[wvns] Noah Feldman: The Big Kvetch
Gary Rosenblatt of The New York Jewish Week starkly frames the issue
of Harvard Professor Noah Feldman's erasure from the ranks of
graduates of Brookline's Maimonides School.
What Feldman's essay points up is that intermarriage is the
irreconcilable issue for those who argue that American and Jewish
values are compatible. "We've sold a lot of Jews a bill of goods when
we've told them there are no contradictions between being a good Jew
and an American," noted Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish
history at Brandeis University. "In America you are taught you can
marry anyone you fall in love with, but Judaism argues that we are a
minority culture and will only survive if Jews marry other Jews."
Rosenblatt's analysis probably applies even more strongly to Zionism
than to Orthodox Judaism. American and Zionist values are simply
completely contradictory in many serious ways, and when someone claims
that America and Israel share the same values, many Americans and
non-Americans become very uncomfortable.
There is a fundamental disconnect between American principles and
fundamental beliefs of Zionists and many if not most Jewish Americans.
===
Some Background on The Maimonides School and Noah Feldman
Joseph Soloveitchik, who founded Maimonides School was intensely
racist, and the school has followed his tradition slavishly. A Hebrew
language circle in which I took part asked me to videotape a series of
Motza'ei Shabbat lectures given by Rabbi Schacter at the Maimonides
School. Schacter used to be the Dean of the School's Rabbi Joseph B.
Soloveitchik Institute.
Schacter misrepresented the history of Jewish and Christian attitudes
toward Jerusalem, but when he started to discuss Muslim attitudes he
turned viciously racist and spewed lots of essentialist primordialist
nonsense. He claimed that Muslims and Arabs were completely
hypocritical liars to feign interest in Jerusalem now that it was once
again rightfully in Jewish possession. Eventually, he made me stop
recording because he did not want any electronic record of the talk.
Despite Schacter's claims Muslims have esteemed Jerusalem intensely
since it first came under Islamic rule, and the city was an
intellectual, spiritual and pilgramage center for the whole Muslim
world. In contrast, since the 10th century at least (probably earlier)
Jerusalem has had much more importance for Jews as a spiritual concept
than as a physical place.
Vilna was the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Thessalonika was la chica
Yerushalayim. Amsterdam was the Jerusalem of the North. While for
Palestinians there is only one Jerusalem, it probably would not be
hard to come up with 50-100 cities that Jews called Jerusalem over the
last millennium.
I could write a few interesting chapters on some of the most
interesting of these "Jerusalems."
The actual physical Jerusalem became, especially for ethnic
Ashkenazim, sort of a dumping ground for trouble-makers or eccentrics
and not a place of tremendous emotional significance or attachment. A
young woman, the Virgin of Ludmir, is getting uppity and trying to
play the role of a Tzaddik or Rebbe. The community sends her to
Jerusalem in Palestine, and for the most part no one hears of her again.
As for Noah Feldman, he was a junior Harvard fellow and has a D.Phil.
(Oxon) in Islamic Thought. The Bush administration sent Feldman to
Iraq in the early days of the occupation. He was to oversee the
proper incorporation of Islamic principles into the Iraqi
constitution. He was to take into account the Shiite and Sunni
sectarian differences. I doubt that many Iraqis considered such issues
so important before Feldman (and thus the Bush administration) told
Iraqis that the differences were so critical. Feldman only lasted in
Iraq for about a month. He needed an Iraqi Arabic phrase book to get
around. He probably bears some responsibility for subsequent sectarian
carnage.
Joachim Martillo - thorsprovoni @ aol.com
===
Orthodox Paradox
By NOAH FELDMAN
July 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/magazine/22yeshiva-t.html?ex=1186027200&en=4277230fa9e0780a&ei=5070
A number of years ago, I went to my 10th high-school reunion, in the
backyard of the one classmate whose parents had a pool. Lots of my
classmates were there. Almost all were married, and many already had
kids. This was not as unusual as it might seem, since I went to a
yeshiva day school, and nearly everyone remained Orthodox. I brought
my girlfriend. At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot
by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from first
grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few
months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, then looked
again. My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found.
I didn't want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend,
to whom I was by that time engaged. So I called my oldest school
friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation.
"You're kidding, right?" she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her
presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of
Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who
was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.
