National Scholar Updates

It was only a short while ago in America that there were those predicting the death of Orthodox Judaism in this country. A large segment of Orthodoxy included the generation of survivors ravaged by the trauma of a Holocaust they had barely survived. They were learning to adapt to a new society, a new language, and a new culture. The children of those survivors, Baby Boomers of today, were opting out of Orthodox Judaism in droves to join the fast-growing Conservative and Reform movements. The more liberal movements offered much to attract first-generation native-born Jews: services in regal and refined English, a rabbi whose only accent inflecting his sermons was a
Northeastern one, pews that allowed families to sit together, lively social programming with regular dances and parties, and much more. It is no wonder then that some of the greatest Orthodox authorities of the first half of the twentieth century spent much time and a lot of spilled ink in defining borders between Orthodoxy and the rest of the denominational world.

Chief among those busy with the task of separating Orthodoxy from the other movements was the great halakhic decisor, haRav Moshe Feinstein. Rav Moshe was one of the most creative, insightful, and brilliant rabbinic minds of his generation. His genius and erudition were widely acknowledged. He also lived, taught, and offered rulings in the heart of the American immigrant Jewish experience: the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan. When Rav Moshe offered his halakhic rulings, he did so not from a safe and comfortable distance inside a Bet Midrash removed from the ordinary person; he was very much a part of his community and understood intimately the challenges of the day.

Rav Moshe worked tirelessly to free agunot from abusive relationships (E”H 1:43; 1:48; 1:79, et cetera). He grasped the new socio-political reality that American Jews found themselves in and urged people to vote and take part in the civic process (in a letter from 1984), and recognized the government of the United States as a trustworthy and reliable source for oversight so that he permitted halav stam (Y”D 1:47). He perceived the value of the labor movement that was advancing the rights of working Americans and he permitted strikes and negotiations (H”M 1:59). He also forbade any official recognition, interaction with, or participation together with the Reform and Conservative movements (Y”D 1:160; E”H 1:76: E”H 4:13; O”H 2:50; O”H 3:21; O”H 4:91, et cetera).

Furthermore, not only did he draw a clear line in the sand when it came to the non-Orthodox religious Jewish community, he also utilized their practices and customs as a proof and source for what Orthodoxy ought not to do. If the Conservative movement sanctioned a practice then it must be forbidden, even if it was permitted on purely halakhic grounds. A striking example of this is his ruling on the impermissibility of conducting a Bat Mitzvah ceremony inside a synagogue. In his ruling he states: “The ceremony of the Bat Mitzvah is definitely only an optional matter (divrei reshut) and only vanity (hevel), and there is no way to permit such a thing in the synagogue; and all the more so since its root is in the Reform and Conservative movements” (O”H 1:104).
One need only to contrast Rav Moshe’s ruling on Bat Mitzvah to that of haRav Ovadiah Yosef to see the difference between a posek who is occupied with waging a battle against the denominations and one who is not. Rav Ovadiah rules (Yabia Omer, O”H 6:29) that the Bat Mitzvah festivities are a seudat mitzvah, a meal infused with religious significance. Furthermore, he offers the opinion that a parent may recite the traditional blessing recited by Ashkenazim of Barukh shePetarani, albeit without shem malkhut, upon a young woman reaching the age of Bat Mitzvah. Nowhere does Rav Ovadiah reference the Reform or Conservative movements in this ruling. He only states briefly that he was aware of Rav Moshe’s strident opinion against Bat Mitzvah but did not find it compelling.

The denominational war for the heart and soul of American Judaism is over. The struggle of the early generation of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to instill a love of traditional Judaism to their American-born children enchanted with the more American milieu of the other denominations is over. This is not our central struggle, and this is not our battlefield.

We live in a different zeitgeist than Rav Moshe Feinstein. Our struggle is not with the other streams of religious Jewish expression in America. While the predictions in the first half of the twentieth century foresaw an America without Orthodox Jews, this proved dramatically false. The youngest movement in Judaism is Orthodoxy. The only movement in Judaism not experiencing massive rates of assimilation and intermarriage is Orthodoxy. (This is not to say that an intermarried family ceases to connect with the Jewish community, but by definition it will be an attenuated connection with competing religious interests.)

One need only attend the convention of any major Jewish communal organization to witness the sea change. Whereas it was only a decade or so ago that if you kept kosher at most of these large gatherings you were served your food in a plastic box triple wrapped; now almost all of these gatherings are completely kosher with dedicated room for each tefillah. A professional at an organization whose major annual convention I recently attended remarked to me how her organization has had to make major changes to adjust to the influx of Orthodox attendees and lay leaders. The unfortunate reality is that this does not mean a net growth in attendance; rather, this is occurring at the same time the rate of participation and lay leadership of the non-Orthodox continues to decline.

What then is the great challenge of our era? Where should our attention, our communal energy, our rabbinic leaders, our thinkers and activists be focused? I believe it comes down to one distinct issue: We are no longer merely the chosen nation, but rather the nation that chooses. This has been true for some time, but has not been felt as intensely than in the millennial generation (and perhaps will be felt even more so in the generations to come).

As Modern Orthodox Jews, we invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in the formal Jewish education of our children. A year of kindergarten can cost upwards of $20,000 alone in a Jewish day school in a major metropolitan area. With the rise of the Orthodox Day Schools in America combined with the nearly universal year or more in Israel studying in yeshivot or seminaries prior to college we are experiencing one of the most well-educated and well-versed Jewish populations in Jewish history. Countless Modern Orthodox young men and women in their 20s and 30s can turn to a daf of Gemara and translate it and work through the accompanying commentaries of Rashi and the Tosafot. How many of them experience a passion in their daily tefillah? How many of them relate to the teachings of Hazal and can distill the wisdom within? Orthodox Judaism today is not struggling against the allure of a more Protestant Americanized ethos. It is struggling with the great challenge of relativism and postmodernism.

Postmodern influence on the religious worldview of today’s Modern Orthodox millennial generation is profound. Whether it is deconstructing previously held core theological tenets such as a belief in God, the theophany at Sinai, or the election of Israel as a chosen people; or being unconvinced that there are any truth claims, the postmodernist critique of society, culture, and literature has shaken up the Modern Orthodox community in ways we are only beginning to recognize.

How can one become passionate about something that is no more or less true than any other competing value and belief system? How can one find inspiration in the narrative of one’s people if it has been deconstructed through literary criticism and voids in the archeological record? What relevance does Jewish peoplehood have in an era of universalism and global solidarity?

These are the most monumental challenges facing our community now and in the years to come. In a similar vein to the breathtaking life work of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik to bridge the world of Torah with the world of twentieth century modernism, we need today intellectual religious leaders who can stake out intellectual and theological positions that resonate with the millennial Orthodox generation. Just as Lonely Man of Faith inspired a generation of Orthodox Jews, a new Lonely Person of Critical Doubt could have the potential to bring about a similar process in today’s generation.

From my time as an Orthodox rabbi on a college campus, I saw firsthand the impact of the postmodernist approach on Modern Orthodox young people. The intellectually curious young person finds little guidance to help resolve the tensions arising from a deconstructionist method, or to confront more nuanced definitions of truth in a world of competing truth claims. More often than not, they are told that their questions are without merit or their struggles are a test of their faith in God. It does not take long for that young person to opt out of active engagement and to maintain, at most, only an external fidelity to the rituals and lifestyle of Orthodoxy.

Where do we start in addressing this challenge? The first step is to acknowledge that young people today choose their lifestyle, their religious commitments, and their beliefs. People today feel less of a need to maintain what previous generations believed or felt than perhaps in any generation prior. The tremendous growth of the “nones” in the American religious landscape is testament to this fact. If we internalize the reality that people today choose to affiliate, to identify and to practice their faith, then we have an obligation to respond with integrity and thoughtfulness to the critiques people in their 20s and 30s are bringing to the communal table.

Additionally, we have to rethink the way we do business. Michael Perman, the Dean of Global Innovation at Gap, Inc., said it clearly in an interview for Forbes in 2013 when he was Senior Director of Global Marketing at Levi’s: “With Millennials, we have to let go a lot. As a brand, I think we were a company, among others, who felt that tight control of the brand and saying what our voice is was crucial up until probably a couple of years ago. We’re essentially a brand now that is based on co-creation….” Any serious attempt to address the intellectual and theological challenges millennials are grappling with must be done in collaboration and coordination with millennials themselves. There is an expression in special needs inclusion that boldly says “nothing for us without us” and the same is equally true with the millennial population. People in their 20s and 30s have a strong desire to be a part of the conversation and anything that is produced without that joint conversation will not have the same impact and resonance.

If our rabbinic and intellectual luminaries can rise to the time and begin to address the monumental theological and religious challenges posed by this generation, we face the prospect of reinvigorating and infusing a new era of meaning and depth into Jewish discourse and Jewish life. This will take bravery and courage to go where no rabbi has gone before in wrestling with the profound implications of a critical approach to belief in God, in the origins of Torah, in the place of religious obligation in a world of choice and a host of other areas. This conversation must be done with those most directly grappling with these topics. It cannot seek to rebrand and impose twentieth-century solutions on twenty-first-century problems. However, as Calev defiantly declared in the face of overwhelming challenges, “aloh na’aleh,” we can surely accomplish this too if we truly commit ourselves to the task.

When I graduated Rambam Torah Institute, a Los Angeles Orthodox High School, in 1978 (Rambam closed in 1979, giving way to the opening of YULA and the Simon Wiesenthal Center), I was about to enter UCLA with a schizophrenic approach to my own Jewish identity. On the one hand, I had grown up in the Sephardic-Ladino community where I was about the only one to receive a formal Jewish education from middle school on. Being “shomer shabbat” was very old-country and unheard of in “Rodesli-L.A.” (the community of Jews descended from the Island of Rhodes who established the Sephardic Hebrew Center in L.A., where we were members). The only ones who admired or understood why I chose a more traditional path for myself were the senior citizens born in Rhodes, toward whom I tended to gravitate.

Being an only child to a mother who was an only child, and having lost my father when I was a baby, my “playdates” typically were in the living rooms of elderly Rodesli immigrants, who told stories and jokes in Ladino, entertained with dulce (homemade preserves) served in beautiful silver bowls with silver spoons along with coffee, biskochos (round sesame or cinnamon covered cookies), and assortments of burekas or pastelikos (savory turnovers), reshas (homemade pretzels), hard cheese, olives, and abidahu (dried, wax-covered fish roe that was a delicacy), or salado (salted, cured mackerel or tuna). There were no chicken nuggets or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at these afternoon gatherings! These visits often took place on Shabbat afternoons; most of the community lived either on the same block or within a few minutes’ walk or drive of each other. This was South Central L.A.—or Leimert Park or the Crenshaw District—where I could go trick or treating on Halloween night and ask for burekas instead of candy, and get them!

Today this neighborhood is mostly African American with not a Jew in sight for miles. The synagogues have long been sold and converted to churches, still displaying the original stained glass Stars of David in the windows. The lifestyle has also disappeared; no one lives near each other anymore in “Rodesli-L.A.,” and the community has dissipated and spread to the four corners of the Greater Los Angeles Basin. Most of those special people from my “playdates” have gone to the next world, and their children or grandchildren may have remembered a few words in Ladino, have kept a few of their mother’s or grandmother’s recipes, and have for the most part sadly strayed from what was once a tight-knit and traditional community.

In Rhodes, it was the norm to keep the laws of kashruth, observe Shabbat and holidays, and keep close to our Jewish traditions. The members of the community didn’t, however, identify as “Orthodox” Jews, nor did other Sephardic communities in the Mediterranean Basin or the Middle East identify as such. Some families were known to be more religious and knowledgeable, others much less. All, however, went to the same synagogue and followed basically the same customs and practices. This lifestyle was reproduced to an extent in America, when these immigrants established their community in Los Angeles. But the forces of assimilation and acculturation meant English first, American culture first, and work first, even on Shabbat.

The traditions of the “old country” began to fade with the next generation, especially given the choices that America offered, including meat and chicken that looked much cleaner and cheaper than the products from the kosher butcher. That’s why it was unusual for me to wind up in a Jewish Orthodox school, eventually keeping kasher and observing Shabbat. And it wasn’t because my mother was predisposed to that direction. My maternal grandfather was born in Bulgaria, and in the late 1800s emigrated to Palestine, where he was religiously educated and spoke many languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, before coming to the United States in 1920. He met my Rhodes-born grandmother in Seattle, the motherland of Ladino immigrants on the West Coast. My grandmother kept kasher, as did most of her contemporaries. When she was hospitalized, our community rabbi, Solomon Mizrahi, who was revered by all, went to visit and admonish her that she could not refrain from eating in the hospital because the food was not kasher, insisting that her health came first.

But the immigrant generation did not instill a religious lifestyle in the new generation of Americans. There was too much at stake in “making it in America” to have religion hold them back. No, the reason I landed in an Orthodox Day School in the seventh grade in 1972 was that my working single mother who had put me in private grammar school through the sixth grade could not have me to go to a public school that would dismiss the students at 3:00 P.M.—when she didn’t get home until after 5:00. And in the L.A. public schools of the 1970s, there were stories of knifings in the bathrooms and tough characters to deal with. Remember, I just grew up hanging around a group of sweet old ladies and had no training in self-defense against the ruffians roaming the halls of John Burrows Jr. High or L.A. High. “Leshos!” (Keep it far away!), as we would say. Hence, my introduction to the Orthodox Day School system was more for my protection than my religious education, and it developed into my personal road back to my religious roots.

So I did not grow up in an Orthodox family. Such a word was never even familiar to Sephardim. They could be kasher, pray regularly, adhere to all the holiday rituals, and not know what “Orthodox” meant, or if they did, it didn’t refer to them. I grew up in a “traditional” Los Angeles Sephardic family—what we considered traditional in the 1960s and 1970s, that is. (I add Los Angeles because the community was less observant than those Ladino communities in Seattle, New York, even Atlanta). The difference was that while we did have our large extended family Shabbat and holiday dinners, always with one or two “old-timers” who knew how to lead the Kiddush or the Rosh haShana “Yehi Ratsones” (in Hebrew and Ladino) or the Passover “Haggada” (in Hebrew and Ladino), I still enjoyed my pizza with pepperoni just as much as I loved my burekas. We still went to homes for a very different kind of American dinner on Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving.

That doesn’t mean we would think of missing out on celebrating Jewish holidays with all the prayers, whether Rosh haShana, Yom Kippur, or Simhat Torah with the honored “hattanim”—and our services would surely be considered “Orthodox” by any observer familiar with the various Ashkenazic Jewish movements. English translations eventually crept into the services, but the prayer books never changed, nor did the patterns of traditional Sephardic services.

When I had my first Orthodox exposure entering Hillel Hebrew Academy in seventh grade, I came home yelling and complaining that I had to wear a kippah all day and pray so often and at a speed I could not keep up with. My mother thought I wouldn’t last a week. I had to “fake” pray that first year since I couldn’t possibly make it through the entire Amida with my limited Hebrew knowledge. My prior formal Jewish education consisted of Talmud Torah afternoon school (at an Ashkenazic synagogue because our Sephardic synagogue was too far and offered little in terms of Jewish education). I made (Orthodox) friends, and soon I was tolerating this “super Jewish” environment I had been thrown into.

When I started being invited to bar mitzvas almost weekly and didn’t want my friends to know that I drove on Shabbat, I would have my mother drive me up nearby alleys, crouching under the glove compartment so that no one would see me in a car, and when the coast was clear, I’d jump out and walk the last block to the Orthodox Synagogue, Beth Jacob, in Beverly Hills where all the bar mitzvas of my classmates took place. This was a regular paranoid ritual that I practiced, for I feared what my friends or rabbis would think if they only knew! In time, I learned to appreciate the Jewish education I was receiving and the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle of my friends to the point where I soon started my own journey toward what would be considered an Orthodox lifestyle.

I started by giving up pork products around the age of 14. After controlling my taste buds in that category (though my mom thought there was definitely something emotionally wrong with me to give up something I loved so much!), I moved on to eliminate shellfish, then milk and meat, and so forth. It was a gradual process of several years until I eventually stopped driving on Shabbat and holidays and took up the Orthodox lifestyle being taught in my school. I figured that this was the way my grandparents or great-grandparents lived their Judaism, and I could reconnect that chain of tradition, which likely went back generations from what I learned about Sephardic history. I continued my communal connection to my Rodesli synagogue, the Sephardic Hebrew Center, where I became the youngest board member and was part of the small youth group established. I learned to take part in the religious services as a “junior hazzan” on Shabbat and High Holidays.

In my high school, though, I was one of maybe two or three Sephardic students (none of whom came from a Ladino-Sephardic background), and I was the only one with a strong Sephardic identity, having become active in the local Sephardic youth groups that also participated in the national American Sephardic Federation youth conventions of the 1970s. (In 1977, when I was in the twelfth grade, and my Talmud teacher, whom I really liked, made one of his typical anti-Sephardic remarks in class like “Sephardim remind me of Arabs,” that was the last straw. I stormed out of my class, slamming the door behind me, and marched to the school office with the rabbi running behind me promising he was “just joking.” I called the director of the American Sephardi Federation in New York (a “toll call” no less), whom I had met recently on an ASF youth convention and asked if he could come on his next visit to L.A. and speak to my school about Sephardic history and contribution to Judaism. He gladly agreed. I informed my principal in a stern tone that there would be an assembly for the entire school and “every rabbi and student better be there!” They indeed all attended a very interesting lecture, and I was transformed into the Sephardic poster child for the school.)

As I went through four years of Orthodox Yeshiva High School, I was developing two distinct personas, one the Orthodox student who was a member of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, a counselor at the summer and winter Bnei Akiva camps, and the founder of the first chapter of Bnei Akiva at a Sephardic grade school in L.A.; the other a “non-kippah wearing” member of the Sephardic community. By the time I graduated high school and went to UCLA, where I knew both friends from my Sephardic community as well as from my Yeshiva High School, I didn’t know whether to wear a kippah or not and was ashamed and conflicted either way. I ended up wearing a cap for my entire freshman year! I was worried about what my Orthodox friends would think of me if they saw me sans kippah and what kind of fanatic my Sephardic friends would think I’d become if they saw me with one.

This is where I started to appreciate the difference between an Orthodox approach to Judaism and a Sephardic approach to Judaism. I started to attend Magen David Congregation, the Syrian synagogue in L.A. (since I could no longer drive to the Sephardic Hebrew Center with its mixed seating and a microphone, which I now felt uncomfortable with). The walk to Magen David was 45 minutes, but I did it weekly. I started to make friends who were typical of the Syrian Sephardic communities: Shabbat- and kashruth-observant, but not kippah-wearing and not hung up on the “Orthodox look.” They blended into the non-Jewish world just fine, but still kept a very strong Jewish identity. They may have kept strictly kasher at home but felt comfortable eating in non-kasher restaurants, just keeping away from the meat and shellfish. To some, they wouldn’t be considered Orthodox at all; to others they would be considered very Orthodox, based on their regular synagogue attendance, men praying every morning with their tefillin and not driving on Shabbat. And mixed dancing?something that was taboo in those days at any Orthodox event, whether for young or old was never an issue! That was my “aha” moment; the point where I had the realization that Sephardim did not easily fit into a category of Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. We were all over the place, and everyone was fine with it.

As I became more observant, my Sephardic community embraced me as “hahamiko,” a young learned person. I wasn’t denigrated as a religious fanatic, nor was I looked down upon for not wearing a kippah all the time or not fitting the “Orthodox” compartment perfectly. My Sephardic community didn’t judge me; I think they admired me or at least that is how I felt, even though they didn’t always understand why I could no longer attend services at the synagogue I grew up in. I was able to break away from the stigma of fitting the look and practice of Orthodox Judaism, even though I admired and related to their level of observance. While I tried to parlay my activism in the Orthodox Bnei Akiva youth movement, which I still admire to this day, I realized that Sephardic kids, as different as they were in their religious backgrounds, just couldn’t be form-fitted to an Orthodox Jewish youth movement where every boy was expected to wear a kippah, every girl a skirt, act a certain way, dress a certain way, pray three times a day plus birkat haMazon (grace after meals), refrain from attending mixed dances, and basically fit the mold.

But Sephardim didn’t fit such a mold. We were all unique and different to certain extents, even though we generally felt comfortable praying under the same roof. And no one judged us; no one looked at us funny for wearing or not wearing a kippah in the street; women could be very religious and still wear pants or what the Orthodox would call “immodest” clothing; no one felt uncomfortable whether we ate strictly kasher or “pseudo” kasher; no one really minded if you got to synagogue by foot or by car, as long as you got there. And if you didn’t go to synagogue regularly, that was also fine. Shabbat dinner was still to be shared with the family, and major Jewish holidays were spent in synagogue from start to finish, if you could make it.

This Sephardic Jewish identity really created a wider tent for all of us to fit under, and it felt good to be together and not critical of others who observed more or less than we did. The summer of 1980 found me half way through my UCLA career and I decided to join my Orthodox friends from high school who made study in Israel either after high school or during college a commonplace rite of passage. I signed up too and ended up in Jerusalem at Hebrew University with a group of friends, where we immediately gravitated to the other Yeshiva high school grads from across the United States who were also on their Junior year abroad program, coordinating Shabbat dinners together and living the “Orthodox” life in Jerusalem. I wore a kippah all the time, and it felt okay. After all, I was in Israel. The summer of 1980 also happened to be the first summer of the Sephardic Educational Center (SEC) program, founded by Dr. Jose Nessim (z”l) from L.A., who had told me before I left to make sure and visit the program once I got to Jerusalem. I did, and it was life-altering—not because of the experience to be with Sephardic young adults my age from five different countries, but to see rabbis leading the program who were what we would consider “Orthodox,” yet not forcing anyone to wear a kippah or dress in a certain way, other than out of respect for holy places visited or during meals or prayers or classes.

Rabbis Moshe Shamah and Sam Kassin of the Syrian Sephardic community of Brooklyn, and Rabbi Benito Garzon of Spain, forever changed my attitude toward religious life, opened my eyes to Sephardic halakha, and the “live and let live” approach that made all feel comfortable while studying and believing in the same approach to Judaism, just at every individual’s own pace.

In the past 35 years, my Jewish identity has been shaped more by my involvement with the SEC than my Orthodox high school education, with exposure to those Sephardic rabbis and others I met subsequently who with moderation and tolerance kept alive the spirit of the Classical Sephardic approach to Judaism and opened my eyes to a non-denominational approach that echoed the lives of my ancestors who lived in places like Rhodes or Bulgaria and back to the Iberian Peninsula. Theirs was a Judaism that was a natural part of their everyday lives, with one basic approach that centered on a fervent belief in God, traditions that were celebrated by all, synagogues where the entire community worshiped without “membership ID’s” that distinguished what kind of Jew you were.

There were some weak links in the chain of tradition as Sephardic Jews relocated from the Old World to the new but there is certainly hope for a renaissance in Sephardic life as many find that this classic approach to Jewish life is far more comfortable and meaningful that what is offered by choosing an identity that just doesn’t always form fit among Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Hasidic, or Hareidi approaches to Judaism. At our annual SEC Shavuot Retreat for young families in Palm Desert, CA, last May, we held a town hall discussion as part of our Shavuot night study program, entitled “What's Wrong with Organized Religion, and How Can We Fix It?” It was led by another product of the Orthodox educational system, Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, who has also come to embrace and symbolize the Classical Sephardic approach to Judaism. The young families present attend Sephardic synagogues across the L.A. community, synagogues that would appear “Orthodox” but for the fact that not all attendees walk to synagogue, and not all keep strictly kasher, and not all wear kippot outside the synagogue—but all feel a common cause and belief in God and the Torah, along with the centrality of the State of Israel. Suggestions ranged from how to balance the old traditions with the needs of the younger generation and how to attract and hold the attention of synagogue goers. Here were the young leaders who have or will occupy the positions of leadership in our Sephardic communities, and none were shy about introducing changes and suggesting approaches within our traditional halakhic approach that would ensure the survival of these synagogues and communities.

I felt proud as a Sephardic Jew to be able to discuss these issues without fear of backlash or judgment, and proud that I am not judged nor do I feel the need to judge others on their observance. We are all in the same boat and recognize that some will always be more observant and some less and our jobs as Jews are to make all feel comfortable and welcome, maintain a common set of beliefs, and not check ID’s at the door of Judaism. That is the Sephardic approach; it is the vision and identity I gained from many years of following Dr. Nessim’s philosophy: Only God can judge us. This is why I have shied away from identifying myself with the “O” word. I just don’t fit into a denominational compartment and if you feel the same way, you might want to join a Classical Sephardic community—regardless of your bloodline!

Did I mention that my father was Ashkenazic? If you ask an Orthodox Jew, I should “halakhically” follow the tradition of my father. But I don’t, not as an insult to him but as a way of life that I was raised with and came to love and connect to. I don’t find the unity, warmth, and “big tent” feel in the Orthodox world that I do in the Sephardic world. But that’s just me, and I respect and admire you if you are Orthodox or Modern Orthodox or any other Jewish identity as long as it works to bring you closer to God, Israel, and the Jewish People. That’s just the Sephardic way.

Now a look at the next generation. I have two sons and a daughter. My oldest son (20) went through middle school and high school at a Modern Orthodox school in L.A. My middle son (17), only attended Middle School there, and then went to public high school along with my daughter for a number of reasons, not the least being the high cost. I appreciated the Modern Orthodox education and great social bonds that the school offered. I also appreciated the love for Israel that the school incorporated into its curriculum. The alternative Yeshiva high schools in our area have a more right-wing reputation, which wasn’t the direction I wanted for my family. However I did not see a passion for Judaism or the practice of mitzvoth develop in my sons or their friends that I had once experienced myself. My children’s religious connection still came from home, and the example we tried to create of a traditional Sephardic family, not from school, which surprised me.

The feeling I had when I went to high school was that we had a “religious contract” to keep Shabbat, kashruth, etc., even after we graduated. The students I observed in my sons’ classes over the past few years didn’t seem to have that commitment. University life poses challenges to keeping Shabbat and kashruth, praying every day, and taking off class for holiday observance that, for me, went without question but today seems to be a different story. While I never retreated in my religious observance, nor did most of my classmates, the graduates of today’s Modern Orthodox high school, if my own sons are an example, do not seem to feel the same religious obligation we did upon graduation, and that’s a problem. University and the “outside world” appear to have overtaken whatever commitment for practicing a level of Orthodox Judaism they were taught in high school.

