I Am Traditionally Observant, Not Orthodox: My Religious Evolution (Part III)

(Part I, II)

As someone committed to traditional practice while still interacting with Western thought, it should come as no surprise that I would eventually find my way to Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed. Taking Alan Brill's class on the Guide introduced me to the writings of Leo Strauss and the possibility of reading Maimonides in a highly "unorthodox" fashion. On the flip side, I came to recognize that, if we were to take Maimonides doctrinally seriously, we would have to condemn most Haredim as heretics. This, along with Marc Shapiro's Limits of Orthodox Theology got me to start questioning whether there was anything particularly authoritative about Orthodox beliefs. My high school self, if asked about Orthodox beliefs, would have recited Maimonides' Thirteen Principles as something accepted by all traditional Jews going back to the Bible. Now I had to consider the possibility that these were the creation of the Middle Ages and that Maimonides himself may not have believed them. 

The Slifkin affair helped give these issues practical weight. Much as with the Republican Party, I could identify as Haredi for a long time after it stopped making logical sense because I convinced myself that most Haredim were like me. For example, I assumed that most Haredim really were ok with evolution even if they liked to take potshots at it. Haredi outreach literature assured readers that evolution was not a problem for Judaism. The ban on Rabbi Natan Slifkin changed that. It quickly became clear that the opponents of Slifkin were not some fringe group but mainstream Haredi society itself. It was not just evolution at stake, what was being rejected was the entire Jewish rationalist tradition itself. In essence, either, over the course of less than a decade, Rabbi Avigdor Miller, reaching out from his grave, had taken over Haredi Judaism or I had been deluding myself as to what Haredi Judaism was really about. 

As with my conservativism, leaving Yeshiva University for Ohio State in 2006 affected my Judaism. I was isolated without a strong sense of community. Living inside my head without the feeling of being answerable to anyone else, it could only be expected that I would put together a Judaism to suit me. Readers may be surprised to learn that I continued to wear a black hat and jacket through my first year at OSU. Even though it was several years since I had identified with the Haredi community, I continued to wear a black hat as a matter of habit. During the summer of 2007, I fractured my clavicle. For several weeks, it was not practical for me to wear a jacket. If I was not going to wear a jacket, I might as well not wear a hat either. Now that I had stopped, I had the perfect excuse not to take it back up again. 

What led me to stop identifying even with the Modern Orthodox community was biblical criticism and women in the rabbinate. The funny thing about these issues is that I am actually pretty conservative on both of them. It is not as if I believe that biblical criticism refuted the Bible. I know enough Orthodox apologetics to defend against the obvious attacks. Furthermore, as a historian, I know to be skeptical as to what we can say for certainty about the ancient world as well as to the agendas that people bring to interpreting evidence. 

As with many religious scientists confronting evolution, I recognize a distinction between methodological and ontological naturalism. History and science are both games played by rules, one of which is to do research as if the supernatural does not exist. While this means that neither history nor science can ever be used to directly attack religion, it does force one to go about one's day to day studies sounding distinctly irreligious. 

That being said, as the historical method became critical to how I navigated the world, I felt I needed the freedom to go where the historical method might take me even when it might go against orthodoxy. There was a tipping point where I decided that I was not going to stretch orthodoxy just far enough to say that I was just ok but anyone to the left of me was a heretic. From this perspective, it no longer mattered if I had really crossed any lines or not. As long as I believed that one needed the moral legitimacy to do so, I might as well consider myself not Orthodox. 

My opinion as to women rabbis followed a similar course. I am of a very conservative sensibility. I believe that society benefits from having distinct concepts of men and women and can therefore accept that this can even spill over to men and women having distinct roles, including women being excluded from the rabbinate. If pressed, I might employ some version of G. K. Chesterton's anarchist argument against women's suffrage. The moment you give women the vote, you are admitting that government has full legitimate authority over them. As opposed to recognizing the existence of a women's sphere of existence which is outside of politics by virtue of the fact that women cannot vote. Similarly, putting women in the rabbinate means that rabbis are the only legitimate religious authorities. 

