Just so you folks know, I’m currently at the Shalom Hartman Institute, attending their Lay Leadership Retreat, which has been terrific so far, and has been very good for coming up with blogging ideas!

One issue we discussed with Rabbi Dr. Alfredo Borodowski was what exactly the purpose of the Torah text might be. The Torah is a poor history book, a distracted legal compendium, and a fractured take on theology. Were any of these the primary aim of the Torah, we should have to say that it was a failure.

The Torah itself informs us that none of the above were its purpose. The Torah tells us of other books, like Sefer Milchamot Hashem, the Book of the Wars of God, that record military history. The Talmud teaches that the Torah was given “megillot megillot” - one scroll at a time, thus answering what the Torah means when it speaks of Sefer HaBrit (Book of the Covenant) or more generally when Moshe, and later Joshua, are depicted as writing some particular chapter or passage in a book. Evidently, more focused segments of the text were intended to fit the more traditional categories of literature.

Yet all of these, and others, were combined into one text, the text of the Torah, and later, into one compendium, that of the Tanach. Why? To the scholar, the haphazard nature of the Torah text is evidence of its scattered origins. in time, place, and religious outlook. All true, but what of the redactor? Why did he do such a poor job of combining these texts? What purpose did the text have that prevented him from editing the text into some semblance of coherence?

A few ideas come to mind. Let’s assume that Ezra is the redactor of the Five Books of Moses. What did he have to work with, and what degrees of freedom did he have to alter what he had? Presumably, Ezra had texts that he simply could not change. The most ancient texts, like the Song of the Sea, or Ha’azinu, or the Blessings of Jacob, were probably inviolate. They were almost certainly committed to writing by this point, and they were surely committed to memory by many Jews.

Other texts were more fluid, both in precise form and in placement. Genesis 1, a P text, was moved from where it most likely stood at the beginning of Leviticus to the beginning of the Torah. Though Noah shows both J and P strands, they are tightly interwoven, indicating that Ezra had a great deal of freedom with the relative placement of these texts. What Ezra has little contol over, throughout, is the specific content. He cannot read out of the Noah story the tradition that Noah took seven of the ‘pure’ animals and two of the impure, even though it makes the story more consistent. The tradition is too strongly rooted by his time to change or eliminate.

The inclusion of these contrary traditions is, in a very real sense the role of the sacred text in Judaism. As Dr. Borodowski put it, the Torah is a narrative about narrative. The internal contradictions, repeated stories, ambiguities, and other lacunae are the result of compromises between traditions, sources of authority, and political and religious leadership. The preservation of controversy is a key function of the text, because it serves to include all these different voices, and creates interpretive possibilities that do not exist in a more consistent text. The interpretive possibilites lay the groundwork for possible future compromise and inclusion.

Later texts in the Tanach have the same features, for example, the three Isaiahs, the competing historical records of Chronicles and Kings, or the multiple traditions of conquest in Joshua and Judges. Israel Knohl is set to publish a book going back to the earliest days of Israelite presence in the land to unwind these competing traditions and connect them back to their sources in Shchem, Beit-El, Hebron, and so forth, but it is a credit to Judaism that we successfully subsumed so many different voices into one whole not by silencing them, but by including them, even where they disagreed with us.

The Mishna and Talmud embraced this exact methodology, creating a legal code unique in history for preserving controversy and embracing the authority and validity of the minority position. Only recently have legal institutions like the US Supreme Court preserved dissent in a similar fashion. Sadly, Judaism has not done so, and today, legal and religious Jewish writing makes no attempt to create a collective text out of many dissenting voices. Perhpas that is why our dissent divides us so bitterly, where in the past it was a source of strength.

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 the previous post, I spoke in passing about the tangential, rather than causal relationship between the Written and Oral Torah. In this post, I want to clarify and expand upon this idea.

In traditional Jewish learning, the divinity of the Torah leads to a fundamental axiom that the Torah text is entirely intentional. There are no extra words, letters, or even decorations of letters, and there are no accidental or meaningless omissions either. In Midrash Halacha, the Tannaic-era works of halachic scholarship that adduce laws from the Torah text, this relationship is foundational. Hence, over and over again in Midrash Halacha there is an exegetical structure in which laws or aspects of laws are connected to seemingly “extra” words in a verse.

