National Scholar Updates

Introduction [1]

The quest to craft a traditional Judaism that is also engaged with modernity and the wholesome elements of non-Jewish civilization is not new and has been given many names. Some sound odd to today’s Orthodox ears: Traditional Judaism, Positive Historical Judaism, Progressive Conservatism, as well as the more familiar Modern Orthodoxy, Centrist Orthodoxy, and, most recently, Open Orthodoxy.[2] A paradigm for this enterprise was developed in Germany, where Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch, Esriel Hildesheimer, and others developed Neo-Orthodoxy, which Mordechai Breuer described as an attempt to “appropriate the positive values and acceptable norms of European culture and society.” According to Breuer, Neo-Orthodoxy “was not only concerned with somehow coming to terms with modernity and possibly averting its dangers but also with internalizing modernity and putting it in the service of traditional Judaism when this seemed beneficial.” [3]

In late-nineteenth-century America, Sabato Morais adopted the slogan “Enlightened Orthodoxy” as he searched for support to help found the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS).[4] Arthur Kiron has distilled Morais’ vision of Enlightened Orthodoxy as “a harmonious model that combined openness to general cultural trends— poetry, science, and reason, as well as to universal social justice—with devout adherence to particular revealed religious doctrines and practices.”[5] From the 1940s onward, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and his students developed a brand known as Modern or Centrist Judaism.[6] The sociologist Samuel Heilman called its advocates “syncretists” and characterised this post-War form as believing that “much in popular culture and contemporary society was not a source of defilement, but rather a fertile environment for bringing ancient Jewish traditions and values into engagement with modernity…all the while maintaining fidelity to Jewish law and observance.” [7]

However, there is a missing link between Enlightened Orthodoxy and Modern Orthodoxy, which if not entirely forgotten is certainly overlooked. In its first phase under Morais, the JTS promoted Enlightened Orthodoxy, but Solomon Schechter’s appointment as President in 1902 began the process that led to the emergence of a distinct Conservative Judaism.[8] The baton of Enlightened Orthodoxy had to be picked up by others. They have been called proponents of “American Orthodoxy,” but the sources and themes of their outlook went beyond American ideas and needs. It might be called “Positive Orthodoxy” because of the central planks of their approach was an outgoing and confident attitude toward the possibilities for Orthodoxy. They made a bold assertion of their faith, adopted an open-minded if not unlimited approach to scholarly endeavour, and were institutional builders. The champions of this Positive Orthodoxy included scholars and educators such as Rabbis Eliezer Berkowitz, Dov Revel, and Samuel Belkin, and their role in raising disciples deserves, and is receiving, attention. I want to concentrate on four Manhattan pulpit rabbis who drove forward their vision as communal spiritual leaders: Rabbis David de Sola Pool, Leo Jung, Joseph H. Lookstein, and Herbert S. Goldstein.

Context

Before we turn to these representatives of Positive Orthodoxy, we should look briefly at their context; the state of Orthodox Judaism in America in first half of the twentieth century.[9] Rabbi Leo Jung used to say that in this period “Orthodoxy in America was a bad joke,” and although this may have been an exaggeration, it was not without foundation.[10] Most American Jews who attended a synagogue before the Second World War went to an Orthodox synagogue. However, this did not reflect deeper Orthodox practice. On the eve of the First World War, three quarters of immigrant American Jews worked on the Sabbath and 60 percent of Jewish shops were open. Many of those who did not work still did not observe the Sabbath fully and would attend the theater. In a disturbing sign for the future, younger Jews were less observant than their parents. In 1935 it was found that only 10 percent of young Jewish men had been to a synagogue the week before the survey was taken, and in 1940 72 percent had not been to synagogue for a year.

Although by 1937 the Orthodox Union could claim that Orthodoxy was the largest Jewish religious group in America, not only was synagogue turnout poor, in order to maintain what allegiance they could, the Orthodox leaders were forced to make significant compromises including mixed seating of the sexes and late Friday night services to accommodate those who worked into the Sabbath. Orthodoxy seemed to be in terminal decline, doomed to extinction once the immigrant founders of Yiddish-speaking congregations died out. It was the Judaism of the Old World, not the New. By contrast, the Reform movement was strong, and the Conservative movement was growing rapidly (from 22 congregation in 1913 to 229 by 1929). Existing Orthodox leaders and methods seemed to provide no answer to the crisis facing their denomination.

This was the scene into which the proponents of Positive Orthodoxy stepped. They set themselves the task of stemming the tide. They were the founders of a movement that achieved something remarkable. In their time as leading figures, from the 1920s until the 1970s, Orthodoxy in America was transformed. It remained smaller than Conservative or Reform Judaism, but it ceased to be in danger of disappearing, and it regained confidence in its own principles. Between 1955 and 1965, 30 synagogues in the Orthodox Union installed a mehitsa (barrier between men and women in the sanctuary), returning to a more traditional seating arrangement.[11] In 1928, Yeshiva University was established as an Orthodox liberal arts college for men, alongside an existing rabbinical school. In 1956, it expanded to open Stern College for Women.[12] The sociologist Marshal Sklare said in 1971, “Orthodoxy has transformed its image from that of a dying movement to one whose strength and opinions must be reckoned with in any realistic appraisal of the Jewish community.”[13] Unquestionably, this revival owed a great deal to Soloveitchik and his followers, but as Aaron Rakefett Rothkof has remarked, his heroes, and the heroes of his fellow rabbinical students at Yeshiva University in the 1940s and 1950s were men such as Lookstein and Goldstein. They demonstrated that it was possible to make Orthodoxy attractive and successful in the American arena in the twentieth century.

Relevance
Why turn to these Positive Orthodox figures now? What relevance do they have to the Modern Orthodox community today? At the core of the syncretist project in Orthodoxy is the idea that traditional Judaism must be reconciled with the intellectual and cultural conditions of every period. Hirsch found a way for traditional Judaism to co-exist fruitfully with German Romanticism, Hildesheimer with the then-new academic discipline of history and textual study. Later Soloveitchik created an Orthodoxy that spoke in an age of existentialism and epistemological uncertainty. Each generation needs leaders who can do this work, but there is a shortage of leadership in American Modern Orthodoxy. Soloveitchik retired in the mid-1980s and died in 1993. Many of his leading disciples are retiring or are toward the end of their careers. There are some emerging figures, whether Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik at the traditional end of the spectrum or Rabbi Dov Linzer at the liberal end. However, the syncretist endeavour needs a constant new blood. We can encourage new leaders to emerge by reflecting on the importance of leadership itself. The four figures I will discuss were proponents of a positive, broad minded, unashamed, intellectually vibrant Orthodoxy. The task of this paper is to show what Orthodox leaders can achieve, intellectually and practically, when they adopt these attitudes. [14]

Four Figures

This study will examine four synagogue rabbis whose ideas were molded before the Second World War. Each was immensely active and made contributions in numerous areas of Jewish life; however, each had a specific interest. I will examine their approach to their particular concern as a series of case studies. Our quartet comprises David de Sola Pool (1885–1970), Leo Jung (1892–1987), Joseph Lookstein (1902–1979), and Herbert S. Goldstein (1890–1970), who each concentrated on a particular sphere: faith, study, prayer, and community.

David de Sola Pool was the only Sephardic rabbi in this group. In 1907, he was invited by his cousin, Henry Pereira Mendes, to become his assistant at Shearith Israel. He became Senior Minister in 1921 and served the congregation until his death in 1970. There he preached a warm and nourishing faith. Leo Jung was the best educated of the four, in both Jewish and general terms. Jung studied at traditionalist Hungarian yeshivot and the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. He pursued secular studies to doctoral level at several universities. He served the Jewish Center in Manhattan from 1922 until his death in 1987. Jung sought to demonstrate that Jewish learning was sensible, intelligent, and relevant.[15] Joseph Lookstein was born in Russia but came to New York as a small child. He attended traditionalist schools on the Lower East Side and then the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, City College, and Columbia University.[16] He went became assistant to Rabbi Moses Zevulun Margolies (Ramaz) at Kehillath Jeshurun and inherited the pulpit in 1929. He was convinced that the key to revival was to create a synagogue service that the most acculturated American Jew could respect without losing without sacrificing loyalty to halakha. Herbert S. Goldstein was the only one of our four to be born in the United States.[17] Like Lookstein, he saw security for the future of Orthodoxy in the role of the synagogue, but his vision went far beyond the sanctuary. He wanted to place the synagogue at the center of a total community serving all its members’ religious, social, and educational needs.

David de Sola Pool—A Fulfilling Faith

David de Sola Pool was born in London in 1885 into an observant Sephardic family with a history of learning and communal service.[18] Pool grew up three miles from Bevis Marks, so his family worshipped at a branch with room for 120 worshippers, run as a labor of love by his father. There was no official clergy, so Pool heard few sermons growing up and was often called upon to lead services. Even when he was not serving as hazzan, he sang in the choir. The Judaism of Pool’s childhood was warm, uncomplicated, happy, and fulfilling. Shabbat was full of “spiritual uplift and religious joy” and “except on the New Year and Day of Atonement, my religion did not stress that I was the victim of sin.”[19]

Pool’s adolescence disrupted this simple and sunny picture. He hints in his spiritual autobiography to “sturm und drang” days, and his “questioning soul;” however, this never developed into outright religious rebellion.[20] Instead, as he matured, Pool’s general studies brought him awareness of the unity of the world and pointed him to an intellectual faith in a single God. Years later he would expand on this theme, writing of the Jewish Deity:

He is not the God of chaos, of tohu vabohu and darkness, but the God of the marvellous order revealed in nature. Is not this the teaching of the whole Bible, from its opening keynote chapter, the first chapter of Genesis with its poetic, symbolic description of an ordered creation, responding to God’s cosmic law? The law and order or nature revealed to the ancient Jews of the Bible, as they reveal to the modern mathematician-astronomer, the cosmic God. [21]

The intellectual aspect of Pool’s faith was supplemented, or sustained, by the spiritual sustenance he received from nature and from music, even music of Christian origin. Pool described how music spoke to him “in universal accents with transcended sectarian theologies.” [22]

As a young adult, Pool came under the influence of Michael Friedlander (1833–1910), the Principal of Jews’ College.[23] Friedlander was both personally pious and a modern critical scholar, who saw no contradiction between that and his faith. Pool supplemented his studies at Jews’ College with additional instruction in Talmud in the traditionalist community in the east end of London, where he was exposed to its vibrant religious life. He moved to Berlin to further his studies, at the university and the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary, founded by R. Esriel Hildesheimer and led by R. David Tsevi Hoffman. There, Friedlander’s model of faith and scholarship was reinforced. Pool also studied briefly at the Rabbinical College in Florence, Italy, where a similar ideology carried the more Sephardic flavor of tolerance, open-mindedness, and a broad religious humanism.

As a pious, well-educated, English-speaking Western Sephardic Jew, Pool was a rare commodity. After graduating from Berlin, Pool was invited by his cousin, Henry Pereira Mendes, to become his assistant at Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York. He arrived in 1907, became Senior Minister in 1921, and served the congregation until his death in 1970, with a break from 1919 to 1921 when he worked on post-War reconstruction in Palestine. He was a leading figure in the Union of Orthodox Congregations but showed his non-sectarian leanings through his involvement with the cross-denominational New York Board of Jewish Ministers and his acceptance of an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1942. He was a prolific author, writing on American Jewish history, Jewish thought, and social problems, and publishing a series of prayer books with English translations.[24] Like Joseph Soloveitchik, Pool should be read as an existentialist religious thinker, who expressed his own experience in the hope that others would recognize it and respond to it. However, Pool’s experience was very different to Soloveitchik’s. It was not a place of angst and loneliness, but warmth and joy.

Pool’s faith was based on the consciousness of the existence and presence of God and accepting the privilege of serving Him. He told Shearith Israel in his inaugural sermon in 1907:

When he looks again in awe to Heaven he is filled with a strengthening faith that every aspiration to God begets and inspiration from God, that every religious thought and word born from the love of the all-merciful Father returns not empty of blessing to the source of infinite love from which it sprang. [25]

Pool thought that the way to achieve this consciousness of God was not theological speculation but human relationships:

We must keep our souls sensitive to the goodness that is in man, and to aspire to that ideal which we recognize as divine. Then when our spirit is moved with the stirring uplift of beauty, with the thrill of gentleness, with the glory of love, with the moving whisper of the still small voice speaking to us through the conscience and through our ideals, then we shall feel ourselves in the very presence of God. [26]

For Pool, faith had to have content. He identified certain non-negotiable creedal elements of traditional Judaism and defined the “quintessence of Judaism” not as good works but in the declaration of faith contained in the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” Pool regarded the Thirteen Principles of Faith of Maimonides as just one attempt, which never became universally accepted and did “not constitute an official authoritative canon of Jewish belief,” yet, he recognized that they had become the dominant expression and he spent some effort expounding and explaining them.[27] Yet this creedal element did not overwhelm the human and communal, and Pool denied that a Jew must subscribe to a catechism in order to join a synagogue. It was sufficient for members to accept traditional standards in public and official contexts.

Whatever the private views and lifestyle of some members, Shearith Israel had remained traditional in its ritual. Pool condemned as destructive, attempts to depart from traditional Judaism, and saw in them no future:

Therefore, when the voice of criticism is raised and we are told of the supposititious need of reform, we in this synagogue do not even discuss these theoretical claims…We call attention to…the sterility of congregations which have gone from one reform to another. Liberal Jewish congregations may have a seemingly prosperous present but they have cut themselves off from the past and have cut themselves off from the future.[28]

Pool’s emphasis here, and elsewhere, was that faith could not be free-standing; it had to exist alongside action, indeed it was the engine of action. However, the relationship between the two was complicated. Theoretical belief did not automatically lead to upright behavior. It was Judaism’s special contribution to insist on prescribed action, rather that trusting the religious impulse to lead naturally to right behavior:

It is easier to attain a spiritual mood by carrying out a concrete observance than to achieve action through first attaining an abstract spiritual mood. Lo hamidrash haikkar ella hamaaseh-—not theory but practice is essential. [29]

As we would expect this was most manifest in Jewish religious practice. According to Pool, the strictly ritual laws such as tefillin, tsitsith, and kashruth created a life of discipline, which led ultimately to “moral and religious strength…they infuse the routine of life with a sense of divine consecration and bring him closer to God.”[30]

For Pool, therefore, faith in general and Jewish faith in particular was natural, positive and fruitful. It was the result of a childhood of happy piety, based on role models who integrated their faith with their lives. It was fostered by an intellectual comprehension of the nature of the universe and an emotional appreciation of beauty and goodness. It led Jews to a spiritually fulfilling life and encouraged them to help others and improve the world. It was primarily universalistic and inclusive, although certain stands of principle had to be made. This occasionally made Pool critical of other Jewish movements but never exclusive of other Jews. The life of faith was not without effort, but it was a wholesome and enjoyable life.

Leo Jung and the Breadth of Jewish Study

Of our four figures, Leo Jung was the most accomplished scholar, in traditional and modern Jewish modes, and in general studies. He was born in Ungarish-Brod, in Moravia, in 1892.[31] He was the son of the town’s rabbi, Meir Tsevi Jung, who was a follower of Samson Raphael Hirsch and an adherent of Torah Im Derekh Erets. In 1912 Meir became the Senior Minister of the Federation of Synagogues in London. The Federation had been founded to enable the acculturation of new immigrants without forcing them into the highly Anglicized atmosphere of the United Synagogue. There he organized lecture meetings on Sabbath afternoons and created the Sinai League to promote the Hirschian ideology amongst the young. [32]

Leo worshipped his father and was brought up in his ideological and rabbinic mold. He was sent to study at yeshivot in Slovakia and proceeded to the Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. Eventually, he held four rabbinic ordinations, and in London, he received a further endorsement from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. He pursued secular studies at the universities of Vienna, Berlin, Marburg, and London, and received doctorates from the universities of Geissen and Cambridge. In 1920 he went to the United States, which boasted few Orthodox rabbis with advanced Jewish and general education. He took his first pulpit in Cleveland, Ohio, but with his profile and abilities he did not remain there long. The Jewish Center in Manhattan had been founded to promote acculturated Orthodoxy. The first attempt, under Mordecai M. Kaplan, had failed as Kaplan became more openly radical. When Jung was called from Cleveland in 1922, it marked a new beginning. He remained there as either Rabbi or Emeritus Rabbi until his death in 1987, making it one of the leading Modern Orthodox synagogues in America.

Jung was a prolific scholar, writer, and editor. He taught Jewish Ethics at Yeshiva University, translated Tractate Yoma for the Soncino Talmud, and revised his graduate work into a book: Fallen Angles in Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan Literature. In a more popular vein, he published volumes of sermons. However, the bulk of his work to spread Jewish study came through the series he edited for over 50 years, The Jewish Library. The first volume appeared in 1928, the last in 1980, and comprised 18 volumes (some revisions of earlier volumes) in total. Jung was a contributor as well as an editor, and we can infer Jung’s vision for Jewish study from his own writings and those he chose to include in the Library. [33]

In his preface to the first volume of the Library, Jung set out his agenda:

Culture is the unfolding of the divine element in human life, the progressive revelation of God above man through God in man. Judaism essentially is a culture, as rich and as broad as life. Hence, The Jewish Library, devised to bring home the thousand and one life messages of Judaism, will partake of all the shades and contours of that great canvas. The volumes of The Jewish Library, endeavoring to represent Judaism and Jewish life as a whole, will reflect in their content the dreams of the Jew, his urges and ambitions, his romantic march through the ages, the contemplative atmosphere of the Beth ha-Midrash, the rapture of the Kabbalist, the heroic scorn of the prophet—the complete panorama of Israel.[34]

Jung’s definition of “the complete panorama of Israel” was rather narrower than it might sound, and was firmly restricted to expressions of Orthodox Judaism. For Jung this was no contradiction, because he regarded Orthodoxy as the only form of Judaism:

To us Jews the Torah is the book of God, revealed to Israel and through Israel to all me. We believe implicitly in its divine origin, we accept it as the standard of our life. We obey its commandments. The meaning of the overwhelming majority of them is clear to us. Some are beyond our reason, but none strike us as incompatible with sound common sense. We have found also that observance of them has brought unlimited blessings to our people. [35]

This was a sharply polemical statement in the context of the United States, where Orthodoxy was not only in the minority but was widely regarded as outdated and doomed. It was also subtly different from Samson Raphael Hirsch’s approach. Hirsch identified non-Orthodoxy as the enemy. Jung implied that it did not exist. Within the parameters of the legitimate which he set out, Jung had an expansive understanding of valid approaches to Judaism, and he used The Jewish Library to promote this whole range. It is in this regard that his approach to Jewish study becomes significant, because his objective, and achievement, was to place before the Jewish public a wide range of original scholarship that demonstrated the breadth that Jung believed was possible within the boundaries of Orthodoxy.

Jung’s fullest statement of his approach to Jewish study is found in his essay “The Rabbis and Freedom of Interpretation,” which appeared in 1958.[36] Jung began by asserting two principles he regarded as untouchable: the revelation at Sinai and the binding authority of halakha. The acceptance of those two commitments, one theological and the other practical, left the rest of the Jewish corpus open to a wide (if not absolute) freedom of interpretation. Jung regarded this effort as “not merely lawful, not merely tolerated as an undeniable privilege…but encouraged and hailed as indications of religious loyalty…and unfailing source of intellectual and spiritual enrichment.” [37]

Jung quoted the well-known idea that there are 70 faces to the Torah and argued that it was this variety of perspectives that gave the Torah its power. Only through successive reinterpretation could the Torah remain lively and compelling:

[J]ust as the Halakhah is never finished but grows vertically and horizontally through the loving devotion of its authoritative scholars, so is the Agadah or the non-preceptive part of the Torah, eternally subject to search, investigative, comparison, elucidation, an on going enterprise—a complimentary progressive revelation of the message from Sinai— through Moses, Isaiah, Hillel, Saadia, Rambam, Ramban, Ralbag, Arama, Hirsch, Rab Kuk, to the dedicated students in all lands and cultures. [38]

Jung was unconcerned that stories in the aggadah might contradict each other or be fantastical because “although stimulating, instructive, often inspiring, they have no authority, they form no part of Jewish religious belief. Nor may they be taken literally: it is always the ideas, the lesson and not the story which is important.”[39] Jung quoted a wide range of examples of differing or contradictory aggadot, which prove that there can be no single authoritative view, whether regarding the behavior of the patriarchs, the nature of the messianic age, or anything else.