It is one thing to acknowledge that if it was up to me to vote on whether to have women rabbis, I might allow myself to get distracted by other issues that might assume greater importance. It is another matter entirely to make the essence of Judaism about opposing women rabbis to the extent that this would be an issue worth throwing people out. If you are putting more effort into denouncing women rabbis than Haredi claims about the power of gedolim, as exemplified by Kupat Ha'ir, then you clearly lack proper monotheist zeal and might even be an idolater. 

The reality of Orthodox Judaism today, including Modern Orthodoxy, is to denounce biblical criticism and women rabbis at the same time as it winks and nods at gedolim worship. That is not me. So I am ok with being considered not-Orthodox. It simplifies things for me not to be tied down by that label. I prefer to think of myself as a traditionally observant Maimonidean Jew. If there was an intellectually serious Conservative community in my area, committed to halakha and untainted by modern leftism or tikkun olam rhetoric, I would join them. I do not have that so I am stuck doing the best I can without a community in which I really feel comfortable in. 

People who have met me sometimes comment as to how shocked they are when they see how I look and live my life and hear what I sound like when I start talking about religion. One friend, after knowing me for several years, found out that my  father is an Orthodox rabbi and commented: "oh, that explains so much about you." Hopefully, these pieces I have written, will help readers confused about where to place me religiously and offer some context for understanding this blog. 

“They Can Say It, We Cannot:” The Haredi Assault on Jewish Law and Jewish Thought

Rabbi Natan Slifkin has an essay "They Can Say It, We Cannot," which responds to an argument of Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv that certain beliefs, such as the Sages of the Talmud could be wrong about matters of science, could be heretical despite the fact that legitimate Jewish figures held them. Rav Elyashiv claims that these opinions were rejected by Jewish tradition and now we must follow the "majority." So people like Rabbi Abraham Maimonides could believe in rabbinic fallibility, but we cannot. I actually had a similar conversation with a Haredi uncle in Israel. He responded to my claim that I was free to reject non-legalist rabbinic statements (aggadita) because Isaac Abarbanel did it on a regular basis with a "he could do it, we cannot." To which asked whether there was a five hundred year limit on being a heretic.

One of the interesting things about present-day Haredi thought is that it lacks a distinction between law (halacha) and thought (hashkafa) to the extent that these terms might very well cease to be relevant. It would seem that they reject the key distinction between the two, mainly that thought deals with objective reality while law does not. Law goes based on what the established community decides. It is irrelevant if even God says a certain oven is pure or if objective reality says that Yom Kippur is on a certain day. Because of this, we are free to ignore objective reality in law. I can go to court with my walking stick and money belt on the day that "really" is Yom Kippur if the rabbinic establishment says Yom Kippur is on a different day. (Mishnah Rosh HaShana 2:10) I can walk away from the debate between Rashi and Rabbenu Tam over tefillin convinced that Rabbenu Tam was right and still have to put on Rashi tefillin in the morning. In halachic debates in the Talmud and amongst the rabbis of the Middle Ages there is no such thing as a "wrong" opinion; there are just opinions, some that we follow in practice and others that we do not. In terms of the science and Torah debate, this allows us to say, like Rabbi Isaac Herzog, that we still follow laws based on faulty science. We do not have to let Judaism collapse into schisms with every side not eating the homes of the other. Thought is clearly different as there are objective truths and no amount of rabbis saying otherwise can change it. Either God has a body or he does not. (Whether or not one is a heretic for holding either opinion is a separate issue.) King Ahab and his entire court did not have the power to overrule Elijah the Prophet as to the number of gods in existence.

This issue of objective reality is, of course, relevant in terms of one's ability to rule and expect other people to follow. Rabbinic authorities have the right to expect those under them to follow them in terms of law, precisely because it is irrelevant whether they are objectively "right." Even people who disagree with them are obligated to follow them on the presumption that, right or wrong, the "buck" has to stop somewhere. When it comes to thought, the issue of ruling is irrelevant because, by definition, if I believe that my rabbinic authority has made a mistake in his theology then he ceases to be my rabbinic authority and I am no longer even allowed to listen to him.