Luckily for my children, they have their connections to the SEC, whether through trips to Israel or local holiday celebrations like our Shavuot Retreat to keep them excited about Judaism and Israel. Otherwise, they would be left empty-handed without any follow up from their high school rabbis, which is a shame. My wife and I wonder whether the financial investment in their Jewish education was worth it and if it will keep them committed as observant Jews. We took the approach more typical of Sephardic families of trying not to force them to practice their Judaism, though I try to continuously prod and plead that they pray, come to synagogue, remember kashruth when they are away from home. It is not easy, though. I often wonder if they would have been more passionate about their Judaism if we went down a more strictly Orthodox path than a moderate Sephardic one. Hopefully we did make the spiritually healthy decision in the long run.

But knowing what Jewish path is best for today and tomorrow is not necessarily what worked for my generation. There is no question that there needs to be a shakeup in the Modern Orthodox educational system to bring back the passion of Judaism, and there also needs to be more emphasis on Jewish commitment in the Sephardic world if that branch of Judaism is to be strengthened in the Diaspora. For the achievement of a moderate and observant next Jewish generation, there will need to be a synthesis of all the best qualities and approaches of these and other Jewish like-minded approaches, from Modern Orthodox to Sephardic and beyond, creating a Jewish lifestyle that is neither extremely stringent or oppressive nor exceedingly indifferent to religious observance. I hope our religious leaders are up to the task.

I must admit that I was taken aback when called upon to argue the case of the Bible. It has always seemed patently obvious. The Book of Books has stood the test of time for thousands of years, continuing to inspire multitudes irrespective of race, color or creed.

The inherent universal messages are conveyed with literary artistry and religious sensitivity. Words, the very rubrics of communication, discourse and understanding, contain fugues of meaning and cascades of nuances. Figures of speech dance before readers, igniting intellectual curiosity and evoking creative interpretation. The impressive collection of genres addresses fundamental questions of human existence including prayer, theology, philosophy, ethics, concern for others, and personal development. By confronting challenges, heroes and heroines in the narratives demarcate between good and evil. Whether they succeed or fail their decisions and behavior serve as powerful object lessons.

The Bible, a magnum opus like no other, directs the course of human history and provides the foundation of faith and inspiration for billions. It is both larger than life and a book to live by. It celebrates life and teaches us how to mourn. It fosters wonder and amazement. The Bible welcomes our endless questions and our search for answers. It helps us navigate our individual and collective quests for truth, inviting us to internalize ideas and make them our own. Soren Kierkegaard, in a journal entry encapsulates the significance of this endeavor:

“Truth that matters is truth that edifies for otherwise how near man is to madness in spite all his knowledge. What is truth but to live for an idea?” ( Journals of Kierkegaard (1835), pg. 45)

Professor Shalom Carmy has contributed invaluable insights on the religious directives and goals of Bible study. He provides the bottom line: “The aim of Jewish Tanakh study is to encounter the word of God.” (Shalom Carmy, “Always Connect”,Conversations 15 (Winter,2013), p. 1)

Bible is my passion. I have had the privilege of teaching women Tanakh for 40 years. My area is biblical interpretation, a field which spans thousands of years. Intriguingly, biblical interpretation demonstrates the ability of Scripture to address contemporary issues of relevance, while shedding light upon perspectives which transcend time and place. I have taught in a vast array of contexts from Scotland to Vilna, New York to London, Troyes to Amsterdam, Stockholm to Portland, Moscow to Berkley. Today I teach Tanakh in the city of Jerusalem in Israel --the Land of the Bible. Many of my students, women from diverse cultures and walks of life, have trained as teachers in the Joan and Shael Bellows Graduate Program in Bible and Biblical Interpretation at Matan: The Women’s Institute for Torah Study. I have the ongoing pleasure of seeing the far-reaching ramifications of biblical education, and its awe-inspiring impact on communities, families and individuals.

Of late, women’s interest in exploring and mastering the study of Talmud and halakha has gained momentum. While I applaud advancement in every field, it saddens me to hear people relate to Bible study as “démodé”. Alfred North Whitehead once said that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. In like fashion, the rich legacy of Jewish literature is a series of footnotes to the Bible.

This article is directed to those who cherish Bible. It is for the curious and the scholarly. The challenge for those who teach Bible is to make the Tanakh accessible to all so that its influence radiates through concentric circles and women and men think, live and labor in its light .The enduring essence of the Bible presents a wealth of potentiality. Yet the task is far from simple. Mastering the art of the Bible is a spiritual, intellectual, and experiential endeavor requiring academic rigor, spiritual momentum, boundless creativity and discipline. The experience is a collaborative effort and a personal responsibility.

Professor. Nechama Leibowitz, perhaps the greatest woman Bible teacher of all times, notes in her article "How to Read a Chapter of Bible":

“When contemplating the title of this essay, I realize that it reflects a degree of foolishness, not merely because it is not my place to teach others how to read a chapter of the Bible since the keys to this book were not given to me. Rather, because it is highly doubtful whether any individual can determine for others how to read the book. Each and every individual much delve into their own reading, a reading that is compatible with his singular spirit and her unique soul. For their essence has never before been and will never again be. Therefore, their reading and understanding of the Bible is unique, totally their own, not mimicking anything that has ever been thought before.” ( Lilmod ulilamed Tanakh, 1998, p.1)

The Rabbis portray the challenge of mastering the Torah as difficult even for Moses our teacher:

“R. Abbahu said the entire forty days that Moses spent on high, he learned Torah and forgot it. After forty days he said, ’Master of the Universe, I spent forty days and I know nothing!” What did God do? He gave the Torah to him as a gift.”(Shemot Rabbah 41:6)

Forty years later, in a moving poetic passage in the Book of Deuteronomy (30:11-14) Moses declares the clarity and accessibility of Torah even when it appears beyond our grasp.

“Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day
is not too difficult for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in
heaven, that you should say, "Who among us can ascend into heaven
and get it for us, and impart it to us, that we may observe it?" Neither
is it beyond the sea, that you should say, "Who among us can
cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us,
that we may observe it?" No, the thing is very close to you, in your
mouth and in your heart, to perform it.”

In effect, Moses is saying that Torah is not an esoteric teaching intended exclusively for prophets, priests, and scholars. The words “lo bashamayim hi” have generated centuries of discussion about truth, authority, and interpretation. (We will return to that discussion later). Simply stated, the verses neutralize the daunting challenge of learning, 0understanding and upholding Torah - Lo bashamayim hi…ki karov eilecha hadavar meod bficha ublvavcha lasoto . It is not in heaven - No, it is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to perform it.

I would like to suggest that as true as that may be, one can argue the opposite -- ‘kein bashamayim hi’ “it is in Heaven”. The study of Torah is a lofty enterprise, which elevates us heavenward.

The following stories illustrate this interpretation of Moses’ poignant and compelling words and implicitly and explicitly reflect passages from the Book of Books.

On January 16, 2003, Ilan Ramon became the first and only Israeli astronaut to enter outer space. He decided to take several treasured items on the Columbia Space .Shuttle. Among them was a miniature Torah scroll. He explained:
"Being the first Israeli astronaut -- I feel I am representing all Jews and all Israelis. I am the son of Holocaust survivors (his mother and grandmother both survived Auschwitz). I carry the suffering of the Holocaust generation, and I am proof that despite all the horror they went through, we continue to move forward."

The small Torah scroll, merely four and a half inches high, represented a giant step for mankind. It was given on loan to Ilan Ramon by his professor of astrophysics, Yehoyachin Yosef. This Torah scroll had already embarked upon an amazing journey. Rabbi Shimon Dasberg, the chief rabbi of Groningen and Amsterdam, had brought it to Bergen Belsen and used it to prepare Yehoyachin for his Bar Mitzva. Yehoyachin celebrated his Bar Mitzva clandestinely before dawn on Monday March 31, 1944. After the ceremony, Rabbi Dasberg gave the Torah as a gift to Yehoyachin who protested, asking what he would do with a Torah. The Rabbi feared that he himself would not survive the war and requested of the young boy to share its story with the world.
Rabbi Dasberg died in Bergen Belsen. Yehoyachin Yosef was liberated in February 1945. He was 14 years old and weighed 42 lbs. Months later, he was reunited with his family and sailed to Palestine to become part of the a generation of refugees determined to build the Jewish state.

The Torah too survived the war and was kept in a small wooden ark in Yehoyachin’s office. During one of their many meetings, Ilan Ramon inquired as to the ark’s contents. Upon hearing the story, he fell silent and subsequently asked if he could take it into space, thereby illustrating the Bible’s ability to raise humanity from the abyss of despair to the pinnacle of hope. Yehoyachin consented. His family expressed their profound sense of joy in that the Torah had traveled the road to eternity. Yehoyachin exclaimed, ”I never could have imagined that I would be able to uphold my vow to Rabbi Dasberg to such an extent in this world and in worlds beyond.”

On January 2l, 2003, Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, held the scroll aloft during a live teleconference aboard Space Shuttle Columbia,let it float, then took hold of it again and shared its transcendental message:

"This Torah scroll was given by a rabbi to a young, scared, scrawny, thirteen-year-old boy in Bergen Belsen. It represents more than anything else the ability of the Jewish people to survive and go from periods of darkness to periods of hope and faith in the future."

This moving statement was .Ramon’s testimonial to kein bashamayim hi. For sixteen days he united the Jewish people and made them proud. He could have done it with the Israeli flag or his air force insignia. However, he chose something of universal value, an item of monumental significance, to communicate the message of unity: “We have to find a way to bring our people closer together, to show more patience and understanding," Ramon said.

The tragic end of the Space Shuttle Columbia took place eleven days later. The shuttle disintegrated on its reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere, and Ilan Ramon and the other members of that crew did not return. Neither did the Torah. However, the story does not end there. Physics professor Henry Fenichel heard the news and immediately contacted Rona Ramon. A miniature Torah written by the same scribe had accompanied him throughout his horrific incarceration in Bergen Belsen. Fenichel offered the Torah to Rona Ramon who asked astronaut Steve MacLean to take it with him on Space Shuttle Atlantis, the next shuttle sent by NASA. MacLean’s connection to the Bible stemmed from his Christian upbringing. He wholeheartedly agreed. For him, taking the Torah and returning it safely was completing Ramon’s mission of hope.
. .
As astounding as the survival of the diary pages is, their content is even more remarkable. One page contained two biblical passages – one from the Book of Genesis, the second from the Book of Deuteronomy. Both are prayers which Ilan copied into his diary to recite in heaven. The first is the Friday evening Kiddush that ushers in the Shabbat:

“Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that He had done.” (Gen.2:1-3)

In the biblical context these verses are God’s summation of creation. The Almighty surveys all His works that were completed in six days and arriving at day seven, “blesses and sanctifies it as the day of rest. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in The Sabbath its meaning for modern man (1995) explains the significance of the sanctification of time:

“Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, quality-less, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year… One of the most distinguished words in the Bible is the word kadosh, holy; a word which more than any other is representative of the mystery and majesty of the divine. Now what was the first holy object in the history of the world? Was it a mountain? Was it an altar?

“It is, indeed, a unique occasion at which the distinguished word kadosh is used for the first time: in the Book of Genesis at the end of the story of creation. How extremely significant is the fact that it is applied to time: "And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy." There is no reference in the record of creation to any object in space that would be endowed with the quality of holiness.” (ibid.pp.3-9)

“One must be overawed by the marvel of time to be ready to perceive the presence of eternity in a single moment.” (ibid.p 76) Through reciting the Kiddush, Ilan Ramon blessed Divine creation, sanctified the day and all that is holy. The triumph of his spirit filled outer space. (Challal in Hebrew, the word for outer space, also means void). Ramon understood that Sabbath is the touchstone between man and the Creator. “The six days stand in need of space; the seventh day stands in need of man. “.(ibid. p. 52)

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel concludes his treatise with a soul-stirring passage:
“There are few ideas in the world of thought which contain such spiritual power as the idea of the Sabbath. Aeons hence, when of many of our cherished theories only shreds will remain, that cosmic tapestry will continue to shine. Eternity utters a day. “(ibid. p.101)

The visceral shock of the sudden disappearance of Ilan Ramon and the crew of Columbia is palpable eleven years later. As a student of Bible I find solace in biblical text, in the unforgettable story of Elijah and the fiery chariot. It offers us yet another image of “kein ba-shamayim hi.” That is, although Moshe assured us that it is readily accessible to each of us it contains additional registers that reach exalted heights.

“As they kept on walking and talking, a fiery chariot with fiery horses suddenly appeared and separated one from the other; and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind”. (2 Kings 2:11)

In his last hours on this earth, Elijah strolls with Elisha and passes on his mantle to him. They walk engrossed in discussion. What were they were discussing? The Rabbis (Yerushalmi Berachot 5:1) use the expression “walking and talking” (haloch vedaber) as an exegetical springboard and offer a variety of answers. They were talking Tanakh.
One suggestion in the Yerushalmi is that they were discussing the Creation; another view suggests they were discussing the vision of the throned Chariot of God. (Maaseh merkabah - Ezekiel Chapter 1) Very possibly, they were exploring the most sublime secrets of the universe – mysteries of the creation and the Creator. Before departing, the master disclosed these supernal notions to his protégé.

Yet another position is that the two were pondering prophecies of consolation, post-destruction (nechamot yerushalayim) .of Jerusalem. Elijah was sharing. a far-reaching vision of the end of days and the assurance that ultimately things would be right with the world.

The final midrashic opinion is that they were studying the Shema. The recitation of Shema Yisrael is the last religious act performed before death. The Rabbis cleverly interpreted the phrase “Veshinantem Levanecha VeDibarta Bam….Uvlechticha VaDerech“. (You shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall speak of them when…you go on a journey). Indeed the two, teacher and student, were deep in discussion as they traveled on their journey - Elijah’s last mile.

Perhaps there is a deeper meaning. At this critical juncture, Elijah was unpacking the fundamentals of religious dogma contained in the Shema. Elijah the master teacher reviewed with his student the new young leader these essential values.

Into his diary, on the same page as the Kiddush , Ilan Ramon copied the verse from Deuteronomy 6:4 and as the Columbia passed over Israel, he recited the declaration of Jewish faith: "Shema Yisrael – Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one”.
Why did Ilan Ramon recite the Shema at that moment of utmost solemnity? We will never know, however the prayer will reverberate forever.

“It is not in Heaven” (lo ba-shamayim hi), (Deuteronomy 30:12), refers to the cogent and accessible nature of Torah. It takes on additional significance in rabbinic Judaism in the celebrated story of "The Oven of Achnai" (tanur.shel achnai), found in the Talmud Bava Metzi'a 59a-b. The story makes a number of salient points about the nature of the Jewish legal system. For students of biblical interpretation, it is a wondrous demonstration of the outer -limits of the discipline.

The Talmudic dispute concerns Rabbi Eliezer ben Horkanus whose illustrious status as a rabbinic sage won him the title of Rabbi Eliezer HaGadol. He is in the beit midrash arguing over the purity of an oven with his rabbinic colleagues. Ovens and vessels generally transmit impurity. Broken vessels do not. The oven of Akhnai is made of broken pieces cemented together. Is it an oven, or is it a broken vessel? Is it pure or impure? R. Eliezer says it is pure. The rabbis disagree.

On that day R. Eliezer made all the arguments in the world which, however, the rabbis did not accept. He performs miracle after miracle without succeeding to win his case. Finally, logic and miracles having failed, R. Eliezer appeals directly to Heaven. And the Bat Kol -- a voice from Heaven declares: “Why are you disputing with R. Eliezer, for the Halakhah is in accordance with him everywhere”. Rabbi Yehoshua rose to his feet and said, “It is not in Heaven!”

That is the main story. There are several addenda. One explains R. Yehoshua’s retort: “Torah was already given on Mt. Sinai as it says; “Follow the majority ruling.”(Exod.23:2) Therefore, we do not obey voices from Heaven. Another reports that R. Natan met Elijah and asked what happened in Heaven at that time: God, he is told, smiled and said, “My children have defeated Me, my children have defeated Me.”

R. Yehoshua’s ruling was adopted; a public demonstration of the impurity of the food cooked in the oven was made, and R. Eliezer, despite his stature, was excommunicated for rebelling against the elders. The authority that promulgated the law had spoken. The text does not question the authenticity of the Bat Kol. which establishes unequivocally that R. Eliezar is right.

But the Oven of Akhnai case takes the opposite view. The biblical
verse, “it is not in Heaven” is transposed rabbinically to mean that interpretation of Torah is by majority rule. R. Eliezer is deemed wrong because he insists on a particular result in violation of the basic procedural principle. This recognition causes God to smile. His children have understood that the process is more important than the result. Maintaining the integrity of the interpretive system grounded in the Bible and cultivated through methodological debate and persuasion is far more important that whether or not the oven is kosher.

Interestingly, in a fascinating midrashic passage, the rabbis sketch a dynamic portrait of R. Eliezer and his reputation. By divine affirmation the claim of ‘lo bashamayim hi’ which brought calumny upon him is essentially rescinded:

“Rabbi Yossi the son of Rabbi Hanina said, when Moses ascended to heaven he saw the Holy One Blessed be He studying the portion of the red heifer quoting halakha in the name of R Eliezer…He said Master of the Universe all of the worlds [celestial and terrestrial life] belong to you and You are quoting halakha in the name of a mortal! He said to him “ In the future there will arise a zaddik in my world whose name will be Eliezer and he will [solve the riddle] of the red heifer. .. Moses responded , “May it be Thy will that he issue forth from my loins, to which God responded indeed he will issue from your loins as it says “and the name of the one is Eliezer – the unique one is Eliezer.”( Tanhuma B Hukkat 25)

On a simple level the midrash is predicated upon the verse relating to Moses’ son Eliezer “and the name of the one .was Eliezer. for he said, “My father’s God was my helper; he saved me from the sword of Pharaoh.(Exod. 18:4).”

Digging deeper it is noteworthy that the theme is the study of purity and impurity, the very issue that did Rabbi Eliezer in. God Himself is, as it were, studying the ultimate conundrum of purity and impurity of the red heifer, whose ashes purify the defiled and defile the pure. God employs the Torah of R. Eliezer to decipher the mystery. Moses is aghast until God affords Rabbi Eliezer unsolicited testimonial. Moses wishes that Rabbi Eliezer be his descendent. Playing on the words of the verse relating to Moses’ son Eliezer, God tells Moses that his wish has been granted. A beautiful message emanates from this midrash – we are all Moses’ spiritual children. Even the greatest of rabbis draw their spiritual grandeur from Moses, our teacher.

However, there is more. In the midrashic theater Rabbi Eliezer is vindicated. A tikkun takes place. The midrash makes a powerful statement “kein bashamayim hi!” The Torah is in Heaven. In the Yeshiva shel ma’ala, Rabbi Eliezer is right. There is absolute truth. It may be reserved only for a select few like Moses and Rabbi Eliezer. But there can be no denying it. The Holy One Himself confirms it.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik writes:

“ … Judaism considered the study of Torah as the most sublime kind of worship, a way of meeting God, of breaking through the barrier separating the Absolute from the contingent and relative. Human intellectual engagement in the exploration of God’s word, thought and law is a great religious experience, an activity bordering on the miraculous, a paradoxical bridge spanning the chasm that separates the world of vanity from infinity”. ( Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik,Worship of the Heart :Essays on Jewish Prayer, ( 2003 ), p.5).

In a fascinating article about the oven of Akhnai, “The Coiled Serpent of Argument: Reason, Authority, and Law in a Talmudic Tale” [(2004), Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. Paper 151, pp. 1-40)], Law Prof. David Luban analyzes the story from legal, humanistic, and philosophical vantage points and concludes with candor and humility:

“I cannot understand the Oven of Akhnai story at all. It is not written for me. It is written for readers within a tradition that I merely peer at from outside. I never studied Gemara or experienced the intellectual rigors of the cheder…To grasp the story is to realize that it concerns the impossibility of grasping it merely through reading. Akhnai tells us to disregard the bat kol and follow the majority. Those within the tradition understand that the story's real meaning is for members only. It does not disclose itself to modernist readers who privilege their own one-on-one relationship to the printed text over the many-on-many relationship between text and readers that makes up the form of life the text itself celebrates.”

Luban’s incisive comment on rabbinic literature can relate to the Bible as well. The study of Bible is an awe-inspiring enterprise of theological reflection and textual analysis that does not happen in a cultural vacuum. We develop a “one-on-one relationship” to the Bible, as well as a “the many-on-many relationship” We become part of the continuum of biblical interpretation linked through an unbroken chain to Moses. The challenge is overwhelming. The more we learn the more we are aware of what we know not.

We are humbled and encouraged by Moses’ reassurance that ‘lo bashamayim hi’, and urged toward due diligence by his student Joshua: “This book of Torah shall not depart out of your mouth; but you shall meditate therein day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then you shall be prosperous, and then you shall have good success.” (Josh. 1:8). Still and all, there is much cause for pause before undertaking such an overwhelming endeavor because, as we have tried to argue, “kein ba-shamayim hi”;

Prof Shalom Carmy offers us perspective. He eloquently explains, in the context of Torah study, the following lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

“For language with which to speak of the daunting challenge of how to articulate authentically, in one’s own voice, the dimensions of human existence in the face of a seemingly overwhelming burden of tradition, we again quote Eliot:

“And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

“The thinker of whom we speak is embarked on a spiritual quest, the search for a way of seeing and living, that can never be fully expressed, a Truth that cannot be mastered, a Love whose Name we cannot utter, though He possesses ours from Eternity.” (Shalom Carmy, “To Get the Better of Words, An Apology for Yir’at Shamayim in Academic Jewish Studies" Torah Umadda Journal 2, (1990), pp 7-24).

Both in Israel and in the world at large there is serious need for outstanding teachers of Bible. Teachers, who not only transmit information, but also inspire by probing the mystique of Bible and teaching its lessons and values.

It is my hope that this article communicates my passion for Tanakh and encourages worthy students to enter the field and become inspirational teachers. The formidable task of teaching Tanakh requires embracing both courage and modesty- oz v’anava.
Courage will spur us to mine Scripture, again and again, to discover the many gems still waiting to be unearthed. It will enable us to develop a sincere, coherent and sophisticated approach to the content and contours of the Bible. Modesty will help guide us in how to share our spiritual odyssey with others.

Lest we despair that “kein bashamayim hi” we need only remember - “Ah but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?” (Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto)

1 My sincere thanks to Rabbi David Shapiro for his valuable insights.

We are confronted on a daily basis with choices that require us to consult others before making a decision. We may call a lawyer for advice on a legal issue or an accountant for advice on our taxes. We do this because although we may be very good at what we do, no one person knows everything-and it is helpful to be guided by a professional who deals with the issue at hand on a regular basis. If one has a sink that is leaking or an electrical outlet that is malfunctioning, one might ask an electrician or plumber for advice, and will likely follow the advice if it sounds reasonable. When it comes to issues regarding our health-and specifically issues that have significant impact on life-and-death situations-we likely consult with a physician.

Interestingly, in serious medical situations, many observant Jews will seek a consultation with a rabbi for advice as well, to ensure that the medical decision they are making is in accordance with Jewish law and ethics. Jewish law is based on the will of God as transmitted through the Bible and understood by our sages. Therefore, all decisions a Jew makes must be in accordance with this law. The law, however, can at times be ambiguous or difficult to apply to modern medical issues. We try our best to extrapolate from what was written by our sages, which often leads to differing views on what Jewish law would prescribe in different medical situations. It is surprising, however, that even in situations where the vast majority of rabbis are in agreement with what the law should be, the vast majority of laypeople believe otherwise. This is not because they disagree with the rabbinic judgments; rather it is often because they are unaware of them. Rulings on medical issues do not get published in everyday books that are found in the synagogue, and rumor becomes the most efficient medium to spread incorrect concepts.

In my practice, I have noticed three possible causes as to why a patient may receive improper advice from his or her rabbi regarding medical decision-making. It is important to note that I have had many positive experiences with the interaction between rabbi, doctor, and patient; however the cases below are meant to illustrate the times the system fails. Although the current system often does work, and provides an excellent service to both doctors and patients, there are still too many times when it does not. The purpose here is to evaluate why some situations are not handled properly and how we can learn from our past mistakes for the benefit of the Jewish community in the future.

The first issue is simply not knowing the law. Often, what the general public believes to be the law, is not actually the law. Consider the following scenario: A Jewish man is in a car accident and is brought to the hospital and placed on a respirator because he is not breathing on his own after hitting his head. The remainder of the body is intact, his heart is still beating, blood is flowing through the veins, and all organs are functioning well. A neurologist performs an exam and determines the person to be brain dead. The doctor recommends removing the respirator and all intravenous fluids and sustenance, which will inevitably cause the breathing to stop, leading to cardiac arrest and the death of the other organs. If one took a poll of the general community, one would likely find that many people incorrectly believe that according to Jewish law this person is still alive and the machines cannot be turned off. Most rabbis have accepted that brain death is equivalent to death in Jewish law and that in this case the machines should be turned off. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel (both Ashkenazic and Sephardic) has therefore legislated it into Israeli law and once brain death is determined, all medical intervention should cease, despite a continuing heartbeat, and the body should be buried as soon as possible (ASSIA - Jewish Medical Ethics, Vol. I, No. 2, May 1989, pp. 2-10). The only intervention permissible at this point would be to harvest the viable organs. Leaving the brain dead body on a respirator or continuing to manipulate the body with medical intervention is considered disrespectful to the body and is against Jewish Law (Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 339:1). It is unclear to me why, although the majority of rabbis have ruled one way, many laypeople believe the other. This often leads to a situation when in an attempt to follow Jewish law, one will actually be transgressing the law by simply not knowing the ruling of the Chief Rabbinate and going on assumptions based on what popular opinion says the law is.