Jung was keen to demonstrate the pedigree of his ideas. He cited the early post-talmudic authorities Rav Hai Gaon, Rav Sherira Gaon, Rav Saadia Gaon, R. Shmuel ben Hofni, and R. Shmuel HaNagid as supporting this view. He added R. Abraham ben HaRambam (thirteenth century), who regarded statements on scientific or other general subjects made in the Talmud as non-binding, a view with which the leading halakhist in Jewish history, R. Yosef Caro (sixteenth century), seemed to agree. Jung defended allegorical interpretations of biblical passages, for example, interpreting the story of Balaam’s ass and the angelic visitors to Abraham as having good precedent in the Talmud and in the Midrashim, as well as the writings of the Rambam (twelfth century), R. David Kimche (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), and others. Jung was at pains to distinguish incorrect opinions from heresy. In his view, the fact that a view was incorrect did not, by itself, render it unacceptable.

The essays featured in The Jewish Library put these principles into practice. On the foundation of basic shared commitments Jung assembled thinkers who proposed new ways to understand Judaism and make its meaning and message relevant to moderns. This included the reasons for the mitzvoth, reconciling Torah and science while validating both. Jung sought to demonstrate how Jewish ideas could solve contemporary problems such as marital difficulties, labor relations or international law. The series examined music and the arts, Zionism and the re-establishment of a Jewish state. Jewish sources, if properly and sometimes newly analyzed, were shown to have something important and relevant to say. This was part of Jung’s effort to transform the image of Orthodox Judaism from a backward and obscurantist theology into a movement fitted for the present day, which was not only worthy of survival but had to continue because it could contain all that was valuable in Jewish life and thought.

Jung was believed in the importance of role models, and three of the volumes in The Jewish Library were dedicated to biography. Some of these were of highly traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rabbis, such as R. Akiva Eiger, the Hatam Sofer, and R. Hayyim of Volozhin. However, the range of figures is interesting. Two women featured: Sara Bayla and Sara Schenierer, the founder of the Beis Yaakov schools for girls, in its day a revolutionary development. Also included are Hassidic rebbes, such as R. Menahem Mendel of Kotzk and proto-Zionists and Zionists, including Rabbis Isaac Jacob Reines, Tsevi Hirsch Kalischer, and Moshe Avigdor Amiel. He included both his father’s role model, S. R. Hirsch, who promoted Orthodox separatism, and his opponents, Rabbis Seligman Baer Bamburger and Marcus Horowitz, who remained part of pluralistic communities. Jung was particularly keen to celebrate the Orthodox proponents of Wissenschaft, including his own teacher, David Hoffman, but recording the lives of many others, mostly now forgotten such as Rabbis Joseph Duenner of Amsterdam and Joseph Carelbach of Hamburg. They were exemplars of the type of Jewish study Jung was trying to promote: they were pious, observant, believing Jews who nevertheless engaged in Jewish scholarship which departed from traditional conclusions in interesting ways without touching on fundamentals of the faith.

This became Jung’s distinguishing contribution to the effort to maintain and revive Orthodoxy in America. It was widely welcomed in its time, but the views that he espoused have become rather more controversial in recent years. Even within Modern Orthodoxy, there has been a narrowing. Orthodox Wissenschaft is now out of favor, although it still has exponents in Bar Ilan University in Israel, the Bernard Revel Graduate School at Yeshiva University, and among individual scholars elsewhere. Among Orthodox leaders, there is little embrace of the breadth of approaches so enthusiastically promoted by Jung, and there is often outright hostility. This narrowing excludes and delegitimizes, and if we accept Jung’s approach, it does so without any religious necessity. A richer Judaism, Jung’s Judaism, deserves renewed attention.

Joseph Lookstein—Traditional Prayer in an American Sanctuary

Joseph Lookstein was born in Russia in 1902, and after coming to New York at the age of seven, he attended the Jacob Joseph School, City College, and Columbia University.[40] He received his rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University in 1926. While still a student, in 1923, he was recommended by the President of Yeshiva University (YU), Bernard Revel, to Ramaz to be his assistant at Kehilath Jeshurun (KJ). It was then a distinguished but declining congregation in need of revitalization. Some years earlier, modernizing forces had secured the appointment of a JTS graduate, Mordecai M. Kaplan, to run the religion school and deliver an English sermon, as Margolies only spoke Yiddish in public.[41] After Kaplan left, the role of an English preacher was maintained, leading eventually to Lookstein’s appointment. Lookstein excelled in the pulpit and became recognised as a star preacher. In due course, Lookstein married Margolies’ granddaughter. As a member of the family, a graduate of YU rather than the JTS and an experienced member of the KJ clergy, Lookstein duly became Senior Rabbi on Margolies’ death in 1936 and served until his own in 1979. In 1937 he founded the Ramaz School, named after his grandfather-in-law; by the time he died it had a roll of 800 students. However, the center of his rabbinate, indeed his life, remained KJ.

Lookstein possessed an absolute confidence in Orthodoxy. He believed that it had a future and the potential to provide a relevant and attractive religious life to contemporary Americans. He told a meeting organized by Young Israel in 1930:

We are now safe in expecting them [young people] to come back to us, and having come back to find their true happiness and their real self-fulfillment through closer identification and through greater intimacy with Traditional Judaism. [42]

In 1930, this was far from clear, but it was a vision, and it was guided in particular by an attitude toward the practice of prayer. Lookstein fashioned a service that he hoped would make Orthodoxy the denomination of choice. By the end of his career he believed he had achieved it. As he wrote to his son and successor Haskel in 1968:

We made Conservatism or Reform unnecessary and undesirable to a substantial number of families in the neighborhood…Some of them would have joined Conservative or Reform temples in their area but found their way to us and would not go elsewhere…[they] have changed their homes to kosher and their entire home to greater Jewishness. Some of these people sent their children to Ramaz and, because of that, these people and their homes will never be the same…All this we were able to do because…our intention was to conduct the kind of public worship that would be as dignified as the most Reform and as pious as worship in a “shteibbel”…we have never violated in our public worship policy, the Jewish law. [43]

Lookstein’s aim was to create a halakhically conforming service, which combined an Americanized aesthetic with traditional religious feeling. In effect Lookstein sought to create an institutional version of himself: Orthodox, halakhic, but as comfortable in the modern world as the rabbi of any other denomination. Lookstein saw himself and his approach as a way, perhaps in modern America, the way, of drawing as wide a group as possible into an Orthodox setting, with the hope that this would have an impact on their wider religious lives. He wrote in a private note “a well conducted service is in itself the best inducement to attendance.” [44]

Lookstein’s achievement depended on a remarkable attention to detail, meticulous planning, and careful reflection. A record was kept of each person called up to the Torah. The running order of the annual communal Seder for the first night of Passover was set out in advance to the utmost precision. To give a few specific examples: In 1954 he determined that the seating of children during the reading of the Book of Esther on Purim was problematic, and therefore “all children should be made to sit in the section reserved for the children. In no circumstances should children be permitted to sit near their parents; experience has demonstrated that in such cases it is impossible to control them and, therefore, there is noise and commotion in the neighborhood where they sit.” Lookstein was prepared to impose tight control on his staff to achieve the outcome he wanted. In 1953, he pronounced that “the cantor must be made to realize that he is the precentor, the leader of a service not the star of a musical performance indulging in recitatives and cantorial obligatos [who] becomes irritating to those who come to pray and is religiously distracting.”

Every year after the High Holiday services, he would circulate a memorandum that identified what had gone well, what badly, and what ought to be changed. In 1953, he wrote three long notes on changes to the weekday, Sabbath, and High Holiday services in order to increase their appeal. The weekday morning service was not to last more than 45 minutes, if need be by eliminating, shorting, or replacing with English readings some less essential sections, such as the scriptural references to sacrifices in the early part of the service and the supplications (tahanun) after the Amida. The evening service was to be read earlier than nightfall for the convenience of members. The timings of each section of the Sabbath service were set out, so that the entire service lasted no longer than three hours. Responsive and communal reading was introduced to maintain participation. Lookstein ruled that there should never be more than seven men called to the Torah to prevent the reading being extended. He decided that “the opening of the KN [Kol Nidre] service should have a dramatic touch…Perhaps some sort of procession ought to open the service.” Over the course of the High Holiday services there were to be fewer openings of the Ark, to avoid constant standing up and sitting down on the part of the worshippers.[45] Lookstein’s care was minute, extending to the cleanliness of the bathrooms, the shine of the brass fittings, and the condition of the prayer books.

Lookstein’s vision was strikingly similar to the policy of the religious leaders of centrist Orthodoxy in Europe. The presence of figures such as Moses Hyamson from London, serving at the nearby Orach Chayim, and Leo Jung and David de Sola Pool on the other side of Central Park brought these ideas from Britain to New York, and provided a model. Special services, for example, had long played a part in Anglo-Jewish life, to mark coronations, national days of prayer, and the like. KJ instituted services for the Sabbaths before Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day. In common with Shearith Israel, KJ marked Thanksgiving with a special liturgy, delivered by cantor and choir and featuring a guest speaker. This was prayer with a purpose. As a congregational writer explained, “the service on that occasion offers us an opportunity for the integration of Judaism and Americanism and enables us to give to a national holiday a religious flavor and significance.” [46]

Lookstein’s approach worked. When he arrived at KJ, the Upper East Side community was suffering from an exodus to the West Side. The problems were exacerbated by the Great Depression, which reduced membership and other contributions. By the early 1930s, the budget had fallen by two thirds and the congregation was forced to take out a mortgage. Lookstein rebuilt the congregation from this low ebb. From around 1940, the community began to grow again, and by 1946, there were 250 member families and 700 seat-holding families.[47] Lookstein remained obsessed with numbers and kept a weekly tally of attendance.[48] Most remarkably Lookstein was able to attract this strong following even though he refused to bend on the issue of mixed seating, which many Orthodox synagogues introduced because they came to belief it was essential to their survival. Lookstein showed it was not.[49] By the late 1960s, this vision was under attack in the world of New York Orthodox Judaism, which Haym Soloveitchik documented in his important article, “Rupture and Reconstruction.” [50] As Ferziger has noted, Lookstein wrote the 1968 memorandum to his son because he feared that his concept was in danger of being overturned by a growing tendency toward religious extremism, what is now called the “swing to the right.” Toward the end of his career, Lookstein was attempting to defend his achievement from that threat, which he viewed as endangering both a vision of Orthodoxy and a successful strategy for KJ.

Joseph Lookstein’s contribution to the stabilizing and early revival of Orthodoxy in an American setting was to take the central practice of a synagogue, prayer, and find a way to combine the essentials of tradition with an attractive form. This was not Lookstein’s invention. He had Western European models to work from, some in New York, and he had like-minded colleagues, but he was one of the most active and important proponents in America of this approach. Lookstein believed that public worship which engaged with modern tastes and wider society could be a powerful draw for Orthodoxy, and in the case of KJ, he succeeded. Each place and time calls for a different type of engagement, but the underlying principle remains Lookstein’s.

Herbert S. Goldstein—Religious Community

Herbert S. Goldstein was born in New York in 1890. [51] He was raised in an observant household keen to become Americanized, and unlike many others of his generation, he was always more comfortable in English than Yiddish. He attended Etz Chaim Yeshiva and public school before entering Columbia University with a view to becoming a lawyer. However, he was inspired by Joseph Mayer Asher, the Enlightened Orthodox rabbi of Orach Chaim on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to enter the rabbinate. Asher was also the professor of homiletics at the JTS and one of its few remaining ties to Orthodoxy. Goldstein was caught on the cusp of two emerging movements: American Conservative Judaism and American Modern Orthodox Judaism. However, there was still no American alternative to the Seminary for a broadly traditional but Westernized rabbinical training. Goldstein entered the JTS 1910 but was never entirely at home. He clashed with Solomon Schechter and the increasingly radical professor of homiletics, Mordecai M. Kaplan. Goldstein supplemented his studies at the JTS with private tuition and received ordination from both the Seminary and a Lower East Side Orthodox rabbi, Rabbi Shalom Elchanan Jaffe.

Goldstein became the first Orthodox rabbi to be ordained in America and took his first job after graduation as Rabbi Margulies' Assistant Rabbi at Kehilath Jeshurun, but his ambitions were wider. As one of the small number of committed Orthodox Jews from an immigrant background who was also thoroughly Americanized, Goldstein was able to diagnose the problem Orthodoxy faced in America. It was largely Yiddish speaking and based around small synagogues in the Eastern European style. The new, American-born generation rejected such Judaism as foreign. If they were to remain committed to Judaism, they had to be given a way to do so consistent with their American identity. Reform and Conservative Judaism provided that, and Goldstein set himself the task of doing the same for Orthodoxy. Indeed with his JTS background, Goldstein was acutely aware of the challenge from the emergent Conservative Judaism, and was determined to combat it, as he told the Orthodox Union in 1927, “there has crept in a new group, guilty of breaking up the Jewish people into further disunity. They flirt with Reform in practice, and prate about Conservatism on paper…these self-styled Conservatives—these misnomers, the disguised radicals and reformers have not the courage to describe themselves as they are.” [52]

Goldstein believed that had to be a new generation of leaders and a new vision to end the decline of Orthodoxy. As Goldstein told the Orthodox Union in 1933: “Our synagogues and schools are in a woeful condition… the soul of the Jew is being starved. Synagogues have become devoid of their religious leader and whole communities are simply drifting into despair…Our religious and educational plight is a lamentable one.” [53] Goldstein prosecuted his agenda through a variety of means, but his main contribution was establishing a new type of synagogue. Unlike Lookstein who was prepared to work within established institutions, Goldstein wanted to break out of existing structures and found not only a new synagogue but a new type of synagogue.

As early as 1916, Goldstein was agitating for a new synagogue model. It was a type that would emerge in several forms, for example, in the Jewish Center in its first iteration under Mordecai Kaplan. [54] Kaplan wanted to bring the religious, educational, and social together to provide a total Jewish experience in one place, but stated candidly that although they would be under the same roof, he did not propose integration of the religious and the social. Kaplan’s Jewish Center was designed to allow Jews to worship and study, and then to socialize, but without attempting to create a symbiosis between the two.[55] Kaplan was interested in fostering Jewish peoplehood, of which the religious (in the traditional sense) was just one element. By contrast, Goldstein explicitly framed his model as an engine for Orthodoxy, in which young Jews who came for social and cultural purposes would be exposed to a form of Orthodox Judaism that appealed and to which they could commit.

Goldstein envisaged a single institution that would combine the functions of the traditional synagogue, the Hebrew school, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA), which ran the sort of social and cultural events Goldstein wanted to serve as the major attraction for his new synagogue. The inclusion of the YMHA was the most radical move. Such associations were not committed to particular ritual practice and often distanced themselves from Orthodoxy, but Goldstein argued that Jewish continuity depended not only on an attractive synagogue and appealing Hebrew classes but on making the synagogue a “place where men and women can come after plying their daily cares and spend a social hour in an Orthodox environment and in a truly Jewish atmosphere.”[56] Goldstein’s aim was to make this expanded synagogue the center of the social lives of young Jews as a means to religious revival. He claimed that his model would “religionize the whole of social life” and would thereby “bear a generation of knowing Jews and Jewesses, who will be imbued with the ideals and practices of their people, and who will ever strive to make the future of Israel as glorious as its past.” [57] This was a new model, but like other self-conscious advocate of “Orthodoxy” Goldstein presented his approach as a return to the past: “This institution would be a revival of the historic synagogue. The synagogue of old was the center for prayer, study and the social life of the community, all in one. The restoration of this type of synagogue would spell the salvation of Judaism.” [58]

The result was the creation in 1917 of the first establishment of its type, the Institutional Synagogue (IS). Its constitution set out Goldstein’s vision of a comprehensive institution: “The objects and purpose of the corporation shall be to…to maintain a building and equipment for religious, educational, social, civic and physical Jewish activities.”[59] Goldstein left Kehilath Jeshurun to be its rabbi, led membership and fundraising campaigns, and was soon able to spend over $300,000 renovating a building and equipping it with a gymnasium, swimming pool, and locker rooms, as well as the more predicable sanctuary and classrooms. Some of the financial support came from men such as Jacob Schiff, himself a Reform Jew, but one always eager to support initiatives to Americanize immigrants who would never feel comfortable with Reform. He was a major beneficiary of the JTS for just this reason and he gave Goldstein $50,000 for his new building.[60] Although Goldstein wanted to make Americans Orthodox, he was able to exploit Schiff’s desire to make the Orthodox American.

Although Goldstein’s principal insight was the need to create a vibrant communal center, connected to but outside the sanctuary, like others he understood that religious services had to change in order to attract the young. He struck a much less formal note than Jung and Lookstein. The service was decorous but not stuffy; it was run by young men; the cantor was tuneful but not operatic; and sermons were reduced to ten minutes with regular guest speakers to interest the crowd. [61] Social groups were at the core of Goldstein’s vision. In addition to the usual Sisterhood, a Brotherhood was formed. It met for dinner every Monday night to create a real feeling of camaraderie. There were popular Bible classes, visits to the gym, and baseball games in which Goldstein would take part, developing his image as “one of the boys” rather than a distant source of authority. [62]

Goldstein was an executive rabbi. He was not a member of the Board of the synagogue, but he attended and participated in most meetings. The congregation’s cantor described him as “the power on the throne and the power behind the throne.”[63] However Goldstein managed to make members feel actively involved in the life of the synagogue by encouraging congregants to form clubs under the IS umbrella. Any 15 members could form a club and at their height, there were 67 such clubs. The clubs developed leadership and organization skills among the youth and adults, and Goldstein himself modeled the role by leading some clubs, hosting others in his home, and visiting each one from time to time. The clubs reinforced the values of the synagogue through the requirement that each meeting open with a Bible study.[64] As with many other acculturated synagogues at the time, the IS hosted dances. They raised funds, encouraged marriage within the faith and within the synagogue, and attracted new members. Whatever qualms Goldstein may have had about the strict religious propriety of mixed dances he understood their practical value. Mrs. Goldstein was clear that her objective was “to keep Jewish boys dancing with Jewish girls.”[65]

After only a decade in existence, the IS found its Harlem neighborhood emptying out of Jews. In 1926, a branch was established on the West Side and 400 people attended its first High Holiday services. It became clear that the future for the IS lay further south, and by 1929, members of the branch were contributing four times as much financial support as the Harlem members. For a while Goldstein divided his time before transferring his work to the West Side Institutional Synagogue full time. He was uninterested in sentiment. He set out what he wanted to achieve and was determined to accomplish it, even if this upset some members of the Harlem synagogue.[66] He demonstrated that Orthodoxy could be innovative, encourage a broad range of interests, provide an attractive social setting, while still promoting traditional Jewish life. It was bold to turn the synagogue into a complete social, cultural, and health center, and bold, too, to try to infuse religious values into each of those activities.

