Rejewvenate!

As you know I’ve been studying at the Hartman Institute for the past week, and I want to thank them publicly for the opportunity to study and reflect with so many notable scholars, teachers and participants. This post is among the fruits of this wonderful retreat.

The greatest transformation of the Jewish religion is usually credited to Rabbi Yochanan Ben-Zakai, who together with his colleagues at Yavneh, reinterpreted and reestablished Judaism as a religion based around law, and the house of study and prayer. But his was not the first transformation of Judaism, nor is it destined to be the last.

In sweeping terms, the great reformulations of Judaism responded to the greatest moments of crisis and redemption in Jewish history. Let’s explore them briefly.

The Judaism of the period of the Judges is really the first historical Judaism - a Judaism not based on the ongoing revelation of God to Moses, or even to Joshua. Instead, it was the religion of a people living in history, day by day and generation by generation.

We need not detain ourselves with precisely which texts and practices these Jews had. It is sufficient to consider that this was a time when Jews did not celebrate Rosh Hashana as we do today - as a day of judgment - nor did they celebrate or commemorate many other moments, including Purim, Chanukah, Tisha B’Av, Simchat Torah, and so forth. They did not pray in a minyan, or celebrate a Bar Mitzvah. They did not gather together in shul on Shabbat, and they did not study the Talmud or draw inspiration from Isaiah. Nobody sat around a Shabbat table and explained what was bothering Rashi, or told over a vort from the Rebbe. Truly these were very different Jews!

Their religion was not centralized. A tabernacle existed, but Jews continued to worship, through sacrifice, in many places, including their own homes, as the Tanach attests. There were no kings, but there were many prophets, local potentates, and family worship rituals. Whatever texts were possessed were not studied by the general populace, and literacy was limited to a very few people. Religious worship was also closely tied to agrarian and pastoral cycles.

David, Solomon, and the First Temple changed all that. Central governance and worship created a state religion, and an attendant bureaucracy. Sacrificial worship was restricted to the Temple, even if unsuccessfully, and the king and High Priest joined the prophet as the means through which the nation and God advanced their relationship. The construction of the Temple encouraged pilgrimage as a more significant aspect of worship.

The destruction of the First Temple led to even more significant reforms. Ezra the Scribe redacted a Torah text that became standard, and other books, such as those recorded by the prophets, began to appeat. The institution of prayer began to emerge, even as prophecy declined. The notion of a Diaspora community took hold, as most of the exiled community in Babylon did not return with Ezra and Nehemia. In this Diaspora, Jews did not perform sacrificial worship, nor did they make pilgrimage. New modes of organization and communal life began to emerge.

The Second Temple period within the land of Israel was marked by even greater centralization of worship in Jerusalem, and during the Hasmonean dynasty, a merging of the offices of king and High Priest. Judaism had largely shifted from a rural religion to an urban one, complete with a central High Court - the Sanhedrin -  but around the edges, the seeds of a backlash began to sprout. Synagogues, houses of gathering, Batei Midrash (houses of study), sectarian communities, prophets in the hinterland and scholars in the villages all flourished outside of the sphere of influence of the Temple.

When the Great Rebellion led to the destruction of the Temple and the second great exile in 70 CE, there already existed the beginnings of institutions that would reshape Judaism for the next two thousand years. They turned Judaism into a religion of text study and interpretation, prayer and community. The primary institutions were the aforementioned synagogue and Beit Midrash, with their attendant practices of prayer and study. Without an investment in schools, this highly literate mode of religious life could not have emerged.

The Holocaust (and the destruction of many other Diaspora communities, especially in the Sephardi world), and the birth of the State of Israel, along with the rise of another great Diaspora community in the United States has reshaped our religion once again - and we’re just at the beginning. Judaism changes in response to challenges, not in some sort of vacuum. Reform Judaism and Zionism were only the first responses to a world changed by the social and political values of the French Revolution and the economic values of the Industrial Revolution. It is impossible to understate the impact of these twin forces, and nobody, including Jews and the entire world, is done responding and adjusting to these changes.