Haredim seem to want it both ways; that law deals with objective reality and those rabbinic authorities can rule on thought. They assume rabbinic infallibility. This turns every legal decision into a theological one. There is no cause to question my religious credentials if I believe that Rabbenu Tam had the better arguments when it came to tefillin. Haredim would challenge my religious credentials for even believing that Rav Elyashiv is "wrong" in his halachic decisions. On the flip side, they expect their opponents to accept their theology as if it were law.

Now, this brings me to a criticism I have of Rabbi Slifkin. He has been very careful to maintain a respectful stance in regards to the Haredi leadership despite their disrespectful treatment of him. It is an intellectually untenable position. I can never accept the legitimacy of anyone who sees me as illegitimate (i.e. not just wrong, but insane, wicked or otherwise ignorant). To do that would be to legitimize my own illegitimacy. The moment members of the Haredi community went from saying that Rabbi Slifkin was not only wrong but a heretic, there could be no more room for Eilu v'Eilu that both sides are the will of God. (See Rabbi Benjamin Hecht's series of articles on the topic.) Either we who support things like rabbinic fallibility and evolution are right or our opponents are right; there can be no middle ground. We need to be striking back. Anyone who denies evolution denies the righteousness of God, by assuming that God has conned humanity by planting the evidence for the express purpose of convincing us that evolution happened. Why should we treat this any differently from Jews who believe that God needed to send his son down to die for our sins? It would be one thing to give observant Jews the benefit of the doubt for the sake of Orthodox unity. But to allow such Jews to question our orthodoxy, that is unacceptable.

This would also be good political tactics. If the Haredi leadership knew that they were going to be destroying Orthodoxy by making evolution illegitimate maybe they would have held back. We can wash our hands of any responsibility of maintaining a unified Orthodox community. It is the Haredim who declared war on us in support of their heretical theology; they are the ones who bear the responsibility for the consequences.

Ungodly Words: Toward a Political Philosophy of Heresy (Part I)

A cardinal principle of liberal society is that there is no such thing as heresy or heretics; that the notion of a thought crime is a contradiction in terms. That being said the issue of heresy remains a potent one even in the West, though its implications may be somewhat different than in earlier epochs. In the past, when people spoke about heretics, they generally were referring to one whose beliefs lie outside of a given framework and as such is brought into opposition with those whose beliefs lie within that framework. In the modern-day situation, more and more we see that people can come under fire, not just for their lack of belief, but merely because they are open to an idea and take it seriously enough to raise it as a legitimate question. The sin here is not that they do not believe in a doctrine but that they choose to view it as a doctrine in the first place instead of as a necessary truth.

This conception of heresy is useful to explain the unfortunate fate of Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard. He was attacked not for his belief that there are intrinsic genetic differences between men and women, but because he raised the issue as a question. In the eyes of the feminists who attacked Summers, his sin was not his lack of belief in the doctrine of the non-existence of intrinsic differences between men and women. His sin was that he failed to see this doctrine as an obvious and necessary truth in the first place.

At the same time this was going on, half a world away, there was the parallel story of Rabbi Natan Slifkin, who was attacked by the Haredi rabbinical establishment for being pro-evolution and for reading rabbinic texts allegorically. What was interesting about the whole Slifkin affair was that the main thrust of his opponents' attacks was not against the truth of evolution, though they definitely viewed it as a falsehood. Rabbi Slifkin was not trying to convince anyone to accept the theory of evolution, who was not already persuaded by the scientific evidence. All he was doing was suggesting a method with which to deal with evolution within an orthodox framework. The real issue was whether or not there existed, as Rabbi Slifkin claimed, legitimate trends within rabbinic tradition that can be seen as being friendly to evolution. In essence, the issue was whether one could, in the first place, take the notion that the theory of evolution is true seriously.

One is reminded of the Catholic Church's prosecution of Galileo in the seventeenth century. Contrary to common perception Galileo was put on trial less for his beliefs in heliocentrism than for his attempt to justify heliocentrism on biblical grounds (as well as some remarkably poor political judgment on his part). The Counter-Reformation Church was not particularly concerned with science; it was, though, at war with Protestantism. Holding beliefs about the natural world that went against Church teaching was a venial sin; attempting to support a belief contrary to Church teaching through an unorthodox interpretation of scripture was Protestantism. I might go so far as to suggest that Galileo's trial was not a remnant of medieval thinking, but the Catholic Church leading the way for a modern understanding of heresy.

