Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

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

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Argument, for the sages, was a deeply religious mode of discourse: not only argument between man and man, but even argument between man and God. The aggadic or interpretive literature of the talmudic period turns the biblical conversations between man and God – Moses’ plea for the Israelites after the sin of the golden calf, for example, or Hannah’s prayer for a child – into intense and dramatic confrontations which the rabbis termed chutzpah kelapei shamaya, “audacity toward heaven.” In this respect they were continuing a biblical tradition of argument between earth and heaven – we recall Abraham’s dialogue over the fate of Sodom, Job’s over his tragedy, Moses’ and Jeremiah’s over the justice of Providence. It is a highly distinctive tone of Jewish spirituality, one that embarrassed Philo and other Jewish philosophers, but one that remained close to the Jewish heart. We hear it again in some of the elegies composed in the wake of the medieval massacres, in Solomon ibn Verga’s account of the Spanish expulsion, and in the prayers of the chasidic master R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev.
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Reality, these arguments seem to imply, is not monolithic. There is always more than one true perspective on events. At the most basic level, there is the perspective of God and the perspective of man. Neither obliterates the other. Therefore there can be argument between them. Heaven always secures justice in the long run. But man sometimes calls for mercy, not justice; or for justice in the short run, not the long. The perspective of man has, for the sages, its own integrity and claim to attention. The rabbinic literature is, to be sure, acutely aware of the conflict between authority and argument. The angels, in these passages, attempt to silence man for his presumption. But God always allows him a hearing and often is swayed by his arguments. In argument, man reaches his full dignity before Heaven.
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So too with halakhic argument. Two of the most powerful passages in the Babylonian Talmud concern the attempt to silence argument. Rabban Gamliel uses his authority as nasi or religious head of the community to exclude dissenting views. R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus invokes the authority of a “heavenly voice” to overcome his opponents on a question of ritual purity. In both passages freedom of argument is affirmed. Rabban Gamliel is deposed, R. Eliezer excommunicated. The very dignity of the sage, in rabbinic Judaism, is part of the religious celebration of argument. For the sage is not a prophet. He is, said the rabbis, greater than a prophet. A prophet invokes revelation, which cannot be argued with. A sage invokes texts, interpretations, inferences, and analogies. He employs argument, therefore he can be argued with.
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The process of argument, like a cubist painting, allows different perspectives to occupy the same canvas. Since reality is not monolithic, dialogue and debate are closer to its texture than systematic and reductive philosophical programs. Though the Middle Ages produced a series of great Jewish philosophers, the enterprise of philosophy never captured the Jewish imagination as much as the talmudic argument. Nor did Moses Maimonides’ remarkable halakhic code, the Mishneh Torah, a compendium of conclusions on Jewish law with all argumentation removed, supplant the study of argument for its own sake. Indeed the entire literature of Judaism from the early rabbinic period to the threshold of modernity – halakhic, exegetical, philosophic, and mystical – is a series of commentaries on the biblical text, an ongoing and open-ended argument about the meaning of the word of God.
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Diversity and Dialogue
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To a remarkable degree Judaism was, is, and sees itself as, in MacIntyre’s phrase, “a historically extended, socially embodied argument.” It was through this argument that fierce antagonisms were channeled into a sense of common purpose. “Even a father and son or a teacher and disciple,” said the sages, “who study Torah at the same gate begin by becoming enemies to one another. But they do not leave off studying until they come to love one another.” The discipline of rabbinic study is precisely a matter of laboring to understand the strength of an opposing position and seeing that it too has its own integrity. It belongs within the shared tradition of texts, precedents, and canons of interpretation.
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That tradition often yields more than one answer to a concrete question of how to live in a given circumstance and time according to the word of God. To be sure, not every answer is authoritative. This is implicit in the idea of halakhah. Judaism is a community of action. If, for example, there were many different ways of living out the command to rest on the seventh day, Shabbat would not create a community of rest, even though it might create a series of individualized variants of the same idea. Judaism draws the line between community and individual differently from that proposed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberalism. It extends communal norms into what John Stuart Mill might well have seen as the domain of private life and personal decision. That is the nature of a faith expressed in terms of halakhah, religious law.
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Thus, when it came to norms of action, though there might be more than one justified inference from the sources, a halakhic decision is called for, arrived at by argument and consensus. A rejected opinion may be false, but it may not be. It may simply be a truth that did not find favor among the majority of the sages, or one that is not appropriate to this circumstance and time. The views of Shammai, according to one mystical tradition, though rejected as law in the present time will become law in the messianic age.
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There is, nonetheless, a perceptible reluctance in the rabbinic tradition to close the argument and make a formal decision between alternative viewpoints. If a decision is not needed now, the Talmud asks: Hilkheta li-meshicha? “Will you make a ruling for the messianic age?” If there is no immediate urgency, there is no need to foreclose the discussion. So too with matters that did not affect the community of action. Questions of belief and attitudes that had no behavioral implications did not call for halakhic resolution. Neither did ethical questions of ideal temperament and disposition. Despite Maimonides’ inclusion of such subjects within his halakhic code, subsequent codifiers, especially R. Joseph Karo in his Shulchan Arukh, omitted them.
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The same is true even of the fundamentals of faith. Belief in the messianic age, ruled Maimonides, is one such fundamental; but a detailed spelling out of its implications is not. “Neither the exact sequence of these events nor their details constitute religious dogmas.” Indeed the debate about the essentials of Jewish belief, which occupied thinkers for some two centuries after Maimonides had published his famous thirteen principles, took place at a philosophical rather than halakhic level. And in Jewish philosophy, unlike Jewish law, there are no decisions.
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The result was to make Judaism not merely a tradition of argument, but also an unusually open-ended argument “about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.” The arguments that demanded closure in the form of a halakhic ruling tended to be on immediate questions of the rules of conduct. Ultimate questions on the meaning and purpose of Jewish life were debated with equal seriousness in the literatures of aggadah, philosophy, biblical commentary, and Jewish ethical and mystical treatises. But there was no need to bring the argument to an end and choose between alternatives except where a view was so disruptive that it threatened the entire community of faith.
