Renewal of Halakha or the Destruction of Halakha – Part I – Torah and Labor Faithful

[Speaker A] It’s a privilege to speak about the wonderful legacy of Rabbi Berkovits, and also to deal with a subject that is beloved and painful and sensitive and urgent—the broader conversation around the issue of renewal in Jewish law in the context of internal paths. We’ll begin with Rabbi Dr. Yitzhak Hershkowitz, who lectures in Jewish philosophy, a doctor and lecturer in the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Bar-Ilan and at Orot Israel College. He deals with philosophical aspects, the thought of Jewish law, the ideological background of Religious Zionism, responses to the Holocaust, refusal to serve, a range of topics, Maimonides and the ideological and halakhic foundations of Maimonides, a very nice range of subjects, and he is also the rabbi of the Netzach Shlomo community in Petah Tikva. Right? Please.

[Speaker C] Almost a eulogy. Good evening. From the outset I’m going to shorten the duty of thanking all the distinguished people, because it simply won’t end, and thank God everyone here is distinguished and everyone is welcome, so more power to all of you who are here. And I want to open with a few personal words. I had the privilege and the pleasure of being—I don’t even know how to define it—a lecturer in courses in which Meir was present. I don’t want to say Meir’s lecturer, because that’s really not true. More than that, the intellectual experience I had for two consecutive years, once a week, in two courses together with three dear people who are here now—Meir and Shoshi, and also Zvi, all of whom made an important contribution to the book. In Meir’s and Zvi’s case that’s obvious, and with Shoshi it’s written on the first page, so the matter is definitely clear and self-evident. The experience was a moving one. I remember that after the second time I taught the courses—the first dealt, if I remember correctly, with the conceptual foundations of Jewish law, and the second with religious responses to the Holocaust—I remember getting home that evening and my wife said to me, “You look refreshed, as if you just got up in the morning,” which of course is not true, because when I get up in the morning I do not look refreshed. But I told her, really, I had an experience where instead of feeling like a lecturer, I felt like a student drawing from the Torah of his teachers. It was a real experience to see a lecture with so many wise people there, full of all good things and sharing their goodness with the people around them—an experience that was genuinely exhilarating intellectually. And I thank the three of you, and of course Meir, the guest of honor, for that experience. I also thank you, Meir, for the privilege of coming and speaking here in your praise and in praise of Rabbi Berkovits, who of course does not need my praise, and also to speak a bit about the substance of the matter, because in the end, with all the importance and honor we show one another, we came to talk about matters of the spirit. There is no doubt that our generation has been blessed with a major thinker like Rabbi Berkovits, a man who combines so many worlds, such a wise man, who contributed so significantly to the development of Jewish law—whether we are talking about the practical development of Jewish law or the crystallization of the ideas surrounding Jewish law—and that privilege is a great privilege. And when we come to assess the contribution of Rabbi Professor Eliezer Berkovits to our generation, it’s hard to exaggerate. And yet he is a tragic hero, because so few people know his work. And thank God this large audience here is so moving and beautiful, but sadly, if we were to walk down the street—and I assume in most synagogues in our holy land, in most synagogues here in the country—I doubt we could find even one person, leaving aside someone who has read a book by Rabbi Professor Berkovits, I doubt we could find even one person who has even heard of the man and his work. And to me that is very sad. And if we try to understand what Rabbi Berkovits was trying to tell the generation, what questions really troubled him from his youth, from his earliest years, then without a doubt we are talking about the tension between God and man. But the tension, I would say, the constructive tension, between God and man. One of the first dispositions they teach in philosophy departments is that not every question needs an answer. And very often there are questions you need to let resonate before rushing to answer them. And this great tension, which Rabbi Berkovits in many ways lived throughout his life, was a very fertile tension. So who determines? Who decides? Maybe we should even formulate the question in a Platonic way: what is Jewish law? Meaning, before this somewhat provocative title of this evening is even unpacked—destruction of Jewish law or the building of Jewish law—what is Jewish law at all? That is the real question that troubled Rabbi Berkovits all his life. I think that perhaps the right way to approach this discussion would precisely be through Maimonides. In an apparently entirely different issue, the issue of individual providence. One of the principles Maimonides teaches us in the Guide for the Perplexed, in several passages that either were not understood by many in later generations or were understood and precisely because of that people were angry with him—that’s already a political question—is Maimonides’ somewhat vague statements about the issue of individual providence. What is clear in Maimonides is that individual providence exists for people who use their intellect. Now the question is what individual providence is. But someone who uses his intellect has individual providence. Now the question is what that providence is. But one of the things Maimonides teaches us is that in the end the human intellect is a divine gift. Maimonides writes this explicitly: it is a divine overflow bestowed upon us. The human intellect is a gift, a