A second problem that arises is when we seek a rabbinic consultation and are only presented with one view of the law and are advised accordingly. When seeking a consultation, one not only seeks the opinion of the person they are consulting with but often expects to be informed of different opinions on the matter and then advised based on the personal views of the consultant. This holds true in many fields of consultation. However, when seeking a rabbinic consultation, rabbis often present the law based on one view without presenting the other opinions available. At times this advice may be following only one view of the law while differing from the majority view. In medicine, there are times when there is disagreement among the experts regarding the best treatment. A responsible doctor will present both sides to the patient and may even explain why he personally believes one view to be preferable to the other. But it would not be appropriate to present the case as having only one solution that all agree on. The same holds true for rabbis. If there is more than one acceptable opinion on the matter, the person who is coming for a consultation expects to be given all the information available. This is especially true when a rabbi gives advice based on a sole opinion, which disagrees with that of the majority. Even if the rabbi chooses to follow the view of the minority position, he should at least inform the patient that there is a majority view that disagrees. This situation usually arises when most people know of the minority view and it is therefore easy to accept when told to them by the rabbi as it conforms to what they in any case thought to be the law.
An example of this situation is the issue of abortion. Again, if one were to poll the average Orthodox Jew on the acceptability of abortion in Jewish Law, the majority would plainly state that the fetus is a life and it is therefore forbidden to terminate the pregnancy according to Jewish law. Some may go so far as to state that it may even be tantamount to murder. Although this is the correct Catholic view, it does not accord with Jewish law. There is essentially no sage who suggests that the fetus is considered a life and aborting it would be considered murder. This would mean that if that were the case, then someone would deserve the death penalty for performing an abortion, since there would be no difference in status before or after birth. In actuality, none of the early sources of Judaism from the Bible through the Mishna and Talmud make any mention of forbidding abortion. On the contrary, it seems from the Torah that if one caused another women to abort against her will, he simply pays a fine (Exodus 21:22). This is not to say we encourage wholesale abortions at anytime in pregnancy for any purpose, but the majority of rabbis do allow abortions in early pregnancy (some allow within 40 days of conception which is the equivalent of about the eighth week of pregnancy while others allow up to three months from conception which is about the 15th week of pregnancy) for a host of different reasons including medical or psychological stress and the need to abort after a rape or adulterous union. Again, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, follow the majority view and have ruled as such in Israel. Interestingly, Rabbi Eliezer Waldenburg, a highly respected Ashkenazic rabbi has allowed abortions even in the seventh to ninth month since there is no real source within Jewish Law for only allowing it up to 40 days or three months (Tzitz Eliezer 13:102). These are arbitrary numbers that do not have any significant biological basis. With this introduction one can understand how problematic this can become should someone get improper advice from her rabbinic consultant. Imagine the young girl who is raped, or the married woman who was raped or had an affair that results in pregnancy and goes to her rabbi for advice. I have seen cases of rabbis who advise her that she must continue the pregnancy since abortion is a transgression of Jewish law and hence the will of God. Without providing all the information, this young girl will now have to care for this child her whole life and will always be a reminder of the horrible way she conceived. The married woman will give birth to a mamzer who will be forbidden to marry an ordinary Jew. All this could have been avoided if the woman simply had received the proper consultation.

We see similar problems when dealing with the issue of abortion for a baby with a genetic malformation. Many rabbis have permitted abortion in these situations; even if it is not assured that the baby will be born with a defect but only has a high probability of that likelihood. Different rabbis have varying opinions about when and under what circumstances an abortion is permissible. The most lenient view is that of Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli (Amud Hayemini 32). He permits abortion to prevent potential psychological stress to the mother or the potential child. He goes so far as to rule that even if the sole problem is a genetic malformation that will only affect his looks, an abortion is permitted as it may cause others to look at him in such a way that would produce psychological stress. He states that there is no greater pain than this and he reminds us that in Jewish law, emotional pain is considered even more serious than physical pain.

This is very different from the view held by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Although Rabbi Feinstein recognizes the importance and need for premarital testing for Tay Sachs, he unfortunately, did not go one step further. He does write that when one's health is potentially in danger, and a genetic test can avert or alleviate that danger, the test must be taken. He therefore discourages carrier couples from marrying since this will lead to a 25 percent chance at each pregnancy of having a child with Tay Sachs (a debilitating progressive disorder that gradually leads to loss of mental and physical function, and at the peak of the symptoms the child goes blind, has seizures, and suffers in a hospital bed as the parents look on helplessly). This is why he appropriately supports premarital testing and admits the need to avoid giving birth to a child with Tay Sachs. However, situations have arisen where premarital testing was not done, or where testing may have been done but the couple felt a strong desire and commitment to each other that they decided to get married in any case. In these situations, they must make a choice on how to proceed with childbearing. They can risk having children with Tay Sachs, or they can opt to perform prenatal testing while the mother is in early stages of pregnancy, so that if it's found that the baby has Tay Sachs they can abort the pregnancy, within the appropriate time frame as defined by Jewish law, thus saving the future child and the family from this pain. Rabbi Feinstein ruled that families in this situation must go through with the pregnancy, thereby creating a child that is destined to pain and suffering. This ruling seems to contradict his usual mode of requiring us to use medical technology in order to preserve and improve quality of life. What is most surprising is that according to traditional Judaism there is no law against performing abortions even on a healthy baby found in any of the early sources of Jewish law. Rabbi Feinstein forbade the abortion not on legal grounds, but on philosophical grounds. He felt that we are not in a position to play God, and we can always hope for a miracle that this baby's genes will somehow miraculously change and he will not have the disease. This is again surprising as it seems to contradict what we know from the Talmud, that in general we do not rely on miracles and specifically in pregnancy we are taught by our sages that a baby's genes cannot change and therefore it is improper to pray for the gender of the baby once this has already been determined (Berakhot 60a, Shulhan Arukh Orah Hayyim 230:1). Rabbi Feinstein also allows and even requires one, to "play God" when it comes to other areas of medicine and treatment, but mysteriously not in this situation.

In addition to this philosophical issue, Rabbi Feinstein defends his position based on a mystical tradition. According to one view, a soul cannot achieve complete perfection until it has been placed in a body and has been born. In order to assure that this fetus'; soul (if it has one) is able to enter the world to come, Rabbi Feinstein requires a mother to carry the pregnancy to term. Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg took issue with Rabbi Feinstein in a heated written debate (Tzitz Eliezer 14:100). He argued that we do not even know if that mystical concept is correct as it is just one opinion, and that even if that were correct, who gave us the obligation to assure that every soul is born and goes to the afterlife, or even the right to purposefully continue a pregnancy that would ultimately lead to the pain and suffering of the future child and the family? It should be noted that although Rabbi Waldenberg allowed abortions in situations such as these even into the ninth month of pregnancy, most rabbis have adopted stances allowing abortions only in the first trimester at various time points. There is no rabbi who has forbidden abortion outright in all circumstances. Although the Catholic religion did forbid abortion in all circumstances as they deemed the fetus a full human life, it is clear that Judaism has never held this approach, as the fetus does not have full human status before delivery. Since the fetus is not an independent human life, and is simply a part of the mother, it should be treated as any other body part that is ill and requires surgical intervention. It is common knowledge that finding the best possible mate is a difficult task. With Rabbi Waldenberg's approach, even if we discourage Tay Sachs carrier couples from marrying, we at least do not have to ban it completely, and in circumstances where the potential marriage is beneficial for the couple, we are able to allow the marriage and still prevent suffering of future offspring. Again, we can now understand the situations that have arisen where a woman was pregnant with a Tay Sachs baby and went to her rabbi for a consultation who only informed her of Rabbi Feinstein's view without disclosing other opinions.

Another common problem is when a rabbi is consulted regarding issues he may not be familiar with and/or may not have full knowledge of. A scenario that has occurred in my practice several times is when a rabbi is consulted and he does not seek out or is not interested in having all the information. As an example, a child has ADHD and has significant difficulty in both his Judaic and secular studies to the point that he is failing and is not progressing academically. This often leads to poor self-esteem and lack of self-confidence. In a situation such as this I have recommended a trial with a stimulant medication that has been found to effectively correct the chemical imbalance, thereby allowing the child to succeed academically. In addition to academic improvement these children typically improve their overall quality of life. This is secondary not only to their improved education but also to improved confidence and self-esteem. These children are sometimes quite impulsive and can often experience physical injury due to their symptoms as well. The decision on whether or not to treat is done only after fully evaluating the child and receiving information from several sources, including the school, on how these symptoms are affecting this particular child. One such patient's mother subsequent to the medical consultation, called a rebbe in Israel for a religious consultation on whether she can administer the medication to her child. Not willing to discuss the situation with the doctor and without personally knowing the family, the rebbe felt comfortable forbidding the woman from using the medication. This is unfortunate for the child who continues to fail in school and to have a dangerous level of impulsivity, and who has poor social interactions and growth due to these symptoms. Had the rabbi understood better how the disorder is affecting this particular child by getting to know him, through interactions and dialogue with the child's teachers, family, and physicians, the rebbe may have been able to come to a more comprehensive ruling that takes into account all the factors involved. In another instance, the same rebbe approved a child in a similar situation to take the same medication. The rebbe did not know or meet either child, and yet made medical decisions on their behalf.

One of the most common medical questions asked of rabbis regards circumcision. One such question pertains to possibly delaying the circumcision due to jaundice. The common decision among rabbis and mohalim is to delay the circumcision based even on moderately elevated levels of bilirubin and jaundice. There is no medical reason to delay the circumcision in these cases and one is therefore delaying the circumcision, in these situations, unnecessarily. Medically, circumcisions are done routinely in these situations without adverse events, and there is therefore no justification to delay the circumcision. Within this category, is also the question of metzitzah. In brief, after the circumcision is complete, there is a tradition that the mohel sucks some blood out from the incision site. For convenience this was done with direct suction from the mohel's mouth without a barrier. This procedure was done for medical reasons that are no longer valid. On the contrary, it is currently medically beneficial not to perform this procedure at all, especially without a barrier, as there is risk of infection from the procedure. This is especially true in situations where the mohel may be infected with the herpes virus and may transmit this to the child. Unfortunately, doctors are rarely consulted prior to the procedure, and rabbis are asked to make the decision on whether this procedure should be performed and how it should be performed. Without the proper precautions, we have seen many cases of children being infected and developing seizures. This is sometimes a permanent condition caused by this procedure. It seems ironic that a procedure that the rabbis instituted to protect our children is now having the opposite effect; yet rabbis who are not trained in the specialty of infectious diseases can not make a sound decision without consultation with an expert in the field.

* * *

In the modern world we are very concerned and are careful regarding who we consult regarding our physical health decisions. When we have a general concern we are comfortable asking our local general practitioner physician for advice. However, when we have a specific concern we would never only consult with a generalist but will make every effort to ask a specialist in the field who deals with those issues often. Even with all that, we will often still seek a third or fourth opinion from other respected specialists in the field who have proven their depth of knowledge in the subject. Unfortunately the vast majority of people do not afford the same importance to their religious and spiritual decisions and well-being. Similar to physicians, we have many generalist rabbis who have made a career around helping the masses. They are available for all general religious needs from attending a circumcision to attending the funeral. These rabbis are much needed and fill an important role in the communities' lives. Some work from the pulpit, some as teachers in our schools, and some simply offer advice in their free time from whatever other career they are simultaneously pursuing. However, these generalist rabbis cannot be expected to be experts in every single area of Jewish Law and ethics. We expect too much from our rabbis. Even in the time of the Talmud, we find statements of rabbis admitting they are expert in the laws of isur v'heter (forbidden and permitted matters) but not hoshen mishpat (financial law) for example. The semikha system developed at that time even incorporated different examinations for the different categories of Jewish law. There were three general categories at the time: laws for daily living, business law, laws regarding permitting first-born animals (these are known as Yoreh Yoreh, Yadin Yadin, and Yatir Yatir). Rabbis would only advise people in areas of law within which they received their certification. Today, just as the body of knowledge in medicine has made it impossible to master every area in depth, the same holds true for the rabbinate.

In addition to the Bible and Mishna, which the rabbis of the talmudic period had to be experts in, we have 2,000 more years of literature that rabbis need to be knowledgeable about when making their rulings. In addition to this enormous body of religious literature, before rendering a decision, the rabbi needs to fully understand the medical, financial, technological, etc. issues at hand at well. It is almost impossible for one person to be able to master all this in a lifetime, especially with today's rapid advancements in science and technology. How can a rabbi decide laws regarding Internet transactions on Shabbat without a complete understanding of the intricate details of the network and the way the financial transactions occur, even if he were a full expert in Jewish business law? Today that is simply not enough. How can a rabbi decide if a genetically engineered fruit or animal can be kosher without having both a deep understanding of kosher laws, and of genetic engineering? Similarly, how can a rabbi make a decision regarding euthanasia, brain death, organ transplantation, genetics, abortion, medical Shabbat laws, and so forth, without having a full mastery of biology, physiology, and the physics and technology that comprise the respirator, the heart-lung machine, the electroencephalogram? It is simply not reasonable or appropriate to expect all this from every generalist rabbi.

One option is for a rabbi to have available a group of experts he trusts in certain fields who also have a strong understanding of Jewish law and whom he can consult when needed. An ideal option that has emerged is specialist rabbi. Many rabbis have taken upon themselves to become specialists in a particular field. There are rabbis who are particularly knowledgeable about Jewish law regarding end-of-life issues, transplant issues, medicine on Shabbat issues, bankruptcy law, Jewish law regarding technological issues, and so forth. Unfortunately the majority of community members will approach their generalist rabbi with all these questions, leading to an answer, which at times may produce unintended and unfortunate consequences. People would rarely go to their generalist physician for a consultation regarding their advanced-stage brain tumor. It would be inappropriate to expect a complete answer from the generalist. Rather the generalist should refer the patient to a neurosurgeon and/or neuro-oncologist for the proper advice. We should treat our religious health with at least the same level of importance and expectations, and when dealing with a specialized issue, a specialist rabbi should be consulted.

One such example that is often encountered is prenatal testing for Duchene Muscular Dystrophy. Duchene is a devastating disorder in boys who begin as healthy children, but by toddler years have difficulty walking, by teenage years require the use of a wheelchair, and by their late teens require use of a ventilator for respiratory support. This condition leads to death in early adulthood. Throughout this period of motor and physical decline, the patients are cognitively intact and have a full understanding of what is in store for them. This disorder is caused by a genetic mutation on the X chromosome. Every father has one X and one Y chromosome, while every mother has two X chromosomes but no Y chromosome. The sons will all inherit the Y chromosome from their father and either of the mother's two X chromosomes, while daughter with all inherit their father's X chromosome and either of the mother's X chromosomes. When a child has a mutated X chromosome in a certain region, this causes Duchene Muscular dystrophy as described above. These boys rarely have children, as they die so young. Girls however have two X chromosomes, so that even if one is defective the other can almost completely compensate for it. Therefore an adult woman may be a carrier of the disorder, yet can still lead a full healthy life (possibly with some mild weakness). When a couple give birth to a child who is found in early childhood to have Duchene Muscular Dystrophy, she will be counseled that half her male children (the ones that inherit the defective X from her) will have the disease, while the other half will be healthy. In addition, half her daughters will be carriers (the ones that inherit the defective X from her) like she is, and will be in the same situation as she is when they get older. The parents at this point have to make a serious decision that affects the remainder of their life. They can either not have any more children (and this decision is very different for a couple where the first child was found to have Duchene compared to when it is their fourth child) or to continue building their family. If they continue to build their family they have a 25 percent chance of giving birth to another son who will have the disease (and suffer and die young) and a 25 percent chance of having a daughter who is a carrier and will have to make these same decisions in adulthood.

One option available to them is to perform genetic testing during the early stages of pregnancy to determine if the fetus is a boy or a girl and if it has the defective chromosome. This affords the parents the option of aborting the fetus in the early stages of pregnancy and then trying again. This will lead to a healthy family that can continue to grow and fulfill their dreams and religious and spiritual goals. Although this last option appears to be the most obvious choice for many, it is highly underutilized in the Orthodox Jewish community. The main reason for this is the issue described in the prior paragraph. When facing this decision, the family will often ask either their local generalist rabbi or in some communities the rebbe of the entire community for advice and guidance. These rabbis are then expected to make these decisions and rulings without a complete understanding of the situation, the medical information and technology available, all the Jewish laws involved and the overall ramifications of their decisions on the family. Some of the worst cases I have witnessed included a family that was aware of the diagnosis, but was advised by their rabbi that they have a religious obligation to procreate no matter what the situation and must simply have faith in God. This unfortunately left the family with three affected sons, two carrier daughters, and two healthy children. To make matters worse, the eldest sister was not informed of the family genetic condition and was married without informing the groom. They had two affected children before she came to a neurologist, where she was finally informed of the genetic situation, and that all the suffering that her two children would go through over the next 20 years could have been easily avoided, had her mother received the appropriate advice from her spiritual leader. Luckily this young woman was more open to help, and I was able to show her that using current technology, she can be tested in such an early stage of pregnancy that would allow her to abort the affected fetuses within her acceptable window for early abortion.
This true event is only one of dozens in which I have been personally involved, and there are obviously many more in which I have not been involved. It is unclear to me (as the rabbi refused to discuss the issue despite my sincere effort at a respectful discussion) why this particular rabbi, and others make such unfortunate decisions in these life-changing situations. It may be that they are not experts in the laws of abortions, where the vast majority of rabbinic authorities allow at least early (first trimester or 40 days) abortions in these types of situations; it may be that they misunderstood the situation and its ramifications caused by a lack of communication with the physician; it may also be a lack of familiarity with modern medical breakthroughs that are literally occurring daily, that they were not able to come to a more sympathetic decision. How many people have asked their rabbi for advice but were referred to a specialist rabbi instead? It seems to occur very rarely. It is human nature for the rabbi to feel the pressure of coming up with the solution to the problem himself. Many doctors behave the same way and will try to answer a patient's questions to the best of their ability, even if they are not experts in the field. This is simply human nature. What is important is not whom to blame, the laypeople for expecting too much of their rabbi, or the rabbis for not referring the laypeople to a specialist rabbi. Rather, the important issue at hand is how to fix a broken system that doesn't want to be fixed. Rabbi Yosef Caro ruled that someone who is not an expert in a particular field is not permitted to give medical advice or treatment-and if he does he can be considered a murderer (Yoreh Deah 336:1). The Aruh haShulhan adds that according to halakha, one must be licensed in the field of question and approved by the state (in whichever governing body has jurisdiction) to offer such advice. These rules apply to doctors and all the more so to rabbis who may not have such training or certification.

At what point do we decide to stand up to our leadership and demand a better system? How much suffering must continue in vain before we fix this broken system? There is a current concept based on a misunderstood passage in Pirke Avoth that is held in high regard, which is "Ase Lekha Rav," make for yourself a rabbi (Avoth 1:6). This is commonly understood today as stating that every Jew must pick one rabbi and always follow that rabbi. It is considered inappropriate to ask a rabbi other than your own a question of Jewish law. This is absurd and has never been the way our ancestors operated. This new rule, of only asking one rabbi every type of question, is not founded in halakha. Even the rabbis of the Talmud understood that some rabbis had expertise in business law, agricultural law, marital law, etc. and specific rabbis had differing authority based on their area of expertise. Why is it that we expect a rabbi who may have not even studied basic biology to understand the intricacies of complex genetics? The majority of doctors, who went through rigorous medical training, still do not comprehend cutting-edge medical genetics. It wasn't until 1953 that Watson and Crick famously described the structure of DNA and it wasn't until many years later and even until very recently that we are beginning to understand how to test and manipulate genes. My grandfather, Dr. Albert Moghrabi, for example, a first-class physician, studied in medical school in the 1940s, prior to the discoveries of Watson and Crick. Although he is an expert in general medicine and has kept current in his knowledge of genetics, he admits not to be an expert in genetics and would refer to a specialist for genetic counseling.

It is important to realize that there is no one that is "at fault" here. Both the rabbis and the community want what is best for our physical and spiritual health. However, it is the current system that is failing, as it is not structured to keep up with developments of modern life. I believe the best way to address these issues is to have the rabbis, laypeople, and doctors sit down together to openly discuss ways to fix the system. It can't be stressed enough that the problem does not stem from the rabbis, the laypeople, or the doctors. Rather, it stems from the defective interaction between these three groups that leads to the problems mentioned above. As a start, one possible solution may be to publish a book listing both generalist and specialist rabbis in different fields so that one can easily be referred to the appropriate authority who can handle the question for which they are seeking guidance. This is a simple and effective way to help both the community, and the rabbis who are asked questions that are outside their expertise. Doctors can also use this resource to direct their patients to appropriate authorities, and rabbis would also have a resource open to themselves to assure what they are doing is in accord with Jewish law. Many doctors already have a specialist rabbi that they consult; this would provide a list of rabbis in different specialties as well. This may also lead to training programs where rabbis are specifically trained in different fields of medicine so that they can have a better understanding of the situations they are being asked to advise. It would be helpful to have some rabbis attend a neurology clinic, or a cancer clinic, or an intensive care unit once per week or for a six-month training period. We need the appropriate leaders to organize this with our local hospitals and yeshivot. For every case mentioned above where there was inappropriate advice, I can name ten cases where the interaction between the rabbi, the patient, and myself was invaluable. In many of these high-stress situations, open dialogue with rabbis complements the medical treatment by encouraging and supporting the patient from a religious standpoint. This engenders more confidence in the doctor and the treatment, leading to better outcomes for the patient. Without a rabbi's involvement, a religious patient may be scared and untrusting of the modern treatments. A rabbi who has the medical knowledge and spiritual leadership can support the treatment and the patient in ways the doctor never could. It is time that we demand the same level of treatment of our religious and spiritual well being that we demand for our physical and medical well-being. In this time of health-care reform, it is appropriate to look into rabbinic-care refinements as well.

It is axiomatic that Modern Orthodoxy and Modern Orthodox Jews value the academic field of Jewish Studies, which functions as the bridge between the Bet Midrash and the academy, both locations in which we seek to situate ourselves. In articulating the value of such study, proponents often highlight the insights it affords in the realm of Talmud Torah. For example, understanding the ancient Near Eastern context in which Torah was given allows us to understand difficult passages or, perhaps more importantly, enhances our appreciation of the values Torah conveys by placing them in relief against their cultural backdrop. Similarly, enhanced literary sensitivity affords greater insight into both Torah’s artistry and its message. Here I suggest that the field of Jewish Studies as practiced in the academy can contribute in surprising ways not only to our Talmud Torah but to our performance of mitzvoth as well.

My doctoral research examined the experiences of medieval Jewish apostates, Jews who converted to Christianity, a group who had been alternately ignored or excoriated by previous generations of Jewish historians, most of whose study was as deeply rooted in their Jewish identities as is my own. I found myself feeling a stronger sense of empathy than I had anticipated with the typically anonymous figures so often characterized as villains by previous generations of Jewish historians. In exploring the work on religious conversion that emerged out of religious studies and the social sciences, I came to see that while we as a community tend to see apostates and converts as diametric opposites, from a phenomenological perspective, the experience of the ger tzedek (righteous convert) and the meshummad (apostate) is in fact shared: Each is a defector from one religion seeking to join a new religious community.

As Jews, we have minimal experience incorporating converts into our community; there is little in the way of historical models to which we can turn in seeking to address a new reality in which significant numbers of people want to become Jewish. For a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the role of decisions made by rabbinic authorities in the State of Israel vis-à-vis the status of converts in the Diaspora, the question of Jewish communal treatment of converts, or gerei tzedek, in our own American Modern Orthodox Jewish community has moved to the fore. Recent rabbinic improprieties aside, it is abundantly clear that we as a community have not been doing a good job integrating converts into our community.

This reality is not merely a “public relations” problem. There are two mitzvoth d’orayta, Torah commandments, that govern our interactions with converts: the lav (prohibition) of Ona’at haGer, oppressing the convert, and the aseh (positive commandment) of Ahavat haGer, loving the convert.[1] Although rabbinic texts are emphatic in their insistence that these are critically important mitzvoth,[2] they don’t offer much in the way of practical guidance as to what these actually mean. Thus, in discussing what it means to love the convert, only Peri Megadim (to Shulhan Arukh Orah Hayim 156) provides a concrete example of what the mitzvah entails. He describes the case of a convert whose beast of burden’s load has become dislodged. Although it is a general mitzvah to help any Jew in this circumstance, the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer requires that assistance to the convert take priority, as there are two mitzvoth in play here—the same mitzvah of veAhavta leReakha kamokha, loving one’s fellow as oneself, that applies in the case of any Jew, as well as the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer. Just as we know that the mitzvah of veAhavta leReakha kamokha is by no means limited to helping a Jew with his fallen burden, the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer would similarly seem to be necessarily far more encompassing than the specific case mentioned here. But given our limited historical experience with performing or implementing this particular mitzvah, we don’t have a good sense of what its optimal fulfillment should look like. If Peri Megadim emphasizes that the convert is in need of the protection of a special mitzvah because of the vulnerability engendered by his or her lack of connection and support created by extended social and family networks, then the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer would demand that we effectively integrate converts into communities.

Here, given our lack of communal experience at integrating converts, the experiences of medieval Jewish apostates can shed light on what we as a community should—and should not—do to effectively perform the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer. I’d like to first share some of what I’ve learned about the experiences of medieval Jewish converts to Christianity and then turn to consider the implications for our own context.

The story of medieval Jewish conversion to Christianity is mostly a story of failure to integrate former Jews as members of their new religious faith community. As much as medieval Christians theoretically anticipated the conversion of Jews, they didn’t really expect too many Jews to actually convert and weren’t sure what to make of those who did. In part because the goals of church and state were not aligned (much to the frustration of religious figures, kings or local rulers tended to either confiscate the property of Jewish converts or consign it to their Jewish co-religionists so as not to relinquish ultimate control over it), Jewish converts to Christianity were often impoverished. Although Church officials, such as the Pope, worked hard to encourage local officials, such as bishops, or institutions, such as monasteries, to provide for the financial support of converts, these efforts were often met with resistance and skepticism.[3] Poignantly, we have papal letters advocating for the support of a given convert and then, years later, letters to the same address entreating financial aid for the sons of that very convert. It is not surprising that some Jewish converts to Christianity gave up and returned to the Jewish community, nor that something of a vicious cycle developed. Christians were skeptical of the religious sincerity of Jewish converts, whom they feared became Christian more for material than spiritual benefit; inability to achieve support and integration led Jewish converts—or occasionally their children—to return to the Jewish community; this return reinforced the skepticism and suspicion with which subsequent converts were greeted, and so on. It’s worth emphasizing that there are no scoundrels here. Although these responses were undoubtedly intensified by increasing Christian belief in the immutability of Jewishness and the impossibility of conversion from Judaism to Christianity over the course of the twelfth century, concern that Jews converted for material gain and that they were liable to return to Judaism was supported by the evidence of the behavior and choices of many such converts.