Conclusions

Pool, Jung, Lookstein, and Goldstein came from different backgrounds, and they had different personal styles and interests. However, they all made a choice to serve Orthodox Judaism in a time and a place in which Orthodoxy seemed doomed. They each believed they could reverse the trend. By the end of their careers in the 1970s, Orthodoxy was recovering in confidence, and its numbers were holding steady. They were not solely responsible for this change, but their careers marked a turning point. Religious leaders need a full range of tools to address whatever problems come before them, and the inter-War figures we have examined developed approaches that could be of use. They advocated an Orthodoxy without fear, but one of wide vision and confidence. They shared an attitude, a persuasion, and they found success.
David de Sola Pool demonstrated the power of a warm and positive faith. Intellectual sophistication has sometimes been equated with angst and suffering. Pool rejected that approach. He saw wholesomeness in the committed Jewish life. By no means was his Judaism empty of content, however his religious message did not depend on sophisticated analysis; it spoke about the inner religious life of the personal experience of the love of God. In an age when Chabad and other Hareidi outreach organizations attract followers through the simplicity of their message, an over-analyzed and anxious Modern Orthodoxy will struggle. A return to the immediacy and joy of Pool’s message may help address that deficiency.
Leo Jung began as an original scholar and although he continued to write essays and articles, he soon found his calling as an editor, presenting the work of others to a wide audience. The Jewish Library was a demonstration that Orthodoxy could be as sophisticated in thought as any other denomination. By recruiting leading scholars and scientists of the Orthodox present and by drawing attention to the brilliant minds of the Orthodox past, Jung impressed the men and women who would comprise the Orthodox future. For those who seek a subtle and nuanced approach to Judaism, Jung’s approach is still a model. There were those who search now as they sought in Jung’s time, and if Modern Orthodoxy is to fulfill its purpose and reach its natural constituency it might do well to emulate Jung.
Joseph Lookstein was known for his brilliance as a speaker, and although he took tremendous pains over his sermons, his greatest efforts were spent in turning Kehilath Jeshurun into a sanctuary that attracted Americanized Jews. Through judicious changes to the service that were consistent with halakha, he turned a declining community into a flagship synagogue. His achievement was based on the belief that Orthodoxy could be made attractive, and once it was modern Jews would find their natural home. His confidence in his vision of a halakhic but sophisticated prayer service was vindicated by his finding a following even without introducing mixed seating. Few Jews today are attracted to a service like the highly formal one Lookstein developed at KJ, although it still has a constituency. But contemporary Jews they can be engaged by the same spirit that animated Lookstein—a willingness to be creative within halakhic parameters for the sake of a larger goal, the success and continuity of Orthodoxy.
The most iconoclastic of the four figures is the last, Herbert Goldstein. He was the first to establish a synagogue on a new model, where every aspect of a Jew’s religious, educational, and social life could be addressed. This is not because he regarded athletics and drama as ends in themselves, but because they provided a way to reach the many young Jews who had dismissed Orthodoxy as an outdated relic of their parents’ generation. By making the synagogue the place where they wanted to go, at first for social and recreational activities but then for study and prayer, Goldstein eventually reached 3,000 people per week. He showed that Orthodoxy thrived on innovation and that it is possible to harness modern techniques for traditionalist purposes. There is currently an impatience with inherited structures. To give just one example, the success of the independent minyan movement has to be reckoned with. These are generally not Orthodox, but Orthodox leaders with Goldstein’s boldness could adapt their form, or develop an equaling compelling one of their own and seek to replicate not only Goldstein’s technique but also his success.
This study is neither an exercise in counterfactuals nor in hagiography. It is not intended to show that our quartet, or any other figure from the past could have negotiated successfully the challenges of today, or that they were uniquely able and effective. What I hope I have demonstrated is that they were significant figures whom contemporary Modern Orthodox leaders should take seriously. They operated in particularly difficult circumstances and their achievements were substantial. They also show the powerful potential of visionary leadership and the crucial role leaders can play. The challenges of Modern Orthodoxy today are different but in some ways equally grave. Other figures, from both before and after their have much to contribute. However, it is also right to make space at the table for Pool, Jung, Lookstein, and Goldstein, and more importantly for new leaders in their mold.

[1] I am grateful to the Tikvah Fund for supporting the research, writing, and publication of this article, and to the Fellows and staff, in particular Neal Kozodoy, for their comments on earlier versions.
[2] See my discussion of the problems of denominational labels in Benjamin J. Elton, Britain’s Chief Rabbis and the Religious Character of Anglo-Jewry 1880–1970 (Manchester 2009), 17.
[3] M. Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition, (New York, 1992) 22.
[4] American Hebrew, December 19, 1884, 84.
[5] Arthur Kiron, “Varieties of Haskalah: Sabato Morais’s Program of Sephardi Rabbinic Humanism in Victorian America” in Ross Brann and Adam Sutcliffe (eds.), Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture: From Al-Andalus to the Haskalah (Philadelphia 2004), 136.
[6] There has been a volume of important work on this issue, see for example Samuel Heilman, “Constructing Orthodoxy” in T. Robbins and D. Anthony (eds.) In Gods We Trust (New Brunswick, 1981) 150–151; “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy, Part 1” Modern Judaism (2:1 February 1982), 23–52; and “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy, Part 2” Modern Judaism (2:2 May 1982), 171–198.
[7] Samuel Heilman, “How did fundamentalism manage to infiltrate contemporary orthodoxy,” Contemporary Jewry (2005, 25), 261–262.
[8] On the evolution of the JTS, see Jack Wertheimer (ed.) Tradition Renewed (New York, 1997), volume 1, chapters 2–5, 28–30.
[9] For the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century context, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective (Hoboken, NJ, 1996); “Resisters and Accommodators: Varieties of Orthodox Rabbis in America, 1886–1983,” in The American Rabbinate: A Century of Continuity and Change, 1883–1983 (New York, 1985), 10–97; “Twentieth-Century American Orthodoxy’s Era of Non-Observance, 1900–1960,” The Torah u-Madda Journal IX (2000), 87–107; “American Judaism between the Two World Wars;” Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America, Marc Lee Raphael, ed. (New York 2008), 93–113; and his Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington 2009), especially chapters 4 and 5; Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews (Bloomington 1990).
[10] Jacob J. Schacter, “Words of Tribute” in Jacob J. Schacter (ed.), Reverence, Righteousness and Rahamanut, (Northvale NJ 1992), 2.
[11] Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington, 2009) 208.
[12] Ibid., 211.
[13] Marshal Sklare, America’s Jews (New York, 1971), 4.
[14] I am grateful to Jonathan Silver for referring me to Irving Kristol’s The Neoconservative Persuasion (Gertrude Himmelfarb ed.) (Philadelphia, 2011), which models the role of a persuasion (as distinct from a specific manifesto or doctrine) in approaching issues and problems.
[15] In addition to the sixteen volumes (some revisions of earlier volumes) published in the two series of the Jewish Library between 1928 and 1980, see his collections of sermons, which include Living Judaism (New York, 1927); Toward Sinai (1929); Crumbs and Character (New York 1942).
[16] See Adam S. Ferziger, “The Lookstein Legacy: An American Orthodox Rabbinical Dynasty?,” Jewish History, 13:1 (Spring, 1999), 127–14,; Norman Lamm, “Eulogy for Rabi Joseph H. Lookstein” in Leo Landman (ed.) Joseph H.Lookstein Memorial Memorial Volume (Hoboken, NJ, 1980), 7–14.
[17] See Aaron I. Reichel, The Maverick Rabbi—Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein and the Institutional Synagogue, (New York, 1984).
[18] See David de Sola Pool, “David de Sola Pool” in Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies Louis Finklestein (ed.) (New York, 1953), 201–217; An Old Faith in the New World (New York, 1955), 202–208 ; Nima Adlerblum, “Reflections on the Life and Work of Rabbi David de Sola Pool” Tradition 30:1 (Fall 1995), 7–16.
[19] David de Sola Pool, “David de Sola Pool” in Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies Louis Finklestein (ed.) (New York 1953), 204–205.
[20] David de Sola Pool, “David de Sola Pool” in Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies Louis Finklestein (ed.) (New York 1953), 206.
[21] Rabbi David de Sola Pool: Selections from Six Decades of Sermons, Addresses and Writings, Marc D. Angel (ed.) (New York, 1980), 59.
[22] David de Sola Pool, “David de Sola Pool” in Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies Louis Finklestein (ed.) (New York, 1953), 207–208.
[23] David de Sola Pool, “David de Sola Pool” in Thirteen Americans: Their Spiritual Autobiographies Louis Finklestein (ed.) (New York, 1953), 207.
[24] Major works by Pool include “The Place of God in Modern Life” Columbia University Quarterly (24, June 1932), 194–205; Why I Am A Jew (New York, 1957); Is There An Answer? (New York, 1966); Rabbi David de Sola Pool: Selections from Six Decades of Sermons, Addresses and Writings, Marc D. Angel (ed.) (New York, 1980).
[25] Rabbi David de Sola Pool: Selections from Six Decades of Sermons, Addresses and Writings, Marc D. Angel (ed.) (New York, 1980), 18.
[26] Ibid., 82.
[27] See David de Sola Pool, Why I Am A Jew (New York, 1957), 75–80.
[28] Ibid., 41.
[29] Ibid., 83–84.
[30] Ibid., 89.
[31] See Nima H. Adlerblum, “Loe Jung” in The Leo Jung Jubilee Volume Menahem M. Kasher, Norman Lamm, Leonard Rosenfeld (eds.), (New York, 1962), 1–40; Marc Lee Raphael, “Rabbi Leo Jung and the Americanization of Orthodox Judaism” in Schacter (ed.), Reverence, Righteousness and Rahamanut, 21–91; Maxine Jacobson, Trends in Modern Orthodoxy as Reflected in the Career of Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, Unpublished doctoral dissertation (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2004); Leo Jung, Path of a Pioneer (New York, 1980), although the reader should be aware that it is not always reliable.
[32] On Meir Tsevi Jung see Gershon Bader and Moses Jung, “Meir Tsevi Jung” in Leo Jung (ed.) Jewish Leaders (Jerusalem, 1953), 297–316.
[33] Fallen Angles in Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan Literature (Philadelphia 1926); Yoma in Isidore Epstein (ed.) The Babylonian Talmud (London 1938). Jung’s collections of sermons include Living Judaism (New York, 1927); Toward Sinai (1929); Crumbs and Character (New York, 1942). See the bibliography in Raphael, “Rabbi Leo Jung,” especially 79–80 and 88–91.
[34] L. Jung (ed.) The Jewish Library First Series ( New York, second edition revised 1943), vii.
[35] Ibid., 7–8.
[36] Leo Jung , “The Rabbis and Freedom of Interpretation” in Guardians of our Heritage, Leo Jung (ed), New York 1958, 5–30.
[37] Ibid., 6.
[38] Ibid., 8–9.
[39] Ibid., 12.
[40] See Adam S. Ferziger, “The Lookstein Legacy: An American Orthodox Rabbinical Dynasty?,” Jewish History, 13:1 (Spring, 1999), 127–214,; Norman Lamm, “Eulogy for Rabi Joseph H. Lookstein” in Leo Landman (ed.) Joseph H. Lookstein Memorial Memorial Volume (Hoboken, NJ 1980), 7–14.
[41] Jenna Weissman Joselit, “The Middle-Class American Jewish Woman” in Jack Wetheimer (ed.) The American Synagogue, a Sanctuary Transformed (Cambridge, 1987), 219–220.
[42] Joseph H. Lookstein papers, Yeshiva University Library, box 45.
[43] Quoted in Ferziger, “The Lookstein Legacy,” 130–131.
[44] Joselit, “The Middle-Class American Jewish Woman,” 220.
[45] Joseph H. Lookstein papers, Yeshiva University Library, box 41.
[46] Schlang (ed.), Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, 93–94.
[47] Joseph H. Lookstein, “Seventy Five Yesteryears,” in Schlang (ed.), Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, 31–32.
[48] Ferziger, “The Lookstein Legacy,” 135.
[49] See Jonathan Sarna, “The Debate over Mixed Seating in the American Synagogue” in Jack Werthiemer (ed.), The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (New York 1987), 363–394.
[50] Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy” Tradition 28:4 (Summer 1994), 64–130.
[51] See Aaron I. Reichel, The Maverick Rabbi—Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein and the Institutional Synagogue, (New York 1984).
[52] Herbert S. Goldstein papers, Yeshiva University Library, box 8.
[53] Herbert S. Goldstein papers, Yeshiva University Library, box 8.
[54] For more on the idea of a Jewish center see David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool (Hanover, NH, 1999).
[55] Aaron I. Reichel, The Maverick Rabbi—Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein and the Institutional Synagogue, (New York, 1984), 96.
[56] Aaron I. Reichel, The Maverick Rabbi—Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein and the Institutional Synagogue, (New York, 1984), 92.
[57] Ibid., 94.
[58] Ibid., 92.
[59] Herbert S. Goldstein papers, Yeshiva University Library, box 1.
[60] Aaron I. Reichel, The Maverick Rabbi—Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein and the Institutional Synagogue, (New York, 1984), 173–174.
[61] Ibid., 186–191.
[62] Ibid., 224–240.
[63] Ibid., 236.
[64] Ibid., 255–270.
[65] Ibid., 249–254.
[66] Ibid., 305–322.

As a child, in my formative years, I grew up on New York’s Lower East Side. I attended Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem and was privileged to know Rav Moshe Feinstein. My grandfather was the b’al koreh at the Yeshiva and a close friend of Rav Moshe, so I was blessed to have visited the Feinstein home on numerous occasions. Rav Moshe had a great influence on me. It was he who taught me how to interact with Jews of a wide range of observance, especially in the way he modeled Torah as an expression of love, patience, tolerance, and universal respect (b’sever panim yafot).

I used to watch Rav Moshe daven, for he sat just a few rows ahead of me in shul. His discipline was amazing. Between each aliya of the Keriat haTorah, he would lift a book of mishnayot and go through the text, not wasting a moment’s time to study. While this strict discipline was regular practice for Rav Moshe, he would override it and interrupt his study when the virtue of kindness was necessary. His spontaneous hessed was strikingly incorporated within his discipline, so it was evident that this hessed was a well thought out, integrated trait that came from his perception that this is what Torah required, and this surpassed everything else.

I vividly remember when on one Shabbat morning, during Keriat haTorah, an elderly woman with a handbag and purse barged into the shul’s Bet haMidrash men’s section, and cried out, “I must speak to Rav Moshe.” The kehillah was in a bit of a shock, and several men rose up to escort the lady out of the synagogue. But before they could do so, Rav Moshe ran over to her and asked what was wrong. She said that her husband was on his death bed in the hospital, and he wanted to speak to him before he died. Without a moment’s hesitation, Rav Moshe threw on his coat and ran out of shul with the lady. From all appearances she was not an observant Jew; she was carrying a purse on Shabbat, and ignoring the prohibition of entering the men’s section and breaching the mehitsa. Rav Moshe’s essence was hessed, and being interrupted even in Torah study, or not fulfilling the obligation of hearing the Torah reading was secondary to an act of kindness and respect toward this woman. It did not matter in the least whether she was observant or not. This was his Torah mandate.

Another vivid memory was the way he interacted with the young children in the Synagogue. My friends and I were a bit rude and rowdy during Keriat haTorah. Many of the congregants unsuccessfully tried to silence us during the Torah reading, but our passion to discuss the baseball scores outweighed our desire to hear every word of the Torah reading. Rav Moshe never chastised us, and often smiled warmly at me. Reflecting on it now, I realize that he understood how strongly disposed to sports fifth-grade students were, more keenly felt by us than our obligation to keep decorum, not to disturb others and listen to the Torah reading. I was always embarrassed about the noise level, but the far greater imprint was the impression that I culled that treating others with love and respect was Judaism’s supreme value.

As I grew older, I was drawn to the many teachings in our tradition that supported my earliest experience with this Gadol haDor. I was instantly drawn to the teachings in the Gemara and Midrash that emphasized the notion of Imitatio Dei, “Just as God is loving and patient, so must we act with these qualities in this world.” As Ben Azzai says (J.T. Nedarim 9:4), the most important verse in the Torah is that every human being is created in the image of God (Bereishith 5:1), and thus must be treated thusly, as the Mishna in Sanhedrin (4:5) affirms. (A human being is created alone, to teach us that every human being has absolute value, embodies uniqueness, and thus deserves to be treated with equality and respect as befitting one who is created in the image of God.) This was a continuation of what we began learning as children about the laws of damages/nezikin in our earliest exposure to Gemara; the main emphasis was always on how we were to treat other human beings and their property, which included even the property of our enemies.

Later on I discovered the Mussar movement, and R. Yisrael Salanter who said, “The Torah came to create a Mensch; the more human you are, the more Jewish you are.” He captured a most profound dictum that always stayed with me, “Rather than worry about another person’s spiritual level and your own physical needs, worry about your own spiritual level and another person’s physical needs.” (Dov Katz, T’nuat Hamussar, p. 304). This is exactly what I observed in Rav Moshe. As I listened to Mussar lectures and learned Torah, I became convinced in my heart that the prime teaching of the Torah is “olam hessed yibaneh,” the world was created for the sake of the kindness we are able to bestow upon others. As the quaint Hassidic teaching captures it, the Torah begins with a bet and ends with a lamed; lamed bet spells lev, heart, and thus the whole Torah is a heart book, opening our hearts to be kind to others, who are created in the image of God.

These teachings were supported by a whole slew of Torah teachings from various sources. Famously, we learn that among the reasons for the destruction of the Second Temple, the Talmud states, that the Jews did not know how to rebuke each other lovingly, nor did they know how to accept rebuke (Vayikra 19:17–18); moreover, the Talmud (Yoma 9b) teaches that the destruction of the second Bet haMikdash was due to baseless hatred of one Jew toward another. Rav Abraham Isaac Kook says that the third Temple will be built only through the antidote, “baseless love toward our fellow Jew.” Rav Moshe added an important principle in our interaction with those whom we perceive “as in error,” for he placed those in our contemporary generation who do not observe the mitzvoth in the category of tinok sheNishba—they simply have not been educated religiously; they are not willful “sinners.” Thus, the antidote is to educate them with a welcoming presence, and with passion for the beauty of Torah. As the Talmud says, we are to “hate the sin, but not the sinner” (Berakhot 10a).

The Hafetz Hayyim urges us not to say anything bad about our fellow Jew, to be flowing with loving words toward others. That would even apply to governments and political discussions, where we tend to demonize the other. This is not the way of Torat Hessed. Furthermore, it is taught that the Jewish people were worthy to receive the Torah at Mt. Sinai because they were in a state of harmony, “And they encamped as one in front of the mountain” (Shemoth 19:2). It is only when a spirit of love emanates from us that we are worthy of the highest blessing, and it is in this spirit that we truly carry out the mandate of the Torah. The Maharsha, at the end of Yebamoth, similarly states that any halakha that does not lead to peace and harmony is questionable in its veracity, quoting the verse: “Its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace” (Mishlei 3:17).

The Kabbalists suggest that it is incumbent to include sinners as well as the righteous in our communities in order for Kelal Yisrael to reach its Messianic destiny of growth and wholeness. For it is only in the encounter with darkness that we grow fully; only when we face the darkness within and without do we have a chance to overcome obstacles and complacency which inhibit growth. Any closed system that attempts to remain insulated and pure reaches a state of entropy, self-righteousness, and blindness to its own inner failings. It took a Yitro, an outsider, to awaken Moshe to some flaws within his community and the way in which he was leading it. A closed community reaches a state of entropy, and misses the opportunity for growth that an open system, which welcomes outsiders, experiences.

Thus the Kabbalists explain why the ketoret (incense) offering includes a putrid smelling spice, called helbena, with all the other sweet-smelling spices. The letter het of the helbena symbolizes hoshekh (darkness), and het (sinfulness) that is necessary in a holistic community promoting growth, and the mystics urge us to remember that the letter het includes the important concept that “hasdei Hashem kee lo tamnu,” the kindness of the Lord never ceases, and includes the kindness to sinners and those who are in the “dark.” Moreover, each of us needs to face the shadow, the darkness within ourselves as well as in the other, the outsider, in order to achieve full growth, the fulfillment of our destiny, and the actualization of wholeness.

