Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

Sefaria · Jewish Thought > Modern > Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks · 920 sections

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Wittgenstein once spoke of philosophy as a ladder on which one climbed to clearer perceptions. The ladder could be thrown away once the objective had been reached. Whether or not this is true of philosophy, it is the fate of certain legitimating ideologies. Torah im derekh eretz provided an ideological basis on which Orthodox Jews could participate in the secular world. Religious Zionism of R. Reines’s and R. Mohilever’s kind allowed them to participate in a global movement to establish a Jewish state. So long as these objectives had not been achieved, the ideologies were important motivators. But once they have been realized, so securely that they can be taken for granted, legitimation is no longer so important. A second phase ensues.
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With the objectives realized, the next stage becomes suddenly less clear. Synthesizing Torah and secular culture turns out to be highly complicated and not fully realizable. Shaping Israel into a state and society “according to the Torah of Israel” is also a slow and tortuous process. It suffers occasional setbacks. It calls for tact, diplomacy, accommodation, and a long-range strategy that seems to yield few short-term gains. Instead of ideology representing a simple and dramatic goal, it now dictates a measured realism, an engagement with recalcitrant facts. Slogans that once inspired come to seem to stand for compromise and “the art of the possible.” The promised land is always more promising in the wilderness than in the arrival.
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Hence religious Zionism has come to suffer the same fate as Torah im derekh eretz: having become reality it has ceased to be ideology. Orthodox Jews are more likely than others to live or study in Israel, to speak Hebrew, to make aliyah, and to defend unpopular Israeli government actions. At the same time they are more likely to be highly critical of the very idea of a secular state and to refuse to attach religious significance to such celebrations as Yom ha-Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day. Pragmatic religious Zionism has suffered the failure of success. Having seen the achievement of its first objective, “the land of Israel for the people of Israel,” it has lost momentum on the slow and less dramatic route to the second, “according to the Torah of Israel.”
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Anti-Zionism
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What then has happened to Zionism within religious circles? The question is complicated by the extraordinary variety of approaches to Zionism within Orthodoxy. This variety, which at times generates violent conflict and mutual delegitimation within yeshivah and chasidic circles, is all the more surprising given the impressive amount of common ground shared by almost all Orthodox Jews, Zionist or anti-Zionist.
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Israel is the promised land, the land to which Jews turn in prayer and to which they long to return. Settling in the land is a religious duty. A home outside Israel is only a “temporary dwelling.” Orthodox authorities were universally critical of the deletion of prayers about Zion and the ingathering of exiles from the liturgy of the Reform temple in Hamburg in 1818. Orthodoxy rules out anti-Zionism in the sense of an affirmation of the diaspora as home.
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It is equally unanimous in its rejection of Achad ha-Am’s “cultural Zionism”: the attempt to see in Zionism the basis of a new and secularized Jewish peoplehood. Orthodox Jews are agreed in believing that nationalism is not an end in itself, that there must be serious reservations about working within the framework of secular organizations, and that ultimately Israel must become a society organized along religious lines. The common ground is substantial. The ultimate vision is the same. But within this framework deep divisions are possible and have become pronounced in recent years.
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There have been two broad developments. The first is an increasingly negative attitude toward the state. What had been forgotten in the turbulent years between the 1930s and 1950s is that the consensus of Central and Eastern European Orthodoxy before then had been resolutely opposed to the Zionist movement. This has been the stance of the coalition of Orthodox leaders, Agudat Yisrael, formed in 1912, which brought together yeshivah heads, chasidic leaders, and the successors of Hirsch in Germany, R. Solomon Breuer and his son Isaac. The opposition to Zionism was consistent with a positive attitude to settlement in Israel. Isaac Breuer (1883–1946), for example, believed that the Balfour Declaration had messianic significance and that Orthodox Jews should work toward making Israel a national home. He nonetheless vehemently opposed their participation in the secularist-dominated Zionist movement, which he saw as a rebellion against the sovereignty of God.
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The literature of the early twentieth century contained denunciations of Zionism by an extraordinary array of gedolim, outstanding Torah sages. R. Meir Simcha ha-Cohen of Dvinsk (the Ohr Same’ach, 1843–1926) spoke of the “conspiracy” of Herzl and Nordau and their “abominable movement.” R. Meir Israel ha-Cohen (the Chafetz Chayyim, 1838–1933) denounced Mizrachi, declaring that “our healing will not spring from them nor will their glory be for ever.” R. Joseph Rosen (the Rogachover, 1858–1938) condemned the work of R. Reines as “an abomination and a desolation.” R. Aryeh Leb Alter, Rebbe of Ger (the Sefat Emet, 1847–1905), spoke of Zionism as the result of the “confusions of Satan.”
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Collectively they argued that political activism to bring about a state was an attempt to “force the end” and frustrate the oaths by which Jews had agreed to wait patiently in exile. Redemption would come by God, not man. Zionism was worse than Enlightenment, for instead of offering an alternative to Judaism it offered a substitute. It redefined Jewish identity. It substituted nationalism for the life of Torah. It was, said Isaac Breuer, “collective assimilation.” Though these views lost their salience after Hitler’s rise to power, they were bound eventually to resurface, for they represented virtually the entire spectrum of the Torah world and its leading rabbis, men of unquestioned influence and authority.
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The man who carried the argument into recent times was R. Joel Teitelbaum (the Satmarer Rebbe, 1888–1979). A powerful writer and religious leader, and himself a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, he restated the classic objections to Zionism and raised them to a new level of cosmic significance. The secular government of Israel, composed as it was of sinners and heretics, could yield no blessing. Orthodox Jews should have no part in it. Religious Zionists, in calling the state “the first flowering of our redemption,” were aiding a false messianism.
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Zionism had been the cause of the Holocaust. Jews had taken an oath to not rebel against exile, and the nations had taken an oath not to “persecute Israel overmuch.” Since the Zionists had broken the first, they left the nations free to break the second. Indeed, argued R. Teitelbaum, Zionists had a vested interest in stirring antisemitism, for it made diaspora life difficult and supported the claim that Jews were only safe in Israel. Indeed Israel’s “arrogance” and “aggression” had provoked the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars and had heightened antisemitism throughout the world. If Jews would only give up their state and government “they would undoubtedly remove thereby the wrath of God and all of these hardships would vanish.”
