National Scholar Updates

 

 

This striking finding, which was championed by the Christian right, fascinated the writers of this article. We were well aware of the religious literature promoting taharat haMishpahah as a way of renewing sexual interest.[v] Our basic question became: “How do women who are faithful to the tradition of taharat haMishpahah experience intimate marital life?” On the one hand, we speculated that based on the Laumann et al. study’s findings, married observant Jewish women might be even more sexually satisfied than married women in the general population. On the other hand, our extensive clinical experience made us keenly aware of sexual difficulty in many observant marriages. We considered the possibility that the lack of available information and discussion about sexuality in the observant Jewish community might contribute to reduced marital sexual satisfaction than in the Laumann et al. married sample. As scientists and clinicians we were well aware of the limitations of anecdotal vignettes and of impressions from our personal experiences. Thus, we set out to investigate the sexual experience of observant Jewish women from a sophisticated, methodologically rigorous research perspective.

 Our team constructed a survey, similar to that used by Laumann et al., that included questions specific to observant Jewish practice. These items would allow us to determine whether, and to what extent, education about and adherence to the laws of taharat haMishpahah are associated with sexual satisfaction for women. Using many of the same questions as Laumann et al. allowed us to compare aspects of sexual behavior and dysfunction in observant women with that of the general population.  Although Laumann et al. looked at the experiences of both men and women, we focused our efforts on observant women only. Certainly a comparable study of men would add a great deal to the understanding of observant marriages.

Because our objective in this article is to highlight certain issues for the observant community, we will not give a comprehensive presentation of all of our findings. Rather, we focus on areas that might be particularly relevant to the general community, rabbis, mental health professionals, medical personnel, and educators. This last group, educators, includes school teachers of all levels as well as those serving in the unique institution of hattan and kallah teachers, that is, men and women who instruct soon-to-be grooms and brides in the laws of taharat haMishpahah. An emerging new group of religious advisors/educators is that of the yoatsot halakha, women who are highly learned in taharat haMishpahah as well as well versed in gynecology and marital dynamics. All of these religious, medical, and lay people have potential involvement in the intimate lives of observant Jewish couples. Increased knowledge and sensitivity on the part of rabbis, health workers, and educators is likely to enhance intimacy and strengthen attitudes toward observance, thereby improving marriages in the observant community.

 

III. STUDY DESIGN

            The study by Laumann et al. obtained data based on face-to-face interviews. Since observant women generally value modesty and privacy, our project was designed as a written questionnaire that was completed anonymously and mailed back to us. We tried to replicate as closely as possible the Laumann et al. scales of marital satisfaction, emotional and sexual happiness, and sexual function and dysfunction for both women and their husbands. Many of the questions asked for the same information—basic demographics, physical and mental health, sexual education, sexual history, and current sexual practices. Women were included in our study if they were currently married, pre-menopausal, and regularly used the mikvah as prescribed by religious law.

            Mindful that the regular observance of mikvah might span across the denominational spectrum of observant religious life, we asked women to rate their religious affiliation and gave them choices of “Modern Orthodox,” “Yeshiva/Agudah,” or “Hassidic.” The latter two categories describe a level of Orthodoxy that is sometimes referred to as “ultra-Orthodox.” This subdivision reflects a debate within the Orthodox Jewish community. Unlike Modern Orthodox Jews, who actively participate in the general culture, Hareidi Jews, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, embrace a theologically conservative outlook that advocates substantial separation from secular culture. (Hareidi literally means “one who trembles before God.”)[vi] We also gave women choices to denote their religious/cultural affiliation as “Sephardic” or “Ashkenazic.”

No assumptions were made about women’s sexual past or present lives. We asked detailed questions about early sexual life, including auto-eroticism and premarital activity. Knowing about the impact of sexual abuse on later sexual life,[vii] we included questions regarding history of molestation as well as current sexual abuse.  At the same time, we added new questions that addressed the unique experience of women who observe taharat haMishpahah. These questions related to respondents’ subjective perceptions about going to the mikvah and adhering to laws of family purity. We also inquired about pre- or post-marital sexual education, such as whether they attended a kallah class and if so, whether useful information about sexual relations was provided. Women were asked how they dealt with questions they may have had concerning the permissibility of specific sexual activities, and to whom they turned when sexual problems arose in their marriages.

Certain questions were deliberately omitted so as to not offend potential study participants. These referred to same-sex activity, abortion, infidelity, and substance abuse. In retrospect, this stance may have been too conservative, as some women did respond on the open-ended questions that they had struggled with these issues.

            Participation in our study was voluntary. Women received no financial or other material reward. Our goal was to sample a cross-section of observant women based on religious affiliation and socio-demographic information. As the chief entry criterion was regular use of the mikvah, the most obvious, impartial venue for data collection would have been mikvaot. Although several rabbis overseeing individual mikvaot were consulted prior to the implementation of the study, none granted explicit permission to distribute questionnaires at any community mikvah. Instead we recruited women via other sampling methods, such as relying on medical professionals whose practices included large numbers of observant Jewish women (e.g., obstetrician/gynecologists, nurses, midwives, and pediatricians) to distribute the surveys. We also spoke at broad-based Jewish women’s organizations where we asked audiences to fill out the survey. In addition, we posted the questionnaire, which had only an English version, on the Internet and directed it to large listservs of observant communities in Israel. To determine the representative nature of the sample, demographic results from respondents of our study were compared to those obtained in the 2000 census sponsored by the United Jewish Communities.[viii]

 

IV. OUR FINDINGS

1. Demographics

We analyzed 380 returned questionnaires. Our average respondent was 36 years old. More than three-quarters of our respondents were born in the United States, and nearly half were daughters of two American-born parents. Almost two thirds of women and their husbands were brought up in an observant home. The remaining third were ba‘alot teshuva, meaning that they grew up in non-observant homes and chose to become observant on their own, usually around age 20 or 21. Among women who were ba’alot teshuva, only 6 percent of them had become observant after marriage. With respect to affiliation, 55 percent of women identified themselves as Modern Orthodox, 35 percent as Yeshiva/Agudah and 10 percent as Hassidic. Women who responded to the survey were typically well educated; many had graduate-level degrees. Most women held jobs outside the home and had not been married before. Our typical respondent had married at age 23 and had four children.

B.        Sexual Education/History

Respondents reported receiving sexual education from a variety of sources. Most commonly, they learned about sex from friends, written material, and media (movies and television) followed by family members, kallah classes or high school classes, and experimentation. Less than 10 percent cited health professionals as being a source of sex education. It should be mentioned that although Jewish women turned to printed materials for information about sex, the material they read was written by secular or non-Jewish writers and purchased at mass-market bookstores. Until recently, there have been very few works available that specifically discuss sexual matters for observant Jewish consumers.[ix] Only one book dealing with sexuality from the Jewish perspective provides explicit information as to the basics of sexual anatomy or physiology.[x] Bookstores catering to religious clientele do not typically carry such books for fear of violating propriety and alienating their customer base. How do women obtain these materials? Our respondents indicated that they had to make special requests for these books or go to a mass-market bookstore in a different community. One woman wrote of her reaction to the book most commonly cited by respondents to our survey, John Gray’s Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, “Why did I have to learn about sex from an ex-priest?”

Before they were married, two-thirds of participants knew the details involved in sexual intercourse, and a similar number had discussed sexual feelings with their husband. Less than a quarter of respondents reported no physical or sexual contact prior to marrying their current spouse. They did not hold hands, hug, kiss, pet, or engage in any more intimate sexual behavior. This also means that despite the emphasis on premarital chastity, over 75 percent of women who participated in our survey had some degree of intimate contact with their current spouse. There were differences with respect to premarital sexual behavior between those raised religious and those who became observant before marriage. Nearly one-third of women raised observant reported abstaining from any premarital physical contact with their husbands compared with 7 percent of women who became observant on their own. This suggests that while almost all women who become observant do so before marriage, they are more likely to have been involved in physical and sexual relationships with men before marriage than women raised observant. We did not ask women to indicate whether their premarital relationships were with their husbands or other partners.

 Almost all respondents studied laws of niddah with an outside (kallah) teacher before marriage. However, most women did not feel the kallah classes were helpful in preparing them for married sexual life and their wedding night in particular. The prevailing emphasis of kallah classes seemed to be ensuring that women not commit halakhic errors. Few teachers apparently covered other topics such as the permissibility of various sexual acts, and more importantly, how to prepare to engage in sexual acts that culminate in intercourse. Although half of the kallah teachers indicated their availability for follow-up discussion after the wedding, they were rarely consulted.

A handful of women praised their kallah teacher for providing instruction beyond halakhic issues. For example, one woman wrote

 My kallah teacher covered halakhot (legal rulings), sex positions, and shalom bayit (family harmony). Everything was explained clearly until I felt very comfortable. Barukh HaShem (Thank God), I have a beautiful marriage. I strongly believe that a kallah teacher has a big responsibility to convey physical and emotional matters in a clear and concise manner.

 Women who felt well prepared by their kallah class wrote statements such as, “I knew as much as I could, the rest had to be from experience.”

However, more than a third of respondents were disappointed on their wedding night and only 15 percent stated that their wedding night was better than expected. Almost half of the respondants, stated that they could have been better prepared for married sexual life. Despite the fact that almost 90 percent of the women in our sample studied with a kallah teacher prior to marriage, only 50 percent of them learned about sexual matters from this source. In light of this discrepancy, it was not surprising that many women wrote in suggestions of topics they wished had been discussed with their kallah teachers prior to marriage.

            We present excerpts from the suggestions made by women that they felt would improve preparation for sexual life in marriage. In general, there were three types of responses to our open-ended question: “What should your kallah teacher have covered?” The most common response was about basic sexual education. Women wished they had learned more about “women’s body parts, women’s sensitivities, orgasm, different positions,” “what a man’s body looks like, what to expect” and “how to actually consummate the marriage.” Many women voiced shock at their first sexual intercourse. They wished they had known practical information, such as how awkward the position of sex would feel, how to be satisfied or achieve climax, that sex might be painful the first time, that it would be messy, and so forth. The awkwardness of sudden transition from celibate single life to fully sexual marital experience was echoed by many respondents who wrote in that it was hard to “turn off” their notions of being a “good girl.” As one woman, herself a kallah teacher, wrote, “The difficulty we have in communicating needs verbally I feel is a result of the ’modesty‘ and inhibitions we were shown as examples.” Another woman elaborated extensively on this point:

Orthodox attitudes that affected me negatively are not inherently negative— but they have potential to cause problems depending on the person. I think part of the problem is that a lot of the Orthodox community feels like the laws of taharat haMishpahah and the restrictions on premarital sex or touching are a foolproof system that makes sex more wonderful for everyone. The extreme privacy within the Orthodox community, while promoted as modest, beautiful, and virtuous, also causes/supports feelings of shame regarding sex. The laws of tseni’ut (modesty) on a more subconscious level, supports (not necessarily causes) shameful feelings about one’s body. The constant praise of how wonderful and holy sex is because it’s saved for after marriage and only at certain times of the month sets up unrealistic expectations and avoids entirely the physical aspect of sex. Again… tseni’ut and negiah (no touching before marriage) are promoted as being beneficial for women because otherwise men would only look at you sexually. This view makes men out to be uncontrollable purely sexual beings to whom women are powerless. Then you get married and you are supposed to trust that your husband wants to have sex with you because he truly loves you. It’s hard to change that pattern of thought. For 20 years one is told to do things so men don’t look at you sexually, and then poof! One day you’re supposed to feel totally comfortable letting go completely and you’re suddenly supposed to be a sexual being[YR1]  too[MF2] !

I’m not sure these things are unique to religious Judaism —probably other religions as well. And the attitudes might be more reflection of Orthodox society and not the Torah.

           

Many women also wished the kallah teacher would have educated them more on the relationship between sex and Jewish life. They suggested the following topics be covered: “The place of sex and pleasure in Torah life;” “sex and emotion…shalom bayit (family harmony) topics;” “[Jewish views on] a woman’s right to pleasure;” “that sex is not only permissible, but essential to your and your husband’s happiness to have a full, exciting sexual life.” Some commented on the impact of religious upbringing on sexual lives, and suggested these topics were important to discuss in the context of premarital education: “Growing up religious, you are taught to feel that girls should not be forward… it’s OK to be more forward and guide my husband to please me. Giving me an orgasm is not a ‘favor’ to me, rather it is my right as a married woman.”

Our respondents raised many issues that had caused them concern and discomfort: “What if you and your husband are too embarrassed to ask the rabbi a question?” “What if your sex life isn’t a beautiful thing? What if it doesn’t enhance your marriage?” Others indicated “I didn’t realize it was so common for a couple to be unable to consummate the marriage right away;” and some wished they had learned “What should you do if sex does not work like the ’textbook‘ case?” Others wondered, “What constitutes abusive behavior and what is not ‘normal’ behavior?” To summarize, in the concise statement of one woman, “I wish someone told me point blank everything instead of assuming I knew it.”

C.        Attitudes about Mikvah

Two-thirds of our respondents indicated that the experience of ritual immersion in a mikvah was religiously enhancing. These women were asked to elaborate on how this experience was enhancing. The following quotations are illustrative. One woman wrote, “I love going. I always pray in the mikvah and feel very pure after. Spiritually, I feel renewed, closer to God and to my husband.” Another commented, “I feel a rebirth. The mikvah is especially helpful to lift me out of depression I feel about my infertility. It always fills me with hope.” Another respondent stated “I feel that going to the mikvah introduced holiness into our marriage… also, it is simply the halakha that has been done by Jewish women for generations.”  Related to this, one woman wrote: “I feel mystically connected to something very primitive and deep.” Comments such as: “The mikvah experience makes sex spiritual and not animal-like” were made by several respondents.

Almost a quarter of respondents indicated that going to the mikvah could be an unpleasant experience. These women described finding the preparation and process of going tedious and annoying. Concerns about modesty dictate that women keep timing of mikvah use private and that visits to the ritual bath be made only after nightfall. Some of our respondents reported disliking having to make excuses to their children for their absence from the home. Some  felt critical of mikvah facilities and personnel. The majority of negative comments relating to the mikvah's physical facilities came from women living in Israel. The following quotations are a sample of negative feelings: “I don’t feel comfortable naked in front of anyone;” “I don’t like all the superstitions that are attached to mikvah;” “I try not to think about how unhygienic the water is after who knows how many women have been in before me.” More extreme responses are exemplified by the following respondents who wrote, “I hate it,” “(I) Find it degrading,” “I hate being examined like a cow,” “Mikvah is such a turn-off that I come back irritated, annoyed, angry and am mean to my husband, subconsciously, of course,” and finally, “I feel it is almost abusive.”

            With respect to whether sexual or emotional life is enhanced by the observance of taharat haMishpahah, we noted that more than three-quarters of our sample believed that their sexual life is improved by following these laws. The following quotations represent women’s experiences. “When you know you only have two weeks each month, you tend to make more of an effort;” and “I really feel that sex would have become too routine and boring without the rest period that the mikvah provides.” Also representative was the following remark: “It certainly helps. Even though our sexual relations are less than satisfying on the whole, having a break because of niddah does help the sexual relations become a little bit more satisfying; it’s ‘fresher.’”

            One of the interesting observations was the contrast between the high percentage of women who believed taharat haMishpahah enhanced their sex lives with the much smaller segment who felt that their emotional life with their husband was enhanced by taharat haMishpahah.  In fact some women who claim sexual benefits of believed that the niddah period impacted negatively on their emotional lives. One woman stated:

I believe that following the laws of niddah and the mikvah does enhance my sexual life. While I love my husband, after some time sex does get boring. The laws of niddah force a break and renewal. Right after going to the mikvah any physical contact is exciting and invigorating. My problem with the whole process is how my husband and I interact during the time of niddah. It seems like we take a complete emotional break from each other, as well as a physical break. I can’t understand why my husband can’t show me his emotions and feelings about me without sex.

           

This sentiment was expressed repeatedly: “My husband feels he has to become numb and he withdraws from me;” “My husband and I both have a huge problem with the suddenness of the switch between ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ and the accompanying feeling on the mikvah night that we ‘have to’ because the clock has started ticking again. The pressure kind of kills the desire and it ends up feeling very non-spontaneous;” “We fight more when I am in niddah. I feel rejected by not passing objects. It is rude—like I am untouchable. Even though I understand the reason, I still feel rejected.” “I am a very touchy, feely person and suffer terribly not being able to snuggle with my husband. Being a nursing mother now, I do miss the initial excitement of coming home from mikvah, but I would not give up my status of taharah (non-niddah) for that.” “We learned how to have sex properly when I was pregnant [and therefore had nine months of non-niddah time together]. We never found there was enough time to learn and experiment in between niddah sessions.”

            A representative quotation from the much smaller sample of women who wrote that niddah did enhance their emotional life is illustrative: “Sometimes, for example, if a crisis situation arises during niddah, you’re able to resolve it without touching; it brings you emotionally closer.”

