The more I read of Jonathan Sarna, the more impressed I am with him personally, but the more I fear for institutional Judaism. Sarna is intelligent, considered, insightful and articulate, but he’s also an historian, and my feeling is that movements led by historians and sociologists rather than activists and entrepreneurs are already moving into their exhibit space at the museum.

I bring this up to comment on Sarna’s recent article in Reform Judaism Online, published by the URJ. Sarna has some thoughts to share looking backwards, and a few predictions for the future Judaism, inlcuding:

1. In the past, economic crises have caused American Judaism to turn inward and away from Israel and its troubles. It has also gutted educational spending, with terrible consequence.
2. Jewish institutional life tends to benefit from expansions in government services and social safety nets, as these free up significant funds and manpower for Jewish charities and social service organizations.
3. Expect to see lots of Jewish organizations go under, particularly in the hard-hit Orthodox sector, as we finally learn whose been swimming naked as the tide goes out.  Mergers between Jewish instutions will increase, as will mergers between Jewish and non-Jewish institutions.

He’s got quite a few others, but I particularly want to focus on Dr. Sarna’s prediction that, as in the 1930s, American Judaism will turn inwards, and disengage to some extent with Israel. As evidence, Sarna cites the fact that fewer Jews are attending summer-long or semester-long programs in Israel.

My main objection to that piece of evidence is that  it discounts Birthright Israel, which has sent over 200,000 Jews to Israel over the last decade. Much of the decline in summer and semester programs in Israel can be attributed  to the fact that participants in those trips are ineligible for a Birthright tour, and many high-school students in particular have declined to go to Israel with their youth movements, synagogues, or schools precisely because they prefer to go on Birthright for free.

In any case, Sarna also points out that entirely endogamous Jewish couples are outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 by intermarried couples. If roughly 50 out of 100 Jews marry other Jews, you get 25 endogamous couples. That leaves another 50 Jews marrying 50 non-Jews, and thus you get that 2-to-1 ratio that is simply astonishing. Judaism in America has already been redefined on the ground, and we’re still left sorting out exactly what that might mean.

Great article in the Jerusalem Post about the insignificantly small numbers of Americans making Aliyah – only about 3,000 per year. The article is interesting throughout. Heres a good bit:

To Israelis, “aliya” refers to waves of refugees fleeing a cruel world to take control of their destiny in a place where Jews are an indigenous nation. The vision of Israel as a free Jewish political space, a refuge and a voice for a people that had neither, informs Israeli Jewish identity in deep ways.

But Americans have no parallel memory of destruction, and no experience of sacrifice. They are five generations removed from the Czarist pogroms that drove so many Eastern European Jews to America’s shores in the 19th century. Their Jewishness is a personal choice, as valid as many other chosen identities, and their national experience one of prosperity, freedom and social acceptance.

“Aliya” cannot mean the same thing in such radically different cultures.
Indeed, it doesn’t.

On a recent trip to Israel I met up with an  Israeli couple for dinner in Jerusalem. They are old family friends who raised three boys in Efrat, one of the early settlements around Jerusalem, east of the Green Line. As always, conversation was lively and interesting, but one topic stays with me still. The husband turned to me at one point and asked “ How do American Jews deal with their guilt over not living in Israel?”

The question took me by surprise. At first, I thought that maybe it was just because my friend is, well, a settler, a right-wing religious Zionist who believes that a Jew’s place is in the Biblical land of Israel. Nonetheless, the expectation that American Jews actually feel guilty about not living in Israel seemed a bit extreme, even for someone the media might characterize as an extremist.

I realized quickly that my friend was not alone, and his opinion was not extreme, it was in the mainstream. The ideology of Zionism had no room for a Diaspora, because Zionism redefined Jewish identity as a national identity, bound to a land. Early Zionists, and even not-so-early Zionists fully expected that the Jews of the Diaspora would flock, en masse, to the Jewish State. It took at least two decades after the birth of Israel for the realization to set in that the Diaspora was likely a permanent feature of the Jewish community.