I do not raise these issues in order to engage in pious liberal proclamations against the ever-existing threats to the cause of free thought; though I personally would rather deal with heathens, who openly proclaim themselves as enemies of free thought as opposed to apostates, who have betrayed the tradition. I raise this issue because I believe that the notion of heresy is and will continue to be an important part of our political discourse. As long as groups are going to be formed around ideas then the paradigm of Us, who believe, versus that Other, who does not believe, will exist to some extent and as such there will be Believers and Heretics. As such I believe that it is prudent to come to an understanding as to the nature of heresy and its role in society. I am not interested in defining heresy; rather I would like to engage in an exploration of the underlying rationale that allows one to go from saying, on a theoretical level, that if a text were to advocate ideas that contradicted dogma then that text would be heretical to saying, on a practical level, that such and such a text actually does contradict statements of dogma and is therefore heretical. While in doing this I will be dealing with this issue within a Jewish context, though what I say should, in theory, apply to any system of thought.

(To be continued …)

The Blind Censor

The chief film censor in Iran, up until 1994, was blind. Well, nearly blind. Before that, he was the censor for theater. One of my playwright friends once described how he would sit in the theater wearing thick glasses that seemed to hide more than they revealed. An assistant who sat by him would explain the action onstage, and he would dictate the parts that needed to be cut.

After 1994, this censor became the head of the new television channel. There, he perfected his methods and demanded that the scriptwriters give him their scripts on audiotape; they were forbidden to make them attractive or dramatize them in any way. He then made his judgments about the scripts based on the tapes. More interesting, however, is the fact that his successor, who was not blind – not physically, that is – nonetheless followed the same system.
…    

A few years ago some members of the Iranian Parliament set up an investigative committee to examine the content of national television. The committee issued a lengthy report in which it condemned the showing of Billy Budd, because, it claimed, the story promoted homosexuality. Ironically, the Iranian television programmers had mainly chosen that film because of its lack of female characters. The cartoon version of Around the World in Eighty Days was also castigated, because the main character – a lion – was British and the film ended in that bastion of imperialism, London. (Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books pg. 24-25.)

Who in the Christian or Jewish world would be a good stand in for the blind censor or the Iranian MP? What immediately comes to my mind are the Haredi rabbis who could not read English, but still managed to issue a ban against Rabbi Slifkin.

Articles of Interest

Moment magazine has an article on converts to Judaism, in which Y-Love is featured.


Ashley Tedesco writes in Jewcy about attempting to be a Jewish studies major at a Catholic school like Fordham. Catholic schools actually often prove to be quite hospitable places for Orthodox Jews and many Yeshiva University people have specifically gone on to Fordham.


Left Brain Right Brain has Ari Ne'eman's testimony before the Equal Opportunity Commission. In the course of the conversation the issue of eliminating many of the specific autism groupings is raised.


I recently mentioned Malcolm Gladwell on this blog. For those of you who are not familiar with him, here is an article of his from a few months ago dealing with how "Davids" can defeat "Goliaths." This article ranges from military issues and Lawrence of Arabia to twelve year old girls playing basketball with a full court press.


Finally Garnel Ironheart offers a lament about the fact that Haredim can get away with knocking Modern Orthodox leaders, but it is expected as a matter of course that Modern Orthodox Jews will be respectful when it comes to Haredi leaders. In the comments section Rabbi Benjamin Hecht links to an old article of his that I read years ago and consider to be the best piece to come out of the whole Slifkin affair. The article challenges Haredim to justify, in terms of Jewish law and tradition, the claim that their rabbis are the de facto authorities over all Jews including those Jews who do not live in their communities or never learned in their schools. Rabbi Yosef Blau once said something similar, noting that, of all the rabbis who signed the Slifkin ban, there was no one, with the exception of Rav Elyashiv, that he would have ever thought to ask a question a question of Jewish to and even Rav Elyashiv he never would have asked something related to theology.