The above seems to contradict my opening statement – it appears that laws are directly connected to the verses! A closer examination of the exegetical structure is called for. Generally, the Midrash will quote a verse, and then state that based on the plain reading of the verse, we can only deduce some aspect of the halacha. The Midrash will then ask from where we can learn the other aspects of the halacha which we know to be the complete halacha. It will then identify some extra word or phrase in the verse to attach the additional aspects of the halacha to.

Let’s take an example from the giving of the Torah. The verse in question states “ko tomar l’veit Yakov v’taged l’bnei Yisrael.” – “So shall you say to the House of Jacob, and tell to the Children of Israel.” The Midrash then says that based on the above verse, we can infer only that the men received the Torah, and goes on to ask from where can we learn that the women received it as well. The Midrash then says that the Torah’s use of the phrase ‘Beit Yakov’ comes to include the women. In other words, without that phrase, we would have understood that the men received the Torah, so its inclusion must mean that some other group aside from the men also received the Torah – namely, the women.

There’s nothing about the phrase Beit Yakov that forces us to understand it in this manner. The interpretation is entirely local, and includes no claim that Beit Yakov always refers to the women, nor does it bring any proof that this, rather than some alternative explanation is intended (for example, that Beit Yakov refers to the converts, and Bnei Yisrael refers to the direct descendants of Jacob).

What this means is that the knowledge of the dimensions of the halcha, the Oral Torah, inform the interpretation of the Written Torah. We know the halacha, so all we seek to do is find a plausible phrase on which to hang our hats. This mode of interpretation is quite free – the words barely have to suggest the meaning we wish to attribute to them. In the Talmud, we see many examples where the additional of a single letter comes to include a whole new category of subject for a ruling, even though the letter itself suggests no such textual meaning.

This illustrates exactly what I meant when I said the relationship between the Oral and Written Torah is non-contingent. On a deeper level, what it suggests is that the underlying issues in Jewish theology is not whether the Written Torah is divine, but whether, how, and to what extent the Oral Torah is divine. This is a subject we will return to again and again.

Part of the hostility of Orthodox Jews towards Biblical criticism is that by taking the text as a human artifact rather than a Divine revelation, you find yourself in diametric opposition to the fundamental assumptions held by Masoretic sages over thousands of years of Biblical interpretation. Usually, this discomfort is expressed in the halachic sphere, which, at first glance, appears to require a Divine text in order to be comprehensible and meaningful.

I would argue that this is a relatively minor aspect of the difficulties of a human Biblical text for religious life and thinking. Traditional Judaism embraces two sources of revelation, one the Written Law, and the other the Oral Law. The extensive effort of the Talmudic sages to relate, connect, and reconcile these two sources speaks volumes for the non-contingent nature of these sources. Put simply, the laws of the Oral Torah proceed only tangentially from the text of the Written Torah, so rejecting Divine authorship of the Written Torah need not lead to rejection of halacha.

The larger problem with human authorship is that it calls into question the legitimacy of interpretations based upon close readings of the Biblical text. So long as the text is Divine, we can believe that many layers of meaning wait to be uncovered by the patient scholar, and that all of these meanings are authentic and authoritative – as authoritative as the Author Himself. But if we remove an Author who is master of all His intentions, we are left with the mundane yet vexing problem of all literary interpretation: how to discern what an author truly meant.

While this problem has been addressed, to no final conclusion but nonetheless to a wealth of powerful ideas about the human endeavor of literature, there are at least two additional dimensions to the problem for the religious reader of the Bible.

The first is that the Bible is a composite document with many authors and editors, which means that there are many writers, and these writers surely did not share identical intentions for the text, and who could not possibly even know all the intentions of all prior or future parties to the final text. The second is that, as every writer knows, the text takes on a life of its own, and embodies meanings that were never intended by the author, or in the case of the Bible, any author or redactor.

The doctrine of Divine inspiration may successfully address these issues. If you believe that the text itself, in whatever form it takes or has taken over the years, is always precisely what God intended it to be, and only those meanings that God intends us to have at any given point are revealed, even through all-too-human means, you can resolve the dilemma presented by a human text. This positivist view strikes many as a bit pat, much in the way that the argument that God’s foreknowledge of human choices does not contradict human free will does. Perhaps this is a problem without resolution, as it depends upon our ability to decipher the unknowable Divine mind.