I believe that the most important changes for their impact on Jewish practice are gender and racial equality, the ease and speed of travel and communication, and the transformation of societies away from traditionally mandated groups and associations towards wholly voluntary participation.

We’ve already seen how some of these changes impacted Judaism, but we have not yet reformulated our institutions around them. On any given Shabbat, our synagogues are populated only by whomever is celebrating a lifecycle event. Our students fill prep schools and universities, not Batei Midrash. We deconstruct our texts and often eviscerate them, and our new texts go unread except by a cloistered few.

What we need to do is to reshape Judaism around these realities. The Orthodox will not lead this change, as they feel the need less sharply. Their isolationism buffers them to a greater extent from the new reality, but this too is a matter of time. For the non-Orthodox the time need is hard upon us.

The new Judaism will not be about sacrificial worship, or about the synagogue in its current form. It will be about travel, including pilgrimage to Israel and travel to communities in need. It will be about leadership in non-profit organizations and social change ventures. And it must be about education, including mandatory high-school-level Jewish education and high-level continuing adult education. Not service learning. Not one-off lectures. Not the rabbi’s speech. We need more intensive learning, perhaps structured around our holidays, to connect our ideologically rooted think-tanks and institutes to the laypeople. We must realign our laity and our clergy once again. The task is before us, let’s get to it!

In a move that brings Orthodox Judaism hurtling forward through time to the 1960s, the Shalom Hartman institute will ordain women to be Orthodox rabbis.

More accurately, the institute has opened a 4-year program to prepare people of any Jewish denomination to receive rabbinical ordinate.

More on this later, but I think this marks a major turning point in Jewish history, not so much for the content of the decision, but because the decision emerged from an Israeli institute. Is progressive Orthodoxy now an Israeli phenomenon, surpassing Yeshivat Chovevei Torah?

Ultra-Orthodox missionaries from Bnai Brak have hit upon a very old scheme for gaining adherents - monetary incentive. As Ynet reports, Hareidi rabbis have been offering poor high school kids in Ramat Gan 18 shekel to attend a Torah study class.

I’m a little stunned. It is not acceptable behavior to bribe high school students in this manner. Talk about not passing the smell test! Would it be okay for secular Israelis to bribe Hareidi students to eat pig, or attend a lecture on evolution? If I found out that somebody was bribing my kid in order to indoctrinate him without my consent I would be driven to violence! Subverting parental choices about education and basic values goes beyond merely disrespectful. It is a violation of basic parental rights and a brazen act that will surely result in grief to all parties.

I was reading this thought-provoking article in the New York Times about the actual economic meaning of making charitable donations tax-deductible. The article is worth discussing on its own merits, but I want to talk about the implications it has for private Jewish education.

The bar for becoming a tax-exempt organization is set relatively low. Among the examples quoted in the website is an organization to help S&M fans who lost their gear to Hurricane Katrina get new whips, chains, manacles, and ball-gags.

Many private schools have ancillary foundations that raise funds to support the parent institution. Here’s my plan. Let’s say that tuition is $20,000 at the local Yeshiva (or, Hebrew Academy, lo aleinu). You can set up a foundation to support the Yeshiva, and only offer admission to members of the foundation. Have the yeshiva charge $5,000 tuition, and have membership in the foundation cost $15,000 per child. Voila, 75% of tuition at the Yeshiva is tax-deductible!

In the past, I opposed tax relief for private school tuition. Let me clarify the apparent contradiction. I have no problem with taking advantage of current laws and tax avoidance techniques, I just think we shouldn’t vote in new benefits for ourselves without considering he broader community.. That’s our system, and rational people should try to pay as little in taxes as legally required. There is no legal or ethical requirement to be a sucker on taxes and pay more than what is legally required. It’s the government’s job to make sure that the tax system is structured appropriately to collect what is needed.

The other key difference is that my plan makes tuition dollars deductible from your federal income tax as well as your state income tax, and it does not limit the deduction to families making under $150k.

I’m sure that there’s an accountant out there, or a tax lawyer, who will explain why this idea doesn’t work or is illegal. And yes, if all private schools used this we’d have to re-write the tax code. But that’s what I’ve been saying all along! If this is legal, let’s do it!

