Seeding the Right Cloud

Following the time-honored if somewhat irritating tradition of speechmakers who begin by announcing that they are departing from the scheduled topic, I informed those present that instead of focusing on the media’s coverage of Orthodox Jews, I would make my presentation on cloud seeding.

The venue was Agudath Israel of America’s recent 91st national convention, which took place this past weekend at the Woodcliff Lake Hilton in New Jersey, where thousands converged to hear words of inspiration and admonition from some of the Orthodox world’s guiding elders.

And, for some of the attendees, to hear words of lesser gravity from people like me, at various smaller sessions.  Still, the Sunday morning one in which I participated, along with Agudath Israel executive director Rabbi Labish Becker, the session’s chairman; respected educator Rabbi Aaron Brafman; and accomplished attorney Avi Schick, drew nearly 500 souls.

A few voices in the back of the hall demanded that I repeat myself, for surely they had misheard. So I did, but, before puzzlement could turn to consternation, I launched into a pretty funny joke.  No, I’m not going to repeat it here.  If you’re really curious, you can get the CD from zalmanumlas@netzero.net .

But I will offer here the gist of my words that morning.  (I’d love to do the same with those of my co-presenters, but don’t have their notes.  So, again, please just order the CD.)

Orthodox Jews seem to be in the news a lot, usually in news stories focused on the wrongdoings of Orthodox individuals.  That usually begins with the Jewish media, which make yeomen’s efforts to find anything scandalous – or even innocent but which can be presented in such a way as to imply something dark – in the Orthodox community. And larger media pick up the baleful ball and run with it.

Needless to say, there are truly egregious crimes that have been committed by members of the Orthodox community, as by those of any community.  But the powerful lens aimed at the Orthodox world is sui generis.  (I’m not a psychologist, but have my suspicions about why some Jewish media are so bent on ferreting out Orthodox misbehavior; it has something to do with Jewish guilt.  But let’s not go there.)

And yet, there are times when it seems a stream of positive news about Orthodox Jews seems to burst forth from nowhere.

Recently, we were treated to Professor Noah Feldman’s Bloomberg News ode to the scholarship and democratic meritocracy that is Beth Medrash Govoah, the Lakewood Yeshiva; and reports about the political alliance and personal friendship between a Chassidic woman (elected to a town council) and a Palestinian one in Montreal, a man with a yarmulkeh riding a New York subway who allowed a young man in a hoodie to use his shoulder as a pillow, and a Connecticut rebbe who discovered nearly $100,000 stashed in a desk he had bought and unhesitatingly returned it to its owner.  (She had forgotten where she had put the cash, which is a lesson to us all: Whenever we stash a hundred grand somewhere around the house, we should write where on a sticky note and put it on the fridge.)

What, though, precipitates the negative Ortho-news, and what the positive?  A believer in chance wouldn’t have the question.  But a believer in Judaism does.

And “precipitates” is the right word.  My stab at an answer was where cloud seeding came in.

I picture a spiritual cloud of sorts, an amorphous mass of minor acts of chilul Hashem, or “desecration of G-d’s name.”  Any time a visibly Jewish Jew blocks traffic by double parking, or is impatient with a clerk at a supermarket or cuts corners while doing his taxes, a bit of malign moisture is added to that Chilul Hashem cloud.  And when it is sufficiently heavy, it rains down on our heads, and into the media, in the form of a large and public desecration of G-d’s name.

And conversely, when enough visibly Jewish Jews are considerate, polite, scrupulously honest and proactively friendly to others in their daily lives, their actions feed another cloud, the cloud of Kiddush Hashem – “Sanctification of G-d’s name.”  And then the media are presented with un-ignorable examples of public actions of Kiddush Hashem, and are forced to report them.

So by our own actions, each of us helps seed one cloud or, G-d forbid, the other; whether acid rain or blessed rain results depends, in the end, on us all.

The most valuable thing I shared with those present, though, consisted of a sentence from the Rambam (Maimonides), what I believe is his definition of Kiddush Hashem.

“Anyone,” he writes, “who refrains from a sin or fulfills a commandment not for any earthly reason, not fear nor trepidation, nor to seek honor, but [entirely] because [it is the will] of the Creator… has sanctified G-d’s name.”

And so, even – perhaps especially – in our quietest, most private moments, we all have opportunities to seed the right cloud.