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Continuities of Conflict
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Held together as a people by its community of action, halakhah, and the broad framing principles of faith, traditional Jewry was thus able to find a home for an extraordinary variety of visions of what an ideal Jewish life should be. Did it include participation in work and society, or should it be devoted exclusively to the study of Torah? Should education be vocational, or purely “religious”? Were women who studied Torah to be encouraged or discouraged? Did scientific knowledge govern our interpretation of Torah, or did Torah govern our interpretation of science? Was the ideal person one who maintained an emotional balance or one who lived on the outer edge of emotional intensity? Under conditions of oppression, should one reach an accommodation with the ruling power or defy it to the point of courting martyrdom? Was the symbol of military power, the sword, a badge of honor or a mark of shame? Was the messianic age for which Jews longed an event within natural history or a supernatural break with history?
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Answers on both sides are to be found in the rabbinic literature, and we are struck, in reading the debates, by the subtlety and power with which the sages kept the questions open. There are instances where we are led to feel admiration for a sage who acts against the consensus; others where we feel critical of the sage who acts within the law. There are times when an excess of piety is portrayed as foolishness. There are others when a failure to go piously beyond the law is a dereliction of ethical duty. Ve-zu mishnat chasidim? asks the Talmud Yerushalmi at one point. “You may have acted according to the teaching of the law, but is this a teaching for saints?”
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Who is the ideal type within rabbinic Judaism? The sage, the saint, the zealot, the martyr, the person of simple piety, the figure of public authority, the creative intellect, the intellectual conservative, the man of learning, the woman of good deeds, the compassionate, the just? The question is impossible to answer. Each emerges as a distinctive kind of religious hero. The tradition even found it possible to portray sympathetically the relationship between R. Elisha ben Abuyah, the archetypal rebel against tradition, and his disciple R. Meir, one of the architects of the Mishnah.
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This is the mark of a living tradition. It embraces diversity while preserving the structures of community. Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, defined this as the challenge of law and leadership. Human beings, he argued, are less like one another than the members of any other species, yet they need, even to pursue their individual aims, to form societies. The leader uses law “so that the natural variety [of human beings] should be counterbalanced by the uniformity of legislation.” Halakhah creates a society, a community of action. Beyond halakhah are matters no less religiously important, but which are marked by diversity and individuality.
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Beyond halakhah too are those divergent voices on the ultimate questions of how a commanding past is to be carried forward into an open future. Again MacIntyre’s description is apt. A sense of tradition, he writes, “manifests itself in a grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available to the present. Living traditions, just because they continue a not-yet-completed narrative, confront a future whose determinate and determinable character…derives from the past.”
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The arguments within nineteenth-century Orthodoxy, for example, were of just such a kind. How, given the radical change in Jewish circumstance brought about by European emancipation, was the Jewish future to be written? Did it lie, as Hirsch argued, in exemplary participation in a secular society, bringing the ethical truths of Judaism to bear on Western culture? Did it lie, as R. Kook contended, in seeing that exile was ending and a messianic process about to begin, in which Jews were summoned to leave the lands of their dispersion and come home to the promised land? Or did it lie, as R. Moses Sofer and his successors implied, in carrying on the past as exactly as possible, resisting any suggestion of the relevance of change?
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These are voices within a single conversation on what is essential, and what accidental, to the Jewish vocation, and on how historical process is to be interpreted through the perspective of faith. To be sure, Hirsch and R. Kook and R. Sofer were not pluralists in the modern sense, each conceding the rightness of alternative positions. To the contrary: their views essentially exclude one another. If one is right, the others are wrong. And yet their positions remained legitimate choices within the same tradition. Adherents of one would be compelled to recognize adherents of the other as members of the same tradition and the same community of faith. That is what is meant by calling them “voices within a conversation,” or more traditionally, partners in an “argument for the sake of heaven.”
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That is how tradition handled conflict. And the question that has become suddenly urgent is whether the current conflicts within Jewry can be incorporated within this model of “argument for the sake of heaven.” If so, there can be dialogue. If not, there can only be confrontation. The one creates community, the other destroys it. Why then has dialogue between Jews become so difficult in the twentieth century? Why is it so often replaced by mutual delegitimation? If even Reform and secular Jews have turned, in recent years, toward tradition, why has there not been a revival of rabbinic Judaism’s greatest tradition: the tradition of argument, tradition as argument?
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Tradition and “Tradition”
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The short answer is that the brit yi’ud, the covenant of Torah, has not yet been renewed. Jewish attitudes have become more “traditional” without yet returning to tradition. The inability of Jews to communicate across their ideological divides is a measure of the extent to which Jews still stand “between two covenants.” And it is here that we must examine a word we have used frequently, thus far without analysis or explanation: the word “tradition” itself.
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What traditionally was “tradition”? First, it was a set of authoritative texts: the Torah, the rest of the biblical literature, the Mishnah, the Babylonian Talmud, and a range of other writings including halakhic codes, rabbinic Midrash, and Jewish Bible commentaries. Together they constituted a canon, an authoritative body of literature. Its boundaries were not always precisely defined. Nonetheless the shape of the canon was relatively clear. It embodied a Torah she-bikhtav, a written Torah, the five Mosaic books, and a Torah she-be’alpeh, an oral tradition, authoritatively set down in the Mishnah and Talmuds.
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It was to these texts that Jews turned for guidance in the conduct and understanding of their lives. But a tradition is more than a collection of texts. It is a set of beliefs about what those texts represent and why they are authoritative. Despite the flurry of argument in the Middle Ages about what Jewish belief essentially was, there was a clear consensus, best expressed by R. Shimon ben Zemach Duran (1361–1444). Jewish belief, he argued, had three components: belief in God, revelation, and Divine justice. It was over the second of these beliefs, the nature of revelation, that argument was fiercest and schism most likely.
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For rabbinic Judaism revelation meant first, that the Mosaic books were the unmediated word of God; second, that they yielded a set of commandments about how to live and construct a society; third, that after Sinai, Jews were covenantally bound for all generations to keep those commands; fourth, that the covenant could not be modified or annulled by a further revelation; and fifth, that along with revelation went an authoritative tradition as to how to interpret its words and apply them to new situations: the “oral law.”
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There are arguments within the tradition. But there are other conflicts that transgress the boundaries of tradition. By denying the validity of the oral law, sectarian groups like the Samaritans, Sadducees, and Karaites eventually placed themselves outside the mainstream of tradition. By asserting a new revelation and covenant, so did Pauline Christianity. These groups saw themselves as heirs to the same sacred text: the Torah. But they were not heirs to the same tradition of interpretation. Argument and conversation became impossible. Schism was the inevitable result.