De Rossi Really Was Like Slifkin

During the campaign against R. Natan Slifkin one of the claims made by his opponents was that they were following in the footsteps of the rabbis in the sixteenth century who opposed Azariah de Rossi and his book the Meor Enayim. There may be more truth to this than Slifkin’s opponents would like particularly if one accepts the account of the early stages of the campaign against de Rossi offered by Robert Bonfil in his essay, “Some Reflections on the Place of Azariah de Rossi’s Meor Enayim in the Cultural Milieu of Italian Renaissance Jewry (Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman pg. 23-48). Interestingly enough Bonfil wrote this essay in the early 1980s, two decades before this whole controversy.

According to Bonfil’s reconstruction of the event:

De Rossi’s real problem began once R. Isaac Foa of Reggio read the book. The old rabbi, whose intellectual energies seem to have been devoted entirely to Talmudic studies interspersed with mystical speculation, appears to have been shocked at the nonchalance with which de Rossi dealt with certain Aggadot believed by kabbalists to have great theosophical implications. For the likes of R. Foa, this was unthinkable. He dispatched an alarmed letter to Venice, where his son-in-law, R. Menahem Azariah da Fano, had been residing for some months. The letter has not been preserved, so wed do not know exactly what alarmed R. R. Foa. We do know, however, that the letter left a deep impression upon R. Samuel Judah Katzenellenbogen. This scholar, though a competent Talmudist, does not seem to have been distinguished either by his intellectual sensitivity or by his realism, and was, moreover, rather young at the time. He acted impulsively, apparently before he had even had a chance to read the Meor Enayim. In a circular letter addressed to the Italian Jewish communities, he summarized the warnings of R. Foa and appended to it the text of a manifesto against the book that he proposed for signature. The letter itself has not been preserved, and therefore we do not know whether R. Katzenellenbogen was any more specific in it than in his manifesto, where his charge against the book was rather vague, to say the least: “And there were some chapters,” he wrote, “of that third section, called Days of the World, full of new issues never dreamed of by our fathers.”

R. Katzenellenbogen did not claim any position of leadership for himself in the crusade he called for. Perhaps he thought, or hoped, that “the very excellent scholars of each and every city” would agree to sign the manifesto, especially since it merely sought to require that every Jew who wanted to read or own the book “obtain written permission from the rabbis of his city." …

Nonetheless, R. Katzenellenbogen’s initiative seems to have come as a major surprise. Those who heeded his call and signed with him in Venice were no outstanding scholars. Most of them were leaders of the Levantine community, recently settled in Venice; some are unfamiliar to us, and may have also been so to their contemporaries. … (pg. 26-27)

Bonfil brings the example of R. Abraham Manahem Porto ha-Cohen.

R. Porto had not read the book, but testified rather that “through hearsay I heard of him [de Rossi] having treated lightly the words of the Sages.” He had moreover, heard from de Rossi himself about his dangerously novel chronological theory. … R. Porto delivered before his flock a standard sermon on the prohibition of reading sfarim hitzoniyim, warned them of the potential harmful consequences of a practical nature that could result from de Rossi’s chronological reckonings, posted the manifesto in the synagogue without signing it, and stood by for clarifications. (pg. 28)

R. Porto would later retract his ban after de Rossi agreed to make some editorial changes to the book, which did not include his acceptance of standard chronology.

So de Rossi was the victim of a bunch of little known rabbis, who went after him without having bothered to read his book and the issue cascaded from there. Rather than demonstrate the cohesiveness of the sixteenth-century rabbinate the de Rossi affair shows a rabbinate that was in disarray and easily manipulated to suit the purposes of those pulling the strings. Does this remind you of anything?

Ben Stein’s War: A Review of Expelled

I am a practitioner of Orthodox Judaism and a believer in evolution. My view as to the role of religion and science has been heavily influenced by the work of Rabbi Natan Slifkin and Dr. Francis Collins. Because of this I am fairly hostile to intelligent design and its promoters. So I came into Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled, with apprehension. I think Win Ben Stein’s Money was the greatest game show in the history of television, featuring Ben Stein’s dry wit and the spectacle of him putting his money where his mouth was, matching himself against the show’s wining contestants. I have tremendous respect for Ben Stein’s intelligence and the thought of him taking the stand on behalf of intelligent design was disconcerting to say the least.
Expelled is a film that will have a lot of people saying a lot of different things about it. Religious conservatives will likely declare it to be a stunning refutation of Darwinism and pretty much everyone else will see it as a pile of rubbish. Be careful about accepting at face value what you hear about this film; this is one of those films that one must see for oneself. The film is very open ended and one can imprint almost anything you want onto it; this is a weakness of the film, but also just might be its saving grace.