In recent years, the Jewish Agency has come under criticism for not doing its job well, for being inefficient and bureaucratic, and for losing its way now that the mass immigrations of Russian and Ethiopian Jews are complete. My criticism cuts even deeper. Why should the Jewish Agency be encouraging and incentivizing Aliyah at all? There’s a huge difference between rescuing Jewish communities under threat and trying to convince Jews who are comfortable and secure in their Diaspora communities to move to Israel. It’s not like Aliyah attracts enough people to have any real impact on the demographic struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. Moreover, Aliyah as currently structured gives incentive to those who have the least to contribute to the  State and the most to take from it. Still, most Israelis remain enthusiastic about supporting Aliyah, even as most Americans are unmoved by the prospect.

I think that both Israeli and American Jews have lost their sense of purpose. In the Zionist narrative, Israel was a solution the problem of Jewish oppression in the Diaspora. The vision for the state itself was to be a nation like any other. American Jews are not so attracted to that narrative because they already live in a place where they feel safe from oppression, and where they are able to fully participate politically and culturally in the life of the nation. What’s the point of Israel? Sure, the land is important, but there are nearly 6 million Jews living in it already. What kind of personal responsibility should an American Jew feel in such a case?

Israel, in turn, looks to America and expects Americans to feel a sense of guilt for not living in Israel,, because such feelings of guilt would validate the Israeli national project. But even among Israelis, the certainty about why Israel exists and what purpose it is meant to serve has faded. Many Israelis emigrate, seeking a safer, easier, less tense life. Why live in existential crisis every moment, says this new breed of Israelis? What’s so important about Israel that it is worth all that sacrifice?

I believe that the state of Judaism and Jewish identity is at a moment of great uncertainty. The Zionist narrative is threatened and confused, and its ideological power is waning. But in America, assimilation threatens Jewish identity in lockstep with fading support for and relationship to Israel. The American vision of Tikun Olam and ethical monotheism had strongly influenced American culture, but at the cost, perhaps, of its power as a Jewish identity. I believe that Israel and America need each other, and that they need a shared narrative that dignifies both communities. Both America and Israel need flourishing and vibrant communities, seized with vision and creativity. We need a shared sense of purpose, a shared language, and a shared future. To get there, we will need to step back from all the old expectations and assumptions and open new dialogues, but most importantly, we’ll need to ask ourselves the hardest questions: Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is the next chapter of the Jewish story that we’d like to tell?

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? All around the Jewish Internet, and around the Jewish world, we are asking “Why?” I asked “Why?” last year too. Why do we mourn on Tisha B’Av? What relevance does it have today? Who wants a Third Temple anyway?

Traditionally, we believe that both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on Tisha B’av, hundreds of years apart, the First for idolatry, and the Second for baseless hatred among Jews.

Though we typically say that the First Temple was destroyed because of our sin of idolatry, the idolatry of the day was not a matter of private worship. Religion was an organizing principle of government, social interaction, law, and ritual practice. To worship Molech meant to immolate young children. To worship Ashera meant to participate in orgiastic rape rituals with temple slaves. Idolatry was really a matter of competing lifestyles and ideologies, of competing sects seeking to define Israelite life, culture, and worship.

The same is true of life in the Second Temple. Hellenists, Jewish Christians, Sadducees, Pharisees, Sicarii, Zealots, Essenes, and other sects were characteristic of a highly fragmented social, political and religious milieu. These groups fought between and among themselves, to devastating consequences. But the question remains, why do we call this baseless hatred (Sina’at Hinam) ? The ideological differences between these groups were massive! Issues at stake including how many gods were to be worshipped, whether god was corporeal, what was the role of written text of Torah versus oral traditions of Torah, was religious leadership hereditary or earned, what was the appropriate practice of the Sabbath, and who controlled the Jewish calendar. There’s nothing baseless about the bitter rivalries and conflicts that played out over these issues!