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Jewish modernity began with another assault on revelation: that of Spinoza. This led in turn to an astonishing variety of attempts to redefine the meaning of Jewish existence. There were radicals, especially among the secular Zionists, who sought to sever all connections with the texts of the Jewish past, just as, in early Christianity, Marcion had argued that Christians must dispense with the “Old Testament.” For the most part, however, in modernity as in antiquity, tradition proved indispensable.
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But in order to legitimate change, tradition had to be reinterpreted in revolutionary ways. For the reformers, it no longer yielded a set of commands; instead it was a collection of broad ethical truths. For the secular Zionists, it was no longer a set of religious texts; instead it was national literature, the history of a people and its relationship to a land. Such is the power of tradition over human identity that an attempt to rewrite the future almost always involves an attempt to rewrite the past. Reformers and secular Zionists were thus able – as were Sadducees, Karaites, and Christians before them – to see themselves as heirs to the same Jewish past and tradition. But it was a tradition that had become unrecognizable to those – Pharisees, rabbinites, and later Orthodox Jews – who resisted radical reinterpretation and carried on the tradition in the traditional way.
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This is how traditions fragment and split apart, and how dialogue eventually becomes impossible. At a certain point one can no longer say, as the rabbis said of the positions of Hillel and Shammai, that “these and these are the words of the living God.” For this presupposes that the two sides hold in common a shared idea of the meaning of the phrase the “words of the living God.” When this is absent, the phrase is inapplicable. Argument no longer proceeds on the basis of shared assumptions about the authority of text and the rules of interpretation. It ceases to be “argument” in the sense understood by tradition. Instead it becomes a confrontation, to be settled by force or temporarily deflected by diplomacy.
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As long as the various parties have no interest in conversation with one another, the problem is not acute. Each side is content to let history deliver its verdict, each confident that it will inherit the future. But this is a dangerous strategy. It led Christianity, for example, to assume the disappearance of Jews and Judaism; and this led to fearful animosity when both, in fact, survived. If secular and religious, Reform and Orthodox, diaspora and Israeli Jews are unable to recover the framework of argument, and are left instead with only the strategies of confrontation, other fearful consequences are not impossible. It is this more than anything else that has led thoughtful Jews on all sides to seek dialogue in recent years. But we are now in a position to see why that dialogue should prove so surprisingly difficult. For each side, while claiming to represent the same tradition, in fact embodies quite a different version of it.
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Being Traditional
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In what sense are Jews today “traditional”? One of the most intriguing documents of American Jewry in the 1970s was a book entitled The Jewish Catalog. It sold several hundred thousand copies and was succeeded by several companion volumes. It emerged from the chavurah movement, the Jewish equivalent of the communes that flourished in the 1960s along with the student “counter-culture.” The Jewish Catalog seemed to signal a return to tradition. It was interested in precisely those things that most American Jews had hitherto dismissed as largely irrelevant to their lives. It was about kashrut, Shabbat, mikveh, and Jewish learning. It was about the detailed texture of Jewish life. It was a hands-on, do-it-yourself guide to traditional Jewish living.
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But as the Reform theologian Eugene Borowitz pointed out, it was not a contemporary American version of the Shulchan Arukh. It was not a code of Jewish law. It was, as the authors said, “a selection of materials which offer the possibility for immediate application and integration into one’s personal environment.” It was, as its name implied, a catalogue. And a catalogue, as Borowitz noted, “presents resources one can draw on to meet one’s personal needs.” A catalogue “only offers; it never presumes to tell its readers what they must choose.” Borowitz concluded that “for all its rich Jewishness…The Jewish Catalog rejects Orthodoxy.”
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The Jewish Catalog represents one way in which behavior can be “traditional” without being part of a tradition. Take kashrut for example. Two people can be seated together at a kosher restaurant enjoying the same food but for quite different reasons. For one, kashrut is a series of rules about what foods may be eaten, a dietary code. For the other, kosher food is simply a feature of Jewish ethnicity. One can enjoy “traditional” cuisine once in a while, without in any way feeling that there are laws governing the act of eating. Clearly the word kosher means different things to the two people. The same systematically applies to all Jewish behavior. It may be a mitzvah, an act performed in human response to a Divine command, or it can be a “Jewish expression” in the same way that doing a particular kind of dance or singing a folk song can be a Greek or Russian expression.
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The Catalog, along with Borowitz’s Reform Judaism and contemporary Reconstructionism, turns tradition into a range of Jewish behaviors that have nothing to do with the idea of halakhah or law, but everything to do with liberal individualism. “Tradition” in this sense excludes nothing. Many American Jews, for example, light candles on Chanukkah, the symbol of a Jewish war against foreign worship, and at the same time buy Christmas trees. “Tradition” here has been secularized into behavior which has lost all contact with the beliefs which gave it meaning.
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A similar process is at work in quite a different direction in what Jonathan Woocher in America, and Liebman and Don-Yehiyah in Israel have described as the new Jewish “civil religion.” Here what is central is not the individual but the group. Religious symbols are employed to provide “sacred legitimation of the social order.” The phrase “a people that dwells alone” is used to explain Israel’s international isolation. The idea of covenant and collective Jewish responsibility is used to give depth to fundraising programs. Traditional motifs are enlisted in the public rhetoric and ritual of essentially secular organizations.
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The group has always been more central to mainstream Judaism than the individual, so that civil religion is in some ways closer to tradition than Borowitz’s idea of Judaism as personalized choice. But it is not tradition itself. It focuses on public occasions with little or no follow-through into private life. Its function is group solidarity, not worship of a transcendental power. Its role is to endorse, not criticize, the social structure. Religious language is used with deliberate vagueness and ambiguity. Here, too, “tradition” has been domesticated and secularized out of all relationship to its past.
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There is a third sense of “tradition.” It is one of the undercurrents of the Conservative movement or what is sometimes called masorti or “traditional” Judaism. Tradition here is understood in the sense usually attributed to the political philosopher Edmund Burke and is a religious equivalent of political conservatism, defined by Roger Scruton as that outlook “which springs from a desire to conserve existing things, held to be either good in themselves or better than the likely alternatives, or at least safe, familiar, and the objects of trust and affection.”