Survey questions were designed to assess the number of women who report feeling relief upon becoming a niddah, as well as how many postpone immersion.  Almost two-thirds of our respondents reported that they sometimes felt relief at being in niddah (about a third of these respondents reported feeling relieved nearly every month).  More than a quarter of our respondents reported postponing going to the mikvah, almost all for emotional reasons. Only a tiny fraction reported postponing mikvah as a form of birth control (trying to miss ovulation).

 

D.        Asking for Rabbinical Counsel

 Traditional Jewish practice encourages people to seek rabbinic advice when faced with challenging questions. As all aspects of life, from the mundane to the lofty, are imbued with religious significance, observant Jews regularly pose questions to rabbis. Queries concerning  pillars of observant life, kashruth, Shabbat, and taharat haMishpahah are routine. Our data, however, revealed a significant skew regarding questions posed to rabbinic counsel—namely, that women in our study were less likely to inquire about matters relating to sexuality.  This is illustrated by the fact that over 90 percent of women indicated that they have asked a rabbi questions about kashruth or about laws pertaining to the Sabbath. Only 76 percent, however, have asked about an aspect of niddah, and most of these questions were directed to technical concerns about menstrual staining. Just over one-third of women had ever asked a question pertaining to permissibility of a particular sexual practice. Mindful that our respondents are highly adherent to the laws of family purity, we assumed that they would naturally have questions about the religious permissibility of various sexual activities in marriage. We knew from their comments about their kallah (bridal preparation) classes that frank issues such as sexual desires and practices were rarely discussed by those teachers. We wondered, therefore, how couples align their sexual desires and their religious sensibilities.

Fully half of all women answering our survey have wondered whether performing certain sexual acts, during the course of their observant, married life, might constitute a violation of Jewish law. Oral sex was the activity of most concern followed by the use of fantasy during relations. Of this 50 percent who acknowledged halakhic concerns, only a small portion (12 percent) asked a rabbi for guidance. Of the remaining 88 percent who did not seek religious consultation, almost half refrained from the religiously questionable sex, while the rest enacted their desire without permission.

A related area is the use of contraception. Observant Jews take the biblical commandment “be fruitful and multiply” seriously and generally give birth to and raise families larger than those of their secular peers. We wondered how observant women access family planning. Our findings revealed that although nearly 90 percent of our sample reported using birth control at some time in their marriage, only half of these women consulted a rabbi about that decision. Once again, our data suggest that many religiously committed Jews do not bring questions about their sexual or reproductive lives to the scrutiny of their rabbis with the same frequency that they bring questions about equally serious but less bodily intimate matters.

Respondents to our survey were strictly compliant with the laws of family purity. Ba‘alot teshuva (women who became observant on their own) were as rigorous in their observance as women raised observant. Women from both backgrounds who were virgins at marriage were more likely to ask a rabbi questions about niddah laws, about sexual life not directly related to laws of niddah, and were also less likely to postpone going to mikvah. This was true regardless of religious affiliation.

 

E.         Physical and Emotional Health

Although the vast majority of participants in our survey described their health as good, almost half reported that their physical health interfered with sex at least some of the time. Treatment for medical conditions affecting sexual function, such as chronic pelvic pain, endometriosis, and venereal disease were extremely rare, although vaginitis was reported by a quarter of respondents.

Almost a third of respondents reported that infertility had been an issue in their marriages. A quarter reported they had trouble conceiving, but they also reported that they eventually had children. Only 4 percent of the women indicated that they had no children as a result of problems conceiving.

Emotional health seems to have more impact on sexual dysfunction than physical health. The vast majority of respondents indicated experiencing interference with sex due to emotional issues. When asked about whether they had ever been treated by a mental health professional, about half of the sample reported having been in some kind of psychotherapy. The problems they brought to these treatments included marital problems, depression, and anxiety. We were intrigued by the high utilization of mental health services by our respondents. Some critics of this study allege that the large number of women accessing mental health treatment indicates a sample bias toward more distressed women. An alternative interpretation would be that women who allow themselves professional mental health services are more comfortable with themselves and thus willing to participate in a study about intimate life experience.

 

F.         Sexual Abuse

More complete analyses of our data are also presented elsewhere,[xi] but for the purpose of this discussion it is essential to point out that this is the first anonymous survey of married observant Jewish women in which direct and detailed questions were asked about sexual abuse and where objective data was collected. One quarter of our sample answered “yes” to the question: “When you were a child or teenager, did anyone ever touch you sexually in a way that made you uncomfortable (molest you)?” These figures are comparable to those reported by Laumann et al. in their survey of married American women and are consistent with estimates of sexual abuse in the general population.

Two divergent points, which we discuss in greater depth in the above referenced paper, deserve mention here. On the one hand, women who became observant reported significantly more childhood sexual abuse than those raised religious. On the other hand, more ultra-Orthodox Jewish women reported abuse than their Modern Orthodox peers.[xii] We conjecture that women who experience sexual abuse in their younger years may be motivated to seek out a more structured and sexually restricted adult life. As has been established in previous studies, history of sexual abuse is associated with higher rates of mental health treatment in adult life.

Regarding current abuse, domestic violence was reported by 5 percent of our respondents. Two-and-a-half percent alleged that they had been raped by their husbands.

 

G.        Sexual Life

            Women were asked to respond to the same set of questions about sexual frequency and satisfaction as appeared in the study of sexual practices in the United States published by Laumann et al. The pattern of sexual frequency among the sample was different from that of monogamous, married women in the Laumann et al. study. In that study, half of the women reported having intercourse one to two times per week, as compared to 40 percent of our sample. Thirty-five percent of the married observant women in our study reported sexual intercourse three to six times per week as compared to half that number (17 percent) of the Laumann married women. We surmise that this is due to observant couples concentrating their physical intimacy into the two weeks available when a woman would not be in niddah. At the same time, a greater number of women reported sexual intercourse once a month or less.

            Observant women in our study had significantly different experiences with respect to orgasm as compared to the Laumann et al. married, monogamous sample. High frequency of orgasm was much lower in our sample, and reports of never experiencing an orgasm during sex were higher (9 percent as compared to 1 percent). Regarding auto-eroticism almost two-thirds of participants in our study reported doing so at frequencies ranging from several times per week to every few months during the past year.

Like Laumann et al., we inquired about various components regarding satisfaction with marital sex. When participants in our survey rated their physical satisfaction, 75 percent of them rated feeling very satisfied. When asked about emotional satisfaction from sex, generally understood as sense of closeness with their husband, 70 percent rated feeling very satisfied. One question on the survey asked how sex made women feel. Feeling loved and wanted ranked highest, followed by feeling excited, doing wifely duty, and being taken care of. Fewer women endorsed feeling more “negative” feelings such as anxiety, sadness, fear, and guilt.

Communication about sex proved to be an important feature in satisfying marital relations. Women with more satisfying sexual lives described better communication and vice versa. Of women who enjoyed orgasm, over three-quarters said that their husband knew how to bring them to satisfaction and that they could tell their husband what gives them pleasure. On the other side of the communication spectrum, women who have problems with sexual life also have difficulty talking directly to their husbands about this.

 

H.        Sexual Problems

            We asked respondents to our study to rate their experience with six specific areas of sexual dysfunction identified by Laumann et al.: 1) frequent lack of interest in sex, 2) lack of ability to climax, 3) pain during intercourse, 4) not finding sex pleasurable, 5) anxiety about their performance and 6) trouble lubricating during sex. One-third of women in our study indicated experiencing the first difficulty (frequent lack of interest in sex) followed by smaller numbers with the other five categories. Nearly half of our sample cited such difficulties as causing them to avoid sex altogether. It should be noted that the rates of sexual difficulties in our sample were significantly greater than that reported by Laumann et al.

            We also queried women about sexual difficulties experienced by their husbands. According to their wives, a third of husbands experienced premature ejaculation, over 25 percent had difficulty maintaining an erection, and a similar percentage lacked interest in sex. Fewer women reported husbands being anxious about their performance, having difficulty with climax, and not finding sex pleasurable. Some of husbands avoided sex because of these problems.

             Couples experiencing sexual dysfunction had trouble talking about this. Despite the rather high frequency of both male and female dysfunction, as mentioned earlier, few women had talked to their husbands about sexual problems. Additionally, few women sought outside guidance in relation to their sexual problems. Less than 10 percent of the women had asked a rabbi or observant teacher for information, and less than 4 percent asked a kallah teacher for help.

 

IV.       ASSOCIATIONS AND PREDICTORS

We used sophisticated statistical procedures to analyze the enormous data gleaned from the questionnaires. One goal of this study was to understand more fully the variety of factors that are associated with sexual practice, sexual satisfaction, sexual dysfunction, and the relationship between these variables and religious observances. We will not present here all the associations we discovered but only those that strike us as particularly significant or surprising. We remind our readers that associations do not necessarily imply causation.

 

A.        Background Information

            Physical satisfaction was found to be associated with higher income, the husband providing the financial support, and more modern religious affiliation. In other words, lower-income women and women who affiliated as either Agudah or Hassidic reported significantly less physical satisfaction than did Modern Orthodox women in dual-income families.

Emotional satisfaction was associated with similar demographic variables, and also with age group. Sex was more frequent in younger respondents, and also in respondents who were younger when they got married. Younger women reported higher emotional satisfaction compared to older women. Women who provided sole financial support were less satisfied than women who had other support. Emotional satisfaction was lowest for Hassidic women. Older age and not completing college were associated with painful sex and avoidance of sex. Women who were raised observant were twice as likely to have difficulty achieving climax than women who reported themselves as ba’alot teshuva; however they were less likely to report painful sex and less likely to avoid sex.

 

B.        Mikvah and Niddah

 

            Greater physical satisfaction was significantly more likely in women who demonstrated less conflict about niddah and mikvah. These women never postponed mikvah and also did not report feeling relieved when they became a niddah. A different pattern was observed with respect to the influence of postponing mikvah and emotional satisfaction. Women who never postponed the mikvah for any reason showed significantly lower emotional satisfaction than women who did. But women who were often relieved to be a niddah were also less emotionally satisfied. This was also true for those who did not feel that niddah enhanced their sex lives as well as for women who felt that they could have been better prepared for marital life. Interestingly, adherence to niddah was associated with better emotional (but not physical) satisfaction.

 

C.        Sexual Education and History

            In general, physical and emotional satisfaction and frequency of sex were not related to sexual education and history. Women who were virgins at marriage reported greater frequency of orgasms and less difficulty achieving orgasm during marital sex as compared to those women who were not virgins when they married. Conversely, women who had experimented with sex short of intercourse premaritally (i.e., they were technically virgins) reported greater physical satisfaction, greater frequency of orgasm, and less difficulty achieving orgasm than virgins who had minimal (holding hands) or no sexual experience at the time they married.

 

D.        Husbands’ Sexual Dysfunction

            Although physical satisfaction and frequency of orgasm were not significantly related to husbands’ sexual dysfunction, frequency of sex was. Difficulties such as lack of interest, premature ejaculation, performance anxiety, erectile dysfunction, and avoiding sex were associated with less frequent sex. Husbands’ problems achieving orgasm were associated with less emotional satisfaction in the relationship. Furthermore, husbands’ sexual dysfunction correlated with reports of sexual dysfunction by the wife. Greater lack of interest and lack of pleasure as well as anxiety about and avoidance of sex were more often reported by women when similar sexual difficulties were reported for the husband.

 

E.         Communication Patterns

            Communication patterns about how sex was initiated were significantly related to physical and emotional satisfaction as well as to sexual frequency. A significant predictor of good sex was whether both husband and wife expressed interest in initiating relations. A woman’s participation in initiation of sex, independently or mutually, was associated with greater physical and emotional satisfaction, regardless of how she communicated her interest, such as by physical gesture or in words. Sexual difficulty, particularly lack of interest and lack of pleasure, was associated with less involvement in initiation of sex by the wife and more frequent initiation by the husband. Avoiding sex because of sexual problems was similarly related to initiation patterns.

             

F.         Sexual Abuse and Mental Health

            Women who reported a history of sexual abuse, regardless of when the abuse took place, were less emotionally satisfied. Type of abuse or perpetrator was not significantly related to any of the other variables we examined related to sexual satisfaction. Sexual abuse history was related to current sexual difficulties. Women who reported a history of sexual abuse were more likely to report no interest or pleasure in sex, anxiety about sex, and consequent avoidance of sex. When the perpetrator was a relative, women reported less interest in sex.

            Mental health was significantly related to physical and emotional satisfaction as well as frequency of sex. Women with a history of depression, but not anxiety, reported lower physical and emotional satisfaction as well as less interest in and lower frequency of sex.

           

G.        Religious Background

            We were also interested in examining the impact of religious background (i.e., being raised observant vs. being a ba’alat teshuva) on predictors of characteristics of sexual satisfaction. These analyses revealed significant differences between women who were raised in observant homes and those who became observant later in life.  For those women who were raised observant, lower physical satisfaction was associated with feelings they could have been better prepared for sex before marriage, frequently postponing going to mikvah, low emotional satisfaction, not learning about sex by experimentation, not feeling that niddah enhanced emotional life. None of these relationships was observed in women who became observant later in life. It is worthwhile to note that despite having significantly more past sexual abuse than their peers who were raised observant, ba’alot teshuva experienced greater overall sexual satisfaction in marriage.

 

V.        DISCUSSION

            The research goal of this pioneer study was to better understand how married Jewish women who adhere to taharat haMishpahah experience sexual life. Our project included designing a suitable questionnaire, distributing that questionnaire as broadly as possible, and then analyzing the data obtained. We intended our findings to be helpful for the observant lay community as well as the broad spectrum of rabbinic, educational, and health professionals who serve religious communities. Our findings demonstrate something we intuitively know, that sexual and emotional intimacy are complex and nuanced experiences. We hope that subsequent research carries our beginning explorations further.

      As our questionnaire was modeled on the Laumann et al. study, we report the overall comparison that women who participated in our study reported significantly less physical and emotional satisfaction as compared to married  women from the Laumann et al. study. Our respondents also reported greater sexual dysfunction on many of the comparable variables. We speculate that lack of education about sexuality in the observant community might account for these findings. Discussion about sex rarely occurs in homes and schools and is absent even in many kallah classes. Lack of communication skills between husbands and wives regarding sexual life is also a likely contributor to physical and emotional dissatisfaction among observant women.

A number of factors contribute to the reticence regarding sex in observant Jewish culture. Traditional religious communities are reluctant to openly discuss or develop educational curricula for schools regarding sexuality. Reverence for modesty as a value, coupled with dismay regarding the hypersexualized aspects of contemporary secular society, leads to caution. Although there are several limitations of the current study, including the representativeness of the sample, the findings underscore the importance of education about sex within the context of marital relationships. This might occur in the context of standardization of the curriculum of teachers responsible for the preparation of brides and grooms in the area of taharat haMishpahah. Mikvah attendants are another group deserving in-service education. As the actual gatekeepers to immersion, women who work in the mikvah are in a privileged position to observe obvious distress and to direct women to appropriate resources.

One domain in which observant women and secular American women did not differ was in the prevalence of sexual abuse. It is imperative to not minimize the prevalence of such experiences within the observant community in light of their impact on both mental-health-related issues and married life.

Another important conclusion concerns the relatively few differences that could be attributed to adult religious affiliation. Though this may not be very evident in everyday observant life, the data suggest that Modern Orthodox, Yeshiva/Agudah and Hassidic women were far more similar to each other than not when it comes to sexual life. We conjecture that traditional attitudes expressed during girls’ formative years about modesty and gender role exert powerful influence across observant denominations.

We were impressed with the contrast in marital sexual life between women born religious and those who chose to become religious. As compared to their ba’alot teshuva peers, those raised observant experience more sexual distress. We noted a puzzling contradiction between the higher rates of sexual abuse among ba’alot teshuva and their greater sexual satisfaction once observant and married. We also noted that these women, once married, observe laws of family purity as strictly as their religious from birth peers. However, in their younger pre-religious years, ba’alot teshuva enaged in more premarital sexual experimentation. In addition, they were sexually expressive with their husbands even before marriage. We hypothesize that ba’alot teshuva import early, more positive attitudes toward sexuality into their adult marital lives. Greater awareness of sexual feelings and confidence may even offset such trauma as sexual abuse.

We respect that traditional Jewish life advocates premarital chastity and values modesty throughout all of life. We do not recommend that observant Jews advocate premarital sexual experimentation. Our work, however, highlights the need to encourage healthy sexual attitudes and communication skills in the observant Jewish community. This is a broad educational goal to be shared by parents and institutions such as schools and camps. Whatever their differences, lay and religious leaders across the denominations would serve their communities well by focusing on abuse awareness, prevention, and treatment, as well as positive attitudes toward human sexuality.