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Musing: Alan Dershowitz to the Rescue

Celebrated attorney Alan Dershowitz has petitioned Israeli President Shimon Peres to intervene in what Haaretz characterizes as “the case of the apparent blacklisting of Rabbi Avi Weiss by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate.”  That is to say, the conclusion of the Rabbinate that Rabbi Weiss’s conversion standards are markedly beneath their own.

Mr. Dershowitz wrote Mr. Peres that the rabbi at issue is “one of the foremost Modern Open Orthodox rabbis in America” (no argument there, although “Open Orthodoxy,” as has been well revealed, is a misnomer) and – the lawyer’s apparent coup de grâce – “one of the strongest advocates anywhere for the State of Israel.”

The attorney goes on to bemoan the “chasm between the Jews of the United States and the religious institutions in Israel” which he characterizes as “baseless religious tyranny.”

As to Mr. Dershowitz’s authority to pronounce on matters religious, some earlier words of his:

“I am… certain that the miraculous stories that form the basis of most religious beliefs are myths. Yet I respect the Bible and enjoy reading and teaching it. Indeed, I find it even more fascinating as a human creation than as a divine revelation. I consider myself a committed Jew, but I do not believe that being a Jew requires belief in the supernatural… If there is a governing force, He (or She or It) is certainly not in touch with those who purport to be speaking on His behalf.”

The Way We Are

While those of us here south of the border (the Canadian one, that is) were focused on our own local elections, a Chassidic woman candidate in a Montreal borough was busy making history.

Mindy Pollak, a chassidic woman (from the Vizhnitz community) was elected – the first chassidic person to do so – to the Montreal borough council of Outremont, where there have been running tensions for years between non-Jewish residents and the growing number of Orthodox Jews living there.  Her opponent, journalist Pierre Lacerte, had supported a borough councilor widely considered anti-chassidic (if not anti-Semitic) in the latter’s attempt to undermine the construction of an eruv and new shuls in the neighborhood. According to one report, supporters of Mr. Lacerte went knocking on doors without mezuzahs, distributing flyers and announcing that “We’re here to talk about the Jews.”

Ms. Pollak’s political ally and friend was, and is, Leila Marshy, a filmmaker of Arab ancestry who describes herself as a “militant Palestinian.”

An article in the Globe and Mail before the recent election quoted Ms. Pollak as saying that “if we focus on what we have in common rather than what divides us, then we can work toward solutions.”

So begins this week’s roundup of heartening Orthodox Jewish news.  Unfortunately, the media tend to go for the negative or scandalous  And so it’s good every now and then to highlight what, in a bad pun referencing one of the New York tabloids that see their role as highlighting real or exaggerated bad behavior, I call the “Daily Jews.”  That is to say, the vast majority of observant Jews who live their lives in consonance with their religious convictions.

Exhibit B is the “subway guy,” the middle-aged man wearing a yarmulkeh whose shoulder became the makeshift pillow of a young black man in a hoodie who dozed off sitting next to him on the Q train.  Someone snapped a photo of the pair and posted it on the web, where, within days, it garnered over one million “likes” and nearly 200,000 “shares” on Facebook.

Providing that courtesy to a fellow passenger on New York city transit shouldn’t be as surprising as it apparently was to so many.  I remember once when my own shoulder served to provide a fellow citizen the same service, on a bus.  And I’m glad no one had thought to aim a phone then at the sight of the dozing lady and slightly befuddled but unmoving bearded rabbi.  But I’m glad the subway guy was snapped in action (or, better, inaction); I suppose that even doing something simple and decent, it seems, is impressive in our selfish, rude times.

And then we have the finally ended saga of Sarah Shapiro, a respected Orthodox writer in Israel, whose work had been shamelessly plagiarized by another writer, Naomi Ragen.

In December 2011, a district court judge in Jerusalem ruled that, in a novel she wrote, Ms. Ragen had intentionally used passages, often copied word for word, from a book written by Ms. Shapiro, ordering Ms. Ragen to pay Ms. Shapiro damages and court costs, and to omit the copied sections from future editions of her book.

Ms. Ragen appealed to the Supreme Court, which last week brokered an agreement that requires her to abide by the lower court’s order that she remove the plagiarized material from any new editions and translations of the novel; and stipulates that 97,000 shekels of the 233,000 shekels in damages and court costs awarded to Mrs. Shapiro be donated to charity.

Ms. Ragen’s response was to claim victory at that “compromise,” wish herself mazel tov, and rail against “people like Mrs. Shapiro.”  For good measure, she also accuses the woman she plagiarized of plagiarism of her own (for including in a character’s ruminations the words of a well-known popular song from the 1970s, clearly assuming that readers would recognize them).