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These views, representing as they did the extreme Neturei Karta position of principled opposition to the State of Israel, were widely regarded as unrepresentative, even fanatical. A not dissimilar position, though, has come recently to be widely shared in yeshivah circles. R. Isaac Hutner, for example, head of the Rabbi Chaim Berlin yeshivah and an influential presence in American Orthodoxy, argued in 1977 that the Final Solution had been influenced by the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had met Hitler in 1941. The Mufti had become a fierce opponent of Jews under Zionist pressure for a Jewish state. Zionism thus brought about for the first time a coalition of Christian West and Islamic East to destroy the Jewish people. The implication was that Zionism had been responsible for the Shoah.
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The continuing secularism of Israeli life, dissatisfactions within Israeli society, and the oppressive sense of unending conflict between Israel, Arab states, the Palestinians, and world opinion – all these lend momentum to a disillusionment with secular Zionism that can be expressed, in religious circles, in terms of sharp oppositions. Zionism comes to seem to be the cause of all evils afflicting Jews. Politics leads to corruption and decay. The essentially apolitical stance of Judaism since the collapse of the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century C.E. is turned into a powerful critique of the Zionist politicization of Jewish history. Among Israeli baalei teshuvah this view is particularly strong. These views coexist, we must recall, with a strong dedication to the land itself and living within it. Indeed, both the yeshivah and chasidic communities have, in recent years, been highly active and organized in the political arena, a fact lamented by supporters of Neturei Karta. Once again we are struck by the conflict between existential reality and religious ideology.
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Messianic Politics
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If anti-Zionism, mild or militant, has been one motif of Orthodoxy in the last two decades, messianic Zionism has been the other. Here we return to the ideas of R. Avraham Kook. R. Kook, we recall, believed that the return of Jews to their land would set in motion a messianic process. The rift between religion and the secular would be mended. There would be a new flowering of religious creativity. From Israel would radiate forth a Divine light which would heal the tensions between Jew, Christian, and Muslim. In the wake of the Six-Day War it became clear that none of these things had happened. But something else had. Jerusalem had returned to Jewish hands. So had Judea and Samaria. Israel’s army had proved victorious against its assembled Arab enemies.
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Throughout Israel there was a mood of religious fervor. As Eliezer Schweid, himself a secularist, noted at the time, the “storytellers and poets of the War of Independence” in 1948 “did not dare employ religious symbols or the language of religious experience.” In 1967 they did. Religious symbols were “consciously perceived and fraught with meaning.” There was “no sense of recoil from using them.” The mood dissipated among the general population, but it was preserved among a small group of religious Zionists, who now found inspiration in R. Kook’s son, R. Zvi Yehudah Kook (1891–1982). Though there were direct continuities between the thought of father and son, there were differences of emphasis also.
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R. Avraham Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, lived and worked prior to the creation of the state. His son spoke to new realities. In R. Avraham Kook’s writings, the emphasis is on aliyah, national rebirth, and literary renewal. No political program can be extracted from it. In R. Zvi Yehudah’s speeches, by contrast, there was an intense identification with the realities of statehood: the army, the boundaries of the land, and the necessity of war. One speech in particular proved decisive. It was delivered at Merkaz Harav Yeshivah on Israel’s Independence Day, 1967, before the start of the emergency that eventually led to the war. In it R. Zvi Yehudah spoke of his longing for those parts of the land that were currently in Arab hands: “Where is our Hebron? Do we let it be forgotten? And where are our Shechem and our Jericho?... Can we ever forsake them? All of Transjordan is ours…. Do we have the right to give up even one millimeter?”
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Within less than two months these areas were back within Jewish control. In retrospect, the speech was seen as an inspired and inspiring prophecy. Gush Emunim began on its program of settling the territories, beginning in Hebron the next year. Religious messianism had become an active political force. R. Zvi Yehudah was clear on the meaning and imperative of the hour. The transformations foreseen by his father would come in due course. In the meanwhile, redemption must proceed along the axis of conquest and resettlement of the land. “Everything connected to it, all forms of weapons, whether produced by us or by the gentiles…all is holy.”
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It is thus paradoxical, but it has nonetheless happened, that messianism has led to opposite extremes. Neturei Karta and Gush Emunim share the view that the messianic idea is central to Judaism and that the State of Israel can only be understood in relation to it. For Neturei Karta the messianic process has not yet begun; therefore the state is a heresy. For Gush Emunim the process has begun; therefore the state is, wittingly or otherwise, holy and the instrument of redemption. Extreme anti-nationalism and nationalism flow from the same concepts, even the same texts. Between these two radical alternatives, the voice of religious moderation, expressed in a variety of movements – Oz ve-Shalom, Netivot Shalom, and Meimad – has lacked widespread support.
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The significance of religious nationalism has gone far beyond the boundaries of Gush Emunim and embraced a wide section of the religious Israeli public. One of the key problems is the application of religious texts, halakhic and aggadic, to immediate political decision-making. The verse in Deuteronomy 7:2, “You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them,” has been variously interpreted to mean that no territory should be ceded by Israel as part of a peace settlement, or that all non-Jews should be expelled from Jerusalem. Translating halakhah directly into a non-halakhic state creates precisely those conflicts that religious moderates had hoped to avoid. The point was made bluntly by Meir Kahane: “There is an absolute and irreconcilable contradiction between the State of Israel…and the modern nation-state that sees all of its citizens as possessing equal rights…. There is a potential confrontation…between the Zionist state…and modern ideas of democracy and citizenship.”
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Orthodox thinkers of distinction – among them, in their different ways, R. Nachum Rabinovitch, R. Aharon Lichtenstein, and R. Yehudah Amital – have argued otherwise. They stress the importance of religious education as against religious legislation, of peace as against territory, of the broad imperatives of social justice and concern for minority rights. They argue the significance, ethical and political, of international opinion. Halakhah functions in concrete social and historical contexts, they insist, not in the vast abstractions of messianism and apocalypse. Similar views have been taken in different directions by Lord Jakobovits, Mordecai Breuer, and Uriel Simon. The most sustained and controversial attack on religious nationalism has come from the idiosyncratic Orthodox intellectual, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz.
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But the mood of the times has been against them. The conflicts with which Israel is faced have seemed insoluble; their enemies implacable; world opinion systematically hostile. Apocalyptic images speak more directly to Israeli hopes and fears than the language of diplomacy or moderation or subtle halakhic interpretation. Messianic Zionism and messianic anti-Zionism are the result. Israel seems caught in the grip of vast forces. Providence is palpable, though opinions are divided as to whether it is endorsing or negating the state. In this climate, moderate religious Zionism comes to seem too complex, defensive, and weak to chart a lucid future. Argued by intellectuals, it hovers above the storm of political passion and fails to win either votes or hearts.