A further question. On Tisha B’av we mourn the destruction of the Temple because the Temple was supposedly the symbol of Jewish unity. Yet the Temple was the very site of the political and religious power struggles described above. The Talmud is replete with stories about violent confrontations and devious machinations occurring in the Temple itself. The building that was destroyed, Herod’s Temple, was an enormously controversial project when Herod, considered and Edomite non-Jew and Roman puppet by many of his subjects, built it only a few decades prior to its destruction. I can mourn over Jewish hatred, but why mourn the destruction of the very forum in which they played out? It took the destruction of the Temple for Jews to consolidate and unite around Rabbinic Judaism, which sustained it for 2000 years!

In the last 2000 years, Tisha B’av has become a catch-all day of mourning. Kinot (mournful poems) are recited for the Crusades, pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust. The last, in particular, has become an important part of the modern Tisha B’av, because it is both so enormous in scale and so recent as to be quite relevant and relatable. People can still find tears for the Holocaust that they cannot find for a 2000-year old Temple ruin. But the problem with Tisha B’av as a Holocaust memorial is that first question I asked, “Why?”. We have reasons for the destruction of our Temples, but what reason do we have for the Holocaust? Last year, I wrote:

We are still mad from the Holocaust. We can find no meaning in it, we are estranged from God, from ourselves, and from our destiny because of it. We drink in all of its memories, we recite very name, stare at every photo, and listen to every story, but we never master it. We cannot bring ourselves to name its causes, to assign responsibility for it, or to reframe our relationship to God around it. And until we don’t change that, the creeping numbness that inflicts us every Tisha B’Av will grow, the distance between our values, our work, our God, and ourselves will lengthen, and we will become a faceless, speechless people with no lesson for the world but silence.

This year, I will try to formulate the beginning of a response.

The Temple is understood as a symbol of unity, even if in practical terms that unity proved elusive. Yet that unity is expressed in some contradictory ways.

• The Temple is meant to be a house of worship for all people and nations, but its precincts are restricted. Non-Jews could not enter the main sanctuary at all, and increasing levels of restricted access governed the courtyard, sanctum and inner sanctum.
• The pillar of smoke rising to Heaven from the altar symbolized the intimate connection between Man and God, but the smoke itself was produced in the basest way, by burning slaughtered animals.
• Priests were to wear gleaming white difficult-to-clean linen garments, symbolizing purity, but would soon be spattered in impossible-to-remove bloodstains shortly after they started their sacrificial work.
• The Temple was a site of pilgrimage, where you would gather to see and be seen by God, but when you got there, the closest you could come was the front lawn.
• Though the Temple is the site of worship for every Jew, nowhere are the status distinctions between Jews more pronounced. Priests, Levites, and Israelites played very different roles. Wealthy Jews brought different sacrifices than poor Jews. Judges and scholars played official roles. Though all belonged at the Temple site, none were created equal there.
• The courtyard of the Temple housed the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of the Jewish people, which sat in between a bazaar and a slaughterhouse.
• Although the greatest prohibition in Judaism is idolatry, sitting in the Holy of Holies, on top of the Ark of the Covenant that had held the Ten Commandments, was an idol! The center of all Jewish worship and intention was a statue of two cherubs facing one another.

The Temple’s lesson about unity one of the greatest lessons of Jewish wisdom. Unity is not about universal adherence to one idea or ideal. Judaism proposes that unity is about being able to hold many contradictory ideas in our minds at once, and to be able to express them in our lives. The point to aim at, the point where God’s presence could be said to rest, is between the two cherubs. The universe, and our relationship to God, is fundamentally complex. Life is not a morality play or kabuki theater, where obedience to the form defines right and wrong. But life is also not a solipsistic play, where our own egos and intellects determine morality for the entire universe.

To hold contradiction together requires diversity. One person, alone, cannot, contra Walt Whitman, contain all the multitudes. Judaism requires many sects, many tribes, many schools of Halacha, Hashkafah, and Haskalah. We’ve always had them, and together, as a milling and teeming mass of intellect, spirituality, zealotry, piety, and artistry we’ve expressed our love, awe, fear, passion and intimacy for our Father, Master, Teacher, King, and Beloved, the Breath of Life, the Universal, the Unmoved Mover, the Unknown and Unknowable, and all the other seventy names for God.

