Zalman Schachter and Shlomo Carlebach, 1989.
Hasidism has a long history of concurrently repelling and enchanting modern Jews. Today, its distinguishing features—isolationism, religious fanaticism, and aggressive rejection of all things modern, including not only non-Orthodox Judaism but the very idea of secularity—are inexplicable, if not abhorrent, to much of world Jewry.
For many religiously observant Jews, the traditional siddur, or prayer book, constitutes a problem. One such Jew was the great hasidic rebbe, Nahman of Bratzlav (1772-1810), who articulated the problem in terms appropriate to his time: the fixed prayers, with their praises and petitions, are like a well-traveled highway, and well-traveled highways attract robbers. By which he meant that excessive routine makes it difficult to concentrate the mind.
"Is Modern Orthodoxy an Endangered Species?" This was the question posed at a conference yesterday in Jerusalem. Some speakers suggested that the very term "Modern Orthodoxy" doesn't fit the Israeli context or even accurately describe this slice of Jewish life. But what, indeed, is it?
Like nearly all denominational labels, this one is a product of the ideological and political debates of the 19th century, as the radical options posed by modernity—including the possibilities of assimilation without conversion to Christianity and of political self-determination—scrambled traditional categories as never before. In this unprecedented situation, adherents of tradition in general and of traditional Jewish law (halakhah) in particular became one party, now called "Orthodoxy," vying with others for adherents and authority.
Yet it never was a uniform party but rather, in the words of the historian Jacob Katz, "A House Divided." A key issue was, and remains, whether one could be Orthodox and still accept or even welcome elements of modernity and Western culture. Those answering yes became what are known in Israel as Religious Zionists and in the U.S. as Modern Orthodox. But the debates hardly ended there. Which elements of modernity? To what extent, and with what if any qualifications?
The debates themselves point to what makes Modern Orthodox Jews so interesting—namely, their willingness to ask basic questions of self-definition—and simultaneously so anxious for their future. The anxiety is not without reason. In the U.S., though the Modern Orthodox are solidly entrenched as a social group and a way of life, they are embroiled in often divisive internal debate over, these days especially, the opportunities and limits of feminism, and are under steady challenge from a self-confident right wing.
In Israel, the Religious Zionists are analogously riven, not only over feminism but also over loyalty to the state and army, the scope of rabbinic authority, the place of universal ethics, and more; meanwhile, ultra-Orthodoxy has demonstrated a capacity for mobilization that has marginalized the Religious Zionists within the very institutions, including the Chief Rabbinate, they themselves created. Recent years have seen the rise of a powerful new ideology, Haredi-Leumi (ultra-Orthodox nationalist), which affirms Zionism but rejects Western culture.
At yesterday's conference, the speakers thus had much to worry and to complain about. But they also had much to celebrate: the revolution in women's Talmud study, an efflorescence of religious literary and artistic creativity, and the fruits of social activism. Overall, the picture was of intellectual and cultural flourishing alongside social and political beleaguerment: not exactly a new phenomenon in Jewish history. Small in number, the modern (and post-modern) Orthodox continue to play a crucial bridging role between tradition and the larger world, which makes their internal debates among the most consequential in Jewish life today.
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Around the world this weekend, Christians are preparing to celebrate Easter, the holiday marking the death and resurrection of Jesus and the culmination of the period of penitence that began with Ash Wednesday on February 17.
The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus: "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Passover is also the background for the events portrayed in the synoptic Gospels leading up to the passion of Christ crucified.
At the First Council of Nicaea (325 C.E.), however, the Church resolutely decoupled Judaism from Christianity, severing the connection between the fourteenth of Nisan and Easter. "It is unbecoming," said the Emperor Constantine, "that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people." Easter became a date on the solar calendar, with Jesus' resurrection being celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the March equinox.
To this day there is no denying that, for many Jews, Easter recalls dreadful memories. The holiday is the source of the Church's "teaching of contempt," the damning of all Jews for the supposed crime of deicide. The cry of "Christ-killers" would pursue Jews from medieval European ghettos to the 20th-century United States. Easter is also associated with the notorious libel that Jews needed the blood of Christian children to fulfill their Passover rituals. Many of Eastern Europe's worst pogroms, including the 1903 Kishinev massacre, were launched during Easter. Indeed, no Christian holiday did more than Easter to inspire the development of modern political Zionism as an answer to Europe's insoluble "Jewish problem."