The Talmud suggests the same idea when it states that any minyan that does not include a sinner is not a successful prayer gathering. It is lacking in loving-kindness through its insulation, and cannot reach the heights of a group that is engaged in the potentially transformative struggle with its shadow. We learn this intimately from King David, who repents from his sins and is lauded for his growth. As the Gemara states, “A perfect tsadik cannot measure up to one who has done teshuvah” (Berakhot 34b). And the very term for a member of the Jewish people, an Israelite, is one who struggles, who wrestles with God. Remember, it is always easier to love one who is like you; but the challenge is to also learn to love difference. Hence, it is Ben Azzai’s view, suggesting a universal verse that is the most important verse in the Torah and is even preferable to Rabbi Akiva’s more limited view that “Loving your neighbor as yourself” (which suggests only your neighbor) is the most important. Of course, this does not obviate the importance of loving those who are like us, a particularistic demand; we must always begin with ourselves. However, the goal is to build on that and reach out to those who are different from us as well. Indeed, this is the “messianic consciousness” found throughout the tradition where we reach the perception that all of us are children of God, all distinct aspects of the total unity, and our task is to act to bring this about, by acting with hessed and the 13 attributes of God. But the journey toward the messianic era necessitates the facing of dualities along the way, in order to achieve a conscious unity. As the Sefat Emet says at the end of Vayhi, our world is not a world of unity and truth, but a world of duality that necessitates faith; in a world where we journey toward truth, facing the darkness and extracting the light, we strengthen our faith in the face of uncertainty, until we reach our dying days and enter the world of truth. At that point there is no more growth, there is certainty.

Growth comes about in facing the darkness that develops and necessitates faith along the journey.

So, armed with the blessed example of Rav Moshe, and the inspirational teachings of the Torah, I felt within that part of my challenge and destiny in life would be to engage with peers and contemporaries who had not had the same exposure to Torah that I did. And my first experience with working with Jews of other denominations was when I worked with Jacob Birnbaum and others for SSSJ (Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry). This cause involved the plight of thousands of Soviet Jews, and the success of its efforts depended on our ability to engage as large a group of student activists possible. That meant their denominational affiliations were irrelevant. Even though for me, SSSJ started out in the dorms of Yeshiva University with Jacob’s prophetic visits and exhortations, it soon began to involve students from the Jewish Theological Seminary and other schools. United by a common cause, we each gained greater respect for, as well as greater understanding of both the differences and the similarities in our Jewish practice. The common goal for us all was a cause that was important to the Jewish people. Also at that time, Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik allowed YU students to March in protest for the cause of those suffering in Biafra. This permitted us to do our work with the confidence that we were in no way compromising any halakhic dicta; on the contrary, we were participating in activities that promoted peace among Jews, and contributed to the elevation of justice in the world.

Some time after that, when I was in the semikha program at YU, students from JTS called our dorm and asked if some students would be interested in co-creating a strategic plan with them. The primary goal was to influence the Jewish Federation to alter its budget prioritization in a way that would include more funds for Soviet Jewry and Jewish education. They asked for a student representative to participate in regular meetings, with the intent of being present at the annual General Assembly meeting in Boston. The vision was for us to mix with the delegates and explain to them that the current Federation budgetary allocations neglected the dire crisis prevalent in the life of Soviet Jews, and also ignored the escalating cost of Jewish education that needed to be supported in a greater way by the Jewish community’s largest resource.

What we learned from our experience at the G.A. was that funds were raised through local Federations which then bestowed them upon their local communities; so we needed to go back to New York, and convince the New York Federation to reprioritize. So a group of students from various rabbinical schools in New York began meeting on a bi-monthly basis to initiate a dialogue with Federation. This led to a planned protest at the Federation building, because our dialogue did not lead to the results that we had sought. In the process, I learned to understand the sincerity and the idealistic principles of fellow Jews who came from different backgrounds than I did, who held different philosophical beliefs than my own, exquisite fellow Jews who cared about the future of the Jewish people and were willing to sacrifice many days and nights to improve the educational quality of the Jewish community, to take risks in order to ameliorate the plight of Soviet Jews robbed of their heritage in the Soviet Union. Here I was touched by the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe, “Any way can be a way, as long as you MAKE it a way.”

When I graduated the semikha program at YU and received an MSW from YU’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work, my first job was as Hillel Director at MIT. The task of the Hillel Director was (and still is) to engage with the wide variety of Jewish students and faculty who make up the university community. The challenge was to bring tolerance and respect to the various members and unique practices of different communities of Jews, while maintaining one’s own principles, convictions, and practices. As long as one respects oneself, has a desire to share what she or he knows in Torah, and is willing to be respectfully open to the beliefs and practices of others, a natural interaction takes place where people are learning from each other, and stereotypes and fears are attenuated. It is a wonderful opportunity to promote unity within the Jewish people while acknowledging the diversity of our multi-faceted community. Just as the 12 tribes lived under their own flags, but were committed to the welfare of the entire community and the glory of God, Hillel honors the very different backgrounds of the groups of students attending the university while providing them with Jewish education and communal ritual services throughout their stay at the university.

There are, of course, many challenges facing an observant Jew who engages with modern, humanistic, and secular Jewish students. The main requirement for successful connection, though, is the ability to truly listen, to understand the other’s doubts, and to respect and honor each person and group with whom one is interacting. As a Hillel Director and an ordained Orthodox rabbi, I attempted to serve and unite a Jewish community by promoting respect among the different groups and members while honoring the different practices of each tradition. One major obstacle for non-Orthodox students entering an Orthodox setting (if they chose to daven with an Orthodox minyan) is the lack of familiarity with traditional practices and customs, and also with the Hebrew language, all of which makes newcomers feel like inadequate beginners.

Fortunately, most of my students had strong memories and a loving connection to the way of worship with which they were raised. This early path was their sincere and connective way to relating to God and Jewish practice and their earliest memories made a deep imprint on their souls. At that point, I could either attempt to encourage them to stick with and try to master this new form of service, which was alien to them, or encourage their sincere, powerful experience in their familiar prayer mode, and appreciate the depth of their service. I chose the latter, without judgment (following the dictums of R. Yisrael Salanter and the Kotzker) and expanded my appreciation of the depth of the different traditions within Judaism. I found that once they had the choice to say “no” to something they were not comfortable with and did not feel coerced in any way, they were more comfortable in choosing a new form of prayer service if they wanted to. Thus each of the denominational services was given utmost respect, without any attempt to make any group or individual fit into the proscribed halakhic norm.

Another major challenge was engaging with students who did not accept the traditional belief in Divine Providence, as a result of having experienced in their own lives, and in recent history, the “eclipse of God” (Hester Panim), and they could not overcome this authentic feeling. The contemporary experience of the prevalence of evil and injustice in the world, not only between human beings, but also in the natural world of natural disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, famines, tornadoes, and so forth, made them wonder about the lack of God’s intervention in the world. Moreover, they saw no apparent distinction in this world being made between people who kept the commandments and behaved ethically and those who did not.

In this area, I made philosophical attempts to expose students to the Jewish classical interpreters and some modern theologians. For example, ideas such as those contained in Paul Tillich’s “Faith and Doubt,” the teaching of the Sefat Emet to proceed even with doubt, because doubt is inherent in encountering the “Great Mystery” from a rational perspective, and Isaiah Leibowitz’s approach to just do the mitzvah without having to understand the intellectual meaning of the deed, for through the deed itself comes the connection. Although the Rambam requires 13 certain categories of belief in order to be acceptable within the boundaries of tradition, and although the Vilna Gaon asserts that people sin only after they wish to follow their impulses and then rationalize their behavior, I found, on the contrary, that many students genuinely struggled with belief and faith as an obstacle to taking on a traditional lifestyle. They had sincere intellectual doubts and could not take the “leap of faith.” But they were not opposed to participating in the communal experience, engaging in the rituals comfortably, and feeling some spark of connection to their soul as a result.

Despite this approach, the battle was a losing one; some students were won over by intellectual persuasion and contact, but the majority remained skeptical of the traditional worldview found in mainstream Orthodoxy. The most effective way of engaging with all students was to embrace them with love and acceptance, acknowledging their doubts, and inviting them in for practical celebratory rituals such as holy days and Shabbat. Having them experience the warmth of each particular denominational community allowed them to become more accustomed to its practices, despite their reservations about its belief system. But the impact of the “spread of Amalek,” how evil triumphs in the world, was a very powerful catalyst to their doubts. In gematria, Amalek (240) equals Safek (doubt, also 240), and when evil triumphs in the world, the glory of God is reduced, and faith impaired.

There were certain areas that became very stressful for students and faculty to accept when they read the Torah literally, without the inclusion of Oral traditions and commentaries. One prevalent difficulty for them was the literal description of God’s behavior, especially God’s jealousy and retaliation for the Israelites’ not keeping the commandments. They also had challenges with biblical criticism, differentiations between the rights of men and women, attitudes and statements toward gentiles and homosexuals, and so forth. The basic perception of the modern world as evil did not fit into their psychic framework either, having been raised in a post-enlightenment open society and having imbibed the cultural values of humanism, the lure of freedom and choice, materialism, hedonism, and secularism. They sometimes perceived Orthodox Judaism as a cult—tribal, fundamentalist, insular, and not welcoming to outsiders.

I think that this was partially a result of a lack of confidence on their part, not feeling competent because of their ignorance of tradition, so they projected some of their feelings of inadequacy in a hostile fashion toward outsiders. They believed they were being devalued, when in actuality it was their own feeling of inferiority that was creating anxiety, and they dealt with it by blaming those around them who were more learned.

So the antidote to this reaction was to lovingly educate in the depth and beauty of Torah, to respond non-judgmentally to their doubts, and to transparently reveal that I as an authority figure had questions as well (the question is often more important than the answer and can lead to greater depth, according to the Kotzker). But most important of all, it was the working to make our community welcoming, respectful, and warm toward those less religiously educated that drew people in—those individuals from all denominations as well as those not affiliated with Jewish life at home. Furthermore, we worked to make sure that our whole educational staff was comfortable in accepting that beliefs and doubts of others are part of the human condition in the modern world, and to allow for their honesty, to accept and not judge. The dictum of allowing God to be the Judge, and the staff to be welcomers and educators, was our prime guiding principle.
Some of our luminaries, such as the Mei Hashiloah (“The Ishbitzer”) have utilized the concept of “eit la’asot lashem, heifeiru et toratekha” (Psalm 119:126), to expand boundaries in certain areas so as to create openings for those who cannot make full commitments to an observant, Orthodox way of life, and to allow for different philosophical beliefs, even while adhering to many traditions. Following this path our entire Hillel staff attempted to translate the elevated values of Judaism into a modern context, showing how Judaism fits into many of the best values of Western society, and yet rejects some of the excesses that a narcissistic and materialistic culture embodies. An example would be clarifying for some students the misperception that Judaism considers wealth itself to be inherently evil, and articulating how Judaism actually teaches that it is how you utilize your blessing of wealth in a just and generous way that matters. A helpful idea to some students who noticed attitudes in tradition that were at odds with their beliefs was Rav Kook’s statement that along our journey through history as a result of oppression and hostility from others, Jews became reactive and fearful at times, and attitudes crept into the tradition, “jagged cliffs,” that would be removed as we approach the messianic era, but they were not inherent to the core of Judaism. It was thinkers such as R. Emanuel Rackman, R. Eliezer Berkovitz, R. David Hartman, R. Yitz Greenberg, R. Shlomo Riskin, R. Saul Berman, Rav Kook, Martin Buber, and A.J. Heschel, to name a few, that appealed to their modern consciousness.

Although both study and practice were essential, I found that the experiential dimension of Shabbat and the holy days left a far greater imprint than learning about them as “concepts.” Even if students began to take on practices for social reasons, they began to slowly develop an appreciation of the deep spiritual foundation of Judaism.

After some years at MIT Hillel and a year at Princeton Hillel, then completing my studies in the doctoral program at Columbia University School of Social Work, my family moved to Los Angeles so that I could accept a teaching position at USC School of Social Work. In 2000, I received a PhD from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Depth Psychology/Mythology.
At that time a new Rabbinical/Chaplaincy/Cantorial school called the Academy for Jewish Religion, California was being established in Los Angeles. I was asked to join the endeavor, and take on a leadership role. The pioneering concept of this seminary was not to identify with one specific denomination, but to form a faculty with clergy and academicians from Orthodox and non-Orthodox backgrounds. The school would teach Judaic courses found in the denominational seminaries, and add some courses in Hassidut, Mussar, and Pastoral Counseling, with the goal of promoting psycho/spiritual growth in the students. AJRCA’s founders felt that allegiance to the denominations had become more important than the welfare of the Jewish people as a whole; it was becoming widely known that the majority of the Jewish community was not affiliated with any of the denominations. There was a strong desire on the part of mature rabbinical students at existing seminaries for greater cultivation of spirituality to be partnered with an academic curriculum. The charge in establishing AJRCA was to integrate a group of disparate students, honor their individuality, and unite them in a common vision of Jewish peoplehood, love of Torah, and the depth and breadth of great rabbinic teachers throughout the generations. The challenges: Could the halakhic needs of the Orthodox students be satisfied in a mixed group of individuals from different backgrounds with different levels of education and practices? Would the non-Orthodox students feel comfortable with more traditional students? We felt it would be possible for the classes to succeed, but the major challenge was for the form of the prayer services. We settled on a formula, that there would be different styles of services, and that Orthodox students would pray privately or with a traditional minyan, if they so chose, and the non-Orthodox students would pray in mixed services, and everyone would respect the needs and integrity of those who had different practices. Quite miraculously, through this idealistic vision, a faculty of Orthodox and non-Orthodox teachers emerged who respected each other, got along with each other, and were moved in their souls to educate and train a group of idealistic students to the knowledge that touched their souls. The school attracted more students than we could have imagined, and within just 10 years (a remarkably swift achievement) was granted accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), which attested to the quality education that the students received. As the Mishna states: “Every assembly that is dedicated to the sake of heaven will have an enduring effect”(Avot 4:11).

Of course, at first, different segments of each of the denominations directed strong criticism toward this “transdenominational” endeavor. These objections manifested fears on the part of each side that are rarely dealt with. The Orthodox worried that contact with the other, or knowledge of the other, might create flexibility within, which could lead to too great a compromise and loss of tradition. The non-Orthodox worried that contact might expose insecurities and anxieties about legitimacy. It became clear that part of the problem was that when groups only talk to themselves, and exclude the other, prejudices and stereotypes grow rather than diminish. Although each side preached love of the other, the behavior of each side did not always reach this ideal. Part of the challenge became how to disagree with the other and still see him or her as human.

The rigidity that was manifest on each side stemmed from fear, from a feeling of weakness rather than strength. I suggested that if each side would look at its own failings, rather than blaming the other, the other side would be disarmed and a fruitful dialogue could begin. There would evolve an appreciation of the positive contributions of each of the different communities. Of course, this would mean some legitimization of the other, a step heretofore opposed by some, but each side would have to yield something, without compromising integrity, or bear the brunt of the continuing schism that is certainly harmful to Kelal Yisrael. I felt that if we had courage, and proceeded carefully, we would find the way with God’s help. As the Mishna in Avot states, “It is not for us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from beginning it”(Avot 2:16). So we began this endeavor, and every year since then, thank God, AJRCA has graduated rabbis, cantors, and chaplains who have influenced many communities and educated many Jews who would not have otherwise been reached. What has made this possible is the deep feeling of responsibility for fellow Jews these students carried, embodied in their incredible gifts of relational hessed, the school’s emphasis on values of respect for each human being created in the image of God, and the students’ confidence in the truth and beauty of Torah.

This experience of respecting difference while maintaining one’s own values, and working together on projects that affect the welfare and unity of the Jewish people, while promoting the elevation of peace and justice in the world, led AJRCA to join in a new project in 2011 that would expand our graduates’ potential to be effective clergy leaders in the twenty-first century. We joined in the founding of Claremont Lincoln University, the first graduate program to offer courses to students in different seminaries interested in studying world religions, in addition to their own, so they could be better prepared to understand other religions, rather than living with stereotypes, or relying on the limited perspectives that journalistic expositions promote. The idea was that each seminary, Jewish (AJRCA), Christian (Claremont School of Theology), and Islamic (Islamic Center of Southern California), would train its students in their own religious traditions within their full curricula, but that students would have the additional opportunity to take courses in other religions as well, leading to a master’s degree in Interfaith Studies. There would also be some social action projects as part of the curriculum, and students and faculty would have the opportunity to develop trust and friendships with others who were interested in the same ideal of promoting peace and justice in the outer society, and knowledge of the other, so they would feel more comfortable in their desire to engage in interfaith work that is meaningful and that fits into the value framework of their traditions. The program started out with the three Abrahamic religions, and has now expanded to include courses in Eastern and Dharmic religions as well.

Since the world has become so interdependent in the twenty-first century, it seems necessary to educate ourselves to world religions, that may have different cultural and historical frameworks, different forms of worship, but agree on the fundamental teaching of all religions, the golden rule, to treat others with respect and kindness, just as they would like to be treated.

All these institutions and projects, Hillel, AJRCA, and Claremont Lincoln University (CLU), continue to grow as they meet an important need in a new world of intercommunication and encounters with others. If we each remain true to our principles, while remaining respectful of the unique, distinctive practices of others all aiming toward the same goal of a peaceful, just, “messianic” era, we will all be the better for it, and the spirit of God will become manifest palpably as our Sages predict at the “end of the days.” May that day come soon, as we continue to build bridges across the divide.

Book tours are common—authors travel from one place to another to do readings and talks to promote their new books. But story tours? I realize that’s what I’ve been doing, giving readings of a story which I wrote in Ladino and translated into English, “Pasha: Ruminations of David Aroughetti.” The story, published in Midstream in English in 2005, and in Sephardic Horizons in Ladino in 2011, is about a Turkish Jew in the early 1900s in the fast-deteriorating Ottoman Empire and then in New York. When we meet him, this character has virtually nothing. Yet ironically he’s adopted the mindset of a harsh arrogant pasha—the Turkish word means a high-ranking public official, or someone who acts like one. In the spring of 2014, I did eight readings of the story in six weeks on a variety of CUNY campuses; before that, over the years, I’d done ten similar events in California, Massachusetts, and New York.

My CUNY readings were part of my project, “Spanish, Mizrahi, and Black Jews: Diversity and the Jews,” supported by a Diversity Fund grant that allowed me time away from an intensive teaching schedule. I went to Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens, and it was exhilarating being welcomed on campuses in New York all nicely reachable by subway or bus. At Brooklyn College, for instance, I read at a symposium co-sponsored by fourteen departments including Judaic Studies, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Modern Languages and Literatures, Women and Gender Studies, and the office of the President.

At City College I performed for a theatre history course; at Baruch for a course on the Ottoman Empire; at Queensborough for the Liberal Arts Academy and Creative Writing Club; at Bronx Community at the CUNY Language Immersion Program; at City Tech (my campus) for two writing courses; and at the Americas Society for the Latin American Jewish Studies Association /CUNY Academy of the Humanities conference, where I read in Ladino.

The goal of my project was to counter the assumption that ethnic or racial groups are monolithic. People forget that a group with a particular label is actually highly diverse. Asians, for instance, may be Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, or Japanese; or Hispanics, Puerto Rican, Ecuadorian, Dominican or Filipino. Similarly, Jews are not always white, nor do they all have names like Bloomberg or Goldstein; individuals named Rodquigue, Aghassi, Aroughetti, Sulieman, Gourgey, Papo and Abravaya may also be Jews.

One might ask, however, why encourage a multi-ethnic awareness through the lens of Judaism? For one thing, Jewish diversity is a metaphor for diversity at large. But also, CUNY students today don’t know much about Jews, yet are curious about them. Although, for instance, Jewish students were once a large majority at City College, today Jews are a small minority of the nearly half million students at CUNY, and reading a short story about a Spanish-Turkish-American Jew opens students to fresh experience they haven’t encountered before. The Sephardic experience happens to be one with a wide demographic reference. In this case, it’s Turkish, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, Jewish, immigrant and thoroughly American, a mix of the old country and the modern world with juxtapositions of the cosmopolitan and the provincial, the underdog and the power-monger. And in that mix, as everywhere, a good story is about being desperate for dignity.

CUNY students themselves represent so many ethnicities and are from so many countries all over the world that they are eager for new ways of viewing their own histories. In general, I find, people are eager for breaking down the doors of cultural boundaries. I should add that as a teacher of writing and literature, I’m interested in the way awareness of ethnicity crossing unexpected cultural boundaries encourages readers to think in new ways about family dynamics, identity, gender patterns, and even music. Hearing my story, students of diverse backgrounds see their own families in a larger context and model the power of such discovery for their own thinking and writing.