Finally, it may be important that observant Jewish women who have serious religious questions about sexual matters currently do not turn to religious personnel (rabbis or kallah teachers) for advice or counsel in this critical area of religious life. At the time of this writing, the advent of yoatsot halakha was too recent to have significantly impacted our respondents. Certainly this cadre of religious teachers/advisors  in taharat haMishpahah  are uniquely placed to serve observant women in the area of marital sexual life. Just as we advise implementing relationship and sexuality education in established school systems and establishing standards for those who prepare brides and grooms, rabbis would benefit from receiving training in sexual and emotional issues. Those who are in a position to counsel and educate couples both before and after marriage should carefully consider the significance of these observations.

 

 

When I was in high school, a friend and I decided we needed to know whether God existed. It was a big public high school on Long Island, full of Catholics and Protestants who went to church and enough Jews to support a kosher bakery just around the corner from the football field. Everyone got along pretty well. But apart from bar mitzvahs, first communions, and the Civil Rights Movement—which galvanized much of the town’s clergy—daily life didn’t seem to have much to do with religion. God was mostly for holidays.

Yet I myself sensed God’s presence much more often, from an early age. For whatever reason, I always felt there was more going on than met the eye, that there was a Being up there Who cared about me and cared about right and wrong, and had set a right and a wrong in this world. It wasn’t a popular topic as the Vietnam War raged and college dorms started going co-ed and offering birth control pills. But for a few of us, it was pressing, and endured.

My friend was Presbyterian, and we met in choir at school, where I had some of the most intense and moving experiences of my life singing texts such as “O Magnum Mysterium” and “Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs.” What was I to make of this? My family didn’t keep kosher, but I went to Hebrew school three times a week. I didn’t believe what I was singing, but I believed what I was feeling. So did my Christian friend. Our discussions were heartfelt and searching. We were hoping God existed, because without God the world seemed random and notions of good and evil too subjective. And if God did exist, it would matter a lot how we behaved—and we’d have to find a path.

In retrospect it’s obvious that we both really did believe, though I don’t think either of us thought there was only one correct path to follow. We knew we weren’t the first to ask these questions, and we didn’t expect to have to invent religion for ourselves. But we thought it mattered a lot to God what we would do. For me, it was going to mean looking at the best evidence there was of what God had said, what had been revealed to humankind in words—I needed a source. Sooner or later, that would mean text.

And so I set about searching, and though the only path to God is one that takes a lifetime and renews itself every day, I do feel that I found what God wanted of me in Modern Orthodoxy. I don’t think I could have landed anywhere else, and I’m always surprised to learn what a small—and to hear some tell it, fragile—outcropping of world Jewry it is. I don’t think my experience of God or life is unusual, or the demands of Modern Orthodoxy philosophically difficult or severe (financially might be another matter), at least not for anyone who believes in God as a Being, Creator, or Consciousness outside of ourselves. Perhaps what’s unique about my journey is just that I kept running into people who could explain things, and as diverse as these people were, all of them believed, and all of them were careful with language—words being so powerful, of course, that God used them to create the world. One by one, these teachers and what I learned from them prepared my steps: Baruch Ata ... haMeichin m’tsadei gaver. The first time I said that blessing after we moved into Los Angeles’ Pico-Robertson neighborhood, I knew that I was home.

So my journey began at the intersection of words and music, cobbled with contradictions and smoothed by these teachers, who seemed to come along at just the right moment. An avid piano student from the age of 7, I first signed up for choir at age 12, just when Hebrew School was ending and Junior Congregation was now for younger kids. I fell completely in love: music plus poetry, each making the other more compelling, sending the other to soar! The next years overflowed with madrigals and motets, oratorios and gem-like modern works—Brahms and Barber, Randall Thompson, Debussy and Distler—in a choir that met first period every day in high school. Beautiful years! All of it gorgeous and emotional, yet separate, mostly, from my Judaism. Would I allow myself to think about God while rehearsing Haydn’s Creation, lost in the exquisite trio section of Psalm 19: The day that is coming speaks it the day, the night that is gone to following night…? In a word, yes. Even so tortuously translated, it sang and it spoke. When the texts turned Christian—“For unto us a child is born”—I found a way. My cousin had a baby boy; Handel’s bursting fountain of sixteenth notes captured the miracle. On Sabbath and holidays in my Conservative synagogue, we prayed, well, differently; Cantor Victor Jacoby’s ringing baritone filled the room, brought down a heaven of its own. It was exotic, and it, too, was mine.

In college I began to feel more self-conscious about all this. Still hooked on choir, I noticed that the other choral majors sang in church groups and planned for church jobs. I also noticed that the occasional Jewish piece we sang was much less affecting than the Christian works. Then in graduate school, where I went to earn a Master of Music degree, I met my first important religious teacher, a secular Israeli: the great maestro Abraham Kaplan, whose father had formed the first choirs in Israel (then Palestine) and who himself spent 16 years teaching at Juilliard, directing New York’s Camarata Singers and preparing choirs for Leonard Bernstein. The first time I visited his study at the University of Washington, I saw on his desk a small stained-glass ornament that said, “The Lord works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.” Then, under his baton I sang the great Requiem masses of Mozart and Verdi, transported into a realm of holy inspiration grounded in texts that must have been relevant but that he didn’t believe either. Yet he led, and taught, with complete certainty, his interpretations informed by the text but transcending it; in performance it seemed he dissolved into the mind of the music. It’s a little hard to imagine if you haven’t performed with a great conductor, but perhaps if you’ve watched Dudamel you’ve seen it for yourself.

Of course this was very affirming. Professor Kaplan seemed to have no problem feeling and expressing the power of music as real or holy in a generic sort of way; like him, I could reject the meaning of the words without denying what the music was teaching me in vague spiritual terms. This now seems obvious; words are just humanity’s best attempt to share what people think they know—approximations, tools. No one would confuse the word “love” with the feeling, or say it encompassed it. So I could make a kind of separation in my mind between what the music offered and the words that had carried the composer to its discovery.

But it didn’t answer my religious questions. How was I to relate to God myself? Words are important too. Hadn’t God communicated with humanity that way? Calling Lekh lekha to Abraham, sending Moses off to Pharoah armed with verbal admonitions? Not to mention dictating the entire Torah, exactly general and specific enough to last 3,000 years so far and presumably to eternity? Whatever I’d learned studying music, it wasn’t the Torah. That was still to be found.

Around the same time I met Professor Kaplan, I also met another Presbyterian, though he considered himself “lapsed.” This young man, a medical student, was also very concerned about both religion and words and—first one, then two conversions to Judaism later—he became my husband. He had a strong belief in God, but the religion he’d been raised with, he said, was built on metaphors, and the metaphors no longer made sense to him. This became an insurmountable problem for him as a Christian, but only increased his desire to understand what God really did want. Late into the night when he wasn’t at the hospital, we would wrestle these questions together, until finally he started his residency and said he’d have to revisit religion when he was sleeping more than one night in three. That left me on my own for three years, during which I thought long and hard about whether Judaism might be wrong and Christianity right—I read the New Testament and wondered whether it was possible that God’s kingdom was already here, and that all we had to do was love one another and He would be with us. I didn’t have any Christian teachers outside of the great composers, but in any case I couldn’t accept it, couldn’t believe.

I went on to study journalism in New York while David finished his residency, and when we both returned to the Northwest, I invited him to visit the synagogue I’d joined in Tacoma, Washington. At Temple Beth El there, he found that the words of the Reform siddur Gates of Prayer made more sense to him than what he’d left behind in church. With Beth El’s very thoughtful Rabbi Richard Rosenthal, z”l, he started reading Franz Rozensweig and Rav Kook, and studying them with him on Wednesdays. One day he asked what it would take to convert, and Rabbi Rosenthal said, “Whenever you’re ready.” David had a Reform conversion, and that meant—to my understanding and training at that time—that my best friend and I would be able to marry, and continue a religious journey together. A year and a half later, we did.

We ended up in Los Angeles in the post-denominational congregation of Reform Rabbi Mordecai Finley, whose services plus lunch and bentching lasted until 2 P.M. on Saturdays and who taught us not only the weekly parasha—including stories I’d never learned, like Jacob and Tamar, Pinhas, Bilaam, Nadav and Abihu—but also the concept of spiritual discipline, the idea that the ritual commandments provide opportunities for us to bring God into more of our day-to-day actions and that, moreover, they were in the text. This was something I’d been waiting for: a way to live with God in mind. Although they were presented as voluntary, I loved each new mitzvah and concept I discovered.

The Torah asks us not to eat pork or shellfish. The Torah tells us not to place a stumbling block before the blind, literally or metaphorically. The Torah—God’s instructions!—held all sorts of commandments and stories, and by the way, many of them were very confusing without the interpretation of sages over the generations since. With that ancient elucidation, Rabbi Finley noted, they became both clear and ingenious—separating milk and meat, for example, as a way to delineate life and death in the world hour by hour; separating wool and flax, adjuring us to know when to be strong and forceful versus when to be soft. There were other commandments too, he noted, that we couldn’t understand but could take on faith—faith, something that came easily to me!

Rabbi Finley also encouraged us to hear Orthodox teachers—one year he sent us out to Orthodox synagogues on Shabuoth, and my husband David and I actually went to B'nai David-Judea, which many years later would become our home. But religiously we were still comfortable where we were. I served as one of three lay cantors, singing and arranging prayers, even directing a choir and trying to find some spiritual richness in the music. I did, a little, especially Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. Our eldest daughter became bat mitzvah there, and when my beloved father died, there were tools both elevating and comforting with which to mourn him. We studied Hebrew with Rebbetzin Meirav Finley, and the holy language began to speak to us on its own.

It was a time of unfolding light, affirming to me what I’d long suspected: that my ancestors had hung on tight through persecution and pogroms to more than Shabbat candles and Pessah seders, as wonderful as those were. There was more there, enough to fill many lifetimes, and we were beginning to see what it was.

What drew us the rest of the way, once we encountered it, was the beauty of observance and a growing certainty that it was, in fact, commanded—as I’d sensed since high school, God surely cared what we actually did. We attended a three-part-seminar on the Orthodox view of marriage, taught by Rabbi Baruch Gradon of the Los Angeles Kollel, to which we were invited by friends who’d become Orthodox the year before, and after that I joined a series of living room classes sponsored by a Hareidi “outreach” organization called Ashreinu. The leaders of that group, Mrs. Shira Shapiro and Rabbi Moshe and Bracha Zaret, welcomed us into their modest homes for Shabbat dinners, the first we’d experienced in an observant setting, not minding that we drove there.

We were very moved by their example. Everyone at their tables, including the youngest of their children, could discuss the parasha better than most of the adult Jews we’d ever met. They were gracious and intelligent and their conversation was always rich with meaning. They were notably comfortable talking about God—something I’d only been able to do before with my Christian friends in high school, and then with my husband. And they were distinctly un-cranky—about their children, their jobs, whatever they discussed. In these religious homes, everything was seen as a miracle—exactly as I had been experiencing life all along. A high goal, they said, was to see God behind every tree, every lamp, every occurrence—to see far more than met the eye.
In my new class, taught by Mrs. Ivy Kalazan, concept after new concept lit up my world.

The shofar, she taught us, represented the blowing of God’s breath through the shell of our physicality. Our connection to God was un-severable, like the vertebrae of the spine, and could be damaged but never broken. The flame of Shabbat candles represented our yearning and reaching toward heaven, and the beauty of Judaism could bring holiness to a humble leaf of lettuce—by our washing and checking it to ensure it held no bugs. Everything physical has a spiritual correlate, she taught, and since God made men and women different physically, there must be spiritual differences as well.
This politically incorrect observation was something I’d always believed; here I had a religious explanation, grounded in the most basic understanding of creation.

I also read Blu Greenberg’s How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household and started observing the mikvah laws on my own, and then I read Rabbi Ezriel Tauber’s To Become One and studied privately; these laws and the concepts behind them, from the notion of what’s hidden being the most sacred to the idea that water is the closest we have to a physical emanation of God’s presence, were dazzling and answered questions I didn’t know I had. They illuminated, decoded in a way, my relationship with my husband, while protecting it at the same time from any possibility of boredom or routine. These ideas are so basic to Orthodox understanding, growing out of hundreds of generations’ grappling with text (in this case, Bereishith and Vayikra), and yet to David and me they were entirely new, while at the same time not seeming foreign. And it was ancient, proven wisdom: my grandmothers, and their grandmothers, had followed these laws. I was restoring a link in the chain.

For all of these reasons, really from the very first Orthodox lectures we attended, David and I began to walk our lives into this world of beauty and commandment. We loved our synagogue but my leading services on Shabbat mornings now seemed off; shouldn’t I be present for my family, instead of warming up my singing voice in the shower and getting ready to perform? We had long ago stopped shopping on Shabbat, but shouldn’t we also stop driving, and gardening, and turning on the lights? It might mean alienating my non-observant Jewish family, not to mention David’s Protestant one, which had been tested enough by his first conversion; it would also mean a second conversion for him. We loved our mixed neighborhood and we’d have to sell our home. We loved our local public school, but Ivy Kalazan taught in a religious high school—this material was available to children, during the day?—so they would change schools; that was probably the hardest thing of all. But we wanted them to know the beauty of this new way of life, and to understand it, just as we wanted them to take music lessons, study science and learn to read.

When the time came, we asked Shira Shapiro of Ashreinu to recommend a synagogue, and she suggested three: B’nai David, another that was Modern Orthodox and an Aish HaTorah center, all in Pico-Robertson—not the more Hareidi part of town where she lived. Later I asked her why, and she said that because I’d been leading services, she thought I’d be more comfortable in a synagogue where women had a larger role. That surprised me—it hadn’t seemed important to me at the time—but it turned out to be good foresight on her part.

Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, at B’nai David-Judea, won us right away. Rav Yosef’s derashot were all about the text—how Moshe’s trials inform our own, how commentators understand the characters through back stories gleaned from textual hints, how individual words—individual words!—open windows onto worlds of meaning beneath the surface, and how all of this calls us to high personal responsibility every moment of our lives. On top of that, B’nai David was full of people just like us; by some estimates, fewer than a third of its members (at least at that time) had been raised in Orthodox homes. We were greeted there with lunch and dinner invitations, Purim baskets, and Pessah recipes, shiurim about holidays, lashon haRa, medical ethics, and maintaining the dignity of the dead while preparing them for burial. We also heard, though less frequently, about mixed Arab-Jewish schools in the Negev, and occasionally we heard from Israeli thinkers and journalists, and leaders of projects for Ethiopian emigres or Darfur. We signed up to deliver meals to the poor through a program very careful to protect their anonymity. More recently, we’ve joined a group of about 15 congregants who meet bi-monthly with a similar demographic from the liberal Islamic Center of Southern California. Coming from such a rich and challenging intellectual world before Torah, all of this was absolutely necessary for us to be observant and still feel like ourselves. I think this is true of most of the congregation, and of all of our friends there.

I hadn’t thought the shul’s women’s tefillah group, called Shirat Chana, would matter to me; remember, I’d decided that leading services compromised my observance of Shabbat. But it turned out to be quite helpful in our transition; when my middle daughter was bat mitzvah age, she was able to lain and lead services just as her older sister had, albeit at Minha with only nine men allowed to be present. Other innovations I would appreciate only later: for example, women carrying the Torah through the women’s section, which thrills me every time, especially when I carry it myself. The mehitzah at B’nai David goes right down the middle, and women can get as close to the bima, the Torah and the derasha as any man can, meaning we can see and hear everything and move if we can’t. Women at my shul say Kaddish, and I am able to say Kaddish for my father every fall. Sometimes we have women as scholars-in-residence, a woman is president of the congregation this year, and I myself am a kind of gabbai: for seven years now, I’ve been in charge of arranging which men and boys will lead Shabbat Shaharit, Musaf, and Anim Zemirot. David and I did not join B’nai David-Judea for any of this, but I would have felt much less included—and increasingly so, as time went on—without them. Because our journey has always been a joint one, if I were not fully involved (my husband does go to daily minyan on his own, a pleasure for him), it’s hard to see how it could have endured.

I’m not saying it’s been perfect. We had to step farther out of the world we knew than I had expected. Travel is harder, most restaurants are out. Raising our son and daughters, some things turned out to be impossible because of Shabbat; sadly for me, this included Los Angeles’ excellent children’s choir, along with any high school with a full orchestra or band. Even at Shalhevet High School, which is unusual in its attention to the arts, against the competing demands of four Judaic classes and a full academic program, the choir I direct meets just twice a week after school—far short of what defined my own high school years. This kind of thing has raised questions that Modern Orthodoxy tries to answer but doesn’t quite—for example, does God want us to be a light unto the nations while hiding our children away in schools with only one another, at a time and place in history when children learn together from every place on earth?