Yet that is the very task set before us! We are commanded to do God’s will, yet we remain forever uncertain as to what God’s will is. I’m reminded of the “What would Jesus do?” bracelets that are meant to remind Christians to imitate Jesus in their own lives. To me, the question sounds rhetorical, and the mutability of the answers is reflected by the variations on that question in modern life, from the earnest environmentalist’s formulation ‘What would Jesus drive?’ to the pacifist’s rhetorical declaration ‘Who would Jesus bomb?’ to the hipster’s ironic dissociative ‘Who would Jesus do?’

Claiming knowledge of God’s mind or will is a dangerous game, and it is made even more dangerous when that claim is buttressed by the positivist argument that those interpretations that we make are those that are authorized and intended by God by virtue of our ability to make them. Left unresolved in this is the problem of mutually exclusive interpretations, or interpretations that proceed from different assumptions about the text.

As Jews we interpret the Biblical text charitably, seeking to resolve its contradictions and gloss over its lacunae in service of an interpretation that matches our theology. Gnostic Christians, on the other hand, took a radically opposite approach to the text, with Muslims and traditional Christians falling out in other places along the spectrum. What’s to say that the Muslim interpretation of the Binding of Isaac as actually referring to the Binding of Ishmael is incorrect? Or that the Christian interpretations of various prophecies in Isaiah are misguided?

In the end it’s a matter of authority. Which interpreters, ancient, modern, and contemporary, do we acknowledge as having authority to ‘uncover’ meanings in the text? And what do we truly mean by this grant of authority?

At least part of this answer can be found in the Rabbinic dictum from Pirkei Avot to make a rabbi for oneself. Though it may be tempting for some (even as it is terrifying for others) to undertake the responsibility for sorting through all this alone, and to vest authority in the individual, this is not truly an answer to the questions of to whom authority is granted and what is the nature of that authority. It is a negation of the possibility of authority, because it fails to separate the responsibility for the decision from the accountability for its execution.

Only God can perfectly merge action and intention in all ways. For us humans, we strive to vivify our will by following through on our intentions with actions. The process of decision-making is an entirely human endeavor, through which we attempt to both clarify and give weight to our intentions and thereby bind ourselves to act upon them. In the religious sphere, introducing a rabbi to the equation automatically means that there will always be a gap between what our theology might demand of us and what our rabbi would command us to do, but that’s a good thing. The nature of authority, as we discussed is that we must submit to it, and the purpose of submission to authority is to expand the circle of people and ideas that define our religious expression. It is a necessary prerequisite to community formation.

To return to our original issue, I would say that it is less important what position you take on the question of Biblical authorship and interpretation than it is to attach yourself to an interpretive tradition, and to submit to its authority in practical terms. The friction generated between that and your personal theology is itself an expression of that age-old dilemma that we are commanded to do God’s will, even as His nature and will are unknowable.

In my last post I discussed how shul as an institution has not yet adapted to the lifestyle of the progressive observant family. Here now are some concrete suggestions for making that shift.

Shul has got to be shorter. A typical Young Israel starts at 9 AM and gets to kiddush at about noon, or even later. For many people, coming late is simply a way of managing the amount of time you’re will to spend in shul. I would argue that for most people, three plus hours is well past the point of diminishing spiritual returns.

To make shul shorter, I say we do a ‘heicha’ kedushah (that’s where instead of doing all of Chazarat HaShatz after the silent recitation of the Amidah, the Chazan says the first part of Chazart HaShatz, through the kedushah, aloud, prior to the silent recitation of the Amidah by the congregation) for all of the Amidot.

Chazarat HaShatz served two halachic purposes. The first was to provide those who did not know the davening by heart and either could not read or had no access to a siddur a means to fulfill their obligation to pray. The second was to bind the congregation together into a tzibbur - a communal prayer group. With the advent of Gutenberg, Artscroll, and Amazon.com, there is no lack in our Jewish community for printed siddurim, and the heicha kedushah would serve the latter purpose as well, and more quickly, than the full version. Have you looked around recently during Chazarat HaShatz? It feels like a Victorian drawing room - a bunch of people are reading books, there are some not-so-hushed conversations, lots of people mill around, and lost in all this is the drone of a Chazan reciting a prayer that everyone in the room has jsut gotten through reciting themselves.

