Battling the Psychopathology (4): Haym Soloveitchik: Rupturing and Reconstructing Ashkenazi Jewish Dysfunction in a Racist Key
David Shasha
Haym Soloveitchik: Rupturing and Reconstructing Ashkenazi Jewish Dysfunction in a Racist Key
Sometimes it is hard to tell where the White Jewish Supremacists are when it comes to the Sephardim.
In my article on Samson Raphael Hirsch’s de rigueur Ashkenazi attack on Maimonides, I made note of the different ways in which Sephardim and Ashkenazim see the purpose of the Jewish ritual commandments:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osm0botpWsc_L-yS0ZvOOD-FPmIY75vb7T83BjQI9wE/edit
Here is what I said in the article:
As is known, Maimonides developed the Aristotelian tradition in Judaism out of Arab sources and here he articulates a deeply profound and impressive rationale for the commandments which is eminently logical: God speaks to the Jewish people in their language; in rabbinic parlance, ha-Torah medabberet bi-lshon benei adam.
This understanding of the commandments was seen as revolutionary as it took away the essential uniqueness of Judaism and placed it squarely into the realm of the purely human; a rationale that sought to purify the worship of the one God and eliminate the pagan dross.
Maimonides’ understanding establishes the principle of religious pluralism which he articulates clearly in his discussion at the end of the Laws of Kings, the final section of his Mishneh Torah:
But man cannot grasp the thoughts of the Creator, for His ways are not our ways, nor are His thoughts our thoughts, and all the words of Jesus of Nazareth and the Ishmaelite after him, are nothing but a means to straighten the path to the King Messiah, and to the bring the entire world to worship God as One. (11:4)
In this generous vision of the Messianic era Maimonides reinforces the idea that God works in manifold ways. The commandments of the Torah, like the derivative belated mission(s) of Christianity and Islam, are a means to bring all human beings to an understanding of the Truth.
Maimonides was articulating an understanding of Judaism rooted in the principles of Religious Humanism; a way of seeing the world and the sacred in terms of history and the fundamental human experience.
Hirsch, articulating what has become commonplace to the Ashkenazi Orthodox tradition, saw Maimonides as essentially outside of the Jewish tradition:
This great man, Maimonides, to whom, and to whom alone, we owe the preservation of practical Judaism to our time, is responsible, because he sought to reconcile Judaism with the difficulties which confronted it from without, instead of developing it creatively from within, for all the good and the evil which bless and afflict the heritage of the father. His peculiar mental tendency was Arabic-Greek, and his conception of the purpose of life the same. He entered into Judaism from without, bringing with him opinions of whose truth he had convinced himself from extraneous sources and — be reconciled. For him, too, self-perfection through the knowledge of truth was the highest aim, the practical he deemed subordinate. For him knowledge of God was the end, not the means; hence he devoted his intellectual powers to speculations upon the essence of Deity, and sought to bind Judaism to the results of his speculative investigations as to postulates of science or faith. The Mizvoth became for him merely ladders, necessary only to conduct to knowledge or to protect against error, this latter often only the temporary and limited error of polytheism. Mishpatim became only rules of prudence, Mitzvoth as well; Chukkim rules of health, teaching right feeling, defending against the transitory errors of the time ; Both ordinances, designed to promote philosophical or other concepts; all this having no foundation in the eternal essence of things, not resulting from their eternal demand on me, or from my eternal purpose and task, no eternal symbolizing of an unchangeable idea, and not inclusive enough to form a basis for the totality of the commandments.
This idea that there is a primordial Jewish ontology that is tied to the irrational and the magical occult was repeated by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the most prominent disciple of Hirsch’s Modern Orthodoxy in the 20th century, in his book-length essay The Halakhic Mind:
It is pertinent to note that modern Jewish philosophers have adopted a very unique method. The source of knowledge, for them, is Medieval Jewish philosophy. The living historical religious consciousness which embraces both antiquity and modern times is ignored. Such a method cannot cope with the problems of Jewish philosophy for three reasons. First, medieval Jewish thought, despite its accomplishments and merit, has not taken deep root in Jewish historical religious realism and has not shaped Jewish religious world perspective. When we speak of philosophy of religion, we must have in mind foremost the philosophy of religious realities experienced by the entire community, and not some abstract metaphysics cultivated by an esoteric group of philosophers. Second, we know that the most central concepts of Jewish philosophy are rooted in ancient Greek and medieval Arabic thought and are not of Jewish origin at all. It is impossible to reconstruct a unique Jewish world perspective out of alien material. (p. 100)
Judaism is therefore always alone and on the outside of civilization. There is no possibility of a true synthesis based on cultural and religious evolution. The primordial is the true, the atavistic and the literal become absolute markers of a closed Jewish epistemology.
It is thus fascinating that this harsh rejection of Sephardic Jewish Humanism, with its robust philosophical and scientific values, would come up against that other Ashkenazi stand-by: Sephardim have no relationship to Modernity:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LQGPldAVbze_Fjb78pZ57LwQ0pC-Pt0eetskBVQ8aq4/edit
In my article on Yehouda Shenhav’s book The Arab Jews, I stated the following:
The term Arab Jew is one that is at the very foundation of the contestation of the history of Jews who once lived in the Arab world. With the exception of the Jews who continue to live in Morocco, the robust, if modest, communities of Jews native to the Arab world have ceased to exist. The history of these communities has generally been filtered through the mechanisms of the Zionist worldview which claims at its core two important points: First, Zionism has sought to negate the whole of the Diaspora Jewish history. The Hebrew term shelilat ha-galut has become a constant refrain in Zionist and Israeli thinking, most recently being bandied about by the novelist A.B. Yehoshua who has repeated the claim that one can only be a Jew in the land of Israel. The Jewish Diaspora in this context is a place where Jews live(d) abnormal lives and even as they function as a link in the chain that connects Jewish history back to its pre-70 CE phase when Jewish territorial life still existed, that Diaspora existence is viewed as an abnormal state. Second, the Jews who lived in the Middle East, outside the orbit of Europe and its Modernity, have been viewed as primitives and as lacking in refinement and culture. In addition, these Arab Jews, pejoratively known in Israel as Mizrahim – Orientals, represent an uncomfortable link to the current enemies of the Jewish state.
I also cited the late Arab Jewish activist G.N. Giladi who wrote the following in his classic book Discord in Zion:
Sephardi Jews suffered from harsh health conditions in the camps with each family, usually with many children, living in one tent whose area was smaller than a normal room. In 1950/1 the winter was unusually harsh, with snow falls everywhere. The tents and the huts had no heat, and since there were only a few standpipes in every camp people had to stand in long queues for their water ration. In rural areas, priority was given to the Ashkenazi farmers and the camps had their water cut off. Often the water was muddy and unfit for drinking which led to an increase in complaints and violent demonstrations against the authorities which were put down with a steel hand. There was one shower, with cold water naturally, for every 16 people, but it was rare to find a shower which worked regularly. The toilets consisted of a small pit measuring one metre square, and there was one for every four families. The queues to use them were long and sometimes there was only one per hundred people. After heavy rainfall, the contents of the pits would overflow and in summer they gave off a foul stink and nourished armies of stinging insects. The government did not bother about rubbish removal, and, since the camps had no gutters, mounds of rubbish piled up. Since some of the camps lay on the Lod-Tel Aviv highway, Ashkenazi journalists wrote that these camps were jeopardizing Israel’s image since they could be seen by foreign tourists and it would be better to move them away from the highway. The establishment thus started building cement huts a few kilometers away and demanded that the camp inhabitants buy them and move into them. The Sephardim, however, spurned the offer because there was no asphalt road from the new location to the highway, but the Ashkenazi newspapers picked this up and reported ‘these Sephardim refuse to live in buildings because they are used to living in tents like the Bedouin.’
The Arab Jews are seen as primitive and lacking in all rudiments of culture and civilization; even though Ashkenazi intellectual leaders like Hirsch and Soloveitchik have claimed that we were too acculturated!