Even converts whose conversions “stuck” found themselves in a kind of religious “no man’s land.” One Christian miracle tale depicts the fear of a young Jewish boy seeking conversion to Christianity that he would wind up as a penniless “Jew-Christian” of a sort with which he was all too familiar.[4] In another example that had a monumental impact on the modern Jewish experience, early modern Jewish converts to Christianity in Spain were labeled “New Christians” and subjected to social and economic disadvantages similar to those they had experienced as Jews (not to mention Inquisitional scrutiny). Successful integration into their new religious communities was all too elusive for many medieval and early modern Jewish converts.

Even cases that at first blush appear to have been successful conversions raise questions about how effective the integration achieved by these converts actually was. One child who was forcibly converted during the First Crusade was taken to a monastery and became a monk. In twelfth-century Christian author Guibert of Nogent’s depiction, the young formerly Jewish monk was outstanding among his peers—he composed a work of anti-Jewish polemic, and once, when he was holding a lit candle, the dripping wax miraculously formed the shape of a cross. This young monk was incorporated into a monastic community. But why the need for miracles? Or polemical works against Jews? And why wasn’t it sufficient for this young monk who had been converted from Judaism to simply be “good enough?” [5]

The names of apostates Nicholas Donin and Pablo Christiani are infamous among Jews for the role each played in bringing harm to his former co-religionists. Nicholas Donin is remembered for his role in introducing thirteenth-century Christians to rabbinic literature; he was the primary Christian antagonist at the 1240 Trial of the Talmud that culminated in the burning of the Talmud in the center of Paris two years later. Just over twenty years later, Pablo Christiani pioneered a new Christian missionizing approach using rabbinic literature to prove the truth of Christianity. Furthermore, he inaugurated the method, which would continue to be developed and sharpened over the course of the next century and a half, at the Vikuah HaRamban, Nachmanides’ disputation at Barcelona. These apostates certainly seem to have found a place within their new Christian communities, but their role as “professional converts” begs the question: If one of the only ways that Jewish converts can find a place within their new religious communities is to highlight their status as former Jews, does this really constitute true integration into a new religious community?

Even well-intentioned efforts at ameliorating some of the problems confronted by Jewish converts could backfire. English King Henry III took a personal interest in encouraging Jewish conversion. He founded and supported the London Domus Conversorum, house of converts, to alleviate the plight of impoverished converts and ensure them of a modicum of material aid. As things transpired, for many converts the Domus became a permanent “halfway house” in which Jewish converts to Christianity learned from one another, married one another, and bequeathed their spots in the Domus to their children. Long after the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, descendants of English Jewish converts to Christianity resided in the Domus, the final relics of Jewish life on that island. [6]

Despite the overall bleak experience of medieval Jewish converts, there were a few bright spots, or contexts in which Jewish converts were able to be incorporated within their new faith communities. Of course, these cases are by definition more difficult to study, as converts who effectively integrate typically disappear from the historical record. There are miracle tales that relate the conversion of young Jewish women to Christianity. These stories focus on the young women’s encounters with Christianity, generally through conversations with young Christian clerics, and their subsequent conversion. Immediately upon conversion, according to these accounts, the young women converts either marry Christian men or enter a convent; after becoming part of a Christian family or “monastic family” we hear no more of them. This is the closest we come to “happily ever after” for medieval Jewish converts.

Jewish apostates, or converts from Judaism, have only recently been incorporated into Jewish historiography [7] and at first blush medieval apostates and early-twenty-first century gerei tzedek may seem to have no apparent connection to one another. I suggest that the largely failed experiences of Jewish renegades from the Middle Ages can provide much needed insight into how to avoid Ona’at haGer and how to properly fulfill the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer. In the absence of much specific halakhic guidance about how to integrate converts into our community due to the relative rarity of conversion to Judaism in the past, the experiences of pre-modern Jewish apostates sensitize us to the distinctive situation of the convert and proffer insight that can productively guide our communal approach to a significant challenge with which we are confronted.

In thinking about our communal approach to converts, or gerim, we have tended to emphasize the importance of ascertaining the suitability of prospective candidates for conversion. We have focused on ensuring that prospective gerim are properly informed of, educated about, and committed to the observance of the mitzvoth in which they will become obligated and that the technical or ritual aspects of conversion are enacted correctly. Appropriately, responsibility for assuring that these important requirements have been met has by and large been assumed by and been communally assigned to rabbis.
Among the things that emerge from my study of medieval Jewish apostates is that there are multiple elements inherent in the experience of joining a new religious community. These different aspects are inherent in the language that we use to talk about “Jews by choice.” We tend to use the terms “convert” and “ger” interchangeably, as direct translations for one another. And in some ways they are. But the different etymologies of these terms highlight different facets of the experience of becoming a member of a new faith community. To convert, from the Latin “conversus,” means “to turn toward,” and the term convert identifies one who has turned toward a new religious faith. The term “ger” by contrast, emphasizes that its subject is an alien, a stranger, not a native. Of course, both “turning toward” and becoming a stranger are elements in joining a new religious community.

Our community has emphasized the “turning toward” aspect of the conversion experience. We have been less attentive, however, to the other, equally significant aspect of the experience of conversion, that of integration of the convert into her or his new community.

We conceive of conversion as a phenomenon of the soul. Yet the experience of joining a new religious community is in many ways similar to the experience of immigration, as sociologist of religion Peter Berger has noted in his classic work The Sacred Canopy. He advises that the convert who wishes to “stay converted” would do well to make choices that immerse her or himself in her or his new community. By the same token, he observes that the receiving community has an obligation to allow the convert to become immersed in his new surroundings and to facilitate such immersion. [8]

As we foster integration of converts into our communities, we should recognize that, like other immigrants, gerim may bring old tastes and habits with them. Having become a convert is an indelible aspect of individual experience; integration into a new community, no matter how effective or embracing, cannot efface its significance in forming a person’s identity, nor should it seek to do so. We are well aware that immigrants, including those who are eager and whole-hearted in their desire to acculturate into their new home, retain aspects of their previous cultural identity. Immigrants may speak with an accent, enjoy their native cuisines, or even keep house in ways that differ from the norms of their adopted home. None of this in any way interferes with or contradicts the ability or desire to be or to become American, for example. In our eagerness to incorporate “new immigrants” into our community, we must be wary of replicating the tendencies of the Spanish Inquisition, which saw in every converso who didn’t like the taste of pork or who changed the linens on Friday evidence of “Judaizing,” or residual belief in and commitment to the Jewish faith. [9] Although for some conversos this may have been the case, for many others, perhaps the vast majority, these represented retained cultural habits, not religious commitments.[10] Assuming that elements of converts’ previous identities don’t conflict with Jewish religious beliefs or practices we should tolerate and even appreciate or celebrate these rather than seek to eradicate them or view all deviation from cultural habits and norms as a religious threat.

What communities can and, according to the Torah, must do, is enable a convert to feel her or himself not a ger—a stranger, an alien—in our community, but at home. This aspect of the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer is highlighted in the pasuk in Parashat Kedoshim (Lev. 19:34) that R. Moshe of Coucy, in his thirteenth-century Sefer Mitzvoth Gadol (Positive Commandment 10) identifies as the source of the commandment to love the convert: “The stranger (ger) who sojourns with you shall be to you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Part of the Torah’s mandate is to help the ger resemble the ezrakh, the native, to enable her or him to feel at home. This instruction is relevant primarily after the ger has converted and is incumbent not only on rabbinic leaders but on each individual member of the community as well.

This is a new, and welcome, task for our community. Ironically, the experience of medieval Jewish apostates is one of the resources on which we can draw to help us know how to properly and effectively incorporate newcomers into our religious community. Although they may have opted out of membership in medieval Jewish communities, their reception by their new faith community provides us with the tools to rise to the challenge of our own vastly different circumstances. While some of what emerges from their experience is fairly readily apparent, other aspects of what we can learn are not.

We are all aware of the prohibition of Ona’at haGer, which includes reminding the convert of his or her origins. We are less sensitive, though, to the reality that asking a convert to share her or his “story,” whether publicly or privately, impedes integration and singles the convert out as a “ger.” Such requests come with the best of intentions; it’s not only fascinating to hear about someone who has freely chosen to be part of our community, but it’s also deeply reinforcing of our own identity as Jews. It’s no wonder that many converts find themselves asked to share their conversion narrative with Jewish audiences, especially adolescents. As a community we are deeply concerned about attrition among “emerging adults.” Facilitating young people’s encounter with those who have chosen the life into which their audience was born seems like a wonderful educational opportunity. Desire to hear converts’ stories is not limited to young audiences. One major Jewish organization devoted an entire issue of its periodical to the stories of converts; now there’s a YouTube channel (“Kiruv Media”) that posts videos of converts sharing their narratives. Yet the experience of pre-modern converts suggests that asking converts to share their stories for the benefit of their new faith community affects converts in ways that are ambiguous at best.

The early modern German converts studied by Prof. Elisheva Carlebach found themselves as instructors of Hebrew, teaching rabbinic biblical interpretation to Christians, or authoring quasi-“ethnographic” depictions of Jewish life for interested Christian audiences. Each of these roles advanced important theological or spiritual goals within their new Christian communities. Yet limiting converts to new identities as Christians that demanded continual reference to their status as converts impeded their ability to fully integrate into Christian communities and ensured that they remained, like the title of Carlebach’s work, divided souls. [11]

The lesson for our own situation is clear: While we should not prevent converts who want to share their stories from doing so, we must avoid putting converts in the position of feeling impelled to share their experiences of conversion, no matter how inspiring these may be. Creating a context in which converts to Judaism find a place in our community only as motivational speakers or as “professional” converts is inimical to the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer even when received with great enthusiasm.

We should also be sensitive to the pitfalls of creating a “convert ghetto” or a contemporary “domus conversorum.” Needless to say, no one has suggested that we should establish a “merkaz kelitah” for converts. The contemporary reality is more complicated and the risk more subtle. As individual communities develop a reputation for being particularly embracing of converts, they naturally attract an influx of gerim and prospective gerim. We should be attuned to the perils of creating a community with a distinctively “convert” character. Paradoxically, as in the case of the medieval domus conversorum, the efforts of those most concerned with and committed to meeting the needs of gerim can potentially impede the communal integration of converts that represents the optimal fulfillment of the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer.

In addition to offering guidance about what not to do, the experiences of pre-modern Jewish converts also afford us insight into what we ought to do to help converts feel less like strangers and more at home. As we’ve seen, these converts mostly failed to integrate into their new communities; some even returned to their Jewish former communities in the wake of this unsuccessful integration. But there were some converts who joined religious communities (like monasteries or convents), who were adopted into Christian families or who married Christian young men and then left no further imprint in the historical record. While this invisibility is frustrating for the historian, it also suggests that the convert became effectively incorporated into her or his new community in a way that did not flag her or him as a former Jew or as a convert.

As things stand in our community, rabbis are charged with the responsibility of serving both as gatekeepers and as ushers into our community. The intensive rabbinic relationship with a prospective convert frequently culminates with the candidate’s conversion to Judaism. Yet as we have seen, much of the challenge confronting converts revolves around what happens in the days, months, and years after the technical or ritual aspects of conversion have been completed. In thinking about how to help converts become part of our community we ought to consider how we might emulate the approaches that achieved successful integration.

The mitzvah of Ahavat haGer is predicated on the assumption that the sense of being a “stranger” persists after conversion, not during the process of becoming a Jew. This mitzvah, like all other mitzvoth, is incumbent not just on rabbis, but on all of us. As is often the case, though, that which is “everyone’s” responsibility can become “no one’s” responsibility. The instances of successful integration experienced by medieval Jewish converts suggest that becoming part of a family—either a monastic family or a nuclear, and by extension, extended family—enables the neophyte member to become genuinely part of the community. Re-imagining the process of conversion to include not just rabbinic guidance and oversight but also integration into a family that is willing and eager to “adopt” a new member can lessen the experience of being a stranger and foster the development of actual “belonging.”

Rabbinic thinking about conversion construes the convert as being born anew: Ger sheNitgayer keKatan sheNolad dami (B.Yebamot 97b). This is not merely a homiletic observation but a legal statement with practical implications. Of course, newborns cannot survive in the absence of family or surrogate family; newly-born adult Jews have a hard time doing so as well. The lessons of medieval Jewish apostates suggest effective integration of the convert necessitates carefully matching prospective converts with appropriate families who can serve as “surrogate” families, “adoptive” families, or even “God-families” who will think of the ger as “ours.” This can enable the convert to feel like a “ben/bat bayit”—that is, at home, becoming embedded not only within an individual family but within that family’s broader web or network of relationships within the community. This is a relationship with a person in the process of becoming Jewish that should be entered into with the assumption that it will continue more or less indefinitely, rather than terminating once the process of conversion has been completed. Parenthetically, fostering the development of close relationships with members of the community in addition to the relationship with the rabbi supervising the conversion builds in a safeguard against rabbinic abuse during the process, but that’s not the primary objective here.

Halakhic commentators discuss the extent and duration of the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer. Among the possibilities they entertain are that it is limited to the convert him or herself; that it extends until the tenth generation (!); that it persists until the descendent of the convert has one parent who is a native born Jew; or that it applies only as long as the convert and his/her descendents are known as “converts.”[12] While the range here is astounding, these possibilities all point in the same direction: The mitzvah of Ahavat haGer responds to the unique vulnerability of the convert; once the convert and/or his descendants are fully incorporated into their new community, either by no longer being “known” as a convert or by having one native-born parent and the network of relationships that being born into a Jewish family entails the mitzvah is no longer applicable. Optimal performance of the mitzvah of Ahavat haGer entails helping the convert move from the uniquely vulnerable category of the “stranger” in need of special protection to the more general category of veAhavta leReakha kamokha, that is, to being fully immersed within the community indistinguishable from other communal members.

Becoming a member of a new religious community is an indelible aspect of individual experience. Integration into a new community, no matter how effective or embracing cannot efface that significant aspect of individual experience, nor should it seek to do so. What communities can and, according to the Torah, must do is help the convert feel less like a stranger. The Torah exhorts us to love the stranger “ki gerim heyitem beEretz Mitzrayim,” “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt (Deut. 10:19).” We are enjoined to learn from our mostly negative historical experience in the land of Egypt that treatment of the ger is critically important. In this same spirit, I suggest that we can learn how—and how not—to relate to converts in our community from our own historical experience as converts, (or apostates) in pre-modern Europe. Although they may have opted out of Jewish communal membership, their reception (or lack thereof) by their new faith community provides us with the tools to rise to the challenge of our own vastly different circumstances. Their experience heightens our awareness of the two aspects of becoming part of a new religious community. In the words of Megillat Rut, the convert seeks both “amekh ami—your people is my people” and “Elokayikh Elokai—your God is my God.” While our current approach to conversion is focused on the second of these, academic study of medieval Jewish apostates reveals both the importance of the first and provides guidance about how to help bring about the aspiration of “amekh ami.”

[1] See Minhat Hinukh 63 and 431.
[2] See Rambam, MT Hilkhot Deot 6:4.
[3] See the letters collected in Solomon Grayzel, The Popes and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century, New York: Hermon Press (1966).
[4] See Mary Minty, “Responses to Medieval Ashkenazi Martyrdom (Kiddush ha-Shem) in late Medieval German Christian Sources,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 4 (1995): 13–38.
[5] A Monk’s Confession: The Autobiography of Guibert of Nogent, ed. and trans. Paul Archambault, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press (1995).
[6] On the London Domus, see Robert Stacey, “The Conversion of Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth Century England,” Speculum 67 (1992): 263–283.
[7] See Todd Endelman, Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (2015), “Introduction,” pp. 1–16.
[8] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, New York: Doubleday (1967), pp. 50–51.
[9] For a discussion of the complexity of the experience of first generation conversos see Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Converso Dualities in the First Generation: The Cancioneros,” Jewish Social Studies 4 (1998): 1–28.
[10] The religious identity of conversos, and especially the degree to which crypto-judaizing was a significant or dominant factor in that experience, has been contested. See the discussions of B. Netanyahu, The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources, third edition, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press (1999) and The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, New York: Random House (1995); Renee Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel: The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (1999); and Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision fourth edition, New Haven and London: Yale University Press (2014).
[11] Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750, New Haven: Yale University Press (2001).
[12] See Minhat Hinukh 431; Pri Megadim to Shulhan Arukh Orah Hayim 156.

One of the very serious questions that faces every posek is what degree of flexibility does he have in determining his decisions, whether in the direction of stringency or that of leniency. Is he inexorably bound by the rulings of the Shulhan Arukh, for example? Or may he take a position which is more stringent than that of the Mehaber ? (It is generally agreed that he may add stringencies to his own private practices.) Conversely, can he take a position of leniency, which would seem to contradict the standard rulings?

We know that there are certain well-defined areas of halakha where the posek is given considerable leeway and personal freedom, and may even be encouraged in the direction of koah de-heteira adif (favoring the position of leniency). For example, the Talmud declared that mi-shum igun akilu Rabbanan, i.e., in the case of agunot one should lean toward a permissive path. So too, bi-khdei hayyav, mi-pnei kevod ha-beriyot, hefsed merubbeh, shaat ha-dehak, mi-shum tzaara, etc. On the other hand, in certain cases one may rule more stringently, in accordance with the principle of lifnim mi-shurat ha-din.

This is obviously a very broad subject, on which there is a very considerable literature, and clearly we cannot even begin to cover it systematically within the framework of this study. However, what we shall attempt to do here, is to limit ourselves to a discussion of some of the halakhic methodologies available to the posek, who, when he feels the circumstances demand or merit it, wishes to achieve a position of leniency. Indeed this was the main thrust of my two books, Darkah shel Halakha, Jerusalem 2007, and Netivot Pesikah, Jerusalem 2008.

One of the methodologies that may be employed, when there are issues such as severe loss of income, welfare of the community, tragic situations, etc., is to have resort to minority opinions, despite the general normative principle that we follow the majority opinion. This methodology is well-founded in our early sources. Thus the Mishnayot in Eduyot 1:5–6 teach us the following:

5. And why do they [the Masters of the Mishna] record the opinion of the individual against that of the majority, whereas the halakha [ruling] may only be according to the opinion of the majority? That, if a court approves the opinion of the individual, it may rely upon him…
6. R. Yehudah said: If so, why do they record the opinion of the individual against that of the majority when it does not prevail? That, if one shall say [i.e., at a later date], "I have received such a tradition," another may answer, "You did not hear it [except] as the opinion of such a one.”

To this we should add the text found in the Tosefta (Eduyot 1:4), where we read:

The halakha is always in accordance with the opinion (divrei) of the majority; the opinion of the individual as opposed to that of the majority is only cited to be rejected. R. Yehudah says: The opinion of the individual as opposed to that of the majority is cited lest there be an hour of need, and they can rely upon it. The Rabbis said: The opinion of the individual as opposed to that of the majority is cited so that when one says “it is pure” and the other says “it is impure,” this says “it is impure in accordance with the view of R. Eliezer,” they reply to him, “the ruling is in accordance with the tradition of R. Eliezer.”

The Mishnah rules that the minority view can be used by a more senior beit din, while the Tosefta says that it can be used to make changes in the law when there is an hour of need.

The Mishna text has been the source of considerable discussion in recent times. See, e.g., Y. Blidstein, Samhut u-Meri be-Hilkhot ha-Rambam: Perush Nirhav le-Hilkhot Mamrim (chapter 1–4), Tel-Aviv 2002, pp. 83–84; K. Albeck, Mavo la-Mishnah, Jerusalem 1999, Nezikin pp. 475–476; Y.M. Epstein, Arukh ha-Shulhan be-Atid, Jerusalem 1969. Hilkhot Mmmrim 5:5; M. Fisch, "Parshanut Dehukah ve-Textim Mehaivim: Ha-Okimta ha-Amorait ve-ha-Filosofiah shel ha-Talmud," and Iyyunim Hadashim be-Filosofiah shel ha-Halakhah, eds. A. Ravitzky, A. Rosenak, Jerusalem 2008, p. 265; M. Rorth, Orthodoxiah Humanit: Mahshevet ha-Halakhah Shel ha-Rav Professor Eliezer Berkovitz, Tel-Aviv 2013, pp. 41–54, referring to Berkovitz's Ha-Halakha Kohah ve-Tafkidah, Jerusalem 1981 pass., and other of his writings.

However, let us go back to the classical commentators to the Mishnah, such as R. Yisrael Lifschitz, who in his Tiferet Yisrael ad loc., explains:

It should seem to me that he wishes to say that one can rely on the individual opinion at times of need, as it is stated, "R. Shimon is worthy to be relied upon in times of need.” (B. Gittin 19a, B. Berakhot 9a, B. Shabbat 45a, B. Nidah 6a, 9b)

Similarly, R. Shelomoh ha-Adani, in his Melekhet Shelomoh ad loc., writes:

For were it not for the opinion of the individual it would be impossible to annul the opinion of the majority, even in times of need…. But if there was a difference of opinion on a certain issue, then a different court, even of lesser status, can rely on the minority view….

He adds further proof for this assertion from a statement by R. Saadiah Gaon to B. Ketubot 93a, (cited in Otzar ha-Geonim, by B. M. Lewin, Jerusalem 1939, p. 310 no.721). There is a difference of opinion as to whether this methodology applies also to biblical laws or merely to rulings of rabbinic status, the Siftei Cohen, Shah, (Shabbetai ben Meir ha-Cohen, 1621–1661) (to Yoreh Deah 242 ad fin.) taking the former position, and the Turei Zahav by R. David ha-Levi (1586–1667) (Yoreh Deah 293) the latter.

R. Menasheh of Ilya (Lithuania 1767–1831) clarified the Eduyot statement as follows:

We thus learn that a court may rely on an individual and, at its discretion, change a law from the one that had bound their ancestors…. (Alfei Menasheh vol.1, Jerusalem 1979, p. 44)

This, too, is the view of the Raavad (as against that of the Rambam), and also of Tosafot to Megilah 5b, as explicated by R. Mosheh Tzvi Neriah, in his article "Yahid ve-Rabim,” Or Hamizrah VIII, 1961, (3/33), pp. 9–11.

Indeed, it could well be that both dissenting views are actually correct. So we read in B. Eruvin 13b and B. Gittin 6b that:

R. Abba stated in the name of Samuel: For three years there was a dispute between Beit Shamai and Beit Hillel, with these claiming "the halakha is as we say." Then a heavenly voice declared, "These and these are the words of the living God, but the halakha follows the rulings of Beit Hillel.”

And see Ritba to Eruvin ibid. ed. M. Goldstein Jerusalem 1974, p. 107, who writes as follows:

They asked the Rabbis of France, of blessed memory: How is it possible that both [opinions] be the words of the Living God, when they forbid and they permit? And they replied, When Moses went up to the heavens to receive the Torah, they [the angels] showed him for every single detail 49 facets to forbid and 49 facets to permit. And he questioned the Holy One blessed be He concerning this. And He said that it would be given to the Sages of Israel in each generation [to make a determination], and that determination would be according to their ruling. And this is correct according to the homily, but in truth there is a secret [explanation], (i.e., an esoteric one).

(See Moshe Halbertal's analysis in People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority, Cambridge Mass. London 1997, pp. 63–72, on what he calls "The Constitutive View").

Compare this to Midrash Psalms 12:4, ed. Buber, pp. 107–108:

Said R. Yannai: The Torah was not given "cut and dried" (hatikhin), but for each word that God gave to Moses He gave 49 facets for [declaring] purity and 49 for impurity. Said Moses before Him, "Master of the Universe, how then will we be able to clarify the issues?" He replied to Him, "We follow the majority; if the majority declare impurity, it is impure, if purity, it is pure."

(This text is derived from Y. Sanhedrin 4:2, 22a.) See further B. Eruvin 6b. See further, R. Hayyim Vital, Shaar ha-Kavanot: Inyanei Tefilin, Derush 6, 11a, ed. Yeshivat-ha-Mekubalim, Jerusalem n.d. but c. 2005, vol.1, p. 199.)

Similarly, we read in B. Hagigah 3b:

"The masters of the assemblies" (Ecclesiastes 12:11)—these are the scholars who gather together in assemblies and study Torah, some ruling pure and others ruling impure, some prohibiting and others permitting, some rejecting and others accepting. Were one to say, "How, then, can I learn Torah from now on?" The Scripture says, "They are given from our Shepherd" (Ecclesiastes 12:11). One God gave them, and One Leader attended them.” [1]

R. Menahem Recanati, in his commentary on the verse "And God spoke all these words saying,” (Exodus 20:1), writes as follows:

The Rabbis said in B. Hagigah 3b: "[The words of the wise are as goads and as rails fastened] by the masters of the assemblies…" (Ecclesiastes 12:11)—these are the learned Sages; "assemblies," they who are studying Torah; these declare pure and these declare impure, these declare kosher and these declare not kosher, these permit and these forbid. Should a person say: How can I now learn [i.e., what is correct]? For this we learn, "And God spoke all these words saying" (Exodus ibid.):—they all have one father, all were given by one Master, they were spoken by the Lord of all acts. And they said: R. Meir had one pupil who could prove the insect to be pure in 49 ways (B. Eruvin 13b). [And, of course, insects, vermin, are impure.] And all this is because the words spoken [by God] were [in] "a great voice which did not end" (Deuteronomy 5:19)—[a voice] which had all the facets which change and turn over from impure to pure, to forbidding and permitting, to not kosher and to kosher. Because we cannot possibly believe that that voice lacked anything. Therefore in the greatness of the voice were things that could turn in all directions. And each of the Sages received his own ["voice"], for not only the prophets received from Mount Sinai, but all Sages in every generation, each of them receives his own [message]. And this is what the verse (ibid.) tells us, "these words the Lord spoke unto all your assembly [in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness." [My emphasis] And in relation to this it is stated that "Both these and these are the words of the living God.” For if one of them was mistaken, they would not have made this statement. And these are the 70 facets that the Torah has, which turn to all sides, for that "voice" split up into seventy branches, as we have explained in our commentary to Psalms. Our Sages, of blessed memory taught that God gives to a great host of exponents the "word" which splits up into seven times seven voices, i.e., seventy tongues. And R. Yehoshua ha Levi explained it, like a man who strikes the anvil and numerous sparks fly out in all directions. So too the great host of exponents. The hammer is but one single thing, and it splits up a stone [which it smites] into many fragments. So too is "the voice" in which the Torah was given. And if you think about it, this clears up all the uncertainties.