Not long after, I bumped into the photographer, in synagogue, on Yom
Kippur. When I walked over to him, his pained expression told me what
I already knew. "It wasn't me," he said. I believed him.
Since then I have occasionally been in contact with the school's
alumni director, who has known me since I was a child. I say "in
contact," but that implies mutuality where none exists. What I really
mean is that in the nine years since the reunion I have sent him
several updates about my life, for inclusion in the "Mazal Tov"
section of the newsletter. I sent him news of my marriage. When our
son was born, I asked him to report that happy event. The most recent
news was the birth of our daughter this winter. Nothing doing. None of
my reports made it into print.
It would be more dramatic if I had been excommunicated like Baruch
Spinoza, in a ceremony complete with black candles and a ban on all
social contact, a rite whose solemnity reflected the seriousness of
its consequences. But in the modern world, the formal communal ban is
an anachronism. Many of my closest relationships are still with people
who remain in the Orthodox fold. As best I know, no one, not even the
rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life
decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand. What remains
of the old technique of excommunication is simply nonrecognition in
the school's formal publications, where my classmates' growing
families and considerable accomplishments are joyfully celebrated.
The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not
ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside
traditional Talmud and Bible study. Our advanced Talmud and Hebrew
classes were interspersed with advanced-placement courses in French
literature and European political history, all skillfully coordinated
to prime us for the Ivy League.
To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep
school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of
Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years.
That aspiration is not without its difficulties. My own personal
lesson in nonrecognition is just one small symptom of the challenge of
reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity —
of Slobodka and St. Paul's. In premodern Europe, where the state gave
the Jewish community the power to enforce its own rules of membership
through coercive force, excommunication literally divested its victim
of his legal personality, of his rights and standing in the community.
The modern liberal state, though, neither polices nor delegates the
power to police religious membership; that is now a social matter, not
a legal one. Today a religious community that seeks to preserve its
traditional structure must maintain its boundaries using whatever
independent means it can muster — right down to the selective editing
of alumni newsletters.
Despite my intimate understanding of the mind-set that requires such
careful attention to who is in and who is out, I am still somehow
taken by surprise each time I am confronted with my old school's
inability to treat me like any other graduate. I have tried in my own
imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me,
expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while
trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in
the public sphere. As a result, I have not felt myself to have
rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done
so by virtue of my marriage.
Some part of me still expects — against the judgment of experience —
that the individual human beings who make up the institution and
community where I spent so many years of my life will put our
longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries.
The school did educate me and influence me deeply. What I learned
there informs every part of my inner life. In the sense of shared
history and formation, I remain of the community even while no longer
fully in the community.
If this is dissonance, it is at least dissonance that the modern
Orthodox should be able to understand: the desire to inhabit multiple
worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence.
After all, the school's attempt to bring the ideals of Orthodox
Judaism into dialogue with a certain slice of late-20th-century
American life was in many ways fantastically rich and productive. For
those of us willing to accept a bit of both worlds, I would say, it
almost worked.
Fitting In
Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a
central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of
traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613
biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the
reality of the modern world. You must strive to be, as a poet of the
time put it, "a Jew in the home and a man in the street." Even as we
students of the Maimonides School spent half of every school day
immersed in what was unabashedly a medieval curriculum, our aim was to
seem to outsiders — and to ourselves — like reasonable, mainstream
people, not fanatics or cult members.
This ambition is best exemplified today by Senator Joe Lieberman. His
run for the vice presidency in 2000 put the "modern" in modern
Orthodox, demonstrating that an Orthodox Jewish candidate could be
accepted by America at large as essentially a regular guy. (Some of
this, of course, was simply the result of ignorance. As John Breaux,
then a senator from Louisiana, so memorably put it with regard to
Lieberman during the 2000 campaign, "I don't think American voters
care where a man goes to church on Sunday.") Whatever concerns
Lieberman's Jewish identity may have raised in the heartland seem to
have been moderated, rather than stoked, by the fact that his chosen
Jewish denomination was Orthodox — that he seemed to really and truly
believe in something. His Orthodoxy elicited none of the
half-whispered attacks that Mitt Romney's Mormonism has already
prompted in this electoral cycle, none of the dark hints that it was,
in some basic sense, weird.