Last year, I talked about how the Satmar Rebbe blamed the Holocaust on Zionism, while the Zionists blamed the Holocaust on the Jew of Exile, who could not shake himself out of his existential misery, shake off the shackles of his religious tradition, stand up, declare himself a nation and not a faith, and redeem himself. Both are wrong, but both are right. The answer is not to unify around one pole or the other. Had all Jews abandoned Judaism to move to Palestine, we would have lost the very soul of Judaism in exchange for a piece of dirt and a UN membership. Had Jews not taken to the Zionist dream and built what was to be the State of Israel, the Holocaust might well have ended the Jewish project entirely. And they are not the only ones who are right and wrong. The Reform, who cast away law in favor of ethics, and the Orthodox, who cast away ethics in favor of law, and the Conservative, who cast away principles in favor of compromise, and secular who cast away history in favor of culture, and all the other sects, groups and denominations of Modern Judaism, they are all wrong, and all right, and all need to learn not just to tolerate, but to dignify the other as necessary, as valid, as honored.

Diversity ensures our survival. Without it, we have no mechanism for finding new ideas, for defining new ways to express our core values in a changing world, or for striving for our own improvement and drawing closer to our ideals and our vision of the Divine. Tisha B’av teaches us that baseless hatred is baseless not because there are no core issues at stake between groups, but because each group is striving for a common goal. Each group is working ‘lishma’ for a pure purpose, even as differences abound about how to pursue it or even what it is. Our challenge is to wrap our arms around all of this stiff-necked people with its squabbling and bickering, to love it, to nurture it, and to lead it it to achieve its promise as a light unto the world. So long as we have not achieved that, I’ll have reason to fast on Tisha B’av.

A little while back, I was invited to guest post on DovBear. I wrote about how Orthodox Judaism has emphasized the ritual and symbolic value of its practices at the expense of the concrete and pragmatic values of those practices. One example I used was Netila Yadayim, ritual hand-washing. Netilat Yadayim has significance connected to ritual purity, but it is also undeniably part of a rich Jewish tradition of cleanliness. In my own personal practice I’ve sought to reclaim the practical value of cleaning my hands prior to eating, and also raising that value to the level of religious virtue by washing my hands with soap and water, and then rinsing with a traditional pitcher of water poured ritualistically over my hands.

Introspective Hareidi, a commenter helped, albeit unwittingly, illustrate my point. He noted that my practic,e of Netilat Yadayim might well lead me to saying an invalid blessing (bracha l’vatalah) because if there was still soap on my hands when I rinsed them, that soap would act as a block (chatzitza) between my hands and the water, thus invalidating my hand-washing and turning my blessing into an act of taking God’s name in vain. I’ll admit to having a pretty good laugh when I read the comment. How absurd! This guy was worried about the soap, but evidently, he had no concern about the dirt that the soap was washing away!

According to the halacha, Netilat Yadayim must be performed with hands that are already clean, precisely because dirt on the hands will block the water and invalidate the ritual efficacy of the hand-washing. But if you position yourself to observe people doing Netilat Yadayim, almost none of them pre-wash with soap. Culture trumps law, as usual.

I bring all this up because my engagement with Netilat Yadayim has been a really fascinating journey. I grew up with Netilat Yadayim being part of the Shabbat. I knew that it was something you were supposed to do at every meal with bread, but practically, it was a Shabbat thing. Having chosen to take it on as an adult for both its ritual and practical sides, I finally found myself meaningfully engaged in religion in a way that has been absent from my life for a long time.

The reason behind my new commitment to Netilat Yadayim  was precisely because it was both ritual and purposeful. But in order for it to be purposeful, it needed to  include soap. And that meant that the whole shape of the ritual was up for grabs. For a while I experimented with different approaches, before finally settling on a practice. Along the way, I puzzled over why we recite the blessing for Netilat Yadayim after we perform the act, and also tried on for size eliminating the entire ritual rinse in favor of just a good old-fashioned washing your hands with soap. This exploration alone was a tremendously rich experience.