Taking off Chazarat HaShatz would easily cut at least twenty to thirty minutes off of the shul experience. Let’s go one further - let’s also return to the triennial Torah-reading cycle. There’s no chiyuv to read the Torah in one year. In fact, the obligation to read Torah on Shabbat is to read seven aliyot. You could read the first column of the Torah every Shabbat and fulfill your obligation. You could easily save twenty minutes, and even more on those weeks that have very long parshas.

There’s also room to trim the beginning. Davening in shul should start from Baruch She’amar. People should recite Brikot Hashachar and Korbanot at home, as the Shulchan Aruch sets down.

Finally, shuls must be strict about liming Hosafot, mishebeirachs, announcements, mazel tovs, speeches, appeals, and so forth. Isn’t it more natural for most of the administrative stuff to happen at kiddush, rather than while everyone is still in their talleisim? As important, shul must be quiet - conversations cannot be tolerated. If you want a davening that is both dignified and well-paced, you have to shut up!

If you adopt all of these changes, you can get through Shabbat morning davening in no more than two hours, and I’ll bet that yours will be the most popular shul in town.

I recently shared a shabbat lunch with a progressive family in a community not unlike my own. While in recent months I haven’t been going to shul on time myself, I was scouting this community, so I made it my business to show up on time. I was also staying over at the house of one of the gabbaim… In any case, at this shul, like at my own, the only people in shul on time were the old folks. I brought the point up with my lunch hosts, and a spirited conversation ensued.

The consensus was that this was a product of men being more involved in childcare, but I feel like that answer is incomplete and imprecise. After all, in progressive communities with egalitarian sensibilities, women have a greater role in the synagogue and their participation in communal prayer is more respected and encouraged. One would expect that shared childcare duties would lead to alternating synagogue attendance, with the husband attending on time one week and the wife the next.

The reality, at least at the shuls I’ve attended, is that young couples roll in during Torah reading, at the earliest - and many miss the davening entirely, showing up only in time for kiddush. It’s the old men who make it for the starting gun, not the young couples.

Truth be told, it’s not surprise. When you change the underlying assumptions and rules that have governed Orthodox society, say, by shifting gender roles, it is natural that there will be consequences to that shift. In order to remain vibrant and relevant, institutions must shift as well. Shul was an institution built by men who didn’t rear children for men who didn’t rear children. It is not suitable, as currently composed, for this new generation of Jews and their lifestyles. In my next post, I hope to make some pointed suggestions for how to adapt this institution to the current reality, and how to continue to affirm the centrality and importance of communal worship in the progessive, observant community.

You know what really grinds my gear? The term Conservadox. Is there anyone out there who uses this term to describe themselves? Or is it just a derogatory term pinned on the not-frum-enough by the frumer-than-thou club?

I recently attended a lecture by Dr. James Kugel, who was recently in New York for a series of speaking engagements, along with other members of my weekly Kugel with Kugel learning group. The lecture itself focused on letters sent to Dr. Kugel in response to his recent book How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now. I was a bit disappointed; though the content was good, Dr. Kugle spent his time on a letter from a reader that Dr. Kugel had already published on his website.

Many readers have hoped that Dr. Kugel would have some new answers to the questions posed by Biblical scholarship to traditional modes of thought. To date, those readers have been disappointed. Like many Jews of his generation, be they scholars, rabbis, or laypeople, Dr. Kugel is basically a compartmentalist. Though he has some non-traditional ideas about the origins of the Biblical text - ideas that are largely consonant with modern scholarship - he does subscribe to the historicity of the Torah, and especially the Exodus. For many Jews of my generation, compartmentalizing the teachings of our faith separately from the results of scientific study is no longer satisfactory.

One question that must come up whenever Dr. Kugel speaks is the challenge posed by an evolving Biblical text to the assumptions of a static, perfect text that undergird the entire tradition of the Oral Torah, from  the Mishnah to the Talmud to the latest works by contemporary Orthodox rabbis. It is disturbing to think that the great Jewish sages produced Rabbinical Judaism on the basis of a false assumption! For many, this is a fatal flaw that collapses the entire edifice of Rabbinical Judaism.

But why is that so? The rabbis of the first half of the first millennium BCE had many basic misconceptions about the nature of the world around them. These included a belief in geocentricism, spontaneous generation, and the many ahistorical stories of the Bible. Modern Orthodoxy has already chipped away at some of these notions by finding or originating interpretations that allow its adherents to affirm their scientific beliefs that evolution occurred, that the Earth is billions of years old, and so forth. One might argue that this simply adds a new challenge to belief - why accept that these rabbis had any special access to Divine knowledge if they were mistaken on so many things?

