In Response to “A Gentile Whom Jewish Law Did Not Recognize”
Contents of the Article
In Response to ‘The Gentile Whom Jewish Law Did Not Recognize’
[ ‘The Gentile Whom Jewish Law Did Not Recognize’ by Michael Abraham, Parashat Noah issue]
Consistency
The article proposes the thesis that the validity of legal rules deriving from the Sages’ recognition of a certain social and/or psychological reality depends on that reality. If reality has changed, then the law changes accordingly. If one accepts this thesis seriously and literally, one must be consistent and discuss the following issues as well:
Will we agree that since the claim that ‘Jews are not suspected of homosexual relations’ is no longer valid, seclusion between two males should be prohibited?
The leniency regarding the prohibitions of seclusion with a woman whose husband is in town, or with a man whose wife is in town, on the assumption that the husband or wife ‘keeps watch,’ seems dubious under present-day conditions in a large city.
The Rema’s permission (which stands in opposition to the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the rulings up to his day) to extinguish a fire on the Sabbath is based on a certain reality in his place and time (for the sake of intellectual honesty, it should be noted that this permission accords with the approach of the article). This reality did not seem relevant even to the decisors in the Ottoman Empire, and it is not valid in Israel today. It follows that the prohibition against extinguishing should be restored in full, with all its implications.
The author devotes his article to changes in reality. All the examples above are equally bound up with changes in reality, and all the arguments in the article apply to them as well. Even so, as far as I know, these issues have not been raised by any of the Torah figures mentioned favorably in the article, nor by those similar to them in outlook. Is there not here a hidden agenda (perhaps not so hidden) to adapt Jewish law to a scale of values external to Jewish law, perhaps even hostile to it? I do not suspect the author of the article of this, but there is a large and noisy group that is suspect in this regard. 0
Yakar Kanai
Prof. Yakar Kanai is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science
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The Neo-Reform Process
I did not think the processes would unfold so quickly, but we live in a modern age characterized by rapid development. Michael Abraham’s article teaches us what the expected unfolding of the neo-Reform process (without quotation marks) passing over parts of religious-Zionist society looks like. The dynamic is simple: science is the supreme criterion, therefore the obsolete words of the Sages are irrelevant, and the next required stage is that the word of God is irrelevant. A few more articles and it will arrive.
The roots of this process lie in the imagined split in faith between faith as life and faith as intellect. The blunt turning away, evident in the article, from the Kuzari, the Maharal, and Rav Kook, together with the supposed reliance on Leibowitzian intellectual faith and legal obedience, cannot endure over time and cannot give life, because it contains a desperate and cruel inner contradiction between Torah and life. Torah becomes an archaic world, detached and coercive. Who would want to live such a life? A miserable world. There is no difference at all between a Jew and a Gentile, and yet it is still absolutely forbidden to marry a Gentile. Amusing to the point of stupidity. Jewish law has become a Procrustean bed, the commandments mere technical acts devoid of life and essence. An arbitrary, outdated divine command with no hold on anything real and true. If this is religion, I too do not want to be that kind of religious person.
If Michael Abraham’s God had studied in academia, his situation would certainly have been better. He would presumably have legislated laws a bit more updated and relevant. Instead of troubling himself to take the family of the Hebrews from the land of Canaan to Egypt, instead of waiting so many years until they became a people and bringing them out with all the unnecessary and wasteful ceremony, if he had only been privileged to see the enlightened world as we know it today, he could have wrapped up the whole business of the giving of the Torah with far more available clients.
He surely would not have been impressed by a few Arab thieves who lived in his period and close surroundings and whom he thought were unfit for the Ten Commandments, and he probably just happened to end up in Ur of the Chaldeans and never really saw the world. If only he had lived in our age, if he had known the global village, he certainly would have thought differently. The Gentiles we know today simply did not appear in the assessments he made of reality in his era.
If he had only known what modern science knows, that there is no health problem in mixing meat and milk, as people once thought, he surely would not have legislated that law. More than that, those laws lapse of themselves. For all the laws he legislated were based on scientific reason, ‘for that is your wisdom and your understanding’ (Deut. 4:6), and since reason advances and says something different from God’s outdated assessment of a few thousand years ago, the laws lapse of themselves, and there is no need at all for responsive rabbis to repeal them.