The richest part of the experience, however, was not around the specifics of the practice. It was about the commitment to the practice. Sometimes I would forget to wash my hands, and remember only in mid-meal. Even though my hands were basically clean, I felt a pull to wash them, a pull I largely honored. Other times, I would be about to start a meal shortly after washing my hands for some other purpose, like if I had recently been to the restroom. My hands were clean, so did I need to wash them again? I didn’t really think so, but I often did, simply to retain the habit. In the few weeks since I adopted the practice, I felt like I was going through thousands of years of Jewish ritual evolution aimed at meeting my commitment both to ritual and to the practical value of having clean hands.

I’m certain that most Orthodox Jews reading this will shake their heads, perhaps in amusement, and perhaps in disdain. I don’t begrudge them those reactions. I just wish that on some level, they will also nod their heads in recognition. The struggle around religious practice is dignified by human initiative. My choices felt meaningful, powerful, and sometimes, when everything balanced out just right, they even felt holy. That’s an experience that I’ve rarely felt in the Orthodox world, and I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that absence.

I’m not really a current events blogger, but the corruption scandal in NJ raises some interesting questions around a topic I am very interested in: the relationship between the US government and the American Jewish community.

Lots of websites and commenters have been throwing around the term moser to describe Solomon Dweck, the FBI informant who cooperated with authorities to help implicate rabbis, politicians and other notables in the recent sting. A moser, according to traditional halacha, is a Jew who delivers other Jews into the hands of secular authorities. The sin of mesirah is a grave one, and the violator is considered worthy of being killed, even in an extrajudicial manner (as in, vigilante justice). It makes no difference whether those being informed against are innocent or guilty, by the way. The law prohibits turning Jews over to non-Jewish authorities even if these Jews are despicably evil.

It’s easy to understand how Maimonides, for example, who writes in such terms about a moser, might feel so strongly. Whether living in Christian Spain or Muslim Egypt in the 12th and 13th centuries, little could be expected by way of justice, fairness, or humane treatment by the prevailing governments and legal systems. Some would argue that the Dreyfuss Affair, the trial and convictions of Julius and (especially) Ethel Rosenberg, and Jonathan Pollard suggest that modern democracies and even American democracy don’t have a much better track record. The point, though clearly an overreaching, is well-taken.

In the modern world, where does this leave us? We know that child-molestors like Baruch Lanner and Yehuda Kolko were left free to ruin more lives and abuse more innocent victims precisely because rabbis in the Orthodox community refused to turn them into secular authorities. These same rabbis also lacked the tools and powers to prevent these men from committing further abuses.

Omerta may be appropriate when secular authorities are capricious at best and violently cruel and antagonistic at worst. Faced with such an enemy, the Jewish community must be secretive, protective, and devious. Yakov deals with Lavan, just such an enemy, b’mirmah, deceitfully. Trust, honesty, and openness must be mutual to be meaningful.

However, in the United States, where Jews live with a government that they too elect, and in a nation that is unprecedented in history for its embrace of Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish leadership, this culture of silence is a corrosive and corrupting influence, particularly when silence is coupled with zero enforceability. Instead of protecting us from an exploitative and dangerous authority, it actually endangers us further, because it encourages corruption, extortion, bribery, and a general disrespect and abuse of the system of laws and justice that protect all of us.

If our communities are built on corruption, we encourage hatred of Judaism by Jews and non-Jews alike. How many Jews felt a sense of revulsion upon hearing this latest sordid story? The Syrian community feels betrayed and slandered. The Orthodox community at large feels a pit in its stomach, particularly as this is the period of the Nine Days, a particularly tragic and mournful time in Jewish history. And the broad family of Jews is sickened as well by yet another story of financial malfeasance that seems to confirm all the worst hatreds and stereotypes still held by some non-Jews, even in this, the fairest of nations.

The answer is a difficult one. If we hold fast with the prohibition of mesirah than we, as a community, are the true criminals, for failing to police ourselves, and for allowing this evil to take root in our midst. Alternatively, we can turn over the powers of investigation and enforcement to the State, and lose some of our dignity, identity and uniqueness in the process. What is for sure is that this is not an isolated incident, and that a culture of corruption and contempt for government and for Gentiles is thriving, particularly in some Orthodox communities. We need to address the moral and economic causes underlying this immediately, lest we breed a new generation of anti-Semites, and lest we fail to treat our fellow American with the full measure of justice and fairness that he surely deserves.