And Sarah Shapiro’s reaction to the closing of the case?  She offered “a profoundly felt thank you” to the justices “for protecting my work” and called their “peaceful resolution” of the case “quintessentially Jewish.” She had words for her adversary too, embracing her “fellow American immigrant to the Land of our Fathers” as someone who “has done so much, with passion… to defend this country with her power of words…”

“I look forward to meeting you again someday, G-d willing,” her statement concluded, “as fellow writers.”  And she quoted Dovid Hamelech in Tehillim:”Then we will be as dreamers… May we reap in joy what was sown in tears.

And that wraps up our survey of this week’s “Daily Jews.”

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

 

 

 

What’s New

As someone with a well-honed sense of wonder, who delights at the sight of a blue jay (even though several of them regularly greet my wife and me outside the window during autumn breakfasts) and who, walking to Maariv each night, surveys the constellations and planets with awe (and feels a frisson at the occasional shooting star), I might be expected to marvel as well at modern communications technology.

And I do, at least to an extent.  The rapid advance from dedicated word-processing machines (How futuristic was that StarWriter I bought in the 1980s!  It had a five-line screen!) to computers, and then to more powerful computers – and the invention of e-mail and the Internet (thank you, Mr. Gore!) and smartphones – has been nothing short of astounding.

And yet, unlike blue jays and shooting stars, the state of personal tech today often leaves me grumpy.  E-mail, for instance, for all its convenience and efficiency, seems to have only increased workloads.  The Internet, for all the good that it may have to offer, presents so much that is the opposite of good – not just fraud and panderings to the lowest human instincts but avalanches of ill will and cynical slander purveyed online by disturbed, malevolent individuals. And smartphones are too smart for their own good.

As I discovered a few months ago. As if I weren’t already sufficiently wary of communications technology’s larger challenges, I was accosted by something more subtly irksome, in the form of the message I received when I turned on a new phone.  The device introduced itself to me as my “Life Companion.”

Okay, now, I said to it, that’s quite enough. I appreciate (somewhat) the fast and efficient mail-on-the-go, the high voice quality of the phone calls, the reliable music player, the weather and travel apps.  But even if this new model could cook supper, wash clothes and proofread articles, it would not be my “life companion.”  I already have one of those.  And she doesn’t even need a battery.

The device’s presumptuous self-introduction got me thinking about how, really, all of technology is presumptuous.  The aforementioned StarWriter (like its great-grandfather before it, the IBM Selectric electric typewriter) was once “the future” of writing. “Super-8” film was supposed to be the ultimate in video recording, here to stay (until it went and left).  And, to roll the film (remember film?) ahead to more recent years, does anyone even use a Segway anymore?

Just as the sartorial styles of the 1960s and 1970s look so embarrassingly silly in photographs from those ancient times (yes, we had photographs then – taken by actual cameras!), so will the computers and smartphones of today one day strike our descendants as primitive.  “What?  You used to have to actually touch a screen or speak into a device?” many a child will ask a wizened grandparent, with a condescending snicker.  “Didn’t you have brainwaving?”

All of which points to one way of understanding Shlomo Hamelech’s eternally timely words in Koheles, “There is nothing new under the sun.”  Of course there are new things, all the time.  They just don’t stay new.

The Talmud teaches us that what isn’t “under the sun,” however, Torah, can yield newness, new insights, new ideas, new understandings. But perhaps the simplest understanding of the limitation “under the sun” is that, when it comes to what the Creator, who transcends the universe, has bequeathed to us in what we call “nature,” the shine, so to speak, never dulls.

Blue jays, comets and constellations may be old things, but somehow they remain fresh and awe-inspiring every morning and every night.  They will never go out of style, and won’t ever be improved upon.  Things in the natural world are, one might say, engineered to last.  In the world of technology, though, no matter what its engineers may imagine, what’s present will one day be past, in fact passé.

And yes, after enough poking around, I finally figured out how to change the greeting my phone offers when activated.  Now the screen declares: “This too shall pass.”

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Musing: Times Are Strange

A lengthy op-ed in the New York Times by one Susan Katz Miller celebrates intermarriage and the raising of children of intermarrieds in both Jewish and non-Jewish traditions.  Her family “celebrates Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana, Sukkot, Simhat Torah, Hanukkah, Passover and many Shabbats…  We also celebrate All Saints’ Day and All Souls, Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter.”

Ms. Katz and her Episcopalian husband want their children “to feel equally connected to both sides of their religious ancestry.”

