To the Editor:
In fairness to Jack Wertheimer [“The Orthodox Moment,” February], it is not easy for any outsider to plumb the inner intricacies of an extremely multifaceted American Orthodox Judaism. He has introduced the general reader to a new world. Many of his observations—especially his incisive analysis of the conflict sparked by Orthodox students at Yale—were on the mark. But many others were not.
Any of the scores of thousands of former students of America’s yeshiva heads (roshei yeshiva) will tell you that their rabbis were hardly “cushioned from reality and free to pursue a form of legal idealism,” as Mr. Wertheimer writes. To the contrary, the success of the first generation of America’s yeshiva heads—like Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, Joseph Soloveitchik, Isaac Hutner, Moshe Feinstein, Aaron Kotler, Jacob Ruderman, and Yaakov Kamenetsky—was based on their unique ability to “read” America and understand the innermost yearnings of American Jewish youth. As a group, they eschewed extremism of any kind. Their greatness lay in their ability to establish lifelong relationships with students, to create a world of intellectualism, scholarship, wisdom, depth, spirituality, and self-sacrifice that succeeded in overcoming America’s business-like coldness and impersonalization. It is they who restored status and dignity to Torah study and who demonstrated through their incisive and brilliant lectures and tireless private discussions with students that Torah study merited lifelong devotion.
It is truly tragic that for American Jews who are not Orthodox, this most ancient and demanding form of Judaism remains a secret religion. They meet Orthodoxy exclusively in the overpublicized public debates in the media, but its inner life—its belief system, its intellect, scholarship, and vibrancy, its incessant search for truth, the intense joy of its Sabbaths and holidays—remains to them a sealed book.
Even I, who was raised in a traditional home and attended Hebrew day schools through high school, was delightfully shocked the first time I entered the study hall of Rabbi Chaim Berlin at age twenty. The animated excitement and high velocity of the spirited talmudic debate of 400 college-age students were a transforming experience that led to a lifetime of study and association with that school and its saintly rosh yeshiva.
Ninety-nine percent of non-Orthodox Jews have never invested the twenty minutes required to experience a similar moment. The intensity of that spiritual and intellectual experience—the actualization of daily Torah study as the essence of Judaism—has been the life-giving heartbeat of the Jewish people for thousands of years and, thank God, remains so.
[Rabbi] Pinchas Stolper
Senior Executive
Orthodox Union
New York City
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To the Editor:
Jack Wertheimer presents a fairly accurate picture of the American Orthodox world today, though it is marred by occasional dubious contentions and even outright misrepresentations. For example, Norman Lamm, the president of Yeshiva University, was harshly criticized by a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) yeshiva dean not because Rabbi Lamm “fail[ed]” to subscribe to a “separatist ideology,” as Mr. Wertheimer states, but because he was perceived to have disparaged some who do.
What is striking about the essay, though, is that while Mr. Wertheimer seems to disapprove both of the insularity of contemporary haredi society and of the increasingly libertarian “anything-goes” mores of the wider world, he seems oddly reluctant to connect the two. Should he not allow for the possibility—or probability—that the intensification of the former is an understandable, necessary, perhaps even laudable reaction to the latter?
[Rabbi] Avi Shafran
Director of Public Affairs
Agudath Israel of America
New York City
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To the Editor:
The main theme of Jack Wertheimer’s article is the unexpected vigor of America’s Orthodox community and the discomfort this vigor engenders in the general Jewish community, despite all its passion for continuity. His thesis demands some clarification and elaboration.
The official numbers declare that Orthodox Jews are growing fewer, but the numbers game is deceiving. It is true that the much-maligned 1990 National Jewish Population Study finds that the number of Jewish households identifying themselves as Orthodox has shrunk by half in twenty years. But, as Rabbi Yitzchak Adlerstein of Los Angeles has commented, “People lie, statistics lie, but pizza shops don’t lie.” The number of establishments that cater to strictly Orthodox Jews has been growing exponentially in the last twenty or more years. When businesses thrive, customers must be lurking somewhere.