The Hispanic elements of my fiction, especially the fact of my writing this story originally in Judeo-Spanish, has made my project particularly attractive to a category of colleges such as City Tech and Bronx Community College that are known as Hispanic-Serving Institutions because of their high percentage of Latino/a students. For Hispanic students in general, the story of the Spanish Jews, who kept speaking Spanish in Turkey and elsewhere for five hundred years after their expulsion from Spain, opens new doors for listeners to understand their own Spanish backgrounds. Most of my readings have been in English, but I generally read excerpts in Ladino for the shock of recognition students have when they understand it.

“Pasha” essentially is a story about manhood in the face of harsh prohibitions. How does a young man in Turkey survive—with basically nothing, no money or education—when he’s a second son prohibited from even touching the violin his older brother will inherit along with the prospect of becoming a musician? David Aroughetti’s prospects in Turkey are especially bad because his own father can barely scrape together a living, and his whole community is struggling with poverty. Then too, after he emigrates, as he asserts himself and assimilates to early twentieth-century New York City, selling cigarettes on the streets, for instance, what are the personal and emotional costs and losses? People from all countries face similar pressures, continually calculating the costs of moving ahead, and the strains in relationships between men and women, and parents and children, that accompany a reordering of the past and a dash to the future. Perhaps nowhere are these questions muddled through, avoided, or confronted more than on the campuses of City University, where students from over two hundred different countries study together to promote their future. The questions remain for all immigrants and migrants trying to make their peace with traditional backgrounds and the open question of the future; they need to find not only an identity, but the relationships and community that allow them the dignity that every human being craves.

My CUNY readings were exhilarating because of the array of differences in the way the audiences of students and faculty responded, and the pleasure of the unexpected. A common reaction was, “I’ve never heard of Jews that speak Spanish.” An unusual one was when a young woman, having listened, wanted to talk about her family’s life in Sarayevo. A Latino student in a white button down shirt thoughtfully asked, “Did you notice that despite who this character is, and what we expect from him, he finds a way to rebel in America”? A handsome tall dark-skinned student said “I have to tell you that the Pasha story describes exactly how things are today in Ivory Coast.”

A stylish young Jamaican woman, who grew up in a poor Kingston neighborhood in a zinc hut right where a gully flooded regularly during storms, wrote, “I think you hit it dead on. All we are searching for is ‘identity’ to find who we are in the world and what we are meant to do. It really is a journey. There’s a huge misconception that you are born knowing who you are and what you want to do and that is completely false. Life is about discovering who you are in this chaos of a world.” A student named Remy said about the tense and aggressive main character, “I wished he could smile, enjoy life a little.” Another student said her father is Russian, her mother Chinese, and the story reminded her of how she likes to listen to Chinese music with her mother. In the course on Ottoman history a student asked if the main character’s arrogant pasha personality was an emblem of the whole problem of the Ottoman Empire at that time. A student in a writing class brought up Venezuela to say, “Some political leaders adopt pasha approaches to governing.”

Kimberly La Force, a former student of mine from St. Lucia, currently in a philosophy course for her graduate program at Columbia University, brought up an illuminating point after the reading she attended. She wrote me that the main character’s aggressive assumption that he is superior to others should be considered with an eye to the error of “dichotomous thinking.” Quoting the contemporary feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, Kimberly said the problem with thinking in dichotomies like male/female, or mind/body, is that it “hierarchizes polarized terms” making one “the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart.” Indeed, by the end, the story restores the subordinated essence to its proper value, in a way our pasha does not expect.

I’m reminded of how students in Professor Carole Harris’s literature course last year talked about the dynamics of power in the way individuals treat each other. After reading the story, students considered “Pasha” characters in the short stories of the Southern American writer Flannery O’Connor, the Dominican writer Junot Díaz, and the Irish writer James Joyce, and noted the way literature written “inside a community” encourages discussion of difficulties in the very cultural groups that set up harsh dichotomies as social codes.

I’m a writer, a person who likes to stand to tell a story. We live in a world where the sight of text has often prompted the rejoinder “tl;dr”— too long, didn’t read. Perhaps the oral telling of a story can slow us down in the right way, and as we agree to be there for that thirty minutes or hour, we re-orient our sense of time. In the classroom at the top of the stairs in the Bronx, when I handed a copy of my story to a student who wanted to read along, I heard a groan because it looked long. When I said it will take me just thirty minutes to read it aloud, we were suddenly okay. Oh, half an hour. Literature builds bridges, takes down walls.

Listening to stories is worth something. The very sound of a story being told takes hold in the body. Peter Elbow, a well-known inspiring writing teacher whom I met at a recent Modern Language Association national convention, has said that language resides in the mouth and the ear, and meaning resides in the body. We need stories, music—that violin that the second son was not allowed to touch. I think the Diversity Fund should sponsor fiction-readings all over CUNY for writers of all backgrounds.

In May I began the second part of my Diversity project; I’m doing oral history interviews of Jews from different countries and neighborhoods of the world, for instance, Tunisia, Morocco, African-American Harlem, Bulgaria, Iraq, Israel, Turkey, India, China, Yemen. After that, to be continued.

Notes:

Jane Mushabac’s short story appeared in her English translation, “Pasha: Ruminations of David Aroughetti,” under the pen name S. Manot in Midstream LI.4 Yiddish/Ladino issue (July/Aug. 2005): 41-44; and in her original Ladino, “Pasha: Pensamientos de David Aroughetti,” under the pen name Shalach Manot in Sephardic Horizons online journal 1.4 [http://www.sephardichorizons.org/Volume1/Issue4/Pasha.html] (Fall, 2011).

City Tech is New York City College of Technology, a college of the City University of New York located in Downtown Brooklyn.

“Excuse me for a moment; I need to take this call,” I said to the rabbis I was meeting with at an important convention for Hareidi professionals dealing with practical halakhic issues and public policy. I had just stopped by the convention to meet some of the rabbis who had taught me and mentored me over the years. I was sitting with my main mentor—a Yeshivishe, Litvishe Rav—and his friend, a close associate of some of the Hareidi rabbinic authorities.

What made this moment ironic is that while my mentor and his friend were discouraging me from taking the position of President of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, the call I received was from the Chairman of the Board of YCT offering me the job! In fact, just that evening, before coming to the convention, I had met with the Board of Directors of the Yeshiva for my final interview. So as I stepped aside, still surrounded by dozens of Hareidi rabbanim at the hotel, I accepted the offer from YCT, fully aware that in some ways I was agreeing to take myself into a different world than where I was standing. In an ocean of black hats, I was committing myself to a modern and open life-boat. But even at that moment of contrast, I still saw myself, and Modern Orthodoxy in general, as paddling in the same direction as the large ship of Hareidi, Yeshivish Orthodoxy. Moreover, I remained hopeful that along the way, there would be bridges from the life-boat to the large ship that would enable passengers in both vessels of Torah to intermingle and inspire each other.

The belief that Modern Orthodoxy, inclusive, open, and connected with the non-Orthodox world, could also connect with Hareidi, Yeshivishe, Hassidishe Orthodoxy animated my decision to take on the presidency of YCT, a relatively new yeshiva founded by Rav Avi Weiss. I had been the rabbi of a rapidly growing (from 90 to 400 members) Modern Orthodox shul in Chicago, and every time I went in to meet the lay leaders and faculty of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, I made sure to combine the trip with visiting Rashei Yeshiva of my alma mater, Yeshiva University. Some were more encouraging of my interest in YCT, some less encouraging, but all my encounters leading up to taking the job at YCT continued to reinforce within me the belief that as committed as YCT was to a Modern and open Orthodoxy, I could still connect the Yeshiva and its talmidim to the broad world of Orthodoxy, across the spectrum.

In fact, as it was announced that I would be becoming the President of YCT, some well-known rabbis, well-respected in the Hareidi world, said that they were interested in coming to YCT, as long as it was done quietly. These rabbis were interested in discussing kiruv and other pertinent matters with the students because basically, we shared the same goals.

I was quoted in the press as having the sincere desire to reach out and connect with both the “Right and the Left” and to welcome students from the spectrum of Orthodoxy. My experience in Chicago, where both my shul and I had close professional and personal relationships with many Centrist Orthodox and Hareidi rabbis and communal professionals—let alone lay leaders—convinced me that we were all together in this mission of spreading Torah throughout the Jewish world. Certainly there were arguments that justifiably could make me cynical, but I had a lot of evidence that bridges existed, and could be widened, to connect all of Orthodoxy.

Then came the installation. Rav Avi Weiss has been excited and supportive throughout the process of passing on the presidency to me, and with his encouragement and my own excitement for taking on this new role, the Yeshiva planned a gala installation to introduce me to the community. In my own thinking, consistent with the mission of the Yeshiva to train Orthodox rabbis to serve the entirety of the Jewish community, not just the Orthodox community, an installation should include the spectrum of the Jewish community. Yeshivat Chovevei Torah is one of the leading rabbinical schools in America, producing more Hillel rabbis—in various positions—than any other single institution, let alone the dozens of pulpit rabbis and educators in important positions throughout the Jewish community (85 so far).

So it was natural that we invited all the rabbinical schools—from Yeshiva University to Hebrew Union College—to participate in the installation. I had no expectation that every Hareidi or even centrist institution would participate or even attend. I may be passionate about building bridges, but that doesn’t mean every institution or community leader is—that much I recognize. Yet, it was gratifying that Orthodox and non-Orthodox leaders came from all over, together with another 500 people, to celebrate this transition at a Yeshiva, transforming our Yeshiva from a start-up to an established center of Torah. What was interesting—though not surprising—was that much of the Hareidi organized world attacked the bridge-building on the left as a sign that Chovevei Torah was not sufficiently Orthodox. The paradigm that the Hareidi institutional world was presenting, and accepted passively by elements of the organized Centrist world, was that if an Orthodoxy builds bridges with the Left, in an open, respectful way, it will not be able to build bridges to the Right. It is either or: If you want to be part of our type of Orthodoxy, or be in partnership with us, you will have to burn your bridges with the non-Orthodox organized world. No Presidents or Chancellors of non-Orthodox institutions should be on a pre-installation panel discussing the future of rabbinical education; if they are, we do not want to be any part of such an installation. It is either embracing your Orthodox friends and rejecting any respect or honor for the non-Orthodox, or we have no desire to connect with you.

Upon reflection, the strong reaction to placing non-Orthodox rabbis on a stage to be given respect and honor at an Orthodox ceremony could have been expected. Genuine and justifiable fear has built up in the Orthodox world for more than two centuries toward heterodox movements. There is fear that they are out to destroy Torah, mitzvoth, and Judaism as we know it. Indeed, this might have very well been the case in the past: Reform leaders spoke out against the “cult” of ritual in Judaism; Conservative leaders erected synagogues that had mixed seating and called for serious changes to halakha in a process unfamiliar to the Orthodox world. Reconstructionist Judaism represents the teaching of Mordechai Kaplan who rejected the Orthodoxy he grew up in. Perhaps if many of the open and inclusive Modern Orthodox leaders who are pluralistic would have been rabbis 100 or even 50 years ago, they would not have been able to build the bridges to the non-Orthodox world that we can build today.

The fear of the non-Orthodox world is understandable, but it is anachronistic and the wrong approach. Not only do the non-Orthodox movements espouse Torah and mitzvoth—albeit in their own unique ways—they are gateways for thousands of Jews to find more commitment to Torah and mitzvoth. These Jews who find Judaism and Jewish life through the non-Orthodox movements and non-Orthodox leaders, frequently are then drawn to Orthodoxy as well. The competition with non-Orthodox movements will only help Orthodoxy grow stronger, rather than pose a threat. More importantly, the opportunities that non-Orthodox movements provide for Orthodoxy, as far as outreach and connection to diverse Jewish populations should make us Orthodox Jews grateful for the other movements. In fact, placing Orthodox and non-Orthodox leaders on a stage, anywhere, is a way for Orthodoxy to learn more and to shine, rather than be damaged and beaten up.

Nevertheless, we in the Modern Orthodox world who have moved away from a position of fear to one of respect and excitement to build bridges to the non-Orthodox movements and organizations need to be sensitive to this fear. Perhaps in my joy of having such incredible leaders on stage with me, in equal, loving dialogue, I was not sufficiently sensitive to this fear that still exists in the Hareidi, Yeshivish, and Centrist organized world. One way of confronting this real fear is to further develop the idea of “emunat hakhamim”—the belief that rabbis, and the general halakhic rabbinic environment, need to be trusted to work things out. Normally, emunat hakhamim is a construction used to justify rabbis maintaining the status quo, despite how illogical and unethical it may seem, or to justify onerous humrot (restrictions) that make practical living difficult. Don’t question, but trust and believe in the great minds of our time. Emunat hakhamim differs from Da’as Torah: Da’as Torah is accepting the advice of the rabbis on non-halakhic, public policy issues; emunat hakhamim is trusting that the halakhic process works, that as strange as the rabbinic Orthodox halakhic consensus seems, it deserves to be trusted and adhered to.

I suggest that the concept of emunat hakhamim must be emphasized in alleviating some of the fear that people feel when bridges are built to the non-Orthodox world: Trust Orthodoxy! Trust Torah! Trust the halakhic system that as long as rabbis and scholars are learning Torah, are arguing Torah, are making Torah the basis of their decisions, we are safe! We do not need to fear that a Reform rabbi who learns in the Beit Midrash or who speaks to students will corrupt them and their Torah—or, will, God forbid, corrupt the thinking of great Torah scholars, Modern Orthodox or otherwise. No, we need to trust the system of Torah that started on Mt. Sinai and has been handed down to us in an unbroken chain to this very day. If we trust Torah and the halakhic system, we should not fear a slippery slope or the teachings of non-Orthodox rabbis. Our system built up over the millennia, and advanced over the past 200 years by the great Yeshivot that have re-enforced Torah learning, enable us to deal with any challenge, any question, any unexpected understanding of Torah, in a coherent way that will ultimately bring about Torah True Judaism. If we really have emunat hakhamim, we have nothing to fear of bridges to other Jews, even if they have a different perspective on Torah.

Yet perhaps even more important than dealing, sensitively, with the fear of bridges, we need to challenge the core idea of zero-sumism: that if we disagree or have competing approaches, only one of us can win. This is the Israeli concept of “frier-ism”—if I let someone get ahead of me, or freely benefit, then I must be losing and I must be a big loser at that. Thank God, we are in a world of a positive-sum game: We can each have our own approach, we can even compete, and yet, more times than not, we can both benefit from the interaction and relationship. That is essentially at the core of pilpul, or “kinat sofrim”—the competition the Talmud encourages to acquire more wisdom for everyone involved. When I encounter someone who disagrees with me, even on fundamental Jewish ideas, it is an opportunity to learn more, and sharpen my belief, rather than a moment of weakness and failure. Politically, that makes me a proponent of free-trade, immigration reform, even ethical capitalism. When it comes to the realm of Orthodox bridge-building to the non-Orthodox world, we in the Modern Orthodox camp need to demonstrate to the rest of the Orthodox world that our bridges are making us better Jews, not weaker Jews.

Yeshivat Chovevei Torah has an opportunity to demonstrate the value of openness and building bridges to Torah by producing top-quality Torah that comes out of a Modern Orthodox, inclusive-oriented yeshiva, and by pushing our students to continue to model passionate commitment to Torah and mitzvoth, in both the spiritual and ethical realms. It is a challenge. Many in the pluralistic Modern Orthodox world do not show the same passion for ritual laws as those on the less tolerant, more Hareidi side of Orthodoxy. The more we can show that this is a positive-sum world for building bridges, the more we can show that our bridges to the Left make us more passionate toward Torah, rather than more tepid, the easier it will be to demonstrate the value of building those bridges to Jewish life in America.

Bridges to non-Orthodox Jews and bridges to different types of Orthodox Jews are important for the same reason. We have to learn from each other; we have to share the Torah and destiny that God has chosen for all of us. We do not need to build bridges to demonstrate our legitimacy. For that we just need to live, learn, and love as good Jews following God’s ways. We do not require anyone on the Left or the Right to tell us we are legitimate or to make us feel loved; God and God’s Torah are the yardstick for legitimacy. Nevertheless, the bridges that have to go up on both sides help us be better Jews, and they strengthen the Jewish people. It is a challenge to convince many in the Orthodox camp of the value of such bridges to the non-Orthodox—but that challenge should neither stop us from building those bridges to the non-Orthodox, nor should it make us despair from believing that we can build bridges to the Hareidi, Yeshivish, or even Centrist Orthodox world.

After a year as President of YCT, I understand better that it will take a lot of effort, patience, and sensitivity to erect the critical bridges to other elements of the Orthodox world. Yet, my belief in emunat hakhamim and my belief that ultimately this is positive-sum world gives me hope that we will successfully build those bridges to the Right, while holding onto, even strengthening, our bridges to the Left. It has taken centuries for the world to understand the benefits of free trade and commerce, even when products compete with our own products. Judaism is just beginning to build the trust and respect necessary for free-trade bridges between denominations and leaders of the different movements and non-movements. But as president of a Modern Orthodox yeshiva that is committed to training Orthodox rabbis to connect with and learn from all Jews, there is no other way. Bridges to other Jews are the way we become better Jews. And no one will stop us from striving to become better Jews, to learn from everyone and every Jew, and to work together with all Jews to make us “goy ehad ba’aretz”—one, unified nation in the land.

On this coming Rosh HaShana the Shmita (Sabbatical) year (5775 – 2014-15) will begin. According to its laws, routine agricultural activities are prohibited and its produce is ownerless, free to be taken by all. At the end of the year, Shmitat Kesafim (the remission of debts) also takes effect. If we look at this also in the context of the (currently inapplicable) Yovel (Jubilee) year, which in addition to the Shmita laws also frees the slaves and includes massive agrarian reform as all land that had been bought and sold in the previous fifty years reverts to its original owners, we witness a massive societal change with utopian overtones. Before returning to this topic I would like to present two inverse parallel stories of utopian redemption, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s “The Master of Prayer” and Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” . Their tales are surprisingly similar in structure and yet opposites in the values that they promote and in their respective visions of society, redemption and utopia.

Rebbe Nachman (1772-1810) witnessed the beginnings of modernization, the industrial revolution, capitalism and the enlightenment. He saw these trends as posing a grave threat to people of religion and struggled to empower his followers and readers with tools to maintain their faith and values. He told the story "The Master of Prayer" to his followers on Saturday night, January 6, 1810, less than a year before his untimely death from tuberculosis. This story which is based upon Kabbalistic motifs regarding the process of the future redemption, focuses primarily on the charismatic and revolutionary Master of Prayer (perhaps alluding to Rebbe Nachman himself), who leads a secret counter culture group that lives on the edge of a general society that is increasingly alienated from spiritual values. This group was dedicated to the worship of God and was based upon a clear set of values and goals: “He would explain that the only true goal was to serve God all the days of one’s life, spending one’s time praying to God and singing His praise” (280). This spiritual goal stands in stark contrast to the materialistic values of the rest of society, which are clearly seen as mistaken: “Wealth is not the goal of life at all…the only goal is the Creator, may His name be blessed” (297). In Rebbe Nachman’s tale, the society at large is that of extreme capitalism, whereas the revolutionary counter culture group is spiritual. It is not clear whether the group was run as a collectivist commune or not, but we shall shortly be exposed to their position regarding the accumulation of wealth.

The Master is not content to merely minister to his flock. He and his followers actively engage in recruiting members of the general society to run away and join their secret band. “It was the custom of [the Master of Prayer] to visit inhabited areas, convincing people to emulate him, serving God and constantly praying. Whenever people wanted to join him, he would take them to his place away from civilization, where their only activities would be praying, singing praise to God, confession, self-mortification, repentance, and similar occupations…Eventually his teachings began to make an impression, and his activities became well known. People would suddenly vanish without a trace; no one know where they were…people began to realize that all of this was due to the Master of Prayer, who was attracting people to serve God” (281-282). He is well-known and highly feared by the society at large, who could not succeed in capturing him due to his ability to cleverly disguise himself: “It was impossible to recognize or capture him, since he would always appear in a different disguise. He would appear to one person as a merchant, and to another as a pauper” (292).