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Ideal as Moderation or Extreme
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So, while the Jewish people as a whole has moved toward traditional attitudes, tradition has not moved toward the Jewish people. To the contrary, it has moved further away. Orthodoxy has become radicalized. The connections once made between it and secular culture on the one hand, and the collective Zionist enterprise on the other, have grown attenuated and thin. The ironies of the religious situation continue to abound. In the previous chapter it was argued that Jewry outside Orthodoxy has become more traditional attitudinally but not existentially, in terms of its beliefs, not its lifestyles. In this chapter we have suggested a similar discrepancy within Orthodoxy itself. Torah im derekh eretz and religious Zionism are Orthodox realities but no longer ideologies. They exist de facto but are not defended de jure. This does not make relations between Orthodoxy and the rest of the Jewish world easier. For attitudes generate conflict; and conflict has increasingly dominated the Orthodox agenda.
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At this stage a tantalizingly simple question comes to the fore. Which is the more authentic, the more mandated by tradition: religious moderation or religious extremism? Accommodation to a real world or the dedicated pursuit of a utopian ideal? There is, of course, no answer. For R. Saadia Gaon the ideal religious personality was marked by harmony, balance, and integration. For the chasidei Ashkenaz, the thirteenth-century German-Jewish mystics, it was one who lived at the very edge of human experience, in constant consciousness of martyrdom. Jewish thought is a constant dialectic between world-affirmation and world-denial.
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In the pages of the Talmud, we meet R. Jose ben Kisma arguing for political compromise with the Romans, and his colleague, R. Chananiah ben Teradyon, insisting on defiance unto death. R. Ishmael argues for a combination of Torah, work, and citizenship. R. Shimon bar Yochai insists on Torah exclusively and at all times. Maimonides sees halakhah as the perfection of society. Jewish ethical treatises, from Chovot ha-Levavot (“The Duties of the Heart”) in the eleventh century to Mesillat Yesharim (“The Path of the Upright”) in the eighteenth, see it as the perfection of the self. The argument as to whether moderation or extremism was the religious ideal has been a recurring theme of Jewish deliberation. Maimonides saw, with characteristic insight, that the tradition idealized both types: he called them the “sage” and the “saint,” respectively.
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To be sure, one could hardly call either Samson Raphael Hirsch or R. Avraham Kook “moderates.” Hirsch favored the complete secession of Orthodox congregations and rabbis from any Jewish organization dominated by non-Orthodox Jews. It was this philosophy, promoted by Hirsch’s successors through Agudat Yisrael, that increasingly today challenges any Orthodox involvement in community-wide bodies. R. Kook, ostensibly the most tolerant thinker in Jewish history, wrote that alongside any belief which is both certain and universal “goes a refusal to share with others in any collaborative pluralism.” The tolerance in which he believed was one which found “a place for every form of illumination, of life and of spiritual expression.” But Judaism determined that place. R. Kook would surely have agreed with Yeshayahu Leibowitz that Judaism is “totalitarian in the realm of values.” As Eliezer Schweid has pointed out, R. Kook and the secularists in whom he found “hidden sanctity” talked at cross-purposes. What he and they understood as tolerance were two different, diametrically opposed things.
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In a sense, this has been one of the problems of contemporary Jewish thought: that the figures who most left their mark on posterity, Hirsch and R. Kook, left an unsuspectedly double-edged legacy. Hirsch could be quoted in favor of both Torah im derekh eretz and Orthodox segregation. R. Kook could be cited in defense of both moderate and radical politics. The same has proved true, in recent years, of R. Joseph Soloveitchik, who is standardly cited nowadays on both sides of controversies on the role of women, pluralism, and humanism in Jewish life. Those who spoke most forcibly for moderation, among them R. Azriel Hildesheimer, R. Yaakov Ettlinger, R. Isaac Reines, and R. Chaim Hirschensohn, were altogether less dramatic and systematic. They left no philosophy that could be summarized in a slogan and capture the imagination.
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Secularization and Segregation
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But the tension remains. Halakhah concerns both the individual and society. Judaism embodies a code of individual perfection on the one hand. But it remains, on the other, resolutely tied to the Jewish people as a whole. What moderated Jewish law in the past was the fact that it was the constitution of a complete society, from the righteous to the sinners and the great mass of intermediates between. The Jewish people was constituted by its Torah, said R. Saadia Gaon; but the Torah, equally, had to be interpreted in the context of the Jewish people. It was the law not of an elite, nor of a self-selecting community of those who chose to adhere, but of the biological “congregation of Jacob,” those who had been born into its covenant.
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This mutual bond between the Torah and the collective entity of Israel split apart with European emancipation. The structures of Jewish self-government dissolved. The environing society was itself secularized. Jews became free to be Jewish in any way they chose. They had the option, unprecedented for many centuries, of ceasing to be Jewish without becoming, religiously, anything else. Modernity, as many social theorists have pointed out, is marked by the transition from “fate” to choice. Roles and identities are no longer things given by birth. They become things one chooses. The chaos this created for Judaism we have charted throughout this study. Jewish identity and its attendant duties and relationships are primarily given by birth. Modern consciousness could hardly have done other than have the effect of disintegrating tradition. That the Jewish people still survives in a state of real, if fragile, coherence is little short of miraculous.
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In retrospect, the insight of R. Moses Sofer has been stunningly vindicated. It had already been adopted by chasidim. It came to be taken up by Samson Raphael Hirsch as well. Judaism would survive precisely if faithful Jews took advantage of the collapse of Jewish self-government and dissociated themselves from the rest of the Jewish world. In the protected enclaves of the yeshivah, or the chasidic community, or the Hirschian school-synagogue nexus, they could pursue a life of religious intensity strong enough to resist the tide of secularization and assimilation. The world of tradition was collapsing around them. What else could be done but conserve a “saving remnant”? The more independent they were of the general Jewish community, the more free they were to develop an elite that would eventually emerge, in an age more congenial to tradition, as heirs of the Jewish future.