If Michael Abraham’s God were living in our time and observing the wonderful invention of electricity, he would surely instruct us to kill animals by electric shock rather than by an outdated cruel act like ritual slaughter. How primitive. But what can one do? He lived in a different era. But really, there is no need even to abolish ritual slaughter in a rabbinical court; ritual slaughter lapses of itself, for God wanted us to do this in the most humane and rapid way. The moment reality changes, Jewish law adapts itself to reality. Bottom line: one who does not believe in the Oral Torah will in the end also not believe in the Written Torah. And the road there is short and fast.
Yet it is symbolic that דווקא in the Parashat Noah issue Michael Abraham built a tower with its top in the heavens, with the arrogant intention of ‘let us make a name for ourselves’ (Gen. 11:4), to place man at the center, even above God. Reform quickly leads to heresy. We can only say to Michael Abraham and his camp: recant—’If they listen, good; but if not, let them go up to the mountain, Ahiyah will build an altar, Hananiah will play the lyre, and they will all deny and say they have no share in the God of Israel’ (Berakhot 63b). I have always wondered at this surreal style: ‘Hananiah will play the lyre.’ Perhaps the point is to prepare us for the fact that words of Reform and heresy do not come דווקא from untalented, coarse figures, but דווקא from gifted stylists, wielders of a sharpened pen, delicate souls with artistic inclinations. And yet healthy and simple truth makes its way. The people of Israel lives on, healthy and advancing.
Eli Adler Rabbi Eli Adler is a teacher at the Atzmona preparatory academy in the community of Naveh
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Reality and the Enactment
Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham’s words are a breath of fresh air, only rarely heard in our circles. The kernel of the article lies in its basic principle, which calls for independent thought grounded in examination and observation, and not necessarily in one example or another discussed in the article.
Each person has his own life experiences, each person his own life observations. There is, of course, a difference between subjective observation and objective observation. Observation about the nations of the world is subjective, and presumably the esteemed writer’s observation is not like that of my grandfather, who was born in Poland during World War I and lost most of his family in World War II. But there are scientific truths that we cannot deny, and Jewish law should be decided accordingly.
And there is objective observation, which must rest on science, as known at any given time. The world is not made up of earth, air, water, and fire, but of somewhat more elements, as listed in the periodic table; there are no seven heavens, and therefore there are no mysterious ether waves between the heavens, and the list could be expanded again and again. But what are we to do when a well-known rabbi opens his book with the four elements, a theory originating in ancient Greece and from there spreading throughout the (Gentile…) world and seeping into our own?
And it was not only Meiri who pointed out that something in the world had changed. Let us bring additional evidence from the renowned commentator on the Mishnah, Rabbi Ovadiah of Bartenura. He explains the wording of the Mishnah in tractate Kilayim—’Shiryim and kalakh are not subject to the prohibition of mixed species, but they are forbidden because of misleading appearance, etc.’ (Kilayim 9:2)—as follows:
Shiryim and kalakh—these are types of silk, and kalakh grows in the maritime regions; its appearance is like gold, it is extremely soft, and it resembles wool. But they are forbidden—because one may come to confuse them with wool and linen. And because they were not commonly found among them, people did not recognize them and might come to confuse them; therefore they are forbidden because of misleading appearance. But nowadays, since silk is common among us and everyone knows and recognizes it, no type of silk is forbidden with wool or with linen. Likewise hemp is permitted both with wool and with linen, since everyone recognizes it.
Rabbi Ovadiah of Bartenura tells us that in the past, ‘because they were not commonly found among them, people did not recognize them,’ but now a change has taken place. Thus reality has changed and the rabbinic enactment is no longer in force!
Menachem Markovitz
Menachem Markovitz is a project manager at Israel Aerospace Industries
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Dangerous Essentialism
Rabbi Michael Abraham’s article contains three central claims: a. The words of the Sages describe a rational system based on analysis of real reality. b. One must distinguish between facts and norms. The legal norms are fixed and unchanging. Objective facts on which the Sages relied, and which were valid for their time, should be updated. c. One must distinguish between first-order adjudication, which uses talmudic norms and applies them in practice, and second-order adjudication, which is adjudication by precedent. In Rabbi Abraham’s opinion, first-order adjudication must be renewed.
I will divide my remarks into two parts: in the first I will point to an apparent lack of coherence on the part of the writer, both in relation to things he wrote in the past and within the body of the article itself; in the second I would like, בעקבות Rabbi Abraham’s remarks, to open a discussion about the nature of Talmud study in our time—what its ends and purposes are.
