that the U.S. government is not dependent for its welfare on Morais' prayers and having exhausted that argument, turns nasty:

You are aware that the Adjunta can suspend you from office, which would only be a step to discharge ... You know that the Board can command a majority to any measure their wisdom may induce them to think correct ... are you prepared to be hurled from a position of pecuniary independence ... to one of unrequited labor in which you might find it difficult to earn a pittance?

After this affair blew over, and the President again got his prayerful due, Morais' penchant for expressing himself on civil rights again got him into trou­ble. On Thanksgiving, 1864, he gave an address in which he referred critically to the institution of slavery. I was unable to find his precise wording, but it seems that he expressed satisfaction at the absence of threats of sedition and secession in the North. Morais was clearly amazed at the violence of the reaction. The synagogue adjunta would brook no reference to this issue which had the country bitterly divided, and decreed that "henceforth all English lectures or discourses be dispensed with, except by particular agreement of the Parnas [President] made in writing." Despite Morais' protests, the gag rule held for about two months. Then some members petitioned the board, and on February 5, 1865, the board voted that the Revd. S. Morais deliver a religious discourse (the word religious is underlined!) on one Sabbath of each month, and any holiday. Immedi­ately before the Passover that year Morais wrote: "I would now respectfully ask that you allow me to address the Congregation whenever I deem it fit." Morais never again indulged in grand gestures as in the Mortara case, but he did estab­lish his freedom to speak on social justice in the pulpit, and he did so frequently. Morais was addressing the most influential Jews in a major American city, and he extended that forum through reports of his addresses which were frequently published, and, as we shall see, he involved himself directly in other ways too. Morais' stand on slavery was rewarded by an honorary membership in the Union League of Philadelphia.

Two major areas of social justice concerned him deeply. One was the issue of religious and racial prejudice and its natural follower, oppression. This included both crass discrimination, and the subtler pressures involved in the movement to make America a Christian country not only notionally, but as a matter of law. Paradoxically, Morais sometimes took a stronger stand on discrimination against non-Jewish groups than Jewish. Why this was may be seen in the notorious Hilton-Seligman affair of 1877. On May 31, 1877, the wealthy Jewish banker, Joseph Seligman went to the Grand Union Hotel at Saratoga for the tenth consecutive year. On requesting his room he was told: "Mr. Seligman, I am required to inform you that Mr. Hilton has given instructions that no Israelites shall be permitted to stop at this hotel." Seligman wrote a stinging letter to Hilton advising him to get out of the hotel business, since he was losing money, not because Jews were staying in his hotels, but because he did not know how to run them. A loud clamor broke out in the press. Morais was asked to speak up, but in this instance he was ambivalent. Yes, discrimination was bad. But the eastern watering places were full of ostentation and display, not to mention the infraction of the Jewish Sabbath and dietary laws that accompanied these unbecoming qualities. Moreover, Seligman had had associations with the Ethical Culture movement which made his Jewish affiliation questionable. Morais was not alone in his feelings. I. M. Wise's mouthpiece in Cincinnati, the American Israelite declared:

If he wants no Jews, let him have none ... keep away from Saratoga, keep away from Long Beach ... they cannot imagine in Europe that the watering places here are the elysium of empty heads and shattered brains, and hearing of the intolerance and stupidity they must be led to think we are a nation of fools and madmen. Stay away from those places, save with your honor also the honor of the American republic.

For once, the arch-reformer Wise and the traditionalist Morais saw eye-to-eye. Quite different and unequivocal was Morais' reaction to the Chinese ques­tion. Morais, gentle soul, observed that the Mosaic law prohibited muzzling an ox while it worked to avoid causing it pain. How then, he wondered, can human beings inflict deliberate suffering on one another? The address that Morais gave on this subject is extant among his papers, but it has some pages missing and it is best to quote it as it was reported in the press. The report conveys well the passion of this remarkable statement:

He animadverted upon the conduct of the lawless towards the un­fortunate aliens of the Mongolian race on the Pacific coast. He termed that demeanor atrocious and the conniving of local offi­cials infamous. He saw in every drop of blood of the Chinese spilt by ruffians a blot of the escutcheon of Liberty. In his mind a racial persecution in this country was a deep humiliation and an insult to the great of old who labored and fought to establish a government broad enough to cover every human being that seeks its protection. Mr. Morais alluded to the Restrictive act limiting the admission of Chinese. He considered it an outrage against a nation of three hun­dred millions with whom we are at peace, and the bill now said to be in course of preparation to forbid the Unites States to Chinese altogether he stigmatized as an indignity revolting to every right thinking man. He held that if even all the inhabitants of Central Asia who come to our shores ... were as depraved as their enemies describe them, no justification could be found for the barbarities to which they are subjected ... he knew that the writings of [China's] philosophers and moralists do not suffer in comparison with those of nations which claim to be the sole representatives of civilization.