Indeed, Shenhav also makes note of the Religious Zionist leader Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and his duplicitous role in the Gaslighting of the Sephardic community and its rabbinic elite:
The categories developed by Said in his Orientalism are thus operative in the encounter between Ashkenazi Zionists and Arab Jews in Abadan. What is even more startling is the degree of subterfuge that was undertaken in the process of trying to brainwash the Arab Jews to leave Iraq and Iran and come to Palestine. Sadly, this subterfuge implicates the figure of the revered Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook who, as a hardened Zionist fighting his own internal Jewish battles against the Orthodox anti-Zionist Ashkenazi establishment, provided “cover” to emissaries like Sereni who required a new identity in order to be permitted access to the Arab Jewish communities.
What Kook did was to confer upon the emissaries – all atheist socialists to a man – the traditional character of the shali’ah, or in Shenhav’s term shadarim. These shadarim concealed their true identities under the guise, ironically, of religious emissaries empowered to persuade the local Jews to come to Zion not for secular or nationalist reasons, but for religious ones.
Kook supplies letters to these emissaries providing them with necessary “cover.” In a letter written in 1932 for the emissary to Yemen Shmuel Yavne’eli, a completely non-religious Jew, we see the rabbi “state” the following:
The bearer of this letter who is visiting your country is the important dignitary and sage [sic!] Mr. Eliezer Ben Yosef… This dear man was in the Holy Land for many years and he has information about the customs of all our brethren, may they live… We have entrusted him with matters to investigate and to inquire about from the high and honorable sages … in order that we may also allow the communities of Yemenites who are gathering among us to follow their own customs…. (p. 94)
And lest there be some confusion over whether or not Rabbi Kook is explicitly and with malice lying to these gullible Yemenites, let us read the words of Yavne’eli himself who states explicitly how the swindle was to work:
For reasons of caution vis-à-vis the Turkish government … it was decided that this trip should be cast in a religious character and that I should go, on the surface, on a mission from Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook in Jaffa in order to pose to the rabbis of the communities in Yemen a series of questions concerning marriage, divorce, family life, prayer, synagogues, and receive from them written replies. Equipped with a letter and with a notebook of questions from Rabbi Kook … I sailed from Jaffa to Port Said.
As I was re-reading Haym Soloveitchik’s much-cited and much-debated 1994 essay “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy” I was struck by how this point on Sephardic primitivism was forcefully reiterated in the lengthy introduction to the footnotes:
Several points very much need underscoring at the outset. First, the orthodox
community described here is of European origin. This essay does not discuss
religious Jewry issuing from Muslim countries, commonly called Sefaredim, primarily because, unlike their Western brethren, their encounter with modernity
is very recent. (p. 103)
In case we did not get the point, he emphatically raises it again in note 34:
Significantly, demons and ghosts are still part of the popular Israeli Sefaredi cosmology, and is reflected in the preachings available on cassettes in Israel. This difference should be corollated with the divergence that exists on the issue of "hellfire." Direct appeals to the horrors that await sinners are strikingly absent from contemporary Ashkenazic writings and equally from the burgeoning cassette literature. It is found abundantly, however, on the cassettes by Sefaredic preachers (e.g., R. Nissim Yagen in the series Ner Le-Me’ah: no. 41, Neshamotj no. 86, Ha-Parpar ha-Kahol" Part I; no. 140, Ha-Shoshanah she-Navlahj in the series Hasdei Naomi: no. 3, Omek ha-Din). This suggests that in the Ashkenazic community, after some five or six generations of exposure to modernity, thoughts of the afterlife have lost much of their vivacity. The Jews from Muslim countries arrived in Israel soon after its founding in 1948. For those who came from rural areas this was their first encounter with the modern world; the same was true even for some coming from more urbanized settlements. Only a generation removed from their former culture, their vivid sense of the afterlife has not yet been dulled by modernity. (p. 115)
So, which one is it?
Are the Sephardim primitive boors, or non-Jewish cosmopolitan sophisticates?
I would like to point here to Joann Sfar’s excellent graphic novel The Rabbi’s Cat, which allows us to see this Sephardic Jewish sophistication and worldliness in all its glory:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pH_hEwUcvmOEy5tdJ5brNibZYwn60hWvypYGTZFZC_o/edit
In my article on the book I stated the following:
In the case of The Rabbi’s Cat we are introduced to an Algerian Jewish family with a very unique cat. The family has lost its matriarch and the cat, in love with his young mistress, decides to eat the family parrot and thus is enabled to talk. This literary device permits Sfar to have an ongoing philosophical dialogue go on between the rabbi and the cat.
In these dialogues, one part humorous and one part existentially challenging, we see emerge a richly textured portrait of Algerian Jewish life. Sfar skillfully draws a verbal and a visual image of a society that is deeply complex and in the throes of some extremely difficult changes and transitions. The rabbi is shown as having been a community leader and now must take a test given by the French consistoire in order to maintain his place as the community’s rabbi. We see the rabbi studying French texts in order to pass this dictation exam. As this is happening, the cat wishes to be Bar Mitzvahed and to begin the study of Kabbalah, Jewish mystical lore. In the conversations between the cat, the rabbi and the rabbi’s rabbi we see a kind of Marx Brothers hilarity that is replete with many of the complicated issues that mark the modern Jewish condition.
The cat appears to be a cynic and questions many of the religious beliefs and orthodoxies of the old rabbi and his Sephardic rabbinical traditions.
Here we see Sfar reconstructing the philosophical debates that existed among Sephardic rabbis since the time of Se’adya Ga’on and Maimonides. This proclivity for philosophical discussion is of course tempered and recontextualized by the more modern Western elements that become a subtle thematic in the book as a whole.
Throughout The Rabbi’s Cat there is a constant battle waged between the traditional ways of the Algerian Jewish past, a past that is deeply embedded within its Arabic cultural environment, and the great pressures that have been exerted by the French presence in Algeria; pressures that have caused internal problems for the Judaism of people like the old rabbi and for the continuity of an old world that saw Jews and Arabs forming relationships that were both amicable and peaceful. The cat is an agitator who seeks to trip up the rabbi and force him to relinquish many of his long-cherished beliefs. But the rabbi continues counsel the cat and stand up to many of his challenges.
In this aspect, Sfar looks at the battle between traditional Sephardic Judaism and the challenges of modernity. And the rabbi does not acquit himself poorly in this regard. He shows himself to be a wise and sensitive teacher, filled with a warm spirit and a giving heart. The pressures that are being exerted from the side of a corrosive French presence in Algeria are seen as forcing traditional natives like the rabbi out of their own identities in a way that will ultimately do damage to their internal equilibrium. These native Algerians live under a racist French occupation where they are refused service in restaurants and where they must prove their proficiency in the French language in order to minister to their native communities.
Indeed, in a very stark contrast with Sfar’s sensitive examination of the socio-cultural dynamics and religio-philosophical dialectics of Sephardic life in the midst of great change, “Rupture and Reconstruction” proudly cites Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman as a way of entering Modernity in terms of the overall Mimetic thesis:
God's palpable presence and direct, natural involvement in daily life-and I emphasize both "direct" and "daily"-, His immediate responsibility for everyday events, was a fact of life in the East European shtetl, so late as several generations ago. Let us remember Tevye's conversations with God portrayed by Sholom Aleichem. There is, of course, humor in the colloquial intimacy and in the precise way the most minute annoyances of daily life are laid, package-like, at God's doorstep. The humor, however, is that of parody, the exaggeration of the commonly known. The author's assumption is that his readers themselves share, after some fashion, Tevye's sense of God's responsibility for man's quotidian fate. If they didn't, Tevye would not be humorous, he would be crazy.
Tevye's outlook was not unique to the shtetl, or to Jews in Eastern Europe; it was simply one variation of an age-old cosmology that dominated Europe for millennia which saw the universe as directly governed by a Divine Sovereign.100 If regularity exists in the world, it is simply because the Sovereign's will is constant, as one expects the will of a great sovereign to be. He could, of course, at any moment change His mind, and things contrary to our expectations would then occur, what we call "miracles." However, the recurrent and the "miraculous" alike are, to the same degree, the direct and unmediated consequence of His wish. The difference between them is not of kind but rather of frequency. Frequency, of course, is a very great practical difference, and it well merits, indeed demands of daily language, a difference in terms. However, this verbal distinction never obscures for a moment their underlying identity.