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It took almost two centuries. But that, in the last two decades, is precisely what has happened. To these heroic figures, who guarded tradition’s flame against the cold extinguishing winds of modernity, Judaism owes an eternal debt. But there was a price to be paid. The price was the atrophy of the concept of “the congregation of Israel” as an empirical reality. In the voluntary enclave, Jewish law could be interpreted strictly rather than leniently, for it was no longer bound to the constituency of all Jews. Most Jews did not observe Jewish law anyway, so whom could leniencies benefit? The more the enclave felt the need to be segregated from a secular world, the more oppositional images came to the fore. Instead of synthesis, there was dichotomy and choice. Where some had proposed an “and,” religious authenticity now demanded an “or”: Torah or secular culture, religion or Zionism, Judaism or the Jewish people.
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Thus, as society drifted away from religion, religion drifted away from society. As the Jewish people moved far from Orthodoxy, Orthodoxy moved in directions that took it far from the majority of the Jewish people. The alienation was mutual and self-reinforcing. The two great attempts to span the divide – Hirsch’s and R. Kook’s – became increasingly untenable as the gap widened. And so the great paradox of the Jewish present was born.
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Jewish peoplehood has rarely before seemed so desirable and so elusive. In the last twenty years the sense of global Jewish kinship has deepened, but so too has the sense of inner Jewish conflict. As the idea of peoplehood has become secularized, it has moved further away from Torah, the one basis on which it could be coherently constituted. Orthodoxy, the one group positioned to unify the Jewish people, has seemed to be the one group standing in the way of unity. Increasingly it has developed a confrontational stance toward secularism in Israel and Reform in America. Internally it has been riven by conflict between the various chasidic and yeshivah groups, and between both and modern Orthodoxy.
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We have argued that only tradition has the power to shape the Jewish people into a coherent entity. But does it? When Judaism itself becomes a battleground, where do we seek the Torah that “was only given to make peace in the world”? Have there been other voices within Orthodoxy that have sought to bring it closer to the rest of the Jewish world? As Orthodoxy moves inward toward greater segregation from secular culture, have there been movements in the opposite direction? What is and should be Orthodoxy’s relation to the Jewish people as a whole?
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Between Two Covenants
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In confronting the Jewish world, Orthodoxy faces a situation at once full of possibilities and risks. We have suggested that the Jews of many different kinds have, for the last two decades, been moving emotionally closer to and yet sociologically further away from tradition. The most enduring effect of the shift in consciousness since 1967 has been a renewed and deep sense of Jewish peoplehood. But does “the Jewish people” still exist?
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At a theoretical level, its meaning, role, and destiny are understood differently by Orthodoxy and Reform, by Israelis and Jews in the diaspora, and by secularists and religious Jews in Israel itself. At the most basic level there are those who believe themselves to be Jews, having been so pronounced by Reform rabbis in America on the basis of conversion or the patrilineal principle. Yet halakhically they are not Jews. It is not accidental that the question “Who is a Jew?” has provoked such bitter controversies, for it goes to the heart of the matter. If there is no clear and single answer to that question, can we speak lucidly of a Jewish people at all? And if we cannot, what becomes of the sense of peoplehood? Jews have sought unity in the late twentieth century, while still living within divisions created in the nineteenth.
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Imagine a group of friends in a mountain valley. Their aim is to climb. They agree that each will take a separate route. For some time, each is fully occupied in the difficult task of negotiating, step by step, a path upwards. Each is out of sight of the others. Eventually each emerges at the top. But they then discover that each has reached the top of a separate peak. They can see one another on their separate summits. They want to be reunited, but none is willing to climb down. Yet that is exactly what they will have to do if they want to be together as a group again.
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That is the nature of Jews and Judaism today. Each group can claim to have reached its particular summit, even if each has privately to admit to falls and injuries on the way. Secular Zionism can point to the State of Israel, created and sustained by secular means: through politics, diplomacy, and wars. The liberal Jewish denominations can point to a flourishing diaspora, particularly in America, affirmative in its identity which it still chooses to express through religious institutions, even if its attachment to Jewish law and observance is slender. Orthodoxy can point to its unprecedented successes in Jewish education, its burgeoning day schools and yeshivot, it high birth rates, its passionately committed young, its resistance to assimilation, and its growing power within the Jewish world.
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But there are separate summits. And there were injuries on the way. Secular Zionism would have to admit that its initial vision does not have the power to explain and sustain Israel’s character today. To find meaning in their personal lives and their internal and external confrontation with the Arab world, Israelis have turned toward religious language and in some cases toward a religious way of life. In recent years, more Israelis have chosen yeridah than diaspora Jews have chosen aliyah. Reform Judaism in America has recently been growing. But only because it has chosen to provide religious legitimation for the great numbers of Jews who have intermarried. In so doing it has consciously courted the risk of writing itself and its members out of the Jewish people. Orthodoxy has seen the biblical and rabbinic tradition, of which it has been the uncompromising defender, lose its power over the vast majority of Jews in both Israel and the largest diaspora community, the United States. It is a successful and confident minority, but it is a minority nonetheless.
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Each regards the others as a threat to itself. Secular Zionism is threatened by a Reform that legitimates the diaspora, and by an Orthodoxy that either attaches little independent value to the state or, in the form of Gush Emunim, seems to want to take it into an aggressive, risk-ridden confrontation with the Arab world. Reform is threatened by an Israel that has made life increasingly awkward in the diaspora, and by an Orthodoxy that seeks its delegitimation. Orthodoxy is threatened by a State of Israel and a diaspora Reform, both of which it sees as active agents of secularization.
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And yet, more powerfully than any events since the destruction of the Second Temple, twentieth-century history has made Jews conscious that their fate is indivisible. The Holocaust, the birth of Israel and its subsequent isolation have made Jews feel that, with or against their will, they are involved, each in the destiny of all. The various sections of the Jewish world have not simply gone their separate ways. Israel retains close links with the diaspora and the diaspora with it. Reform has sought new ways of recognizing the centrality of Israel on the one hand, traditional observance on the other. Orthodoxy has been involved with the Israeli political process, and has held back from formally excluding Reform Jews from the Jewish people even if it will not and cannot admit Reform as a form of Judaism.
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Having reached this set of separate summits, where does the Jewish people go from here? In facing this question, Orthodoxy bears a peculiar responsibility of leadership. To see why, we have to return to first principles.
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Jewish Peoplehood
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Jews and Judaism represent more than a religion accidentally tied to a people, or a people coincidentally bound to a religion. The definitive moment which brought Israel into being was the covenant at Sinai, which married a people to God, and God to a people. The conventional distinctions between religion and nation here fall away. For the people of Israel was to be constituted by a covenant which embodied the religion of Israel. The relationship between the two might be tense and troubled, but a split was inconceivable. There could be no people without a specific faith, and no faith conceived independently of a particular people.