In the original sermon Morais censures by name President Chester Arthur for sanc­tioning prejudice in yielding to pressure from unscrupulous politicians. The newspaper report doubtless deemed it discreet to omit this. There is no doubt that Morais had established his right to speak out. It is clear moreover that Reform Judaism did not have a corner on the issue of social justice, despite the grandiloquence of the "Pittsburgh Platform," which laid great stress on this matter and was promulgated at this time. Morais spoke too on the sufferings of the Armenians. After pointing out that there were conflicting reports as to what had happened, he continues:

We cannot too strongly condemn a barbarity that pushes a people into the Mosque at the point of the bayonet. I have read protests from Christendom. I have noticed likewise that in Chicago Rabbis have made their voices swell the sound of these protests against the ruthlessness of the Turks. Nothing new. Jews will always side with the persecuted, and not only side with them, but try speedily to come to their deliverance.

He goes on to cite Moses Montefiore's help for the Maronites in 1860, and Baron de Hirsch's help for both sides in the Russo-Turkish war of 1878. He then protests reports that President Cleveland's intervention was because America is a Christian country. America should support all the oppressed. He continues:

Much as I wish to wipe off from memory words that pierced like a pointed steel, I cannot forget that on a day when by invitation, I pleaded before the members of the Episcopal brotherhood the cause of my oppressed brethren in Russia, I received a most cutting rebuff. I was relating how a Jewish lad had his face and hands burnt with hot irons for having stolen an apple, when the Reverend Dr. McConnel ... most uncharitably remarked that in a Christian country, a minority that keeps aloof from the majority must expect perse­cution. What a companionable guest at the table of Ximenes and Torquemada that Episcopal clergyman would make! How palatable the repast seasoned with invectives against those stiffnecked Jews who need the thumb screw and the hot iron to bring them to the foot of the cross!

Ah, my brethren, I say it again. Take care of your own. For prejudice is stalking abroad and would tread on us ... Still be on the alert by reason of ineradicable prejudice. Take care of your own, my brethren!

The attitude of the Reverend Dr. McConnel was not at all uncommon. As the author of Black Like Me declared: "The first rule of racism is to blame the victim."

Morais concerned himself actively with the weal of Jews in foreign lands. A letter to Charles Emory Smith, minister to Russia from 1890 to 1892, elicited a courteous reply assuring him that the imperial government intended no new repressive measures against the Jews. He declared that Morais' representations were on "a subject in which no representative of the United States could fail to feel a deep interest." He concludes: "I recall our personal meetings with great pleasure and well remember your high standing among your people."

Morais was also in touch with Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, a New York Sephardic Jew, who was appointed U.S. consul in Bucharest in 1870 and at­tempted to further the emancipation which had been promised to Rumanian Jews by the 1856 Treaty of Paris. On January 27, 1874, he wrote to Morais:

I am happy to tell you that my heavy task appears to be in a more promising prospect than ever, and that I cherish the firm belief before very long of accomplishing the emancipation of our long suffering brethren.

Peixotto left Bucharest two years later, his firm belief still unfulfilled.

Another aspect of religious problems was the desire on the part of many believing Christians to emphasize the Christian character of the United States, despite the efforts of the founding fathers to separate Church and State. Jacob Ezekiel, a friend of Morais who later moved to Cincinnati and served as secretary of the Hebrew Union College, took President John Tyler to task in 1841 for using the phrase "Christian people" in a proclamation on the death of President Harrison. Tyler sent him a courteous reply in which he disavowed any intention to offend, and told Ezekiel that "your voice and the voices of all your brethren will ascend to our common father."