What exactly was the nature of the society that the Master of Prayer was trying to overthrow? While there were actually several different lands that he was undermining, it is clear in the story that the most misguided and most difficult of all to fight against was “the Land of Wealth”. In this super capitalistic society men are judged solely upon the amount of wealth that they own and are assigned hierarchical status based upon their financial worth alone, with the richest individuals proclaimed as “gods” and the poorest as “animals”. The result is a never ending spiral of fierce competition for one’s life literally depended upon moving up the societal ladder. According to their religion there were even “animal” (human) sacrifices to the “gods” and not surprisingly theft and murder abounded. Not only that, but “Charity was a very great sin. They believed that if a person gave charity, it would diminish the influx of wealth that God had given him…It was therefore forbidden in the strongest terms to give charity” (289-290). This society, which strongly reminds us of Sodom, the biblical town of horrors, is the greatest challenge for the Master of Prayer. Not only is the society rampant with violence and idolatry (including human sacrifice), but the belief in wealth also constituted the most difficult theological error to combat, for: “it was possible to get a person out of any desire except for the desire for wealth” (337). This topic of the desire for wealth and its inherent spiritual dangers was addressed by Rebbe Nachman in numerous places in his writings and he must have seen its rampant negative effects all around him. The rectification for this disorder was only possible if the person were to be brought to a special place (“the path of the sword”) where he would be miraculously cured from his desire for wealth: “In that place money is the greatest shame. If someone wants to insult another, he says that the other has money. Money is so great a shame, that the more money a person has, the greater his shame…Now it was revealed that wealth is the main thing of which to be ashamed” (349-350). In the end the Land of Wealth falls as its inhabitants repent their evil ways and spirituality replaces material values as the essential definition of human activity. The entire world is redeemed and the eschatological utopia is ushered in.

A century and a half after Rebbe Nachman told the tale of the Master of Prayer, a remarkably similar tale with the opposite message was published, “Atlas Shrugged”, the magnum opus of the American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982). Born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum to a fairly assimilated bourgeois Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Rand and her family suffered greatly during the Communist revolution and in its aftermath. Arriving in the United States in 1926 she developed an extreme capitalist and libertine philosophy that she called “objectivism” and used the heroes in her books as her ideology’s mouthpieces. She also promoted an atheistic and rationalistic world view portraying her socialist anti-heroes as “mystics”. She considered herself a writer of the “Romantic Realist” school.

Her self-identification with her positive characters was nearly total, as she wrote in “About the Author” at the end of "Atlas Shrugged": “I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books – and it has worked for me, as it works for my characters”. Atlas Shrugged represented the pinnacle of her literary career. Simply stated, in a mere 1168 pages she had managed to state her philosophy in its most highly developed form and it would seem that from then on it was all downhill in both her literary career and her personal life.

Like the Master of Prayer in Rebbe Nachman’s tale, "Atlas Shrugged" is also about a mysterious revolutionary figure living on the edge of society. John Galt is a brilliant individualistic inventor who has disappeared from the oppressive socialistic society that America has become and he strikes fear into the hearts of that society, whose slang refrain to almost anything is “who is John Galt?”. He too lures people from the general society to his secret utopian hideaway. However, the scenes are completely reversed, as the general society is an oppressive America ruled by socialist dictators who trample individual and economic rights. Galt steals away the leading minds of the country. Rugged individualists like himself, these elite "industrialists" join him in “going on strike” against a society that takes advantage of their brains and productivity in order to serve one of mediocrity and passivity. Galt and his friends know that eventually America will implode (and they also help it along the way here and there) and then they will take over, and their capitalist utopia will again rule America and the world, and people will once again have the ultimate freedom – to produce and to make money.

As stated above Rand’s heroes are all great orators who expound her beliefs to her readers. We are thus treated to such gems as: “When I die I hope to go to heaven…I want to be able to afford the price of admission… to claim the greatest virtue of all – that I was a man who made money” (96). “To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America…If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose…the fact that they were the people to create the phrase ‘to make money.’…The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality” (414). “I am rich and I am proud of every penny that I own…I refuse to apologize for my money” (480). (emphasis in original).

Moving on to Galt’s secret utopian society we find that even the most rugged individualists must live by some rules. So when railroad magnate Miss Dagny Taggart accidently arrives on her first visit Galt explains: “We have no laws in this valley, no rules, no formal organization of any kind…But we have certain customs, which we all observe…So I’ll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word ‘give’” (714). Inscribed above the building that houses the revolutionary motor that Galt has invented to power the village is the following motto: “I swear by my life and my love for it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (731). While it is true that the group members work hard and live relatively modestly, their long-term vision obviously extends way beyond their temporary mountain hideout.

What would be an appropriate symbol for such a society? Dagny receives the answer upon her arrival: “But close before her, rising on a slender granite column from a ledge below to the level of her eyes, blinding her by its glare, dimming the rest, stood a dollar sign three feet tall, made of solid gold. It hung in space above the town, as its coat-of-arms, its trademark, its beacon – and it caught the sunrays, like some transmitter of energy that sent them in shining blessing to stretch horizontally through the air above the roofs” (706). The dollar sign also appears upon their locally produced cigarettes and was used by Dagny when she finally leaves her railroad terminal for the last time: “she glanced at the statue of [her grandfather] Nathaniel Taggert…she took the lipstick from her bag and, smiling…drew a large sign of the dollar on the pedestal under his feet” (1138).

If in the "Master of Prayer" the redemption was signaled when the inhabitants of the Land of Wealth became disgusted by money, Atlas Shrugged ends with the following messianic vision: “’The road is cleared,’ said Galt. ‘We are going back to the world.’ He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar” (1168). We should not be surprised that at Rand’s funeral her friends placed a six foot high floral bouquet on her grave – in the shape of a dollar sign.

In summation, if we compare the utopian visions of our two authors, it is clear that for Rand state socialism (and spirituality that she rather strangely connects it with) undermine all that is good and noble in humanity, destroying human motivation, individuality and freedom, and ultimately, society itself. The solution is in absolute Laissez-faire capitalism and the freedom to invent, produce, trade and most importantly - to make money.

In Rebbe Nachman’s view it is faithless capitalism that leads to idolatry and violence. The solution is faith, and it would seem that ultimately the nature of the particular economic system is secondary as the emphasis is upon Divine service combined with a great deal of compassion. It suffices us to note again in Rand’s utopia even the use of the word “give” is prohibited, whereas one of the greatest signs of corruption in Rebbe Nachman’s despicable Sodom-like Land of Wealth is the prohibition on charity.

Did Ayn Rand model her hero John Galt (gelt?) upon the Master of Prayer? It is possible that she had read Martin Buber's 1906 German translation of the story, but it seems unlikely and at the end of the day, it isn't really so significant. The question that interests me is what does Judaism, via the mitzva of Shmita, have to teach us about utopian beliefs?

Historically it can be argued that the modern state of Israel began with a heavy-handed socialist economic model which led to bureaucracy, inefficiency and corruption. We later moved to a capitalist free market model, based on individualism which led to both economic growth and a massive gap between the wealthiest and poorest members of our society. Some say it is the largest in the Western world. We also suffer from a situation in which a significant percentage of our population lives below the poverty line. It seems clear that there is a need for balance. Alexander Dub?ek said in the Prague Spring of 1968 that Czechoslovakia was in need of "socialism with a human face" and perhaps Israel in 2014 is in need of "capitalism with a human face". The social-economic model of Shmita, seen in its broader context including Shmitat Kesafim and Yovel can provide us with the proper model. Let us briefly examine some of the explanations given by the classic commentators to this mitzva and their relevance to our question. While it is clear from their words that Shmita contains multiple elements including personal and national spiritual growth and renewal (such as providing the opportunity for a year of Torah study) as well as addressing ecological and agricultural concerns, I will focus primarily on those perspectives which pertain to social and economic issues.

Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed (3:39), writes as follows: "This [mitzva] expresses mercy and compassion for human beings as it says “and the poor of your people will eat”…and it also strengthens the land and increases the harvest by allowing the land to rest". We see here an emphasis on social justice as the poor now have equal access to food supplies. It may be that the agricultural aspect is not to be seen only in light of increasing future profits for the landowner, but as part of a plan to maximize food production in the Land of Israel for the ultimate benefit of all of the inhabitants.

In addition to additional “religious” messages the Sefer HaChinuch (Mishpatim, mitzva 84) teaches: "There is an advantage to this, for us to acquire the trait of forgoing. One should also remember that the land which gives him fruit…doesn’t produce through its own power, but there is a Master over it and over its masters”. Here it is apparent that one cannot clearly distinguish between the ritual and the interpersonal aspects of Shmita. For if it comes to instill within us the character trait of forgoing one’s property and financial rights for the good of society, this must be coupled with an increase in ones faith that ultimately it is God Himself who rules over the land and provides for our needs. One who internalizes this spiritual message will find it easier to share his wealth with others while learning to take his own losses in stride.

Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalisher (Sefer HaBrit, Behar s.v. Derech HaSheni, U’Sefarta Lecha) explains that "the wealthy man will learn not to look down upon the poor man, for the Torah said that in the seventh year everyone is equal, both rich and poor have permission to enter gardens and fields and eat”. An additional reason is “so that he will not always be burdened with physical pursuits…and when he throws off the yoke of labor he will engage in [the study of] Torah and wisdom. And those who don't know how to study will build houses and buildings so that the Land of Israel will not be lacking them either…for the need and perfection of the world". Rabbi Kalisher, the great 19th century proto-Zionist, openly stresses the equality of rich and poor during the Sabbatical year, both in terms of economic opportunity and in terms of consciousness. While he stresses that the rich will cease to look down on the poor there will no doubt be an additional benefit – that for a change the poor will be endowed with dignity and self-respect. This new consciousness, especially when combined with the reforms of the remittance of debts and the freeing of the slaves and returning of property in the Jubilee year will serve to level the socio-economic playing field as we shall discuss shortly. Even his caveat that those farmers not suited to a year of Torah study will engage in construction work for the good of society is part of a harmonious and utopian vision of a righteous society predicated upon spiritual values, physical labor and equality. It is of little wonder that elsewhere in his commentary he quotes an opinion to the effect that the Shmita year is meant to recreate the reality of the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve sinned. This is of course, a well-known vision in Jewish eschatology.

Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, writing in the introduction to his classic exposition on the laws of Shmita (Shabbat HaAretz), explains that "The individual shakes off his profane existence often, on every Shabbat…the same effect that Shabbat has on the individual, Shmita has on the entire nation…whose inner Divine light is occasionally revealed in its entire splendor, which cannot be annulled by ongoing social life…by rage and competition". What is of interest to us here is not Rabbi Kook’s beautiful description of the well-known comparison between Shmita and Shabbat, but rather his characterization of the atmosphere that characterizes the workweek and non-Shmita reality as one of “rage and competition”. The endless fight to get ahead financially at the expense of one’s “competitors” must occasionally give way to the atmosphere of compassion and equality that we have seen above.

Rabbi Yaacov Ariel, the chief rabbi of the Israeli city of Ramat-Gan explains as follows (Zeh Dvar HaShmita): "The mitzva of Shmita is built upon two foundations: the public and the private…the mitzva’s central idea is to remove one from his egocentric perspective and develop his feelings for his fellow man, public responsibility and a “majestic” perspective". While the end of Rabbi Ariel’s words here hint at certain aspects of Halachic debate and public policy regarding the proper observance of Shmita’s legal aspects, his first comment is crucial. We are dealing with a law which is to have a very specific moral and psychological impact on us. If Rabbi Kalisher spoke of the cessation of the superiority complex of the wealthy, Rabbi Ariel broadens it to include a general cleansing from our usual egocentricity in favor of a much broader perspective that centers upon our concern for the individual other and for society as a whole. I recall that during the previous Shmita year of 2007-8 I heard him quip that whereas in general the Torah leans towards capitalism, during the Shmita year it is decidedly communistic!

In the fall of 2001, just as the Shmita year was ending and the remission of debts was about to take effect, I was privileged to study the topic of Shmita Kesafim with my late teacher Rav Shagar (Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg zt”l). He too stressed that with the overall package of Shmita, Shmitat Kesafim and Yovel the Torah was presenting us with clear socio-economic imperatives. In his view what we see here is a periodic attempt to reset economic reality and level the playing field. Debts are cancelled, land is returned and slaves are emancipated. He pointed out that in ancient time one of the main reasons why a person would become a “Hebrew slave” (what we would call an “indentured servant”), was his inability to pay off his debts. Thus the combination of the economic measures listed above together with the availability of free produce during an entire year would be sufficient to return society, at least temporarily, to a harmonious balance. This, when combined with a heightened consciousness of faith in God’s providence as the true provider, the cessation of the usual competitiveness and the arrogance built into the economic system, would provide us with a taste of the revolutionary changes in store for the world when the true messianic utopia comes to pass. I can only hope that our proper observance of the Shmita year in all of its aspects will hasten that great day.

Rabbi Zvi Leshem was ordained by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and holds a PhD in Jewish Philosophy from Bar-Ilan University. He served for several decades in senior educational and rabbinic positions before assuming his current role directing the Gershom Scholem Collection for Kabbalah Research at the National Library of Israel. He is the author of "Redemptions: Contemporary Chassidic Essays on the Parsha and the Festivals".

Identification and Dislocation:
the Breakdown of Worshipful Expression

by Michael Haruni

One of the dilemmas we faced during the preparation of the Nehalel siddur was over the instructions, or “rubric”. For on the one hand there is, undoubtably, tremendous value in the detailed instructions appearing in the major contemporary English-language siddurim on how and where to bow in Amidah, where to kiss tzitziyot during and after Keriyat Shema, how to wave the lulav, and so forth. Baaley teshuvah especially have, since the advent of the ArtScroll siddur, found themselves able as never before to participate competently and confidently in shul procedures. The frum-from-birth users have benefited too, it must be said, filling in finer details previously eluding them.

On the other hand, however, we also sensed that detailed performance instructions induce not a heartfelt act of worship but a sort of robotics, leaving out the real mental and spiritual requisites of prayer. The motions we perform when we pray should ideally function, surely, as expressions of the stirrings of our hearts, as elements in our acts of telling God of our love and awe of Him, of our thanks for the good in our lives, and of our needs. Indeed, the performance of mitzvot generally should be driven to the outside from within; whereas I suspect that by synthesizing such motions from detailed choreographic instructions, we create an act that goes no deeper than its outward features. (I confess that, with Nehalel beShabbat, we too rather often fell in with the contemporary standard of providing mind-control instructions.)

This focus on the formal synthesis of practice is symptomatic of the larger malaise compellingly observed by Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: that in mainstream Orthodoxy, shul-going, tefilah, and Halachah generally have, for many of us, ceased to act as instruments of genuine worship—as the language by which we express our love of God in response to His overarching, quite straightforward demand, le’ahava et Adoshem Elokecha.

We have replaced God with prayers, no longer realizing to Whom we are praying. We even use Halachah as an escape from experiencing Him. We are so busy with creating halachic problems, and so completely absorbed by trying to solve them, that we are unaware of our hiding behind this practice so as not to deal with His existence… We must realize that the purpose of Halachah is to have an encounter with Him, not just with the Halachah. Halachah is the channel through which we can reach Him, not just laws to live by. (Present volume, p…..)

The remarks that follow are my attempt to understand this communicative role of Halachah—as well as the apparent breakdown of this role. What really can we expect of Halachah in this respect? Is there really substance to this idea of communicating with God through Halachah? In particular, when we say that Halachah can work as a means of communication, or of expression, are we merely invoking a metaphor—albeit a highly potent one—or can we attribute to this idea some philosophical and even psychological reality?

I’ll begin by mentioning the observations made by Rabbi Haym Soloveitchik concerning the role of mimicry in the acquisition of halachic practice. For I want to suggest that Halachah does have a real expressive force, which is strongly connected to this role of mimicry—much in the way that the expressive force of language is connected to the role of mimicry in the acquisition of language. (Indeed I suspect that the idea of the transmission of meaning from each generation to the next, loaded tacitly in R. Soloveitchik’s concept of a mimetic tradition of Halachah but not made explicit in his discussion, is part of what makes that concept so alluring.) Our lesser regard now for Halachah as an instrument of communication is tied, I shall then suggest, to the shift away from mimicry as the source of halachic practice.

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In his seminal article, “Rupture and reconstruction: the transformation of contemporary Orthodoxy” (Tradition, Vol. 28, no. 4, 1994; my page references are from its reprint in R. Rosenberg & C. I. Waxman, eds., Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader, 1999), R. H. Soloveitchik describes the move that began in the 1950s in Orthodox circles, especially in the US, UK and Israel, towards a religious practice constructed from halachic texts, and away from what had previously functioned to transmit halachic practice through generations, namely, the mimicry of observed practice. Halachic practice had always gained its currency in each generation of orthodox Jews by their seeing and hearing the practice of their parents, teachers and rabbis as well of others in their communities, and emulating this.

Halakhah is a sweepingly comprehensive regula of daily life...it constitutes a way of life. And a way of life is not learned but rather absorbed. Its transmission is mimetic, imbibed from parents and friends, and patterned on conduct regularly observed in home and street, synagogue and school. (p. 321)

But various factors, R. H. Soloveitchik explains, particularly the ruptures created by mass emigration from the Old World and most especially by the Holocaust, led us to seek out the bases for our practices, less in the visible conduct of our model figures, more in halachic texts. The compulsion to faithfully reproduce that halachic life no longer visible to us—the form of life we attribute in our imagination to those vanished worlds—has pressed us to explore incessantly deeper into the texts for minutiae of Halachah lost, we fear, from erstwhile practice. “A tireless quest for absolute accuracy, for ‘perfect fit’—faultless congruence between conception and performance—is the hallmark of contemporary religiosity.” (p. 328) Powered by this clamor for ever greater accuracy, an explosion of Halachic literature and readership has mushroomed, and obscure practices that may never have actually had any significant role in religious life, now newly sourced in texts, have become germane to the new Orthodoxy.

R. H. Soloveitchik is clearly not suggesting that the mass of halachic text now dominating Orthodox life is in any way extraneous to Torah miSinai (and nor, for what it’s worth, am I). Only that (in my fallible understanding), the reality of religious practice—the reality which must act, surely, as the defining paradigm of what religious Judaism eternally is—has never in actuality embodied the multitude of minute requirements that are now being deciphered out of the textual tradition and introduced into mainstream practice. Whereas if we want to get a closer idea of what real Orthodox Judaism is, what really identifies it, we must look back at what our ancestors of a few generations ago and before were actually doing. And to use one of R. H. Soloveitchik’s examples, they did indeed sort bones from the fish they ate on Shabbat, despite the applicability, theoretically, of the issur livror, which has only more recently been brought into focus.

Now what might this imply about the possibility of genuine worship? I fear that the text-based construction of worshipful conduct, characteristic of our time, leaves something vital out of our performance of mitzvot. For as long as what fed our religious practical proficiency was the connective of mimicry, this, as I shall now try to clarify, must have brought a certain crucial kind of response into play. Watching and emulating a person with whom we identify, as they lay tefilin, or wave a lulav, we not only reproduce the practice enriched with those subtleties which a written description—inevitably an abstraction to some degree—leaves out. This identification with our model, I shall argue, also imparts a certain inner element that turns the practice into a means for genuine human worshipful expression—and missing from it when our worshipful conduct is synthesized out of text.

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Think of what happens when we observe and imitate a human being. What was at work when, as a child, I watched my father wearing tefilin and praying—saw a human heart throbbing in powerful devotion to God—and then, identifying with him, began to pray and later lay tefilin in imitation of him?

The most striking accomplishment of the human facility to imitate—and the principal phenomenon with which I shall compare halachic practice—is language. But I’ll first dwell momentarily on mime artists and their artful impersonations of human beings. This illustrative model will, I hope, help us understand certain elements when we look, first at language, and then at the halachic case.