A Change in Values
The reader of the article comes away with the impression that Rabbi Abraham proposes a sober historical reading of the Talmud, free of prior assumptions, and opposes an intra-textual and synchronic study of the Talmud as a religious text serving as a sacred (and exclusive) source of moral norms, as is customary in most traditional yeshivot. As part of this, Rabbi Abraham prefers adherence to the logical and rational explanation over the metaphysical one. My question is how these remarks accord with what he wrote regarding the issue of ‘Hebrew Law.’ In Aqdamot 15 (2005), Rabbi Abraham came out against the discipline of ‘Hebrew Law,’ arguing that Jewish law (and his remarks there are directed to talmudic law!) is a holistic religious and metaphysical system that presents an absolute and theoretical truth:
A decisive difference between Jewish law and other systems is that at the base of Jewish law lies a very distinctive metaphysical, and even ontological, infrastructure, derived from its religious context. This difference lies not in the essence and character of that infrastructure, but in its very existence. Civil legal systems rest on concepts of justice, values, and various norms. Jewish law, by contrast, posits at its foundation, beyond norms and values, a legal-spiritual ontology and a metaphysical substrate (ibid., p. 149).
It seems to me that in Rabbi Abraham’s remarks here one can hear a new voice, and the relation between the two sets of statements deserves clarification.
Moreover, as one whose point of departure is that Jewish law and the Talmud represent a worthy and perfect normative system, Rabbi Abraham is uncomfortable with the question of Jewish law’s relation to the Other. In order to solve this conflict, Rabbi Abraham argues that reality has changed. It is worth noting the way the argument is presented in the article: he does not claim that the world today is better than it was in the past, and that particularistic values once considered sacred (of course not only by Jews) are today rejected in favor of liberal and universal values; rather, he claims that real reality has changed. When the Sages regarded Gentiles as inferior, ‘like that pig,’ their words fit reality! The Gentiles surrounding the Sages really were like pigs—immersed in sexual depravity, theft, and violence—and therefore one must examine whether those statements are valid in present reality.
In my opinion, here Rabbi Abraham digs a deeper pit than the one from which he seeks to escape, and sins by what he calls in the article a ‘tendency toward an essentialist reading of the sources.’ This is a sweeping (and mistaken) rewriting of history in order to rescue the words of the Sages, instead of asking whether in some cases the norms of today may be preferable to what was accepted in the period of the Sages. In my view, this is an essentialism graver even than the assumption that there is a metaphysical layer to Jewish law (something that, of course, was very common in the period of the writing of the Talmuds).
And here the remarks touch the story that opens the article—a subject more deserving than any other of discussion: how is it possible that yeshiva students who invest all their time in Torah study lack the moral and intuitive feeling, obvious to modern Western man, that ‘all human beings are born equal’? Does this not powerfully echo the conclusion that something is wrong with the method of study in the yeshivot?
The Language, Not the Norms
Contrary to Rabbi Abraham’s opinion, I think that the value and importance of the Talmud derive primarily from its language and not from its norms. It is clear to me that in order to arrive at conceptual and up-to-date clarity on moral, ethical, social, and other issues, one cannot suffice with studying only a text written 1,500 years ago, however important and central it may be; I believe in the development and refinement not only of real reality, but primarily of human and cultural existence. We will never plumb moral and social issues without studying, alongside the traditional sources, Kant, Mill, Hegel, and Marx, as well as Spinoza and Buber. The sources, in my opinion, constitute a language that grants us identity and belonging (in this connection, I think it proper to refer to the many writings of Israel Prize laureate Professor Eliezer Schweid, on this subject, which did not receive the resonance they deserved in Israeli society).
The second question is what the proper balance should be in Jewish studies. Should not a yeshiva student become acquainted with additional Jewish texts, some of which even became classic books for other peoples (such as Ibn Gabirol’s The Fountain of Life, which until the nineteenth century was part of the Church canon); become acquainted with the history of Jewish thought throughout the generations, and with the cultural contexts in which the central principles of Jewish thought developed and took shape? Should he not broaden his fields of knowledge to include critical thinkers, and modern thinkers who did in modern Europe what Maimonides had done in his age—Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, Buber, and others?