R. Shelomoh Luria, Maharshal, in his introduction to his Yam Shel Shelomoh, formulates this notion as follows:

Everything that is found in the words of the Sages of the Torah, from the time of Moses up to the present day, these are the Sages concerning whom is it said, "The words of the wise are as goads" (Ecclesiastes 12:11)—they were all given by one shepherd (B. Hagigah 3b). And be not surprised by the various differences of opinion, which are so very distant one from the other, if these opinions are directed to heaven…. But all are the words of the living God, as though each one of them received [his tradition] from God and from Moses, even though what came out of Moses' mouth could never be two opposite statements on one single issue. And the kabbalists explained that all souls were present at Sinai and received [the words] through 49 channels (tzinorot), seven times seven purified (cf. Psalms 12:7). And these are the voices (or sounds) which they heard and saw. [cf. Exodus 20:18, "And all the people saw the thunderings (kolot, voices) and the lightning….” These are the opinions that were transferred through the channels (or conduits), each one seeing through his channel in according with his own understanding. So each one receives in accordance with the strength of his soul… such that one reaches one conclusion, declaring impure, and the other another one, declaring pure…and all are true. And you may understand this. And for this reason the Torah was given to the Sages of each and every generation, each according to the source of his understanding… and in accordance with that which is shown to them from the heavens. [My emphasis]

This seems to express the view of continued revelation, and this indeed is the view of R. Mosheh Alsheich in his commentary to Proverbs 21:17. There, he has an extended discussion on what clearly for him was a very vexing provocative question, as to how two conflicting views can both be correct. His solution is also based on his Kabbalistic views. (See below. See also Abraham J. Heschel, Prophetic Inspiration of the Prophets: Maimonides and other Mediaeval Authorities, Hoboken, NJ, 1996.)

Similarly, R. Mosheh Feinstein, in his Igrot Mosheh, Yoreh Deah 3:92, writes:

Our Sages describe the opposing views of halakhic debate as both being "the words of the living God." This means that Torah study of the diverse views of Sages inherently does not contain something which is not true. Thus the opposing views of Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel are both true. This rule applies also to the disputes of R. Eliezer and all the Tannaim and Amoraim. All of them were given from One Shepherd. Thus it was not untrue when the Heavenly Bat Kol announced that the halakha was in accord with R. Eliezer. His words were inherently true—even though in this world we decide practical halakha on the basis of majority decision. Because of the inherent truth of all views of our sages, we say the blessing "Who gave to us the Torah of truth" even if we are only learning the views that have been rejected from practical halakha such as those of Beit Shammai or minority opinions.

And in Igrot Mosheh, introduction to Orah Hayyim, we read:

It is correct and obligatory for the sages of the latter generations to decide halakha—even if they are not qualified according to the standards of the sages of the Gemara. Therefore there is definitely a concern that their halakhic determinations are not in accord with the view of Heaven. However, in truth, we are guided by the principle that Torah is not in Heaven. Rather it is determined according to what appears correct to the rabbi after proper study of the issue to clarify the halakha according to the Talmud, and the writings of posekim. He is to use his full abilities to seriously deliberate with fear of Heaven—in order to determine what appears to be the correct halakha. Such a pesak is viewed as true and he is obligated to issue his conclusion. This obligation exists even if in fact his ruling is contrary to the halakha in Heaven. His ruling is also considered the "word of the living God" as long as he is convinced he is correct and it is internally consistent. He will receive reward for his rulings even if the truth is not in accord with his position. Proof for this is found in B. Shabbat 130a: A certain city in Israel that followed the halakha according to R. Eliezer—even though this was not the accepted halakha—received great reward in terms of long life… Thus, the ruling which a rabbi is obligated to teach and receive reward for it, is that which he decides after studying the issue with his full ability. This obligation and the receiving of reward exists even if the ruling is not in accord with the truth. This is the nature of all disputes of the Rishonim and Aharonim concerning what is permitted and what is prohibited. As long as a universal ruling has not been determined—each rabbi can make decisions for his followers according to that which he thinks is correct—even though the objective halakha is only in accordance with one of them. Both will also receive reward for their rulings. Because of this we find much dispute also in the most severe prohibitions—with variations between places that rule like the Rambam and Beit Yosef and those that rule like Tosafot and the Rema. Both of the opposing views are "the words of the living God even though the actual truth as understood by Heaven is only like one of them.

This almost mystical view is echoed in a statement by the Shlah ha-Kadosh, (Toledot ha-Adam: Beit Hokhmah sect. 8):

How do we understand the concept that all the words of our sages are the words of the living God? We read in Eruvin 13b: For three and a half years Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel argued concerning whose views were actually halakha. A Bat Kol announced from Heaven that both views were the words of the living God, but the halakha was in accord with Beit Hillel. The Ritba writes in the name of the rabbis of France that the halakha was given in 49 different ways of prohibition and 49 different ways of permission—it was left up to the rabbis of each generation to determine what was the correct halakha for their generation. There is a problem with this explanation. Only when both sides can be right is it reasonable to say, "Both are the words of the living God." For example, in B. Gittin 6b, concerning the concubine of Givah, the views are not mutually exclusive and both could be correct. However in a dispute where one side says it is prohibited and the other side says it is permitted—then surely both cannot be correct! Therefore, if we choose one side, how can we say about the rejected view that it is "the word of the living God"? The rational mind is simply not satisfied with the words of the French rabbis. In fact, the resolution of this problem is dependent—as the Ritba alluded—upon kabbalistic reasoning and secrets… The explanation of this issue, in my humble opinion, is found in B. Bava Metzia 59b concerning the dispute between R. Eliezer and R. Yehoshua whether Heaven can decide the halakha. I already have explained that every single mitzvah has a source in Heaven. According to one's attachment in Heaven, that is how the mitzvah manifests itself in the physical world. The carrying out of the actual mitzvah is directly related to the nature of the attachment. However not everyone has the same level of attachment. Therefore, each rabbi will decide the halakha based upon his personal attachment and consequently they will not necessarily agree. The final halakha is decided by the majority which indicates the most representative means of attachment to Heaven… This is so even though a particular individual might have a much higher type of attachment in Heaven. The halakha is determined by what is the most appropriate way that the mitzvah performed physically for the majority. Thus, we can see why two mutually opposing views can both be the "words of the living God." For example, in the dispute concerning tefilin between Rashi and Rabbeinu Tam, each holds that the tefilin of the other is invalid. Would you think that one side never fulfilled the mitzvah of tefilin during his entire life?! The answer is that each side had a unique attachment to Heaven which determined their ruling about tefilin. However, the final halakha is determined by the majority…

Indeed, throughout the generations scholars struggled with the concept of multiple truths—"eilu ve-eilu…,” seeking kabbalistic explanations, or finally admitting that such is beyond human comprehension. Thus R. Tzadok ha-Cohen of Lublin, in his Dover Tzedek, Pietrokov 1911, p. 4, writes:

The expression eilu ve-eilu refers to the fact that… all the aspects and parts are in fact a unity, and they all are the words of the living God. However, this concept is truly beyond rational comprehension. How is it possible that complete opposites are both true? We know that it is impossible that truth is anything other than one. How can diverse and conflicting things all be a unity? … Therefore, this concept of eilu ve-eilu is beyond the material intellect of man. That is also, why there is no absolutely clear halakha in the Oral Law that is beyond dispute—except for halakha le-Moshe, which is not disputed, as the Rambam states…

And similarly in R. Abdallah Somech's Zivhei Tzedek, Bagdad (1813–1829), Yoreh Deah sect. 26:

Question: How could the conflicting opinions of our sages—where one asserts that something is prohibited and another claims that it is permitted—all be given to Moshe on Mount Sinai? Answer: The answer to this question is extremely deep, and we are not able to answer it properly. Even the Rishonim did not have a full response to it….

He then quotes the Ritba (cited above), the Shlah, the Hida, etc. finally admitting that:

Even the Ritba indicated that the genuine answer is from the mysteries of Kabbalah. Therefore, the bottom line is that this question is beyond our ability to understand. We see the many answers that were to give a little comfort—especially to the masses. Thus, they will have to suffice because the real answer is found in Kabbalah, which is not appropriate for either of us.

Each of these authorities seeks to explain how two contradictory views can, in a sense, both be correct. And we for our part can hardly know which is the "more correct.” For us, then, we are left with a situation of continued uncertainty—safek.

And moving into modern times R. Yitzhak Hutner, in his Pahad Yitzhak: Quntras Ve-Zot Hanukah, Brooklyn 5624 (=1964), p. 18, wrote as follows:

Our perception of the power of Torah she-be'al Peh as revealed through disagreements is greater than when there is agreement. For within the principle that "these and those are the Word of the Living God" is included the essential principle that even the shittah that is rejected as practical halakha is nevertheless a Torah view, when it is expressed according to the norms of the discourse of Torah she-be'al Peh. This is because the Torah was given by the da'at of the Sages of the Torah (as enunciated by the Ramban). And if they then vote and decide according to the rejected view, the halakha then changes in a true sense (aliba' de-emet)… The result is that in disagreement the power of Torah she-be'al Peh is revealed to a greater extent than by [the Sages'] agreement. The "war of Torah" (milhamtah shel Torah—Torah debate is thus not merely one mode of divrei Torah among others, but rather "the war of Torah" is a positive creation of new Torah values, whose like is not to be found in ordinary words of Torah [where there is no disagreement].

And indeed this is the opinion of R. Yaakov Hagiz (1620–1674) in his Halakhot Ketanot, Jerusalem 1974, part 1, no.146 (p. 18), where he was asked if a controversy between the decisors is regarded as a safek (uncertainty), and he replies in the affirmative, (or in his formulation, "so it seems most likely").

Furthermore, it is a generally accepted view that even though we have accepted the rulings of Maran, R. Yosef Karo, this is not because we are certain that his views are correct (ain zeh mi-torat vadai), but only as a pragmatic means to get out of the area of uncertainty (mi-torat safek). So we learn from Shut Nediv Lev, by R. Hayyim David Hazan, Saloniki-Jerusalem (1862–1866), vol. 2 sect. 63. Likewise in Rav Poalim, by R. Yosef Hayyim, Jerusalem (1901–1913), vol. 4, Yoreh Deah sect. 4 ad fin.; Penei Yitzhak, by R. Yitzhak Abulafia, Aram Tzovah, Livorno, Izmir (1871–1888), vol. 1 Yoreh Deah sect. 9, 13; vol. 2, 28c, vol. 5, 162d, etc. See R. Ovadiah Yosef, Halikhot Olam vol.7, Jerusalem 2002, p. 32, who cited additional sources.

And again, ibid. p. 259, R. Yosef writes:

But it seems… that in a difference of opinions among the posekim, the [ruling] never leaves the area of uncertainty (safek),even though the Torah ruled to follow the majority, this is only in certain cases—here he lists them—but this is not the case in a mahloket posekim, which always remains within the area of uncertainty….

R. Yosef brings numerous sources, early and late, to prove his contention. R. Asher Weiss, in his Minhat Asher vol. 2, Jerusalem 2014, p. 171 expresses much the same opinion, namely that to follow the majority is not clearly a biblical injunction (referring to B. Eruvin 46a).

We find a similar sevarah (reasoning) much earlier in the Shitah Mekubetzet to Baba Metzia 6b, in the name of Rosh that even the view of a majority remains a safek, but that the Torah ruled that we should follow such an opinion; (cited by R. Shlomoh Kluger, in his U-Baharta ba-Hayyim, Budapest 1934, sect. 12, and discussed by R. Ovadia Yosef in Yabia Omer vol. 10, no. 60:3, p. 198; likewise by my sainted grandfather, R. David Sperber, in his Afrakasta de-Anya, vol. 1, Brooklyn N.Y. 2002, no. 91, pp. 237–239). However, see Peri Megadim to Yoreh Deah 100, sect. 37, who calls this principle into doubt. And see, in brief, Mosheh Avigdor Haikin, Kelalei ha-Posekim, London 1923, p. 70:10. (Indeed, the whole notion of "the majority,” rov, is by no means clear and is exceeding by complex. See Hazon Ish to Kilaim 1:1.)

The great early-twentieth-century authority, R. Avraham Yitzhak ha-Cohen Kook (1865–1935), in his Shabbat ha-Aretz, Jerusalem 1985, p. 42, writes as follows:

We find, that even when a number of mishnayot rule stringently and this was the practice for many generations, nonetheless, when [some Rabbis] relied upon an individual view to rule leniently, [other] Rabbis did not object…. Even when they had always ruled stringently in accordance with the view of the majority, when later, in times of need and necessity for the sake of the community, they ruled on a rejected view, the Rabbis leveled no objections.

Indeed, there are times and situations when it is incumbent upon us to resort to minority opinions. When the gravity of the situation demands it, great authorities made lenient decisions based on such minority positions. This is especially the situation in the case of the "enchained woman"—agunah, a woman whose husband has vanished and is not known to be dead, so that she cannot be divorced, but neither can she remarry. This was well summed up in a passage by the great sixteenth-century rabbi, Avraham ha-Levi, who lived in Egypt, in his response Ginat Veradim, Even ha-Ezer Part 3, sect. 20 (Jerusalem 1951), (cited above note 53):

If we were to examine the opinions of the sages of ancient times—in order to fulfill what they obligate us to do and as we do in all other areas of law—and follow the majority rule so that there would never be any challenges to our decisions, then there would never be freedom for the agunah from any rabbinic teacher. And it is our fault that there are terrible situations which result in the daughters of our father Abraham remaining as widows with living husbands. And there is none to be gracious or kind to them, and they are left starving and thirsty and destitute. And we shall also be concerned lest they follow paths of immorality: Great poverty can lead one to such a path. Moreover, these women are young and active (and will not be able to wait with restraint.) Yet, if we want to follow the lenient decisions, the seriousness of the issue holds us back. Therefore, we have no alternative but to follow the path that was firmly established by our earliest rabbis—to follow the path of straight thinking even if it is against the consensus of the gedolim from whose waters we drink, as it is written in the Talmud, "It is sufficient to rely on (the minority opinion) of Rabbi X, even though it is not the accepted halakha. And it has already been stated at the end of B. Yevamot 122a, "We allow a woman to marry on the authority of an echo," i.e., that they were lenient with her because of her iggun, [enchainment].

Admittedly, this is a somewhat special halakhic category; but we may learn from it that in cases of what may be regarded as a form of necessity, we do have recourse to minority opinions. Indeed, there are numerous examples in rabbinic literature of recourse to the use of minority opinions, such, for example, R. Mosheh Feinstein, Igrot Mosheh, Orah Hayyim 4, sect. 66, idem, Orah Hayyim 2, sect. 18.

In view of the above it becomes clear that one is permitted to take a minority position in pesak. This is evident in the writings of the great Baghdadi posek, R. Yosef Hayyim (author of the famous Ben Ish Hai) in his introduction to his major responsa Shut Rav Poalim, vol. 1, Jerusalem 2001. For there, when analyzing the different kinds of responders (meshivim), he writes:

There is one who is nimble and effective in knocking on the doors of the books of all the responders, early and late ones, and even the latest, minor and major up to our times, even of authors who are still alive, and his intention is to search in order to see and understand the opinion of each and every scholar who was involved in the specific issue, and this is certainly an admirable approach. For one thing, because, if he finds an author who examined the issue in depth, and he agrees with his conclusion, then his ruling to the question posed before him and for which he has to give a practical solution, will not be his alone, but also on the basis of this other opinion, and he will not be a "lone judge,” (referring to the first Mishna in Sanhedrin, and cf. B. Sanhedrin 5a).

Clearly then, the posek who has examined numerous sources may legitimately rule in accordance with his own conclusions (see below Appendix 3 and see Shut ha-Rashba, vol. 1, no. 253, Jerusalem 1997, p. 108), but it is preferable that he couples his adjudication with yet another opinion, even if this be a minority position.

In my extensive study of this issue, in Darkah Shel Halakhah, I brought a variety of additional sources to support this contention.[2] Furthermore, in my Netivot Pesikah, Jerusalem 2008, pp. 32–35,[3] I discussed the status of sources discovered more recently that may have the effect of changing accepted halakhic practice, and the degree of legitimacy to making use of them in order to bring about such change. [4]

To the above we should now add the following related issue, namely that the fact that the majority hold a given opinion does not necessarily means that that opinion is truly the correct one, as is evident from the Mishna in Eduyot cited above. [5]

Thus some commentators ad loc. explain that the rejected opinion could become the correct halakhic approach. We already noted that this is the opinion of R. Menashe of Ilya, cited above.

Indeed, it could well be that both dissenting views are actually correct, as we have already pointed out above, and so we learn from B. Eruvin 13b and B. Gittin 6b that the views of Beit Shamai and Beit Hilllel actually were both correct. And there are kabbalistic statements that in the time of the Messiah the halakha will be according to Beit Shamai, and also that its dominant view on the form of the tefilin will be that of Rabbeinu Tam.

To the above we may add the remarks of R. Yisrael Zeev Gustman, in his Kuntresei Shiyurim to Kiddushin, Brooklyn 1970, 24/2, that only when there is an absolutely certain ruling is this binding, but where there is a difference of opinion between the authorities this is not an absolute ruling, and hence in a safek de-Rabbanan, in a point of uncertainty in an issue of rabbinic status, we rule leniently.[6]

We quote the very beautifully formulated statement of Isidore Twersky, in his Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (Mishneh Torah), New Haven and London 1980, in a section entitled "The Impossibility of Absolute Finality" (p. 139):

Many of these categories converge upon one overriding fact: Maimonides' realization that law has immanent uncertainties, that the legist regularly and unavoidably faces unimagined contingencies and new hesitations. Absolute finality is a utopian construct. Like the historical process or personal experience, law can never be purified of its mutations and individuality. A code is a rational construction which captures and freezes as much as possible of a fluid, unpredictable, sometimes recalcitrant reality, but there is always a fluctuating residuum which must be confronted openly and freshly. Maimonides was well aware of this and indicated it in various ways.

And on p. 142 he adds:

…. All his desires for finality, objectivity, and universality notwithstanding, Maimonides was sophisticated and realistic, sensitized by the very Rabbinic tradition which he was codifying. He knew that despite his major contribution to condensation and consolidation the vitality and effervescence of halakha could not be fully contained or compressed. The logic of law and the contingencies of life have always to be aligned. Halakha and reality are both multifaceted realities.

To the above we may add the view that even the rulings of R. Yosef Karo in his Shulhan Arukh, which are so widely accepted, at least in the Sephardic communities, are not accepted because they are "certainly correct,” but out of a level of uncertainty, or as formulated by R. Yaakov Hayyim Sofer, in his article "Hakhraot u-Piskei ha-Gaon Erech ha-Shulhan,” which appeared in Zekhor le-Avraham, ed. A. Berger, 1993, p. 233: “That we accepted the rulings of Maran [Yosef Karo] was not from certainty [that he is always correct] but only from doubt.”

This is also the position of R. Yosef Hayyim, in his Rav Poalim vol. 4, Yoreh Deah sect. 5 ad fin.; R. Ben Tziyyon Aba Shaul, Or Tziyyon, vol. 2, introduction sect. 1:2; R. Mosheh ha-Levi, Yosef Daat sect. 12:3; R. Hayyim David Kazan, Nediv Lev, vol. 2, Hoshen Mishpat sect. 63; R. Raphael Yosef Hazan, Hikrei Lev, vol. 1, Yoreh Deah sect. 127; R. Meir ….. , in his introduction to the Ben Ish Hai p. 12; perhaps also R. Ovadiah Yosef Yabia Omer vol. 9 no. 17:21, p…… , and no. 105, p. 225 sect. 3 ad fin., and many additional sources cited by R. Yaakov Hayyim Sofer, etc.

Admittedly, this view is not universally accepted, and is the subject of considerable controversy, such that other authorities claim the Shulhan Arukh's rulings are absolute, containing no uncertainty. To refute the above authors, see, e.g., R. Neriah Gafni, Magen Yosef, vol. 1, Jerusalem 2011, pp. 117–132, and R. Yitzhak Yosef, Ein Yitzhak vol. 3, Jerusalem 2009, pp. 95–99, for extensive polemic discussions upon the interpretation of a passage in his introduction to his Beit Yosef. Nonetheless the views of these great authorities cannot be summarily discarded.

Thus, in addition to all that has been stated above, there is an innate element of uncertainty in all aspects of halakha, and this element does not weaken it, but rather strengthens it by admitting of greater flexibility and resilience.[7]

Samuel Morell, in his Studies in the Judicial Methodology of Rabbi David Ibn Abi Zimra, New York, 2004, pp. 177–209, discusses ben Zimra’s unique way of ruling according to the "Middle Way,” and he summarizes his findings (ibid. p. 208) that:

The message of the "middle way" is that there is no substantive preference for one opinion over another.

Is this not what R. Yitzhak Colon (d. 1480) wrote in his Sheelot u-Teshuvot Maharik, Warsaw 1884, no. 163, p. 176:

In my humble opinion it would appear that wherever the Talmud notes that so and so, the ruling is like this, the talmudic authorities did not plumb the depths of each and every controversy, deciding that the halakha should be in accordance with him whom they stated to be the authoritative one, because it was not possible for the talmudic Sages to examine in depth every single difference of opinion of the Tannaim and Amoraim and to determine according to whom is the halakha in detail. Rather they followed the majority view, [especially] when they saw that a certain Tanna was sharper or more accepted than his fellow Sages. And so too with the Amoraim. And they relied on this approach to determine that the halakha be in accordance with this opinion, except in certain exceptional cases where they knew that the halakha is in accordance with the dissenting view. And the Sages of the Talmud had the authority to determine the halakha as they saw fit, and [saw their ruling] as beyond doubt. And this was the case until the period of Rav Ashi and Ravina, who end the period of horaah—decision-making. And in this way they determined the laws. And I have many proofs that this is the case, but I have no time at the present to elaborate on this…

So these rulings in accordance with the majority were for the most part pragmatic rather than minutely reasoned decisions.

On the other hand there may be a considerable danger in consistently taking the stringent path, as we have already indicated above. See, for example, the very harsh statement of the Radbaz, R. David ben Zimra, in his Responsa, part 4, no. 1368:

…But in any case if he wishes to take upon himself stringencies [he may do so], and he should close himself off in his own house, [but he should not do so for others], for [in so doing] he leads to conflicts, and to vain hatred, and the desecration of the Name, God forfend, and may the Good Lord pardon him, Amen.

Indeed, the superior status of leniency is a guiding principle in many of his rulings. So writes Israel M. Goldman, in his The Life and Times of Rabbi David Ibn Abi ben Zimra, New York, 1970, p. 23:

To those scholars who would pile on stringency upon stringency, he expressed himself in terms such as follows: "Leave our people Israel alone! It is enough for them if they are careful about that which the Torah has forbidden, and about that which the Rabbis have forbidden, and still you come along and add doubt upon doubt.” [Responsa of RDBZ vol.2, Venice 1749, no. 637]. Again, "I do not deem it necessary to add such stringencies for Israel which the earlier authorities have not instituted. Would that Israel would observe that which has already been placed upon them, for if you grasp for too much you may grasp nothing, with the result that nothing is left in the hand” [ibid. vol.1, no.163]. And in an impatient tone to one writer: "You come to create new forbidden foods out of your own head!” [ibid. no.145].

Goldman (ibid. pp. 23–24) continues to give some concrete examples of the Radbaz' approach. He writes:

To illustrate: A Jew was sick and it was deemed necessary to violate the Sabbath in his behalf. But because of his piety he refused to allow them to violate the Sabbath on his account. R. David, maintaining the traditionally humane Jewish views in such matters, calls this man "a pious fool who will have to give account for his life to God. The Torah taught 'You shall live by them' and not die by them [ibid. vol. 4, Livorno 1652, 67]. Even in a case where the doctor does not think it necessary to make a medicine which would cause a violation of the Sabbath but the patient feels that such a medicine will help him, R. David decides that the principle, "a man's own heart feels the bitterness of his soul the most," applies in such a case and the medicine should be procured, [ibid. 66]. Further, the great authorities differ on the point whether it is permitted to do anything for a sick person which would cause Sabbath violation if those things are not absolutely necessary. R. David clearly takes his stand with the words: "There is a difference of opinion on this among the legal authorities, but I am among the lenient interpreters" [ibid. 130]. In the same spirit, when a man was sick during the Passover week and he needed barley water as a medicine, R. David gives careful instructions how it can be prepared with the least possibility of leaven cereal being spread and adds: "I see fit to permit this for a sick man even if he is not in danger." Should a Jew who is in prison on the Sabbath and who has no food, be allowed to tell the jailer to buy and bring him food on the Sabbath? Or, shall he fast till the next day, since the prison is locked at night? R. David decides that it is permitted to send the jailer on the Sabbath day [ibid. vol.3, Fürth 1781, 576].

A more detailed analysis of Ben Zimra's halakhic approach and his tendency to leniency, (most especially in the case of Agunot, but not solely), may be found in Samuel Morell's Studies in the Judicial Methodology of Rabbi David Ibn Abi Zimra, New York, 2004, pp. 58–75, 87–90, 170–171.

Even harsher and more forceful against those "who put stringency upon stringency" are the words of R. Yaakov Emden (1697–1776) in his Sheilot Yaavetz vol. 2, Lemberg 1884, no.150 (fol. 48); where he rails against the Ashkenazic humrot, which he says are observed even more than biblical laws (gufei Torah), and which he claims leads to very serious errors in clearly prohibited laws, stating that he who prohibits the permitted in the end will permit the prohibited. He accuses them of blindness and having lost any sort of wisdom, making the insignificant essential, leading to great loss.