Lieberman's overt normalcy really is remarkable. Though modern
Orthodox Jews do not typically wear the long beards, side curls and
black, nostalgic Old World garments favored by the ultra-Orthodox, the
men do wear beneath their clothes a small fringed prayer shawl every
bit as outré as the sacred undergarments worn by Mormons. Morning
prayers are accompanied by the daily donning of phylacteries, which,
though painless, resemble in their leather-strappy way the cinched
cilice worn by the initiates of Opus Dei and so lasciviously depicted
in "The Da Vinci Code." Food restrictions are tight: a committed
modern Orthodox observer would not drink wine with non-Jews and would
have trouble finding anything to eat in a nonkosher restaurant other
than undressed cold greens (assuming, of course, that the salad was
prepared with a kosher knife).
The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance
the observant person from the rest of the world. When followed
precisely, as I learned growing up, they accomplish exactly that.
Every bite requires categorization into permitted and prohibited, milk
or meat. To follow these laws, to analyze each ingredient in each food
that comes into your purview, is to construct the world in terms of
the rules borne by those who keep kosher. The category of the unkosher
comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the
rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say,
almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not. You cannot easily
break bread with them, but that is not all. You cannot, in a deeper
sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring
the body through food.
And yet the Maimonides School, by juxtaposing traditional and secular
curricula, gave me a feeling of being connected to the broader world.
Line by line we burrowed into the old texts in their original Hebrew
and Aramaic. The poetry of the Prophets sang in our ears. After years
of this, I found I could recite the better part of the Hebrew Bible
from memory.
Among other things, this meant that when I encountered the writings of
the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I felt
immediate kinship. They read those same exact texts again and again —
often in Hebrew — searching for clues about their own errand into the
American wilderness.
In our literature classes we would glimpse Homer's wine-dark sea, then
move to a different classroom and dive headlong into the sea of the
Talmud. Here the pleasure of legal-intellectual argument had no
stopping place, no end. A problem in Talmud study is never answered,
it is only deepened. The Bible prohibits work on the Sabbath. But what
is work? The rabbis began with 39 categories, each of which called for
its own classification into as many as 39 further subcategories. Then
came the problem of intention: What state of mind is required for
"work" to have occurred? You might perform an act of work
absent-mindedly, having forgotten that it was the Sabbath, or
ignorantly, not knowing that action constituted work. You might
perform an action with the goal of achieving some permissible outcome
— but that result might inevitably entail some prohibited work's
taking place. Learning this sort of reasoning as a child prepared me
well, as it has countless others, for the ways of American law.
Beyond the complementarities of Jewish learning and secular knowledge,
our remarkable teachers also offered access to a wider world. Even
among the rabbis there was a smattering of Ph.D.'s and near-doctorates
to give us a taste of a critical-academic approach to knowledge, not
just a religious one. And the teachers of the secular subjects were
fantastic. One of the best taught me eighth-grade English when he was
barely out of college himself, before he became a poet, a professor
and an important queer theorist. Given Orthodoxy's condemnation of
homosexuality, he must have made it onto the faculty through the sheer
cluelessness of the administration. Lord only knows what teachers like
him, visitors from the real world, made of our quirky ways. (In the
book of poems about his teaching years, we students are decorously
transformed into Italian-Americans.)
In allowing us, intentionally or not, to see the world and the Torah
as profoundly interconnected, the school was faithful to the doctrines
of its eponym, the great medieval Jewish legalist and philosopher
Moses Maimonides. Easily the most extraordinary figure in
post-biblical Jewish history, Maimonides taught that accurate
knowledge of the world — physical and metaphysical — was, alongside
studying, obeying and understanding the commandments, the one route to
the ultimate summum bonum of knowing God. A life lived by these
precepts can be both noble and beautiful, and I believe the best and
wisest of my classmates and teachers come very close indeed to
achieving it.
The Dynamics of Prohibition
For many of us, the consilience of faith and modernity that sometimes
appears within the reach of modern Orthodoxy is a tantalizing
prospect. But it can be undermined by the fragile fault lines between
the moral substructures of the two worldviews, which can widen into
deep ruptures on important matters of life and love.
One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the
community who later died tragically young — addressed a school
assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox
professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that
the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its
purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The
rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a
non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so
they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a
non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the
Jewish and non-Jewish communities.
Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of
outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it
values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of
laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives
equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter
explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish
Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.