The explanation for this seeming incongruence is really very simple. A generation or two ago, the typical Orthodox Jew in the United States was as little committed to observance of halakhah (Jewish law) as the typical non-Orthodox Jew is today. Today’s Orthodox families, as Mr. Wertheimer notes, are strongly committed, and so are their children.
The only area where I must differ sharply with Mr. Wertheimer is in his interpretation of the great power of those whom he calls “immigrant rabbis.” He hews to a popular stereotype when he writes that
in the late 19th century, certain Orthodox rabbis in Europe had developed a new conception of their role. Instead of limiting themselves to deciding matters of Jewish religious law, they had taken to expounding on matters of social policy, politics, and much else besides—all in the name of Torah.
Not so. Throughout Jewish history, great rabbis have been community leaders. Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, Nahmanides, and Solomon ben Abraham Adret (Rashba) led their respective communities in medieval times. Hatam Sofer and Samson Raphael Hirsch were gone before “the late 19th century,” and the Vilna Gaon and the great hasidic leaders hardly limited themselves to disputes about dairy spoons falling into meat pots.
When the relative handful of great European rabbis and heads of yeshivas arrived in the United States beginning in the late 30’s, they found an Orthodox community in an advanced state of breakdown. It was almost moribund, and few predicted its survival, much less vigorous growth.
Haym Soloveitchik, whom Mr. Wertheimer quotes approvingly, maintains with considerable accuracy that the traditional way of life “is not learned but rather absorbed,” that it is “imbibed from parents and friends, and patterned on conduct regularly observed in home and street, synagogue and school.” True, but such a tradition hardly existed in an America where Sabbath observance, partitions between men and women in the synagogue, yeshivas, age-old dietary standards, and the prevailing influence of halakhah in daily life were virtually nonexistent.
Against this backdrop, the new arrivals in the United States could hardly have counseled their students and followers to follow the prevailing “tradition” of the street and synagogue. It is wrong to say, as many do, that the newcomers broke with tradition. To the contrary, tradition had to be reestablished in America, and if one of the ingredients in doing so was to go back to the texts on which Jewish practice had been based, what choice was there?
Far from being unworldly and unaware, the yeshiva and hasidic leaders are in close touch with their students and disciples, and advise them on a wide array of matters. They are consulted precisely because they understand and relate; otherwise they would indeed have been consigned to ivory-tower matters of rabbinic esoterica. It is sad that Mr. Wertheimer yields to the facile pejoratives that are routinely hurled by Orthodoxy’s opponents. There are different approaches among us and no shortage of foolishness and worse, but it is hardly true that “extremism” is our “religious norm.”
[Rabbi] Nosson Scherman
Mesorah Publications, Ltd.
Brooklyn, New York
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To the Editor:
In his rather mean-spirited critique of contemporary Orthodoxy, Jack Wertheimer criticizes the haredim for being “super-stringent” and “preoccupied with minutiae.” I, for one, am baffled. Surely, Mr. Wertheimer must be cognizant of the fact that unlike other branches of Judaism, where Torah law tends to fall into the category of suggestion or recommendation, Orthodox Jews believe that both the written and oral laws are divine. This being the case, the observance and interpretation of Torah law (translation: minutiae) have eternal ramifications. Thus, the Orthodox stance is rather straightforward: eternity is at stake and we are taking no chances.
What is most troubling about Mr. Wertheimer’s article, however, is his alarm at the “haredization” of Orthodoxy. He is appalled at the seemingly incomprehensible “syndrome” whereby young people who were formerly modern-Orthodox are moving increasingly to the Right. While he attributes this phenomenon to the fact that many of the educators in centrist institutions are haredi, he overlooks the most obvious cause for the shift: the younger generation’s disenchantment with an increasingly obscene secular culture and its quest for a more spiritually intense and religiously rigorous lifestyle. Indeed, more and more of today’s young people are searching for answers to life’s most overwhelming questions and are finding those answers only within the fervent, passionate Judaism that has come to be the hallmark of haredi society.