It seems to me that the story opening the article obliges us to return and deal with these macro questions, which, beyond their intrinsic importance, may lead to the renewal of a modern Jewish culture, for which the Jewish people have long yearned.
Adiel Zimran
Adiel Zimran is a research student at the Hebrew University, a junior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, and a graduate of Har Etzion Yeshiva
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It Will Dismantle Jewish Law
What makes a legal ruling an accepted legal ruling, and what leaves it ‘outside the pale’? There are several components to this, of course, but one of them, perhaps the main one, is the question whether the ruling takes account of the developmental path of Jewish law. The use of precedents and consideration of existing legal positions are basic components in the development of Jewish law over many generations. There is certainly a difference among decisors regarding the relative weight of earlier sources and precedents within the legal ruling, but the very recognition that one cannot skip backward without limit, and that one must take account of the accumulated body of rulings on a given issue, is a foundational principle of Orthodox Jewish law.
This greatly undermines Michael Abraham’s call to return to ‘first-order adjudication,’ as he calls it, by which he means giving a contemporary interpretation to rules stated in the Talmud, even if over the generations those rules received other interpretations. Few decisors over the last several centuries of Jewish law have issued ‘first-order’ rulings, by referring to talmudic norms and applying them in reality, as Abraham says, without taking account of interpretive or legal precedents regarding those norms. Still fewer are the cases in which such rulings, insofar as they did not come from the greatest legal authorities, entered the cumulative flow of Jewish law.
First-Order Adjudication
However, Abraham’s call is problematic for another reason: what is ‘first-order adjudication’? In his view, such adjudication is supposed to apply talmudic norms in our reality. Research into the Oral Torah has often identified changes in legal conceptions between Tannaim and Amoraim, between different generations of Amoraim, and between the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud. Abraham’s demand to return to first-order adjudication assumes a basic commitment דווקא to the Babylonian Talmud, but in many respects—historical, interpretive, and logical—it is not clear why the Babylonian Talmud should be the line one may not cross backward. And what if, in the decisor’s judgment, tannaitic norms differ and are more suitable to our time than the talmudic ones? And what of norms emerging from the Written Torah that are not found, in the decisor’s deep judgment, in the Oral Torah? One who is prepared to skip over the Shulchan Arukh and its commentators, the Rishonim, and the Geonim ought in principle also to agree to skip beyond the Babylonian Talmud, back to the Jerusalem Talmud, tannaitic literature, and perhaps even to the Written Torah.
The main problem in Michael Abraham’s remarks lies in the fact that full implementation of his proposal is liable to dismantle the Jewish law that lies before us today. Abraham is aware of the danger of the ‘slippery slope’ present in his remarks, but he warns against allowing fear of that slope to ‘paralyze the healthy conduct of Jewish law.’ It seems to me that this warning stems from a lack of understanding of the true meaning of first-order adjudication. Such adjudication distinguishes between talmudic norms and facts; the norms are binding and eternal, whereas their practical implementation depends on facts. Since reality changes, practical facts change, and following the change in the substrate on which Jewish law applies its norms, the practical expression of those legal norms is also supposed to change. But one must know this: the distinction between eternal norms and their implementation neither begins nor ends with questions of psychological-social determinations such as ‘it is better to live as two than to live as a widow,’ the status of the Gentile, or the status of the deaf-mute in Jewish law, which Abraham cites in his article.
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Jewish law is built on the concrete realization of norms, with practical expression shaped according to the reality familiar at the time that law was formulated. The basic norm of Sabbath rest, for example, is refraining from labor. What that labor is from which one must refrain—this is not stated in the Torah but in the Oral Torah, in the list of the primary categories of labor in Mishnah Shabbat 7:2. In scholarship it is agreed that the list of the primary categories of labor represents the system of everyday labors familiar in the period of the Sages, and they are the Sages’ real-world application of the basic norm of refraining from labor on the Sabbath. This must be said clearly: the list of primary categories of labor suits our times no more than the rule ‘it is better to live as two than to live as a widow.’ It is a list suited to the lives of farmers and craftsmen, and has nothing to do with modern life, based on electronics and computers.