This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers
rose to suggest that the doctor's attitude was putting him in danger
of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard
from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated
with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a
non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the
patient's life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and
non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you
intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were
in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting
was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the
Sabbath violation to occur.
Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he
said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not
because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in
the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and
non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not
just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the
Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives
might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to
accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world
could not proceed in good faith.
Nothing in the subculture of modern Orthodoxy, however, brought out
the tensions between tradition and modernity more vividly for a young
man than the question of our relationship to sex. Modernity, and maybe
the state-mandated curriculum (I have never checked), called for a day
of sex ed in seventh grade. I have the feeling that the content of our
sex-ed class was the same as those held in public schools in
Massachusetts around the same time, with the notable exception that
none of us would have occasion to deploy even the most minimal
elements of the lesson plan in the foreseeable future. After the
scientific bits of the lesson were over, the rabbi who was head of the
school came in to the classroom to follow up with some indication of
the Jewish-law perspective on these questions. It amounted to a
blanket prohibition on the activities to which we had just been
introduced. After marriage, some rather limited subset of them might
become permissible — but only in the two weeks of the month that
followed the two weeks of ritual abstinence occasioned by menstruation.
After that memorable disquisition, the question of relations between
the sexes went essentially unmentioned again in our formal education.
We were periodically admonished that boys and girls must not touch one
another, even accidentally. Several of the most attractive girls were
singled out for uncomfortable closed-door sessions in which they were
instructed that their manner of dress, which already met the school's
standards for modesty, must be made more modest still so as not to
distract the males around them.
Whatever their disjuncture with American culture of the 1980s, the
erotics of prohibition were real to us. Once, I was called on the
carpet after an anonymous informant told the administration that I had
been seen holding a girl's hand somewhere in Brookline one Sunday
afternoon. The rabbi insinuated that if the girl and I were holding
hands today, premarital sex must surely be right around the corner.
My Talmud teacher — the one who took the physician to task — handed me
four tightly packed columns of closely reasoned rabbinic Hebrew, a
responsum by the pre-eminent Orthodox decisor, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein,
"in the matter of a young man whose heart lures him to enter into
bonds of affection with a young woman not for purposes of marriage."
Rabbi Feinstein's legal judgment with respect to romantic love among
persons too young to marry was definitive. He prohibited it
absolutely, in part on the ground that it would inevitably lead to
nonprocreative seminal emissions, whether intentional or unintentional.
What Feinstein lacked in romantic imagination was more than made up
for by Moses Maimonides, who understood the soul pretty well. He once
characterized the true love of God as all-consuming — "as though one
had contracted the sickness of love." Feinstein's opinion directed my
attention to a passage in Maimonides's legal writings prohibiting
various sorts of contact with women. The most evocative bit runs as
follows: "Even to smell the perfume upon her is prohibited." I have
never been able to escape the feeling that this is a covert love poem
enmeshed in the 14-volume web of dos and don'ts that is Maimonides's
Code of Law. Perfume has not smelled the same to me since.
Difference and Reconciliation
I have spent much of my own professional life focusing on the
predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while
simultaneously cleaving to tradition. Consider the situation of those
Christian evangelicals who want to participate actively in mainstream
politics yet are committed to a biblical literalism that leads them to
oppose stem-cell research and advocate intelligent design in the
classroom. To some secularists, the evangelicals' predicament seems
absurd and their political movement dangerously anti-intellectual. As
it happens, I favor financing stem-cell research and oppose the
teaching of intelligent design or creationism as a "scientific"
doctrine in public schools. Yet I nonetheless feel some sympathy for
the evangelicals' sure-to-fail attempts to stand in the way of the
progress of science, and not just because I respect their concern that
we consider the ethical implications of our technological prowess.
Perhaps I feel sympathy because I can recall the agonies suffered by
my head of school when he stopped by our biology class to discuss the
problem of creation. Following the best modern Orthodox doctrine, he
pointed out that Genesis could be understood allegorically, and that
the length of a day might be numbered in billions of years considering
that the sun, by which our time is reckoned, was not created until the
fourth such "day." Not for him the embarrassing claim, heard sometimes
among the ultra-Orthodox, that dinosaur fossils were embedded by God
within the earth at the moment of creation in order to test our faith
in biblical inerrancy. Natural selection was for him a scientific fact
to be respected like the laws of physics — guided by God but
effectuated though the workings of the natural order. Yet even he
could not leave the classroom without a final caveat. "The truth is,"
he said, "despite what I have just told you, I still have a hard time
believing that man could be descended from monkeys."