Nechama Preis
Brooklyn, New York
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To the Editor:
Jack Wertheimer’s insights on the “Orthodox moment” are generally—and characteristically—perceptive and well-taken. However, I believe his comments on the changing religious role of women in the modern Orthodox community call for further discussion.
In both the modern Orthodox and haredi communities, Jewish literacy for women as well as men is taken for granted. Hesitation among the haredim to offer women unfettered access to a formal Talmud education should not mask the fact that women in both communities are taught to feel fully comfortable in a synagogue service, navigate traditional texts, understand classic legal codes, and assume communal leadership positions.
Studying classic texts and codes, Orthodox women have found that many religious activities unexplored by their grandmothers are fully permissible to them. But this paradoxically explains why separate women’s prayer groups have been “soft-pedaled,” as Mr. Wertheimer notes. I teach at the Yeshivah of Flatbush, where male and female students attend morning and afternoon services and take the same finals in Talmud. Yet, over the years, I have consistently found little if any interest in these prayer groups. Such groups, in fact, do not seem to have much appeal for the majority of Orthodox women, who feel that they are already leading a meaningful life according to halakhah. Moreover, literate women recognize that these groups have no resonance in traditional discussions.
With regard to the ordination of female rabbis, it is worth noting that even now, women have already gained professional entry into the world of the Orthodox rabbi. They teach and function as administrators in yeshivas; they lecture and have prominent positions in Jewish public life; their counsel is sought by those who know and respect their knowledge. While the non-Orthodox movements have a monopoly on women rabbis, it is the Orthodox community that has the overwhelming majority of women engaged in serious advanced study of classical Jewish texts.
The activities of feminist and non-Orthodox women’s groups in many ways retard rather than enhance the expansion of women’s roles in the Orthodox community. Secular feminists often dismiss traditional religious authorities as patriarchal, and the Reform and Conservative movements espouse a philosophy of egalitarian-ism that cannot be supported by an unbiased reading of halakhic sources. Additionally, a few outspoken Orthodox women have further clouded the issue by aligning themselves publicly with others who do not share their halakhic commitment.
More than a few rabbinic leaders within the Orthodox community are privately sympathetic to suggestions for increased ritual involvement for women, but they simply do not want a public fight over the issue. Whether this is a failure of leadership or a strategic conservation of resources is often a matter of perspective. There are, after all, many other issues facing Orthodoxy and other battles to be fought. In any event, it inhibits an internal public discussion of a natural, healthy, and inevitable change in the Orthodox community.
Joel B. Wolowelsky
Yeshivah of Flatbush
Brooklyn, New York
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To the Editor:
Jack Wertheimer trenchantly analyzes both positive and negative currents within contemporary American Orthodoxy. Orthodox successes in Jewish education, family life, and commitment to Israel should indeed be models for emulation among Jews everywhere. Conversely, the tendency to elevate “extremism as religious norm” and the inability to grant any form of recognition to non-Orthodox religious leaders have frequently polarized relations within the Jewish people. The voice of Orthodoxy needs to be heard within Jewish communal forums, but that voice will simply not resonate when so much of the public face of Orthodoxy suggests contempt for the non-Orthodox religious movements.
Particularly troublesome in this regard has been the collapse of modern Orthodoxy as a bridge with the liberal movements. Mr. Wertheimer politely refrains from faulting the modern Orthodox for their failure to resist a haredi ascendancy. Yet the modern Orthodox have not, for example, protested statements by the Israeli chief rabbinate forbidding Reform and Conservative participation in local religious councils—to say nothing of the venom frequently directed at Reform and Conservative rabbis. (Ironically, the willingness of modern-Orthodox rabbis to serve on communal rabbinic boards in the United States has long been a defining issue between them and ultra-Orthodox rabbis.) At the same time, the most traditionalist developments within Reform and Conservative Judaism have elicited not a word of support from the mainstream Orthodox leadership.