One could greatly multiply such statements, (see e.g., Maharatz Chajes to B. Niddah 34a, or responsa of the Mabit R. Mosheh Mi-Trani, vol. 3, sect. 68, Brooklyn 1961, 13ab, who wrote: "Do not be very pious (hassidim harbei) [for] it is sufficient for you [to accept] that which the Torah prohibited,” (cf. Y. Nedarim 9:1), i.e., you need not add new prohibitions), but the above should suffice to underscore the dangers of excessive stringencies. (And cf. above note 42.)

And here I would like to recall a wonderful story (that I cited in my On the Relationship of Mitzvot between Man and His Neighbor and Man and His Maker, Jerusalem, 2014, pp. 40–43) that R. Yehudah Leib Maimon records in his Toledot ha-Gra (Jerusalem: 1970, 7), concerning the rabbi of Frankfurt, R. Avraham-Abush, a contemporary of the Gaon of Vilna:

They relate that once the shohahtim (slaughterers) of Frankfurt came before him with a query concerning [the kashrut of] a lung, a matter on which the Rema and the rest of the Polish authorities ruled most stringently. The incident took place on the eve of a festival, and the matter was one which potentially involved a very considerable monetary loss for the impoverished slaughterer. The members of the Beit Din wished to rule stringently and declare the meat not kosher (in accordance with the view of the Rema), but R. Avraham-Abush began to search for ways of finding it kosher. The judges of the Beit Din insisted on their position that it is impossible to rule leniently against the view of the Rema and his colleagues, but R. Avraham-Abush argued with them, discussing the halakhic issues involved, and finally ruled that the meat was kosher. The members of the Beit Din were astonished, asking him: How could one possibly rule leniently declaring it kosher against the ruling of the Rema and the great authorities of Poland who held the same opinion?!

R. Avraham-Abush replied to them as follows: I prefer at the end of my days when I come [before the Heavenly Court] to argue my case with the Rema and his colleagues, rather than with this poor slaughterer. The slaughterer is a simple man, and it will be very difficult for me to argue my case with him before the Heavenly Court, if he brings me to court claiming that I declared his animal tareif, and that in doing so I caused him great monetary loss,[8] and that I damaged his business on the eve of the festival. But I am sure that when I lay out my arguments before the Rema and his colleagues, we will reach an agreement…

The logic in R. Avraham Abush's position is clarified in a similar tale told by Yaakov Rimon and Yosef Zundel Wasserman in the book, Shemuel be-Doro: R. Shemuel Salant z"l, Rabbah shel Yerushalayim 1841–1909, Hayyav u-Poalav, Tel-Aviv: 1961, 122–126:

Once upon a time some learned rabbis were arguing with him (R. Shemuel Salanter) on a case where he had ruled "kosher," and needless to say he refuted their counter-arguments. One of them turned to him and said to him: "You have refuted our arguments, but what will happen when you come before the Heavenly Court and have to argue with the Beit Yosef and the Rema?" He replied as follows: "Surely you will agree with me that it will be better for me to argue my case with them, since I believe that I understood in depth their opinion, rather than having a claim against me on the part of the ox [i.e., on the part of the owner of the ox] that I incorrectly declared tareif… [9]

Both these tales have a common denominator: namely that if the rabbi ruled incorrectly, declaring tareif meat kosher, he has sinned against God, and Yom ha-Kippur will atone for this sin. But should he have ruled kosher meat as tareif, he will have caused damage, hurt and monetary loss to the slaughterer, and this is a sin against his fellow-man for which Yom ha-Kippur does not automatically atone; and hence he preferred to err on the side of leniency rather than risk erring on the side of stringency.[10]

Indeed, much the same concept is to be found in a responsum of R. Eliezer Fleckles, Teshuvah me-Ahavah vol. 1, Prague 1806, no. 181. There we read:

He was wont to say to his disciples, "Go and see who is more severely punished: he who is overly stringent (she-lo ke-din) or he who is overly lenient. And you will understand that he who is overly stringent is more severely punished. For he who is overly lenient sins a sin between man and his Maker, and he will be repentant and be forgiven. But he who is overly stringent must appease his neighbour. And this is hinted at in the statement , 'Your donkey (hamorkha) is gone, Tarfon' (B. Sanhedrin 33a)—a double word-play on hamor- donkey, and humra- stringency,[11] for that is a hint at one who rules with excessive stringency and declares everything as forbidden [i.e., to be eaten]. See Rashi and Tosafot to tractate Beitzah 2b, (de-heteira) on the (koah de-heteira adif).

Let us further take note of the very explicit instructions formulated by the Shlah ha-Kadosh (R. Yishaya Horowitz, author of Shnei Luhot ha-Berit, Amsterdam 1698), and aimed at rabbinic decisors. He writes (ibid. 184b, in Masekhet Shevuot, ed. M. Katz, vol. 2, Haifa 2002, p. 266 nos. 89–91):

89: The goal of study is to study and to teach, to keep [the law] and carry it out. You, my children, may the Lord guard over you, if you are asked to give a ruling, and have the privilege to be decisors, take great care in your decisions, that you stumble not, God forfend… And before you give your judgment, make sure that the law is as clear as daylight in your heart, without any hint of uncertainty… And if there is any uncertainty, be not ashamed to discuss this with other students. Who was greater than Rav Huna, who when he had to rule in matters of tereifot (non-kosher foods), would gather others [to join in the decisions], so that 'each would carry a chip off the beam' (i.e., share the responsibility), (B. Sanhedrin 7b). [Cf. the Shlah's son, R. Sheftel's instruction in Hanhagot ha-Tzadikim, vol. 1, Jerusalem 1988, p. 109, no. 22.] And may the fear of God be in your hearts.

90: In any case, do not say, if that is the case, let us be stringent in most cases. For this is not called a (decision of a) decisor, to rule stringently for others not in accordance with the law, though he may do so for himself, should he so wish. And in Masekhet Berakhot in the first chapter (4a), it talks of the generation of King David, when their hands were soiled with foetus and placenta… in order to declare a wife pure to her husband. It does not say whether they wished to purify or declare impure; only that they toiled so much not to declare the pure to be completely certain impure, thus keeping them from the mitzvah of procreation. So the decisor is cautioned not to cause others to err, God forfend, but we should learn of the power of leniency. And this is the law in all rulings, even one for himself (i.e., when the decisor decides for himself), that the measure of piety is that he be stringent for himself, if there is place for stringency; but if there is not, but he merely wishes to take upon himself a stringent position because of his lack of knowledge, had he studied and gone more deeply into clarifying the issue, he would see that there is no place for stringency, and if he nonetheless rules stringently, he is a pious fool (hassid shoteh).

91: … But greater is he who toils [in his learning of] Torah, and studies until it is clear to him that it is permitted… Then, praise be he in this world… and it will be good for him in the world to come that he steeped himself in Torah….

I would like to add a further consideration: For there is a well-established rule in Jewish law, that we find formulated by the Shakh [Sifrei Cohen, by Shabtai Cohen, 1621–1663, he being a major commentator to a part of the Shulhan Arukh], in his Kitzur Hanhagot Issur ve-Heter 9, Yoreh Deah 245, thus, “Just as it is forbidden to permit that which is forbidden, so it is forbidden to forbid that which is permitted.”

This principle is already found reflected in the prayer of R. Nehuniah ben ha-Kanah (flor. Erets Yisrael c.80–110 CE), found in the Talmud (B. Berakhot 28b), where he expresses the hope that he will not err in his judgments: “That I do not declare the impure pure, neither the pure impure…”

See the parallel in Y. Terumot 5 ad fin., a statement of the 3 cent. C.E. R. [E]liezer; Y. Hagigah 1:8; Y. Sotah 8:2, cited in medieval sources such as, Semag Asin 111, Hagahot Maimoniyot, Mamrim 1:5. And see also Teshuvot Maimoniyot to Maakhalot Asurot 15, in the name of the Yerushalmi.

Cf. B. Berakhot 28b, and Rokeah sect.28 who wrote, "The sin of permitting things that are prohibited is just as the sin of prohibiting things that are permitted." And see further R. Ovadiah mi-Bertinoro to Avot 5:8, and Yitzhak Yosef, Shulhan ha-Maarekhet, vol.2, Jerusalem 2010, pp. 409–411. We may further recall the words of R. Dimi in the name of R. Yitzhak in Y. Nedarim 9:1, that the judges exhort him who took upon himself a prohibitive oath, saying, "Is it not sufficient for you that which the Torah prohibited, but that you wish to prohibit other things!" (See Barukh ha Levi Epstein, Barukh she-Amar to Avot, second ed, Tel Aviv 1905, pp. 72–73.) Of course, this principle also has its parameters, and the Rabbis frequently imposed prohibitions to distance and prevent people from sinning, le-afrishei me-Issura. However, this subject is beyond the scope of our present study.

This clearly places a great degree of responsibility upon the decisor, requiring him to examine most intensively any issue before declaring it prohibited. For it is always easier to say "No, it is forbidden,” than to say "Yes, it is permitted.” But the easy way is not the way of halakha, but rather one must attempt to reach a clarification of the truth. (See my Netivot Pesikah, Jerusalem 2009, pp. 173–176.)

There may be an exception to this rule in the case of a repentant who has to take upon himself additional stringencies in order to counteract his natural tendency to give in to his evil inclinations. For him, writes R. Yona Girondi, in his commentary to Avot 3, 16, that the "baalei teshuvah" should distance themselves from that which is permissible in the area in which he sinned….But this is a special situation. (See also his Shaarei Teshuvah 1:2, N. Rakover, Takanat ha-Shavim, Jerusalem 2007, p. 676.)

This principle is discussed in numerous rabbinic sources, and is the subject of an extensive responsum on the part of R. Menashe Klein, in his Mishne Halakhot vol. 5, Tel-Aviv 1973 no.104, pp. 150–153, and cf. idem, vol. 4, Brooklyn 1977, no. 105 p. 172, etc., and the many additional references collected by Lior Silber, in his Milei de-Hassiduta 2nd edition (n.d., but c. 2014) pass.

Furthermore, the Pithei Teshuva to Yoreh Deah 116:10, ad fin., cited the Solet le-Minhah (that is the Solet le-Minhah ve-Shemen le-Minhah, which is the second ed. Of R. Yaakov Reischer's Minhat Yaakov, Dessau 1696) , Kelal 76, Din 8, that "one who is stringent in those laws where there was no stringency mentioned among the Amoraim (such as 'annulment in sixty', (bitul be-Shishim) or a "secondary vessel,” (keli sheni) is, as it were, practicing epikorsut, heresy, and there is no benefit in his action only loss…."

We may add the observation of Zvi Zohar, in his Heiru Penei ha-Mizrah: Halakha
ve-Hagut etzel Hakhmei Yisrael ba-Mizrah ha-Tikhon,Tel-Aviv 2001, p. 343, that R. Ovadia Yosef stresses the preference for leniency in pesak, wherever it is possible. And (ibid. pp. 79–80 note 79) he notes that this principle is explicitly spelled out in R. Yosef's article "Mishnato shel Yisa Berakhah,” Shevet Ve-Am, second series 1/6, 1971, pp. 95–103. He further points out that in R. Yosef's volumes of responsa, Yabia Omer and Yehaveh Daat, the phrase Koha de-heteira appears 118 times (!), giving a sampling of references.

The great burden of responsibility upon the decisor, that we mentioned above, is very revealingly reflected in a passage by Rav Avraham Yitzhak ha-Cohen Kook, which with singular clarity expresses his personal concern as to when to rule stringently and when leniently, and what are the implications of the two alternatives:

…For I know clearly the nature of the people of our generation, that it is just when they see that we permit all that is permissible according to the depth of the law, they will understand that whatever we do not permit is because this is the true law of the Torah. Consequently the masses will follow the rulings of halakhic decisors—which is not the case if it becomes evident that there are things which, from the point of view of the halakha, are permitted, and the Rabbis, neglecting to taking note of the troubles and distresses of Israel, leave the situation as prohibited. For then, the result, God forbid, will be to bring about a great desecration of God's name, (Orah Mishpat, Jaffa 1985, sect. 112, fol. 126b), and cf. Mishpat Cohen no.76). [12]

It is precisely this kind of concern that demands the careful pursuit of halakhic clarification and determination. [13]

[1] See on this whole subject the comprehensive and penetrating analytical study of Avi Sagi, in his The Open Canon: On the Meaning of Halakhic Discourse, New York 2007, pass.; Eliezer Berkovitz, Not in Heaven: The Nature and Function of Halakha, New York 1983, pp. 50–53. See further Yitzhak Yosef, Maarekhet ha-Shulhan vol. 2, Jerusalem 2010, on the rationale for ruling according to a minority opinion where there is great loss—hefsed merubeh, or in special circumstances—shaat ha-dehak, and ibid. p. 642, as to whether the rulings in the Shulhan Arukh are final and certain or remain in the area of uncertainty—mi-koah safek, (citing as examples, Hayyim David Hazan, Responsa Nediv Lev, Salonica-Jerusalem 1862–1866, Hoshen Mishpat sect.50, and his father Rephael Yosef Hazan, in his Hikrei Lev vol. 3, Salonica 1787, Yoreh Deah sect.127, and others). See further Hanina Ben Menahem, Judicial Deviation in Talmudic Law: Governed by Men, not by Rules, London Paris etc. 1991, pp. 158–165, on using minority views, and pp. 173–182, on horaat shah.

[2] And see also ibid. pp. 104–109. See also above note 109. And here we may add the following references: R. Ovadiah Yosef, Yabia Omer vol. 10, Jerusalem 2004, Yoreh Deah sect. 43; R. Meir Sigron, Or Torah 44/2 (532). 2012, pp. 153–156; Meiri to Sanhedrin 32b, p. 144, that one should always try to find compromise and rule mercifully, i.e., leniently; Y. Porat, in Or ha-Mizrach 12/1, 540 1963, pp. 6, 8, on R. Naftali Tzvi Berlin's (Netziv) position on relying on alternative positions which are more lenient, etc.
[3] And see also my discussion in my Legitimacy and Necessity: Scientific Disciplines and the Learning of Talmud, Jerusalem 2006, pp. 23–25, and also pp. 60–63. On the Rema's use of minority opinions, see Asher Ziv, Rabbenu Mosheh Isserles (Rema), New York 1972, pp. 109–110.
[4] Here I may add that the standard rule is that when there is a difference of opinion between an earlier and a later authority, we usually follow the later one, for even though he may be a lesser scholar, he is, as it were, a dwarf on the shoulders of a giant, who has a broader horizon. (On this phrase, see Shmuel Ashkenazi, Alfa Beta Kadmaita de-Shmuel Zeira, Jerusalem 2000, pp. 322–327.) The Meiri was intimately acquainted with the Rambam's writings, but still took an independent position. (See on this principle of Halakha ke-Batrai, in my Darkah shel Halakha, Jerusalem 2007, p. 9, and most recently the remarks of R. Yaakov Hayyim Sofer, in Or Israel 17/1 (63), 2011, pp. 240–242, where he also brings a variety of sources proving that one follows the later authority, even when he is single opinion against many. He also draws the parameters within which this rule may be applied.) See above note 67.

On the very important issue of how we act or react when discovering new sources (or readings) that were unknown to earlier posekim and might change the halakha, I wrote extensively in my Legitimacy and Necessity: Scientific Disciplines and the Learning of Talmud, Jerusalem 2006, pp. 22–25, 58–63, and again in my Netivot Pesikah, Jerusalem 2008, pp. 31–41. We showed there that the Hazon Ish believed that "new data" cannot change established halakha. (See S. Leiman, Tradition 19, 1981, pp. 301–310, for a full discussion of the Hazon Ish's view see further S.Z. Havlin, Ha-Maayan 8:2, 1968, pp. 35–37; M. Bleich, Tradition 27, 1993, pp. 22–55; Y. Tzvi Halevi Lehrer, Tzefunot 16, 1992, pp. 68–73; S. Spiegel, Amudim be-Toledot ha-Sefer ha-Ivri: Hagahot u-Megihim , Ramat-Gan 1993, pp. 495, 508–513, and finally, Benjamin Brown, Ha-Hazon Ish, Jerusalem 2001, pp. 392–395.)

In his opinion information that was not known to the Beit-Yosef, for instance, such as that found in the Meiri, was hidden from him by divine providence, so that the halakha be crystallized as is was. The later discovery of the Meiri cannot change that crystallized halakha of the Beit-Yosef.
A similar view is voiced by R. Aharon David Deitsch (cited in the introduction to Y.N. Stern's edition of Hiddushei ha-Hatam Sofer al Sugyot ve-Perek Shevuat ha-Edut, 1929) in the name of the Hatam Sofer as follows:
I heard from our good teacher the author of the Hatam Sofer z"l, who said of himself that when a question comes before him, he reads the question before he examines it in depth, for he has to concentrate his thought so that he only wishes to respond to his questioner, [reading] the truth before Him that gives the Torah, be He blessed. And afterwards, that which occurs to him to reply, he regards as the truth. [And] even if later the questioner raises a difficulty from a gemara or the posekim, one that had he remembered at the time of writing [his response], he would have changed his ruling, and would not have bothered to justify his [earlier] opinion and ruling; even so, since the Holy One blessed be He in the first instance hid this [data] from him, and he was certain of himself that he had searched for the truth, he would put his mind to justifying his first opinion and legitimate it through a deep analysis. [My emphasis]

See Maoz Kahana's M.A. thesis, Hebrew University Jerusalem 2004, p. 107, where he brings further evidence that this indeed was the Hatam Sofer's position, referring us to his responsum, Evan ha-Ezer vol. 2, no.102, from 1809, (which in turn refers to R. Yonatan Eibeschutz' Urim ve-Tumim, Jerusalem 1977, sect.125).

However, we showed that the Rema to Hoshen Mishpat 25:2, wrote:
But if at times there is a responsum of a Gaon which was not mentioned in the books, and we find them (later on) differing from him, we do not have to follow the later authorities, because it is possible that they did not know the view of the Gaon, and had they known it they would have withdrawn their view (Maharik, sect.94).

So too he writes in his responsum no.19 (ed. A. Ziv, Jerusalem 1971, p. 128) concerning minhagim (customs):
But in a place where something was innovated and this was unknown to the earlier authorities… it is certainly the case that it is permitted to enact new enactments… for we can presume that the early authorities would not have make their enactment in such a situation.

And, indeed, this is the majority view, see Kenesset ha-Gedolah to Yoreh Deah 37, Beit Yosef, no.50, 149. See further on this matter, R. Yaakov Hayyim Sofer, Beit Ya'akov (Jerusalem, 1985), p. 19, n.5, 52–53; and his Tiferet Yitzhak (Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 46, 115, and his copious references in his Hadar Yaakov, vol. 6, Jerusalem 2006, pp. 195–197, etc. Hence, discoveries of new early texts of Geonim and Rishonim should certainly be taken into account. A case in point is the Meiri, who was only recently fully discovered, and in whose writings we find numerous pesakim of relevance to our day. (See Beit Ya'akov, p. 52, n.17.) See eg. R. Ovadiah Yosef, Yabia Omer, vol. 4, Orah Hayyim 24:11, who writes that "had the Aharonim, who ruled stringently [on a certain issue] known the words of Meiri (to Rosh ha-Shanah 28b), who plainly holds the opposite view, they would certainly have abandoned their own conclusions in favor of his" (p. 103). And so too in vol. 4, Orah Hayyim 5:1, he writes, "and had the aforementioned Aharonim seen the responsum of R. Abraham son of the Rambam, they would surely not have differed from him" (p. 48). See further his introduction to his volume 5.
A further aspect of this issue may perhaps be seen in the frequently found argument that one does not have to follow a specific early authority because he did not yet know the Zohar, which was only revealed after his time. See, for example, Lewy, Minhag Yisrael Torah,pp.107, 132, etc. See also, other outstanding halakhic sources, such as the response of the Maharam (Rabbi Meir b. Barukh) of Rothenberg, (see, for example, R. Josef Katz, She'erit Yosef, ed. Ziv,(New York, 1984), sec.62, p. 149, etc). The argument is, of course, that had they had known the Zohar, they would have ruled in accordance with it. And the same argument is applied to the rulings of the Ari. Thus, for example, R. Yitzhak Barda (Responsa Yitzhak Yeranen, vol. 3, sec.13) writes, "had the Poskim known what the Ari knew, they would have reversed their opinions." So too, the Hida writes (Birkei Yosef, Orah Hayyim, 421: 1, etc.), "We follow him (the Ari) often even when he rules contrary to Maran (=R. Yosef Karo). For the rabbis maintained (kim le-hu Rabanan), that had Maran heard the words of the Ari, he would have chaged his mind." (See M. Hallamish, Kabbalah in Liturgy, Halakha and Customs [Ramat-Gan, 2000], chapter 5, p. 117–145 [Hebrew].)

We could add many additional sources to bear out our contention, but let us suffice with just one more example, a responsum of the Avnei Nezer, of R. Avraham Bornstein of Sochotchov, Orah Hayyim 362:
And it is known that the second part of the letter was published in our time [Lvov 1860], and in the time of R. Meir of Lublin (16 cent.) and the Magen Avraham (17 cent.), it was not published, and (hence) his words gain no mention. And it is possible that had they known of it they would have changed their opinion, since in an issue of rabbinic status (mi-derabanan) it is advisable to take the lenient position.
Furthermore, see R. Ovadiah Yosef, Halikhot Olam vo.6, Jerusalem 2001, p. 226, where he argues that in a case where the Beit Yosef for some reason was unaware of a Yerushalmi text and a whole range of Rishonim ruled in accordance with that text, had the Beit Yosef been aware of all this material, he surely would have ruled differently. He brings a number of authorities who hold this position (the Hida in his Shut Hayyim Shaal vol. 1, sect.56; idem, Yosef Ometz sect. 80 ad fin.; R. Yehudah Ayash, Shut Benei Yehudah, vol. 2, sect.124, fol. 202.b, etc.). I have been somewhat terse here, and even so have been overly extensive. For this subject requires a full examination in its own right.
[5] See Yitzhak Namni and Tzvi Idles, Samhuyot ha-Rov be-Halakha, Kiryat Arba 2002, p. 16, following on a statement by R. Shimon Shkop, Shaarei Yosher, Shaar 3, chapter 1. In fact, in many cases the Talmud does not adopt the majority view. See Paul Heger, The Pluralistic Halakkah: Legal Innovations in the Late Second Temple and Rabbinic Periods, New York 2003, pp. 187–200, in a section entitled " Preference for Individual Opinion."
[6] See most recently R. Elhanan Wasserman, Kuntres Divrei Sofrim, ed. Daat Sofrim, 2014, p. 78 note 85.
[7] Compare R. Menasheh of Ilya's notion of "relativism in the Talmud" and "The Supressed Minority,” on which see Yitzhak Barzilay, Manasseh of Ilya: Precursor of Modernity Among the Jews of Eastern Europe, Jerusalem 1999, pp. 98–113.
[8] On this halakhic concept, see what I wrote in Darkah shel Halakha (Jerusalem: 2007, 117–118, 140–141, 175–177); Minhagei Yisrael, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: 1994, 53–54); idem vol. 8 (Jerusalem: 2007, 263); Encyclopedia Talmudit, vol. 10 (Jerusalem: 1961, 32–41).

Bension Cohen of New York (in an internet communication from Sept. 15, 2010) would wish that there be here an amplified explanation of R. Avraham-Abush's ruling so that it be more clearly understood. He would interpret it as follows:
….. both the slaughterer and the Rabbi were caring for the poor, they were concerned about Mitzvot she-Bein Adam le-Havero as well as the Mitzvot Bein Adam la-Makom. The lung is one of the least desirable organs for a butcher, generally sold to the poor. The strict rendition of treifa, the slaughterer argued, would make all the poor who rely on this meat not to have the ability to celebrate the holiday with a little meat, causing the poor unnecessary anguish, before Yom Tov. Therefore, … the Rabbi who recognized the potential anguish, of the poor not having cheap meat for Yom Tov as well as the greater monetary loss required of them to purchase clearer portions of the meat, rendered a lenient pesak predicated on the shitah…. Presented in this… (chapter). There is a double consideration of Kevod ha-Kelal and the recognition of the Tzaar. The explanation presented… while very lofty presents an argument made by a true Gadol.

My thanks to Mr. Cohen for this insightful amplification, which is certainly much clearer and more forceful than a mere reference to the concept of hefsed merubeh, which might lead one to the erroneously simplistic conclusion that when it comes to money the Rabbis are ready to be lenient, (as Cohen writes, warning us against such an understanding). This is, indeed, partially true, but requires a detailed understanding of the concept of hefsed merubeh, for which reason I gave some basic references.

Here we may add that there is a general misconception that it is easier to rule stringently—le-humra, thus avoiding the dangers of permitting the forbidden. However, the Rosh, in his response, Klal Bet, sect.17 ad fin., writes, "and he who rules forbidding something must bring clear and strong evidence, for the Torah was concerned for the property of Israel. Further details may be found in R. Yitzhak Yosef's Ein Yitzhak, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: 2009, 298–306, 596).
A different approach to a similar situation is told of R. Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. It was his way to be extremely stringent in cases of kashrut for himself. But when it came to others, he feared to mistakenly declare something not kosher, thus causing damage and as it were stealing other people's property. On one occasion, he felt he had no alternative but to declare some meat non-kosher, "even though according to the Shach it is kosher, I may not cause you monetary loss and be considered a thief according to the view of the Shach." There and then, on the spot he took from his purse the value of the animal and gave it to the butcher, (A. Tobolsky, Hizaharu be-Mamon Haverchem [Bnei Brak: 1981], 249).
[9] On the Relationship between man and his Maker etc., ibid.
[10] See my discussion in Darkah Shel Torah, 140–141. Here we may add the following story brought by Meir Tamari in his Al Chet: Sins in the Marketplace (Northvale, N.J. and London: 1996, 24):
A shohet, "ritual slaughterer," once came to the Chafetz Chaim fo advice, saying, "The laws of shehitah are so many and difficult I am afraid that I may sin and cause others to sin through an infringement of them. I think I will go into business." The Chafetz Chaim's reply was simple and direct: "If your major concern is the safety of your soul, you should remain a shohet. The laws of the marketplace and of money are far more numerous and onerous, while God, your partner, is an ever-present witness and judge to any deviations."