This same grappling with tension — and the same failure to resolve it
perfectly — can be found among the many Muslims who embrace both basic
liberal democratic values and orthodox Islamic faith. The literature
of democratic Islam, like that of modern Orthodox Judaism, may be read
as an embodiment of dialectical struggle, the unwillingness to ignore
contemporary reality in constant interplay with the weight of
tradition taken by them as authentic and divinely inspired. The imams
I have met over the years seem, on the whole, no less sincere than the
rabbis who taught me. Their commitment to their faith and to the legal
tradition that comes with it seems just as heartfelt. Liberal Muslims
may even have their own Joe Lieberman in the Minnesota congressman
Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.
The themes of difference and reconciliation that have preoccupied so
much of my own thinking are nowhere more stark than in trying to make
sense of the problem of marriage — which is also, for me, the most
personal aspect of coming to terms with modern Orthodoxy. Although
Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between
Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is
especially definitive.
The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish
law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern
Orthodox community in the liberal modern state. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism
addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group
living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted
Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace
citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the
relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent. The solution
adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community
as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so
much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not
to ask) as by what they do.
Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information
is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish
concern for continuity and self-preservation — itself only intensified
by the memory of the Holocaust — marriage becomes the sine qua non of
social membership in the modern Orthodox community. Marrying a Jewish
but actively nonobservant spouse would in most cases make continued
belonging difficult. Gay Orthodox Jews find themselves marginalized
not only because of their forbidden sexual orientation but also
because within the tradition they cannot marry the partners whom they
might otherwise choose. For those who choose to marry spouses of
another faith, maintaining membership would become all but impossible.
Us and Them
In a few cases, modern Orthodoxy's line-drawing has been implicated in
some truly horrifying events. Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak
Rabin, was a modern Orthodox Jew who believed that Rabin's peace
efforts put him into the Talmudic category of one who may be freely
executed because he is in the act of killing Jews. In 1994, Dr. Baruch
Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the
Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a
prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn. (In a classic
modern Orthodox twist, the same distinguished school has also produced
two Nobel Prize winners.)
Because of the proximity of Goldstein's background and mine, the
details of his reasoning have haunted me. Goldstein committed his
terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the
Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the
Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the
special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the
famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the
Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to
erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.
This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of
Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide
depicted in the Western canon: God's directive to King Saul to kill
every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and
cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared
the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter,
God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I
can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I
was in synagogue, too.
Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical
command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in
another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of
the Assyrian King Sennacherib's policy of population movement at the
time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who
was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the
story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical
recurrence: "In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy
us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands." The
Jews' enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the
Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.
To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking
the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied
Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle
the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without
mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as
well as similarity. According to one newspaper account, when he was
serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish
patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his
gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people,
"Clean of hands and pure of heart."
It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for
ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own
midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense. After the
Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet
Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment —
said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped
through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs
buried below.
Lives of Contradiction
Recently I saw my oldest school friend again, and recalling the tale
of the reunion photograph, we shared a laugh over my continuing status
as persona non grata. She remarked that she had never even considered
sending in her news to our alumni newsletter. "But why not?" I asked.
Her answer was illuminating. As someone who never took steps that
would have led to her public exclusion, she felt that the school and
the community of which it was a part always sought to claim her — a
situation that had its own costs for her sense of autonomy.
For me, having exercised my choices differently, there is no such
risk. With no danger of feeling owned, I haven't lost the wish to be
treated like any other old member. From the standpoint of the
religious community, of course, the preservation of collective mores
requires sanctioning someone who chooses a different way of living.
But I still have my own inward sense of unalienated connection to my
past. In synagogue on Purim with my children reading the Book of
Esther, the beloved ancient phrases give me a sense of joy that not
even Baruch Goldstein can completely take away.
It is more than a little strange, feeling fully engaged with a way of
seeing the world but also, at the same time, feeling so far from it. I
was discussing it just the other day with my best friend — who,
naturally, went to Maimonides, too. The topic was whether we would be
the same people, in essence, had we remained completely within the
bosom of modern Orthodoxy. He didn't think so. Our life choices are
constitutive of who we are, and so different life choices would have
made us into different people — not unrecognizably different, but
palpably, measurably so.