Also, I sometimes encounter signs of tribal chauvinism—a sense that Jews are somehow superior, ethnically, culturally, or otherwise, to non-Jews. This is beyond my ken, and strikes me as wholly unworthy of a worldview that celebrates the ultimate value of every human being.

But no culture is perfect, and every choice has its price. David and I still live in the big, diverse city of Los Angeles; we’re still news junkies; and we’re still hopelessly romantic about the flow of history and our small place in it—now we’re tied to a particular strand, one that feels ancient, eternal, and true. The evidence we have for this is partly on paper and partly in our hearts, as close as breathing and a just a bookshelf away.
And Modern Orthodoxy opened to us huge troves of text, all growing from the root of the Torah like the branches of a flowering tree, exquisite separately and together. That is what I set out so many years ago to find: a way to follow God’s instructions, one that works in the world we live in with all its challenges and mystery, and that ties us to God. Whatever our failings, David and I now can try to make our lives the fullest possible expression of those instructions as we are so grateful to finally understand them. This is a gratefulness that goes, and takes us, far beyond words.

Whenever I think of the huge demonstration of Hareidi yeshiva students at the beginning of this month, I think of Gateshead Yeshiva in England where I spent many years studying Talmud. It is Europe’s most famous yeshiva and a bastion of Torah study in the Hareidi world. Paradoxically, I also think of Spinoza’s incomparable masterpiece, the Ethics, written in a small room in Voorburg, the Netherlands.

I come from a completely secular background with no Jewish education, but good schooling in secular philosophy where Kant, Hume and Wittgenstein reigned supreme. When I ventured to have a look at Gateshead Yeshiva with the intention of learning Talmud, I did not know what was awaiting me. I expected a Jewish university for talmudic studies where enlightened teachers and students would discuss the latest problems in theology and talmudic historiography. But nothing was further from the truth. This was not even Yeshiva University. It’s not just that there were no secular studies and no talk about Plato’s theory of immortality or Leibniz’s famous theodicy; this was an altogether different planet. There was nothing but one supreme endeavor: learning Talmud, combined with Rabbi Aryeh Leib Heller’s (1) classic Ketzos HaChoshen and Rabbi Yaakov ben Yaakov Moshe Lorberbaum’s (2) Nesivos HaMishpat, two brilliant talmudic works.

There were 300 of us, and we slept in our overcoats in what some people called a bedroom, where the temperature was far below zero. Our neigel vasser (3) was frozen in the morning. There was no lobby in the yeshiva where we could relax, nor was there a cafeteria. We knew that the food we ate was practically taken from the mouths of our roshei yeshiva. Our menahel ruhani (spiritual mentor), Rabbi Hizkiyahu Eliezer Kahan z”l, was as poor as a church mouse but looked like a king in his spotless frock coat and with his long, carefully combed white beard. He was a “Nevardoker” – a student of the famous Nevardok Yeshiva (called after a city in Lithuania) of pre-Holocaust Europe, which was dedicated to strict discipline and unfailing religious devotion. The non-Jews in Gateshead knew that when Rabbi Kahan, who walked as upright as a soldier, passed by in the afternoon, it was exactly 4:00 p.m. – not a minute later and not a minute earlier. They could not help but take their hats off to this remarkable human being who was a great tzaddik.

When you entered the yeshiva, you were no longer sure in which century you were living – the 5th, 12th, 17th or 20th. This was a world unto itself, made up of singularly focused people. There was no walking out to the street for a few minutes to get some fresh air; no option of going to a kosher restaurant to get a cup of coffee or have a falafel; no chance of meeting a religious girl studying at the famous Gateshead Seminary. Although 150 of them were right around the corner, they were light-years away from our yeshiva. Not only was it dangerous to walk in the streets, since so many drunken people wandered around, but no one even had any interest in doing so. It was considered bitul zman (a waste of time). There was one supreme goal: shtaigen in lernen (excelling in learning).

The roshei yeshiva showed incredible integrity, deep religiosity and a total absence of any personal agenda. There was no competition between them, no scandals and no quarrels. Just Torah in all of its splendor. What counted was the service of God through learning the Talmud, a holy text of infinite sublimity. This monumental text took them back to Mount Sinai, and through its pages they relived the greatest moments in all of Jewish history. There was much naiveté, a withdrawal from the world, which made the rabbis seem like human angels while studying the laws of damages and injuries. There were also mussar shmoozen. These were not intellectual discourses like Kant’s sophisticated insights about ethics; they were emotional, often spontaneous, outbursts of love for God and man. Through the singsong chants, they would lift us up to heaven and ask of us to be supreme human beings and Jews. Nothing in this world comes close to those religious experiences.

I spent 12 years in yeshivot, and then completed my Ph.D. Today, when I speak with many people who reject the yeshiva world and criticize it harshly for its faults, I realize that although I agree with many of their critical assessments, they fail to understand the inner music of these institutions.

They do not realize that this introverted but remarkable world somehow lifted the Jews out of their misery throughout history and gave them the strength to survive all their enemies under the most intolerable conditions brought on by anti-Semitism. It was this denial of time that made the Jews eternal. The yeshiva world was no doubt very small compared to what it is now, but until the emancipation it was the pride of the entire Jewish world. The Talmud afforded the Jews wings, enabling them to fly to other worlds; to return to the past that no longer existed; and to look toward worlds that were still to come. It became the Jews’ portable homeland, and their complete immersion in its texts made them indestructible even as they were tortured and killed. The Talmud became their survival kit, which ultimately empowered their offspring to establish the State of Israel, nearly 2000 years after they were exiled from their land. This is unprecedented in all of the history of mankind.

For nearly 2000 years the yeshiva world made Jews view life sub specie aeternitatis, as Spinoza called it – from the perspective of eternity. Indeed, it allowed them to leave behind ordinary history and become a-historical. Jews stepped out of history because it was the only way to survive in history. And so the yeshiva world gave the Jewish people a tool for survival, which no one could match for the last 2000 years. Had the yeshiva world not done so, the Jewish people would never have endured, the State of Israel would not have been created, and no Jews – neither religious nor secular – would have lived in this wonderful country. All Israelis owe their lives to the wondrous yeshiva world, whether they like it or not.

In some way, Spinoza was a yeshiva student. He lived in his small room in Voorburg, and that was his beit midrash. Like the yeshiva students, he nearly never left it. There he built his universe and wrote his magnum opus. Consistent with his own philosophy, he too lived outside of history. His deep thoughts, insights and noble feelings are not of this world.

They too are the product of sub specie aeternitatis and therefore suspect. In the long run they will break down, because one might be able to escape this world, even for a long time, but ultimately one needs to return. Thoughts that are eternal and untouchable are too beautiful and, for most people, unreachable. And so it is with the yeshiva world. Learning Talmud without being able to put much of its teachings into practice is too abstract and too unworldly.
With the establishment of the State of Israel, Jews were forced to re-enter history. But after 2000 years of living as yeshiva students and followers of Spinoza’s saintly teachings, it is a painful transformation. Most of our leaders, our government, and the roshei yeshiva have not yet realized that we are still hanging in suspense. We live with one foot in the world of the yeshiva and Spinoza, and the other foot on the ground with all its challenges and harsh realities. Our political leaders want us to come down and stand with both feet on the ground, while the yeshiva world wants to stay in the beit midrash of Spinoza, in heaven. Both will have to realize that their goals are unrealistic. It is much too early to decide whether we should come down with both feet on the ground, or continue to stay in heaven with at least one foot. We still find ourselves at a crossroads. One is reminded of the story told about a former premier of China who was asked what the impact of the French Revolution was on modern European history. His reply was, “It’s too early to say.”

What our political leaders have to ask themselves is whether it is already possible to fully return to history. Our enemies surrounding us are getting stronger and stronger. Their hate increases daily. Israel now finds itself in an unprecedented and precarious situation, more and more isolated. We are close to becoming, once again, a nation that “dwells alone,” as our biblical arch-enemy Bil’am stated thousands of years ago. (4) Can we really afford to fully enter into history bound by its normative rules, and be defeated by these very rules because we are not yet strong enough? Wouldn’t it be better to stay with one foot in the world of sub specie aeternitatis, outside of history? In fact, isn’t the very existence of the State of Israel a bit too miraculous to fit the norms of history? Perhaps we should make sure that some of our people, our yeshiva students, continue to live outside of history so that they can rescue our nation if history does not accept us as real players and we would otherwise disappear. Isn’t it true that we are treated as a people with no history, as the United Nations, many European countries, and even the American administration use double standards when judging us, not allowing us to be part of conventional history? We are still living through the birth-pangs, as yet unable to say what the baby will look like.

On the other hand, it is our Hareidi roshei yeshiva and those recognized as the gedolei hador who are guilty of not realizing that we Jews must return to history at some point, and if they don’t want to join us they may lose us altogether and they themselves may not survive. They seem to be completely oblivious to the radical change that has taken place in the Jewish world – including their own yeshiva world – after the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. We have been taught that in the long run it is impossible for all of us to stay outside of history. The Holocaust has taught us that we cannot survive ad infinitum without entering history. We have too much eternity and too little geography. To argue that our yeshiva students are the ones who really defend us against our enemies, and that we do not need soldiers, is an escape from reality and as anti-halakhic as can be. It is a rewriting of Judaism that the Hareidi leadership cannot even accuse the Reform of doing.

Both the secular and the Hareidi utterly lack historical perspective. The secular have to learn that we may need to keep some people outside of history, and the Hareidi leadership will have to realize that now that we have a state of our own, all of us, without exception, must serve in Tzahal because we are trying to get back into history. In fact, every young Jewish male outside of Israel should feel it his absolute moral obligation to serve for a few months in the Israeli army, because by now world Jewry is depending on the State of Israel, if only so that when it really goes wrong in Europe or the United States there will be a haven for them.

It cannot be denied that the Israeli government made a major blunder in the way it handled the need to draft yeshiva students for army service. Some Knesset members believe that they won, but in reality it was a monumental loss and they became the laughing stock of Israeli society by arguing for equal service by all. Everyone knows that there’s no such thing as equality in the army. Some people risk their lives, others do not. If all were equal, the army wouldn’t function. We also know that a Jewish State will never be able to put people in jail because they learn Torah.

Both parties should have learned from the great British Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin who states that there are no ideal solutions in this world. There are only tradeoffs. “You cannot combine full liberty with full equality… Justice and mercy, knowledge and happiness can collide,” says Berlin. It is not that such perfect harmony cannot be created because of practical difficulties. It is that “utopian solutions are in principle incoherent and unimaginable… so there have to be choices.” One can only choose how much equality and how much liberty, how much mercy and how much justice. Belief in a perfect world “cannot but lead to suffering, misery, blood, terrible oppression.” (5)

The only thing the government can do is suggest that Hareidi yeshiva students go for basic training and build yeshivot in the army. The students would have to walk around in uniform and learn full time, learn with other soldiers, do community service, or something similar. Fair? Certainly not. But fairness is not a value that can always work in the military.

Only a tradeoff can work; there is no other option. And by allowing these students to study while in the army, we at least remind ourselves that we may still have to be an a-historical people and that we cannot yet afford to live solely within history. It is still too dangerous. If some of us are full-time cooks in the army, others can be full time learners in the army. Much too expensive? Sure! But you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Still, the greatest mistake was not made by the government but by the Hareidi leadership. When it organized a demonstration in which nearly 600,000 black-hatted yeshiva students participated to show their love for Torah, one could hear a pin drop just before the crowd burst out in an unprecedented cry of Shema Yisrael. That was the perfect opportunity to prove their love for our brave soldiers and all of Israeli society by having all 600,000 men and women recite prayers for the welfare of the soldiers and all Jews in Israel. That would not only have been a great kiddush Hashem; it also would have turned Israeli society around and healed much of the animosity between the Hareidi and non-Hareidi communities. Yeshiva students would have been seen in a different light. Instead of having upset hundreds of thousands of Israelis, among whom many have lost their sons and daughters in combat, it would have created an entirely different atmosphere in the country. There is little doubt that most yeshiva students would have done it with great love. The failure to ask them to do so is not just a missed opportunity. It is completely irresponsible and a terrible tragedy. When the world-renowned, Hareidi halakhic authority Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Aurbach z”l was asked to which graves of tzaddikim one should go to pray, he said to go to the military cemeteries. The fact that the Hareidi leadership did not tell 600,000 of their followers to pray for our soldiers proves beyond doubt how small-minded are those who are recognized as gedolei hador.

To paraphrase Spinoza: All noble men are as great as they are rare.
*************************
1. Rabbi, talmudist and halachist in Galicia, 1745-1812.
2. Rabbi and respected posek in Lissa (today known as Leszno), Poland, 1760-1832.
3. Water put near one’s bed at night for washing hands upon arising.
4. Bamidbar 23:9.
5. Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Halban Publishers, 2007) pp. 142-3.

Lately, a strange feeling has gotten hold of me. I am not yet able to fully articulate it, but something tells me that God is relocating to a different residence. He has hired a moving company, and they are at this time loading all His furniture and possessions into a van and awaiting His instructions as to the destination. The truth is He’s been thinking about moving for a long time but has not yet done so because we, in our ignorance, are still busy visiting His old home, completely blind to the fact that the curtains have been taken down, most of His furniture has already been removed, and He is standing in the doorway, dressed in His jacket and ready to go. He nevertheless listens to us, smiling and feeling sorry for us that in our utter blindness we still believe we are sitting comfortably in His living room, chatting, and having coffee with Him, while in fact He is sitting on the edge of His chair, gazing longingly at the door, dreaming of His new home.

Synagogues—whether Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform—are no longer His primary residence. Surely some of the worshippers are pious people who try to communicate with their Creator, but overall, the majority of these places have become religiously sterile and spiritually empty. So God is moving to unconventional minyanim and places such as Israeli cafes, debating clubs, community centers, unaffiliated religious gatherings, and atypical batei midrash. The reason is obvious. In some of those places people are actually looking for Him. And that is what He loves; not those who have already found Him and take Him for granted. He is moving in with the young people who have a sense that He is there but cannot yet find Him. It gives Him a thrill. In some of these cafes He encounters young men sporting ponytails, without kippot, but with tzitziyot hanging out of their T-shirts, praying in their own words, attempting to find Him. In secular yeshivot, He meets women in trousers and mini-skirts who are earnestly arguing about what it means to be Jewish and who kiss mezuzot when they enter a fashion show. Then there are those who, to His delight, are keen on putting on tefillin once in a while and do this with great excitement; or who enthusiastically light Shabbat candles Friday night and can get into a serious discussion about Buddhism and how to combine some of its wisdom with Kabbalah and incorporate it into Jewish practice.

No, they don’t do so because it is tradition, or nostalgia, as their grandparents did, but because they sincerely want to connect, to grow and become better, deeper, and more authentic Jews—but at their own pace and without being told by others what they ought to do. They won’t go for the conventional outreach programs, which try to indoctrinate them and are often terribly simplistic. No, they strive to come closer because of an enormous urge and inner explosion of their neshamot. No better place for God to be, even if these attempts may not always achieve the correct goals and are sometimes misdirected.

At these unconventional sites, theological discourses take place over a glass of beer, and the participants talk deep into the night because they can’t get enough of this great stuff called Judaism. Many of these people want to study God and understand why He created the world and what the meaning of life is all about. What is the human condition? What is a religious experience? How do we confront death? What is the meaning of halakha? What are we Jews doing here in this strange universe? They realize that life becomes more and more perplexing, and these questions are therefore of radical importance. These are, after all, eternal issues. Who wants to live a life that passes by unnoticed? It is in this mysterious stratosphere that God loves to dwell. He can’t get enough of it.

Regrettably, His interest wavers when He enters conventional synagogues. He finds little excitement there. Many of His worshippers seem to go through the motions, activate their automatic pilot, do what they are told, say the words in the prayer book, and go home to make Kiddush. Few are asking questions on how to relate to God, why they are Jewish, or what their lives really are all about. Many do not want to be confronted with these nasty issues. They only disturb their peace of mind. A nice, conventional devar Torah is good enough. After all, everything has already been discussed and resolved. Regular synagogue visitors only speak to Him when they need Him, but almost nobody ever speaks about Him or hears Him when He calls for help in pursuing the purpose of His creation.

So God is moving to more interesting places. He laughs when He thinks of the old slogan, “God is dead.” It was a childhood disease. He knows we learned our lesson. It is too easy, too simplistic, and has not solved anything. He knows that He has not yet been replaced with something better. Oh yes, there are still run-of-the-mill scientists who believe that they have it all worked out. Some neurologists sincerely believe that “we are our brains” and that our thinking is nothing more than sensory activity. They seem to believe that one can find the essence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by analyzing the ink with which the composer wrote this masterpiece. There are even Nobel Prize winners who believe that we will soon enter God’s mind and know it all, no longer needing Him. They are like the man who searches for his watch in the middle of the night. When asked why he is looking under the street lamp, if he lost his watch a block away, he answers: “This is the only place where I can see anything.” These scientists have still not realized that there are more things, on earth and in heaven, than their research will ever grasp. They have convinced themselves that they are merely objective spectators and have not yet understood that they themselves are actors in the mysterious drama of what is called life.