Morais was seriously disturbed by efforts to have Sunday recognized in the Constitution as a day of rest, as well he might be, since the provisions of the proposed amendment, which he quotes, were very severe. This decreed that "no person or corporation shall perform any secular labor, nor ... engage in any play, game, amusement or recreation on that day." All assemblies, except for religious worship, were to be forbidden. Penalties were to range up to one thousand dollars, and if one allows for a century of inflation, it appears that the penalty was stiff indeed. Morais condemned the attempt to "chain the State to the clogging wheels of the Church." He declared that the Constitution "will cover beneath her ample folds all that seek protection from the abuse of power, but never will she dictate tyrannical terms to those whom she has promised shelter ... Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

The republican sentiments that were his in his youth came flooding back when he heard statements such as: "official positions and public trusts should be restricted by constitutional enactment to persons in sympathy with the high moral aims of the government." Such thinking, in his view could make "America a scourge in the hands of the crafty to tear the lives of the powerless, whether they be Jews or Christians."

Morais was greatly incensed also by attempts to convert Jewish children to Christianity by deception. This became a particular problem when large numbers of Russian and Polish Jews arrived in Philadelphia in the 1880s and subsequently, in the wake of deteriorating conditions in Eastern Europe, settling in the southern part of the city. Missionaries saw the possibility of evangelizing among these poor, Yiddish-speaking Jews, sometimes using means that were less than totally honest. In one instance, a school was set up which purported to be a Jewish school in which Hebrew was taught, and the children were offered rewards for attendance. While there, unknown to their parents who did not speak English, the children were indoctrinated in the tenets of Christianity. Morais decided to investigate. Accompanied by a friend who knew his way around, Morais slipped into the school and observed what was occurring. The principal of the school became aware of his presence and was furious. She termed it an intolerable intrusion, and threatened to call the police. Morais withdrew. "I did not put her to the test," he comments. "In that instance I considered discretion the better part of valor." Morais then took to waiting outside the school, asking the children their names, and alerting the parents to the fact that the school was not what they thought it was. This avoidance of confrontation was typical of Morais, and stood in the mainstream of a long tradition of Jewish quietism. He was ready to persuade and to cajole, but always wanted to avoid violence, or what he termed "scandal."

The Russian immigrants brought other problems in their train. Although Philadelphia prided itself on being the "city of homes" and did not have the tenements typical of New York City, sweated labor became commonplace in Philadelphia too. Morais declared:

Iniquity alone could have conceived the sweating system, so prolific of evils—a system stunting the growth of children employed under it, bending with premature old age men and women in the prime of life, tainting the atmosphere with foul vapors ... Families vegetating in holes, poisoned with pestilential air, stitching and stitching and stitching, twelve or fourteen hours a day to receive what does not suffice to procure a scanty meal.

Morais' solution for these severe social problems was, it must be confessed, simplistic. The worker should give a fair day's labor and the employer should pay a reasonable wage. Morais was convinced of the ennobling character of labor, and horrified at the thought of the socialist and anarchist tendencies, all too patently linked to atheism, which were unseen riders on the immigrant ships. "Communism!" he cries out at one point. "Horror of horrors! Communism!" Morais' attitude to work was demonstrated by his strong support of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, founded by French Jews in 1860, one of the main aims of which was to give useful work training to young Jews in backward countries. In an unusual outburst, Morais condemns bitterly the action of the Rebbe of the Belz sect of the Hasidim ("miscalled" according to Morais) for making a special trip to Vienna to ask the authorities to keep out these secular schools:

Such is the profanation of the name of God brought about by a pretentious sect that assumes the appellation of "pious" and gives their chief the title of "righteous." A piety which hugs the chains of ignorance, a righteousness which invites persecution.

From our standpoint we can see that the Rebbe of Belz knew very well what he was about. Schools of this type brought with them the French language and secular culture. In North Africa they brought about a rapid destruction of the traditional religious orientation of the community, and this was precisely what the Rebbe wanted to avoid. It is interesting to observe too, that in his fervor Morais slipped into a kind of thinking not unlike the Episcopalian reverend gentleman he condemned. "A righteousness which invites persecution" comes perilously close to condemning the victim who wanted above all to preserve his culture intact.

Arguments over the merits of secular and trade schools were purely academic for the immigrant workers of South Philadelphia. Ankle deep in half-sewn pan­taloons they wanted only to improve their miserable lot. In 1886 there was a strike widespread in the United States in an attempt to secure an eight-hour workday. Two years later a Jewish Tailors' and Operators' Association was organized in Philadelphia and painful events followed. Their first strike was a fiasco, col­lapsing in two days. Before the strikers were permitted to return to work, they were required to take an oath on the Bible that they would never again strike. Morais became deeply involved in efforts to act as an honest broker in subse­quent strike action. Morais' son, Henry S. Morais, asserts that his father settled the 1890 strike with the help of George Randorf, a young man who had useful language skills. Henry Morais hints darkly at the doctrinaire background of the strike:

The cause of the unfortunate workers has, invariably, been injured by the domination of labor agitators, some of whom are rabid An­archists, and would instil poisonous views into the minds of the un­tutored.