As all that occurs is an immediate consequence of His will, events have a purpose and occur because of that purpose. Rationality, or, as they would have had it, wisdom, does not consist in detecting unvarying sequences in ever more accurately observed events and seeing in the first occurrence the "cause" of the second. Wisdom, rather, consists in discovering His intent in these happenings, for that intent is their cause, and only by grasping their cause could events be anticipated and controlled. The universe is a moral order reflecting God's purposes and physically responsive to any breaches in His norms. In the workings of such a world, God is not an ultimate cause; He is a direct, natural force, and safety lies in contact with that force. Prayer has then a physical efficacy, and sin is "a fearful imprudence." Not that one thinks much about sin in the bustle of daily life, but when a day of reckoning does come around, only the foolhardy are without fear. (p. 101)
Juxtaposing Sfar’s North African Jews with Aleichem’s Russian shtetl is very instructive, given Soloveitchik’s degradation of Sephardim as being newcomers when it comes to Modernity. Indeed, it is Tevye’s atavistic ignorance that has been so misunderstood by contemporary Jews, who seek to use his simplicity and naivety as some magical sign of Jewish authenticity.
Sholom Aleichem, as was the case with his ornery successor Isaac Bashevis Singer, and even later with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, was an antagonistic chronicler of the Mimetic shtetl way:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-jewish-mark-twain/355735/
As William Deresiewicz states in his excellent Atlantic article “The Jewish Mark Twain”:
How many of Sholem Aleichem’s people would indeed remain Jews was an open question. The writer—who wasn’t observant, spoke Russian at home, and gave his children names like Emma and Misha, not Motl or Hodel or Tzeitel—was deeply ambivalent about the prospect of assimilation. In 1911, late in his career—a time, says Dauber, by which he’d come to feel the shtetl world was disappearing—he published a collection called The Railroad Stories (available with Tevye the Dairyman in a single English volume by Sholem Aleichem’s finest translator, Hillel Halkin). These are tales of Jews in motion, merchants being shunted, third-class, around the Pale, and they feature a kind of figure we might call the man-on-the-train.
The man-on-the-train, by and large, is no longer a schlimazel. He’s a Jew who is making modernity work. He’s a wise guy, an angle-player, maybe even a bit of an operator. He’s headed for Kiev, or just got back from Buenos Aires. He’s scamming the insurance company, or fleecing fellow passengers at cards. But he’s no longer sure, completely, who he is. In “On Account of a Hat,” a real-estate broker, waking from a nap in a station, accidentally grabs the cap of his bench mate, a Russian official. He had wanted to be treated like his neighbor (“It’s not such a bad life to be a Gentile”), and now he is. But as the conductor leads him to the first-class car (“This way please, Your Excellency!”), he cannot figure out what’s going on. He catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror—and thinks that he’s still in the station, dreaming. He has managed to assimilate, and now he cannot recognize himself.
In “Cnards,” another late story, the process comes full circle. Apostasy has invaded the town itself. All the young men are addicted to cards, figured as a kind of anti-orthodoxy. They play around the clock in a house they call the Chapel, smoking on the Sabbath, eating pork, and reading secular books. One day, they are visited by a pair of men in full Hasidic regalia, ostensibly collecting money for yeshivas. What are those strange cardboard squares?, the two want to know. (Cnards is their best attempt to render the reply.) They sit down at the table and proceed, it hardly need be said, to clean the locals out. Our final sight of them is on their way out of town on the train, clean-shaven and fashionably dressed, thumbing their noses at their victims. Now it’s not modernity that is the dress-up game; it is tradition. Just like when they put on Fiddler.
Far from being an “innocent” narrator of the shtetl, pace Soloveitchik, Aleichem was a defiant Maskil:
Sholem Aleichem saw it all and wrote it all, in part because he lived it all. He was born in a town but raised in a shtetl. His father, Nochem, was a prosperous merchant who was reduced to poverty in Sholem’s early adolescence. Nochem was also both observant and a Maskil, a devotee of the Jewish Enlightenment, with its love of European culture. Sholem went to a cheder, religious primary school, but then to a secular high school, where he found his calling in the Russian masters and the Western classics. Then came something out of a fairy tale. Working as a tutor, Sholem fell in love with his charge, the daughter of a wealthy estate manager—though wealthy doesn’t start to cover it. The affair was exposed; the tutor was dismissed; the lady persisted; the lovers were eventually united. Less than two years later, her father suddenly dropped dead, leaving Sholem, at the age of 26, among the richest Jews in Eastern Europe.
The Sephardic Jewish culture that Joann Sfar lovingly recounts out of the shards of his family history is quite different from Aleichem’s often confrontational style. It should of course be remembered that Tevye’s story does not end well – either for himself, his daughters, or the community. His ubiquitous talks with God are alternatively seen as either quaint or proof of his madness.
By contrast, Sfar represents a completely different Jewish tradition; one whose roots go back to the glittering literati and scholastic philosophers of al-Andalus.
I have written about the struggle to bring this resplendent Sephardic culture into the Modern world, as it struggled with White Jewish Supremacy, in my article about the great writer Yitzhak Shami:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zBDUaVURGCMrdpCW4Fek9DwZBVRXh0-UajobOKK5bW4/edit
We can trace a line from Shami to equally devoted Sephardic writers like Yehuda Burla, Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, and most recently Ronit Matalon; all of whom present an essential difference when we look back at Ashkenazi Modernists like Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
The Sephardic manner is less fraught with tension, and more receptive to the channels of tradition as a means of constructing contemporary identity. Sephardic Judaism is one that is more at ease with itself, and with the larger world in which it is a vital part. It is culturally integrative without losing its parochial Jewish sense, cosmopolitan without ever feeling alienated. It is truly a Jewish Humanism.
Shohet Kahanoff famously promoted the idea of Levantinism as a counterweight to Zionist anomie and alienation:
https://www.eretzmuseum.org.il/e/396/
As it states in that posting “The Levant as Parable”:
“A typical Levantine in that I appreciate equally what I inherited from my Oriental origins and what is now mine of Western culture, I find in this cross-fertilization, called disparagingly in Israel Levantinization, an enrichment and not an impoverishment. It is from this vantage point that I wish to try to define the complex interrelated malady of both Israel's Sephardic (Jews of oriental/Middle Eastern origin) and Ashkenazi (East European) communities".
In the late 19th century, in the wake of the economic prosperity that British colonialism had brought to Egypt, waves of immigrants poured in from numerous countries, such as Iraq, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon and North Africa. Among the immigrants were Jews who settled primarily in Cairo and Alexandria; they soon embraced French culture, imparted by the Alliance school operated by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. In the early 1920s, a vibrant cultural mosaic was created in Egypt's big cities, against the background of the songs of Umm Kulthum, Farid al-Atrash and Leila Mourad, as well as western cadences, which included the rumba and tango. Muslims, Christians and Jews enjoyed the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Levant.
This was the milieu of Jacqueline Kahanoff, later to become a writer, essayist, literary scholar, feminist - and a Levantine by her own definition - who grew up in the Cairo of those days. Her mother was Yvone Chemla, of Tunisian extraction, and her father, Yosef Shohet, a descendant of a traditional Iraqi family. Jacqueline's mother was a woman of culture, and an ardent reader of French literature, mainly of Marcel Proust. As a child Jacqueline spoke English with her governess, Arabic with the servants, and French with her teachers and friends at school. Despite her education and desire to become independent, her parents opposed her wish to study medicine and chose for her the traditional role of women in a patriarchal society: wife and mother.
The Egypt of Kahanoff was also the Egypt of Edmond Jabes, whose massive neo-rabbinic colloquy of voices The Book of Questions proved to be so decisive in the development of Post-Modernism, with its intense connection to the pluriform rhetorical style of Talmudic dialectic.