A good example of this is the rule governing computer use on the Sabbath; as is well known, the greatest decisors still hesitate about the legal status of electrical actions on the Sabbath, and the more common guidance is that these are only slight prohibitions, so that for someone compelled to write on the Sabbath, Jewish law recommends writing on a computer, since handwriting is more severe. Obviously, this can be true only if we accept the Sages’ application of the basic norm of refraining from labor on the Sabbath—the list of primary categories of labor in the Mishnah. By contrast, if we were to infer the duty of Sabbath rest from the reality around us, we would certainly determine that using a computer, or electricity, is the quintessential desecration of the Sabbath, and that writing by hand is preferable.
In sum, if we were trying to assemble a list of primary categories of labor and their derivatives as a ‘first-order’ ruling, we would choose entirely different labors. The use of a computer, in its various aspects, would be spread across several primary categories of labor, whereas the leather-working labors, for example, would certainly be greatly reduced. And so too with the details of Sabbath law. The distinction between a ‘first vessel,’ ‘pouring from a first vessel,’ and a ‘second vessel,’ for example, is an entirely archaic distinction. First-order adjudication would seek to examine whether measurable cooking processes had occurred in the substance, not in which vessel the dish had been placed.
Detachment from the Real Source
And so it is in countless legal subjects, light and weighty alike; examples may readily be found in the laws of menstrual purity or in dietary laws, and even the laws of blessings are, ostensibly, awaiting adjudication of a new order. The laws of establishing a meal and of foods that accompany bread are based on a meal whose main feature is the eating of bread, with the other components of the meal accompanying it. Our eating culture is different, and bread no longer serves as a central component of the meal. First-order adjudication would adopt the talmudic norm of determining what is primary and what is secondary, but it would require a substantive change in the practical directives because of the change in bread’s status within the meal.
Of the laws of menstrual purity there is no need to say much. It is enough to recall that at the basis of the law defining the size of the bloodstain that renders a woman forbidden stands the concern that one may find lice blood adjacent to the woman’s body. So too with dietary laws, whose basic concepts, such as ‘absorption’ or ‘imparting taste,’ cannot withstand empirical testing.
According to Abraham’s position, which calls for first-order adjudication, there is therefore no place to preserve these laws. As a natural scientist, he seeks, and apparently with good reason, to adapt legal norms to the picture of life as science knows it today, as we know it from reality. The problem is that the gap between reality and Jewish law is so great that such a demand would lead to a complete collapse of the entire legal structure. Abraham’s call for adjudication that seeks to preserve the fundamental norms while pouring those norms into contemporary frameworks does not concern defined and specific areas of Jewish law, but all of Jewish law as a whole, and therefore amounts to uprooting the existing legal structure of the last two thousand years.
Indeed, even one who is not a natural scientist cannot deny the gap between reality and Jewish law, and he adopts several possible solutions to the problem, one of which Abraham also presented: going ‘to the realms of metaphysics,’ as he put it. That is, assigning spiritual values to practical things, which makes it possible to transfer the discussion from concrete reality to the world of spirit and idea. Although personally I am very far from such an approach, I cannot ignore the fact that throughout the generations it has been adopted more than once by decisors and thinkers when they dealt with the gap between Jewish law and reality, and quite a few laws were shaped and entered the cumulative legal repository as a direct result of such a worldview. Unlike Abraham, then, I cannot deny the legitimacy of using metaphysical arguments as part of the legal game.
In my opinion, the solution to the gap described above lies in recognizing that one of the principal components in the process of Jewish law’s development is its formalization—that is, the detachment of legal concepts from their concrete source and their insertion into formal frameworks that do not represent existing reality. This is how Jewish law works in every area: a ruling that originally arose as a response to a real situation becomes over the years a formal ruling that is no longer meant to refer to concrete reality. Returning to the examples I gave above, the primary categories of labor on the Sabbath once represented the basic everyday labors, but once they were accepted, we no longer examine how well the list suits our daily life; on the contrary, we examine the ‘legality’ of our daily life by comparing it to that formal list. And so too in the laws of menstrual purity: we do not examine the laws of stains in comparison with modern habits of life and hygiene, and therefore we still declare a stain pure if it is smaller than a certain measure, even though the concern that it may be the blood of a louse no longer exists.
It is important to note that adherence to Jewish law as a formal system does not necessarily lead to stricter law. On the contrary, sometimes the path that permits legal leniency lies precisely in viewing Jewish law as a formal system. As in the example above from the laws of menstrual purity: first-order adjudication, which would seek to examine legal principles through realistic eyes, would remove the basis from one of the important leniencies in those laws, and so in many cases.