Daniel Septimus comments:

We are all aware that when we turn to Jewish tradition for teachings that inspire us to work for social justice, we often turn a blind eye to texts that can inspire the opposite: religious paternalism, inequality, brutal forms of capital punishment, and yes, even race-based genocide.

But is this okay? Can we credibly cite Jewish teachings that encourage a better world when there exist parallel teachings that could lead to a worse one?

The comments were made in the context of writing for the America Jewish World Service Dvar Tzedek program, which publishes an ethics-based commentary on the parsha each week. He goes on to point out that although it is very easy to cherry-pick, especially in Sefer Devarim, those ideas that ore most consonant with our own ethics, those other ideas must be addressed.

Whether we condemn these texts or merely note their difficulty, they are our responsibility. If we ignore them and fail to forge communal opinions about them, we risk the possibility of them being resurrected and reclaimed.

Of course, it goes well beyond possibility. I have personally heard members of the settler movement claim that Palestinians are the modern-day Amalek, or more moderately, among the seven nations of Canaan who must similarly be exterminated. The ongoing issue of Agunot is another living example of this problem.

What is to be done? Rabbinic Judaism had a pretty good answer in the systematic evolution of halacha. The elimination of capital punishment, polygamy, and corporeal punishment, and the institutions of ketubah, heter iska, and prozbol addressed many problems in ethics and social justice. Unfortunately, our denominations today can’t seem to find that path. Orthodoxy has abandoned the notion of evolution of halacha in favor of a plainly falsifiable belief in static halacha; Reform have abandoned halacha altogether. In the words of Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, “If you take it all upon yourself as an obligation rather than as a choice, you’ve reached the point at which you’re no longer a Reform Jew.” Taking it one step further, Reconstructionist Judasim simply denies God’s existence (let din v’leit dayan). As for the Conservatives, they are riven in at least twain (though in truth, the complexities of their divisions may indeed be a strength, as their new generation seeks to marry the most progressive ethical notions with the most traditional and restrictive Halachic norms). Right now, the movement could be fairly described as ish hayashar b’eynav ya’aseh - each person does as he sees fit.

What’s needed is a revival. Not a revival of Jewish culture or reconfiguration of Jewish conecpts a la the FrankenJews at Jewcy. Not a new commitment to Jewish texts and text study, which so often is agenda-driven. What’s needed is a revival of Yirat Shamayim - fear of God. Acceptance of the idea of Mitzvah-as-commandment, not as good deed, or even favor-to-the-Jewish-People, or even as a nourishing aspect of self-identification.

Today is the second day of Elul, a time for introspection, evaluation, repentance, and renewed commitment.  It is marked by shofar-blasts at shacharit, the morning prayers recited by probably no more than one-tenth of the Jewish population in the US. Hayitaka Shofar ba-ir V’ha’am lo yecherad (can a shofar be blown in a city, and it’s inhabitants not tremble?) (Amos 3:6). The question is asked rhetorically, but today, the shofar’s call is barely heard, much less heeded. I want to end today with the words of the captain of the ship that Jonah sailed upon to avoid his stern, commanding God’s decree :

ו  וַיִּקְרַב אֵלָיו רַב הַחֹבֵל, וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ מַה-לְּךָ נִרְדָּם; קוּם, קְרָא אֶל-אֱלֹהֶיךָ–אוּלַי יִתְעַשֵּׁת הָאֱלֹהִים לָנוּ, וְלֹא נֹאבֵד.	6 So the shipmaster came to him, and said unto him: ‘What meanest thou that thou sleepest? arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not.’

(Jonah 1:6) The Rambam tells us that the shofar calls to us to awaken from our slumber, and to return to God. Sometimes, as in Jonah’s case, that return is painful, and the task before us is unpleasant. It requires personal abnegation, not affirmation. We may be called upon to do that which we find distasteful, or even that which we are diametrically opposed to. But we cannot, and we should not flee it. Even in the depths of the sea Jonah did not find comfort, only a temporary escape. It’s time for us to make our accounting before God, to face the music, and acknowledge that there is a Law, and Judge who holds us to it.