Susan Handelman has written perceptively about it in her seminal article “Torments of an Ancient Word: Edmond Jabes and the Rabbinic Tradition”:
The richly complex literary tradition of Sephardic Modernism thus clashes with the “primitivism” of Fiddler on the Roof shtetl-mongering nostalgia, and presents a challenge to Ashkenazi racists like Haym Soloveitchik who deign to mark us as primitives, when in fact the opposite claim could easily be made, based on the evidence he presents in the article. Sephardim have had much less of a struggle in dealing with the intersection of Judaism and Modernity than Ashkenazim have had.
Was it perhaps the advent of Hegelian Zionism, which had its own struggle with the primitive and atavistic, in the context of the larger erasure of the classical Sephardic heritage in both Israel and the Diaspora, that brought about this false sense of Sephardim being alien to the Modern?
The question is quite an interesting one, because Soloveitchik, the son of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, presents in “Rupture and Reconstruction” the idea that Modern Orthodox Judaism has been overrun by Haredi Orthodoxy in a way that marks the triumph of Written Text over Mimetic Tradition:
If I were asked to characterize in a phrase the change that religious Jewry has undergone in the past generation, I would say that it was the new and controlling role that texts now play in contemporary religious life. And in saying that, I open myself to an obvious question: What is new in this role? Has not traditional Jewish society always been regulated by the normative written word, the Halakhah? Have not scholars, for well over a millennium, pored over the Talmud and its codes to provide Jews with guidance in their daily round of observances? Is not Jewish religiosity proudly legalistic and isn't exegesis its classic mode of expression? Was not "their portable homeland," their indwelling in their sacred texts, what sustained the Jewish people throughout its long exile?
The answer is, of course, yes. However, as the Halakhah is a sweepingly comprehensive regula of daily life-covering not only prayer and divine service, but equally food, drink, dress, sexual relations between man and wife, the rhythms of work and patterns of rest-it constitutes a way of life. And a way of life is not learned but rather absorbed. Its transmission is mimetic, imbibed from parents and friends, and patterned on conduct regularly observed in home and street, synagogue and school.
Did these mimetic norms-the culturally prescriptive-conform with the legal ones? The answer is, at times, yes; at times, no. And the significance of the no may best be brought home by an example with which all are familiar-the kosher kitchen, with its rigid separation of milk and meat-separate dishes, sinks, dish racks, towels, tablecloths, even separate cupboards. Actually little of this has a basis in Halakhah. Strictly speaking, there is no need for separate sinks, for separate dish towels or cupboards. In fact, if the food is served cold, there is no need for separate dishware altogether. The simple fact is that the traditional Jewish kitchen, transmitted from mother to daughter over generations, has been immeasurably and unrecognizably amplified beyond all halakhic requirements. Its classic contours are the product not of legal exegesis, but of the housewife's religious intuition imparted in kitchen apprenticeship. (pp. 65-66)
Essentially, Soloveitchik is making a very complex argument about text, tradition, and the intellectual very simple for us: With the advent of new text-based outreach strategies in the Haredi community, the older and much simpler ways of the past are being erased.
And it is this erasure that is leading to the radicalization of Humra, the strict interpretation of ritual Jewish Law:
Significantly, this massive, critical audit did not emerge from the ranks of the left or centrist Orthodoxy, some of whose predecessors might have justly been suspect of religious laxity, but from the inner sanctum of the haredi world, from the ranks of the Kolel Hazon Ish and the Lakewood Yeshivah. It issued forth from men whose teachers and parents were beyond any suspicion of ritual negligence or casualness. Moreover, it scarcely focused on areas where remissness had been common, even on the left. Indeed, its earliest manifestations were in spheres of religious performance where there had been universal compliance. The audit, rather, has encompassed all aspects of religious life, and its conclusions have left little untouched. And the best example and, also, one of the earliest ones, is shiurim (minimal requisite quantities). On Pesach evening one is obliged to a minimal amount of matzah-a quantity equal to the size of an olive. Jews have been practicing the Seder for thousands of years, and no one paid very much attention to what that shiur was. One knew it automatically, for one had seen it eaten at one's parents table on innumerable Passover eves; one simply did as one's parents had done. Around the year 1940, R. Yeshayahu Karelitz, the Hazon Ish, published an essay in which he vigorously questioned whether scholars had not, in effect, seriously underestimated the size of an olive in Talmudic times. He then insisted on a minimal standard about twice the size of the commonly accepted one. Within a decade his doctrine began to seep down into popular practice, and by now has become almost de rigeur in religious, certainly younger religious circles. (p. 68)
The article is on the surface an impassioned attack on Haredi Da’as Torah in favor of Modern Orthodox Da’as Torah, but underneath that contentious surface there is a deeply fascinating Freudian unearthing of Soloveitchik’s relationship to his father and the community:
In 1959, I came to Israel before the High Holidays. Having grown up in Boston and never having had an opportunity to pray in a haredi yeshivah, I spent the entire High Holiday period-from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur-at a famous yeshiva in Bnei Brak. The prayer there was long, intense, and uplifting, çertainly far more powerful than anything I had previously experienced. And yet, there was something missing, something that I had experienced before, something, perhaps, I had taken for granted. Upon reflection, I realized that there was introspection, self-ascent, even moments of self-transcendence, but there was no fear in the thronged student body, most of whom were Israeli born. Nor was that experience a solitary one. Over the subsequent thirty-five years, I have passed the High Holidays generally in the United States or Israel, and occasionally in England, attending services in haredi and non-haredi communities alike. I have yet to find that fear present, to any significant degree, among the native born in either circle. The ten-day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are now Holy Days, but they are not Yamim Noraim-Days of Awe or, more accurately, Days of Dread-as they have been traditionally called.
I grew up in a Jewishly non-observant community, and prayed in a synagogue where most of the older congregants neither observed the Sabbath nor even ate kosher. They all hailed from Eastern Europe, largely from shtetlach, like Shepetovka and Shnipishok. Most of their religious observance, however, had been washed away in the sea-change, and the little left had further eroded in the "new country." Indeed, the only time the synagogue was ever full was during the High Holidays. Even then the service was hardly edifying. Most didn't know what they were saying, and bored, wandered in and out. Yet, at the closing service of Yom Kippur, the Ne’ilah, the synagogue filled and a hush set in upon the crowd. The tension was palpable and tears were shed. (pp. 98-99)
It is quite jarring to read these passages.
The head of American Modern Orthodoxy raised his family in an environment where people were not Frum! And the son of that iconic figure spent some time during the Jewish Holidays away from his family among the Haredim in Israel and the Diaspora.
“Rupture and Reconstruction” is a text that functions on a number of different epistemological and religious registers. It is a plea for “Centrism” against Right Wing Haredism; it is a family romance that speaks to the oasis-like womb of an irretrievable past; as it presents a scholar of Ashkenazi Jewish history as a sociologist of the Orthodox Jewish community, which is suffering from a loss of memory and moral integrity.
Haym Soloveitchik was trained in Ashkenazi Jewish History by Jacob Katz:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haym_Soloveitchik
Famously, Katz wrote his book The Shabbos Goy as a means to elevate the Ashkenazi PILPUL tradition over Sephardic Jewish Humanism and its scientific values:
https://www.amazon.com/Shabbes-Goy-Study-Halakhic-Flexibility/dp/0827604130
The book was reviewed by University of Calgary Professor Eliezer Segal:
https://people.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Shokel/900203_Shabbes.html
Here is what he said there:
The greater part of Katz's study focuses on the medieval and modern communities of central and eastern Europe. More than their Sephardic counterparts, the Ashkenazic rabbis attached considerable weight to the established customs of their communities, even when the prevalent practice seemed to conflict with the Talmud.
The rabbis would often propose bold re-interpretations of the relevant talmudic passages, seeking to expand the options for permissive rulings. For example, Rabbi Jacob Tam, always a halakhic maverick, argued that the very act of earning a living is in itself a religious mitzvah that can serve as grounds for bending the restrictions.
Much of the book consists of meticulous descriptions of the ways in which halachic scholars coped with the popular tendency to employ Gentiles to do jobs that they themselves could not do.
In some instances this involved straightforward prohibitions. More often, the rabbi would suggest an alternative way of making the situation more acceptable, often through the use of legal fictions such as a formal sale of a business along the lines of the practice used for leaven on Passover.