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Conservative Judaism was born in 1845 when Zechariah Frankel walked out of the Reform rabbinical conference, which had just voted to abandon Hebrew as the language of prayer. Frankel’s objections were not so much halakhic as sentimental and pragmatic. Judaism, he believed, could and should change, for the collective consciousness of Jews in any given age was itself a revelation of the will of God. But change should always be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Indeed it should proceed so slowly as to seem not to take place at all. Change, he wrote, “must be grasped with such care, thought through with such discretion, created always with such awareness of the moment in time, that the goal will be reached unnoticed, that the forward progress will seem inconsequential to the average eye.”
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Though “traditionalism” seems to be close to tradition, there are considerable differences between them. Jaroslav Pelikan puts it thus: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” Traditionalism is always conservative whereas tradition itself is sometimes highly radical. In its early days, for example, the chasidic movement was revolutionary; so, more recently, was Gush Emunim. A traditionalist values tradition because of its age; its authority lies in its “pastness.” Someone firmly within the tradition, however, values it because of its immediacy; its authority lies in its “presentness.” History is a key category for the traditionalist, but not for tradition.
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One of the key problems for traditionalism in general, and Conservative Judaism in particular, is knowing how and on what grounds to mandate change. Within tradition the answer is relatively straightforward: change is permitted only when it takes place according to the rules of halakhah. But conservatives have often sought to go beyond halakhic precedent and include the idea of historical evolution in accordance with the ethos of the age. And it has proved difficult to provide any criterion for distinguishing what, in the ethos of the age, should be Jewishly adopted and what resisted, and why. The confusion within the movement was evident recently when the Jewish Theological Seminary of America voted in favor of ordaining women as rabbis, some on the grounds that the change was in line with Jewish tradition, others because it was a “creative violation” of tradition.
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This then is one reason why internal Jewish dialogue is so much more difficult than it seems. The word “traditional” creates the illusion that Reform, Conservative, and secular Jews share the same tradition as Orthodoxy. In fact, though, each of these three groups has subjected the tradition to revisionary reinterpretation. They have translated it into conceptual frameworks like personal autonomy (Reform), group solidarity (civil Judaism), and historicism (Conservative) that have no place within tradition itself. We can imagine a hypothetical situation in which a number of villages used the same vocabulary but quite different rules of grammar. When members of two villages met, they would initially believe that they were speaking the same language. All the words they used, they would have in common. Only after a long series of mutual misunderstandings would it dawn on them that they were, in fact, speaking different languages. This is the situation within Jewry today.
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Orthodoxy and Uniformity
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But there is one other factor behind the demise of “argument for the sake of heaven,” which has to do with developments within Orthodoxy itself. As long as tradition was coextensive with the Jewish people as a whole, it had of necessity to recognize a multitude of voices. Jews were united by halakhah; therefore they could be divided on other things. Jewish law preserved the integrity of the community. Beyond that there could be differences: of custom, culture, personal piety, and philosophical orientation. The tradition maintained a balance between uniformity and diversity.
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This balance existed so long as the Jewish community was both a varied society and a halakhic society. But secularization has utterly changed the sociology of tradition. Halakhic observance, whether in Israel or the diaspora, is for the most part wholly voluntary. It is not supported by the wider cultural ambience. To the contrary, to be halakhically observant is to go against the secular tide. The Jew who is both Orthodox and involved in the secular world is regularly conscious of a deep inner conflict between the two roles. The result is that Orthodoxy is today experienced as consistent, lucid, and harmonious only in environments that exclude the secular world: in yeshivot, or chasidic circles, or restricted neighborhoods. These are environments that do not mirror society as a whole. To the contrary, they are composed of a voluntary self-selecting elite. They are communities of the likeminded. For the most part today, where there is a varied society, it is not a halakhic society. And where there is a halakhic society, it is not a varied society.
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This leads to a shift in the balance of tradition within any given enclave of Orthodoxy, away from diversity towards uniformity. To be sure, the differences within Orthodoxy are as pronounced today as at any time in the past. Each yeshivah and each chasidic group has its own particular style. Almost every shade of political opinion in Israel has its Orthodox advocates. What is lacking is the public domain of dialogue in which the various sides meet and engage in “argument for the sake of heaven.” Torah once emerged from internally diverse communities. Today it emerges from homogeneous subcommunities. And this does not encourage a serious confrontation with the views of one’s opponents.
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The structures of argument within the Jewish world closely mirror the structures of community. The medieval Jewish community, the kehillah, spanned all Jews within a given locality. It had to find religious space for diversity and argument. The kehillah was shaken by the divisive impact of the Shabbatean movement in the seventeenth century and by the split between chasidim and mitnagdim in the eighteenth. It eventually collapsed altogether under the impact of emancipation. In Germany, Hungary, Israel, and America, Orthodoxy began its long retreat into segregated enclaves. Orthodox Jews found themselves unable to speak a common language with other Jews and eventually even with other Orthodox Jews.
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There was no overarching community to which they all belonged. As a result there was no context for a conversation that would bring different positions into dialogue. This is a potentially tragic situation, all the more so since tradition so obviously contains the resources to channel conflict into constructive argument and ultimately, consensus.
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For rabbinic Judaism is a tradition of argument. And many of the issues that today divide Jews are precisely those to which the canonical texts yield more than one answer. How far is Judaism compatible with democracy and liberalism in a Jewish state? How far should Jewish law govern the public domain of Israeli life, even at the cost of infringing on civil liberties? Should the influence of Judaism on Israeli society be felt through the political process, or the educational system, or through personal example? Does Judaism mandate religious coercion? Is the state’s religious duty to stand firm in the face of international opinion or to set an international example of the ethics of self-restraint? May Israel trade land for peace?
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The same is true about Judaism in the diaspora. There are legitimate questions about the halakhic response to contemporary society. Should conversion be made easier or harder in a situation of high rates of intermarriage? Which enhancements of women’s roles in Judaism reflect the concerns of the biblical and rabbinic literature, and which import values hostile to the tradition? How far, as a matter of religious duty, should Jews be engaged in the ethical concerns of their wider society? Which changes in the shifting political and moral climate are to be welcomed and which challenged and subjected to critique?