“Perhaps,” she writes, “having been given a love for Judaism and basic Hebrew literacy in childhood, they will choose at some point in their lives to practice Judaism exclusively. That would be good for the Jews. Or perhaps they will choose to be Christians or Buddhists or secular humanists who happen to have an unusual knowledge of and affinity for Judaism. That would also be good for the Jews.”

Neither, however, would be good for the Jews.  Ms. Katz, “the granddaughter of a New Orleans rabbi,” was “raised Reform Jewish” by her own “Episcopalian mother and… Jewish father.”

Times, indeed, are strange.  Geraldo Rivera and Stella McCartney (Paul’s daughter) are halachically Jewish.  But Susan Katz Miller is not.

Note to Readers

I have added a new category to those listed to the right: “Oldies (Hopefully Goodies)”.  Older, often lengthy pieces will be posted under that category. 

The first article to be posted there is titled “Graphoanalysis: Science or Snow Job?”, and concerns the popular pursuit of divining people’s character from their handwriting.  It appeared in Ami Magazine in 2011.

AS

Orthodoxy And Honesty

The essay below was written for, and published by, Haaretz.com.  I share it with that paper’s permission.

The perils of religious self-definition became amusingly apparent in the recent Pew survey of American Jews. One category of “Jews” was “Jews by affinity” – Americans lacking any Jewish parentage or any Jewish background who simply choose to call themselves Jews; more than one million people so identified themselves.  Similarly suspicious are the survey’s self-described “Orthodox,” fully 15% of whom reported that they “regularly attend services” in a non-Jewish place of worship, 24% of whom handle money on the Sabbath and 4% of whom say they erect holiday trees in their homes in December.

In a recent op-ed, Rabbi Asher Lopatin insists that the “Open Orthodox” movement whose flagship institution, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, he now serves as president has every right and reason to call itself Orthodox – indeed that anyone can choose whatever Jewish religious label he wishes to wear, and that “no one has the authority” to “write someone out of Orthodoxy.”

The issue here, however, is not one of people but of concepts, not about writing anyone out of anything but rather of defining words, which, pace Humpty Dumpty, are expected to have meanings.

To be sure, words’ meanings can change.  Once, not very long ago, a “mouse” was exclusively a furry creature, and “gay” meant only “joyful.”  Perhaps “Orthodox Judaism” will, as Rabbi Lopatin wishes, undergo a metamorphosis too, and come to encompass even theologies that are indistinguishable from the one currently associated with the Conservative movement.

But at present, as over the past century or two, “Orthodoxy” has been synonymous with full acceptance of the mesorah, or Jewish religious tradition – including most prominently the historicity of the Jewish exodus from Egypt; the fact that the Torah, both Written and Oral, was bequeathed to our ancestors at Sinai; and that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob actually existed – concepts that prominent products or leaders of the “Open Orthodoxy” movement are on record as rejecting.

Orthodoxy is “pluralistic,” in the sense that it encompasses pieces at odds with one another on myriad issues.  Parts of the Orthodox universe embrace formal secular learning, parts eschew it; parts recite the Israeli Rabbanut’s prayer for Israel, and parts don’t; parts are defined by the warmth and tumult of their shul services, parts have services that are formal and sedate.

But all those parts, for all their differences in orientation and practice, are unified by a belief system that embraces the Thirteen Principles of Maimonides (derived from the Talmud and other links in the chain of the Oral Tradition – our mesorah).   An adherent of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, a Satmar chassid, a “Litvish” yeshiva graduate and a student of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchonon Theological Seminary are all unified by the essence of what the world has called Orthodoxy for generations.  But “Open Orthodoxy,” despite its name, has adulterated that essence, and sought to change both Jewish belief and Jewish praxis (as in ordaining women or suggesting that problematic Jewish marriages can simply be retroactively annulled).

It would be unfortunate were a new movement to force Orthodoxy to find a new name for itself, just in order to communicate the idea of a community that affirms the entirety of the mesorah.  It would be unfair, too, since there already exists an “open” movement that seeks to “conserve” what it likes of the mesorah but to respect the Zeitgeist and embrace different approaches and practices from those of the Jewish past.

Why, indeed, can’t the new Jewish movement just append itself to the already existing one that shares its ideals?  A cynic’s answer would be: because it wouldn’t be newsworthy; a conservative wing of the Conservative movement is hardly a novelty; a “new” and “open” “Orthodoxy,” the violence done to the latter word in the process notwithstanding, is something special.  A non-cynic would have no answer.