I confess, I rarely visit blog websites. I follow over 200 blogs on various subjects, and the only way I can keep up is by using an RSS reaser (Google Reader is my favorite).  Practically, what that means is that I don’t really pay that much attention to the various blogrolls, links, and ads on anyone’s site, or even on my own. But after reviewing my blogroll this morning, I realized that it was time to spruce things up a bit. Time to get rid of some old, defunct blogs, and time to give credit to new friends whose ideas have influenced my own, and whose hard work in keeping us all updated I have benefited from.

Here then is the blogroll draft class of 2009, in no particular order:

• Boundless Drama of Creation – Written by Seth Cohen, an active member of the Atlanta Jewish community. Seth writes mostly from a Federation perspective, and has held various positions with the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta.
• Conversations in Klal – ProfK, a Yeshivish Orthodox wife and mother from Staten Island, but soon to be moving “out of town,” writes about absurdities and extremism in her community.
• Cross-Currents – This venerable blog features Avi Shafran, mouthpiece of Agudath Israel and other right-wing Orthodox voices including Yitzchok Adlerstein, Toby Katz, and Yaakov Menken. A good place for understanding Yeshivish and American Hareidi Jewish opinion, but a terrible palce for conversation, as the comments are heavily censored.
• Orthonomics - SephardiLady, a sharp-tongued Suze Orman for parents of large Orthodox families, shows no mercy when slaying the scared cows of Orthodox entitlement such as summer camps and Pesach vacation, and displays deftness with a calculator as well as tremendous compassion and generosity when doling out financial wisdom and providing resouces for managing the fiscal health of an Orthodox household.
• The Fundermentalist – JTA writer Jacob Berkman keeps tabs on all the happenings in the world of Jewish philanthropy in this popular new(ish) feature. A must-read in the Madoff era.
• Three Jews, Four Opinions – Originally a group blog featuring two law professors and a lawyer representing the Reform, Conservative, and post-denominational communities, the blog is now largely written by Bruce, the Conservative lawyer. The blgo mostly discusses Jewish legal theory, the Documentary Hypothesis, and Jewish sociology.
• Wolfish Musings – BrooklynWolf’s eclectic blog touches on various aspects of moderate Orthodox Jewish life, and includes an ongoing feature on photography.
• Moishe House Blog – Moishe House is an international network of young Jewish adults who live together in ‘Moishe Houses’ around the world and create educational and social programs for their communities. This blog, written by members, chronicles their successes and failures, as well as their wisdom and insights into Jewish community.
• On the Fringe – Al Tzitzit – Shira Salamone writes about her experiences moving from a left-wing egalitarian Conservative to a right-wing traditional Conservative synagogue. Having recently lost her mother A”H, she has explored issues relating to women’s prayer, kaddish, and so on, while continuing to comment on broader political and religious issues.
• Shalom Hartman Institute Blog – Mostly a video blog, the SHI blog features astoundingly good lectures by leading intellectuals at their Jerusalem-based thinktank, including David and Donniel Hartman, Moshe Halbertal and Israel Knohl. Also on tap are presentations by their excpetional women scholars like Melilah Hellner-Eshed and Rachel Shabbat Bet-Halachmi, and featured talks from their various summer study institutes for rabbis and lay leaders. SHI is a pluralistic research and leadership institute that grapples with Judaism, Zionism, the Diaspora, and Modernity.
• Torat Ezra – DYS is a traditionally observant blogger who write about politics and Kosher, and who has taken up mobile blogging of late. DYS also contributes to DovBear.
• eJewish Philanthropy – Since 2007, this Jerusalem-based blog has been providing news, resources, and insight into the world of Jewish Philanthropy, with an eye towards highlighting best practices, web strategies, and innovation from the younger set of Jewish activists.
• GenYGive – Written by Miriam Kagan, this philanthropy blog focuses on Generation Y/Millennials, and on progressive approaches to doing good.
• Reb Blog – The personal blog of Rabbi Daniel Brenner, Executive Director of Birthright Israel NEXT, and also my boss!
• Kosher Blog – The name says it all. This blog, run by Jonathan Abbett in Brookline, Steven Weinberger in Brooklyn, and Marc Melzer in Manhattan, keeps me up to date on new kosher eateries as well as new kosher outrages.
• (Edited to add one more) Garnel Ironheart – A provocative blogger who writes a self-described “new approach to Modern Orthodoxy,” Ironheart has come under criticism for advocating a more Hareidi approach under the guise of Modern Orthodoxy. I remain puzzled as to whether he is or is no Rabbi Dr. Michael Scweitzer, author of The Unending War trilogy from which the name Garnel Ironheart is taken, but I enjoy his posts and his comments on this blog.