Rabbi Dr. Shalom Carmy’s response to Noah Feldman has been widely praised (and widely anticiapted) perhaps because Carmy is today what Noah Feldman might have become had he stayed frum. Personally, I was a little disappointed by it, because of the straw-man syndrome that it too falls prey to, like many other responses from the Orthodox movement:

In settling his scores with his alma mater, Feldman ascribes to his high school rebbi the claim that a doctor who treats a Gentile on Shabbat violates the day unless his explicit intention is to do so only in order to avoid animus. Though this sounds like nonsense, I am informed that a high school teacher actually said it.

The insinuation that religious Jewish doctors cannot be entrusted with the care of non-Jewish patients was, as we all know, part of the arsenal of 19th century European anti-Semitism. It was not meant in earnest: as an Orthodox deputy once remarked, during a debate on the licensing of physicians in the Austrian Parliament, several of the most outspoken leaders of the anti-Semitic party used Jewish doctors.

[...]

In any event Feldman presumably knows very well that his high school teacher’s remark is not representative of grown-up halakhic thought, and he knows even better that it is not a guide to the practice of Orthodox Jewish doctors. Nonetheless, in his desire to satisfy himself against those who failed to properly esteem his choices and flatter his vanity, he has resorted to one of the most potent weapons of 19th-20th century anti-Semitism. He has made it easier for individuals or groups in medical schools to sideline or bar Orthodox Jews, in the name of high-sounding universalistic moral ideals, from positions in the medical profession. Whether he intends these consequences or not, and whether or not he envisions, in his wise shrewdness and genteel outrage, further punitive consequences to his classmates and their children, he has employed his power and prestige to those ends. He, and we, must live with the consequences of his decision.

Was Noah Feldman really suggesting that Jewish doctors can’t be trusted on Saturdays? I think that the common denominator to far too many of the Feldman responses is that they all seek to rebut arguments and contentions that are far simpler than those Feldman actually brought up. And to me, Carmy’s attempt to elide the point by saying that we must deal even with Feldman’s unintended consequences is not convincing.

We all agree that saving the life of a non-Jew on Shabbat is ok. Does it matter what your mindset is? According to Rabbi Carmy, it does not, but I am not convinced that his view is the only or final view on the matter. Still, I couldn’t find a single Orthodox doctor who embraced the mindset that he was working to prevent Antisemitism when treating non-Jews on Shabbat. In fact, many of the doctors I spoke to said that they keep their minds on their work, and to do otherwise would diminish their effectiveness. Perhaps this gap between theoretical and practical halacha could be addressed.

Over the last twenty or so years, we’ve seen a rise in shomer-shabbas residencies. Most Orthodox Jews consider these residencies a boon whose primary virtue is freeing observant doctors from grappling with the difficulties of working in a hospital on Shabbat. But it feels to me like there is a disconnect between this idea and the notion that l’maaseh, there is no difference between saving the life of a Jew and a non-Jew on Shabbat.

Moreover, non-Jewish doctors are often quite resentful of the Shomer Shabbas residency programs because they are forced to cover the Shabbat shifts. No doubt, the Jewish residents cover the Sunday shifts, but for doctors who live in a world where Friday night is the primary night for social engagements, having to work many more Friday night and Saturday shifts is a real burden. I’ve been told by some residents that these Shomer Shabbas residencies are often only available at lower-ranked programs, where foreign medical students (who cannot afford to be so demanding) make up the bulk of the non-Jewish staff. Here then is a living, breathing example of animosity directed at Jews for their unwillingness to practice medicine on Shabbat, not just some theoretical meanderings. Yet never have I heard that Jewish residents should avoid Shomer Shabbas residencies ‘mishum evah‘ (i.e. to prevent Antisemitism). That too is a disconnect.

On a personal note, a very close friend of mine declined a prestigious anesthesia residency at Mass General in favor of a ho-hum program that was willing to offer him a Shomer Shabbas residency. This gifted medical student turned down the opportunity to study anesthesia at the very institution where the discipline was founded some 160 years ago, and which remains among the finest places for a young clinician to learn his trade. Did this Jew correctly prioritize Shabbat over saving lives?