And God simply winks. During the duration of this long-term disease beginning in the nineteenth century, antibodies have been developing to fight against the denial of His very being. Although atheism is still alive and kicking, many have become immune to all these simplistic ideas. Over the years, more and more antitoxins have accumulated, and we are now stunned by the fact that He, after all, may indeed be in our midst. Suddenly, an outdated hypothesis has come to life again. God is a real possibility, and we had better become aware of that.

But here’s the catch: While the religious establishment is now shouting from the rooftops “We told you so,” it has not yet grasped that this is completely untrue. The discovery of God did not happen because of conventional religion but in spite of it.

The truth is that the great shift concerning God took place far away from the official religious establishment. It is in fact a miracle that some people continued believing in God while religion often did everything to make this impossible. For centuries the church blundered time after time. Since the days when Galileo proved the Church wrong, it was constantly forced to change its position. And even then it did so reluctantly. The enormous loss of prestige that religion suffered because of it is beyond description. God was pushed into the corner. Not because He was not there, but because He was constantly misrepresented by people who spoke in His name. Since the Renaissance, many other great minds have moved the world forward; and although several may have missed the boat, a large number of them introduced radical new perspectives of the greatest importance. Yet, the Church’s only response was to fight them tooth and nail until, out of utter necessity, when all its arguments had run out, it had to succumb and apologize once again for its mistakes. Time and again, religion lagged behind in sharing the victory of new scientific and philosophical insights. Ironically, long before the Church officially sanctioned these new discoveries, they were already part and parcel of the new world. As always, the imprimatur came too late.

Thus, religion paid a heavy price. Its territory became smaller and smaller. The constant need for capitulation made many people leave the world of religion and opt for the secular approach. And the story is not over yet. Scientists are now discussing the possibility of creating life forms in the laboratory that do not depend on DNA to survive and evolve. In all likelihood, several religious leaders will fight this again, with force and ferocity, and will probably have to succumb once more when they can no longer deny the hard facts of science.

But what was happening in the Jewish religious world? Although it cannot be denied that Judaism, too, got caught up in all these debates, and quite a few staunch traditionalists were not much better than some of the church fathers, the overall situation within Judaism was much more receptive to scientific developments. Whereas the Church declared in one authoritative voice— often the synod— that these new scientific discoveries were outright heresy, such pronouncements never took place in the synagogue. This is because Judaism is so different from other religions. Positions of unconditional belief were never its main concern. They were always debated, but never finalized, as was the case with the Church. What kept Judaism busy was the question of how to live one’s life while living in the presence of God and humanity, as expressed in the all-encompassing halakhic literature. Because of that, it did not see scientific discoveries as much of a challenge. There was also a strong feeling that scientific progress was a God-given blessing. The greatest Jewish religious thinker of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, was even prepared to give up on the concept of creation ex nihilo if it would be proven untrue. [1] Although he was attacked for some of these radical and enlightened ideas, the general attitude was: Let science do its thing, and if we were wrong in the past because we relied on the science of those days, we will now rectify our position. Even when the Talmud made scientific statements, many—although certainly not all—understood them to be the result of scientific knowledge of the day, and not sacrosanct. And even when these debates became more intensive, it was never argued that opposing views should be absolutely silenced. There was no final authority in matters of belief, no Jewish synod. At the same time, many sages warned against making science into an idol that is all-knowing and can solve life’s riddles.

Louis Kronenberger notes that

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all…of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.[2]

But today all this has changed. In many Orthodox circles, Judaism’s beliefs have become more holy than the pope. Suddenly, there is an attempt to outdo old-fashioned Catholicism; to insist that the world is actually nearly 5,800 years old; that the creation chapter must be taken literally; that the seven days of creation consisted of twenty-four hours each and not one minute more; that there is no foundation to the theory of evolution; and that the Talmud’s scientific observations came straight from Sinai. That this happened in the past, when there was limited scientific knowledge, is understandable; but that such claims are still made today is downright embarrassing. It makes us blush. We can laugh about it only because the hopelessness of some of these ideas has already passed the point of being disputable. They have faded into flickering embers soon to be extinguished.

Surely it could be argued that possibly science will change its mind. But if the core beliefs of Judaism are not undermined (and they are not!), and as long as there is no indication that science will change its mind in the near future, there is no need to reject these scientific positions. And let us never forget that it is not even completely clear what these core beliefs are! So why fight modern science? [3]

The incredible damage done by doing so is beyond description. It makes Judaism laughable and, in the eyes of many intelligent people, completely outmoded. It makes it impossible to inspire many searching souls who know what science teaches us. If not for this mistaken understanding of Judaism, many people would not have left the fold and could actually have enjoyed Judaism as a major force in their lives.

And it is here that many of us, including myself, are at fault. We blame the Synagogue for this failure, as we blamed the Church hundreds of years ago. Many of us have said, “Judaism has failed”; “It is outdated”; “I am getting out.” But such statements are as unfair as they are illogical. Judaism is not an institution external to us, which one can abandon as one quits a hockey club. We are the Synagogue, and we are Judaism. When Galileo revolutionized our view concerning the solar system, it was not only the Church that failed; we all failed. Those who from the perspective of Galileo claim that the Church was backward are reasoning post factum.

We must realize that although Judaism consists of core beliefs and values that are eternal and divine, it is also the product of the culture during which time it developed. That, too, is part of God’s plan and has a higher purpose. And when history moves on and God reveals new knowledge, the purpose is to incorporate that into our thinking and religious experience. Ignoring this is silencing God’s voice.

According to Alfred North Whitehead,

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.[4]

That is why God is relocating. He doesn’t want to live in a place where His ongoing creation is unappreciated and even denied.

We have replaced God with prayers, no longer realizing to Whom we are praying. We even use halakha as an escape from experiencing Him. We are so busy with creating halakhic problems, and so completely absorbed by trying to solve them, that we are unaware of our hiding behind this practice so as not to deal with His existence. In many ways this is understandable. Since the days of the Holocaust, we have refused to confront the problem of His existence due to the enormity of the evil, which He allowed to happen. So we threw ourselves into halakha to escape the question. But although the problem of God’s involvement in the Holocaust will probably never be solved, we must realize that the purpose of halakha is to have an encounter with Him, not just with the halakha. Halakha is the channel through which we can reach Him, not just laws to live by.

Notwithstanding the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust, we must return to God. It’s high time we realize that His being is of a total different nature than we have ever imagined. God can only be understood in a way that is similar to the relationship between a computer hard disk and what you see on the screen. What you see on the screen is totally different from what is inscribed in the hard disk. You can examine the inside of the disk using the most powerful microscope, but you will see nothing even slightly resembling pictures, colors, or words. We are mistaken when we picture God based on the world screen. In no way does it reveal the actual contents of the hard disk, God Himself. All we know is that God’s ways—which we see only through the external sense of sight—is somehow related to the disk. The problem is that we believe we can have a good look at God by watching the screen. But we haven’t the slightest clue of what is actually going on in the disk. The Holocaust will almost certainly remain an enigma, but it can never deny the divine disk.[5]

It is in those who are still uncomfortable with God that new insights about Him are formed. And it will be in those uneasy environments that Judaism will be rediscovered and developed. The need for religious transcendence, and for the spiritual thread that keeps many young people on their toes, is enormous. Numerous secular people are joining a new category of spiritual theologians. Matters of weltanschauung are pivotal to many secular Jews now. The problem is that for them, and for the religious, the Torah is transmitted on a wavelength that is out of range of their spiritual transistors’ frequency.

Yes, we turn on the radio, but we hear strange noises and unusual static. There is serious transmission failure. We are no longer sure where the pipelines are. God has relocated.

In the world of physics, matters are becoming increasingly hazy. Our brains are penetrating places where well-established notions, such as matter and substance, have evaporated. They have been transformed to puzzling phenomena. They have moved, and God has moved with them. Science is becoming intangible, and it’s happening at a speed that we can’t keep up with. It puts us in a difficult position and causes us anxiety. We are all living in exile, within a mystical landscape. Those who are aware of this are alive; those who are not have left this world unwittingly.

The question is whether we move our synagogues to where God is now dwelling. Will we, the religious, live up to the expectations of the young people in cafes and discussions groups who have preceded us? Will we apologize to them and join in their discussions, creating a real religious experience out of our synagogue service? Or will we, as usual, stay put, fight the truth, and then be put to shame?

When will we move Judaism to the front seat so that it once again becomes the leader instead of a follower?

Will we move to God’s new habitat, or are we still drinking coffee in His old home, where the curtains have been removed and He is long gone?

***
There is a serious breakdown that has taken place in the Orthodox community worldwide. Today, most of these communities view themselves as observant, not model, communities. An observant community is one that is concerned primarily with religious observance. As such, it views halakha and a proper Orthodox environment to execute its demands as its priority. It sees its main obligation as ensuring that Orthodox Judaism survives the ongoing encroachment of secularism and assimilation. To a certain degree, its interest in halakha comes at the expense of Judaism itself. It lacks the language and spirit necessary to become a model community conveying the great message of Judaism to all other Jews, and even Gentiles.

Basically, it is defensive.

The Orthodox community does not realize that it is not observance that should be its main concern. Its primary goal should be to create a spiritual environment in which Jews, whether religious or not, take part in the great mission called Judaism, driven by a visionary halakha. Because it fails to understand this, it views strangers with suspicion. They are only welcome after a security check. The language spoken in these communities is of right and wrong, good and bad, safe and dangerous. It is a language of survival.

Mainstream Orthodoxy has fallen victim to a false kind of modernity in which flaunting irreverence has become the norm. Debunking is commonly practiced, and at every turn we experience the need to expose the clay feet of even the greatest. Human dignity, a phrase often used, has become a farce in real life. Instead of deliberately looking for opportunities to love our fellow men and women, as required by our holy Torah, many have rewritten this golden rule to read—in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel—“Distrust your fellow man as you distrust yourself.” People’s lack of belief in themselves has spilled over to their relationships with others. Mediocrity has led them to believe that we are a generation of spiritual orphans. Influenced by materialistic philosophies, many a religious person who once revered his fellows has become part of the problem without even being aware of it.

When observing even those who are fully committed to helping fellow Jews find their way back to Judaism, we see an attitude that is foreign to religious life and thought. We cannot escape the impression that some people, without denying their love for their brothers and sisters, tend to talk down to “secular” Jews. This has become the norm. Constant emphasis is placed on the need to cure the secular person of his or her mistaken lifestyle. But this is asking for infinite trouble. It is based on arrogance. While religious Jews see themselves as the ideal, they relegate secular Jews to second-class status and decide that it is they who needs to repent for their mistaken ways. Such an attitude is based on the notions of contrast and lack of affinity. The secular Jew will always feel inferior. Therefore, the point of departure from which one reaches out to bring fellow Jews closer to Judaism is, at the same time, its undoing. The suggestion that “One should throw oneself into a burning furnace rather than insult another person publicly” [6] may very well apply, since it is the community of secular Jews that is being shamed and treated as inferior.

For Jews to bring others back to Judaism they need to celebrate the mitzvoth that the secular Jew has been observing for all or part of his life, not condemn his failure to observe some others.

Heschel writes, “The foundation should be humility, not arrogance.” [7] There is little doubt that secular Jews, consciously or unconsciously, keep a large number of commandments. Many of them may not be in the realm of rituals, but there is massive evidence that secular Jews are firmly committed to keeping interpersonal mitzvoth. Beneath the divisiveness of ritualism lie the underpinnings of religion, such as compassion, humility, awe, and even faith. The pledges are different, but the devotions are equal. It may very well be that the meeting of minds is lacking between the religious and non-religious Jews, but their spirits touch. Who will deny that secular Jews have a sense of mystery, forgiveness, beauty, and gentleness? How many do we know who lack inner faith that God cares? And how many will not show great contempt for fraud or double standards? Each of these is the deepest of religious values. We must try and make the so-called non-religious Jews aware of the fact that they are much more religious than they may know; that God’s light shines on their faces just as much, if not more, than on the faces of those we call religious Jews.

This not only calls for celebration but may well become an inspiration for religious Jews—not just by honoring secular Jews for keeping these mitzvoth but by taking an example from their non-observant brothers, by renewing these mitzvoth and good deeds in their own lives.

Just as the non-religious person needs to prove his or her worthiness to be the friend of a religious Jew, so the religious Jew needs to be worthy of the friendship of a secular fellow Jew. It would be a most welcome undertaking if the religious would call on the non-religious for guidance in mitzvoth in which they, the religious Jews, have been lax, as well as in how to improve themselves.

There is a significant need for calling Jews back to their roots by showing them that they never left. Once religious Jews learn that secular Jews are their equals, not their inferiors, a return to Judaism on the right terms will come about.

Orthodoxy celebrates its massive growth and unprecedented birthrate, but by doing so, it masks the tragedy of the thousands who are never given an opportunity to get in touch with Judaism or are unaware of how Jewish they really are. The language of condemnation and devaluation that permeates Orthodox classrooms not only makes it impossible for many to enter—but also causes numerous young people who were raised in a religious environment to leave the fold and turn their backs on Judaism. Even worse is the fact that Orthodoxy continues to point to this trend as evidence in support of the need for its insularity and separatism, blaming secularity for this tragic state of affairs, while the truth is that to a great extent it is Orthodoxy itself that is to blame.

***
The primary concern of Judaism is the art of living. To accomplish this goal it is committed to a strong sense of tradition and a determination to realize certain optimal goals. It is this road which has made Judaism unique and makes it stand out among the community of religions. This unique directness from a historical past into a messianic future; from Mount Sinai to justice for the orphan, widow, and stranger; and the ultimate abolition of war has saved Judaism from death by ice and death by fire, from freezing in awe of a rigid tradition and from evaporating into utopian reverie. [8]

Still, what Jews always looked for in the Torah was not just a way of living, nor the discovery of a truth but—this is scarcely an exaggeration—everything. Their love for the Torah was not just molded by particular teachings but by their conviction that everything could be found within its pages. God is no doubt central to Judaism but because the Jews never lost their intimate awareness of the multifarious colors of the Torah and its tradition, no dogma could ever gain authority. Even after Maimonides attempted, under the influence of Islamic theology, to lay down definite formulations of Jewish belief, Judaism refused to accept them as sacrosanct and did not allow such attempts to come between itself and the inexhaustible Torah text. It is for this reason that the kind of tension between religion and the quest for truth is almost unknown in Judaism. No sacrifice of the intellect is demanded.

One look in the Talmud proves this point beyond doubt. The flow of thoughts, opposing ideas, and the making and rejection of opinions and insights are abundant. The interaction between legality, prose, narrative, illusion, and the hard reality is astonishing. It makes the Talmud into the richest of all literatures; not even Greek philosophy was able to produce such a symphony of ideas in which the waves of the human intellect and divinity move forward and backward. There is an absolute lack of systematization, and it is clear that any such attempt was nipped in the bud. From a modern point of view, one might argue that the search for truth in the Torah was not directed toward proportional truth because such a notion was lacking by definition. The most persistent intellectual energy and analytic efforts were devoted to the continual contrivance of beautiful and profound interpretation to discover the totality of life.

Since the Torah was considered God-given, it might have been logical that fundamentalism would ultimately triumph and lead to conflict with science and other disciplines. But this inference is founded on a major misconception. Precisely because the text is seen as the word of God the essential ambiguity of the text was granted implicitly and every verse by definition has many levels of interpretations, both poetic and legal. There is even the compatibility of playfulness with seriousness since the former is a most important component of human existence as created by God.

Today, the attempt to streamline and straightjacket the Jewish tradition and to create a final Jewish theology is a major mistake and a complete misreading of its very character. Although there is, for practical reasons, a need to put halakhic living into a pragmatic context that requires conformity in action, this should never be the goal when focusing on Judaism’s beliefs. It is the task of the rabbis to do everything in their power to rescue Judaism from dogmatism. Although it can’t be denied that Judaism incorporates certain primary beliefs, these beliefs were always kept to the minimum and were constantly a source of fierce debate. Most important, one must remember that such “dogmas” never turned into a reductio ad absurdum. Freedom in doctrine and conformity in action was the overall policy to which the talmudic rabbis were committed, even when convinced of certain fundamental truths. This is also evident when one studies the relationship between the biblical text and the Oral Torah, where we see a minimum amount of words and maximum amount of interpretation.

It is detrimental to Jewish tradition to transform words into fixed clusters of thought and the storing up of whole theories. The idea is not to become the owner of a mass of information, which is entrusted firmly in one’s memory and carefully transmitted into notes. Once one does so, one becomes scared and disturbed by new ideas, since the new puts into question the fixed sum of information that one has stored into one’s mind. As such, ideas that cannot easily be pinned down are frightening, like everything else that grows and is flexible. Instead of being passive receptacles of words and ideas, the ideal is to hear—and most important to receive and respond—in an active, productive way. It needs to stimulate a thinking process that ultimately leads to the transformation of the student.