Max Whiteman, the historian of Philadelphia Jewry, gives a very positive assessment of Morais' beneficent influence on the strike. Able to bridge the gap between manufacturer and worker, he

disarmed the anarchists with compassion and thereby gained so much support among the Jewish workers that the anarchists were re­luctant to outrage Jewish sensibilities further by irreligious activities such as a projected pork feast at a Yom Kippur Ball.

Morais saw little help for the oppression of Jews in the incipient Zionist movement. He does indeed defend Theodor Herzl, the father of Political Zion­ism, who, he says, is neither a Utopian nor a fanatic. One can see the struggles he had with Herzl's plan to obtain land in Palestine by the changes he made in his text. First he wrote as follows:

to go in search of means to facilitate the acquisition of a spot where the systematically degraded of Abraham's progeny may breathe free­ly is a philanthropic design.

Apparently he was unhappy with the choice of the word "acquisition" because, I suggest, it might militate against his idea, firmly rooted in tradition, that Israel was to wait for the Messiah, and not hasten the end. So he toned down "acquisition" to "securing." But this was still too strong, implying perhaps (God forbid!) some kind of violent action, and so he substituted "recognized purchase." But then, he must have asked himself, can Jews be safe with a recog­nized purchase? And so he settled on "guaranteed purchase," which apparently fulfilled his criteria of security and non-violence. Morais normally did not make fair copies of his addresses, and when he gets into sensitive areas, it is possible to see him painfully arriving at a position in his erasures and alterations. Whether one regards this as an honest striving for a consistent viewpoint, or a difficulty in making up his mind, is a question. It seems that Morais' ultimate conclusion was that Zionism was a pipe dream. In response to a Zionist lecture delivered by Dr. Friedenwald of Baltimore to the Mikveh Israel Association in Philadelphia he declares: "We still believe that the renationalization of our people is still in the remote future."

In contrast to his modern viewpoint on racial discrimination, Morais is very traditional in his attitude to women. He explains the Orthodox separation of men and women in the synagogue as "solely and simply an endeavor to allow the mind to be centered on the worship, and prevent, as far as possible, its being directed to human objects mutually attractive." It is interesting that Morais stresses the mutual nature of the attraction, since it raises the question why women should not officiate and men be the onlookers, but perhaps it is too much to expect him even to entertain such a radical idea. In another address he comments that

Woman occupies a station, which, unless she forfeits it by urging it to extremes, will ever, as at present, enable her to carry into practice the distinguishing traits of her character, scattering around the path she treads the seeds of knowledge and charity.

He here utters a clear warning that woman should not exceed the bounds that nature has laid down.

Morais tried throughout his life to follow his principles of adherence to hu­manity, justice, and true religion as he saw it. Yet, as he felt death draw near, he was not happy. Just ten months before he died, he declares in a letter, "Life has never been to me a delightful gift from my parents, and that for reasons which it were idle and foolish to relate." On the face of it Morais' unhappiness may appear strange. One might say his life had been rather successful. He was widely respected, honored, and loved. He had children who looked up to him, the fruit of a seemingly happy marriage. He retained his mental faculties unimpaired until he had a stroke which took him with merciful speed. I should like to offer some tentative reasons for his depression, recognizing that there can be no guarantee of their accuracy.

I must preface my suggestions by outlining what seems to me to have been the Jewish recipe for survival during the long night of the Diaspora. Jewish militarism died in Masada, destroyed by the superior might of Rome. It was replaced, it seems to me, by a threefold strategy. The first was a devotion to a literary legacy including especially, but not exclusively, the Talmud, which buoyed the spirits of the Jew under next to impossible circumstances, and which assured him of his special relationship with God, interrupted, but not ended, and ensured him a glorious restoration at some imminent date. This was the theoretical underpinning of Jewish survival. The Jew might be spat upon in the street, but he had a secret which kept his ego intact and his will unbent, and which he daily mulled over in his books. Despite all appearances to the contrary he could declare with the Bible of Israel:

Who is like unto thee?