These are the types of issues that Feldman raises in my mind, and I would rather discuss them than waste time debating Feldman’s character, intentions or integrity, or those of his respondents.

I plan to write about this, but for now, I’d just like to provide some links about this issue. If you haven’t heard about it yet, here’s the summary. Dr. Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard University, wrote at length in the New York Times Magazine from this past Sunday, about his experiences at the Modern Orthodox Maimonides School in Brookline, which he attended for twelve years. Dr. Feldman has since married a non-Jewish woman and has two children. Entitled “Orthodox Paradox”, the article explores the contradictions and challenges of living at the crossroads of modernity and tradition, as written by someone who still seems himself at that crossroads.

NY Times Article

Shmuly Boteach, who had a close relationship with Dr. Feldman during the latter’s two years at Oxford University, responded thoughtfully.

A response from R. Ozer Glickman, a Rosh Yeshiva at Yeshiva University affiliate the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, is available on request. Send email to rejewvenator[at]gmail.com

Gil Student added some resentful comments.

To see what other bloggers are saying, click here.

Update: Jewcy editor Joey Kurtzman interviews Noah Feldman about his article, “Orthodox Paradox.”

Tuition at Jewish schools is probably the most significant expense that Orthodox parents face in raising a large religious family, and prices are only climbing higher. For a family with five or six children, total tuition bills can easily top $100,000 per year!

Sometimes I wonder why the shidduch crisis, a largely undocumented, understudied, and anecdotal problem gets so much community attention and resources, when the easily-quantified, often-studied, and broadly-felt problem of tuition costs stares us in the face, still unsolved.

The OU has been advocating support for a bill that will ease the yeshiva tuition problem in New York State by making tuition costs tax-deductible for middle class families, and providing a tuition credit to poor families. Without getting into the details of the bill, my questions is how is this a good idea? Why should New York State taxpayers pay to send Yossi to yeshiva? Do we want to pay to send Katherine to Catholic school, or Mahmoud to madrassa?

Some will argue that we are merely getting a refund because we don’t use the public school system. But of course, many people don’t use the public school system. Should people without children get the refunds as well? It’s not like we don’t benefit from public schools - the existence of an educated American population is a bedrock on which our national prosperity is built. We expect that most everyone we deal with has a high school diploma, and can read, write, do basic math, and have a shared cultural currency. We would be much poorer and far far less well if we were surrounded by ignorant, illiterate brutes (as we once were in Europe).

We do have a problem with tuition in our communities. It’s a problem we made for ourselves, and it’s one we will have to solve for ourselves. Let’s not go looking in the public till. The OU urges you to call Governor Spiter at (800) 319-3403. I say call him, and express your opposition to the Lopez-Goldin Tuition Tax Deduction Bill.

Lenny at JSpot.org recently posted about his dissatisfaction with how progressive Jewish organizations do text studies. His complaint is that these organizations are using the texts, not teaching the texts. Because most of these text studies are accessories to a particular political, charitable, or moral campaign, they come off as predigested pap. Educators preselect texts and commentaries that support their goals, essentially drawing a bullseye around the dart of their political and moral beliefs. These sessions can feel artificial and demoralizing. In Lenny’s words, “Finding excerpts that support my predisposition seems to do more to comfort me in my superficial Jewishness and little to deeply engage me with Judaism.”

To address this problem, Lenny proposes:

…doing away with such one-time self-congratulatory events and moving to an ongoing Jewish adult education courses that more deeply engage us with our rich tradition.

A Jewish adult education course would not start with the brash assumption that we will find the answer that we want to hear in the text. Rather, such a course would be a more open-ended inquiry into our ancient and sometimes contradictory history. It would uncover the major debates about a particular topic (e.g. treatment of workers), teach the participants about the major compilations of literature that capture those debates, and trace the evolution of Jewish thinking over time and space.