Mime artists do not merely reproduce the external, visible features of their subject. They show us these by way of showing us the attitude of the subject—the joy, despondence, meekness, haughtiness and so on which they see in their subjects. The mimic looks empathically into the mind of the subject, sees this person’s mental state and reproduces it through the mannerisms and gestures which express that mental state. Indeed it is by focusing on that state of mind of the subject and then finding it in themselves—“becoming” the subject internally—that mime artists replicate those external expressions. And though we see directly only those external features shown us by the mime artist, we also see through them to the joy or the haughtiness and so forth—we are looking, that is, at a person in that mental state.

Something like this goes on in the acquisition of language. Infants hear the sounds of words and in due course replicate these. But these sound-productions become speech only insofar as infants match them with the meanings these sounds express. Hearing their parents say “apple” and discovering that their parents use this word when they want to say something about an apple, the infants too become able to use the word to mean apple. They must have, in other words, like the mime artist, seen into the minds of their parents and detected this desire to refer to an apple. Astonishing though this human facility is, it is not something magical: it will have been preceded by a natural process in which their parents, or other models, have some number of times done things like said “apple” as they hold or point to an apple. (According to some contemporary views, this is enabled by an innately endowed conceptual scheme which this process merely fills with content; but for our purposes this makes no difference, as the relevant end result of the process is the same.) The infant becomes able in this way to recognize the meaning the model intends when using the term—aware, that is, of the mental act which a use of the term expresses. And it is this match which the infant then reproduces: finding in her or himself the desire to say something about an apple (such as that she or he is hungry for an apple), the infant is able to express this desire by using the word “apple”.

It is thus by imitation of our parents as well as our siblings, extended family, teachers, community and so on, as they use the terms of the language in appropriate contexts, that we learn to use these terms, paired systematically with the world of meanings, ultimately making up the complex whole of our language.

The infant does not of course pursue this imitative achievement consciously or deliberately (unlike the mime artist). Yet nearly all of us are, quite evidently, innately endowed with the ability involved here (not with the language itself, but with the ability to acquire the language by imitation). It is, moreover, our innate impulse to press ahead with this process: we are innately urged to empathically see what people have in mind and thus learn how, upon discovering those states of mind in ourselves, to give them expression with our own corresponding linguistic behavior.

In just this way we also acquire a panoply of more elementary, non-linguistic gestures and mannerisms, such as head-shaking, shrugging, frowning and ululating. We detect in others a meaning, see that it is matched with a certain kind of physical expression, and so become able to express this meaning, when we find it in ourselves, by reproducing the same physical expressions (though some matchings might also have come to us innately, such as a smile with happiness). Indeed the universal human facility and urge to imitate is, in this way, central to the transmission of gestures and characteristics that are, like language, largely nationally and culturally specific (indeed it is often striking how much of the mimetically acquired characteristics of a child’s facial expressions and mannerisms are family-specific).

Once our language and other terms of expression are acquired, there is nothing artificial or constructed about our use of them. They become, rather, the natural, instinctive instruments for expressing our thoughts about the world and our yearnings. It is with these we give unmediated expression to our most intimate and overwhelming emotions. They are what reveal, in the most powerful and essential way, our very humanity.

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So it is, I suggest, when by emulating our parents, siblings, teachers and rabbis, we learn to pray, to lay tefilin, to create the world of Shabbat, and so on. We acquire in just this way a language for speaking to God. For as we watch them, we are aware not just of the physical aspects of their actions: we also have an urge—I am extrapolating here from what is hugely evident in the case of language and gesture acquisition—to empathically identify the mental states of which these physical aspects are expression; to discover, that is, the mental states motivating their worshipful behavior; and thus we become able, when we find this worshipful mental state within ourselves, to give it expression by exhibiting the same worshipful behavior. What we emulate is, in other words, not just the outward behavior, but the pairing of these inner and outer components of the act of worship. Through these pairings, thus acquired, our halachic practice becomes the means for expressing our own worshipful mental states. In this way, Halachah as a whole becomes our natural idiom for expressing to God our own inner stirrings.

Here, again, I am not imputing to the halachic novice any magical, mind-reading powers. How then do our halachic novices determine what the inner states of their models are? How do they know whether this is their model’s love of God, or awe of God, or perhaps the model’s lasting passion to blindly obey a teacher from childhood, or possibly even—for all the novice can tell—eagerness for money offered to the model in exchange for performing the mitzvah?

It is possible, for all I know, that in some instances at least, the novice is able to distinguish, just from the subtleties of the model’s performance, that it is an expression of love of God, or perhaps that it is an expression of blind obedience to a teacher. That said, I don’t assume every Jew on the way to independent halachic observance has sufficient perceptive powers, even if some do. Different novices will vary in this respect; so will their models vary as to how much their performances show their inner states. But I’d surmise that, more usually, other contextual indications play a role here, too. One novice may know her father as a man gushing with love who, as she knows also from conversation with him, directs much of this love to God; and this will probably tilt her interpretation of her father’s behavior. Likewise if she knows that a Kaddish-sayer in shul is providing someone a service in exchange for payment. Moreover, a novice’s interpretation could be erroneous—nothing assures he sees the model’s soul accurately. Or possibly the novice identifies the mental state less specifically—perhaps as some indeterminate attitude somewhere between love and awe. But whatever attitude or emotion the novice ascribes to her model—truthfully or falsely—this, I suggest, will be part of the mental state-with-expression match which she emulates in her own performance of the mitzvah.

The context influencing the novice’s interpretation could include, for sure, the learning and discussion he or she brings to bare. His having learned about ahavat haShem, for instance, may prejudice—correctly or otherwise—how he now understands the performance he observes. But I doubt this learning can stand on its own in the cultivation of the worshipping self. For it is the process of observing, interpreting and emulating human beings that furnishes the novice with this warm instrument of human expression. The language-like, expressive force of halachic practice—its capacity to reveal our inner stirrings in this immediate, instinctive way—derives from this imitative process, and not, in most of us at least, from theoretical study.

There is also another feature of this imitative process that significantly empowers halachic practice as a means for showing God our souls. Our identification with our parents, family, teachers and community not only invests halachic practice with the capacity to express our worshipful feelings: in addition, much in the way that my first language is itself inseparable from my sense of who I am, the language of religious practice itself becomes part of my identity. It comes with this sense of being intimately mine. When I pray, I am speaking a message to God which draws, in the fullest possible way, from my very being—free of posturing or alien fabrication, essential in both content and form to the person I am.

I must at this point offer a reality check. What is this relation actually like between performance of a mitzvah and the mental state it expresses? Is this something we could really recognize in our lives? I think the answer is yes, but to prevent us looking for the wrong thing, I must mention a few features which an expressive halachic act need not have. Firstly, as I shall clarify, a halachic act can be expressive of love, or of awe, without this being any kind of overwhelming, trance-like state of consciousness; indeed it need not be any kind of conscious episode. Secondly, the idea that love of God impels us to perform a mitzvah does not mean we should expect this love to sometimes impel us to act in any involuntary or unconsidered way (it will not, for instance, sometimes shake us helplessly out of bed at 2 am to lay tefilin). More positively, our love will show through action that is clear-headedly attentive to time and circumstances.

Compare an act of love for another person, such as when, pressed by love, I buy a present for my wife. This is a highly complex action, lasting over a period, comprising an indefinite sequence of sub-actions, each waiting for the right moment. I may first conceive the idea on Sunday, then check when I can shop for it, and only on Tuesday get in the car, turn the ignition, drive down to Emek Refa’im, search for parking, look in at a few stores, wait my turn at one of them and discuss options with the salesperson, finally choose something, take out a credit card, and so on. The deliberate and time-phased nature of the scheme takes nothing away from its being motivated the whole way by love, from it being manifestation of this ongoing condition of my person. I am not transported through it by any trance-like state of consciousness. Conscious episodes of love may occur in me from time to time, though I doubt these are essential to love being the motive. (This is not the space for a theory of love, but I’ll just retell the familiar wisdom that what does testify to its being love is a much larger narrative—years of marriage, shared understanding and lots more.) Nor has this love taken hold of me and forced me to act in any involuntary way: it is, rather, integrated rationally into the matrix of my intentions and understanding regarding the world generally. It is true that some acts of love are less time-bound, more spontaneous, such as a kiss given just on a whim. But these, too, are typically executed not in an involuntary transport but with at least some attention to circumstances, and with ensuing restraint (e.g., not in front of certain witnesses).

It is to this same extent plausible that my performing of a mitzvah is an expression of love, even if it is not produced involuntarily by a spontaneous burst of passion. For so it is with love: it can be my ongoing love of God that presses me to lay tefilin, say Birkat Hamazon, make Kiddush at the Shabbat table, though I do each just when it is appropriately occasioned, at which moment I enact a complex and deliberate scheme (carry my tefilin to shul, go to my seat and so forth). Nor does the possible absence of any conscious episode of loving Him, as I perform the mitzvah, cast doubt on the existence of this love, or on its being at play as my motive. The love may at some moments enter consciousness, but its doing so is not essential to its being my motive. It will be, rather, this ongoing condition of my person which, just in appropriate circumstances—such as it being time for Shacharit, or when I finish a meal, or when we come to the Friday night table—manifests in my considered performance of the mitzvah. (If mitzvot shehazman lo geraman differ at all relevantly in this respect from the more time-bound mitzvot I’ve used as examples, it is in their being potentially more spontaneous; so that, kal vechomer, there can be even less suspicion that they fail to demonstrate love.)

I must stress also that none of what I’ve said comes to deny that halachic texts play a role in the cultivation of expression through halachic practice—of course they do. A practice we have acquired through imitation and then refine further by consulting texts retains its identity as an instrument of personal expression. In contrast, however, a practice constructed in the first place from text alone, and deployed in an attempt to express through it (say) love of God, will lack this immediate and instinctive communicative force. Nor will it truly come from me.

Where, it must be asked, does this place ba’aley teshuvah or for that matter converts? Bereft of a parental model, are they unable to secure the intimate expressiveness of Halachah which I argue is yielded by mimetic transmission? Are they not bound to relying on instructional text? Not at all. Newcomers to Orthodoxy will acquire this identification with practice by attaching themselves to, and identifying with, a community, empathically watching what their fellow shul-goers and perhaps teachers do, and emulating them. In the course of time they, like anyone else there, will have made the language of worship their own. As much as the rest of us, they will acquire the patterns of prayer, tefilin, kashrut, the dos and don’ts making for the glow of Shabbat, and so on, until these shape, for them too, the form of life that is, potentially, our unmediated expression of love of God. They too become participants in this vital, human, forward-moving project of intimately worshipping God, a flux that began at Sinai, has been carried forward from generation to generation, and is now propelled onwards by us.

Family and community have been the artery within which Torat Moshe has coursed through our history. In just the way each generation of a nation inherits its language, we’ve inherited halachic practice, loaded at each moment with its signifying force—and always with the sense that this is the language our ancestors have used, since Matan Torah, to express their love of God. To be sure, each generation imparts its admixture to this organically developing tradition—partly in the form of evolving minhag, partly through scholarly refinement; just as each generation of a nation imparts colloquialisms and sometimes scholarly correctives to its national language that are soon incorporated into its mainstream. Yet it is with this entire continuous emerging tradition that we identify; it is with the inner dimension of worship running through it that we empathize. In this ongoing human project we’ve found our place, and in so doing have become genuinely able to participate in worship.

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But a breach now in the sequence, with the new shift to the authority of text, places it in danger. For the project of synthesizing halachic practice from text gives us no more than this behavioral facility; it contains no mechanism providing us with a means for expressing our inner stirrings to God, such as is furnished by imitation. The shift from mimicry to the authority of text thus brings with it, I suspect, not just the change of quantity and emphasis in halachic practice accounted for by R. H. Soloveitchik—the move to a Judaism of chumrot—but also a qualitative change: it is failing to cast Halachah in the spiritual and psychological role it has traditionally fulfilled.

I must, however, step back a moment and ask, is this harsh conclusion born out by reality? Is it really true that a halachic practice incorporated into our lives after we discover it in a text, instead of by emulation, is less likely to function as expressive of our love of God? Let me flesh out the situation with an example. Suppose in a shiur on Mishnah Berurah, I learn that Chanukah lights must be in a window less than 10 tephachot (slightly less than one yard) above ground level, if one has such a window (if one doesn’t have one, then higher is okay; cf. 671:27); and suppose that, in ignorance of this, it has been our family practice to place them in a window above 10 tephachot, even though we do have a window below this height. I can imagine ourselves engaging in some family debate, then switching to the lower window, and yes, with the feeling that we are only now fulfilling the mitzvah properly. But I doubt anything about doing this switch, motivated just by our concern to conform with the written ordinance, will make it in any sense an act expressing our love of God. It will feel, rather, like an alien imposition, even a disruption of the particular form of life by which we’ve celebrated the relation God has had with Am Yisrael and through which we’ve shown Him our reciprocal love.

I must also very forcefully stress here that I do not for a moment mean to suggest, God forbid, that a failure of the communicative role of a mitzvah could be reason not to perform it. I am, to start with, most certainly not qualified to suggest to anyone what they are halachically bound to do or not do. And more importantly: even if I am correct in saying that a mitzvah we’ve discovered in a text lacks the expressive force that would have been given it by imitation, some other solid reason may nevertheless exist to perform this mitzvah. What our reasons are for performing mitzvot is a huge question of hashkafah, far beyond the scope of the present discussion; but expressiveness is certainly not an exclusive answer. Suffice it to mention here the plausible view that we must perform the mitzvah simply lishmah—as a self-sufficient, intrinsically valuable act; or the view that we must perform it just because God has told us to; or that it is for the sake of some human utility, known or unknown to us, which God wishes us to introduce into the world; or because by doing it repeatedly we eventually do come to express by it our love of God. Deeply disconcerted though some of us may be if the expressive potential of a mitzvah has fallen into some dereliction, it would be outrageous to suppose this could be reason to stop performing it. My conclusion does not extend beyond pointing to this breakdown of expressiveness.

But even this limited statement may seem overly alarming. For in reality we still mostly identify with parents and a community whose practices of Shabbat, tefilin, kashrut and Chanukah lights, for instance, are our primary encounter with and source of mitzvot. Insofar as we are prompted into our own performing of a given mitzvah by identification and emulation, so too does this action retain its expressive power. There admittedly are contemporary practices of which I doubt this can be said—in some circles, for instance, the gebrokts apron, preventing matzo crumbs from landing on moisture, has become de rigueur accoutrement at the seder table—but these remain the minority of our practices. Surely, then, the tradition is still principally transmitted by imitation.

That may be true, yet I fear the evaluative shift towards a religiosity based on the authority of text nevertheless brings with it a more pervasive erosion. For it devalues in a general way the possibility of communicating through Halachah with God. One way of putting this is that a different motivation for performing mitzvot has begun to captivate us, namely, to cultivate a practice whose formal features match the requirements of texts; so that, correspondingly, we have become less driven by the motive to show God our love. The whole enterprise of performing mitzvot in order to express our inner devotion—always its vital human core—is moving towards obsoleteness.

Actually, though, I think the situation is more complex. It is not that we have ceased to inherit halachic practice through mimicry. Mimetic transmission largely continues: we still observe parents, teachers and others performing mitzvot, and we are still driven to interpret their motives and to emulate the halachic practice that becomes, in ourselves too, expressive of those motives. But we are now gripped by an ideology that focuses just on the formal match between behavior and text. Our new premise, that achieving this match is the true reason for performing mitzvot, now guides our interpretation of halachic practice—is now what guides the novice’s interpretation of her model—so that the novice is much likelier than before to interpret halachic practice as motivated just by the concern to achieve this formal match. She may even be misinterpreting that practice—a real, active love of God might be concealed from her by the new premise—nonetheless, a formal match will in turn become her own motive for performing mitzvot. The motivational turn widely infecting us in this way is what is prompting the novel preoccupation, described by R. H. Soloveitchik, with elevating ever more details from the halachic literature into common practice. Moreover, given the authority of text, even the imitative identification with our forbears could, with time, become superfluous altogether.

Halachah is potentially the language in which we tell God we love Him. We learn it by observing others speaking it, empathizing with their motives and emulating them. But we are losing sight of this communicative purpose of Halachah. It is as if we are becoming obsessed with learning some natural language, not in order to communicate in it with others, but just for the purpose of producing syntactically perfect sentences, without the ability to use these sentences for conveying our thoughts: at first we go about this by observing its native speakers—listening only for the formal properties of their speech, indifferently to the meanings they express through it; then in due course we turn for our authoritative source to an instruction manual of syntax, renowned for its accuracy, which teaches us to produce excellent sentences but leaves out their meanings. We are moving, it may be said, towards a condition of halachic aphasia.

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All is not lost. We can counter the trend with education—as parents by telling our children, as teachers by telling our students and, I humbly submit, as rabbis our congregants, that our reason for performing mitzvot is ahavat haShem. This principle, disseminated widely enough, stands a chance of prejudicing accordingly the next generation’s interpretation of halachic practice. But as their models, we shall need to be sincere: our own examples need to convincingly demonstrate this love. If we are visibly phony, no one will inherit it from us.

Some of My Best Friends
A Journey through Twenty-First Century Anti-Semitism
By Ben Cohen
Edition Critic, 2014, 215 pages

Ben Cohen is a specialist on Jewish and international affairs and has written articles for the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Haaretz, Tablet, and many other publications. He collected seventy of these articles and published them in this volume. He distinguishes “bierkeller” from the new “bistro” anti-Semitism. The first, which is best-known, is the crude variety that was shouted by Nazis as they guzzled beer and by red-necks in our own country today while they mimic this egregious behavior. But “bistro” anti-Semitism is polite, quiet-mannered, seemingly reasonable, pseudo-sophisticated, expressed mostly, according to Cohen, by members of the far left. These anti-Semites hide their animus by critiquing Zionism, not Jews. Cohen gives multiple examples of this behavior that add up to an insidious indictment that reaches even the highest levels of friendly governments.

Cohen’s articles fall into six categories: The UK, Jews, and Israel; The Middle East and Israel in context; Anti-Zionism in action; Anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism; The US and Israel; and On Israel and Iran.

Among much else, Cohen highlights that “whereas once the Jewish question (or problem) was viewed through the prism of economics, now it belongs to the realm of politics.” Jews are seen as heading, aiding, and maintaining American world leadership for their own interest: “Jewish national consciousness is, a priori, reactionary, supremacist, and politically aligned with imperialism.”

Cohen sees that the far left is fixated with the Palestinians and it is in their statements about the Palestinians “that we find the brashest expressions of anti-Semitism…. Fringe neo-Nazi groups notwithstanding, significant anti-Semitism is now exclusively a left-wing rather than a right-wing phenomenon.” The term Zionism has become a “code word for the forces of reaction in general, Zionism has assumed a global importance for the contemporary Left that even Marx and Lenin could not have foreseen.” This new anti-Semitism is “generally dated back to September 2000, when the second Palestinian intifada began.” As a result, “the extreme left in western societies not only denigrates Israel and Zionism in a systematic manner, but its irrational hostility frequently spills over into contempt towards Jews and Judaism.”

The new anti-Semites claim that their “views are not offensive, not anti-Semitic.” They are only standing up for the rational and moral view, the view with which every reasonable person would agree. It “is the opinion of those who object to the views that should be considered beyond the pale.” When Jews call them anti-Semites, they are being unreasonable.

This subtle anti-Semites, for example, would not deny that the Nazis killed Jews, but they redistribute much of the blame for their deaths upon the victims. Boycotting Israeli goods is not being anti-Jewish it is only an attempt to make Israel realize its mistakes and to see reason.

Cohen discusses the alleged distinction between moderate and radical Muslims, which hopefully places Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, in the first grouping. Yet, Rouhani dismissed Israel as a “miserable regional country.”