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These are questions that would have traditionally created “argument for the sake of heaven.” And the faith of rabbinic Judaism is that Torah lives more in the way the argument is conducted than in the conclusions reached. If it proceeds through a debate informed by text, precedent, and interpretation, it becomes part of Torah. It becomes part of the commentary each generation of Jews writes to the covenant. But if it proceeds through political pressure, mutual delegitimation, and violent confrontation, there is no real argument. There is a search for victory, not truth. The clash of opinions becomes secularized. Judaism, instead of providing the means for handling conflict, fuels the flames of conflict into conflagration. The great tradition of “argument for the sake of heaven” comes to an end.
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That has happened in our time. It is a process that must be reversed.
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To Mend the Jewish World
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We can now draw our long argument to a conclusion. Two alternative futures confront the Jewish people. For there are forces operating on and within it in two radically opposed directions.
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The first is convergence. The predictions of the nineteenth century have proved false. Orthodoxy has not disappeared. Neither has Reform. Israel exists. The diaspora survives. What appeared to be mutually exclusive alternatives have each been realized. A new perception has come to dominate Jewish attitudes in the last two decades. The Jewish destiny is indivisible. Jews are implicated in one another’s fate. The Final Solution made no distinction between Jews; neither, for the most part, does anti-Zionism. The nineteenth century was marked by its divided visions of the Jewish future. The late twentieth century has been marked by a fervent desire for a single vision and a shared future.
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That vision can be simply summarized. It affirms the unity of the Jewish people across space and time. Jewish unity has ethical implications, in particular the idea that all Jews are responsible for one another. Jewish survival is a primary value and is not to be taken for granted. It is threatened militarily and politically in Israel, and socially, through assimilation, in the diaspora. Israel is a central focus of Jewish identification and concern. It supports and is supported by the diaspora, and their destinies are interlinked. Jewish tradition remains important, for it explains the uniqueness of the Jewish past and strengthens the sense of identity and community. Neither Jewishness nor Israeliness can be divorced from Judaism; nor can Judaism be divorced from a sense of peoplehood.
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Such is the consensus that has emerged since 1967. We might call it “folk Judaism.” And it is clear that it differs markedly from the revolutionary scenarios of nineteenth-century Reform on the one hand, secular Zionism on the other. Jewish attitudes have moved far from the longing for “normalization” that dominated these two movements and forced them into a break with tradition. Just as Jewish thought has converged on Israel as its center, so it has converged on tradition as its framework.
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Many of the attitudes that characterized the nineteenth century and made tradition so difficult to sustain – universalism, liberalism, humanism, acculturation, an emphasis on ethics to the exclusion of ritual, and a focus on the future to the exclusion of the past – are in decline. In their place has come a new respect for particularism, Jewish distinctiveness, textual study, ritual, and the idea of continuity with the Jewish past. This is a Copernican turn in both Reform and secular Zionist thought, and it offers the possibility for the first time of a reconciliation of these movements with Orthodoxy. Enlightenment and emancipation created a series of fateful rifts within the Jewish people. As the values of the nineteenth century come increasingly into question, those rifts begin to mend.
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Conflict
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Jews have, attitudinally at least, converged on tradition. But tradition, in the meanwhile, has moved further away from the majority of Jews, for two reasons, which are intrinsically connected. While secularism and assimilationism – the ideologies – are in eclipse, secularization and assimilation – the social processes – are still strong. This results in two phenomena. First, liberal Jewish movements like Reform are driven to provide religious legitimation for an increasingly wide range of behaviors. At its furthest extreme, as we have seen, this includes synagogues for homosexuals and a series of endorsements of intermarriage: officiating at mixed marriages, nominal rather than halakhic conversions, and conferring Jewish status on the child of a non-Jewish mother without conversion.
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Secondly and for the same reason, namely that the forces of secularization and assimilation are so strong in contemporary society, Orthodoxy has been forced to define itself increasingly in opposition to the norms and ethos of the age. Its centers of strength have been in its most segregated environments – the yeshivah, the chasidic group, and the exclusively Orthodox neighborhood. The idea that there could be a synthesis, Hirschian or Kookian, between Judaism and diaspora or Israeli culture as a whole has come to seem progressively less plausible. The images that dominated Hirschian Orthodoxy and religious Zionism – unity, reconciliation, and harmony – have been displaced by the language of opposition and confrontation: between Orthodox and other Jews, between Judaism and Zionism, between Torah and secular culture, and between Israel and the world.
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The paradox, then, is this. The very processes that have brought about convergence have brought about conflict and made more likely the second possibility: a deep and lasting schism, whether between religious and secular Jews in Israel, or between Orthodoxy and liberal Jews in the diaspora, or between Israel and the diaspora itself. Throughout the nineteenth century, the dominant motif of Reform, Orthodoxy, and diaspora and secular Zionist thought was that it exclusively possessed the key to the Jewish future. The alternatives were unviable and would simply disappear in the course of time. Each was spared the task of coming to terms with the survival of the others.
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But each has survived. Attitudes have had to be revised. There has been a turn toward Israel on the one hand, tradition on the other. And here the conflict is born. For not all Jews live in Israel, and not all Jews live by tradition. A critical asymmetry then arises. Jews in the diaspora accord centrality to Israel; but Israel cannot confer legitimacy on the diaspora without contradicting its own most fundamental assumptions. Likewise, Reform and Conservative Jews and a majority of Israelis accord centrality to the Jewish religious tradition; but Orthodoxy – tacitly acknowledged as the central bearer of tradition – cannot confer legitimacy on Reform or secularism without contradicting its most basic beliefs.
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Convergence brings conflict. So long as the various strands within the Jewish world defined their future without reference to the others, Jews might simply have drifted apart. That was the situation a century ago, but not now. It is when the diaspora defines itself by reference to Israel, and when non-Orthodoxies define themselves by reference to Orthodoxy, that a clash of perceptions is inevitable and confrontation becomes increasingly likely. The most bitter arguments are those that take place within the family. For they take place between people who have conflicting expectations and are yet indissolubly linked to one another. As Jews grow existentially further apart and yet increasingly see themselves as the members of a single global family, the more the disputes between them take on the character of a family quarrel. On the one hand this is benign. It signals the current strength of the wish for Jewish unity. On the other, it is fraught with tragedy. For the dissension is real and deep and seemingly insoluble.