The Torah itself contains the answer:

הַנִּסְתָּרֹת–לַיהוָה, אֱלֹהֵינוּ; וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ, עַד-עוֹלָם–לַעֲשׂוֹת, אֶת-כָּל-דִּבְרֵי הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת.

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God; but the things that are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.

Explicitly, the Torah tells us that not everything is revealed to us, and that we are only responsible for that which we know. The implication, too often ignored, is that as more is revealed to us, our responsibilities change. Ignoring knowledge, no matter how disturbing to our traditional beliefs that knowledge may be, is ultimately a repudiation of our responsibilities to God, to ourselves, and to our children.

Scientific knowledge has enormous impact on our moral choices. Advances in communicating with the deaf, have changed the halachic status of deaf people from a non-obligated non-entity into full members of religious society. Insights into economics have brought innovations that allow Jews to lend money with interest. Revolutions in medicine have redefined the borders between life and death, and with that, the responsibilities due to those at that threshold.

I propose that the knowledge we have gained about the Biblical text in particular, but about the world and its inhabitants in general must inform our religious philosophy and our moral choices. The sages of our Mesorah certainly did, and we can do no less. We are in no way impugning their spiritual stature or relationship with God, nor are we repudiating their mission and goals. But we must accommodate our newfound knowledge, because all knowledge is ultimately a gift from God, and any new insight into the world is a new insight into Creation, and ultimately is itself a form of revelation that lets us better understand the mind of God.

XGH can’t get enough of the science vs. faith issue, and I suppose neither can I. Unlike XGH, I’ve always taken the not-at-all-original position that science and faith have two different roles and asking if they contradict is sort of like asking whether the Declaration of Independence contradicts a grapefruit.

A fundamental truth and feature of human existence is the presence of uncertainty in our lives. Whether it’s choosing an investment, a school to attend, a candidate to vote for or a movie to go to, we must constantly make choices based on insufficient information about the past, present, and future.

Science is one kind of response to uncertainty. Logically, if the problem we face is uncertainty, better information will improve our decisions and capabilities. Thought we often think about science as a pathway to inventions and innovative products, those things are the result of engineering, not science. At heart, science is a quest for knowledge, and the knowledge gained impacts every area of human endeavor.

We all acknowledge that science as practiced in the last few hundred years has been an astonishing success. But science is a relatively slow process, and its task - the understanding of the universe - is immense. No matter how fantastic science is, we remain with a tremendous amount of uncertainty.

Religion is at heart a response to that uncertainty. At its best, it is a tool for navigating uncertainty. We would all agree that even as science circles closer and closer to satisfying and complete answers to some very difficult and important questions, it remains incomplete. There are very many questions that science cannot answer, and very many answers that science has provided over time which have proven to be incorrect by varying degrees. Therefor, for the person trying to establish a method for making decisions, science is an imperfect tool. Relying on its findings absolutely, to the exclusion of all other means of evaluation, is irrational. It is true that one cannot do science effectively except by submitting fully to the scientific method, but doing science and living life are two different pursuits, with very different goals.

Religion is many things: a tool for making decisions when faced with uncertainty, a means for protecting and conveying important information across generations, and a source of comfort and strength in times when doubt and fear overwhelm our rationality.

We attribute truth even to non-rational aspects of religion. I can’t scientifically test for Tumah v’Tahara. No neurologist or cardiologist has ever identified the soul. But if we are to put any stock into the intelligence of our forebears, and the value of human cultural experience, we must agree that these constructs, whether physically real or not, are just as true as gravity or magnetism. We can see and feel their impacts, even if we cannot test or measure them scientifically.

When I need to make a decision, I evaluate that decision not only based on  ‘rational’ modes. I ask myself, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this, whether God would approve of my decision. Surely, the answer I receive depends on my specific conception of God - after all, many suicide bombers have asked themselves this same question, and came up with an answer I find evil and abhorrent. But how can I live without asking that question? Science can’t give me certainties, and as it turns out, neither can religion. But religion allows to tap into generations of human knowledge about relationships, right and wrong, community, and insight into how to live a meaningful life, and I just can’t get that from science.

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?