In post-Holocaust Europe, that message of collective Jewish guilt became progressively toned down, with traces still remaining in the Passion Play performed in Germany every ten years since 1634. Instead, the Jewish state of Israel has come to be identified as, in effect, "this odious people" among the nations, an object of fierce political denunciation often couched in the discredited but still-toxic religious tropes of old. In 2002, an Athens newspaper depicted the PLO chief Yasir Arafat as Jesus being crucified by the Jews; today some pro-Palestinian groups falsely claim that the Jewish state arbitrarily forbids Christians from worshipping freely at Easter.
And yet, at a time when both the Jewish and the Christian traditions face a common danger in extremist Islam, it is worth stressing that contemporary Israel has no firmer friends in the world than evangelical Christians, who recall Jesus as an observant Jew and understand his resurrection not as a post-modern metaphor but as the Gospel truth. In democratic societies, even as they agree to disagree about matters of ultimate truth, believing Jews and Christians continue to have much to talk about, and to defend.
Several weeks ago, a well-known Modern Orthodox rabbi in New York announced that a learned young woman serving in his synagogue as a teacher, preacher, pastoral counselor, and halakhic guide would henceforth be referred to as "Rabbah"—the feminine form of "Rav," or rabbi. In thus effectively ordaining Sara Hurwitz as the first female Orthodox rabbi, Avraham (Avi) Weiss set off a firestorm. The presiding body of ultra-Orthodox rabbis has ruled that Weiss himself must no longer be called Orthodox; the Rabbinical Council of America, an avowedly Modern Orthodox body, may expel him as well.
No stranger to controversy, Weiss has bucked establishments before, often in the name of his commitment to a far-reaching inclusiveness that he calls Open Orthodoxy. Several years ago, he established a rabbinical school committed to his philosophy; he is also one of the founders of the International Rabbinic Fellowship, an organization of moderate Orthodox rabbis.
Women's roles in society are debated almost everywhere, but Weiss's move issues from specifically Orthodox trends as well. One is the historically unprecedented emergence in recent decades of women versed in the sort of traditional learning formerly the precinct of men. Challenging Modern Orthodoxy from the other direction is the so-called "shift to the Right," that is, the growth in size and strength of ultra-Orthodoxy: Jews who are more stringently observant than the Modern Orthodox and far less willing to enter into dialogue, especially on matters of principle, with the outside world.
This story bears significant implications for American Jewry as a whole. Ever since the mid-19th century, Modern Orthodoxy has served as a bridge between the mass of non-Orthodox and secular American Jews and the world of tradition, complete with its passion, its scholarship, and, yes, its strangeness. If, as some suggest, the ordination of Modern Orthodox women will mark the Rubicon beyond which lies a new, "post-Orthodox" age, the bridge may give way to fresh barricades in the already fractious contests pitting Jews against fellow Jews.
Jack Wertheimer
One class is analyzing a talmudic debate after having read it in the original Aramaic; in a neighboring room, students are conversing entirely in Hebrew; in a third, an "Ethicist" column from the New York Times is being examined in light of rabbinic sources; in still another, young men and women are working their way through a biblical text.
Jack Wertheimer
As if from a fantastical time machine, some 300 youngsters disembark in the woods of western Pennsylvania to find themselves at the building site of King Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. In a quick briefing they are introduced to the biblical passages describing the construction project, invited to imagine the challenges confronting the ancient builders—how to move and hoist heavy loads of quarried stone, how to shape metal into giant candelabra—and then immediately drafted into the mammoth task. Only when their labors are complete, two and a half hours later, do they begin the mundane assignment of meeting their counselors and locating their bunks.
Jack Wertheimer
As if from a fantastical time machine, some 300 youngsters disembark in the woods of western Pennsylvania to find themselves at the building site of King Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. In a quick briefing they are introduced to the biblical passages describing the construction project, invited to imagine the challenges confronting the ancient builders—how to move and hoist heavy loads of quarried stone, how to shape metal into giant candelabra—and then immediately drafted into the mammoth task. Only when their labors are complete, two and a half hours later, do they begin the mundane assignment of meeting their counselors and locating their bunks.
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