I accepted his point as true — but for some reason I resisted the
conclusion. Couldn't the contradictory world from which we sprang be
just as rich and productive as the contradictory life we actually
live? Would it really, truly, have made all that much difference?
Isn't everyone's life a mass of contradictions? My best friend just
laughed.
Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law
professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations.
===
Noah Feldman's intimate critique in the Times seen as raising the
question of how to deal with Jews who marry out
Modern Orthodoxy Under Attack
Gary Rosenblatt
07/27/1997
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=14347
However tempting, it would be a mistake to dismiss Harvard Law
professor Noah Feldman's personal and pointed critique of Modern
Orthodoxy in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday ("Orthodox
Paradox") as merely The Big Kvetch.
His essay, sure to provide fodder for numerous sermons this Shabbat,
is a long and bitter complaint that despite his numerous and
remarkable professional accomplishments, he has been snubbed by the
Brookline, Mass., yeshiva high school from which he graduated with
honors in the 1980s.
Despite the fact that Feldman was valedictorian of his class at
Harvard, a Rhodes Scholar and Truman Scholar who completed his
doctorate at Oxford in record time and went on to help craft the Iraqi
constitution, he and his then-girlfriend were literally cropped out of
a reunion picture of Maimonides School graduates published in the
alumni newsletter some years ago, and none of the personal updates he
has sent in since have been published. Why? Because the girlfriend —
now wife — is Korean-American. Not Jewish.
And Feldman, who aptly describes the yeshiva's goals of "reconciling
the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity" as seeking to
combine "Slobodka and St. Paul's," maintains that he has been rejected
by his community despite the fact that he has "tried in my own
imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me,
expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while
trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in
the public sphere."
Poor Noah, one may think on first read. How primitive and unfair for
his former yeshiva to refuse to publicly acknowledge his successes.
But as one continues to read Feldman's essay, we see that it is he who
is unfair in expecting to be lauded by a community whose values he has
rejected and in crafting an intellectually dishonest case for himself.
Still, the implicit and more lasting question raised by the essay is
how should the Jewish community in general, and the Orthodox community
in particular, deal with Jews who have married out?
Sending a message to our children that we deeply value in-marriage for
social, religious and communal reasons is all well and good, but what
do we do after the fact, once they've chosen a non-Jewish partner and
conversion is not a part of the conversation?
Unfair Arguments
As for Feldman's arguments, in insisting that Maimonides himself, the
12th century rabbinic scholar and philosopher, believed that knowing
the world was the best way to know God, he ignores the fact that it
was Maimonides who codified Jewish law, established the 13 principles
of faith, and insisted on adherence to halacha.
Feldman then goes on at some length to cite Jewish law's tensions over
violating the Sabbath to save the life of a non-Jew. But he fails to
mention that the dispute is Talmudic, not practical; no Modern
Orthodox doctor would hesitate to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath.
Perhaps most upsetting, and unjust, the only allegedly Modern Orthodox
Jews Feldman describes in his essay besides Sen. Joseph Lieberman are
Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzchak Rabin, and Baruch Goldstein, the
American-born physician who murdered 29 Arabs in Hebron in 1994. The
two are cited as examples of men who took Jewish imperatives to their
logical conclusion by committing murder.
"That's like judging the peacock by its feces," noted Rabbi Saul
Berman, a scholar and former head of Edah, an organization that
promoted Modern Orthodox values.
Indeed, no serious Modern Orthodox Jew is unaware of the tensions
between upholding the Torah law and recognizing the values and
benefits of Western democratic ideals. Rabbi Berman credits Feldman
with pointing out the need to explore such tensions, which when
unrecognized or out of balance can produce an Amir of Goldstein, "but
it's not fair to judge the system" by such aberrations, he maintains.
Psychic Pain
In the end, Feldman's essay is less about Modern Orthodoxy than about
his own psychic pain over being rejected. He wants it all: to be
embraced if not applauded by the Jewish community whose values he has
discarded by marrying out.
As Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, senior scholar at Yeshiva University's
Center for the Jewish Future, noted in a letter sent to The Times,
"fealty to Jewish tradition requires more than a `mind-set' expressing
`respect and love' for its teachings; it presupposes certain
fundamental normative behaviors. America is a country of choices, but
choices have consequences and not every choice is equal. It is
unrealistic for Mr. Feldman to expect to maintain good standing in a
community whose core foundational behavioral — as well as value —
system he has chosen to reject."