To be sure, there are signs of renewal within the modern-Orthodox camp. Conferences on feminism and Orthodoxy have attracted overwhelming grassroots support. Edah, an organization dedicated to revitalizing modern Orthodoxy, has impressive lay and rabbinical leadership. Academic Jewish studies and Jewish communal organizations recently have attracted cadres of modern-Orthodox scholars and professionals willing to assert the values of both Jewish tradition and modern culture.
Nevertheless, a real straggle persists for the soul of contemporary Orthodoxy. Mr. Wertheimer effectively calls for greater communal understanding of Orthodoxy’s inner nature and, at least by implication, for communal support of Orthodox currents that will foster both Jewish continuity and Jewish unity. Whether the currents he favors or the forces for greater Orthodox isolation prevail is a question of great significance to the entire Jewish people.
Steven Bayme
National Director
Jewish Communal Affairs
American Jewish Committee
New York City
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To the Editor:
“The Orthodox Moment” is dispassionate and lucid, and helpful to readers in its clear exposition. Yet there are some glaring lacunae in the article, some of which would challenge Jack Wertheimer’s optimism concerning the Orthodox movement’s future.
Today, thousands of haredim are seriously poor. In the last fifteen years, most haredi yeshivas have dropped any pretension to secular-studies programs, which has led to widespread illiteracy in the community. Like many African Americans in the 1940’s and 50’s, the haredim are now positioned completely outside the labor market. Poverty and illiteracy thus combine to assure the recurrence of what I call the Ellis Island phenomenon: no jobs, then no food; no food, then no religious observance.
Add to this the expanded options that now exist for drugs and prostitution, and the haredi numbers for tomorrow look a lot less rosy. One dean of a school for advanced talmudic scholarship in Israel assured me that there was not a single haredi family in his community that did not have a son or daughter who was leaving the fold; in fact, organizations now exist to pursue these wayward children. This march to self-destruction must surely be taken into account when prognosticating the future of contemporary Orthodoxy.
Mr. Wertheimer also needs to play out some of the implications of the intensive Jewish education now taking place in the Orthodox world, modern and haredi alike. One such implication is that most Orthodox college students now come armed with a knowledge of classical Jewish texts far exceeding that of most Conservative and Reform rabbis. If for all of their lives these students are taught not to suffer ignorance gladly, then one can understand even while not condoning their smirks when they hear Reform and Conservative sermons; this alone suggests that no long-range attempt at Jewish unity is likely to emerge even from centrist Orthodoxy.
[Rabbi] Joseph A. Polak
B’nai B’rith Hillel House
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
Jack Wertheimer has presented us with an excellent understanding of the Orthodox community. His analysis and the implications he draws from it are mistaken, however, if not the very opposite of what his historical material suggests.
Mr. Wertheimer’s primary assertion is that the Orthodox are misunderstood by the rest of the Jewish community. He castigates the community, especially those of us in the religiously observant but non-Orthodox community, for not coming to the defense of the Orthodox students suing Yale, claiming that we have caved in to liberal values at the expense of Jewish values.
I wonder what Mr. Wertheimer would say to the religiously observant and learned students from all the religious streams, including the Orthodox, who did not protest the living conditions at Yale but who continue to remain both in the dorms and in the classrooms? Would he say they have given up their religious values and cower before the liberal university? This is the core issue with respect to which both Mr. Wertheimer and the Orthodox community err today.
The mark of a religious individual, one deeply committed to Jewish values and observance, is to be involved in the world, not to withdraw from it. Religious values that cannot stand firm before the test of contemporary culture, that cannot survive the lure of the marketplace or the liberal university, have little staying power as values. It may be safer and easier to withdraw from contemporary life, but, from the time of Abraham onward, Jews have been a people destined to be part of the larger world and to have an impact on it, to confront it with a model of deeply held religious values. It is unfortunate that today’s Orthodox world has narrowed its understanding of this Jewish role, because our society and culture need to experience and feel the values of Judaism lived by the Orthodox community.