We find much the same idea reflected in the Netziv (R. Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin), in his Haamek Davar to Genesis 20:7, "[Now therefore restore the man his wife; for he is a prophet], and he shall pray for thee, and thou shalt live":

According to what we have explained… that the sin was that [Avimelech] caused grief to our forefather Abraham, surely he only needed to appease him, and there was no need for prayer. However, from here we may learn that one who sins against his neighbor also sins against God, and it is not sufficient to appease one's neighbor alone. One must also beg forgiveness from God. And for this reason he needed Abraham's prayer, in order to be completely expiated.

[11] To understand this "hint,” we must see it in its fuller context as recorded in B. Sanhedrin ibid. There we are told that:
…Once a cow whose uterus was missing [was brought before] R. Tarfon who fed it to dogs, (because he regarded it as not kosher). And the case was brought before the Sages at Yavneh and they declared it Kosher… Said R. Tarfon, "Your donkey has gone, Tarfon.” Rashi explains: Namely, I must sell my donkey in order to repay the loss of the cow to its owners.

There may also be a word-play on Tarfon-Tareif.
See continuation of the text, where R. Akiva confronts him that he does not have to pay for the "damage" he did.
[12] On which B. Gelman, in his article in Milin Havivin 3, 2007, p. 90, comments:

Rabbi Kook realized that permissive rulings, when appropriate, increase the public's trust in rabbinic leadership, and with increased trust will come increased levels of observance from a trusting public. Conversely, needless, stringent rulings can lead to distrust, less observance, and a breakdown in rabbinic authority. While Rabbi Kook issued these warnings regarding Passover stringencies, his words can easily and appropriately be applied to other areas of halakha as well.

[13] Finally, we should also take account of the statement in Y. Berakhot 2 ad fin., and Y. Shabbat 1:1, that one who is exempt from something and nonetheless does it is an ignorant person (hediot). I discussed this principle at length in my On the Relationship of Mitzvot Between Man and His Neighbor and Man and His Maker, Jerusalem New York 2014, chapter 10, pp. 69–78, which needs no repetition here. I would only add a reference to R. Yosef Zechariah Stern, Zekher Yehosef vol. 1, Jerusalem 2014, sect.67, pp. 318–320, who, in his usual fashion, gives plentiful pertinent references to the discussion.

Change is necessary

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks published “Lessons in Leadership” in 2015. Professor Ronald Heifetz who wrote the Forward points out that the rabbi is stressing that people of all religions and cultures should not sit passively and rely on the decisions of authorities and even God, and that Sacks encourages “a change of people’s attitude, values, and behavior.” This requires thought, action, and perseverance. “One has to sift through what to keep (as part of their lives), what to discard and which innovations will enable (them) to survive.” Progress “demands not just someone who provides answers from on high, but changes …. As Sacks put it… (we need to) become God’s partner in the ongoing work of creation.” God, or we might say the Torah, also changes. “Sacks suggests that since the partnership between God and humankind is real, perspectives flow both ways. Deliberation takes place – top down, bottom up. God (wants us to change and) changes the (divine) plan based on dialogue (between humans and the divine). We must learn to listen; God listens too.”

Jonathan Sacks is one of the great leaders of Jewry today. He served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation and the Commonwealth for twenty-two years from 1991 until 2013. While this recent book focuses on the lessons that each of the 54 biblical portions teach about leadership, he writes that he is speaking about a general ongoing approach to life. He speaks of all kinds of leaders, of countries, communities, families, parents, as well as leadership of one’s personal life, becoming what the Torah wants individuals to become. “The Lord may be our shepherd, but no Jew was ever a sheep.” He writes: “Applying inflexible rules to a constantly shifting political landscape destroys societies,” and to do so in our personal lives, destroys our lives and makes it impossible to be all that we can be. He notes that “the Torah does not contain a word that means “obey” because blind obedience is not a virtue in Judaism.”

Maimonides

This stress on change and not authority may appear to be an improper view, especially of a religious leader. But the wisest Jew Maimonides said the same thing in the twelfth century. He wrote that this is why God placed eyes in front of our faces, not in back. While the term “tradition” is used frequently in discussions about Jewish values and practices usually in a praiseworthy fashion, Maimonides warns us to be skeptical of traditions, no matter what their source and no matter how many people insist that the tradition is correct. He writes in his Commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates that people must test all traditions, whether they are medical treatments taught by the famed physicians Hippocrates (c.460-c.370 BCE) and Galen (129-c.200 CE) or Jewish values by learned rabbis, and examine whether these traditions are logical, help improve people and society, and conform to science. No one would rely on medical advice that is over two thousand years old without examining modern scientific findings; other traditions are no different.

Reliance on God is wrong

Sacks warns us not to “leave everything to divine intervention…. It is not what God does for us that changes the human situation. It is what we do for God.” People need leaders, who are “unafraid to face the challenges of today and build for tomorrow instead of, as so often happens, fighting the battles of yesterday.” One cannot rely on yesterday’s decision; “no two generations are alike.”

We dare not sit passively while alive and seek God in a realm beyond life. We must seek God in life and in how we live. God gave us a mind, a body, and society, and we must treasure them and constantly seek to improve them. We are not defined by what happens to us but by how we respond to what happens to us.

What do the Bible and others say?

The failure of leadership, whether of others or of oneself results from a failure to act, “Judaism is God’s call to human responsibility.” According to the Bible commentator Rashi to Genesis 6:9, God whispered to the patriarch Abraham, “Don’t wait for me. Go on ahead.” When God called out to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, after they ate the forbidden fruit, “Where are you,” it was a call “not directed only to the first humans. It echoes in every generation.” Righteousness is not leadership.” True leaders have “the courage not to conform…. They have a vision (of the future), not what is, but what might be. They think outside the box. They march to a different tune…. Dead fish go with the flow. Live fish swim against the current.”

Rather than repeating ancient mistakes, following the traditional practices of old, people need to change. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said, “since the world never stops for a moment, and the pattern of power changes like the movement of a kaleidoscope, you must constantly reassess chosen policies towards the achievement of your aims.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that his aim in philosophy is “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Sacks explained: “The fly is trapped in the bottle. It searches for a way out. Repeatedly it bangs its head against the glass until at last, exhausted, it dies. Yet the bottle has been open all the time. The one thing the fly forgets to do is to look up. So, sometimes, do we.”

“Why did God call on Abraham to challenge Him (regarding God’s decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18)? Was there anything Abraham knew that God did not know? The idea is absurd. The answer is surely this: Abraham was to become the role model and initiator of a new faith, one that would not defend the human status quo but challenge it.” Exceptional as many societies were, one of the most remarkable phenomena in history is that, according to the Torah, God chose the very people who challenge heaven itself.

“What is it that made Jacob – not Abraham or Isaac or Moses – the true father of the Jewish people?” Jews are called “Children of Israel,” one of Jacob’s names. Because more than the others, Jacob faced repeated crises, stumbled at times, and suffered. “But Jacob endured and persisted…. To try, to fall, to fear, and yet keep going: that is what it takes” to grow.” Winston Churchill wrote: “success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” The Lubavitcher Rebbe said, we need to recognize that a descent can lead to an ascent.

Women

Unlike many of his Orthodox rabbinic contemporaries, Jonathan Sacks emphasizes that women should, like men, be leaders, not just acquiescent wives. The Torah teaches that there were “six courageous women without whom there would not have been a Moses”: Moses’ mother, his sister, two midwives, Moses’ wife, and Pharaoh’s daughter who adopted Moses. Four of these women were not Abraham’s descendants. Leviticus Rabba 1:3 states that Pharaoh’s daughter acted so well “that (she, among nine others) entered paradise in their lifetime.” There were also seven female prophetesses: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah, and Esther (Megilla 14a) and great female Torah scholars “from the Mishnaic period (Beruriah, Ima Shalom) until today.” Without women there would have been no Moses and no Abrahamic faiths. Women changed the world in the past and should do so today.

This is a great book that opens the mind and frees individuals from improper stultifying traditions. It is filled with wisdom, and generally contains more than one wise statement on every page that encourages us how to live.

Good morning. I would like to thank Tom Severson, Michael Davis, David Nelson for inviting me to speak to you this morning and the many of you for allowing me to talk with you today.

"It's 2:00 in the morning. We are at Hackensack University Medical Center in Northern Jersey and are grieving beyond tears and words. Our younger son, Daniel, hasn't been feeling well for a couple of days, complaining of back pain and shortness of breath.

“Two hours ago, what we thought was perhaps a virus or something tied to the heat and humidity was something much worse. Our little boy has cancer.

“Just two days ago, Daniel had scored two goals in a street hockey game at camp, a performance more impressive when realizing he was playing with a collapsed left lung.

“For whatever reason, we have been hit with a challenge we never sought. But with God's help and the strength of friends and family and a terrific medical team, we fully expect Daniel to celebrate his Bar-Mitzvah in three years and hopefully to marry and raise a family.”

I wrote this for CSP Daily News on July 5, 2013 – 9 days after Daniel fell ill -- as I prepared to take a short leave of absence.

Today, nearly 2 ½ years later, I am speaking publicly for the first time about the trials, challenges and the profound appreciation of a faith that had to transcend its routine.

For much of my life I have prayed every day. I grew up in Boston – and as many of you know I’m a devout Red Sox fans. I was raised with an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, one imbued with a sincere pride in our religious faith, coupled with a deep love of people of all backgrounds.

More recently, I have come to appreciate a certain insight. It is one thing to go to Church or Temple or a Mosque and recite the daily or weekly prayers when there is little at stake. Oftentimes, in this scenario, it is we who define God – what He means to us, the role He plays in our daily lives.

It is another thing to cry in our prayers, to wonder if God is truly listening and whether we will receive the favorable answer that we seek. In this relationship it is God defining who we are, who I am and the relationship that God and I share.

This has been my life over the past two years. I pray three times a day, every day. Prayer has always served as my spiritual food much as breakfast, lunch and dinner provide the nutritional source to empower us through our day and evening.

With Daniel’s cancer, prayer took on an additional role – that of medicine, my cure, my hope.

There is a beautiful and yet complex story in the Bible. It occurs in Chapter 20 of Genesis. We have just completed the story of Lot and his two daughters and how after the destruction of Sodom and Gemorra. Thinking that the world had been destroyed, Lot’s two daughters intoxicate their father and have relations with him in order to bring new life. That’s the last we read about Lot and his life.

The story now moves to Abraham and Sarah. He is 99 and she is 89. For decades they try to have a child but without success. Time is certainly NOT on their side.
Living in the Near East, they travel South to the city of Gerar and as they do, Abraham notices that Sarah is still attractive. He suddenly fears that the people of this community may kill him if he is truthful about his marriage. So he tells Sarah to “lie,” to reply that she is his sister if asked about their relationship.

And indeed, such happens. The King – known as Abimelekh – literally “takes” Sarah. But before any hanky panky can happen, God appears to Abimelekh in a dream and says Sarah is married and that her husband Abraham is a Prophet.

God then punishes not only Abimelekh but his entire palace by blocking their orifices. After Abimelekh apologizes to Abraham and returns Sarah to him, Abraham prays for the King and his Court to be healed. God answers and Abimelekh and his crew are able to conceive and bear children.

It is this prayer of Abraham – of praying for others for the very thing that he and Sarah lacked – a child – that prompts God in the following chapter to reveal that he has remembered Sarah and that he’ll restore her youthfulness – V’HaShem Pakad et Sarah.
Interestingly, the Hebrew root PKD means more than just “remember,” it suggests that God took an accounting of the lives of Abraham and Sarah and affirmed their worthiness to be blessed with a child. Only then does Sarah bear her first and only child -- Isaac.

[Parenthetically, it is striking that the 3 vignettes of Lot, Abimelekh and Abraham/Sarah all deal with fertility and perpetuating or obstructing life.]
In the stories of Abimelekh and then Abraham/Sarah, there are inspiring lessons. The first is the power of prayer, of Abraham’s ability to intercede on behalf of Abimelekh and his Palace. The second is the altruism to place someone’s needs ahead of your own even when you share that very need. [Rashi]

This is where you come in. In the days after our discovery, you extended yourself and embraced me and my family. In less than one week after we learned of Daniel’s cancer, I received more than 150 emails from you – the leaders who make up our convenience-store industry.

Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Jews, as well as many who do not associate with a particular denomination, prayed for my son. And some of you – nearly 2 ½ years later – continue to pray for Daniel. How amazing. In the depths of my greatest pain you have been a source of salvation.

I’m happy to share that the daily medications of Mercaptuperine, the scheduled intake of Prednisone, Pentamadine, Methotrexate and countless other multi-syllabic, tongue-twisting drugs ? are nearly over. By next month, Daniel’s regular treatment ends.
We then embark on what is basically a six-month wait with intermittent treatment. If he is cancer-free, that portends well for his future. If cancer is found…

The shift from daily doses of medications to a certain hiatus is personally very frightening. The idea of meticulously preparing his medication has given us a sense of empowerment, a partnership between medicine and prayer; Man and God.

In just weeks, our partnership will change. In lieu of pills, prayer will be our sole representative, faith our lone agent. Truly the next six months will rest in the Hands of God.

One stage is nearly done, another soon to follow. What I know is what we all know –
Life truly is a Gift from God and it’s our mission to appreciate it each and every day.
When I wake up in the morning I recite a little prayer as soon as I open my eyes. It is called the Modeh Ani. It is a prayer of gratitude to God for restoring our soul – for giving us a new day. It is up to us to make each and every day a worthy gift from God.

Thank you so much and Bless you.

Devil in Jerusalem
By Naomi Ragen

This is a very well-written, gripping, and suspenseful novel that is based on true horrendous events among Jews, Christians, Muslims, Atheists, and indeed all people. Although depressing, the story needs to be told to protect vulnerable and insecure people from falling into the grip of cult leaders who lead innocent victims into believing that the cult leader is a “messiah,” a “god-like” figure, a man or woman who knows the ultimate truth, who is in conversation with angels and God, who is defending his gullible flock from demons, and aiding them to climb to loftier heights, to become what he or she claims God desires them to become.

Some of these cult leaders milk their followers of their wealth or part of it, leaving them to live in harsh conditions that is “better for them,” which “helps clean them,” while the cult leaders live in huge mansions in luxury, even flying in multi-million dollar planes.

Many of these leaders are sick psychopaths who derive unnatural pleasure from being able to control and manipulate people. Some, as the “messiah” in this tale enjoy hurting their followers and getting others to hurt people as they watch, or, as an American cult figure did, he poisoned hundreds of his flock.

While this book does not address it, there are many, too many, “ultra-religious” leaders, who although not reaching the level of a cult leader, also take advantage of insecure, often insufficiently educated people leading them to think that what they are teaching is true religion, while what they are saying is untrue. They attract many followers, even well-educated men and women, and cash in on them by taking donations and ego-bursts. They demand the observance of practices that reasonable religious leaders consider absurd and demeaning, even demonic, behaviors that cut off their congregants from friends and neighbors.

Naomi Ragen’s tale of a Jewish cult leader in Jerusalem is based on some true events that occurred in Israel, but while Jewish it is an unfortunate universal tale. Irony is too weak a word to describe the striking similarities of the Jerusalem cult leader to what occurred in ancient times in Jerusalem’s Valley of Hinnom, called Gehinnom in Hebrew, which came to be the word for “hell,” where pagan priest were able to convince their followers to deliver their children to burn them as sacrifices to their god.

Ragen’s tale is the story of a loving couple, an educated woman and her loving husband who is not as educated as his wife, who is a well-meaning luftmensch, a man with his head in the clouds, who does not like to work. They are Americans from good families who moved to and settled in Israel because of their love of Judaism. He thinks that he should spend as much time as possible studying Talmud for he was told that this is what God wants. However, he soon becomes attracted to the study of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, which he really does not understand, and falls under the influence of the “messiah,” a charismatic, bearded, highly disturbed rabbi with a restricted group of followers who teaches practical Kabbalah. Although the husband spends time “studying,” he finds time to produce children. Soon, with half a dozen kids, and with little or no help from her husband, tired, feeling lost, and confused, she also falls under the “messiah’s” control.

What follows is bizarre, cruel, and unbelievable. She is led to do things no rational person would do. Brainwashed and convinced that what she is watching is good for her and her children, she looks on as her children are tortured, beaten, burned, forced to eat vomit and feces. She allows the “messiah” to do tormenting things to her and to her husband, and to cause her to afflict her husband, and he her.

This is a powerful tale, a story well-worth one’s time to read and enjoy, for Naomi Ragen is a superb writer. But it is also a reminder that there are many in society today, even in Israel, who take advantage of people, and we must beware and not passively and naively trust all that we hear and see even when the words and acts are spoken and performed by a black garbed saintly-appearing rabbi.

Religious mis-education engendered an egregious handicap for second-generation survivors. Theological implications of the Holocaust were typically ignored in yeshiva curricula and teacher-student discussions. Religious instruction consistently disregarded, and even censored, aspects of scripture that could have been utilized to reconcile some negative Holocaust experiences with religious doctrine. Instead, second-generation survivors were subjected to an idealistic religious perspective where God is consistently a just, kind, merciful micromanager, where human suffering is attributed to transgression and guilt. Whereas such an educational stance may be functional for children growing up in a relatively just world, it is definitely inadequate for youngsters from families who had just rebounded from the Holocaust and who confront its traumatic reverberations daily. Coupled with the negativity that permeated their home environments, this lapse in education resulted in disturbing—and often insurmountable—dissonance in many second-generation survivors. Utilizing developmental theory to inform the quality of relationship one has with God, the dissonance of second-generation survivors coming of age is annotated by discordant religious, moral, and psychological worldviews that were not ameliorated by proper education
A Jewish Modern Orthodox second-generation survivor who is a research clinician in trauma, the author highlights clinical insights from the perspective of the psychopathology of trauma and abuse. Paralleling this effort, he charts his own trials and tribulations as a student—juggling a heritage of despair with disparate teachings at home and yeshiva as he trekked through the ruins of his people in search of a kind God.

Introduction

Philosophy is not a central topic in formal education. Viewed as somewhat esoteric and less relevant than other disciplines in modern society, it is rarely offered in secondary schools (even as an elective) and is not in the core curriculum of higher education. Religious colleges and seminaries, of course, do feature philosophy as a required course.
However, religion and philosophy are less central to Judaism than conduct and behavior. Scholars across the Jewish denominations concur that Judaism is primarily a religion of deed, not of creed (Bleich, 1992; Borowitz, 2014). As such, theology and deliberations about the nature of God are not part of the typical discourse among Jews, even in synagogues and institutions of higher learning. Jewish religious instruction is primarily task- or behavior-oriented. Thus, the topics that are seen as “relevant” in religious schools usually relate to daily behavior and religious practices. Theology and religious philosophy are hardly of interest to elementary and high school students. It is therefore not surprising that typical yeshiva curricula paid little attention to theology or philosophy, other than frequent references to a kind, merciful God.
For the post-Holocaust generation, however, The Question of God was a burningly relevant issue. God’s nature was at the crux of the junction of its history and its religion. Religious education magnified The Question to the level of an enigma, since this generation of yeshiva students was exposed to scriptures featuring a host of references to a hostile and vengeful God, all the while being taught that God was merciful.
This educational conundrum left the instruction about God to parents, to the community, and to the media. Since second-generation survivors had parents who were survivors—by definition, a good amount of their theological “home education” was informed by the open sores of recent Holocaust experiences. The “street education” they received from the community at large—typically consisting of Holocaust survivors—echoed and reinforced the discordant perspective they absorbed at home about an unjust world managed by an unreliable God. Rounding out the circle, Yiddish-language media they were exposed to—newspapers, radio, contemporary lyrical music recordings, and library books—cemented the very same unhelpful understanding of God’s role in the world. Absent contravening corrective education in school, this orientation is what second-generation survivors internalized and took with them into adulthood. This internalization was a constant counterpoint to the merciful God icon championed by the religious education establishment.
Yeshiva students were also exposed to scripture references to God as Father. This complicated the internalization of God in this cohort. For many survivors and their families, their understanding of God’s role did not coincide with the imagery of a kind caring father. In another vein, second-generation survivors often had a non-idealized “father image” because of the perceived weakness of their parents during the Holocaust. Developmental theory posits that the God concept that children internalize is very much linked to their formative experience with parental figures. As such, the God-father contextualization negatively affected the ability of their children to establish a secure relationship with God. God as Father is an effective religious educational parallel only when Father is an idealized icon. It is not a functional parallel for those with a weak father image.
In the following sections, each of the above noted factors are detailed and discussed, from social, religious, and educational perspectives. Scriptural inconsistencies, variations in perspectives about God, providence (especially divine micromanagement), and trauma are elaborated, elucidating the plight of second-generation Holocaust survivors as they contended with religious inconsistencies within the context of their education. The cognitive and psychological coping modes of this cohort are elaborated and evaluated. Their challenges in establishing an adaptive relationship with God are explored, in light of an educational system that failed to address—and even exacerbated—the dilemmas and contradictions they faced.

The Environmental Influence

Yeshiva education was particularly crucial to second-generation survivors who immigrated to major American urban centers. In the characteristic absence of discussions with parents about theological/religious significance of the Holocaust, the pervasive input these children were exposed to came from Yiddish media. In a sense, these media became primary transmitters of the Holocaust legacy to our generation.
A number of Yiddish newspapers thrived in the post-war era, and they featured a continuous diet of pieces saturated with interpretations of Holocaust experiences. Needless to say, the content of these pieces, which were usually reactive rather than educational or reflective, shaped the orientation of its young readers in a manner that was not conducive to developing an adaptive perspective.
The public library was an important resource for the immigrant family. With traditional values for the “written word” and minimal expendable income, families took full advantage of the library. My childhood family of four usually checked out seven or eight books each Friday.
The libraries in Jewish neighborhoods offered a large number of Yiddish-language books. In our local branch, the stacks for the Yiddish collection numbered well over a thousand, and the collection was second in size only to English-language fiction. By the time I was in ninth grade, I had to search each Friday for books I had not read yet. I estimate that more than 75 percent of these books were depictions of Holocaust experiences.
As early as I can recall, our radio was always on during waking hours, and it was tuned to WEVD, the Yiddish-language radio station. A good percentage of the programming consisted of songs and lyrics that found resonance among Holocaust survivors. Late evenings, when WEVD stopped broadcasting, the air was filled with the sound of phonograph recordings of contemporary Yiddish music. In retrospect, it seems that radio and records gave voice to the feelings that our parents could not verbalize to us. Indeed, many of my generation were given to humming the tunes of these compositions habitually, perhaps as a confirmation of the message conveyed by the lyrics.
With the limited venue of contemporary Jewish music, it is not surprising that the children soon knew all of the songs and lyrics by heart. One gets a poignant feeling of the mentality of the era in the song Eyli, Eyli (My God, My God; Heskes, 1992, No., 1194; Nulman, 1972, No. 74), written at the turn of the twentieth century, and popularized in the Warsaw Ghetto. The lyrics were disseminated widely when they were recorded by major cantors, especially Yossele Rosenblatt, and played regularly on New York Yiddish radio, rendering it the anthem of suffering of the contemporary Jew. I surely knew all the words of this piece and hummed its tune frequently as a child:

My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?
My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?
In fire and flames we have been burnt
Everywhere they shamed and mocked us
But no one could turn us away from You, my God
And from Your Holy Torah
From Your commandments, My God.
Day and night, I only think of You, my God.
I keep Your Torah and Your commandments with awe.
Save me, oh save me from danger
Like You once saved our fathers from an angry czar
Only You can help.
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

The tune left us all with in an atmosphere of confusion: If God helped in the past, why did he not help during the Holocaust? Why did God abandon his people?

Exposure to Confusing Scriptures

Seeking to inculcate us with compassion and kindness toward others, our teachers extolled us to emulate God (Deuteronomy 28:9: “You shall walk in His ways") using two general guidelines:
• You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy (Leviticus 19:2).
• For the Lord your God ... loves the stranger, providing him with food and clothing; and you too must love the stranger… (Deuteronomy 10:17–19).

These guidelines are elaborated by the Talmud into specifics:

Just as God is gracious and compassionate, you also should be gracious and compassionate (Talmud Shabbat 133b). Just as He is called “righteous,” so should you be righteous ... Just as He is called “pious,” so should you be pious (Sifri, Deuteronomy 11:22). Just as He clothes the naked ... visits the sick ... comforts the mourners ... and buries the dead ... so should you (Talmud, Sota 14a). [1]

But, the elaborations ignored verses that pull in the other direction, exemplified by the following:

• The Lord is a man of war (Exodus 15:3).
• The Lord is a jealous and avenging God (Nahum 2:6).
• The Lord is a God who avenges (Psalms 94:1).
• He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations (Exodus 34:6–7).
• Thou hast slain, and thou hast not pitied (Lamentations 3:43).

There are many other biblical passages that feature harsh attributions to a vengeful God (who metes out punishment), passages that hardly coincide with the idealization of a loving God. A straightforward reading of the Bible may well instill within a child a hostile image of God. Indeed, some contemporary authors who take an unfettered look at scriptures have concluded that God, as he is represented in the Bible, is savage and sadistic (Armstrong, 1972). Moreover, there is a distinct Jewish liturgical theme accusing God of atrocities in Jewish liturgy dating back to the Book of Lamentations. While one might expect these discrepancies to be addressed directly in Bible classes, the fact is that students are often put into an untenable position that implicitly coaxes them to ignore any biblical passages that do not coincide with the selective portrayal of God as just and merciful.
It is fairly commonplace for a child in the traditional yeshiva system to be familiar with the entire Pentatuchal text at an early age. Contradiction and implausibility in biblical text are often “explained away” by commentators homiletically by interpreting some texts as being figurative. However, children are not used to allegories, making it likely that children, with their concrete tendencies, will have a hard time disregarding the literal meaning of scripture.
As the Bible was our main focus of study and reading, we were generally raised with the notion of a divine system with rules of fair play. Punishment for misdeed was part of this system, of course. Hence, the dictum we learned in Deuteronomy 24:16, “Fathers shall not be put to death for children, neither shall the children be put to death for fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin” made perfect sense. However, we were also taught about God’s reactions that did not conform to such standards. Take, for example, Exodus 20:5: “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” Sadly, such discrepancies were never acknowledged, far less addressed, by our teachers.
Familiar with the Pentateuch in grade school, I remember being particularly struck by Moses’ admonition to the Jews of Egypt, to visibly mark their doors in anticipation of the plague of the slaying of the Egyptian first-borns, so that their children not get caught up in the destruction aimed at the Egyptians. This was explained to us using constructs that imply God’s loss of control over the fury he unleashes: “Once permission has been granted to the Destroyer, he does not distinguish between the righteous and wicked” (Talmud Baba Kama 60a).
The Talmud tells us that when Moses asked God, “Teach me your ways” (Exodus 33:13), he was actually formulating the age-old question: “Why do the righteous suffer?” Various talmudic narratives (e.g., Sanhedrin 27b, Kiddushin 39b) suggest alternate explanations. These include suggestions that wicked parents cause suffering of their righteous offspring, that suffering purifies the soul, and that suffering serves to remove the slightest of sin residues to enable increased rewards in the afterlife.
Another approach in the scared literature is to see God as functioning in two alternative modes: Judgment and Mercy. Rashi, the primary biblical commentator, applies this dichotomy to a dual approach in conceptualizing God’s management of the world: Elohim stands for the God of judgment who judges and punishes the evil of the world, while Jehovah symbolizes kindness and is the chief attribute that was extant at creation (Yitzhaki, 1090, Exodus 20:1). However, these explanations did not clarify my understanding of God nor his role during the Holocaust.