Judging just from the film, I am not certain were Ben Stein stands on the issue of intelligent design. He is clearly critical of what he sees as a Darwinian establishment that, from his point of view, has used strong arm tactics against all those who would dare to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy. Proponents of intelligent design are portrayed sympathetically as scientists who are the victims of a totalitarian Darwinian establishment, which seeks to quash all dissenters. This point is emphasized by frequent cuts to footage of the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. To be fair to Ben Stein he specifically denies that the theory of evolution caused the Holocaust. He just believes that evolution was a key enabling factor in the rise of the Nazis. Further than this I am not certain. Is Ben Stein an actual supporter of intelligent design or is he simply defending their right to dissent? For that matter what does Ben Stein mean when he uses the terms intelligent design and Darwinian evolution; does intelligent design mean that evolution came about through a creator and does Darwinian evolution mean that evolution happened without a designer?

This lack of clarity severally weakens the film, turning it into a hodgepodge of vague generalizations. We are given a parade of people representing either “Big Science” on the one hand or who are dissenters from it. The film never really clarifies what each of these people hold. I think the film would have benefited if each interviewees were asked if they believed in God and if so what sort of God they believed in and to what extent they were willing to accept the theory of evolution.

I believe that this film, despite itself, is useful precisely because it illustrates the problem that has plagued the whole debate over evolution, which unfortunately, all too often, has descended to rhetoric, vague generalizations and accusations. While Expelled has all of these same flaws, I did not find it to be mean spirited and Ben Stein, to his credit, conducts himself with a high level of class.

This ambiguity over what the intelligent design debate is supposed to be about plays itself out very nicely over the course of the film. In the film, the head of the Discovery Institute, which has spearheaded the intelligent design movement, denies that there is anything religious about his group’s work and that they are simply critical of certain elements of traditional Darwinism. Advocates of intelligent design claim that they are not arguing for the existence of God. Believing in some sort of High Power, might offer a solution to some of the issues they raise, but that is simply speculation and has nothing really to do with their work as scientists. On the other side, Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken opponents of intelligent design, when interviewed, is perfectly willing to acknowledge the possibility that life was seeded by some being of “higher intelligence,” but that this being must have also come into existence by some sort of naturalistic process. So what is everyone arguing about? I guess it is that intelligent design advocates claim that Darwin is flawed. But there are a lot of ongoing debates within the scientific community as to many of the details of evolution via natural selection, such whether it happened gradually or whether it happened through relatively sudden shifts. The advocates of intelligent design do not seem to be actually rejecting Darwinian evolution so what is all the fuss about?

Despite the fact that I disagree strongly with what I think the film is trying to say, Ben Stein still manages to be entertaining. Maybe this is just me trying to see the good in what Ben Stein has produced here, but I do think that he has accomplished something worthwhile.

Slifkin Affair I: The Theological Neccesity to Accept the Claims of Science.

As with any self-respecting Jewish blogger, I do have an opinion about the Slifkin affair and the relationship between religion and science. So here is a start. I am first and foremost a rationalist, someone with a deep-rooted faith in the power of the human mind to understand the physical world and even to possibly go beyond it. If I did not believe this, I could not believe in the possibility of human beings knowing of God. If I reject the conclusions that my mind has reached as to the nature of the physical world, why should I be any less skeptical about the conclusions that my mind has reached about any supreme, omnipotent, metaphysical beings? As such, from a strictly theological perspective, I have no choice but to treat the products of human reason, such as science, with reverence. If the gift which God has given us leads us to certain conclusions then we must take those conclusions seriously even if those conclusions are problematic from the perspective of traditional thought. Those who dismiss science and argue that human reason is limited and must therefore submit to a divine tradition miss the point. If human reason has no validity then the structure on which we base this divine tradition goes with it. Because of this, in the case of evolution, I feel theologically bound to accept its claims. To use religion to reject evolution would not just be bad science it would be heresy as well.