Finally, I feel Mr. Wertheimer’s remarks about the liberalism of the university are disingenuous. The entire Jewish community has benefited greatly from a liberal United States. The ability to live, work, and go to school everywhere in the U.S. as an observant Jew is taken for granted today, with nearly every institution, from the public-school system to the military, willing to accommodate the religious needs of Jews. There are aspects of our liberalism and open society that cause me pain and discomfort as an observant Jew, as one who has values that differ from the general culture. But I believe it is our responsibility not to castigate liberal institutions but rather to help make them stronger and more responsive. What Mr. Wertheimer fails to tell us is that Yale tried to be open and sensitive, offering the protesting students many accommodations including their own dorm suites and bathrooms.
Mr. Wertheimer cannot write about the “haredization” of Orthodoxy while at the same time castigating both Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews who hold a more open halakhic stance. In fact, the more crucial mitzvah is to remain a full participant in the community, with all its tensions and uncertainties, than to pull apart from it and live in constricting isolation.
[Rabbi] Joel H. Meyers
Executive Vice President
Rabbinical Assembly
New York City
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To the Editor:
Jack Wertheimer suggests that the countercultural posture of Orthodox Judaism today, particularly its continued adherence to traditional sexual values, could serve as a rallying point for the broader Jewish community to challenge contemporary American hedonism in the name of Jewish ideals.
Unfortunately, the insularity of the Orthodox community has become so extreme that Orthodox leadership, intent on protecting its tiny enclaves, shows no interest in influencing the larger society. Thus the new president of the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel, declaring that “contemporary society is . . . steeped in immorality, from the top down,” could only suggest removing televisions, VCR’s, and the Internet from Orthodox homes. And the modern Orthodox differ only in degree: the president of the Orthodox Union, commenting on the Yale Five, argued that these young men and women, and others like them, had no business being at Yale, since all Orthodox students should attend only sectarian Orthodox institutions. Motivated by the perverse logic of the-worse-the-better, Orthodox leaders may actually prefer mixed-sex dorms because they expose the essential depravity of American culture and deter young Orthodox Jews from venturing into it As for the few modern-Orthodox schools that encourage applications to the Ivy League, they fear that rocking the Yale boat could make it harder for present and future graduates to get in.
Lawrence Grossman
Flushing, New York
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To the Editor:
“The Orthodox Moment” really consists of two articles. The first is a history of the evolution of American Orthodoxy over the last two generations, and the second is a discussion of the Yale Five. The first article is excellent, though I would quibble with Jack Wertheimer’s assertion that the narrow-mindedness of the religious Left is equivalent to that of the Right. Although there is harsh rhetoric at both ends of the spectrum, it has been my experience to encounter more of it from the Orthodox sphere, in which I live.
With respect to the second article, I take issue. I have little sympathy for the Orthodox students at Yale: instead of going to one Y.U., they could have gone to another Y.U.—Yeshiva University—which would have easily accommodated their needs. It is not clear to me why Yale must accommodate them. It is extremely easy to be Orthodox at numerous other first-class educational institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Brandeis, all of which boast exciting Orthodox communities contained within a secular environment.
Mr. Wertheimer’s suggestion that the non-Orthodox community should have given its support to the Yale Five is an attempt, I think, to extend a bridge to Orthodoxy. The problem with such an alliance is that the cultural chasm between the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox (and the rest of American society) is, for better or worse, too great. It might have been more interesting had Mr. Wertheimer suggested that an alliance be built around the issue of school vouchers. He might favor this in view of his own Conservative movement’s expanding Solomon Schecter schools—over 70 in operation and twenty on the drawing boards—all of which require hefty funding. The Orthodox are already tapped out from supporting their network of private schools. This may be an area for creating a common alliance—though the price to be paid, a breach in church-state separation, is perhaps too great.
Joseph R. Rackman
New York City
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To the Editor:
In his article, Jack Wertheimer wonders why most Jews did not rally to the defense of the Orthodox students at Yale. Yet he fails to address the key questions related to the case: did these students choose Yale freely? Did they have other choices? Did they or should they have known of the school’s dormitory policy prior to acceptance? If “yes” to this last question, should they not have discussed their concerns with the administration beforehand?