Indeed, the model I have presented here is far less attractive than Michael Abraham’s. It requires Jewish law to remain within a relatively rigid formal framework, and allows changes only when they are made on the basis of legal precedents (when such precedents exist, of course) and creative interpretation of earlier sources. Such a process, of slow changes that constantly require a glance over the shoulder, toward the legal repository accumulated over the generations, is necessary for preserving Jewish law as a living and existing body. Precisely the demand to reread the talmudic sources, despite the enormous temptation of such a reading, will bring about a major collapse of the entire legal system.
Haim Burgansky
Rabbi Dr. Haim Burgansky is the rabbi of Hoshaya and teaches in the Department of Talmud at Bar-Ilan University. Among other things, he works on the development of Jewish law
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A Simple Exercise in Logic
Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham replies
Yakar Kanai brings three examples, regarding which he assumes that I will not raise the demand to examine change in light of changed reality. Unfortunately, I must disappoint him: I absolutely think that these examples too, and others like them, should be examined.
Moreover, he presents these changes as something radical that surely even I would not agree to, whereas these are really very minor changes, and in my estimation many decisors would agree to changes of this kind (if the factual analysis is indeed correct; see below). I will begin with the absurdity regarding the Rema’s leniency about extinguishing a fire. First, I do not see why Yakar Kanai thinks that reality has changed on this issue. But that is a technical point. Let us assume for the sake of the discussion that it has indeed changed. The Rema changed the law and was lenient, or in effect repealed it, and now we cannot restore the law to its former state and observe it properly? This is truly absurd conservatism, and I am sorry that I was suspected of it. In my opinion, almost all decisors would say that when reality returns to what it was, the leniency lapses. Is there no obligation today to sleep in the sukkah? Is it now permitted to light Hanukkah candles inside the house? These too were two leniencies of the Rema based on the reality of his time and departing from the law as it strictly stands.
By contrast, the example of male homosexual relations is very problematic. It demonstrates why concerns about a slippery slope can be solved even without legal petrification. First, I do not know whether in the time of the Sages there were fewer people with a tendency toward male homosexual relations, as Kanai assumes. Second, even if there was a change, it is entirely possible that it stems from the fact that people then were more observant of Jewish law, and not because of differences in inclination. If so, there is no point in prohibiting seclusion, for one who is not faithful to Jewish law will not observe the prohibition of seclusion that we impose either.
Third, it is not clear to me what minority must be suspect of something in order to prohibit seclusion. Sexual desire between man and woman characterizes most people (even if with regard to incestuous prohibitions among relatives this is not a majority, but those are particular cases of specific women), and therefore it is reasonable to prohibit seclusion between them. But desire toward males, even in our day, still characterizes only a small minority. Perhaps seclusion should be prohibited for someone with such an orientation, but why prohibit it for all of us?! This is a slope that is not slippery at all, and there is no reason in the world why even a Reform heretic like me should slide down it. I hope I will be forgiven if I ignore the suspicions about an agenda hostile to Jewish law (not mine, only that of other noisy people).
Demons and Apocalypse
Rabbi Eli Adler relies mainly on threats and labeling. His words do not address even a single argument that I raised. It is simply complete disregard for the content of the remarks, with a focus on the smell (of heresy) wafting from them. From his words I learned that I am part of a ‘neo-Reform process (without quotation marks), passing over religious-Zionist society.’ Those neo-Reformers (= me and those like me) place science as the supreme criterion, and therefore the words of the Sages are not relevant in their eyes. Immediately afterward he predicts the apocalypse now: prepare yourselves, prepare yourselves, for in my next articles it will become clear, heaven forbid, that the word of God is no longer relevant.
His remarks remind me of a charming quotation from Rabbi Wolf, who headed the ultra-Orthodox girls’ seminary that bears his name. At the beginning of his book he declares: ‘Science is false and our Torah is true.’ His assumption is that there is an inherent contradiction between science and faith and Torah, and therefore each of us must choose between them decisively. Rabbi Adler assumes the same thing. In his opinion, whoever accepts the principles and findings of science necessarily gives up the words of the Sages and faith in general. I find this a truly wondrous phenomenon, especially when it comes from someone who considers himself among the disciples of Rav Kook (he mentions him among those to whom I turn my back). On this his teacher already wrote: ‘Our generation is a wondrous generation, a generation all astonishment.’