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Schism
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Nowhere is this more clearly in evidence than in the continuing controversy over “Who is a Jew?” Consider the theoretical possibilities. The Law of Return, on which the controversy is centered, might simply be abolished. But the Law recognizes a Jewish arrival in the land as an oleh, someone who has “returned,” and not simply as an immigrant. It is central to the connection between Israel and the Jewish people as a whole. Removing the Law would remove one of the foundations on which Israel stands as the state not only of some Jews, but of the entire Jewish people. It would sever a key link between Israel and the diaspora.
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Alternatively, the Law might be amended to include the insistence that a Jew is one born to a Jewish mother or who has undergone a conversion “according to halakhah.” It is this proposal, advocated by many Orthodox leaders within and outside Israel, that has generated the controversy. For while it would affect perhaps no more than some half dozen cases a year, it would imply that the many thousands of conversions performed under Reform or Conservative auspices are invalid from the point of view, not only of Orthodoxy but also of Israeli law. Were it passed, the Reform and Conservative movements might choose to break their connections with Israel on the one hand, or to establish themselves as completely separate religions on the other. But this too would result in schism.
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Alternatively, the Law might explicitly recognize any conversion by any Jewish religious authority in the diaspora as valid. It would then be hard to resist the de jure recognition of the Reform and Conservative movements within Israel itself. The religious divisions that fragmented German, Hungarian, and American Jewry would then be imported into Israel. The consequences are frightening to contemplate. The de facto pluralism of the diaspora is one thing; a de jure Jewish pluralism in Israel is another. It would lead, of necessity, to a direct collision between Orthodoxy and the state.
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Thus, the desire not to precipitate schism holds the Law of Return in its present state of ambiguity. But the consensus is fragile. It depends on a balance of forces and restraints that cannot be guaranteed to last. The same is true about many other conflicts that lie just below the surface of contemporary Jewish life. The possibility that they might erupt into what might in effect be a civil war within the Jewish world is less remote than it seems. The previous era of Jewish autonomy within the land of Israel, initiated by the Maccabees and ended by the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, began and ended with a war of Jew against Jew: a war of zealots against Hellenizers. The parallels between the factionalization of Jewish life at the time of the Maccabean revolt of 166–164 B.C.E. and the revolt against Rome, 66–70 C.E., and the divisions now evident in the Jewish world are uncomfortably close.
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There is a common pattern: a revolution against the assimilation or secularization of Jewish life by a small group of intensely religious Jews who see themselves as instruments of Providence in an apocalyptic drama. Bitter internecine conflict is not unknown in Jewish history. In galut, it is kept in check. Rabbinites and Karaites, chasidim and mitnagdim, enlighteners and traditionalists fought their battles, but they were minorities under a non-Jewish power. It is in Israel, where the character of a Jewish society is at stake, that conflict escalates into full-fledged war. In the struggle, the particularists always win out against the assimilated: the Maccabees against the Hellenizers, the Pharisees against the Sadducees. The zealots who initiate the conflict are a minority, but they are supported by the broadly traditional base of the population. But though the result is a religious victory, it is also a human tragedy. Sinat chinam, antagonism between Jew and Jew, led to the destruction of the Second Temple, said the sages. And though the records of that period are unclear, there seems to be a core of historical as well as ethical insight in that remark.
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Process and Event
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In the present situation, therefore, it becomes important to concentrate not only, or even primarily, on what the various groups within the Jewish world hold in common – which is less than appearances suggest – but on the resources of tradition for handling conflict. Jewish unity is less a fact than an objective. And unless it is a unity that allows for diversity, it will not occur at all.
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Two hundred years after emancipation, there is still a multiplicity of answers to the question emancipation provoked: What is a Jew? But because the various sides have come closer, the controversies have become more intense. Jews are faced with a fundamental choice. Will the mood of the last two decades translate itself into convergence or schism? Much will depend on how the many arguments over policy and principle are conducted. They can become part of the “historically extended, socially embodied argument” that is Torah’s application to the Jewish present and future. Or they can be distributed between groups and positions that have no mode of communication with one another.
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It has been suggested that argument takes place within a tradition. Judaism did not merely contain argument. It celebrated it as a high, perhaps the highest, form of religious expression. It was in argument that the word of God became real in the life of man. It was in argument that the covenant was continued into the present and future. It was in argument that divergent viewpoints were brought into relationship with one another. It was in argument that the many voices that comprise knesset Yisrael, the collective community of Israel, were orchestrated into the choral symphony called Torah.
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That argument began to break down two centuries ago. With the collapse of structures of Jewish community, Jews were set free to pursue their individual or sectional destinies without reference to one another. The result was a series of divisions which are not yet mended, and which subtly and tenaciously perpetuate themselves through all talk of unity and “tradition.” Potential tragedy is in sight on a number of different fronts. It can be deferred, but not forever, by diplomacy and rhetorical ambiguity. The alternative is a candid acknowledgment of what divides Jews and an attempt to locate those divisions within the framework of tradition and “argument for the sake of heaven.”
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How is this to be achieved? One thing is certain. It will not be achieved immediately. Divisions that took a century to create will not be healed in a matter of years. Hence our first desideratum: a sense of the importance of process as against event, slow movement toward ultimate objectives, as against a mode that has come increasingly to dominate Jewish political and religious thought: the belief that conflict will either be resolved by a single dramatic occurrence or it cannot be resolved at all.
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Perhaps the single most conspicuous lacuna in Orthodox thought is its lack of a sense of historical process. This affected its relationship to the Zionist movement, and it affects today its relations with the State of Israel. Jewish thought is strong on historical contrasts. There is galut and ge’ulah, exile and redemption. There is ha-zeman ha-zeh, “this time,” and there is, by contrast, the messianic age. But on how to move from the one to the other, it is less clear. As we have seen, this results today in two extreme positions, anti-Zionism and messianic Zionism, neither of which have close contact with political and social reality. Either the State of Israel is not messianic, in which case it has no religious significance, or it is messianic, in which case all its acts are holy. It is hard to find, in intensely religious circles in Israel today, a position which avoids these extremes.
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And yet, three times every day, Jews recite an Amidah which sets Israel in the context of a historical process. First there is a prayer for the ingathering of exiles; then one for the restoration of “our judges”; then one for “the righteous and the pious”; then one for the rebuilding of Jerusalem; then one for the restoration of the Davidic monarchy, mark of the messianic age. Quite where the present State of Israel stands on this continuum is open to debate. Does it represent the “ingathering of exiles,” or not until all Jews have made aliyah? Is national sovereignty the “restoration of our judges,” or not until the government of Israel is religious? These questions are less important than the fact that Israel is set within a historical process, to be judged not by whether it is or is not now the “beginning of redemption” but by where it leads.