In most of the cases, it seems that the rabbis were looking for ways to grant retroactive sanction to practices that they could not curb. One of the most commonly repeated phrases in the book is the talmudic dictum, "Better that they should sin inadvertently than by intention," a testimony to the resigned frustration felt by halakhic authorities unable to make their communities conform to the real demands of Jewish law.
The important questions debated by the rabbis relate, for the most part, to economic rather than domestic life. Jews would find themselves involved in businesses that had to remain open on Saturday, either because they were contracted to the government or because the employees were Christian and the five-day work week was yet undreamed of.
In addition to the legal questions involved, Katz uses the halakhic materials to paint a fascinating picture of the economic activities pursued by Jews, especially in the modern era. But to this reviewer's mind, the most interesting sections of this book are those that describe the complex considerations that guided the Orthodox leadership in the polarized Jewish communities of 19th century Russia and Hungary.
The Enlightenment and the Reform movement were making strong inroads, and the Orthodox rabbinical authorities realized that their decisions could not be made simply on the merits of the cases. A ruling that was too lenient could be viewed as a concession to the forces of change, while excessive stringency was likely to alienate those who were sympathetic to the tradition, but would find it financially onerous to close their businesses for two days a week.
The rabbis who were consulted tried first to ascertain where the questioners stood ideologically. The general tendency was to choose the stricter options, a decision which seems to contribute to the decline of Orthodoxy in these communities.
Katz’s position stands in stark contrast to that of Jose Faur, who in his article “The Legal Thinking of Tosafot” sees the PILPUL tradition as a nihilistic form of Jewish anarchy:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kbUdiHw_tgRwPh6zkHqFMfDFu4-agV-y5tGKi0jCeFg/edit
In his words:
The impasse from which the Tosafot took its departure was: How to maintain the Talmudic tradition in a different social and historical context, The Tosafot analyzed the Talmud in a manner, that it would reflect the mores, ideology, economics and social situation of the Jewish communities in France and Teutonic lands. Seen from this perspective, the Tosafot school appears deeply concerned, on the other hand, with the preservation and maintenance of rabbinic authority, and well aware, on the other, of the historical, changes that had taken place in Judaism since the compilation of the Talmud.
The pilpul methodology of the Tosafot presupposes that there is no objective Halakha. In the final analysis, law is grounded on the discretionary judgment of the rabbi, and it is formulated through pilpul. The rabbi molds the law to fit the specifics of any situation. The pilpul reflects the specifics of the situation as seen by the rabbi, and projects to the community the pronouncement of the law made in a hallowed text -- as interpreted and recast by the rabbi.
I have discussed the PILPUL tradition in the following article:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-is-pilpul-and-why-on_b_507522
Faur connects the Ashkenazi legal-moral epistemology to the Anti-Maimonidean movement and to the Catholic Church:
Aristotelian thought and philosophical speculations reached France from Moslem Spain. This type of speculations provoked very strong opposition. Undoubtedly, some of the opposition was grounded on the fact that this branch of rationalism came from Islam. However, the roots of this form of anti-rationalism were deeply entrenched in the institutional values of France. Theologians in France and Teutonic lands were deeply divided as to whether or not one may rationalize the content of the faith, although religious speculation was favored by men of the stature of William of Conches and Thomas of Aquinas, it generated strong opposition at the end of the twelfth century and throughout the thirteenth century. Bernard of Clairvoux, who has rightly been characterized as the “great detective of heresy,” is the best example of the orthodox position. In the year 1140, he convened a synod at Sens with the purpose of examining the doctrines of Peter Abelard. Bernard charged Abelard with discussing the foundation of the faith by the ordinary means of human reason. The persecution of heretics and the atmosphere of suspicion that beset the study of philosophy and rationalistic theology were symptomatic of that period. It is important to note, however, that the opposition to the study of philosophy was not uniform. Some opposed only certain philosophical works, in particular the Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle, which were considered extremely dangerous. The works of rationalist theologians were also singled out. To illustrate: Aquinas’ Summa was considered dangerous, because it also examined the arguments that were made against the faith. Some, like Walter of St. Victor, strongly opposed it on the grounds that it might suggest doubts to the mind of the reader. In the year 1215, Robert of Courzon permitted the study of the Ethics and Logic of Aristotle, but he forbade the study of the Physics and the Metaphysics as well as the works of David of Dinant and the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. In April 1231, Pope Gregory IX addressed a bull to the teachers and students of Paris forbidding the study of natural philosophy until these works were properly examined and corrected.
From the above it is evident that the Maimonidean controversy, as well as the opposition to rationalistic theology and philosophy among Jews, was not merely the effect of a purely internal Jewish phenomenon. Rather, it reflected the attitudes and concerns of the general environment.
The effects of the general environment on the Jews were not restricted to the realms of theology and speculative philosophy. It was also present in the fields of Halakha and Talmudic interpretation, In the following sections we shall proceed to examine some of the basic elements of Tosafot's legal thinking and the methodology used in their interpretation of the Talmud in light of the method applied by the French Jurists in the analysis of Roman and Canon law.
It is therefore important to note how this Ashkenazi PILPUL foundationalism connects to Right Wing politics.
Katz’s book was reviewed by the prominent Jewish Neo-Conservative David Novak in The Jewish Quarterly Review:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1455137?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Novak’s Neo-Con pedigree is impeccable, as we can see in Murray Friedman’s book The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy:
https://www.amazon.com/Neoconservative-Revolution-Jewish-Intellectuals-Shaping/dp/0521545013
The following citations from the book list those Straussian machers:
All our dear friends are there, from David Brooks to Dennis Prager.
It is critical to keep all this in mind when reading the Haym Soloveitchik article, as Modern Orthodoxy has hewed closely to the Neo-Con ideology and its various permutations; as we have seen in the late Zalman Bernstein and his Tikvah Fund:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y8UrV67wrZUghBRZimf_5PeQTkQbzXsufntJtD6Y1EM/edit
Tradition magazine, a publication of the Rabbinical Council of America, published a Symposium on “Rupture and Reconstruction” last Fall, marking its 25th anniversary:
https://traditiononline.org/archives/?_sft_category=fall-2019-issue-51-4&_sf_ppp=20
At the very heart of the Symposium are three articles by Tikvah Fund writers:
https://traditiononline.org/what-rupture/
https://traditiononline.org/ruptured-gender-roles-in-a-text-centered-world/
https://traditiononline.org/how-zionism-is-reconstructing-american-orthodoxy/
Those articles argue against Soloveitchik that, rather than “rupturing” the Jewish community, the new Orthodox standards point to a synthesis of Right Wing Neo-Con Jewish politics, which I identify as Straussian, and a radical religious revolution in Israel which has brought the various Orthodox factions together in a warm Zionist embrace.
Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer is the leader of Tikvah’s Haredi division:
https://tikvahfund.org/faculty/yehoshua-pfeffer/
Sarah Rindner is part of Tikvah’s literary wing, and a Right Wing radical who has moved from her Monsey upbringing into the new synthesis:
https://muckrack.com/sarah-rindner/articles
The following article provides some sense of the community and its values:
Finally, there is Tikvah Chaim Saiman, a professor of Judaic Studies and Law at Villanova University:
https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/law/academics/faculty/Facultyprofiles/ChaimSaiman.html
His recent book Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law was published under the Tikvah imprint:
https://www.amazon.com/Halakhah-Rabbinic-Library-Jewish-Ideas/dp/069115211X
The book was a best-seller at the YU Seforim Sale, as it provides a crucial link between Modern Orthodoxy and the “New Talmudism”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPbxxP_kkV536tPTvMpsUE9feBgoBSa7QEP8iXXDHIk/edit
Saiman’s article “How Zionism is Reconstructing American Orthodoxy” allows to see clearly how this integrative process works:
Finally, as Orthodoxy has grown in size and influence, it has developed a political voice distinct from (and often at odds with) the organizations that dominated Jewish political engagement for most of the twentieth century. Much of this surrounds pro-Israel activism, as what were once synagogue brotherhoods and men’s clubs have transitioned into Israel Action Committees. Further, the percentage of AIPAC’s Orthodox attendees seems to grow ever year. The year “Rupture and Reconstruction” was published, it was difficult to gather a minyan for minha at AIPAC, by contrast, videos posted on social media from the past few conferences show hundreds attending shaharit services. Whether online or on campus, being pro-Israel is part of the Orthodox brand, and a clear marker of communal affiliation.