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By the covenant at Sinai, the people agreed to be bound by a distinctive, holy way of life. In return, their history would be uniquely written in moral rather than natural categories. It would be a commentary on their covenantal loyalty or betrayal. It would be seen, both by themselves and by others, as evidence of the presence of God in history, or sometimes, tragically, as the temporary “hiding of the face” of God. The people of Israel would be both edah and ed, a congregation and a witness, summoned and testifying to a Divinely endowed destiny.
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They would find that their end was already written in their beginning. There would be a pattern to their fate. Jewish history would repeatedly be written in terms of exile, exodus, and glimpses of redemption. From time to time Jews would disappear. Assimilation, forced conversions, and persecutions would take their toll. But as a people they would survive. With a perfectly uncanny conviction, the prophets were certain of this: that the covenantal people would endure every persecution, and be ingathered from the furthest exile. But it would survive on the basis of the covenant. It would survive because dispersion and persecution would recall them to their singular sense of peoplehood and from there to their holy way of life.
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Judaism cannot therefore coherently imagine a divorce between Torah and the Jewish people, or between either and the place of their redemption, the land of Israel. Tradition envisaged no Jewish identity that was ethnic without being religious; or that was religious without the dimension of peoplehood; or which was not, in some sense, turned toward Israel; or which was based on an Israel unrelated to the Jewish people as a whole, or to Torah. Because there was only one God and one revelation, there could be only one Jewish people, one Torah, and one land which is a Jewish home. Individuals might make their choice to live outside one or the other. But there would be no enduring or lucid Jewish identity that did not define itself in relation to these three framing realities.
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Covenantal Crisis
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But underlying this definition is a monumental assumption, namely that Jews would continue to see themselves in these terms. “It is not with you alone that I am making this covenant and this oath,” says Moses, addressing the generation that would cross the Jordan and take possession of the promised land. “I am making it both with those who are standing here with us today before God our Lord, and with those who are not here with us today.” The covenant would bind all future generations. But why would it? Why should it?
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We here confront the central, if unstated, question that has hovered just below the surface of Jewish life since the beginning of emancipation. Why be Jewish? Judaism marries fact and value, birth and obligation. One is born a Jew. Yet to be a Jew involves the assumption of responsibilities, a set of commands that define a way of life. A key, or perhaps the key assumption of Western thought since the Enlightenment is that these two propositions cannot be joined to one another. Obligation presupposes choice. Existence, in Sartre’s phrase, precedes essence. How then can a Jew be bound by the terms of a covenant made somewhere else and long ago, in a lonely desert by an ancient people? As a human being, surely he is free to write his own destiny. He is free to be a Jew or not a Jew. Or, deciding to be a Jew, he is free to shape that fact as he chooses. If there is choice, how can there be fate? If there is freedom, how can there be a prescripted Jewish destiny? In one way or another, this question has haunted the history of Israel since its earliest days. But there are times when it becomes particularly acute. At such times, there is covenantal crisis.
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We can identify earlier periods at which the givenness of the Jewish destiny became acutely problematic. In exile in Babylon after the fall of the First Temple, Jews might have gone the way of the ten tribes before them, of disappearing through assimilation into a larger culture. After the fall of the Second Temple, again Jews might have chosen the way of Rome, or even the way of Pauline Christianity, integrating themselves into and even transforming from within the dominant imperial power. In the fifteenth century in Spain, they might have chosen, en masse, publicly to accept Christianity even if they remained marranos, Jews in secret. European emancipation offered a similar embrace, half menacing, half benign. Each invited Jews to abandon or merge their particular identity in favor of a more universal conception of civilization, history, and faith.
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Some Jews did. In not every case was it a matter of defection to another people or culture or religion. It could take the form of limiting Jewish identity so that it fitted into the space left for it by the dominant culture. It could become a Hellenized Judaism that accommodated to the eclecticism of the Greek and Roman worlds. It could become a secret Judaism that took outwardly Christian forms. It could become a denationalized and ethicized Judaism that accorded with European notions of what a religion might be in a secular state. It could become a Jewish nationalism that sought expression in a secular state of its own. Alternatively, Jews could mount an attack on both their own and the dominant faith, seeking a world of pure universalism in which there were neither Jews nor Gentiles. Such, in modern times, was the strategy of Spinoza, Marx, and Freud. In each case the assumption of Sinai was shaken, that Jews had a unique and particular destiny that accorded with no universal norms. The question ceased to be theoretical and became burningly real and personal: Why should Jews remain bound to and commanded by a remote and distant covenant?
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Why Be Jewish?
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We can trace, too, the answers Jews gave to that question. There was the mystical answer given by the sages. The covenant in the wilderness was made not only with one generation but with the souls of all Jews as yet unborn. They were there and gave their assent. Sinai is, as it were, written into the collective unconscious of the Jewish mind. Then there was the natural law answer given, in fifteenth-century Spain, by Isaac Arama. Jews had found safety only under the wings of Providence. Cast to the winds of chance, they had been treated savagely by every people among whom they had come to live. It was no more possible that all Jews should forsake the covenant than that all members of a particular species should commit suicide. The law of Sinai was as deeply engraved in Jewish consciousness as the law of life was written into nature. Alternatively there was the legal-metaphysical answer given, also in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition, by Don Isaac Abarbanel. Jews had ceded their freedom to God by becoming His servants after the exodus from Egypt. From then onward, Heaven held a title, as it were, to the Jewish people.
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Each of these was an attempt to show how fate could coincide with freedom, and how a covenant could be passed on across the generations. But undoubtedly the answer that held the greatest resonance was a much older one, first given by the prophet Ezekiel. “You say: We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world…. But what you have in mind will never happen. As surely as I live, declares the Lord God, I will rule over you with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath. I will bring you from the nations and gather you from the countries where you have been scattered – with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath.” History would recall Jews to their destiny. They might succeed individually, but not collectively, in assimilating. The nations would resist it. They would expel Jews. There would be an exodus against their will.