But both the cynic and the sober observer would rightly consider the use of “Orthodox” to be a violation of truth in advertising.  We need, Rabbi Lopatin writes, to “respect each other’s understanding of what Orthodoxy is.”  But – at least until the dictionary jettisons history here – “Orthodoxy” is not an all-encompassing umbrella. There may be different sub-species of aardvarks and of zebras, but an opossum cannot lay claim to either entry.

Seeking to revise the mesorah, although disturbing enough, is one thing; redefining a time-honored word while misrepresenting what one is doing, quite another.

It’s one thing, in other words, to be “open.”  But, above all, one must be honest.

© 2013 Haaretz

Musing: A Premature Obit for Yiddish

A mailing from the Yiddish Book Center, an Amherst, Massachusetts-based cultural nonprofit dedicated to translating and promoting Yiddish books, is sitting on my desk.  The oversized envelope contains  a fundraising letter and various enclosures.

Emblazoned across the front of the envelope is the large word “Yiddish,” followed by the legend, its second word highlighted:

“Our last chance to keep it alive forever!”

Someone really should buy these folks a bus ticket to Williamsburg.

In Our Bones

We cannot see the tens of thousands of mazikin, or “harmers” (often translated as “demons”), that the Talmud teaches surround us always (Berachos 6a).  Were they visible, says Abba Binyamin, they would utterly terrify us.  The same, of course, is true about the tens of thousands of spores, bacteria and viruses that constantly seek to invade our bodies.

The latter are held off, if we are alive and healthy, by an unbelievably complex biological network we call the immune system.

Langerhans cells on our skin keep tiny potentially lethal invaders out.

The enzyme lysozyme in mucus breaks down the cell walls of malign bacteria, as do tears and saliva.

An astounding menagerie of protein molecules we call antibodies, moreover, is produced by the white blood cells born in the marrow of our bones, each product designed (yes designed; there’s a Designer here) to disable a specific bacteria, virus or toxin.  Lymphocytes, one such product of our bone marrow, attack a broad array of the bacterial and viral agents that are capable of causing us great harm.

And the system contains a vital control subsystem governed by the Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA), a molecule present on the surface of practically every cell in our bodies, that identifies those cells as our own, protecting them from attack by the myriad germ-fighting antibodies commanded (yes, commanded; there’s a Commander here) to seek and destroy foreign invaders.

We know these facts today because of the progression of science and its observations of the world beneath the threshold of unaided human vision – and the devastation that occurs when any part of immune system ceases to work and a body is invaded by biological mazikin.

The immune system is to be constantly marveled at.  But a particularly apt place to ponder it is during the prayer recited on Shabbos (and at the Pesach seder) that we call “Nishmas Kol Chai” (“The Spirit of All Living Things”).  During the Shabbos service, sadly, that prayer is often truncated or even omitted entirely by many people, likely because it comes at the end of a portion of the service (like Aleinu, another “orphan in shul”).  And yet, halachic sources say that it should receive preference before much of what precedes it.  And for good reason.

Some of “Nishmas” consists of verses borrowed from Tehillim and the prophet Yeshayahu, along with poetic renderings of concepts from the Talmud.  Toward the prayer’s end, we find the words:

…From severe and enduring diseases You spared us… therefore, the organs that You set within us shall thank and bless… and declare the sovereignty of Your name… as it is written [Psalms 35:10]: “All my bones shall say, ‘Hashem, Who is like You?  You save the poor man from the one stronger than he, the poor and destitute from the one who would rob him…’”

Our very bodies, in other words, our organs and their processes, figuratively “thank and bless” our Creator – by their very workings. What is the pertinence here, though, of King David’s praise of G-d’s saving a poor man from being oppressed by a stronger one?

From the perspective of what we know today, it is not hard to perceive the exquisiteness of that reference in its context.  The “poor men” are our bodies, vulnerable to hordes of imperceptibly small but dangerously strong agents of harm.  Is it not self-evident that we owe our Creator our wide-eyed gratitude for the easily ignored but incalculably vital miracle that is our immune systems’ ceaseless work to vanquish those baleful agents?

And is it not particularly exquisite that the parts of our bodies King David singles out as declaring “Hashem, who is like You?” for saving the poor from the strong… are our bones?

© 2013 Rabbi Avi Shafran

 

Open “Orthodoxy”?

A rejoinder to my recent essay, “True and Tragic Colors,” about Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and “Open Orthodoxy,” was published by The Times of Israel.  Below is my response to that posting, written in my capacity as Agudath Israel of America’s spokesperson.