Cohen explains how the new anti-Semitism plays out in various countries, including the US where Jewish-oriented programs are curtailed, England, Iran, and others. In Turkey, for example, the ruling Justice and Development Party is called moderate by many people, but “this seems to me less like logic, and more like prayer.” The leadership is promoting Islamic practices such as Islamic dress codes, it demands that married couples have at least three children, prohibits alcohol, abortion, and smooching in public, and clamps down on freedom of speech. Turkey’s leaders “fulminate against shadowy plots hatched by Marxists, Kurdish separatists, and – most of all – Jews.” These are not the acts of moderates.

Cohen’s book ends with a thought-provoking article on the view of the prior United Kingdom Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, who argued that the British system of multiculturalism, where every “every ethnic group and religious group becomes a pressure group, putting our people’s interest instead of the national interest.” Individuals have rights, but they should seek to aid the goals of the nation in which they live, as Jews have always done. “The norm was for Muslims to live under a Muslim jurisdiction and the norm, since the destruction of the first Temple, was for Jews to live under a non-Jewish jurisdiction.” There is, Cohen concludes, “the historic unwillingness within Islam to accept that there are situations in which Muslims will be a minority,” and this refusal is corroding England.

In short, Cohen’s book contains many analyses of situations around the world which explain the subtleties behind what is happening and why, and which highlight problems that people and nations with rose-colored glasses prefer to ignore, but must be addressed.

Throughout the centuries, historians, philosophers and anthropologists have struggled with the concept called Israel more than with nearly any other idea. While attempting to place Israel within the confines of conventional history, they experienced constant academic and philosophical frustration. Any definitions they suggested eventually broke down due to significant inconsistencies. Was Israel a nation, a religion or an altogether mysterious entity that would forever remain unexplainable? By some, it was seen less as a nation and more as a religion; others believed the reverse to be true. And then there were those who claimed that it does not fall into either of these categories.

In fact, it was clear to everyone that “Israel” did not fit into any specific framework or known scheme. It resisted all historical concepts and generalities. Its uniqueness thwarted people’s natural desire for a definition, which can be alarming and terribly disturbing. This fact became even more obvious once Titus the Roman forced the Jews out of their country, and specifically after the collapse of the Bar Kochba rebellion. It was then that the Jew was hurled into the abyss of the nations of the world and has since been confronted with a new condition: ongoing insecurity. While mankind has always faced moments of insecurity, it is the Jews who have been denied even the smallest share of the dubious security that others possess. Whether Jews were aware of it or not, they always lived on ground that could, at any moment, give way beneath their feet.

In 1948 Israel once again became a country. But many forgot that it was not only a country. All the other dimensions, such as nationhood, religion, mystery, insecurity and lack of definition continued to exist. The people of Israel today do not find themselves exclusively in the land of Israel, and instead of one Israel the world now has two. But the second, new Israel has until now been seen as responding to the demands of history, geography, politics and journalism. One knows where it is. At least one thinks one knows where it is. But it becomes clearer and clearer that this new and definable Israel has already become as much a puzzling and perplexing entity as the old Israel always was.

Throughout its short history, the State of Israel has experienced the most inexplicable events modern man has ever seen. After an exile of nearly 2,000 years, during which the old Israel was able to survive against all historical odds, it returned to its homeland. There it found itself surrounded by a massive Arab population that was and is incapable of making peace with the idea that this small and peculiar nation lives among them. After having suffered a Holocaust in which it lost six million of its members, it was not permitted to live a life of tranquility on its tiny piece of land. Once again, the Jew was denied the right to feel at home in his own country.

From the outset Israel was forced to battle its enemies on all fronts. It was attacked and then condemned for defending its population and fighting for its very existence. Over the years it had to endure the international community’s policy of double standards. Today, as in the past, when it calls for peace it is condemned for provoking war. When it tries, as no other nation does, to avoid hurting the citizens of the countries that declare war on it, it is accused of being more brutal than nations that committed and still commit atrocities against millions of people. Simultaneously, and against all logic, this nation builds its country as no other has done, while fighting war after war. What took other nations hundreds of years, Israel accomplished in only a few. While bombs and rockets attack its cities, while calls for its total destruction are heard in many parts of the world, it continues to increase its population, generate unprecedented technology and create a stronger and more stable economy. But the more it succeeds, the more its enemies become frustrated and irritated, and the more fragile Israel’s security becomes. The more some nations aspire to destroy it, the more the world is forced to deal with this small country and its miraculous survival. By now, Israeli politics and diplomacy occupy more space in major newspapers than any other political issue or general topic ¬¬– as if Israel is actually at the center of world events.

Jews must ask themselves what this non-classification really signifies. Is it due merely to lack of vision and insight on the part of the nations? Is it that Jews could really fit into a system but the nations have not yet allowed them entry? Is it a negative phenomenon? A temporary one, until it will rectify itself in the future?

We have only one way to comprehend the positive meaning of this otherwise apparently negative phenomenon: faith. From any other viewpoint, the failure of Jews to fit into any category would be intolerable, a meaningless absurdity. We need to understand that the Jews’ inability to conform to any classification is the very foundation and meaning of their living avowal of Israel’s uniqueness. Israel’s very existence is the manifestation of mysterious and heavenly intervention in history to which the Jews must attest. Only in Israel do history and revelation coincide. While other nations exist as nations, the people of Israel exist as a reminder of God’s involvement in world history. Only through Israel is humanity touched by the divine.

The realization of this fact has become modern Israel’s great challenge. Its repeated attempts to overcome its geographic and political insecurity by employing world politics will not work. Driven by its desire to overcome its vulnerability, it wavers between geography and nationhood, appealing to its history and religious culture while unable to find a place that it can call its existential habitat.

Reading about Israel’s prophets, we see how they warned against such false notions of security. They predicted that Israel would perish if it insisted on existing only as a political structure. Yet, it can survive – and this is the paradox of the reality of Israel – as long as it insists on its vocation of uniqueness.

Israel was summoned to remind the world of God’s existence, not only concerning religion but also as a historical reality and above all as a unique moral voice. We must understand that our enemies want to uproot our system of values and principles by drawing us into situations in which we are forced to make moral decisions that are so complex that they become nearly impossible to implement. In that way, they are able to accuse us of war crimes and the worst atrocities. The world has not yet forgiven the Jews for the Holocaust. As long as their direct or indirect participation in the massacre of the Jewish people proves their total moral bankruptcy, these nations cannot live at peace with themselves. They must therefore prove that Israel’s moral standards are worse than theirs. Only in that way can they cleanse themselves of their own moral failure.

We must convince our children that the reason why we are here and why we need to fight war after war is not for our phenomenal high-tech, our military power, or our capability to build a modern state out of barren desert. All those accomplishments are means, not ends. We are here to fulfill an extraordinary mission that is deeply rooted in Jewish religious and moral values.

We don’t fight wars just to survive; we don’t even fight to merely overcome evil. We fight wars because we believe that man must surpass himself so as to become righteous, and that is possible only if the great evil that surrounds us has been eliminated. Israel needs to be a powerhouse of moral audacity, defying the world’s mediocrity and hypocrisy.

We cannot endlessly continue to send our children into the battlefield unless they are convinced that they are fighting for a supreme mission. While they are, at this hour, highly motivated, we have no guarantee that this will continue tomorrow. Only when they know that they fight for the soul of all men and that a highly inspiring Judaism is our invincible weapon will they continue to fight for all of us. After all this is not a war like all other wars, this is a Jewish war with a four thousand long history of spiritual heroism. But this requires a revolution in Jewish education, a drastic reorientation of what Judaism is really all about, and extraordinary boldness on the part of our rabbis.

If the government wants our children to continue fighting, it will have to give primacy to this Jewish mission and ensure that it becomes deeply engraved in their souls. If not, it will one day lose our children and be left without a supreme army. We cannot fight just because we are Israelis. We must fight because we are, first and foremost, Jews. The decision will be between putting band-aids on our wounds or performing a long-overdue surgery and getting things right.

There is no security for Israel unless it is secure in its own destiny. It must assume the burden of its own uniqueness, which is nothing less than taking on its role as God’s witness. And it must draw strength from this position, especially in times such as ours when Israel’s very existence is again at stake. Paradoxically, once it recognizes its uniqueness, it will undoubtedly be victorious and enjoy security.

****

Review by Israel Drazin

On the Relationship of Mitzvot between Man and his Neighbor and Man and his Maker
By Daniel Sperber
Urim Publications, 2014, 221 pages

The winner of Israel’s prestigious Israel Prize, Professor Daniel Sperber, a rabbi and Dean of the Faculty of Jewish Studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, published an extremely significant book that should change the thinking of Jews and non-Jews about the purpose of religion. Sperber notes that Jewish law has two categories of commands, called mitzvot in Hebrew, those between people and God and those between one person and another. “The question we wish here to discuss,” he writes, “is which of these two categories is, as it were, more weighty. Or formulated differently: if there were to be a clash between two different mitzvot from these two categories, which one would prevail?” Sperber shows readers many, perhaps over a hundred statements from respected Jewish authorities showing that when a conflict arises, preference must be given to “mitzvot between man and his neighbor,” not “between man and his Maker.” The following is a sample of these statements. The quotes are from Sperber’s book.

There is the classic statement of Hillel emphasizing human relations: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your friend. That is the whole Torah and, as for the rest, it is commentary.” The “Kabbalist R. Hayyim Vital (is quoted as saying) that when one rises in the morning, even before one goes to prayer, one should remind himself of the mitzvah ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself’ (Leviticus 19:18).” The famed codifier Rabbenu Asher wrote: “the Holy One blessed be He is more desirous of mitzvot that are done to the satisfaction of human beings, than those which are between man and his Maker.”

The founder of the Musar (Ethics) movement Rabbi Yisrael Salanter said: “Better a failure between man and God, than between man and man.” Rabbi Yosef Engel, known as the Taz, wrote that “God, as it were, would have no complaint or find any fault in one who could not fulfill His commandment (when observing a mitzvah relating to one’s fellow human, such as paying a debt) and need not make it up.” The Ethics of the Fathers states: “He in whom the spirit of mankind find favor, in him the spirit of God finds favor; but he in whom the spirit of mankind finds no favor, in him the spirit of God finds no pleasure.” The Talmud teaches “theft from an individual is more serious than theft from that which has been dedicated to God.” The Netziv wrote that “charity given to the poor is of greater virtue than money given to the temple itself.” In fact, giving charity is even “seen as preferential to building a synagogue or even the Temple.”

This preference is found in Jewish law. The codifier Rema wrote that the biblical mandate to dwell in a Sukkah on the
holiday of Sukkot should be ignored “if a person is engaged in bringing sustenance to their families in straightened circumstances.” Maimonides taught that the biblical command “of bringing the omer (the new barley harvest) before the altar of God cannot push aside those mitzvot directed to helping the poor.” The Code Shulchan Aruch rules that people should not interrupt involvement in communal affairs to pray. Maimonides and Joseph Caro wrote in their codes that as important as study of Torah is, it should be interrupted to give charity. Although the law of the Shabbat is in the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments), the Jewish law is that “even the slightest suspicion of a life-endangering situation overrules the laws of Shabbat.”

After showing these and many more statements and laws that support the view that Judaism considers the behavior of people to one another more important than their behavior towards God, Professor Sperber tells moving tales in close to forty pages showing how famous rabbis exemplified this teaching, people like the Brisker Rav, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kosov, Hafetz Hayyim, and others.

He follows this in part three by showing the many ways that Jewish congregations instituted the practice of giving charity prior to beginning one’s morning prayer. This “underscores the moral priority of relationship towards one’s fellow human even before one turns to one’s Creator.”

Thus, it is no surprise that Jewish tradition taught that prayers on Yom Kippur can annul “sins against God,” but “those against fellow humans are not expiated on Yom ha-Kippurim until the sinner appeases him that was sinned against.”

The Film Ida
A review by Roger Mesznik; July 14, 2014

Today, Lynn and I saw (with friends) the film IDA, a Polish film provided with English subtitles.

I was moved and puzzled, induced to think and grieve, and left a bit cold. I am very glad to have seen it, and I recommend it.

The film is set in Poland of the 1960s. A novice in a convent (Ida) is talked by the mother superior into meeting her aunt prior to taking her vows. Talking to her aunt for the first time, Ida discovers that she (Ida) was born to a Jewish family, and that her parents and her baby cousin were assassinated during WWII after being stashed for a while by a neighbor in a hideaway in the forest. She also discovers that she was spared as a Jewish baby by being deposited with the village priest. She was saved because she was too small to recall anything, her skin was not dark enough to betray her, and she would not show evidence of a circumcision. She eventually discovers that the then-assassin is a still-living neighbor whom she manages to see.

While watching the film, my first thoughts were directed to the many victims of the Shoah I knew and know who were damaged for life, often damaged irreparably, even though they were spared the gas chambers, the camps, and the killing fields. The story arc of Ida made me think of the people who ended with no descendants. The arc made me think of the people who were never able to overcome the futility of lives rendered sterile, people whose lives were deprived of meaning and purpose, people whose lives were eviscerated of hope, people whose decisive years were wasted hiding in a coal cellar, or in a forest, or under false identities, or in convents and monasteries, or with false families. These victims were not killed, but many of their lives amounted to little more than seeing their respective survival to its predictable end.

From my family history, from friends and acquaintances, from the literature, and from this film again, I was made to feel once more for the millions of victims whose lives were spared, but whose substance and vitality was drained from them with no recourse. Viewed with hindsight, reincarnation in Israel or in the US (to choose the two overriding such destinations) seems so self-evidently healing, and so often heroic and praiseworthy. But we do not have many auto-biographies of the many victims who never healed. Untold numbers of lives are right now draining into an amorphous insignificance of lost hopes and forgone opportunities. They are departing without a record; they are leaving this world without having left any imprint.

I also knew and know people who spent years fighting the Nazi occupation. Many of them spent those years also hoping to create a world in which such monstrosities will never happen again. These hopes were appropriated by false saviors and by idolatrous characters who promised Eden on earth. These liars eventually delivered nothing but disappointment, more pain, more deaths, and many more broken hearts and disillusioned minds.

Ida is in her early twenties. And yet, at the film’s end, she elects to surrender to her original destiny and live out her life as a nun. But the convent is a sad place. It is lost in a far corner of a small village, devoid of any effective purpose and doomed to eventual abandonment. Its decaying old house is too big, its economic basis is missing, and its superficial religious role is fulfilled by greeting people with “God be with you” and the off-handed dispensation of a blessing to a little baby.

Prior to deciding to return to the convent, Ida clearly foreswears the opportunity to seek justice, or revenge, or even a modicum of compensation for the crimes committed against her and her family.

She could have returned to the convent driven by an urge to escape this sordid past. She did not. She could have done it because she elects to devote her future to some grander vision of her religious calling. She did not. She could have done it because she simply wanted to live it up when finally liberated from her oppressive past and present. She did not.

She seems to return to the convent out of a deep sense of self-abnegation; and nothing more. The misery of being a Jew in this hostile world at this hostile time is transformed into an elective controlled misery of self-denial and empty sacrifice. Is it a possible, half-hearted “religious answer” to the well-known “survivor guilt”, or is it only a convenient regression into familiar contexts? This process saddened me.

It seems that her just-discovered past has so broken her that all she can do is to spend the remainder of her days in meaningless self-denial. To be sure that the denial is indeed as painful as it is supposed to be, she even engages in a discovery of what she will miss when taking her vows. She does it on the advice of her aunt who commits suicide shortly after suggesting this possibility to her. After celebrating the memory of her dead aunt by following her advice, she snuffs the remainder of her own life in quiet obedience to inconsequential, anonymous self-effacement. Is she committing a slow-motion suicide which is formally consistent with Catholic religious precepts, but a suicide nonetheless? And to make sure that the viewer understands the depth of this meaningless sacrifice, she is shown as a beautiful and attractive young woman at the prime of her life, and she is told so more than once in the film.

I felt betrayed by Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Jewish boy who had a successful religious “career”, becoming the Catholic Archbishop of Paris. I was moved by his request to have a Hebrew Kaddish prayer recited at his funeral at the portal of the Cathedral of Notre Dame to abide by the beliefs of his parents who were murdered on account of their Jewishness. I am of two minds about Edith Stein, (aka St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), a girl of deeply religious Jewish origin who studied medicine, converted to Catholicism, became a nun, and who was apparently either unable or unwilling to save herself when the Nazi came for her in her convent and exterminated her in Auschwitz.

However foreign to me these acts are, they are decided acts of conscious commissions; they are manifestations of a free will which decides to try and leave its imprint on the world to the best of its lights. Ida’s slow suicide is not a commission; it is an omission; it is a denial of responsibility. This is why I was saddened by this Jewish variant of the stereotype of the Catholic martyr.

It evoked in me the loss of so many others, whether or not they had converted. To gauge the impact of the film’s purposeful design, I tried to imagine the same film with an uncircumcised boy and a monastery. It would work mechanically, but not nearly so well. Male saints are usually not so passive. The sympathy for Ida is driven, in part, by the female gender role and the loss of a beautiful girl. This is why the film left me also cold.

Though I am saddened by Stein and Lustiger, their path is consistent with the trajectory of more than 90% of all people who were ever born Jewish. A nation (or a people) which were dominant in the Mediterranean of the Roman world could only be reduced to a rather small few million survivors by continuous shedding of co-religionists, whether forced or voluntary. Lustiger, Stein and untold others tried as best they could to follow their ideas. Ida and untold others like her just gave up. They gave up and they reverted, they yielded to convenience and familiarity.

I do not deplore weakness. I do not deplore accommodation (Think of Primo Levi working inside as a chemist and saving himself in Auschwitz). I do not even deplore instrumental treachery if needed for survival (think of “Sophie’s Choice”). But I am depressed and angered by Ida’s (non-) choice.

The aunt says at one point: “I went to the forest to fight; and for what?” She was clearly a “Court Jew” of the Communist party. She was not a Court Jew because she could lend money; she had none. She was a Court Jew because she could lend unflinching reliability. She and others like her made up the only population segment that the power-seizing communist regime could reliably count on to be steadfastly anti-fascist. As a judge, she became known as “Red Wanda”. She could have been relied on to mete heavy punishment to fascists and collaborators; but also later probably to “Bourgeois

Counterrevolutionaries”. We do not know whether she did also sit in judgment over “Zionist Trotskyists” or “Neo-rightist-deviationists” (speak Jews). She had clearly tried to shed her past. When forced to face it again through the eyes of her niece, she clears what she can, and then she commits suicide in a manner which is statistically decidedly non-female and atypical for women. With her suicide, she grants Ida full liberty to select her own future because the only and just established familial ties are terminally severed. Ida is cleared of all attachments. Ida is now free to choose.

The emptiness of the aunt’s position is also emphasized by a tinny rendition of the anthem “The Internationale” on a poor tape recorder at her funeral. All that is left of the grandiose attempt to “create a new man” and save humanity is this spooky rendition of the hymn of a promised salvation. The aunt’s name, Wanda, is the most common Polish name after Maria. Apparently unwilling, as a Jew, to take on the name Maria, she chose a generic appellation, a really common first name, a name of the people; and probably, in its time, also for the people.

The film put an odd emphasis on the insignificance of this drama in the grand sweep of history. However weighty the situation for Wanda and Ida, it means ultimately nothing for everyone else. When Ida mentions to a new acquaintance that she is of Jewish origin, he replies “I have some Gypsy background in me”. Is this the film maker’s invitation to rise above the biological destiny and the historic determinacy? Are we supposed to become self-defining individuals, unbounded by a common past and our common history?

The filmography is very intriguing. In many passages, the characters are set within the lower part of the picture frame. It makes the viewer feel as if tiptoeing up to an open window to peer through that window into another person’s life. For me, it created another distance to the characters. It provided me more detachment, and it made me feel more disengaged. Did the filmmaker do it to emphasize that the story is ultimately no more than the self-defining defiance of inconsequential individuals?

The setting was very well presented. The ruts and potholes in the road as they drive, the black and white tiles, the recurring spiral staircase, the peeling paint in the hospital, the communist-fashion heavy heels on women’s shoes, the gloomy air, and the all-pervasive suspicion.