The attempt today to halakhalize and legalize Jewish thought is missing the whole message of the talmudic way of thinking. It will undermine the halakha itself since it will kill its underlying spirit. There is little doubt that due to the pan-halakhic attitudes that we now experience in certain rabbinical circles, we see the symptoms through which the halakha becomes suffocated and often rejected by intelligent, broad-thinking people. A plant may continue to stay alive in apparent health after its roots have been cut, but its days are numbered.

If the kind of rabbinical censorship that we have lately encountered in relationship to certain books and ideas on Orthodox Judaism was to be applied to the talmudic text itself, it would mean that the best part of this great compendium on Jewish thought and law would be censored and burned.

Freedom of thought must be guaranteed if we want the Jewish tradition to have a future. This applies in particular to teaching. A man or a woman who holds a teaching post should not be forced to repress his opinions for the sake of upholding popular simplistic opinions or even more sophisticated ones. As long as his or her opinions are rooted in the authentic Jewish tradition, and expressed with the awe of Heaven, it must be encouraged—however much this is disliked by some rabbinic authorities.

Uniformity in the opinions expressed by teachers is not only not to be sought, but is, if possible, to be avoided since diversity of opinion among preceptors is essential to any sound education. No religious Jewish student can pass as educated if he or she has heard only one side of the debates that divided the earlier and later sages. One of the most important things to teach is the power of weighing arguments, and this is the foundation of all talmudic debate. To prevent the teacher from doing do so or to bring this to the attention of his or her students is misplaced rabbinic tyranny and has no place in the Jewish tradition. It is the Christianization of Judaism by rabbis.

As soon as censorship is imposed upon the opinions that teachers may avow, Jewish education ceases to serve its purpose and tends to produce instead a nation of men and women, a herd of fanatical bigots.

Today’s talmudists must realize that they can become imprisoned by their own talmudic knowledge. They may have tremendous talmudic expertise, but they may have forgotten that one needs to know more than only all the intricacies of text. One needs to hear the distinctiveness of its content, the spirit it breathes, the ideological foundations on which it stands. To know the Talmud is to know more than its sum total.

Techniques for dealing with individuals whose opinions are disliked have been well-perfected. Especially so when the condemners are people of power and the accused are young and inexperienced. It is an easy and well-known tactic to accuse the condemned of professional incompetence. Most of the time, the dissident is quietly dropped. In the case of more experienced individuals, public hostility is stirred by means of misrepresentation and character assassination. Since most teachers do not care to expose themselves to these risks, they will avoid giving public expressions to their less “Orthodox” opinions. This is a most dangerous state of affairs. It is a way to muzzle genuine and important knowledge and to deny people insight. But above all it allows obscurantism to triumph.

Certain religious leaders, including rabbis, may believe that such tactics of repression and character assassination work, but they should know that although books can be burned, the ideas expressed in them do not die. No person and no force can put a thought in a concentration camp. Trying to do so is similar to the act of somebody who is so afraid of being murdered and therefore decides to commit suicide so as to avoid assassination.

****

Torah study has become nearly impossible, and the problem lies not with the Torah but with people. To read the text requires courage. Not courage to open the Book and start reading, but courage to confront oneself. To learn Torah requires human authenticity; it means standing in front of the mirror and asking oneself the daunting question of who one really is, without masks and artificialities. Unfortunately, that is one of the qualities that modern people have lost. Modern people have convinced themselves to be intellectuals, removed from subjectivity and bowing only to scientific investigation. As such, these people have disconnected from their Self. Because people are a bundle of emotions, passions, and subjectivities, they cannot escape their inner world, much as they would like to. Still, modern people formulate ideas. They may proclaim the rights of the spirit and even pronounce laws. But these ideas enter only their books and discussions, not their lives.; they hover above their originators’ heads, rather than walking with them into the inner chambers of daily existence. These ideas don’t enter people’s trivial moments but stand as monuments—impressive, but far removed.

People are no longer able to struggle with their inner Self and therefore cannot deal with the biblical text. The text stares them in the face, and people are terrified by the confrontation. All they can do is deny the text, so that they may escape from themselves. Since they know that they must come to terms with themselves before coming to terms with the Book, they cannot negate it or disagree with it, as this requires them to deny something that they don’t even know exists.

Does that mean that these modern people are not religious? Not at all. Even the religious person is detached from the spirit. The religious person has elevated religion to such a level that its influence on his or her everyday life, in the here and now, has been lost. It is found on the top floor of his or her spiritual house, with its own very special atmosphere. It has become departmentalized. But the intention of Torah is exactly the reverse. Its words, events, and commandments are placed in the midst of the people, enveloped in history and worldly matters. What happens there does not take place in a vacuum but in the harshness of human reality. Most of the Torah deals with the natural course of a person’s life. Only sporadic miracles allow us to hear the murmurs from another world that exists beyond. These moments remind us that God is, after all, the only real Entity in all of existence. But the Torah is the story of how God exists in the midst of mortal human’s ordinary troubles and joys. It is not the story of God in heaven, but of God in human history and personal encounter.

The art of biblical interpretation is far more than just knowing how to give expression to the deeper meaning of the text. It is, after all, impossible to treat the biblical text as one would any other classical work. This is because the people of Israel, according to Jewish tradition, are not the authors of this text. Rather, the text is the author of the people. Comprising a covenant between God and humanity, the text is what brought the people into being. Moreover, despite the fact that the people often violated the commanding voice of this text, it created the specific and unique identity of the Jewish nation.

That is precisely why reading the text is not like reading a conventional literary work. It requires a reading-art, which allows the unfolding of the essence and nature of a living people struggling with life and God’s commandments.

This calls for a totally different kind of comprehension, one that must reflect a particular thought process and attitude on the part of the student.

George Steiner expressed this well when he wrote:

The script…is a contract with the inevitable. God has, in the dual sense of utterance and of binding affirmation, “given His word,” His Logos and His bond, to Israel. It cannot be broken or refuted.[9]

The text, then, must be approached in a way that reflects a human commitment to ensure that it indeed will not be broken or refuted. This has become a great challenge to modern biblical interpretation. Many scholars and thinkers have been asking whether the unparalleled calamity of the Holocaust did not create a serious existential crisis in which the text by definition has been invalidated. Can we still speak about a working covenant by which God promised to protect His people, now that six million Jews, including more than a million children, lost their lives within a span of five years under the cruelest of circumstances?

The reason for raising this question is not just because the covenant appears to have been broken, but also because history—and specifically Jewish history— was always seen as a living commentary on the biblical text. The text gave significance to history and simultaneously took on its religious meaning.

Can the text still be used in that sense, or has it lost its significance because history violated the criteria for its proper and covenantal elucidation?

Not for nothing have modern scholars suggested that there is a need, post-Holocaust, to liberate ourselves from this covenantal text in favor of shaping our destiny and history in totally secular terms. The Holocaust proved, they believe, that we have only ourselves to rely on, and even the return to Israel is to be understood as a secular liberation of the galut experience.

It is in this context that “commentary” needs to take on a new challenge: to show not only how the covenant, as articulated in the text, is not broken or refuted, but how in fact it is fully capable of dealing with the new post-Holocaust conditions of secularity. Without falling victim to apologetics, biblical interpretation will have to offer a novel approach to dealing with the Holocaust experience in a full religious setting, based on the text and taking it beyond its limits.

It will have to respond to the fact that God is the most tragic figure in all of history, making the life of humanity sometimes sublime while at other times disastrous. The biblical text is there to tell humans how to live with this God and try to see meaning behind the absurdity of the situation.

But above all, modern commentary must make sure that the Torah speaks to the atheist and the agnostic, for they need to realize that the text is replete with examples of sincere deniers and doubters who struggled all of their lives with great existential questions. The purpose is not to bring the atheists and agnostics back to the faith, but to show that one can be religious while being an atheist; to make people aware that it is impossible to live without embarking on a search for meaning, whether one finds it or not. It is the search that is important, the end result much less so. The art is to refrain from throwing such a pursuit on the dunghill of history throughout the ages. The struggle of homo religiosus is of greatest importance to the atheist.

That most secular people no longer read the Torah is an enormous tragedy. The Torah is too important to be left to the believer. The beauty of day-to-day life takes on a different and higher meaning through the Torah, and that will evoke in atheists a faintly mystical anticipation, which they will experience when they are alone or when they watch a sunset at the beach. A voice is born, and it speaks to them; they feels a melancholy that calls forth something far away and beyond. They happen upon a situation that suddenly throws them over the edge, and they get taken in by the experience of a loftier existence. They realize that the god they were told to believe in is not the God of the Torah. The latter is a God with Whom one argues; a God Who is criticized and Who wants people to search even if it results in the denial of Him.

This issue is related to other critical problems. Surveying Jewish history, we see drastic changes in the ways the biblical text was encountered. In the beginning the Torah was heard and not written. Moshe received the Torah through the spoken Word: “The Word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, for you to carry out.” [10] God may be unimaginably far away, but His voice is heard nearby, and it is the only way to encounter Him.

At a later stage, the Word evolved into a written form. Once this happened, there was a process by which the spoken Word was slowly silenced and gradually replaced by the written form. With the eclipse of prophecy, God’s word was completely silenced and could then only be read. As such, the Word became frozen and ran the risk of becoming stagnant. At that stage it was necessary to unfreeze the Word, which became the great task of the Sages and commentaries throughout the following centuries.

Subsequently, a third element gained dominance. The text must be relevant to the generations that study it, while at the same time remaining eternal. Commentators throughout the ages have struggled with this problem. How does one preserve the eternity of the Word and simultaneously make it relevant to a specific moment in time? Many commentators were children of their time and clearly read the text through the prism of the period in which they lived. This being so, the perspective of eternity became critical. It was often pushed to the background so as to emphasize the great message for the present. Much of the aspect of eternity was thereby compromised, and that caused a few to wonder how eternal this text really is.

Others wrote as if nothing had happened in Jewish history. That reflected the remarkable situation of the Jewish people in galut: its ahistoricity. After the destruction of the Temple, Jewish history came to a standstill. Although much happened, with dire consequences for the Jews, they essentially lived their lives outside the historical framework of natural progress. It became a period of existential waiting, with the Jewish people anticipating the moment when they could once again enter history, which eventually came about with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

Inevitably, then, some commentators wrote their exegeses in a historical vacuum. They hardly emphasized the relevance of biblical texts to a particular generation. Therefore, the student was often confronted with a dual sentiment. While dazzled by a commentator’s brilliant insight, the student was forced to ask: So what? What is the implication of the interpretation for me, at this moment in time? Here we encounter a situation in which relevance is sacrificed for the sake of eternity.

With the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland, Jews are confronted with an unprecedented situation, which has serious consequences for biblical commentary. Due to a very strong trend toward secularism, caused by the Holocaust as well as other factors, the issue of relevance versus eternity has become greatly magnified.

Today, more than ever before, there exists a greater and more pressing need to show the relevance of the text. The radical changes in Jewish history call for a bold and novel way of understanding the text as a living covenant. At the same time, the drastic secularization of world Jewry and Israeli thinking requires a completely new approach on how to present to the reader the possibility of the Torah’s eternity. With minor exceptions, the religious world has not come forward with an adequate response.

Most worrisome is the fact that the majority of Jewish commentary books published today in Orthodox circles comprise compilations and anthologies of earlier authorities without opening any new vistas. It is as if new interpretations are no longer possible. The words of God are treated as if they have been exhausted. It clearly reflects a fear of anything new, or an inability to come up with fresh and far-reaching ideas. This phenomenon has overtaken a good part of the Orthodox scholarly world. Judaism is turning more and more into a religion in which one writes glosses upon glosses, instead of creating new insights into the living covenant with God.

No doubt, not every person is equipped with the knowledge and creativity needed to undertake the task. Years of learning are an absolute requirement before one can make a genuine contribution in this field. Still, one must be aware of the danger of “over-knowledge.” When the student is overwhelmed by the interpretations of others, he or she may quite well become imprisoned by them and so lose the art of thinking independently. Instead of becoming a vehicle to look for new ideas, the student’s knowledge becomes detrimental. This has happened to many talmidei hakhamim.

What is required is innovation in receptivity, where fresh ideas can grow in the minds of those willing to think creatively about the classical sources, without being hampered by preconceived notions. Only then will we see new approaches to our biblical tradition that will stand up to the challenges of our time.

****
We are currently living in a transitional phase of monumental proportions and far-reaching consequences. Our religious beliefs are being challenged as never before. We are forced to our knees due to extreme shifts and radical changes in scientific discoveries; our understanding of the origins of our holy texts; our belief in God; the meaning of our lives; and the historical developments of our tradition. We find ourselves on the precipice, and it is becoming more and more of a balancing act not to fall off the cliff.

We keep asking ourselves: Can we survive and overcome? What are the tools to make that possible? Or, shall we drop our earlier beliefs, give in, and admit our defeat?

In the old religious climate, everything was certain. We knew the truth. Traditional Judaism gave us the foundations, and everything was under control. The tradition was safeguarded behind shatterproof glass, well-protected and unshakable. But now, all certainty is affected by skepticism and the glass has been broken.

Today, faith dangles in the free flow of doubt, and we need to learn how to live in this new stratosphere.

The truth is that Jewish Orthodoxy (from the Greek orthos ("true" or "right") and doxa ("opinion" or 'belief") never existed. Originally, Judaism was highly unorthodox. Although it always believed in God and Torah, it never offered any specifics of what God meant or what Torah consisted of. That was left to speculation, never to be determined. The early Sages, as testified by the Talmud and philosophers, disagreed on some of the most fundamental issues of faith.

But over the years, we wanted more certainty. We wanted it handed to us on a silver platter, so that we could avoid debates and live a life of religious comfort, apathy, and mediocrity. Influenced by other religions, we adopted the need for cast-iron certainty and psychological security. So we began to rewrite Judaism in a way that would fit into the notions of established religions—well-structured, with a good dose of dogma. What we did not realize is that by doing so, we misrepresented Judaism by losing sight of the plot, thus doing it a great disservice.

We need to realize that our epoch of uncertainty is in fact much more conducive to authentic Judaism than all the conviction we've had in previous generations. It forces us to rediscover what Judaism is really about and gives us the opportunity to rebuild where rebuilding is required and leave untouched what should remain untouched.

Because we are compelled to reconsider, we will delve more deeply into the great resources of Judaism and stay away from all superficiality to which Judaism has lately succumbed. The greater the challenge, the more profound are the discoveries. Knowledge is important, but doubt is what gives you an education.

Moreover, we will actually be able to enter the minds of all those biblical figures who lived in constant ambiguity about God and the Torah. Avraham’s great doubts concerning the reliability of God in connection with His request to sacrifice his son Yitzchak was a most traumatic experience. It was the pinnacle of religious uncertainty.

Moshe’s bewilderment at not knowing who God was when he asked to see Him and God’s refusal to reveal Himself are the climax of intense religious struggle. In the desert, the Israelites asked whether God was among them. This came close to pantheism or even atheism. Nadav and Avihu’s unauthorized offering of a "strange fire" in the Tent of Meeting came from a feeling of ambiguity about whether the only way to serve God was by merely following the strict demands of halakha as given by God, or whether one could explore new avenues to divine service.

On one occasion, the Israelites were not sure whether the Torah was indeed the word of God. Korah challenged this very belief and declared that it was not from heaven and that Moshe and Aaron were not prophets.[11] This must have caused a major crisis among the Israelites.

The Torah gives evidence to a most difficult religious journey traveled by the Israelites, full of doubt, struggle, and trauma. Surely some of these doubts were more existential than intellectual, but the latter cannot be disregarded.

Once we realize that uncertainty was part of the biblical personality, we will have a much better grasp of the text and what Judaism is actually claiming. But this is only possible when we find ourselves challenged by those very existential doubts.

There is nearly nothing greater than the free flow of doubt in today’s society. It offers us unprecedented opportunities to rediscover real religiosity. In contrast, the quest for certitude paralyzes the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition that impels humanity to develop its spiritual and intellectual capacity. Sure, this is a risky undertaking, but there is no authentic life choice that is risk free. Life means constantly moving and growing, whereas organic matter that fails to shift and grow decays and will eventually die. So it is with a person’s religious life. The role of religion is to accommodate the blossoming of the human soul and to prevent one from descending into a place of spiritual stagnation.