There is no doubt that Israel faces considerable security and diplomatic challenges. But this has been the case since the state’s creation, and today Israel has fewer existential fears than in decades past. The emergence of Orthodoxy as the vanguard of Israel activism seems less correlated with an assessment of Israel’s security concerns per se, and more about how American Orthodoxy conceives of its own mission and priorities.
In many ways, the difference between these two paths for Orthodoxy harken back to the century-old fissures between religious Zionism—centered on national affiliation with Am Yisrael living in Eretz Yisrael—and more classical expressions of frumkeit that stressed personal piety and halakhic scrupulosity. In a similar vein, R. Mosheh Lichtenstein recently contrasted his own theology, which, based on that of the Rav, his grandfather, focused on the existential relationship between the individual and God, and the approach of one of his co-rashei Yeshiva at Har Etzion which places greater emphasis on the redemptive relationship between God, the land, and the nation.
While few of the enumerated shifts conflict with halakha (indeed, many complement observance), to the extent Soloveitchik saw undertaking humrot as a new expression of religiosity, communal passions seem to have gravitated elsewhere. Intentional or not, celebration of Israel’s (post?) secular military, cultural, and economic prowess cannot but cast strict halakhic compliance as less of a defining marker of Jewishness, especially when measured against Orthodoxy’s traditional reticence of all things Israeli for exactly these reasons. Likewise, the shift in the relative appreciation for army service and “real life” in Israel over time spent in YU’s bet midrash, reflects a subtle attitudinal change in the relative value of these activities.
Finally, engaging the political sphere not only displaces resources and attention from religious practice to political activism, but also shapes the image Orthodoxy presents to itself and the larger world. In service of shared political objectives, contemporary Orthodoxy is more willing to overlook the halakhic chasm between it and non-Orthodoxy, as well as the theological chasm between Jews and their non-Jewish allies—Christian Zionists foremost amongst them. Though none of these factors impacts Orthodox observance per se, the ability to downplay, overlook, mitigate, and side-step these differences points to a delicate re-ordering within the hierarchy of Orthodoxy’s values. (pp. 97-99)
Indeed, in capsule form all the main Tikvah markers are here: The delicate balancing act between Halakhic observance and secular nationalism; the sincere plaudits for Christian Zionism and its debased messianic tendencies; a muscular understanding of Judaism as more Sparta than Jerusalem; the minimizing and historical reformulation of Halakhah in a post-redemption Jewish world; all in ways that make Plato primary as the Hegelian Zionist romance enchants American Judaism.
It is a perfect blending of these critical elements, as can be traced throughout the Symposium in its militant march towards the collapse of Jewish difference in the Orthodox world. Israel has now become the great equalizer, in defiance of Soloveitchik’s previous insistence on binary division.
It is thus critical to see Tradition’s “Rupture and Reconstruction” Symposium as a means to bring the current Modern Orthodox Jewish community into this new Tikvah institutional configuration.
Although not in the published volume, the Tradition website has a contribution from Zev Eleff that speaks to this unity:
https://traditiononline.org/response-on-the-reception-of-rupture-and-reconstruction%E2%80%A8/
Eleff’s aim is to bring together the various Orthodox strands in a historical manner rooted in academic scholarship:
In fact, the transformation of “mimetic culture” to “book culture” emerged as an important point in a variety of scholarly fields. For instance, the late Yaakov Elman and Mahnaz Moazami borrowed it for their analysis of Second Temple Judaism. Mark DeWitt applied it to changing dancing traditions in Northern California. Talya Fishman found it useful for Medieval Judaism and Judah Galinsky for fourteenth-century Spanish Jewry. Zeev Gries and David Nimmer used it to analyze Hatam Sofer’s Hungarian environs. Deborah Dash Moore and Noa Gutterman drew on the thesis while writing on Reform Jewish women. Marina Rostow footnoted the article in her book on Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate while Samuli Schielke and A. Kevin Reinhart adapted the thesis for their work on Islam. It proved helpful to Seth Schwartz’s work on sixth century rabbinic culture, Mark Slobin’s on American Klezmer, and Shaul Stampfer on the Vilna Gaon’s disciples in the Holy Land. Soloveitchik himself had utilized the argument, though in the reverse, in several essays on halakhic change within Medieval Ashkenaz.
The Symposium also provides us with hardline Right Wing Da’as Torah proponents like Gedalyah Berger and Michael Harris, who both extol the Haredim as being Mimetic:
https://traditiononline.org/some-ironic-consequences-of-text-culture/
https://traditiononline.org/reflections-from-across-the-pond/
Again, as with the Tikvah contributions, what we see in these entries is a slick attempt to turn Soloveitchik’s binary contentiousness into a harmonious whole; a Jewish community that has come out of the Orthodox Wars of the recent past stronger, more unified, and ideologically coherent. It is one big happy family!
It is thus notable that many of the writers deal with the issue of Women and Orthodoxy in a way that vigorously promotes Text over Mimesis, and in so doing castigate Soloveitchik for closing off that outlet for women who do not want to be chained to a heimische stove:
https://traditiononline.org/a-rupture-of-her-own/
https://traditiononline.org/reconstruction-in-no-mans-land-2/
In this vein SAR’s Rivka Press Schwartz allows us to see her transition from Haredi to Modern Orthodox in a way that puts the matter in very personal terms:
https://traditiononline.org/metrology-and-mimesis/
As she states:
I first read “Rupture and Reconstruction” as an eighteen-year-old student in Beth Jacob of Jerusalem, an elite haredi women’s seminary. My parents’ home was and is haredi by institutional affiliations, intellectual and open. My mother had read the essay and, recognizing its importance as a commentary on and critique of the American Orthodox world, sent it to me in Jerusalem. In the days before scanning and emailing, this meant painstakingly photocopying its 60-odd pages and airmailing them to my dormitory. I read the essay, and circulated it among like-minded friends. (At one point, a teacher of ours denounced a pernicious and harmful work circulating among the student body, whose ideas were dangerous. I listened apprehensively, expecting at any point to be fingered as the disseminator of heresies. It turned out that she was referring to some quack diet book that was making the rounds.)
That year, I was privileged to spend time with the late Rabbi Nachman Bulman and his wife, Rebbetzin Shaindel Bulman. Rabbi Bulman, a man not easily characterized in a sentence, ranged widely across the Orthodox world in his learning, teaching, and institution-building. Over a Shabbat meal in his apartment in Maalot Dafna, R. Bulman shared his thoughts about “Rupture and Reconstruction”: “He’s 90% right,” he said. “And he’s 100% wrong.”
That characterization, of an analysis that captured the lyrics, but missed the tune, of haredi life, resonated with me, with the way I read the article as a (very) young adult ensconced, even if at its left-er edge, in the American haredi world. While Soloveitchik’s analysis of the mimetic and text-based traditions was novel and powerful, his description of the contemporary haredi world as substituting law-book scrupulosity for lack of genuine religious feeling did not accord with lived experience. Around me I saw people serving Hashem with commitment, devotion, and yirat shamayim; the tendency towards halakhic stringency came from a desire to best fulfill the will of God, rather than as a poor attempt to fill the void left by lack of viscerally-felt religious experience. (p. 102)
Ilana Kurshan does the same from a somewhat different perspective:
https://traditiononline.org/a-chicken-soup-for-every-parsha/
Ms. Kurshan was raised in the home a Conservative rabbi and his powerful Jewish institutional professional wife:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilana_Kurshan
But Kurshan too, as we see from her article, is part of the new HARDALI alliance bringing together Haredim and Modern Orthodox under the welcoming Zionist umbrella:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardal
Indeed, it is a perennial Tikvah theme that fully permeates the Symposium.