In my remarks I repeatedly explained that I am dealing only with the factual determinations of the Sages, and not with their legal and normative determinations, which obligate us. From Adler’s remarks I learn that, as an opponent of neo-Reformers (without quotation marks) like me, he finds himself committed to all the factual determinations of the Sages and the Rishonim. I am left only with the question: does he propose that we heal ourselves with the medicines of the Sages? (Only now have I heard of someone who has been seized by cordiacus, and they are looking for a physician for him.) As remembered, science is false and our Torah is true. I would further ask: how would he rule in a situation where people begin repaying debts before the due date? Would he cling to the factual determinations of the Sages that people do not repay before the due date? By the way, what does this have to do with science? And what about the status of deaf-mutes? Does he think the earth is a rectangular box? (See the talmudic discussion of twilight. Hint: why do spring waters become warm at night?) Does he intend to build airplanes or produce medicines in light of his Torah knowledge? His contempt for observation and the scientific method truly worries me, though it does not surprise me. I will not conceal that, in my opinion, the thought of a disciple of Rav Kook teaching at Wolf Seminary is truly a fulfillment of the prophets’ vision.
Adler writes that my flawed Leibowitzian method detaches Torah from its contents and turns it into something technical, barren, and alienated. His example is the prohibition on marrying Gentiles. In his opinion, this must be based on seeing the difference between us and them as metaphysical and essential. He does not even trouble himself to argue that there really is a difference in behavior between a Jew and a Gentile, for observation does not really interest him (remember: science is false and our Torah is true). Somewhere deep inside a difference is hidden. How does he know that if it has no concrete expression? Presumably because science is false and our Torah is true.
In my poverty, I have not merited to understand why we must posit metaphysical assumptions in order to explain the prohibition of intermarriage. Is seeing the difference between us only on the plane of our missions not enough to explain the prohibitions on intermarriage? By the way, what did Meiri think when he said forcefully what I am saying? Or perhaps his remarks were written out of fear of the censor (as is customary to explain at Wolf Seminary). Do priests, in his opinion, also have to possess metaphysically different qualities from ordinary Israelites? I am puzzled. As for the demons awaiting us farther down the slippery slope (meat and milk and electricity), see my response to Rabbi Burgansky.
The discourse of Adler and those like him evades dealing with reasons and arguments, and prefers instead to toss about apocalyptic threats and general labels (neo-Reform, the smell of heresy, Leibowitzianism, etc.). There is not one argument in his words, nor one response to mine. This is an expression of conservative hysteria, which feels helpless in the face of arguments. It simply cannot cope with them, and instead of acknowledging the truth, or leaving the matter unresolved, it prefers to attack and label. In my remarks I intended to open a door to a somewhat more intelligent discourse, one occupied with arguments and thinking rather than empty slogans. If the first kind of discourse is Reform and the second is Orthodox, then I am a proud Reform/Leibowitzian/heretic (without quotation marks. Do not forget). Labels interest me as much as a garlic peel.
How to Draw Conclusions
Zimran’s remarks hardly touch what I wrote. It seems to me that he is simply writing an article about subjects of study and yeshiva education. Three points nevertheless do touch on my remarks, and only to them will I respond:
a. Regarding the lack of coherence in my remarks. I wrote that at the basis of Jewish law there is a metaphysical-ontological system, and he adds ‘absolute’ (and assumes that this is always the case, though I did not write that). The contradiction in my remarks is created by those additions, and therefore I am exempt from answering it.
b. In his opinion, I support a ‘sober historical study free of prior assumptions’ and also ‘oppose an intra-textual and synchronic study of the Talmud.’ All this is entirely undeserved. I wrote nothing at all about the study of the Talmud, and I certainly support דווקא its ‘intra-textual and synchronic’ study, as I have done all my life. I do not at all believe in historical study free of prior assumptions, if only because there is no such animal. My remarks dealt solely with the question of how we are to draw legal conclusions from this intra-textual study.
c. He writes that I did not raise the possibility that the Sages were mistaken even relative to their own time (that is, that even the Gentiles of their time did not deserve the attitude fixed toward them), and that I dealt only with the possibility of a change in reality relative to their time. I completely agree that this is possible, and it indeed follows from my remarks (I wrote that in my opinion the words of the Sages are based on observations and on what they saw). I do not think that this is the case in the issue of the attitude toward the Gentile, but that is another subject.