On the one hand, I salute Lenny’s vision. Unfortunately, as I commented to his post, in the non-Orthodox world, Jewish adults simply don’t have the keys to access the treasury of Jewish learning, and because of that, they just don’t attend ongoing adult education classes. I teach in a nondenominational Hebrew high school program, and when I first started teaching there, I was stunned by the paucity of Jewish knowledge possessed by my students. Once, I asked a class of twenty students to tell me about Noah, and not a single one could answer - not even the student named Noah!

Outside of Orthodoxy, Jewish adults have a limited grasp of Hebrew (written and spoken), a lack of significant exposure to fundamental texts, and an almost total ignorance of the great Jewish thinkers of the last two thousand years. Whereas Orthodox students will have learned much, if not all, of Chumash (The Five Books of Moses) with Rashi and other commentators, as well as selected books from the Prophets and Writings, a few representative chapters of Talmud with advanced commentary, and assorted other books of Halacha, Mussar, and Jewish philosophy, there is, broadly speaking, no such parallel in the Conservative or Reform movements.

That’s the problem, pure and simple. I don’t know how it happened, but somewhere, the value of intensive Jewish education was lost from these movements, and the results are a laity that doesn’t know what Jewish learning is, and as a result, has very low expectations of Jewish education, and an even lower sense of responsibility to seek out and commit to consistent, high-quality Jewish learning.

As Lenny correctly surmised, I do believe that Hebrew schools need to focus on basic texts instead of ’soft’ Judaism. But that’s not enough. The problem is not just that our focus is wrong, it’s that we are under-committed. We can’t send our kids to Hebrew school for five or six hours a week for about four years and expect any depth out of the experience. How many weeks per year does a Hebrew school meet? Maybe twenty-five? So a Jewish child gets about five hundred hours at Hebrew school over the course of four years - the equivalent of about twelve weeks of working full-time. It’s just not enough time, and we all know it! To borrow from The Big Lebowski, three thousand years of tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax, and you want me to fit it into how long?!?

In the Orthodox world, it is a mark of honor and distinction to be known as a Jew who “knows how to learn.” Such a person can walk into a Beit Midrash, or a shul library, open a Jewish text he has never seen before, and decipher its meaning. It’s more than the ability to translate Hebrew (and Aramaic!) into English. It’s not just reading and grasping the plot of a particular parsha. It’s a whole world of meta-knowledge - which commentator is a literalist, which can help you with a grammar problem, and which will address the ethical or theological issues raised by a verse. It’s a familiarity with the Jewish bookshelf, and with major streams of Jewish thought. It’s the ability to swim in the sea of Talmud, explore the tributary streams of a religious idea, and emerge on the banks of a new understanding of your faith, your life, and your choices. This kind of learning, this kind of dedication is what leads to an ownership over Jewish text and tradition, and it need not and should not be the sole realm of Orthodoxy.

The problem facing the liberal Jewish community is much broader than the question of how to do better text studies, or even why Jewish social and political organizations should be doing adult Jewish education at all!

The problem is that liberal Jews send their children to public school, not Jewish day school. The Hebrew school programs that these Jewish children attend struggle with the Sisyphean task of teaching Judaism amid all the distractions of school, friends, family, extra-curricular activities, sports, and so forth (in my own school I have students whom I only see in the autumn, because they play softball in the spring, and students I only seen in spring because they play football in the fall). Kids are very savvy to priorities, and they learn that Hebrew school, Jewish knowledge, and attendance at synagogue aren’t really that important! What kind of adults will these children be? I submit that they will be no different from their parents, and like their parents, they will have limited interest in, and limited patience for authentic Jewish learning.

(Deut. 33:4)

Knowledge of Torah is the heritage of the Jewish people. If a liberal Jewish organization is just another liberal organization, but for its Jewish content, then what are the liberal Jewish people if not for their Jewish content? Unless the Conservative and Reform communities elevate education to the top of their lists of priorities, they will cede the very definition of Judaism to the Orthodox on one hand, and to the political fashions of the day on the liberal side of the ideological spectrum on the other. Without a grounding in the texts with which our tradition and culture is intertwined, we have no religion, no culture, and no identity.