A people saved of the Lord

Who is thy helpful shield

And glorious sword.

Though thine enemies are deceitful to thee,

Thou shalt tread on their high places. (Deuteronomy 33:29)

Second, the Jew maintained a low profile. The stooping gait which is charac­teristic of the Jewish stereotype was not because of a burden of care or worn out observances, but rather to avoid any missiles that might be whizzing over­head. Third, the Jew learned to make himself useful, if not indispensable, by honing skills in language, communications and commerce which permitted his oppressor to hate him as much as he pleased, but tolerate him because he had to. As we well know, this threefold strategy did not always work—the long list of massacres of Jews is testimony to that—but it was the best that could be done under the circumstances.

Now Morais was no innovator; he hewed faithfully to these principles. He evinced and tried to inculcate in others a deep love of Jewish sacred literature and espoused the life style which it displayed as a model. He avoided scandal and confrontation and tried, like Moses Montefiore, whom he greatly admired, to improve the lot of his fellows by persuasion and cajoling. He believed firmly that the Jew should be a useful, productive citizen and supported efforts to train young Jews in appropriate skills.

During his life in Philadelphia, Morais witnessed the total breakdown of this millennial strategy for Jewish survival. He saw the loved Talmud burned, not literally by non-Jews as had so often happened in the past ineffectually, but metaphorically by Jews. The Reform movement in Judaism which he had always opposed, without scandal of course, was riding high, destroying the first pillar of the survival strategy I have delineated. He cries out:

Forty-one years I have labored to raise a generation of consistent Israelites, but now that I have seen the departure from earth of nearly all whom I first met in March of 1851, I hear their succes­sors call Moses antiquated, and the rabbis besotted ... Alas for the ears doomed to listen to profanity ... Oh for a reaction, oh for a reawakening of the Jewish spirit.

It pained him deeply that a Jewish convention held in Milwaukee flouted di­etary laws, and he expressed satisfaction that such things did not happen in Philadelphia.

Moreover the pillars of low profile and usefulness were not functioning any more either. With the sharp decline in religious clout under the onslaught of Darwinism and new scientific discoveries, which seemed to attack the very foundations of religion, the charter of anti-Jewish feelings was rewritten. The writings of such racist theoreticians as Wilhelm Marr and Houston Stewart Chamberlain diverted these feelings from their religious context, and took away from the Jew the escape route through conversion that he had previously had. Judaism could no longer be shaken off. It was as undeniable as the color of one's skin. It was a racial characteristic. The Dreyfus trial, which was an active issue in the last years of Morais' life, symbolized the crumbling of these two pillars of Jewish survival. Here was a Jew of modest attainments and even more modest ambitions, who wanted nothing more than to be a useful, docile servant of the French Republic. Despite that, he was broken simply because he was a Jew, and all who rose in his defense, including Emile Zola, were mercilessly disposed of. One must, I think, read some of the anti-Semitic French writing of that period to comprehend the degree to which human beings are capable of detesting other human beings whom they do not even know. Only in this context can we understand the logical outcomes of these events, the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s on the one hand, and the new kind of Jewish activism and intransigence which have so shocked a world still used to the type of Jewish quietism that Morais symbolizes.

I would speculate, then, that Morais' bitterness of soul was due to his re­alization that the traditional paths to which he had devoted his life could be trodden no longer. The social justice for which he longed was not to be achieved by passionate but always gentlemanly admonitions, and waiting patiently for the Messiah. It was to be done through strikes and boycotts and flaming headlines screaming "J'accuse!" and through the "renationalization of our people," as he called it. These measures were to be coupled with grim confrontations with others who had their own claims to the Jewish patrimony.

Whether the patient, moderate voice of a Morais has any place in our own time is perhaps one of the major questions we face. Let me conclude with his comment on the biblical injunction to "let thy brother live with thee." He declares:

The common adage "Live and let live" ... may seem liberal enough to some, perhaps too liberal in this age of unscrupulous competi­tion, but it falls far below the mark when measured by the Jewish standard of righteousness ... When I am asked to "let my brother live with me" I understand that I may not push him aside, so that I may walk more at large, but that I must make room for him ... "

Morais understood that the bedrock of social justice is the brotherhood of mankind, and that this recognition carries with it the positive duty to make room actively for our fellow human beings. It is a message that has lost none of its freshness, and it speaks as much to our generation as to his.