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Maimonides described the messianic state in the concluding chapters of his code, the Mishneh Torah. It would be one in which Israel was free of “servitude to foreign powers” and at peace with her neighbors. There would be “neither famine nor war, neither jealousy nor strife. Blessings will be abundant, comforts within the reach of all.” Jewish family pedigrees, which had become obscured through the course of time, would be clarified. Jews would be “free to devote themselves to the Torah and its wisdom.” They would reconstruct their religious life, and through Israel, the world would come to recognize God. That defines a series of ultimate objectives. And it sets an agenda of religious debate as to whether any given policy of the state advances or impedes them. There is room here for wide-ranging argument on the economy, social justice, political and military objectives, religious freedom or religious coercion, “Who is a Jew?” legislation, and the importance of Israel’s standing in the eyes of the world. But that argument concerns process. It cannot take place if the messianic age is seen as a single decisive event.
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The same lack of a sense of process hinders Orthodox relations with Reform. To be sure, Orthodoxy cannot and will never recognize Reform as a legitimate expression of Judaism. But neither Jewish law nor Jewish thought mandates an all-or-nothing approach to tradition. Reform Jews have made affirmations that are significant and positive. They have chosen to identify as Jews. They have chosen to recognize the existence of God and the importance of religious expression. They have chosen, in recent decades, to emphasize Jewish peoplehood and the State of Israel. Process is important. It makes all the difference whether Reform is moving closer to, or further away from, tradition. The view that nothing the Reform movement does short of a complete return to Orthodoxy can have significance is hard to justify by any other than isolated texts. And it encourages Reform to further distance itself from the rest of the Jewish world.
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It is important that Orthodoxy, in its relations with Reform, maintains the balance that the sages described as “thrusting aside with the left hand and drawing near with the right hand.” The divide cannot be minimized or conjured out of existence by talk of a “pluralism” that is unavailable within the tradition. But at the same time it must be made clear what brings the two sides closer together and what drives them further apart. The recent interest of Reform in the Hebrew language, Jewish day-school education, and religious ritual are powerful moves back toward the family of faith. Reform has undergone an extraordinary volte-face from the attitudes expressed in the Pittsburgh Platform a century ago. These are signs of convergence. At the same time, its legitimation of homosexuality attacks one of the most basic Jewish values: the essential link between sexuality, marriage, and the family. And its policy on conversions and patrilineal Jewish status may yet completely divide the Jewish world. Here, as forcefully as it can, Orthodoxy must say to Reform, lo zu ha-derekh, this is not the way.
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One passage in the writings of Maimonides has always been controversial, precisely because it describes the role of process in Jewish history and law. It took forty years in the wilderness, he argues in the Guide for the Perplexed, before the Israelites could cast off the mentality of slaves and acquire the courage needed to inherit the land. Human nature changes slowly. And God never intervenes to change it miraculously. The Torah did not immediately legislate an ideal society. It made concessions to a people used to idolatry. It adopted the path of gradual education toward a series of ideals. Even Divine legislation must reckon with human realities. Maimonides implies that the process to perfection is slow and beset with obstacles. The legislator must maintain a constant dialectic between ultimate aims and present human possibilities. There is no such thing in history as a sudden redemptive event that changes human nature, and no such thing either as a predetermined messianic process. Halakhah aims at creating an ideal society, but it must always be workable within a real society.
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That perspective is a voice within Orthodoxy that needs to be sounded forcibly and often. It would lead to a renewal of religious Zionism. It would give direction, too, to the relationship between Orthodoxy and Reform. It is the single most compelling reason for moderation rather than extremism as a religious ideal.
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Recovering the Argument
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The second desideratum, we have suggested, is that tradition finds a home for many voices and that many voices find their home in tradition. We have argued that Reform and Conservative Judaism in the diaspora and secularism in Israel are not yet tradition even if they have become “traditional.” But at least some of their concerns can be stated within tradition. It is important that they are. For every cultural crisis that is expressed within the framework of revelation and halakhah becomes part of the “argument for the sake of heaven.” And every one that is not, becomes instead the scene of a divisive confrontation.
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Examining the literature of Judaism, we are struck by how many incompatible positions it gives expression to. The Torah is the source of all knowledge; yet one learns astronomy from the Greeks, honoring of parents from the Romans, manners from the Persians, and one makes a blessing over “sages of the nations of the world.” Men are pious when they trust in miracles; but they are pious when they do not rely on miracles. Converts are dangerous to Israel; but Israel went into exile only to acquire converts. The messianic age will be supernatural; but it will be natural, marked only by an end of Jewish subjection to foreign powers. Each of these views finds its place within the tradition. And one could multiply examples almost without limit.
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The question is: How is this phenomenon to be interpreted? Does it mean that there is no one right answer to any question of Jewish values? Or that to the contrary, there is, and dissenting sources must be ignored? Or that, in R. Soloveitchik’s imagery, to be a Jew is to be torn by ceaseless conflict? We would argue that it means none of these things. Judaism is best understood not as a set of correct positions but as a set of axes of tension: between universalism and particularism, action and passivity, freedom and constraint, individual and community, equality and hierarchy, past and future, timelessness and responsiveness to time. It strives to maintain a balance between these opposing values. But there is, as Maimonides so clearly saw in his ethical writings, no universal point of equilibrium that can be prescribed in advance. It depends on the person, place, and time.
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This structure begins to fall apart when opposing forces and values are no longer linked in a single argument. For example: we noted in an earlier chapter that, according to Josephus, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes were divided in their view of history. For the Sadducees, history was made by man; for the Essenes it was determined by God. The Pharisees – precursors of the rabbinic sages – argued that it was a complex interplay between both.
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Zionism presents a fascinating parallel two thousand years later. The secularists took the Sadducean view. History is made by man. Orthodoxy in the 1860s, in the writings of Alkalai and Kalischer, had originally taken the Pharisaic position. Redemption is brought by God but initiated by man. But under pressure to distance itself from the secular Zionists of the 1890s and 1900s, it was increasingly driven into an Essene stance. History is made only by God. Therefore any human attempt to build a State of Israel would be heresy. Orthodoxy was driven into an extreme position, not fully representative of tradition, by the opposite extremism of the secularists. The religious argument over Zionism suffered a blow from which it has never fully recovered.