The Enigma of Providence: God as a Micromanager

There are divergent views within the Jewish literature about the degree of God’s involvement in the details of nature (Flavius Josephus, 75, 94). The scope of divine providence (hashgaha peratit in Hebrew; literally, “individual oversight”) ranges from a Personal God, who has detailed oversight of all human events (Talmud Hullin 7b), to the variable oversight of humans based on their level of righteousness (Maimonides, 1180), to the notion that there is oversight of the species but not of the individual (Nahmanides, 1230), to the disavowal of any divine control of human conduct, since it would negate free will (Ben Joseph, 925). The orientation accepted by contemporary mainstream Orthodoxy, however, favors the perspective of God’s detailed control of all human activity. Its essence is encapsulated in the following aphorism:

Know what is above you: an eye that sees and an ear that hears. All of your
activities are written in the book, and there is a reckoning for everything you do (Avot 2:1).

This is the view favored by the yeshiva system, and this is what was taught to the children of Holocaust survivors.
In his interpretation of providence during the Holocaust, Rabbi Soloveitchik views the Holocaust as a period when God actually removed himself from managing world events (Besdin, 1993). Labeled Hester Panim (literally, “Hiding the Face”), this theological maneuver does “explain” horrors of mass extermination, if one can accommodate a God who is absent from world events. [2]
Paralleling God’s judging role and merciful role, there is yet another persona of God in the hearts of Holocaust survivors that seems startling: one of capricious hostility. Analyzing the internal religious icons of survivors, we sometimes encounter a volatile figure with a bad temper—a mercurial God who can get “carried away” in his vengeance. This is a God who regrets his mistakes at times (Lawliss, 1994). Yet, during times of harsh judgment, He seems unapproachable. Consider the yearly liturgy recited by Jews for centuries during the Ashkenazic High Holiday service, depicting the torture and murder of Israel’s sages some 2,000 years ago. Addressing the complaints of Israeli leaders about His actions, God responds:

If I hear another sound, I will transform the universe to water, I will turn the earth to astonishing emptiness—this is a decree from My Presence! (Yom Kippur Prayer Book, p. 643).

The Holocaust, in particular, is easily construed by some survivors—as it surely was perceived by many of my cohort—as an instance where the destructive forces unleashed by God “simply got out of control.” As children, the notion that the Jews needed to protect themselves from God’s wrath which was directed at their Egyptian oppressors seemed ungodly, leaving us with the unspoken understanding that our benevolent God sometimes gets “carried away” and overreacts in an unfair fashion—hardly a God one would be inclined to trust.
As one means of reconciling perceived divine harshness with the image of the benevolent God, I have been stunned to hear survivors (when they let their guard down) referring to God as “crazy” for instigating horrors. I am reminded of the adaptive attribution I see in the family members of Alzheimer’s patients who become uncharacteristically violent toward loved ones. “This is not the husband I know,” I often hear. “He has changed into another person. It’s as if he were possessed!” The tenor of this “explanation” resonates starkly with the various “excuses” by family members of a molesting parent: “It wasn’t his fault;” “He was under horrible pressure;” “He was not himself;” “It’s the drugs that made him do it.”
It has been suggested that an inconsistent God may be easier for people to relate to than a God with strict standards. Interpreting Cain’s understanding that God favored his brother Abel inappropriately, Goldin (2007) elaborates:

The reality of a thinking God, who demands compliance to His will, is too frightening to [Cain]. It is easier to believe in a Deity Who chooses favorites
by whim than to deal with the burden of God’s true demands. (p. 20)

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that children growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, given no rationalization of the horrors while being exposed to inconsistent depictions of God in the daily biblical studies, might revert to viewing God as willful, capricious, or apt to lose control.
There is a poignant finale to the Selihot (forgiveness prayers) of Ne’ilah (the concluding Yom Kippur service):

May it be your will, You who hears the sound of weeping,
That you place our tears, in your vial permanently.

As a person for whom the Holocaust is alive and current in my conscience, I have—at times—felt that this prayer adds insult to injury, so to speak. In my mind, it evokes the following excerpt from the analytic protocol of a patient with a history of childhood emotional neglect:

I cried, and my Mother did not come to help. I thought it was because she was
an evil mother. Then I found out it was because she could not hear me. That felt better….I always explained away the fact that my father failed to protect me or rescue me when it all happened. I thought to myself: He probably does not know, he does not realize what is really going on. It’s like he was deaf, maybe even dead. But when I finally realize that he was there all along, hearing me cry, and he did nothing—that really hurts!

Coping with Divine Dissonance

Left with a subjectively palpable presence of a dissonant God, the child is forced to grapple with a perceived discrepant duality. The viable options are to try to reconcile them or to take the perspective that they are inherently irreconcilable and resign oneself to an unsettled stance.
De-synthesizing is common in early childhood (when the child has not yet learned to reconcile behaviors that seem incompatible). However, it is also utilized by older children and adults as a regressive defense mechanism when faced by betrayal or extreme interpersonal disappointment. Referred to clinically as splitting, it can engender a pathological condition when it manifests in adulthood and results in two different inconsistent relationship styles toward the same person, with no attempt to reconcile them.
Viewed logistically, splitting is the most expedient approach to deal with incompatible representations of God. Consider the similar circumstance in which a child finds himself at the mercy of an all-powerful parent who behaves inconsistently toward the child—at times kind and understanding, and at other times vicious and harsh. In cases where the child has not had an opportunity to experience this parent previously in a consistent manner, splitting will be invoked by the ego. The child essentially learns to relate to the parent as if there actually were two parent figures here—a good parent and a bad parent. This orientation frees the child from dealing with contradictions. The parent is thus experienced as “wholly” benevolent when he or she is behaving in a kind manner, and “wholly” terrible when behaving poorly. I propose that this is exactly how the Orthodox Jewish child of Holocaust survivors—and survivors themselves—first related to God.
Survivors split God into two antithetical motifs. The split, engendered by the introduction to God in their early Bible studies as two different personas, was originally synthesized by positing that God is vengeful toward those who violate his commands and merciful to those who heed his rules. Yet, various scriptures and prayer texts contradicted this simplistic explanation.
Children, especially those who recognize inconsistency despite apologetics, manage to relate to God by splitting Him into two entities. Especially from the perspective of Holocaust survivors and their families, the God who perpetrated the Holocaust is not the merciful God they have known since childhood (and still cling to as damaged adults). [4]
Along with others in my cohort of second-generation survivors, I interpreted these “god variants” in a literal sense—with a distinct polytheistic flavor. Our “working model” of theology resembled Greek mythology. God existed as a good force competing with negative God-forces, based on our literal readings of biblical citations in the Prayer Book, which describe God as being “above all gods” (Psalms 135:5) or as punishing other gods (Jeremiah 46:25). As I saw it, the god of horrors actually had a different persona—and even a different name—than my God. Our God needed to be distanced from the divine aberration that brought indiscriminate destruction upon our families.[5]
It is noteworthy that de-synthesis actually has been posited as an intrinsic Jewish solution to eternal suffering. Some scholars elaborate a dialectic perspective, suggesting that the splitting mode adopted by children to deal with parental discrepancies is the preferred Jewish response to cope with the chronic societal oppression. From an adaptive perspective, the oppressive conditions of Jews in various European communities gave rise to distinct brand of humor, which was predicated on the promotion of illogic as a means of dealing with circumstances that were objectively insurmountable. In their brand of adaptive humor, Jews “defend” their future and their hope of survival by renouncing logic; as such, they refuse to be over-powered by the implications of a harsh reality (Juni & Katz, 1988; Juni, Katz, & Hamburger, 1996; Juni, & Katz, 2001). And that is no joke!

Our God, Our Father: Parallels and Repercussions

God was a constant part of the daily life of the Orthodox European Jew for many centuries. Yiddish vocabulary is permeated by direct references to God as a familiar player in all events, from the mundane to the colossal. In the Yiddish of Orthodox Jews, statements about the future are always qualified by the phrase “If God wills it.” When responding to a question about one’s welfare, the usual response is an unelaborated “Thank God,” with an occasional variation of “Thank God, well.” [6]
Developmentally, young children have a difficult time dealing with a parent who must, by definition, assume supportive and disciplinary roles at different times. Lacking the sophistication of adult reasoning and contextualizing, the child sometimes deals with this perceived contradiction by utilizing the aforementioned defense mechanism of splitting (Klein, 1935); this entails the effective de-synthesizing the parent as having two irreconcilable personas: one supportive, the other hostile. Klein posits that unless (and until) the child learns to synthesize different aspects of a parent into a meaningful whole, his or her internal world literally contains two separate representations of the same individual—a good Mother and the bad Mother, for example. Though they are, in truth, part objects (i.e., different aspects of the same object), these “mothers” are seen as distinct entities. [7]
Only if the child is fortunate enough to have a secure and supportive childhood, can he or she learn to synthesize these part objects and come to relate to a parent as a single entity whose characteristics vary based on situational contexts. This process and its challenges form the crux of the child’s assimilation of a healthy and positive ability to relate to others. [8]
If we recognize the relationship to God as a developmental process, it is reasonable to assume that the template of child-parent relations is relevant here as well. [9] For the child who is raised with God as a real feature of daily life, notions of a compassionate God must seem inherently incompatible with those of a vengeful and destructive God. Clearly, the God the child idealizes is the omnipotent benevolent God. The vengeful and punishing God is the one who deals with evil-doers and sinners. But, can the child deal with these intuitive incompatibilities any better than he or she can deal with the incompatibilities of the good mother and bad mother?
Fostering the notion of God as a kind father may seem disingenuous at the rudimentary level. At the very least, it deserves elaboration and qualification. I wish my High School administrators and staff, who included eminent masters of Jewish philosophy, had been forthright enough to discuss this imagery with us at a basic and honest level. While the image of kind father might be reconciled with harsh punishment, it certainly is incompatible with vindictiveness.[10] The intent of vengeance is not to help the one who is being punished; instead it is designed for the motive of the punisher. Mercy implies that punishment is withheld precisely in instances where it would be warranted. Not punishing, when punishment is unwarranted is not kindness—it is fairness. From a Western perspective, punishing children is not a means for a father to vent his rage; rather it is intended “for the good of the child” (i.e., educating, a lesson for the future.) Although the Western orientation may not be totally applicable to traditional Jewish culture, it seems that we, as children of the Holocaust, certainly deserved an honest discussion of the incongruity that this imagery engendered within us. Furthermore, coupled with a weak father image who was unable to help his family, and was himself brutalized during the Holocaust, this image of God resulted in an unwholesome conceptualization of God as well.

The Educational Failure

What are the cognitive options for an individual who is faced by a seemingly unkind God? The most salient option is disbelief:

It seems obvious that an omnipotent, omniscient, moral God would not allow injustice. Upon witnessing inequity, it is therefore perfectly natural to doubt God’s existence. (Kelemen, 1990, p. 91)

I wish to take issue with Kelemen’s conceptual formulation of the predicament of dealing with an apparently unjust God. For the child who was raised with God as a virtual feature of his formative environment, doubting God’s existence is not an option.
One might suggest that, unlike parents who constitute an undeniable concrete feature of the child’s world, and unlike the blatant anti-Semitism that Jews slammed into repeatedly—God’s relevance to the world of the child is unobservable and therefore dispensable, particularly when the role of God becomes so problematic to the child. How much simpler would it be to simply negate the entire god construct, and be rid of philosophical quandaries and emotional misgivings? Alas, the child who has been raised in a household where religion is part of daily life has no freedom of religion—at the functional level. Belief in God is part of his or her developmental paradigm. For one who was raised in the social crucible of Orthodox Judaism who is faced by this dilemma, the belief in God is imprinted indelibly on his or her soul.
In families identifying as Orthodox Jews, the icon of God is fixed in early childhood. It is part of the emotional structure that is socialized into the child by his parents as agents of the Orthodox Jewish culture. Children raised in this environment can no more easily disbelieve in God than they can disbelieve in Mother. It certainly becomes a major portion of his relationship repertoire with significant others, as the child is taught that his actions always entail a virtual interaction with an ever-present God. While a child may isolate from others when necessary, one can never escape the presence of God.
Although the child will certainly have the option of deciding whether to follow the dictates of religion at the behavioral level, he or she can no easier excise his beliefs in God than he or she can excise other basic tenets of reality that were inculcated in his formative years. Belief in God is essentially an emotionally implanted construct. To posit a cognitive rationale that can be utilized in choosing not to believe in a God who has been part of one’s life in early childhood is an oxymoron. Religious belief is not exclusively a logical operation. Rather, it is an orientation toward the world that is closer to emotion than it is to cognition. As a rational human being, one can certainly liberate oneself from the behavioral repercussions or dictates of childhood religious beliefs. However, emancipation from behavioral dictates does not incur freedom from an ingrained religious mindset that features an omniscient deity. [11]

It is interesting to note, in this context, the cultural connotations of the apostate, as the construct is formulated in the traditional orthodox Jewish literature. The Talmud (e.g., Avoda Zara 6b) divides apostasy into two categories: Those who violate Jewish law because they are tempted (by greed or desire), and those who do so for spite (where the spite is directed against religious authority figures—and perhaps even at God!). A blatant omission here is the option of one who rejects the very belief in God.
This omission, we argue, entails a cultural testimony that such rejection was not at all a viable option for children who are raised with the God construct as a household reality.
For those who are unwilling (or unable) to react to perceived divine injustice by relinquishing their belief in God, Keleman (1990) encourages them to consider the likelihood that there exists an explanation that we cannot comprehend:

Any rational person will admit that, in theory, the ways of God could be so complex that they defy human understanding. Man might simply be incapable of comprehending and morally evaluating the behavior of an omniscient, omnipotent Being. Just as appropriate actions taken by a parent can sometimes seem unjustified to young children, God’s actions might sometimes strike us as indefensible, despite their absolute righteousness. Our occasional inability to discern God’s goodness is not a repudiation of His existence as much as a confession of our own intellectual finitude. (p. 95)

As plausible as this option may be, it is a fact that it generally gets a poor reception among survivor families whose hurt is scarcely ameliorated by such a non-specific formulation. The same can be said of the approach to interpret biblical text non-literally, as is often seen in theological justifications of divine wrath.
The yeshiva curriculum has traditionally focused on Hebrew language skills,[12] transitioning toward the mastery of biblical texts after grade 2 or 3, shifting toward talmudic text mastery as students progress from elementary school to high school. As a rule, mastery of Talmud was the ultimate purpose of the traditional yeshiva.[13] While some schools also incorporated character development into the curriculum during high school (and this has endured through current practices), theology is noticeably absent.[14] This was the rule, rather than the exception, and was definitely the norm until the late 1960s, which was the period when second-generation survivors were educated.[15] At the least, this absence yielded students unequipped to deal with religious challenges they might encounter. However, for students who faced profound questions and theological contradictions in their own lives, this lack was resounding and profound.
As second-generation survivors, we experienced acute dissonance in the ethics classes we endured in high school. Although theology was not addressed directly, a “proper” concept of God was clearly intended to be internalized in the course of our education.[16] Values were taught as a form of Godliness, in accordance with the principle of imitatio dei (the imitation of God), by citing verses that exemplified the positive characteristics of God. For years, it baffled me that none of my classmates ever challenged the selectivity of these characteristics. We were all well versed in the scriptures cited in the Standard Prayer Book, and could enumerate alternate divine attributes that surely would not be idealized as models for our behaviors and traits. Furthermore, as a second-generation survivor, my immediate associations veered toward the horrific abuse my family had suffered (as we were taught—it was by the ever-present hand of God), and a host of biblical citations in the Prayer Book that championed another side of God’s path.
Unfortunately, the standard of accepted theology in yeshiva tends toward a micromanaging God. While only a few philosophically minded students inevitably become troubled reconciling divine control with the postulate of free will, this radical interpretation of Providence induces acute distress in those who come from a heritage of horrors—Holocaust survivors and their families. If God is posited to micromanage all human history and events, then the Holocaust is clearly not only condoned—but actually perpetrated by God. One can question whether the educational decision of yeshivas to adopt this version of providence made sense when second-generation Holocaust survivor students were cornered into seeing God as actually having perpetrated the Holocaust. [17]

Summary

The yeshiva education system failed second-generation Holocaust survivors by failing to address the theological implications of the Holocaust and by its selective teaching of concepts that preempted religious understanding of the Holocaust by the students. An inadequacy of commission featured the unequivocal presentation of God’s providence manifesting total causality for all human actions, which inevitably engendered negativity toward God by some of these students. Remarkable was the consistent inattention to textual descriptions of God as vengeful and angry, which may have been useful to the students in their coming to grips with a Jewish perspective of the heritage of suffering and injustice they were born into. To a child who was raised in the shadow of the death camps, God’s role during the Holocaust resonated with the censored “unkind” references to God in the scriptures. Many second-generation Holocaust survivors thus emerged from their educational experience with de-synthesized views of God, which yielded unwholesome religious functioning.

References

Ainsworth, M. D. S., & Bowlby, J. (1991). An ethological approach to personality development. American Psychologist, 46, 331–341.

Bell, M. (1991). An Introduction to the Bell Object Relations and Reality Testing Inventory. Los Angeles, CA: Western Psychological Services.

Besdin, A. R. (1993). Reflections of the Rav. Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Pub. Co.

Bleich, B. (1992). Understanding Judaism: The Basics of Deed and Creed. Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson.

Borowitz , E. B. (2014). Rethinking God and Ethics. H. Tirosh-Samuelson and A. W. Hughes (Eds.) Boston: Brill. Quote in “The need for Jewish philosophy,” p. 43.

Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1954). An Object-Relations Theory of Personality. New York: Basic Books.

Freud, S. (1910). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. Standard Edition of the Complete Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol 11. J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.). London: Hogarth 1957, pp. 59–137.

Hall, T. W., & Edwards, K. J. (2002). The Spiritual Assessment Inventory: A theistic model and measure for assessing spiritual development. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 41, 341–357.

Juni, S., Katz, B., & Hamburger, M. (1996). Identification with the aggressor vs. turning against the self: An empirical study of turn-of-the-century European Jewish humor. Current Psychology, 14, 313–327.

Juni, S., & Katz, B. (1998). Creative pseudo-reality as a defensive factor in Jewish wit: A dialectical perspective. Journal of Psychology and Judaism, 22, 289–300.

Juni, S., & Katz, B. (2001). Self-effacing wit as a response to oppression: Dynamics in ethnic humor. Journal of General Psychology, 128, 119–142.

Klein, M. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16:145–174.

Kernberg, O. F. (1976). Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis. New York: Jason Aronson.

Mahler, M. S. (1963). Thoughts about development and individualism. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 18, 307–324.

Modell, A. H. (1975). A narcissistic defense against affects and the illusion of self-sufficiency. International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 56, 275–282.

Piaget, J., & Inhendler, B. (1966). The Psychology of the Child. New York: Basic Books.

Yitzhaki, S. (1090). Rashi’s commentary on the Bible. In D. Bromberg (Ed. & Trans.), The Great Scriptures [Mikra’ot Gedolot] [Biblia Rabbinica]. Venice: Daniel Bromberg Press.

Notes

[1] There are numerous similar references to God’s benevolence throughout Psalms; e.g., “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalms 34:18);
“Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I shall rescue you (Psalms 50: 15). When I recited these Psalms in the past, I sometimes sensed an inner voice that forced its way into my consciousness with a sardonic rejoinder: Why not tell it to the folks crying out for help in the crammed cattle cars on the way to Auschwitz?
[2] A crucial requisite to developing a trusting relationship with the caregiving parent is to realize that the parent continues to care for the child, and that the parent-child relationship can continue, even when the parent is absent. This reflects the principle of object permanence (Piaget & Inhendler, 1966) as it is accommodated within the general rubric of Attachment Theory (Ainsworth & Bowlby, 1991). The construct of Hester Panim (Besdin, 1993), represented by “I will hide my face from them; I will see what their end will be…, Deuteronomy 32:20), disrupts the sense of object permanence and mitigates the development of secure attachment with God.
[3] It should be noted that splitting is adaptive in early childhood but becomes more problematic if it is not gradually abandoned in favor of a synthetic understanding of others. I offer the following familial illustration of de-synthesis in normal development: My wife and I were exploring with our boys (a third and fifth grader, respectively) how they felt when we used to leave them in earlier years in the care of au pairs while we were off at work. When I asked specifically about Jeanine (a young woman who had worked with us for a number of years), both children spoke up simultaneously, asking “Which one?” It emerged that this imaginative young lady apparently had an effective method of dealing with child discipline. When the children misbehaved, she would announce that she was leaving, and that Mean Jeanine would be coming instead; she would then say Goodbye and leave the house. Moments later, the bell would ring, and Mean Jeanine—wearing her cap backwards and speaking in a high pitched voice—would appear. The children remembered Mean Jeanine as a no-nonsense woman who was a strict disciplinarian. In fact, Jeanine (the kinder version) would often warn the children not to push limits, because she would only take “so much” before she would get Mean Jeanine to take over. It was fascinating to watch the amazement of these two, rather intelligent and usually insightful youngsters, as reality dawned upon them. “You mean to say that there was only one Jeanine?!” the eleven-year-old exclaimed? “Wow, she really had us fooled,” was the reaction of the nine-year-old.”
It is posited that in situations where the children were actively encouraged to view a caregiver as consisting of two different caregivers, de-synthesis would remain a feature of object relations for some time. If, for example, a mother would inadvisably “explain” to the child that there are actually two mothers—a good mother and a bad mother—and that their personalities are separate and distinct from each other, that the child would have a hard time synthesizing the two significantly beyond the age (where part objects are typically united into realistic object representations). Similarly, in terms of Theistic Object Relations, it is suggested that the “theological diet,” where two distinct God personas (a kind God vs. a vindictive God) are used differentially in daily lessons, prayer, and liturgy, militates against their synthesis into a unified object representation of God.
[4] Those of us who have a considerable patient population of Holocaust survivors have been referring informally to the stance of coming to terms with irreconcilable God aspects as Theological Schizophrenia.
[5] Splitting of God into kind and vicious entities was reinforced, for us, by the references
in scripture and prayers to Satan as a separate force. For example: the first two chapters of Job, for example, quote interchanges between God and Satan; in the quintessential prayer of the cantor on Yom Kippur (Hineni), there is a direct plea to God to banish Satan from impeding with the prayers.
[6] While the dynamic relationship with God is also emphasized in Fundamental Christianity, the author has found in his work with patients that the construct is far more entrenched in the formative psyche of individuals raised in the Orthodox Jewish milieu.
[7] This view of development is the basis of modern day conceptualization of interpersonal relationships. It conceptualization represents the confluence of Attachment Theory and Object Relations Theory (Bell, 1991; Bowlby, 1969; Fairbairn; 1954; Kernberg, 1976; Mahler, 1963; Modell, 1975).
[8] This reflects the general understanding of the development of interpersonal relations as formulated in Object Relations Theory.
[9] Developmental theorists have argued that—for religious people—an entire facet of the developing ego becomes devoted to a template of man-God relationship which is an intrinsic to personality structure as interpersonal (Hall and Edwards, 2002). In our work with religious patients who are conflicted about their relationships with God, we coined the term Theistic Object Relations to elaborate the contradictory valences of trust and fear that typify the developmental process of religious identity formation, as it parallels the development of secure interpersonal attachments in general Object Relations Theory.
[10] E.g., “God is jealous, and the Lord revenges; the Lord revenges, and is furious; the Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserves wrath for his enemies (Nahum 1:2).
[11] I have met many survivors who became non-observant due to their Holocaust
experiences, but still showed strong beliefs in, and relationships with, God.
[12] See http://chinuchathome.info/index.php/Homeschool/Curriculum/Limudei-Kodesh- Curriculum.html.
[13] See http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/yeshiva/The_yeshiva_before_1800
[14] See, for example, the high school curriculum of a current American yeshiva high school that champions talmudic proficiency and personal ethics (http://ftiyeshiva.org/education/judiac-studies-curriculum/).
[15] Particularly egregious for second-generation survivors was the explicit sanction we often heard about some questions which may not be asked, where children’s requests for explanation were viewed as heretical and subversive in nature. Subsequently, however, some schools did begin to include opportunities for students to have discussions with staff about Hashkafah (a construct that can encompass theological ideas), as exemplified in http://www.ohryisrael.com/curriculum/.
[16] The crucial need for theological input in the religious education of second-generation survivors is particularly crucial from the perspective of Developmental Theory. Using this lens, children gradually transfer (with understandable modifications) aspects of their naive image of reliable all-powerful parents (or father, in traditional cultures) to a developing image of a reliable all-powerful God (Freud, 1910). Many children of survivors, however, attribute weakness and frailty—and often incompetence—to their parents, and certainly do not see them as supports to be relied upon under duress. The assimilation or internalization of God as a source of strength and stability in second-generation survivors is therefore totally dependent on the educational institution.
[17] It is suggested that dissonance may have been minimized had we been indoctrinated with the idea that God’s ways are mysterious and unfathomable. I would argue that such a position would have little traction for young adults who are intent on clear formulations of God’s role in negative world events rather than a seemingly vague deflection of God’s accountability (or even culpability).