Judaism is not alone in this attitude. Witness, for example, the
Catholic Church's discomfort with former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a
divorced Catholic who favors abortion rights, or any religious faith's
attitudes toward members who publicly violate its tenets.
But Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author and television personality ("Shalom
in the Home"), cautions against alienating some of our best and
brightest Jews who marry out. Rabbi Boteach has been a friend of
Feldman's since he served as a rabbi at Oxford University where
Feldman studied for two years in the early 1990s. In an essay in the
Jerusalem Post this week, Rabbi Boteach says that in addition to the
"ethical and humanitarian considerations" regarding ostracizing those
who intermarry, the approach is ineffective, with intermarriage rates
so high.
He argues that the community has a far better chance of winning over
the non-Jewish spouse and the Jewish partner through welcoming
behavior rather than shunning the couple.
This inreach vs. outreach debate has been part of the American Jewish
landscape for a number of years, but there are those who suggest a
more nuanced approach.
"There is a difference between a personal and a communal response to
intermarrieds," noted one Jewish educator who knows Feldman from
Maimonides School. It's one thing, he said, to have a personal
relationship (and one wonders if Feldman would have felt less hurt if
someone from the alumni office had explained the decision not to print
his picture). "But for the school not to crow about a graduate who
married out — how could he think otherwise?"
Cropping Feldman and his wife out of the photo was "unconscionable,"
according to Steven Bayme, national director of contemporary Jewish
life at the American Jewish Committee and a graduate of Maimonides
School. But he noted that even Feldman acknowledged every minority
group requires boundaries to maintain and preserve its own identity
and that marrying out is viewed with disfavor by every denomination of
Judaism.
"The price for the individual may be tragic," Bayme said, "but the
loss is far more destructive for the community in terms of cultural
distinctions and communal cohesion if you remove the boundaries."
Irreconcilable Issue
What Feldman's essay points up is that intermarriage is the
irreconcilable issue for those who argue that American and Jewish
values are compatible. "We've sold a lot of Jews a bill of goods when
we've told them there are no contradictions between being a good Jew
and an American," noted Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish
history at Brandeis University. "In America you are taught you can
marry anyone you fall in love with, but Judaism argues that we are a
minority culture and will only survive if Jews marry other Jews."
Sarna chairs an American Jewish Committee task force on attitudes
toward non-Jews in the community, and asserts that with an estimated
1.7 million non-Jews living in Jewish households — to put it another
way, about 23 percent of those living in Jewish households are not
Jewish — this is "a very important debate" for the community to engage in.
Citing the "magnitude" of the issue and the "bitterness that drips
out" of Feldman's essay, Sarna suggests that perhaps it is time for
the community to reconsider ways to draw people in rather than ignore
or shun them, especially when there are indications that many non-Jews
are supportive of raising their children as Jews.
Others would argue that the community already has tilted so far toward
outreach and acceptance of non-Jews that there is little incentive
left for them to convert to Judaism.
What Noah Feldman has done, consciously or not, is raise some
important issues, less about his old yeshiva and Modern Orthodoxy per
se than about dealing with Jews who do not see marrying out as leaving
the fold.
Conversion is the most obvious and desired solution, but for those who
eschew that option, we need to explore ways to encourage their
positive exposure to Jewish life.
Feldman would argue that just because he intermarried does not mean he
chose to separate himself from his heritage. But being Jewish means
not only incorporating the values and traditions, but also remaining
part of a community.
For all of Feldman's candor in the essay, he has nothing to say about
where he fits into the community, if at all; whether he wanted his
wife to convert; whether they are raising their children as Jews or
not; or his feelings about all this. He only owes us such information
if he wants our understanding and empathy, which clearly he does.
He does owe Modern Orthodoxy an apology for pinning it with his anger
over rejection, knowing full well the rules of engagement. But we in
turn owe him a sense of gratitude for a wake-up call, however
unpleasant, about the need to struggle more deeply and honestly with
the moral and religious tensions and contradictions in Modern
Orthodoxy that can never be reconciled, and about learning how to deal
more sensitively with those on the outside who may be calling out — in
anger and loneliness — for a way back in.
E-mail: Gary @ jewishweek.org
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