By the way, the third point contradicts Adler’s criticism. Zimran accuses me of assuming that the Sages did not err scientifically, while Adler accuses me of preferring science over the Sages (that is, that the Sages did err scientifically). This is an amusing example of the fact that two opposite conclusions drawn from my remarks are both mistaken. I leave this as a simple exercise in logic for the interested reader.
Between Norms and Facts
As for Rabbi Burgansky’s remarks, they are important and substantive, yet it is difficult for me to respond to them in detail on this platform. My article was not a legal-theoretical essay but a journalistic one. Its purpose was not to lay out the doctrine of legal change in all its details, but to point to a fundamental distinction (between norms and facts) that we tend to ignore. Even so, one cannot leave it at that, and I will address several central points.
First, discussion of any change requires entering into the rules of change rooted in Jewish law itself (a court greater in wisdom and number, an enactment whose rationale has lapsed, the authority of the Talmud, and the like). Many imagine that these block the path to any change, but that is not so. On the other hand, it is clear that one cannot and should not ignore them, precisely in order to preserve the stability of the system. The question of what role these rules play, and what exactly they require, needs an analysis for which there is no room here.
Second, when we come to discuss change, we must distinguish between situations in which reliance on the original law leads to absurdities and distortions, and situations in which it merely seems to us incorrect or unnecessary. In this respect, changing the attitude toward the Gentile is not at all similar to changing the categories of Sabbath labor.
Third, I am certainly not calling for a return to the Talmud. That is a misunderstanding of my remarks, and my students are surely tearing out their hair when they read it (I constantly speak against such romantic conceptions). The Talmud must be interpreted in light of all the Rishonim and Aharonim, without skipping, and as part of our entire tradition (while preserving independence). But it is important to distinguish here between norms and facts, and it is important to understand what must be taken into account and what it is less important or less correct to take into account. And certainly the final decision regarding our own time and place is in our hands: ‘Jephthah in his generation is like Samuel in his generation, and you have only the sage of your own days’ (Rosh Hashanah 25b).
Fourth, there is a growing tension between the directives of Jewish law and reasonable, straightforward common sense. Faced with this question there are two ways of coping: academics (like Burgansky), who are keenly aware of it, propose formalization; whereas the ultra-conservative national-religious types (like Adler) propose ignoring it and continuing to drone on as before, insisting that everything is still true and suited to reality, and that even if in our flesh-and-blood eyes the whole business looks rather bad, we should flee to the realms of metaphysics. The hope is that if we recite this mantra enough times, and back it up with sanctimonious eye-fluttering about fear of Heaven while accusing anyone who dares to think a little of heresy (or the smell of heresy), everything will work out. If Adler claims that I am too Leibowitzian, Burgansky claims that I am not Leibowitzian enough.
I am prepared to accept the claim that sometimes a principle whose foundation lies in an understanding of reality is turned into a formal principle detached from its source, if only as a tactic of one who lacks the tools to cope with the difficulties. But in my opinion such a thing can be done only in certain cases, and only where there is need and justification for it, and that indeed is how it has always been done. But in our day it looks like a cancerous growth. Significant parts of Jewish law are losing their meaning and appear absurd on their face, and many people, including clearly outstanding scholars, are because of this losing confidence in Jewish law in general and in the rabbinic establishment in particular. Heaven is my witness that I am no small formalist, and nevertheless, precisely because I do not believe in the Leibowitzian detachment between Jewish law and its contents, I am not prepared to accept such sweeping formalizations.
And finally, I am aware that my path may alter significant parts of Jewish law, and one must take care to do so gently. On the one hand, I do not accept an automatic aversion to changes, just like the Sages themselves (yes, even regarding the categories of Sabbath labor). On the other hand, it is clear to me that not every line of reasoning is enough to make every change, and not every law has the same level of necessity for change. As stated above, there are also legal processes and limitations on changes, at least in some cases. My purpose in the article was only to point to a principled and important distinction that is certainly correct (between norms and facts), to demonstrate it through several cases in which it is fairly easy to see and to be convinced that it is necessary, correct, and possible, and thus to warn against excessive conservatism. The article is no more than an initial directional call toward an alternative. Finer distinctions have no place here.
Published in the ‘Shabbat’ supplement, ‘Makor Rishon’, 14 Heshvan 5774, 18.10.2013