The bottom line is that the students were not farced to accept these regulations—there are other schools. The “road to change” is for bright Orthodox students not to go to Yale. It will be the school’s loss, and the school may get the message.
George Essenfeld
Stamford, Connecticut
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To the Editor:
Jack Wertheimer correctly identifies the problem in the dispute between Orthodox Jewish students at Yale and the university’s sexually-correct living arrangements: is Yale’s understanding of pluralism broad enough to allow morally and religiously objecting students the right to “an alternative lifestyle,” that is, one that does not include sexually integrated quarters? Or is Yale’s embrace of diversity one that stops short of accommodating the appetite for diversity that these students desire?
The Catholic League filed an amicus brief in this case in support of the students, even though none was Catholic. That is because what is at stake is something that transcends any particular religion: freedom of association and religious liberty. If nothing else, this case demonstrates—one more time—who the practitioners of intolerance really are.
William A. Donohue
President
Catholic League for Religious
and Civil Rights New York City
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To the Editor:
Jack Wertheimer is a clarion voice in the wilderness. He correctly distinguishes between the harshness of much Orthodox belief and the valid ethical and moral behavior that the Orthodox often espouse. However, between the dual tensions in Orthodoxy, there lies a third way. Curiously enough, it is in the Conservative, halakhic, pluralistic, intellectual movement in which Mr. Wertheimer is a prominent educator.
I am a Hebrew high-school teacher in a modern Conservative synagogue. We espouse a value system that is ethical and moral and condemns the sexual lifestyles that young Jews are tacitly or not so tacitly encouraged to adopt in the secular world. Most but not all of my teenage students are opposed to the “progressive” sexual regime that has become institutionalized on American college campuses. Mr. Wertheimer, the good news is that many of your own young fellow Jews and students, Conservative though they may be, do “get it.”
Teddy Zabb
New Rochelle, New York
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Jack Wertheimer writes:
Orthodox Judaism, like traditional forms of religion generally, tends to evoke strong passions. I am therefore particularly grateful for the measured tone, by and large, of these letters. Even as they vividly highlight key fault lines in contemporary Orthodox Jewry—indeed, within the Jewish community as a whole—they help to illuminate a complex phenomenon.
My own comments will address three themes that cut across a number of the letters. To begin with, almost all my correspondents touch upon the insularity of the ultra-Orthodox or haredi world, even if they offer differing assessments of it. On the one hand, Rabbi Avi Shafran views haredi separatism as “understandable, necessary, perhaps even laudable,” while Rabbis Pinchas Stolper and Nosson Scherman downplay any of its possibly deleterious consequences by focusing on the role played by ultra-Orthodox leaders of the last generation in the remarkable efflorescence of study and religious observance. On the other hand, Rabbi Joseph A. Polak regards haredi separatism as an occupational and economic disaster in the making; Steven Bayme fears it is silencing the “voice of Orthodoxy” within Jewish communal forums; and Lawrence Grossman laments its negative effects on the engagement of Orthodox Jews with “the larger society.” Adding a different emphasis, Joel B. Wolowelsky hints that the new roles being played by women in all sectors of the Orthodox community, including the haredi enclaves, may yet redraw the map of Orthodox life.
The last four writers offer important grounds for questioning the wisdom of separatist polices still dominant in the haredi world and increasingly influential in other sectors of Orthodoxy As a strategy forged in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the last century, under circumstances vastly different from our own, separatism may be doing far more harm than good to Orthodox Jews themselves. Certainly, it is one of the most divisive forces in the contemporary American Jewish community.
This brings me to the second theme: the current relationship between Orthodoxy and other movements in American Judaism. As several correspondents explicitly recognize, in my essay I was hoping to further understanding through a sympathetic appreciation of the Orthodox world and also to suggest areas where a common approach might be forged across denominational lines. Even though they may differ with me on how and where to construct bridges, Steven Bayme, Rabbi Polak, and Joseph R. Rackman understand the need to encourage the search. But when it comes to concrete instances, and in particular to the case of the Yale students—the third theme in the letters—things get more heated.