Whereas our not-so-distant ancestors in the days of the emancipation walked out and left Judaism behind, declaring it no longer relevant, we know better. We won't take that cheap and easy road. We know that Judaism is much too great to abandon, even if there are obstacles along the way. We are aware that Judaism stands head and shoulders above anything else, and that no philosophy or religious practice can replace it, but we have yet to discover what it is that gives Judaism its unique profundity. We still walk in our childhood shoes, knowing that we have not yet entered the world of adulthood. AusdemKindes—in das Mannesalter.[12] We realize that we must be careful not to obscure the real idea of growth, which is not to leave things behind us, but to leave things inside us.

What we all know deep down is that we have to renew Judaism from within. Not by letting it go, but by raising it up. Not through Reform and Conservative Judaism, or Orthodox dogma, but through a radical purifying process that will take years. Until now we have been busy digging and have found some very interesting elements, but we have not yet hit rock bottom and our findings have been too superficial and too few to make a breakthrough.

Over the years we have covered Judaism with too many clinging vines, to the point where we can no longer see or even recognize das Ding an sich, "the thing in itself." A thick scab has grown on Judaism, and it needs to be scraped off. We have to expose the founding pillars and build a superstructure. We must recognize that the barer Judaism gets and the more uncertain we become, the closer we get to where we need to be, until we hit the core. It will manifest itself in many opposing colors, creating an enormous, beautiful canvas. In this new setting it will be clear that religious uncertainty is one of the most powerful ideas, which keeps us on our toes. And it will give us great insight into Judaism’s core beliefs.

Beneath the clinging vines are divine words. For too long we have mistakenly believed that Judaism is the clinging vine itself. Yes, it had its purpose, but that is not where we will find divinity. It is deeper down, beneath the layers. The time has come to remove it. But it has to be done slowly and in such a way that we do not harm the core. We must remove outdated ideas, often borrowed from other religions; remove the galut from halakha, which became overly defensive; and have the courage to see a new religious world emerging, which will offer us the authentic meaning of the divine Torah and mitzvoth.

It will be painful for those who are looking for absolute certainty. We understand the anguish it will cause. But there is no turning back, and after a time the joy of uncertainty and of discovering the deeper meaning behind Judaism will be immensely greater than that which certainty could ever offer us.

The goal is not at all to be sure that the Torah was given at Sinai, or that all its stories are true. There are very good reasons to believe it is, but we don't know for sure and we should not know for sure. Is it not marvelous to take a leap of faith and live according to something that one cannot be sure of? Of what value are convictions that are unaccompanied by struggle?

Faith means striving for faith. It is never an arrival. It can only burst forth at singular moments. It does not arise out of logical deduction, but out of uncertainty, which is its natural breeding ground.

To have faith is to live with unresolved doubts, prepared to rise above ourselves and our wisdom. Looking into the Jewish tradition with its many debates, one clearly understands that those who deny themselves the comfort of certainty are much more authentic than those who are sure.

Faith means that we worship and praise God before we affirm His existence; we respond before we question. Man can die for something even as he is unsure of its true existence, because his inner faith tells him it is right to do so. This honest admission of doubt is not only the very reason why it is possible to be religious in modern times; it is the actual stimulus to do so.

We need to understand that faith is "the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises," [13] and "we can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand." [14]

To believe is not to prove, not to explain, but to yield to a vision.

Of course belief cannot be credo quia absurdum est. It has to make sense and have a lot to say for itself in terms of knowledge and wisdom. Still, just as no building stands on rock-bottom, but on unsure pillars deeply driven into the ground so as to resist an earthquake, so must belief have enough strength to prove its worth without ever reaching absolute certainty.

Faith is like music. It is true because of its beauty not because of its intellectual certainty. Is it not created from impossible paradoxes, as well as a great deal of imagination that surpasses rationality and scientific or historical facts?

David Weiss Halivni writes,

The truly great need no synthesis. They absorb whatever experience offers them. Their intensely creative personalities act like a fiery furnace, melting away contradictions. What emerges is either a harmonious whole or a creative parallelism with parts that mutually fructify and supplement each other. The truly great do not need to trim edges, as it were, to make genuine experiences fit with each other. They preserve them intact. And if their experiences appear contradictory, they build an emotional bridge spanning them allowing both the landscape and the water to be seen. Lesser mortals resort to logical means of harmonization. [15]

The aim of halakha is to teach us the art of living with uncertainty. Halakha was not meant for those who are sure, because nobody can act out of certainty.

The most challenging question in all of life is what do you do and what do you believe when you are not sure. It is that notion that moves the scientist, the philosopher, and most of all the religious personality. We must destroy the security of all conventional knowledge and undo the normalcy of all that is ordinary. To be religious is to realize that no final conclusions have ever been reached or can ever be reached.

Halakha is the upshot of un-finalized beliefs, a practical way of living while remaining in theological suspense. In that way, Judaism doesn't turn into a religion that either becomes paralyzed in awe of a rigid tradition, or evaporates into a utopian reverie. This dynamic can only come about when Jewish beliefs consist of fluid matter, which halakha then turns into a solid substance. The purpose of halakha is to chill the heated steel of exalted beliefs and turn them into pragmatic deeds without allowing the inner heat to be cooled off entirely. Jewish beliefs are like arrows, which dart hither and thither, wavering as though shot into the air from a slackened bowstring, while halakha must be straight and unswerving but still adaptable.

Indeed, we should be careful not to make faith into an intellectual issue. It is much more than that. The moment we look down on those who continue to have unshakable faith, considering them primitive in face of the many challenges, we have overlooked an important dimension of real faith. Besides the fact that such an attitude reflects arrogance, it also misses an important point: Faith is always more than just thinking about faith. Yes, those people who have lost their faith yet still hold on to it, honestly attempting by way of discussion and study to give their lost faith a new shape, should be deeply respected. At the same time, we should not forget that they are searching for something that the "simple" believer already has.

When we place the reflection on faith higher than the direct experience of faith, we are involved in a purely intellectual endeavor. The search for faith can only be genuine when it is personal, deep, and emotional, and the intellect only plays a small part. The accompanying qualities must be humility, the notion of inadequacy, and a strong urge to find authentic faith. Genuine belief is a way of living, not an academic undertaking. It is an experience in which the whole of the human being is engaged.

Doubt only appeals to the intellect. The intellectual approach to faith is always a barer form of existence than faith itself. The reason is obvious. Besides our critical assessment, the other human faculties remain idle. Trust, hope, love and the notion that one is part of something bigger no longer play a role. Instead, life becomes nothing more than only itself. When doubt and skepticism are no longer the most important faculties through which one seeks religious faith, only then is it possible to actually find it. Skepticism, though it has its place, should not be at the center of one’s search. In today’s climate there is a certain gratification in going to the extremes of genius and brilliance until one nearly loses that which one would like to discover. Intellectual thought and scientific discovery can never cover the sum total of the inner life of man. When one prays, one is involved in something that the intellect can never reach. When one studies Torah and hears its divine voice, it becomes something different than what academic study can ever achieve. It is in a separate category, which is closed to the solely scientific mind.

It is vital that we see these facts for what they are. Only when we realize that intellectual certainty is not the primary path toward finding religious truth, will we be able to deal with our new awareness that the transitional phase we now experience has great purpose and has to be part of our religious struggle and identity. It won’t be easy. Novelty, as always, carries with it a sense of violation, a kind of sacrilege. Most people are more at home with that which is common than with that which is different. But go it must.

God has relocated.

[1] Moreh Nevukhim, Part 2, chapter 25.
[2] Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merill Co., 1954), 94.
[3] Regarding the claim that the full text of the Torah is divine, or that miracles are possible, it is a matter of debate whether these are completely denied by scientific knowledge or not. Many of these claims are not solely within the sphere of pure science. They touch on matters related to the philosophy of science or in the case of Bible criticism, to literary interpretation and the reliability of archeological findings.
[4] Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 234.
[5] I borrow this comparison from my dear friend Professor Yehudah Gellman of Ben Gurion University. See his God’s Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us: A Contemporary Doctrine of the Jews as the Chosen People (Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah Series, Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012).
[6] Berakhot 43b.
[7] See Avraham Joshua Heschel’s many essays in his The Insecurity of Freedom, Essays on Human Existence, New York: Schocken Books, 1972.
[8] Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 268.
[9] George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text.” Salmagundi No. 66 (Winter–Spring 1985), 12.
[10] Devarim 30:14.
[11] See the Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, chapter 10.
[12] German for "from childhood to adulthood." Professor G. Heymans, Inleiding in de Metaphysica (Dutch), [Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik in German] (Groningen, the Netherlands: Wereldbiblioteek, 1933), Introduction by Professor Leo Polak.
[13] Samuel Butler and Francis Hackett, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (Nabu Press, 2010), 27.
[14] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 2010), 81.
[15] David Weiss Halivni, "Professor Saul Lieberman z.l." Conservative Judaism, vol. 38 (Spring, 1986), 6–7.

A few years ago, I spoke about domestic violence on Yom Kippur. Afterward, two very sweet members of my synagogue came up to me and said, "Rabbi, you shouldn't speak about such ugly things from the pulpit. That doesn't happen here."

I thought to myself, "Two rows behind you and a little to the left, it does."

Domestic violence happens in Jewish homes. This article is the reopening of the conversation, because we need to confront this issue. I wish we didn't have to. But this isn't only an issue in the Catholic Church. It is much closer to home than we'd like to admit.

Abuse happens within Jewish families. Physical and verbal abuse happen in Jewish families.

We don't like to talk about what is ugly and painful. We feel shame in revealing our less than perfect family lives. We don't want the outside world to know. We don't want each other to know. So we remain silent. But we are hurting. Some of us are suffering, right here, in our midst. Others inflict deep pain upon those they claim to love.

Victims of abuse can be women or men, young or old. It has been suggested that, on average, Jewish women stay in abusive relationships for five to seven years longer than non-Jewish women, primarily because they don't want to believe that Domestic Violence happens to Jewish women.

There are aspects of traditional Judaism, present even in modern congregations, that maintain the weak position of the victim in the face of abuse. Here are two:

1) Some rabbis have invoked the Jewish ideal of "shalom bayyit," of maintaining peace in the home, as justification for sending a woman back to her abuser. Some rabbis continue to counsel this way, and have only served to disempower suffering Jews.

2) A get, or Jewish divorce decree, by Orthodox law, can only be issued by a man, who can torment his partner with the get's legal power and its control over the wife's future. This makes the vulnerable woman an agunah, a chained woman, trapped by Judaism's rules.

These two aspects of traditional Jewish life are problems. They make victimization possible within Jewish families, and they must be changed. We must take the deeply Jewish step forward and, together, condemn abuse of any kind in our community.

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Abuse can be physical, sexual, verbal or emotional. It can come in the form of the ongoing use of demeaning words like "you're stupid," or ugly, or crazy. It can be total access to and control over bank accounts and finances. It can be threats to injure children or pets. It can be monitoring and limiting friendships, going out, talking on the phone.

Domestic violence is not about having a bad temper or being out of control. It is about power and control—one person exerting power and control over another. Domestic violence impacts on the entire family, injuring also the children who witness abuse by hearing it or seeing it.

I offer two anonymous testimonies from Jewish victims of abuse. One is physical, and might help those in verbally abusive relationships say, "Oh, that's not me." But the second is a case of verbal abuse, perhaps even harder to escape.

1) "The Jewish Community sees my husband as a respected professional who is educated, talented, outgoing, friendly, loving, caring, and compassionate. They were not witness to what took place in the privacy of our home. No one saw him hit, kick, and choke me. No one heard him tell our child, 'Mommy's dead.' No one was present when he threatened to commit suicide in the presence of our child, wipe me off the face of the earth, and promised that I would not survive the night."

2) "I have a boyfriend who is charming to everyone, a real mentsch, sharp thinker—and everyone around looks up to him. So you can understand how I feel alone in how I am feeling, since everyone thinks so highly of him. It's difficult to talk to him about anything because everything I say is either "stupid" or "crazy." Sometimes I have to lie because I'm afraid of how he'll react to certain things. I don't mean to ramble—today was just a bad day. He says it's my fault that the relationship is going south. I know I have to distance myself from the relationship but, honestly, I don't think I can."

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We bear witness to these anonymous testimonies, wondering whether or not people sitting near us are in similar situations. We wonder, perhaps, what to do with the inescapable knowledge that there is, most likely, someone reading this article who is hurting.

So how do we do that? We can turn to halakha, Jewish Law, for guidance. The following is a brief summary of a lengthy teshuva, a Jewish ruling, by Rabbi Elliot Dorff, entitled "Family Violence (HM 424.1995)":

1) Beating and other forms of physical abuse, such as sexual abuse, are absolutely forbidden by Jewish law.

2) Verbal abuse is absolutely forbidden by Jewish law.

3) An abuser has the responsibility to acknowledge his behavior and do teshuva by getting help.

4) Parents may never cause a bruise to their children, no matter what decisions they make regarding corrective parenting.

5) Children may not beat their parents, even when parents were formerly abusive themselves.

6) The requirement that one preserve not only one's own life (pikkuah nefesh) but others as well, demanded by the laws of the pursuer (rodef) and of not standing idly by when another is in danger (lo ta'amod al dam ra'ekha), not only permit, but require others who discover spousal or parental abuse to help the victim report the abuse and take steps to prevent repetition of it. Jews who suspect that children are being abused must report such abuse to the civil authorities, no matter what the consequences. Saving a life takes precedence over the presumption that parental custody is best for the child.

These policies are halakhically binding. They are not optional. We are commanded by our tradition to protect ourselves and to intervene when necessary for others. There are times when it is necessary to act to protect the vulnerable.

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Opening up darkened spaces is a scary, saddening task, but it is a sacred one as well. We've been taught by our tradition that "anyone who saves one soul, it is said about her that she has saved a whole world” (TB Sanhedrin 37a).

And one person's safety is reason enough for us all to spend the energy talking about abuse.

Perpetrating violence on an intimate partner is an affliction with a spiritual dimension that threatens the welfare of the entire community. We act with commitment to the health of our community when we hold abusers accountable. We act in accordance with halakha's call to pursue justice when we declare that abusers cannot remain in our midst and must dwell outside the camp.

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The fabric of our Jewish homes is tradition's instruction to create spaces of safety. The fabric of our homes is our Jewish ethics, which demand that we pursue justice. The fabric of our homes is our developing liturgies and holy days, which call upon us to heal and create wholeness in our world.

For the welfare of both the individual homes we are blessed to have, as well as the collective one we create together, I pray that we commit ourselves to doing so.

May our homes be safe and healthy.

Review by Israel Drazin
A Synagogue Companion, by Rabbi Hayyim Angel
Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, 2014, 351 pages

Rabbi Hayyim Angel is a scholar who writes very readable, interesting, and informative books. He presents “a vision of the Torah that is authentic, passionate,
reasonable, and embracing of people of all backgrounds.” He exposes the plain meaning of biblical texts. He raises thought-provoking questions. He shows that many biblical
books do not state what people think they state, and surprises and delights readers by revealing what the Bible actually says.

In his Synagogue Companion, Angel, the National Scholar of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, has brief essays of no more than a page and a half on the 54
Torah portions and the readings from the prophets that are recited with these portions, and short to-the-point articles on many prayers.

Starting his discussion of the Five Books of Moses, for example, he talks about the “clashes between the literal reading of the Torah and the findings of modern science.”
He quotes and explains Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, “the verses do not pretend to teach us science, but rather spiritual ideas,” and Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz that the idea that God “descended on Mount Sinai to compete with the professor who teaches history or physics is ludicrous, if not blasphemous.”

When speaking about the trees in the Garden of Eden, Angel tells us that “Professor Umberto Cassuto found that nearly every ancient mythology had a tree, a
plant, or a fountain of life. The quest for immortality was an obsession of the ancient world.” And Angel shows how this information helps us understand the depth of the Garden of Eden story.

The Bible gives no reason why Moses shattered the Decalogue, and many scholars offered their ideas. Rashbam thought that Moses was tired and dropped them
since he lost the energy to carry them. Nechama Leibowitz disliked his view: “Rashbam, a literalist par excellence, veers far from the plain sense here. There is no clue in the
text for his interpretation.” Professor Elazar Touito of Bar Ilan University suggested that Rashbam was engaged in an anti-Christian polemic. He was denying the medieval
Christian claim that Moses destroyed the tablets to show that God’s covenant with Israel was cancelled. Rashbam deflated this argument by stating in essence: no, he dropped the tablets by accident.

Rabbi Angel mentions the view of Malbim to contrast and later explore the differences between the leadership of Moses and his successor Joshua. When Moses had an experience of God at the burning bush in Exodus 3:5, he removed both shoes. When Joshua had a vision of the presence of an angel in Joshua 5:15, he stripped off a single shoe. “Shoes symbolize human involvement in the world. Jews are required to remove their shoes while in the Temple precincts and also on Yom Kippur to elevate themselves to the level of angels.” Moses reached the highest level. But according to Malbim’s analysis of Joshua’s “one sandal on, one sandal off” leadership he “had one foot in Moses’ ideal world of prophecy, but at the same time kept the other with his people.” Yet, his shortcomings “enabled Joshua to succeed as a leader in a manner that even his master could not.” Moses suffered continually from Israelite dissatisfactions, but Joshua never faced his people’s discontent.