I was particularly struck by the Symposium entries that referred to a much-discussed 2014 Commentary article by Kirkland Ellis lawyer Jay Lefkowitz on “Social Orthodoxy”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FBEBeQm9T4n7ZYdgtPHQn1ogWd2P1mk9PxF-odnWvTY/edit
Rabbi Daniel Korobkin explains it best in his “Rapture, Reconstruction, and Social Orthodoxy”:
https://traditiononline.org/rupture-reconstruction-and-social-orthodoxy/
He states there:
The natural sequel to “Rupture and Reconstruction” is the landmark essay in Commentary by Jay Lefkowitz, “The Rise of Social Orthodoxy.” In this painfully honest account, Lefkowitz confesses to being fully observant but agnostic about theology in general and belief in God specifically. He represents not only himself but a large swath of Modern Orthodox Jews who look, speak, and daven the very same way as a “believer.” He labels this new brand of Orthodox Jew as “Socially Orthodox.”
Lefkowitz observes that many of his ilk favor religious behavior and community as the most important component of their Judaism while making belief in any set of religious dogma or doctrine secondary, at best. Mordecai Kaplan believed that there was a progression for American Jews that was a recipe for success: First, belong to a community. “Belonging precedes behaving precedes believing,” wrote Kaplan, even though he would later largely deemphasize and devalue the role of belief altogether, focusing principally on community and only secondarily on God.
Lefkowitz argues that Kaplan was only mistaken in thinking that “belonging” preceded “behaving,” when in reality it is the reverse: Common rituals cause a community to coalesce. But as to the argument that ritual precedes belief, Lefkowitz completely neutralizes the second clause in the phrase na’ase ve-nishma, “We will do and we will listen” (Exodus 24:7). In his scheme one can easily put into practice a set of rituals without necessarily having worked out a theology. Essentially, he posits that na’ase ve-nishma has today come to mean simply “na’ase” alone. The new generation has indefinitely shelved the “nishma,” our set of beliefs and understanding of God.
This phenomenon is simply an extension of what Soloveitchik was referring to in describing twentieth-century Judaism as “irrevocably separated from the spirituality of its fathers.” In 1994, this meant that while Orthodox Jews fully believed in God, they did not feel or experience God as palpably and immanently as did their bobes and zeides in the Old Country. But today, the ethereal and detached belief of twenty-five years ago has dissolved to the point where for some it is socially acceptable to no longer associate God with religious practice. One can be fully frum, that is, “orthoprax” in one’s behavior, while not at all “orthodox” in one’s beliefs. (p. 65)
As can be seen from the placement of the Lefkowitz article in Commentary magazine, and the great stir it caused in the Jewish world, Korobkin’s discussion is directed, once again, at the very heart of the Tikvah problematic, where acculturated “secular” Jews, many of whom do not believe in God and do not practice the ritual commandments, are working to further the Neo-Con Zionist alliance in a way that does not alienate any member of the disparate factions from each other.
Taking the problematic one step further, Rabbi Elazar Muskin addresses the problem of wayward Modern Orthodox youth, what is internally called “Off the Derech [Path],” in his article “On and Off the Mimetic Derekh”:
https://traditiononline.org/off-and-on-the-mimetic-derech/
This is how he lays out the issue:
In my own community, I have witnessed numerous young people leave Torah observance. From discussions with colleagues across the country and in Israel, the same situation is being duplicated in their communities. The problem is so concerning that we have given it a name: “going off the derekh,” or in shorthand, OTD. The 2017 Nishma Research Profile of American Modern Orthodox Jews concluded that there were several factors leading to the abandonment of religious observance. Among these, particularly for men, is the issue of extensive focus on halakhic minutiae and a lack of spirituality.
Although the study indicated that this last issue is a concern only for 10% of respondents, in my rabbinic work, I have often found this to be the core of the problem. Recently at a wedding, a young man told me that he brought tefillin along, because he knew many of those men present would not have put on tefillin that morning. With pride, he informed me that at the late afternoon reception he had encouraged nine young men to lay tefillin and recite shema. At first, I shared his sense of accomplishment and was delighted to hear that he was so successful. When I looked around, however, I realized that many of those he encouraged were not young men raised in non-observant homes and communities, who had never been exposed to this mitzva; rather they were graduates of yeshiva high schools and some had even attended yeshivot in Israel.
Unfortunately, this story is not an isolated experience. At that same wedding, a prominent professor of Jewish education recounted that she hears such stories all the time, in all segments of the Orthodox Jewish community. She noted that today our problem is not that our kids have been exposed to the difficulty of being religious. That was yesteryear, when one honestly had to sacrifice to be a Shabbat observer or to eat kosher. She recalled Rabbi Moshe Feinstein’s heartbroken observation that so many European immigrants lost their children to Torah observance because the younger generation heard nothing except their parents’ Yiddish complaint that it was “difficult to be an observant Jew.” Clearly, this is no longer our reality, this professor suggested. (It is true that, today, many find living an Orthodox life to be financially challenging, often attributed to tuition costs—as Nishma’s study finds. Still, that is not a difficulty in observance itself, but in providing Jewish education for their children.) Today, the professor continued, the challenge is that we are blessed with a very good life and we still complain. She noted that one often hears people bemoan a “three-day Yom Tov” or grumble something like, “Can you believe it? I have to attend way too many semahot this month.” She concluded, “Our kids haven’t been inspired to perform mitzvot. They are being taught the details of observance but not its underlining beauty and consequently abandon a Torah life.” (pp. 78-79)
Muskin’s discussion again points to the intersectionality of American Jews and Israeli Orthodoxy and the many complexities that have arisen as Jews embrace their affluence and materialistic lives. It should of course be noted that he is the Senior Rabbi of the Young Israel of Century City in LA.
Since its publication in 1994, “Rupture and Reconstruction” has served to reinforce Ashkenazi Jewish supremacy, and its primacy has led to a re-evaluation of the binary “Text/Mimesis” in terms of current developments and concerns – from Feminism, as we have seen, to the new technologies; a subject that is at the center of Lawrence Kobrin’s article “Are Facebook and YouTube the New ‘Mimetic Community’?”:
https://traditiononline.org/archives/?_sft_category=fall-2019-issue-51-4&_sf_ppp=20
Kobrin, like Jay Lefkowitz, is a lawyer who is also a prominent member of the Orthodox Jewish elite. He examines the myriad ways in which the Social Networking sites and the Internet have created a Virtual Community of Orthodox Jews that marks a new Mimesis:
The Jewish world has not escaped the impact of these developments. Where books and texts were once supreme, and acquiring and owning them was a mark of dedication to Jewish intellectual values, the combined power of vehicles such as HebrewBooks.org, Sefaria, and Wikipedia in English, Hebrew, or Yiddish (as well as the parallel site WikiYeshiva), to say nothing of digitalized databases such as the Bar Ilan Responsa Project, has given anyone with a computer the resources of a vast library. Indeed, most of us possess in our pockets ready access to more Jewish texts than any yeshiva held in its library at any point in pre-digital history. True, the purchase and holding of print books is still considered a value, but the ability of scholars and posekim to know the location of resources pales when compared with the computer’s ability to seek cognate and similar terms and to ferret out any source. It has been suggested that if not for Shabbat restrictions, books might soon disappear even in traditional religious homes. As a result, a consensus of which texts should be considered authoritative has been severely reduced.
In addition, the Internet has brought with it social media. It has provided a platform for the sharing of communication by “communities” of like-minded individuals in the religious world, including the Jewish world.
The essay notes the disappearance of family and community from which imitation might be derived. Social media, combined with illustrative aggregating sources such as YouTube, creates digital mimetic communities of interest not possible before. This provides a substitute for the geographic proximity that marked the age of tradition and mimesis. Today, if one wants to learn how to properly put on tefillin, tie tzizit knots, or kasher a chicken, social media and vehicles such as YouTube are on tap to provide what a parent, bobbe, zeide, or a whole community might have done a century ago.
What does this mean for “Rupture and Reconstruction”? Today, numerous Internet newsletters, blogs, and sites are directed at the haredi community. A vast amount of online Torah material is directed to the Modern Orthodox community, such as YUTorah.org, WebYeshiva.org, and the Virtual Beit Midrash of Yeshivat Har Etzion.