That’ll do it! Here ends the guided tour of my new blogroll. Now go out and make some new friends.

In XGH’s most recent post, How to stop Chareidim breaking the law, the suggestion was to emphasize Kiddush Hashem/Chillul Hasehm (sanctification/desecration of God’s name, usually through public conduct) and its implications for practical conduct in the public square.

While I agree with the sentiment of the post, I think it misses a fundamental point.

There is a 3,000-year old debate in Judaism as to whether human initiative and human judgment is of value.

One position is that God has laid out for us the manner in which we should act, and that the human challenge is to submit to that, to yoke ourselves to that path, and to blind ourselves from anything that might lead us astray. This is the path adopted by Hareidim today.

The other position is that we have been granted a Divine gift of judgment and decision-making, and that we must use those faculties to choose a proper path through an ever-changing world. This is the Modern Orthodox (MO) position.

When the MO look at the Hareidi world, they level a critique based on observed facts. How can it be, they say, that you are following the Divine path, if your real-world outcomes are so poor? Your institutions are built on corruption and theft, your youth are delinquent, uneducated, and filthy, and your communities rally behind th emsot odious villains and act out violently as thier only means of expression. Surely this can’t be God’s will!

In turn, when Hareidim look at the MO, they don’t look so much on the facts on the ground as much as the influences. If you, the MO, want to believe your judgment is sanctified and in line with the Divine will, you must purify yourselves. If you were influenced only by Torah and expressed excellent character traits, perhaps we could believe in your judgment. But instead, your homes have televisions and internet showing obscene images and abhorrent culture. Your children grow up knowing more rock songs by heart than mishnayot, idolizing movie stars instead of Gedolim, and wasting their time on Harry Potter instead of Halacha.

I’m not sure how to bridge this gap, but I do know that the first step towards bridging it is understanding it. This is an ancient Machloket. It’s the same as the argument over whether the world was created in Tishrei or in Nisan. It’s the same as the argument over whether God performing miracles on your behalf is a good reflection on your or a  bad reflection on you. It’s the same as the argument over whether we should start the Haggadah with the story of our slavery in Egypt or our idolatrous roots in Mesopotamia. And this isn’t something we’re going to easily resolve.

By now you’ve all heard about Hareidi Rabbi Avraham Sherman, who heads Israel’s High Rabbinical court, and his ongoing retroactive nullifications of conversions to Judaism. This story has been building for some time, as the Hareidi establishment in Israel, which has long controlled the rabbinic arm of the government, has sought to monopolize power over the definition of who is a Jew.

There are excellent political and religious reasons for them to do so, of course. The question of who is a Jew defines who may claim the right to citizenship in Israel through the Law of Return, and with that citizenship, the basket of Aliyah benefits. From the Hareidi perspective, limiting aliyah only to Hareidi Jews, or at least Orthodox Jews, means that all the money flows to them, and that no money is spent on Russian immigrants, South American converts, or people converted by non-Orthodox clergy.