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Or again: consider the argument over the role of women in Judaism. The Reform and Conservative movements have argued that there should no inequalities in the religious life. There should be mixed seating in the synagogue. Women should be rabbis and cantors. These provisions clearly breach halakhah. A number of Orthodox authorities meanwhile have argued that women’s prayer groups, even when conducted within the parameters of halakhah, should nonetheless be forbidden, on the grounds that they import Reform and secular values into the sanctuary of prayer. Two extreme positions are thus distributed between noncommunicating groups, and argument comes to an end.
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In fact, however, the tradition was more complex. Undeniably the priesthood, paradigm of public prayer, was a male preserve. Yet there is evidence of deep concern for the feelings of women. The biblical narrative presents Eli the priest in an unfavorable light for misunderstanding and mocking the prayer of Hannah. The Talmud records that a peace sacrifice was once brought into the women’s court so that women could lay their hands on it and feel involved, kedei laasot nachat ruach le-nashim, “in order to satisfy women’s feelings.” That there is a pragmatic and religious duty not to let women feel excluded lies behind two important twentieth-century responsa by the distinguished halakhist R. Yechiel Weinberg. Yet such is the sociology of halakhah that when one extreme position is adopted by non-halakhic groups, halakhic rulings tend to move to the opposite extreme in an understandable concern to create a protective fence around Orthodoxy. When this happens, the balance of halakhah is disturbed.
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It is important, then, that alternative positions be stated within the parameters of tradition. Not every position can be. Neither halakhah nor the principles of faith are open-endedly flexible. The fact nonetheless remains that, in general, the larger the question about Jewish identity and purpose in a given age, the more rich in alternatives the tradition is. Once the alternatives are stated within tradition, they belong to a single conversation. They provide a home inside tradition for Jews who would otherwise be driven outside. They provide a bridge between Orthodoxy and Jewish secularism and liberalism. They give balance to the halakhic and ideological argument. They allow it to embrace more than one pole in the continuum of Jewish values. For the faith of halakhic Judaism was that tradition provided a framework, not for a section of the Jewish people, but for knesset Yisrael in its entirety and diversity.
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The conventions of “argument for the sake of heaven” have broken down within the Orthodox world. Scenes of angry confrontation between disciples of rival chasidic leaders and yeshivah heads, along with mutual accusations of error and heresy, have punctuated the media in recent years. They are, in a double sense, a hillul ha-Shem. They are a “desecration” of Torah, bringing it into disrepute. More profoundly, they are a “secularization” of Torah, a recourse to power, politics, and sensationalism in place of the protocols of argument and mutual respect.
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The renewal of the Judaism of argument is, in one important sense, the renewal of Torah in our time. For Torah, being covenantal, faces in two directions. On the one hand, as revelation, it is the voice of God speaking to the people of Israel. On the other, as interpretation, it is the voice of the people of Israel addressing itself to God. The more inclusive Torah is of the Jewish people, the wider the tensions it resolves and the greater the range of the arguments it embraces, the closer it approaches its covenantal ideal. That is the monumental faith the rabbis expressed when they said that “the Torah was only given to make peace in the world.”
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From Orthodoxy to Judaism
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I have not argued any particular case on any of the questions at the forefront of contemporary Jewish debate. I have argued something different and hopefully deeper. As the Jewish world split apart under the impact of social and intellectual change in the nineteenth century, Orthodoxy began to be seen by its opponents as a kind of denomination, one version of Judaism among many. In principle, Orthodox thinkers resisted the idea. They were bound to do so, for Judaism does not admit of denominations. Yet under pressure of circumstance they increasingly began to act as if it were so. Orthodoxy became a segment of the Jewish people, an embattled minority, defending its own integrity and sectional interests. A mutual alienation gathered momentum between Orthodoxy and what was, in America and Israel, a majority of the Jewish community. At the time, surely there was no alternative. Both communities were in headlong flight from tradition.
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The situation is changing. In recent years Orthodoxy has emerged as a force of power and great ideological strength. But it has not yet shed the attitudes, appropriate a century ago, of sectional thinking. In many quarters confrontation still comes more naturally than reconciliation. The search for authority overrides the etiquette of argument. Yet the covenant was addressed to the Jewish people as a whole. And the Jewish people as a whole cannot be identified with the views of any particular group. It lives in the conversation between the various groups. The importance of that conversation transcends any particular statement made within it. It was the faith of rabbinic Judaism that argument for the sake of heaven eventuates in truth, even if one cannot predict in advance what that truth will be. That faith needs reinstatement.
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Jewish mystics used to preface their performance of a religious act with a dedication, le-shem yichud: “For the sake of the unification of the Holy One, blessed be He, with His Divine Presence.” Their acts “mended” a “broken” world. A similar dedication is needed now: “For the sake of the unification of the Jewish people with Torah.” A religious act should seek to mend a divided Jewish people. No one strand within tradition can do so. Only the tradition as a whole has that power. But we believe it does have that power.
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If Orthodox Jews are to mend the Jewish world, they must rise beyond sectional thinking to a position where they can recognize alternatives within the tradition. Some will formulate new alternatives within tradition. The tradition of argument calls for respect for positions with which one does not agree. It leads one to admire stances one does not seek to imitate. These are values powerfully implicit in the rabbinic texts. And not accidentally. For rabbinic Judaism emerged from the ruins of one disastrous division within the Jewish world. We face another. What mended divisions then has the power to do so now. For whether the future translates into convergence or schism depends less on the chimera of Jewish unity than on how conflict is handled.
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There is no sudden, decisive, and miraculous event that will renew the covenant of purpose and reunite Jews with Judaism, just as there is none that will overnight bring all Jews to Israel. But there is a process, slow, arduous, and fraught with risk though it is. In this process, many kinds of Jew have many different parts to play: some by being living examples of religious intensity, others by being courageous advocates of religious reconciliation, some by rejecting secular culture, others by imaginatively appropriating it, some by building yeshivot, others by building society, some by their courage in war, others by their advocacy of peace. Tradition speaks with many voices and is enacted in many kinds of lives. It lives precisely in the extended argument over what it is to be a Jew. To see this is already to have begun the transition from Torah as the faith of some Jews to Torah as the constitution of the whole Jewish people.

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.