At the same time, the Internet has changed the dynamic of pesak halakha, whether by a rabbi or yeshiva leader. In traditional settings, most religious decisions were conveyed individually by a rabbi who knew or met face to face with the questioner. The answer might properly be fashioned to take into account the spiritual place where the questioner was then in, as well as his or her religious observance or understanding. Today, numerous websites publish answers to anonymous queries, which are then broadcast to the world on an anonymous basis. Pesak has become anonymous, both in terms of the questioner and the responder. Even more damaging, “everyone” is now a posek since anyone can access the huge trove of information—some accurate, some not—which appears on the Web, often somewhat cynically referred to with mock reverence as “Rav Google.” (pp. 61-62)
Though it does not explicitly reference Post-Modernism, the article, like many of the others in the Symposium, points us to a new vision of the future that dismisses the Open Text of Rabbinic Midrash as understood by Susan Handelman and Jose Faur in their reading of Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabes, and, especially, Emmanuel Levinas.
I have presented Levinas’ thought in the following SHU compendium:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XWNPnJU7ZjavXKNzSH8d3suz3a7L89UqHyf4ISlwgTU/edit
The Tradition Symposium presents a vision of radical religious literalism that I have discussed in my article “Christian Fundamentalists and Post-Modernism: Law, Hermeneutics, and Textual Multivocality”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HCst9FdQrjdxXVnH5-WyfnBAxXkgbs3_evxqEVTNPRk/edit
As I argued earlier, Soloveitchik’s original thesis in “Rupture and Reconstruction” is firmly rooted in the Ashkenazi Tosafist PILPUL tradition. And while he sought to distinguish his experiential-mimetic understanding of Orthodox Judaism, as he learned it from his father, from that of the text-based Haredim, there remains, as we can clearly see in the Symposium, a strong residue of that White Jewish Supremacy and its racism in the dualistic formulations. A new generation has sought to maintain the Ashkenazi conceptual cultural categories, but to add the new union of the previously warring groups.
It is a central part of The Tikvah Fund Neo-Con worldview in its relation to the HARDALI movement that now represents Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel, and which has had such a strong impact on the Diaspora Jewish community and its institutions.
The bogus Post-Modernity of the new Ashkenazi discourse, as I have argued many times, seeks to ignore cultural multiplicity and textual indeterminacy in favor of a religious certainty that is wedded to the current technologies and cultural memes that permeate our society. It is a way of bringing Lehrnen into the Digital Age without sacrificing the essentialisms that have marked Ashkenazi Judaism over the course of centuries, countering cultural pluralism with a new form of Jewish absolutism.
The great Ashkenazi sage Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewish Humanist who proudly drew from the Sephardic tradition and its profoundly cosmopolitan tendencies, and who is reviled equally among both Orthodox Jews and their agnostic Straussian Tikvah counterparts, published his Hebrew moral tract Koheleth Musar in order to contravene the PILPUL tradition and its irrationalism:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/koheleth-mussar
As David Sorkin says in his excellent study Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment:
The Koheleth Musar was patently a commentary, if of an unconventional sort; it was not confined to one text or one subject, but commented on many texts, from many periods, on many issues. It was an effort to realize the Haskalah’s aim of renewing Judaism by using its textual heritage to address central issues in a reasoned and reasonable manner. Mendelssohn’s first Hebrew biographer suggested that the journal presented an alternative to Talmudic dialectics (pilpul). This assertion is true in the same sense that we can say that the German moral weekly supplanted scholasticism and devotional literature. Mendelssohn attempted to activate the textual heritage, applying texts in a manner entirely foreign to the world of Talmudic dialectics to issues he thought significant to any intelligent Jew. (p. 18)
As we know, Mendelssohn was immersed in Maimonides’ philosophical writings, and even translated his Millot ha-Higayon, Treatise on Logic:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/philosophy-and-religion/philosophy-biographies/moses-mendelssohn
Here is how the entry sums up this relationship and the way it functions in terms of Jewish Humanism:
In the middle 1750s, at around the same time that his first German-language publications were seeing the light of day, Mendelssohn produced his earliest writings in Hebrew. They consisted of anonymous contributions to Kohelet Musar ("Preacher of Morals"), a periodical he co-edited with Tobias Bock. Although the two men managed to publish only two eight-page issues, their effort nevertheless constituted a revolutionary turning point in the development of Jewish culture. It marked the first occasion on which Jewish intellectuals attempted to introduce into their own culture an innovative form of publication then quite popular and influential in Germany, England, and elsewhere, the "moral weekly." Here some of the ideas of the moderate Enlightenment were first presented to Jewish readers in the Hebrew language known to the community's educated elite and couched in terms familiar to them. Above all, the publication by two laymen of a periodical aimed at the moral improvement of the Jewish population amounted to an unprecedented subversive measure in a world in which the rabbinical elite was acknowledged to be the absolute authority in such matters. The weekly called on the Jews to fill their lungs with the air of natural life, to observe freely the beauty of nature, to nurture their sense of aesthetics and harmony. It proclaimed their right to delight in a world that is, as Leibniz taught, the best of all possible worlds created by God. Man, "God's finest creature," is at the center of nature, and it is unthinkable that the Jew, of all people, should repress his humanistic traits. Man can discover the majesty of the Almighty and His powers by observing the creation of the great architect of the world. Kohelet Musar's transmission of such messages appear to have made no significant impression on the Jewish society of the 1750s but it did pave the way for the publication, decades later, of a much more influential successor, the maskilic journal Ha-*Me'assef.
In the decades following this abortive effort Mendelssohn's writings in the Hebrew language were limited in number. In 1761 he published a commentary on Maimonides' Millot ha-Higgayon ("Logical Terms") and in 1769 or 1770 he published a commentary on the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. The former volume consisted of a republication of Maimonides' introduction to logic and philosophical primer together with an introduction and commentary designed not only to clarify Maimonides' work but to bridge the distance between medieval Jewish philosophy and the regnant philosophy of Mendelssohn's own day. The latter utilized the text of Ecclesiastes to expound in a popular form an essentially Wolffian teaching with regard to two principal tenets of natural religion, providence and immortality of the soul. At the end of the introduction to this commentary, Mendelssohn announced that if it were well received he would attempt to write similar works on Job, Proverbs, and Psalms but he never carried this plan to completion.
As we have already seen, the Soloveitchik Brisker tradition was the antithesis of Mendelssohn’s Enlightened Judaism:
Rabbi Marc Angel’s book Exploring the Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik conveniently reiterates the point I made at the very beginning of this article: Maimonides and Mendelssohn are deemed to be outside the parameters of “legitimate” Jewish thought, which brings us right back to the crushing weight of the arguments being made in Tradition’s “Rupture and Reconstruction” Symposium.
Haym Soloveitchik, just like his father, rejects Sephardic Jewish Humanism, and shows nothing but contempt and opprobrium for us as a community. More than this, we are now seeing that in the post-“Rupture and Reconstruction” Orthodox world Sephardim do not even have to be mentioned. Not only are actual Sephardim not welcome to speak at the Symposium, but our ideas and values are not even deemed to be part of the discussion.
While it is always possible for the RAMBAM or Judah Halevi to merit a passing mention in line with the circumscribed YU ideological boundaries, the discourse is one that is firmly implanted in the rocky soil of Ashkenaz and is processed through the nihilism of PILPUL and Da’as Torah authoritarianism. It is a Judaism that is far less tolerant and inclusive than the one practiced by Sephardim, one marked by division and contentiousness.
Haym Soloveitchik, as has become common in the Orthodox Jewish world, never even entertains the possibility afforded by the Sephardic heritage. We can see this intolerance and prejudice in his 1994 article, as well as in the myriad responses to it.
The Tradition crowd is thus simultaneously at one with the HARDALIM and with the Tikvah Straussian Neo-Cons. It is a Jewish realignment that speaks to the crisis of the time we now live in, as Judaism moves inexorably into the dark path of the irrational and the magical occult.
Rather than opening up to Jewish Humanism and its enlightened values, we are now faced with a well-organized, well-funded, and harshly anti-Humanist configuration that rejects the Open Text of Midrash, as it rejects the philosophy and science of Maimonides and the Andalusian Jewish heritage.
David Shasha
From SHU 958, August 5, 2020