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The question and the answer recurred again and again. The talmudic sages envisaged a line of argument that suggested that history had broken the covenant. They read this back into the Babylonian exile. Jews came to the prophet and said: “If a master sells his slave, or a husband divorces his wife, does he then have any further claim on them?” Having sent Jews into exile, God could have no further claim to their loyalty. It was an argument that was to be repeated by Spinoza on the threshold of modernity. Jews, he argued, had ceased to be bound by the covenant since the collapse of their national autonomy. It has been heard more recently in the wake of the Holocaust, this time from Elie Wiesel and Irving Greenberg. Greenberg argues that after the Shoah there can be only a “voluntary” covenant. Its “authority” has ended. Wiesel explains why. “The Jewish people entered into a covenant with God. We were to protect His Torah and He in turn assumes responsibility for Israel’s presence in the world…. Well, it seems, for the first time in history, this very covenant is broken.” In this last remark Wiesel is wrong, for the words have been heard before.
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And yet repeatedly the unexpected has occurred. Jews did not see their sufferings as a sign that they had been abandoned by God and that they should now take refuge in the world. Instead they saw it as a sign that they had been abandoned by the world and that they should now take refuge in God. The covenant, said Isaiah, admits of no divorce between God and His people. Attempted genocide by Haman did not lead to Jewish defections but instead, as the Talmud put it, a renewal of the covenant more miraculous, because more voluntary, than at Sinai itself. Suffering would always lead back to, not away from, the Jewish destiny. If nothing else led Jews to return to their faith at the end of days, said the sages, Heaven would send “a king whose decrees will be as harsh as those of Haman” and they will repent.
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Ezekiel’s words echoed through the ages. History would bring back Jews to their vocation. Isaac Arama told the marranos, “You will find no rest among the Gentiles, and your life will hang in the balance.” Abarbanel, quoting Ezekiel, added that “though they and their descendants would do all in their power to assimilate, they would not succeed. They would still be called Jews against their own will and would be accused of Judaizing in secret and be burnt at the stake for it.” Moses Hess used remarkably similar language in the nineteenth century to the assimilationist Jews of Germany. And this, above all, is what has happened to Jewish consciousness in modern times. It is how most Jews react to the impact of the Holocaust and anti-Zionism. The Jewish destiny cannot be normalized in either the diaspora or Israel. The world will not let Israel, the people or the state, be “like the nations, like the peoples of the world.” More than anything else, a sense of history answers the question: Why be Jewish?
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A Partial Renewal
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But in the past, this was only one aspect of a two-sided process. A sense of shared history led to a sense of shared destiny. To use R. Soloveitchik’s terminology, brit goral, the covenant of fate, led to brit yi’ud, the covenant of purpose. In discovering that persecution did not distinguish between Jews, the Jewish people summoned themselves to a common future in the light of their common past. When Moses, and later Joshua, and later Ezra turn to address the people of Israel in a formal ratification of the covenant, they each preface their remarks by recalling Israel’s history. Covenantal renewal begins in memory, much of it painful. But the pain does not end there. Joshua calls on the people to put away their strange gods. Ezra calls on them to put away their strange wives. To move toward a covenantal future means renouncing some aspects of the past.
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What makes the present moment in Jewish history so tense and fateful is that we stand midway between two processes that have never hitherto been separated. The Holocaust, Israel, and anti-Zionism stand at the very forefront of Jewish identity. There has been a renewal of the brit goral. Jews feel part of a shared history. They feel bound together and in some sense “over against” a hostile non-Jewish world. They feel responsible for one another. They act in concert to defend one another. But there has been no renewal of the brit yi’ud. There has been no convergence toward a reinstatement of revelation and tradition. Because both Reform and secular Zionism have been “traditionalized” this has seemed to take place, but in reality it has not. Instead, tradition has been used to legitimate both secularization and intermarriage, the very things that Joshua and Ezra excluded from the covenant.
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In this unprecedented situation Orthodoxy is faced with an awesome challenge and responsibility. For it was Orthodoxy which, through the last two centuries of a deeply unfavorable intellectual and social climate, has been the guardian of the brit yi’ud. Against Reform it insisted that there could be no secularization of the idea of revelation and no abandonment of the binding authority of halakhah. Against Conservative Judaism it insisted that halakhah is not determined by the values of the age; instead it is halakhah that determines the Jewish response to the values of the age. Against secular Zionism it argued that neither a land nor a state are ends in themselves. Against some recent Holocaust theologians, it has argued that no event in history can “rupture” the covenant or “break” its claim upon Jews.
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Surveying Jewish history since 1789, the Orthodox Jew – especially if he has a belief in Providence – can surely find it in his heart to recognize the achievements of movements which he cannot in principle legitimate. It was a secular Zionist movement that brought into being a Jewish state. It was liberal Judaisms – Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist – that held the loyalties of substantial numbers of Jews who might otherwise have drifted altogether away from the Jewish people. There is a difference, in both Jewish law and thought, between means and ends. He may rejoice in these consequences even as he regrets the means by which they were brought about.
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It might have been otherwise. The early precursors of Zionism were deeply religious Jews. Among the advocates of settlement of the land were the Vilna Gaon, R. Moses Sofer, and a number of chasidic leaders. Rabbis Yehuda Alkalai, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, Isaac Reines, and Avraham Kook were all, in their different ways, architects of a Zionism that was itself a form of Orthodoxy. Nor did preserving the loyalty of acculturated Jews necessarily lead to Reform. In Anglo-Jewry, for example, cultural accommodation took place entirely within the boundaries of halakhah. It did likewise in Hirsch’s neo-Orthodoxy. Zionism and liberalism might have evolved within the parameters of tradition and without shattering the covenant. But history is not written in terms of might-have-beens. As the sages said: What was, was. And in what actually transpired, liberal Judaism and secular Zionism played their part.
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But there is a next stage. Covenantal renewal has not run its course. It has reached halfway to its destination. Until there has been, in some sense, a ratification of the brit yi’ud, the centrality in Jewish life of the covenant of revelation and command, the shift in Jewish consciousness we have dated to 1967 will remain unconsummated. For this to happen, there must be movement in every section of the Jewish world toward some common sense of identity and purpose. But it must surely be Orthodoxy which initiates the process. And this will mean a shift in the direction of Orthodoxy itself. How so?
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Orthodoxy and the Jewish People
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As Samson Raphael Hirsch noted, there is something odd about the word Orthodoxy itself. He objected to it. Judaism, he wrote, “knows of no mosaic, prophetic or rabbinic, and of no orthodox or progressive Judaism. It is either Judaism or it is not.” He did not add, but we must, that Judaism knows of no Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews. They are either Jews or they are not.