Among much else about the Torah, Angel discusses the enigmatic, indeed incredible longevity of the early biblical people; the apparent revelation that God wanted humans before Noah to be vegetarians, Professor Uriel Simon’s, Joseph Bekhor Shor’s, Yehuda ha-Hasid’s, Abarbanel’s, and Ramban’s explanations why Joseph, who had the ability to inform his grieving father that he was still alive, did not do so; and why the Torah ordered the creation of a hereditary priesthood.

Commenting upon Joshua 2, the prophetical haftarah reading for the Torah portion Shelah, Rabbi Angel points out that the Canaanite woman, Rahab, with whom Joshua’s two spies communicated, referred to God several times when she assured the spies that the Israelites can easily defeat her people and conquer her land. Gersonides felt she was only flattering the spies to seduce them to accept the deal she planned to make with them. However several Midrashim took Rahab at her word; she genuinely accepted God and even converted (Mekhilta Yitro 1 and Deuteronomy Rabbah 2:28). “One rabbinic tradition asserts further that Rahab eventually married Joshua (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 14b).” Whether one accepts these midrashic statements as historical facts, “our sages make a remarkable point: Someone from the lowest echelon of the most depraved society can convert sincerely and marry a prophet.”

Angel contrasts Rahab’s acts with the misdeed of the well pedigreed Achan of the tribe of Judah who in Joshua 6 and 7 is executed for plundering the city of Jericho against Joshua’s religious ban. The contrast make crystal clear that it is not ethnic or pedigree that is significant, but behavior. “Canaanites such as Rahab who acted righteously were accepted, whereas Israelites who acted wickedly such as Achan were not accepted.”

In his section on prayer, Angel discusses the meaning, purpose, and challenges of prayer; the origin of the leader of the prayers, called Hazan and Sheli’ah Tzibbur; the differences between biblical and pagan prayer; and the meaning of the more famous prayers, such as Shema and Amida. Among much else, he quotes Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik: “The foundation of prayer is not the conviction of its effectiveness but the belief that through it we approach God intimately.”

In short, this book contains a wealth of information presented in a clear and interested manner by a scholar who understands his subject well.

Four idealistic religious social activists started making the rounds among rabbis and other religious leaders four years ago, to see if perhaps they were missing something. Assaf, Chili, Efrat and Shmuli had grown up together in Jerusalem, been through the religious youth movements, yeshivas, army — but they were troubled. Times in Israel were difficult. Of course they were concerned about the recent Intifada and the security situation, but they were equally concerned about internal social problems: steadily rising poverty, trafficking in women, employment rights. These problematic trends were beginning to characterize their beloved country. And they could not understand why there were no organized efforts or cries of protest from the official rabbinic community, or efforts spearheaded by their own religious spiritual mentors. Where was the voice of Judaism on these issues? Thus was born the concept for a new organization in Israel, Bema'aglai Tzedek, to address the numerous social ills in Israeli society in connection with the millenia-old Jewish ethical traditions, which speak of Tzedek and Tikun Olam. These young and dynamic religious activists strongly believe that Jewish tradition has essential ideas to contribute to the current socio-economic discourse in Israeli society.

And this organization is making waves. Slowly, some rabbis are starting to acknowledge and try to deal with these issues. But why so few, and where were their voices beforehand, and where are their colleagues’ voices now, both here in Israel and in North America?

In Reform synagogues throughout North America, the voices from the pulpits talk about social justice, civil rights and other such issues. Why are these basic humanitarian issues not being regularly addressed from Orthodox pulpits? Surely humanitarian ideas do not conflict with deep-rooted Jewish values. Where is our concern for the commandments regarding social justice repeated many times in the Torah, such as "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or orphan" (Ex. 22:21-2), or "If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in any of your towns within your land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be"(Deut. 15:7-8).

I don't pretend to have answers to why the religious community has separated itself from issues relating to civil rights and social justice. In the current socio-political environment these values have become associated with the secular left. But it is unclear why that has happened. Assaf Banner, the director of Bema'aglai Tzedek, said that when he and his friends started talking the social justice lingo, people were surprised: “We didn't fit the stereotype of the secular Tel Aviv Ashkenazi with round wire glasses…."

When I discussed these issues with a colleague of mine, an intelligent young woman who grew up in the Reform movement in upstate New York, but is now a newly married, religious, head-covering Jerusalemite, she theorized that “halakhic imperatives emanating from the rabbinic tradition stipulate various laws aimed at preserving Am Yisrael, using the strategy of social isolation: inflexible kashrut laws, prohibitions against consuming alcohol in ‘mixed company’, etc. This isolationist approach has given way to the development of an Orthodoxy that is self-absorbed, ethnocentric, and the sociological backdrop to the stunted growth of social justice initiatives in the Orthodox community.” This seems to me a very important insight into our present situation, coming from someone who once sat on the other side of aisle, as it were. And it echoes certain thoughtful academic voices as well. As Menachem Lorberbaum, Chair of Hebrew Culture Studies at TelAvivUniversity and a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, told me: "Part of the problem is that there is no sense of Jewish peoplehood in Orthodoxy, no appreciation of the depth of diversity of Jewish people." He sees Orthodoxy as very insular, and legitimacy has become more important than substance.

Can it be that the Orthodox establishment is more worried about punctilious and zealous application of halakha, and keeping Jews separate from the rest of the world, than about enacting the elemental responsibility to uphold the dignity and basic rights of the disadvantaged and the weak? Why do the two have to be mutually exclusive?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that the Orthodox religious community shows no concern for others. On the contrary, the commitment of Orthodox Jews to Hesed and Tzedakah is on whole exemplary. The ultra-Orthodox community takes care of its own, in a well-organized fashion, somewhat reminiscent of the institutionalized welfare-community infrastructure outlined in chapter one of the Talmudic Tractate Baba Batra. However, it seems that although the Orthodox community certainly practices Tzedakah with a laudable passion, the institutionalized and almost bureaucratic welfare state described in the Talmud has not been adopted.

There is a difference between Tzedakah and Tzedek. This distinction becomes critical in the context of the Jewish State. Tzedakah helps to ease an immediate urgent situation in a specific case, but does nothing to solve the deep-rooted social ailments which are the root of the problem.

Rambam's Tzedakah ladder is well-known. The highest degree of charity, the 8^th level, requires strengthening the hand of one’s poor Jewish brother and giving him a gift or [an interest-free] loan, or even entering into a business partnership with him. In other words, we must help a poor person to get on his feet, so that he can break his dependency and progress on his own. In the context of the Jewish State, perhaps there is a level that is even higher – a 9^th level which requires an institutionalized effort to eradicate poverty, to budget sufficiently to help the weakest citizens adequately, to enforce minimum wages and affordable health-care.

In the summer of 2003, when a series of budget cuts in Israel slashed welfare allocations, the single parents were among those hit hardest. Their summer vigil in an improvised tent-city outside of the Knesset attracted tremendous attention from the media and ultimately from the decision-makers themselves. But where was the organized rabbinic response as this group of (mainly) women fought for the State to help them provide food and shelter for their children? There was silence. This proposed 9th level requires proactive efforts for social change: if the government does not act, its citizens must raise their voices in protest; civil society organizations should not take upon themselves the State's responsibilities.

At the recent opening of a new Center for the Study of Philanthropy at HebrewUniversity in mid-March, the keynote lecture was delivered by Professor Leslie Lenkowski from the Center on Philanthropy at IndianaUniversity. Although he did not refer to a 9^th rung on the Rambam ladder, he did speak of the 8^th rung, using the classic metaphor of "not just giving the fish, but teaching to fish, and… perhaps even reforming the fishing industry." Interestingly, in the second chapter of Baba Batra, in a discussion of fair business practice, detailed regulations are provided relating to the fishing industry that essentially allow for equal access to fish for all fishermen. This chapter could well be cited by Orthodox voices of social conscience here in Israel and abroad. North American Orthodox philanthropists who generously give to Israel tend to have a knee-jerk, negative reaction to social advocacy organizations – even while fervently supporting the soup kitchens, or their favorite Yeshivas and orphanages. Those causes are indeed extremely important and worthy; but is the exclusive focus on such service-providing charities really in the spirit of Rambam's highest rung?

Bema'aglai Tzedek is running numerous programs to try to wake up the religious Jewish community to the need for strong Jewish advocacy, Tzedek (and not just Tzedakah). Together with Bet Morasha they run a Bet Midrash Program that brings Rabbis and religious leaders together to study texts and develop Jewish responsa to social issues. Rabbi Benny Lau, nephew of the former ChiefRabbi, Israel Meir Lau, has been one of the main teachers in this program. Another leader active in these efforts is Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, Rosh Yeshiva of the Yeshivat Hesder in Petach Tikva and one of the leaders of "Tzohar" (an Israel-based group of religious Zionist Rabbis trying to shape the Jewish identity of the State of Israel, according to principled understanding and moderation). Rabbi Cherlow recently published an article in a journal, “An Introduction to Questions of Social Justice in Halakha."

Among its many interesting activities, Bema'aglei Tzedek's most innovative move thus far has been the creation of the "social seal" (Tav Hevrati). This plays on the authority and status of the required Kashrut certificate. Businesses (mainly restaurants), have to live up to certain standards of employment rights, disabled access, minimum wage, in order to receive the "social seal," which they are then entitled to display in their window. The "social seal" in Israel has caught on and is now prevalent in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Kfar Saba and Be'er Sheva. In the same way that customers routinely ask to see a Kashrut certificate before buying products or services, they may now confirm that a business has conformed to the standards of the the social seal. As Assaf Banner asks, "Shouldn't an observant Jew check first that the eatery has this social seal and then the Kashrut certificate? After all, the social seal concerns requirements that are Torah laws, and a number of the Kashrut standards came only later, as rabbinical laws."

It seems so obvious. I recently came across an article written by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein in 1971, titled "Kosher Lettuce." The reference was to the boycotts on agricultural products that were being harvested by underpaid and abused migrant workers. Given the human rights violations of these workers, he argued that the lettuce was not kosher. Kashrut here has a moral basis. To drive the point home, Rabbi Lookstein cited a moving Hassidic story: “It is told of the great Hassidic sage and saint, Rabbi Simha Bunim, that he once visited a matzah factory and saw the workers there being exploited. ‘God,’ he exclaimed, ‘the gentiles falsely accuse us in a vicious libel of using the blood of gentiles in our matzah. That is false. But we do spill Jewish blood into our matzah--the blood of the exploited workers.’ He thereupon issued a most unusual ruling. He declared the matzah produced under exploitative conditions as being ‘forbidden food,’ i.e. non-kosher.”

In order for social justice to return (and I say return, because I do think it was there in the early stages of the Jewish community, and certainly present in the times of Hillel), there has to be a combination of bottom-up and top-down efforts. The grassroots efforts to establish a society on the great pillar of social justice are many and impressive, but the religious leadership has to get on board, relentlessly teaching their constituents about the importance of social justice as it affects society at large.

Questions of personal status are among the most sensitive issues in Judaism and thus require responsible rabbinic leadership.
That is one reason why there was such an outcry last year when Israel’s Chief Rabbinate refused to allow my teacher, Rabbi Avi Weiss, to vouch for the Jewishness of a couple marrying in Israel. While the Chief Rabbinate ultimately backed down and agreed to accept Rabbi Weiss’ word, there are still unanswered questions regarding this episode.

On Jan. 4, 2014, the Rabbinical Council of America — a leading Orthodox rabbinic association — issued this statement: “Recent assertions that the Rabbinical Council of America advised the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to reject the testimony of RCA member Rabbi Avi Weiss are categorically untrue.”

The problem with this statement is that when I visited the chief rabbi’s office with Weiss’ attorney, we were told directly that the chief rabbinate was acting upon the recommendation of RCA officials.

We may not know who is telling the truth in this case, but we do know that the RCA has not been candid about its recent approach to conversion.
In 2007 the RCA drafted a new centralized policy on conversions. This policy brought conversions under the auspices of a new and more stringent approach. At the time, there were some who warned that this new policy could lead to retroactive annulments of previously accepted conversions.

But the RCA protested loudly that it would never retroactively reject conversions and that to do so would be a blatant Torah violation. In 2008, the RCA’s Rabbi Steven Pruzansky dismissed suggestions that the new policy would lead to the reevaluation of all past conversions by RCA rabbis as “an especially despicable falsehood, as it serves only to make generations of converts in the Jewish community anxious about their status and acceptance in the community at large.”

“The reality is that not one past geirus is being reviewed by the RCA or the Beth Din of America, and such was never contemplated,” he wrote, using a term for conversion. “To even suggest otherwise is to blatantly violate the Torah’s numerous admonitions against tormenting the ger.”

Yet we now know that the RCA is casting aspersions on prior conversions by its own members. We know this thanks to Karen Brunwasser, who last month wrote about her personal ordeal in The Washington Jewish Week.
Brunwasser spelled out how, despite her Orthodox conversion nearly 35 years ago, she was rejected by the Israeli chief rabbi’s office in her initial attempts to establish her Judaism and thereby marry her beloved fiancé. She wrote movingly of the emotional turmoil she went through and how she was concerned that it might affect forever her relationship with the new family she was hoping to join.

The RCA, through its Beth Din of America, played a crucial role in actively hindering Brunwasser’s effort to marry.

Brunwasser converted as an infant with a beit din made up of Orthodox rabbis who were graduates of Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school and RCA members. Rabbi Bernard Rothman, a former RCA vice president, wrote a letter to the chief rabbi’s office vouching for Brunwasser’s conversion. In this letter, Rothman praised the head of the beit din that converted Brunwasser, Rabbi David Wachtfogel, as an Orthodox rabbi of the highest standards.

However, as was the case with many RCA rabbis of that era, he was for a time a rabbi in a synagogue in which men and women sat together. Many of these rabbis took jobs at synagogues with mixed seating after receiving explicit guidance on the matter from Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, mainstream American Orthodoxy’s leading authority.

In the past, conversions by Orthodox rabbis who had served in mixed-seating congregations were routinely accepted in the Jewish community. But now, thanks to the direction of the current leadership of the RCA, such decades-old conversions are being rejected.

Thus, on Aug. 11, 2013, Rabbi Michoel Zylberman of the RCA’s Beth Din of America wrote the following in an email to Israeli chief rabbi’s office regarding Brunwasser’s conversion: “We are unable to approve the conversions done by a rabbi who serves in a synagogue without a mechitza.”

Zylberman continues: “Of course, one can argue with this position and if you want to be lenient here on the basis of other authorities you can do that which is right in your eyes.”

Responding to apparent confusion on the part of the chief rabbi’s office regarding Rothman’s current status with the RCA, Zylberman concludes: “With respect to the letter of Rabbi Rothman in which he is signed as a ‘former Vice-President of the RCA,’ that was twenty years ago and he did not sign in the name of the organization.”

Despite what the RCA promised in 2008, it is retroactively negating and rooting out converts who were for decades fully integrated into the Orthodox Jewish community. In doing so, it has set a dangerous precedent that should make every convert afraid and all of us angry and disappointed in its leadership.

Storied Jewish Lives around the World, by Hillel Goldberg

Feldheim Publishers, 2013, 228 pages

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, an award winning author who has published inspiring Jewish stories for over 45 years, and has authored five previous books, has now given us three dozen well-crafted, easy-to-read, inspiring tales of people who we will admire, people we should emulate.

“There is greatness,” Rabbi Goldberg writes, “not only in well known leaders. ‘There is no person who does not have his hour.’ I have known this person too – the ‘simple Jew,’ the poshuteh Yid – shining in his moment of distinction. I have tried to capture” the greatness of these Jews, and their contribution to those around them.

The rabbi succeeds. His stories are interesting, inspiring, and very moving. He tells of people who lived normal lives, but unexpectedly became angels of God.

Among many others, Rabbi Goldberg tells about Professor Frank Talmage who died at age fifty. Despite being very ill, he devoted himself to what became a classic work on the Bible commentator David Kimchi (1160-1235). Although at times quite ill, he continued to teach and inspire students.

He tells us about Daniel Kravitz who because of kindness to a skinhead neo-Nazi, he was able to persuade him to reconnect with his parents and abandon his neo-Nazi group.

There are also stories of an eighteenth century Polish nobleman who converted to Judaism and surrendered his life for his new religion; a holocaust survivor who died years
after the holocaust with the same pious behavior as his grandfather when he died; and the tale of Werner and Lucie who despite numerous difficulties, including the horrors of
the holocaust, difficulties created by the British when they administered Palestine, and a separation of seven years, were able to remain true to each other, reunite, and marry.

In short, this is an inspiring book that readers will enjoy because the stories are fascinating and because of the positive feelings they will produce when they are read.