I am grateful to Dr. Ben Elton, a student at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, for his rejoinder to my recent posting about that institution and “Open Orthodoxy,” in which I asserted that neither can lay claim to the adjective “Orthodox,” at least not if words are to have meanings.

My gratitude derives from the fact that Dr. Elton’s words help clarify the issue.  Although he writes that he is “bemused” by my critique of his invocation of the Wurzburger Rav as an example of Chovevei Torah’s approach, his explanation of his bemusement can allow us to better understand whether that revered Torah personality would indeed approve of the inclusion of non-Orthodox Jewish clergy in training rabbis, which YTC proudly embraced at its recent presidential installation.

Dr. Elton is correct that there was indeed a difference of opinion between the Wurzburger Rav (Rav Yitzchok Dov Halevi Bamberger) and Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch regarding whether the rabbis of the Orthodox community of Frankfurt could remain part of that city’s official “Jewish community” council along with non-Orthodox clergy.

And he is correct, too, to note that Rav Hirsch’s objection to such membership was based on his conviction that it would “thereby give[s] formal recognition to the legitimacy of Reform.”

But he is mistaken to interpret Rav Bamberger’s dissent as permitting membership despite that contention.  The Wurzberger Rav simply felt that membership in a communal body did not, in fact, confer legitimacy of any sort to Reform.  As I noted in my response to Dr. Elton’s original posting, Rav Bamberger expressly forbade membership in other cities’ communal councils, where he apparently felt the terms of membership did in fact confer such legitimacy to Reform.

That a communal Orthodox rabbi, Marcus Horowitz, sat on the body overseeing the construction of a Reform Temple “and used his influence to prevent building taking place on Shabbat” – Dr. Elton’s evidence for his thesis – does not negate Rav Bamberger’s forbiddance to confer Jewish legitimacy on non-Orthodox systems of thought.

Nor does Rav Bamberger’s letter to Rav Hirsch in which he wrote that their common “reject[ion” and “detest[ation] of Reform with all our hearts” should nevertheless “not break the ties of personal friendship which bind us.”

Personal friendships, of course, are not the issue here.  Orthodox rabbis, even among those who affiliate with Agudath Israel, maintain friendships with non-Orthodox representatives.  The issue, though, is not personal friendship but something entirely different: whether non-Orthodox rabbis should be given a public platform to share their views on the quintessentially religious question of how to train rabbis.

As Dr. Elton himself concedes, Rabbi Bamberger would not likely “have advocated theological dialogue” with Reform representatives.  Does he imagine that the Wurzberger Rav would have invited them, as YCT did, to a public forum to train rabbis?  How, then, can Dr. Elton claim that “YCT is simply enduring the same critique today” as Rav Bamberger did in his day, and that YCT “can take pride in [Rav Bamberger’s] company?

Most glaring is Dr. Elton’s response (or lack of one) to the main point of my earlier posting: that neither YCT nor “Open Orthodoxy” can legitimately lay claim to the title “Orthodox.”

He blithely dismisses my summoning of quotations from YCT leaders and honored graduates that negate the very essence of what history has come to call Orthodoxy, with the observation that the quotes “do not contain much new material” and that they have been well explained “in the past.”  He does not, however, offer even a synopsis of any such explanations.  He cannot, for none can exist.  One either accepts that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob existed or one does not; one either subscribes to the belief that the Torah, Written and Oral, was given to our ancestors at Sinai, or one does not.  Esteemed leaders in the “Open Orthodoxy” movement do not.  Orthodoxy does.

History is the best guide here.  The Conservative movement began precisely as “Open Orthodoxy” has begun – the former was so named because it wished to “conserve” what it judged it could of halacha in a new environment that it felt deserved a more liberal approach to traditional Jewish thought and social norms.  It shunned the word “Orthodox” only because it saw that adjective, at the time, as an albatross around its neck, since Orthodoxy was expected to expire quickly in America. YCT, by contrast, embraces the word as a badge of honor.  Not because it fits but because embracing the word “Orthodox” – the institution hopes – might distinguish it from the Conservative movement despite its essential duplication of its essence.

The problem is that, to imagine an example in another realm, a person who is anti-immigration, anti-abortion, against higher corporate taxes and pro-gun and cannot legitimately claim the label “liberal.”  As much as he may call himself that, he is like a leopard claiming to be an eagle.

And leopards cannot even change their spots, much less fly.

Whatever it may call itself, a neo- Conservative movement is simply not part of what history has come to call Orthodoxy.

© 2013 Agudath Israel of America