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The phrase “Orthodox Judaism” is therefore an anomaly. For the word orthodox as currently used suggested a denomination, one kind of Judaism among others. Whereas Jewish Orthodoxy itself, whether defined in terms of Maimonides’ thirteen principles or any of their medieval variants, established the boundary conditions of Judaism. A non-Orthodox Judaism would have been a contradiction in terms, for by its very non-Orthodoxy it would have parted company with Judaism. The phrase “Orthodox Judaism” at any age prior to the nineteenth century would have been tautological. What other kind of Judaism was there? What other kind of Judaism could there be? Neither the word “Judaism” nor the word “Jew” admits qualifying adjectives.
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The concept of Orthodoxy as one kind of Judaism among others has been a critical tension in the development of tradition since emancipation. In halakhah there is no such thing as a plurality of Judaisms, beyond minor local variants of custom. But in sociological terms, there was. In theory, Orthodoxy is the religion of all Jews. In practice it was the commitment of only some, and in some countries, a minority. Leaders of Orthodoxy were therefore caught in a dilemma. Were they to safeguard the religious integrity of the Jewish people as a whole? Or was their primary concern to preserve a minority within the Jewish people, those who held firm to traditional faith and practice? Tradition suggested the former. Pragmatism suggested the latter. And so the history of Orthodoxy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became a story of its progressive disengagement from collective Jewish enterprises.
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In 1868 most of Hungarian Orthodoxy seceded from the general Jewish community. In 1876 Hirsch insisted that his Frankfurt community do likewise. In 1912 Agudat Yisrael was formed to mark the secession of most of Central and East European Orthodoxy from the Zionist movement. There has been increasing pressure within American Jewry for Orthodox rabbis to secede from interdenominational rabbinical groups like the Synagogue Council of America. Wherever Orthodoxy found itself in a minority, among reformers on the one hand or secularists on the other, the consensus was that they could not continue to be associated. They would be lending their names and their authority to decisions with which they could not in conscience agree. They would be helping to legitimate positions which ran directly counter to tradition.
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There were those who disagreed. There was gemeinde Orthodoxy in Germany, “status quo” Orthodoxy in Hungary, and Mizrachi within the Zionist movement, each of which refused to sever its connections with the community as a whole. They had some distinguished representatives, but they were a minority within the Orthodox world. Faced with a general Jewish community unreceptive to its guidance, Orthodoxy turned inward and concentrated on strengthening its own ranks. In retrospect it was a successful strategy.
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But that moment has now passed, or it shortly will. Orthodoxy has secured its future. It has emerged in a position of commanding strength, demographic and ideological. It has achieved the task it set for itself, or rather that was set for it by Jewish destiny. It preserved the Torah against the twin assaults of Enlightenment thought and Jewish “normalization.” The time has come for it to point the way to a reunification of Torah and the Jewish people. For that is the necessary next stage of covenantal renewal.
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The Constituency of Jewish Law
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But it is just here that we encounter a head-on conflict between the aims of “Orthodoxy” considered as a section of the Jewish world, and “Judaism” considered as the faith and way of life of all Jews. For Orthodoxy has found its strength precisely in its disengagement. No longer constrained by the need to formulate halakhah in such a way as to be livable by all Jews, no longer empowered to enforce Jewish law throughout the Jewish community, Orthodoxy was able to develop its own voluntary communities, each an elite of the most committed and intense. Halakhah itself reflected this narrowed constituency. Jewish law became, for the first time, a code not for a people as a whole but for a self-selecting group of the faithful. This was not intentional; but in many cases it was inevitable.
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In the early twentieth century, R. Chaim Hirschensohn, an Orthodox rabbi who had moved to America, bemoaned the fact that halakhic authorities had not responded to the realities of an open, assimilated diaspora. In the early years of the State of Israel, Yeshayahu Leibowitz made the same complaint about halakhah there. It had not come to terms with the needs of an independent state, or a total economy, or modern technology, or military security. Orthodox Jews were able to observe Shabbat in Israel, he argued trenchantly, only at the cost of making other Jews their shabbos goyim.
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But who was listening? The halakhic change they called for was revolutionary. It could hardly be endorsed by the gedolei ha-dor, the generation’s great halakhic authorities, who had increasingly come to share R. Moses Sofer’s view that any concession to modernity, even if technically permissible, opened the door to secularization. It could not be endorsed by the very people with whom Hirschensohn and Leibowitz were concerned, non-Orthodox Americans and secular Israelis. These did not seek a solution within halakhah, for they did not accept halakhah itself. So here was a solution in search of a constituency. In seeking to make halakhah applicable to everyone, Hirschensohn and Leibowitz found themselves speaking to no one. And that has been the problem of what is properly called Modern Orthodoxy ever since.
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Modern Orthodoxy
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Modern Orthodoxy in this narrow sense is not the Judaism espoused by Hirsch or R. Kook or R. Soloveitchik. It is not the establishment Orthodoxy of Anglo-Jewry. Nor is it what in Israel is called dati as opposed to charedi. None of these Orthodoxies proposed halakhic change or any radical revision in the way faith was conceived. The project of Modern Orthodoxy, by contrast, is to make Judaism applicable to a wider range of Jews. It recognizes that “modern consciousness” is something different from “traditional consciousness,” and that as a result many Jews have become alienated from Judaism.
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Modern Orthodox thinkers focus on three aspects of the rabbinic tradition. The first is that it contains considerable resources for halakhic change. The second is that, at times, it gives vivid expression to the power and dignity of human reason and interpretation. The third is a distinction between the purpose of Jewish law and its detailed enactment. When, because of changed circumstance, the law as it stands frustrates the purpose for which it was enacted, change – they argue – is halakhically mandated.
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Modern Orthodoxy in this sense is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its precursors, as we noted, were R. Chaim Hirschensohn and Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Its major spokesmen have been Emanuel Rackman and Eliezer Berkovits, and more recently Shlomo Riskin and David Hartman; more radically still, Irving Greenberg. They have all been highly controversial figures. And we can now see why, and why Modern Orthodoxy did not surface a century before in the days, say, of Samson Raphael Hirsch. Modern Orthodoxy is an attempt to address the constituencies that lie outside halakhah, without abandoning halakhah.
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In earlier periods such attempts had been made and subsequently forsaken. Early Reform tried to make distinctions between biblical and rabbinic law. Early Conservatism sought to stay within halakhah, liberally conceived. Early Zionism was constructed in traditional terms. One by one these attempts foundered under the pressure of radicalism. Reform cast loose from tradition in its militant conferences of the 1840s. American Conservatism did likewise under the impact of Mordecai Kaplan. The Zionist movement did so when it shifted from narrowly political to broader cultural aims.