Rabbi Joel H. Meyers, George Essenfeld, and Mr. Rackman take me to task for suggesting that the Jewish community should have sided with the students. Before highlighting where we differ, I should stipulate that Yale does offer many religious accommodations to observant Jews. I also believe, with Rabbi Meyers, that “the mark of a religious individual, one deeply committed to Jewish values and observance, is to be involved with the world.” The question is how to pursue that involvement.
Whatever one may think of the lawsuit itself, the Yale case provided the Jewish community with a powerful educational opportunity. In the first instance, this was an opportunity to discuss internally, in Jewish settings like synagogues, the degree to which Judaism’s views of sexual morality are at odds with prevailing mores, especially on college campuses. I do not share Rabbi Meyers’s optimism about the ability of Jewish “religious values” to stand “firm before the test of contemporary culture.” How widely are Jewish teachings on sexuality (and many other subjects) even known within the Jewish community?
Here, in other words, was an opportunity to demonstrate that almost all Jewish religious movements share an abhorrence of promiscuity as well as an unshakable conviction that marriage is the central and ideal setting for the expression of human sexuality. This is not just an Orthodox (or, pace Teddy Zabb, a Conservative) issue. Nor is it the only issue on which there is wide denominational agreement. Were Jews to devote less time worrying about the imagined dangers of a large-scale reversion to “ghetto Judaism”—the haredim, remember, are still a minority within a minority—they might well find many points of commonality.
Finally, the Yale incident could have informed Jews—including those Orthodox students at Yale who have opted to “live and let live”—about ways of engaging in the larger national debate over social and ethical issues without the automatic “me, too-ism” that characterizes so many Jewish discussions of American public policy. A different way of thinking, a way of thinking that calls frankly upon Jewish ideas and idioms, might even help establish new types of alliances, as the letter of William A. Donohue suggests.
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Several points in individual letters warrant further comment. Perhaps predictably, the one correspondent who finds my article “mean-spirited”—Nechama Preis—goes on to dismiss with sweeping disdain every version of Judaism but Orthodoxy, on the grounds that all allegedly treat religious law as merely a “suggestion or recommendation.” The truth, of course, is that Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Judaism differ markedly among themselves, and each of them is also—if I may use Rabbi Pinchas Stolper’s words about Orthodoxy—“extremely multifaceted.”
Rabbi Avi Shafran clarifies, from his point of view, why Norman Lamm, the president of Yeshiva University, was publicly castigated as a “hater of God.” But he sidesteps the question of how he himself views such inflammatory talk, a doubly unfortunate omission since President Lamm’s attacker was a rabbinic leader of the organization for which Rabbi Shafran serves as an official spokesman.
Going to great lengths to defend heads of yeshivas from my claim that they are “cushioned from reality,” Rabbi Stolper, for his part, cites the great contributions of rabbis of the past generation to the growth of Torah studies in America. In so doing he inadvertently confirms my larger point, for he describes the previous generation as “eschew[ing] extremism of any kind.” One is left wondering why so many current leaders, themselves the disciples of these distinguished rabbis, should have rejected their teachers’ “ways of peace.”
Rabbi Nosson Scherman takes exception to my description of the haredi leadership of the last generation as “immigrant rabbis,” and then portrays quite movingly how these immigrants transformed American Orthodoxy. What divides us here, I suspect, is a matter of semantics, not substance. In using the term “immigrant rabbis” I did not intend to disparage but rather to note a shift of historic importance: in the decades bracketing the Holocaust, a new type of Jewish immigrant arrived on American shores, bringing a far more sophisticated repertoire of responses to modernity than had been the case with those who arrived at the turn of the 20th century.
Where Rabbi Scherman and I disagree is in our historical understanding of the way rabbis in ages past influenced their followers, in contrast to those 20th-century rabbinic figures who coined a new term, daas Torah, to justify a no less new mode of leadership. That mode of leadership relies far less on “going back to the text,” as Rabbi Scherman has it, than on charismatic authority and intimidating social pressure in order to compel conformity with the rules of the haredi enclave.
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