Many are rightfully tearing their hair out over the potential confusion that retroactive nullification of conversion creates. The Wolf, for example, wonders if uncertainty over conversions will lead to converts being unreliable for any kind of religious obligation, from testimony to minyan.  He further speculates in a later post:

And how about things that have long-reaching consequences? What if you use a convert as a witness to your wedding? Or even worse, what if a convert serves on a bais din (or is a witness) to a divorce? Can you imagine the halachic nightmare that would result from a witness (or judge) on a divorce case (or multiple cases) being found to be not Jewish retroactively, throwing all those divorcees, their new spouses and children (and grandchildren) into some halachic purgatory from which they and their descendants may never escape? What about a convert who sits on a bais din for other conversions — you could have multiple “generations” of invalidated conversions, each wreaking havoc on countless individuals and society as a whole. And, don’t forget, this doesn’t go just for the convert, but for any descendant of a female convert as well!

I believe that this path leads to both a cleavage between Hareidi Judaism and the rest of us, but also to the complete abandonment of Judaism as a hereditary status. By performing these retroactive nullifications, Hareidi Judaism is casting into doubt conversions done by otherwise-respected institutions of MOdern Orthodoxy, like the RCA. As such, the RCA will eventually be forced to reject Hareidi hegemony over them, and will have to work against Hareidi authority over the Israeli Rabbinate. They already are in alliance with the Religious Zionists on this issue, but they will need to work with the Masroti movement and even the Reform movement to rewrite the rules. For all that, they may not even  be successful.

What will be true is that between intermarriage, patrilineal descent, and Hareidi conversion nullification, the question of who is a Jew and who is not will have many answers and no clarity of any kind. For many, the only pragmatic way of dealing with this reality is to rely on people and their self-identifications. Sure, when it comes to weddings some people might ask for a bit more background on a person’s Jewish provenance, but for the gabbai at a shul, the question of Kohen, Levi, or Yisrael will remain the standard by which Judaism is defined in the day-to-day. Whether this is good for Judaism or not I don’t know, but it does represent another stage in our evolution away from a tribal religion and towards something much greater, but also more diffuse.

I recently saw a post from YD about the search for a middle path between Yeshivish Orthodoxy and Modern Orthodoxy.  It was actually the second post in a series, and the first post goes into even greater depth about his feeling that YU is too far over to the right:

Which brings me to YU. I found there to be very little guidance from the Rebbeim in Yeshiva University. Many of them only come in for a few hours, just to give shiur, and leave. Very little is heard from the Rebbeim besides the Torah they teach [...] every once in a while there was a speech about a meaningful topic like dating or something, but this was never followed by a “meet with the rebbe and discuss your issues personally” session. In short, one could easily get the impression there that Talmud Torah is the only important value.

What’s funny about the whole thing is that YCT, which presents itself as left of YU, is seen as too far left. But in the left wing of the MO world, YCT is not left enough, particularly on gender issues. In the meantime, those same folks see Hadar, the right wing of the Conservative world, as too far left.

It appears to me that what we’re actually seeing across the denominations and beyond them, is a supreme dissatisfaction with the status quo. When the people of the United States elected Barack Obama, analysts explained that this was a a ‘change’ election. They were right, but they didn’t say enough. I believe we’re in a moment of tremendous change. I think that in the last few years we have seen the beginning of tremendous challenges to the status quo, and that we will continue to see challenge and change in more and more areas of of our lives.

Nearly all of our institutions are at all-time lows when it comes to approval ratings. This is true of political, religious, business, and even civic institutions. We appear to have reached a tipping point that is birthing new institutions and placing terrific pressure on our existing ones to reform. And at the heart of all this cry for change is a desire for greater openness and unity, a focus on pragmatism over ideology, and an unwillingness to fight the same fights over and over again.

These principles inform the broad river that is coursing through our institutions, and we don’t know how it will turn out. The entrenched forces seeking to maintain the status quo are powerful, well-organized, and willing to go far for their beliefs. We have already seen what this conflict looks like when that river threatens to overflow the levees. We’ve seen brutality and murder of peaceful protesters in Iran, we’ve seen violently rioting Hareidim clashing with police in Jerusalem, and we’ve seen the giants of the automotive industry totter and topple into a feeding frenzy of special interests. We don’t know yet how it’s all going to turn out, but make no mistake, change is coming, change is here, and we are responsibly, both individually and collectively to harness its force for the better by being more open to one another, more focused on what’s real, and less willing to be derailed by the issues that have divided us in the past.