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But, as we have argued, the direction of change has since been reversed. Each of these movements has, markedly since 1967, been seeking a place within tradition. Could tradition find a place for them? Could it find a home within the categories of revelation and halakhah for the new situation of women in society? Could it enhance their position in the laws of divorce? Could Judaism confront intermarriage by a liberal interpretation of the laws of conversion? Was there a place within its values for the idea of democracy? Or for a humanistic sense of personal autonomy and dignity? Could Orthodox Jews engage in dialogue and collaborative ventures with secular and non-Orthodox Jews? These were and are the kind of questions raised by Modern Orthodoxy, and in general it found it possible to deliver affirmative answers.
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Modern Orthodoxy is, in short, an attempt to locate modern consciousness within tradition. It is a symptom of an age in which “modernism” has itself become more traditional. It addresses the same issues that were once confronted by Reform, Conservative, and secular Zionist thought but stops short of their break with halakhah. Its overwhelming problem in finding an audience is that these alternatives still exist. Those who wish to give Jewish expression to feminism, liberalism, or personal autonomy can do so more freely elsewhere. Those who are attracted to Orthodoxy are so because it expresses opposite values: authority, community, and a highly defined sense of personal role.
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Tradition’s Many Voices
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Modern Orthodoxy stands at the extreme outer boundary of tradition. It is a matter of some argument within Orthodoxy as to which side of the boundary it stands: inside or outside. It is nonetheless an important phenomenon. It is not one to which the author of this study would personally subscribe. Judaism. I believe, is far less compatible with modern consciousness than Modern Orthodoxy has suggested. Nor is halakhah as open to change as some statements within the tradition might lead one to conclude. There is a difference between the wide powers theoretically available to a Jewish court of law and the much narrower precedent of how those powers have actually been used. Nor can it be taken for granted that everything that can halakhically be permitted, ought halakhically to be permitted. The famous remark of Blu Greenberg, that “where there is a rabbinic will, there is a halakhic way,” does not entail that where there is a halakhic way, there is a rabbinic will.
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There are serious counter-arguments to many Modern Orthodox positions. Invoking the power of a rabbinical court to retroactively annul marriages, for example, on a scale never before practiced, would alleviate the position of women whose husbands refuse to grant them a divorce, but it would weaken the structure and sanctity of Jewish marriage as a whole. A more liberal policy on conversion than that practiced by many Orthodox courts in the diaspora is certainly available, and has at times been adopted by rabbinical courts in Israel. But there is a case for saying that this would be seen to be a tacit legitimation of intermarriage. One can, as David Hartman has done, write an account of Judaism in terms of anthropology rather than theology, focusing on those sources which stress human initiative and downplaying those which emphasize human dependence on and submission to the supernatural. But does this adequately represent the full meaning of such concepts as prayer, command, and Providence? There is a place within Judaism for personal autonomy. But there is also a place for the idea of obedience to law and reverence for its great interpreters.
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But – and this is the crux – there is a difference between Orthodoxy as one kind of Judaism among others and Orthodoxy as the faith of the Jewish people. On this latter conception, it becomes profoundly important that the tradition speaks with as many voices as possible, and that as many positions as possible find their home within tradition. Saadia Gaon in writing his Beliefs and Opinions, and Maimonides in writing the Guide for the Perplexed, did not set out to address all Jews. They set out explicitly to speak to those whose doubts were leading them away from Judaism altogether. R. Soloveitchik, in his introductory remarks to The Lonely Man of Faith. declared it to be a completely personal statement, which may or may not strike an answering chord among his readers. What makes these works important is not that they represent a universal norm, but that they resolve certain cultural crises within the framework of halakhic Judaism.
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I once wrote that “a sober analyst of the history of Jewish philosophy may conclude that its practitioners solved no ultimate problems; rather, they allowed certain personality types and mental frameworks to take their place in Judaism. The rationalist feels at home because of Maimonides; the antirationalist, because of Judah Halevi. R. Soloveitchik, in his philosophical writings, has answered no questions, but he has done what a great Jewish thinker should. He has given a home to the previously unhoused: to the Jew in the modern world who experiences conflict, loneliness, and the sharp unease of faith.”
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A similar statement could be made about Modern Orthodoxy. It has indicated certain possibilities within the tradition that had not been systematically explored before. It is possible, even probable, that Modern Orthodoxy is more significant to those outside Orthodoxy than those securely within. That explains its controversial nature and its difficulty in finding a following. It does not negate its significance. For it is Modern Orthodoxy that provides a bridge between Orthodoxy itself and Conservative and Reform Judaism and secular Zionism. Such a bridge must be found if Orthodoxy is once again to become the faith of the entire Jewish people. It must be found if there is to be a renewal of the brit yi’ud, the covenant of Sinai, with the Jewish people as a whole.
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Tradition as Argument
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We argued in the last chapter that if there is to be covenantal renewal, it is important that the Jewish tradition – the tradition of revelation and halakhah – speak with as many voices as possible. Behind this assertion lies a specific item of faith. That faith is one of the most distinctive features of rabbinic Judaism, and one which has fallen into disrepair in recent times.
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Perhaps the best way into the subject is a profound set of remarks delivered by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most impressive contemporary philosophers of ethics. His book After Virtue (1981) is an attempt to reinstate the idea of tradition as a central category in moral thought. What is of interest here is a passage in which he describes a feature which he believes characterizes traditions in general:
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When a tradition is in good order, it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.
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So when an institution – a university, say, or a farm or a hospital – is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict….
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A living tradition then is a historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.
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This characterization is extraordinarily germane to Judaism. The sages, as we noted in the Introduction, celebrated machloket le-shem shamayim, “argument for the sake of heaven.” They epitomized it in the archetypal debates between Hillel and Shammai, about which it was said that elu ve-elu divrei Elokim chayyim, “these and these are the words of the living God.” The central document of rabbinic Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud, is written in the form of sequences of argument. The argument itself and the clarification of the issues involved are often more important than the conclusions reached. Rejected opinions are considered as closely as accepted ones. Indeed, the Talmud states that the rulings of the school of Hillel became authoritative because, among other things, they studied the views of their opponents as well as their own and stated them before their own.

Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, Maggid Books, 2023. Via Sefaria (sefaria.org), Sefaria-Export. Version source: https://korenpub.com/products/arguments-for-the-sake-of-heaven Licence: CC-BY-NC. Source.