gift that the overwhelming majority of creatures in the world do not have. And that is true regarding animals, and unfortunately it is also true regarding some two-legged walkers, but that is already a different discussion. I saw something very nice this week: a Torah scholar wrote that he has a variant of what in science and the philosophy of science is called Ockham’s razor. Ockham’s razor says that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one—we won’t get into the logic of that now—and he has a variant: if a phenomenon can be explained by stupidity, there is no need for further explanations. So thank God there is a lot of stupidity in the world; wise people said that before me already. So not everyone uses his intellect. But a person who uses his intellect really is under the Creator’s providence. Because a person who uses his intellect doesn’t go to dangerous places, doesn’t eat foods that are unhealthy for him, lives a reasonable, sensible, balanced life. He doesn’t get too angry, doesn’t get too sad, doesn’t sink into depression, and also doesn’t get overly excited and jump around wildly. And such a person lives a life that allows him to enjoy this world and get the most and best out of it, and therefore in practical terms he is under the Creator’s providence. And this statement of Maimonides about individual providence is, in my humble opinion, true, and one can see it as guiding Rabbi Berkovits’s teaching when he comes to speak about Jewish law. It is a very naïve and almost childish view to assume that in Jewish law there is really a tension between the divine and the human. The starting assumption of presenting things this way—as though there is what the Holy One, blessed be He, said, and there is what I think, and let’s see who wins the arm-wrestling match—that assumption, that what I say is not God and what He says has nothing to do with man, is simply a mistaken starting assumption. And therefore Rabbi Berkovits’s longing to engage with the aggadic layer of the words of the sages, with the layer that more powerfully makes the Creator present as part of everyday human experience, is an understandable longing. Because what Rabbi Berkovits was really trying to do all his life was not to provide an answer to this great tension between God and the human, but to blur the boundary between the divine and the human, and to try to understand where the right mixture lies—or maybe I would say it a bit differently—where the true voice of the Holy One, blessed be He, is found. Where is the divine? Is the divine really found only there, or is the divine also found here among us? I think this longing also helps us relax in the face of many of the burning issues Rabbi Berkovits touched on, and also helps us understand him and his contribution. I think someone who says that Rabbi Berkovits’s ideas amount to the destruction of Jewish law—and sadly there were those who said that—doesn’t really understand how Jewish law is formed. And there are things you know only in practice. I feel very connected to Rabbi Berkovits’s personality from my own very small place, as someone who is both actually a community rabbi and also studies the subject a bit. Because when you’re a community rabbi, you know there is no such thing as everything being up there. There is no such thing as everything existing only on the divine plane. Why, am I divine? It says, “And Moses went up to God.” It says that Enoch is there in that realm, and Elijah too—that’s it, it doesn’t say that about anyone else. If I may quote my late father, who liked to say many times that there is only one person in the Hebrew Bible of whom it says that he knows the knowledge of the Most High, and that is Balaam—and he says it about himself. So I do not know the knowledge of the Most High, and nevertheless here I am issuing halakhic rulings. Now, I do not consider myself a halakhic decisor—not like Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, not like Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, and not like a quarter or a tenth of them. And yet, factually, I issue halakhic rulings. How do I do that? Who authorizes me? Who permits me? Do I consult the Holy One, blessed be He, on every halakhic ruling I make? If I said yes, people would start paying me hundreds of thousands of shekels—not by check, though; cash would be fine. It could be done, by the way, if anyone wants. But sadly I can’t say that about myself. I don’t consult the Holy One, blessed be He. Unless I say that I do consult Him. When do I consult Him? When I open a page of Talmud, when I open the Shulchan Arukh. With whom am I consulting at that moment? Am I summoning Rabbi Yosef Karo from the dead? Am I conjuring up the Noda B’Yehuda and the Machatzit HaShekel? Whose descendants, both Rabbi Berkovits and I, had the privilege of being. Not at all. I’m not summoning them from the dead, and to tell the truth, forgive me for saying so, their personal opinions don’t interest me either. Their personal views are irrelevant to the discussion. What matters is their contribution to this great thing called Jewish law. And we too, as much as we belittle ourselves, we too contribute to it, because in three hundred years they’ll tell stories about us too—how holy and righteous and great we were. That’s how it works; that’s the nature of stories. And therefore in the end, yes, there is consultation with the Creator here, and the voice of the Holy One, blessed be He—a great voice that did not cease, with both meanings of that phrase—echoes in the world. And when one understands that his entire project—and I really think, if I may say so modestly, after reading quite a few of Rabbi Berkovits’s books, not all of them unfortunately, but the feeling is that his whole project stands there in longing and striving for the revelation of the voice of the Holy One, blessed be He—once you understand that, you gain a very deep understanding of his most radical statements, his most significant ones. And I want to conclude by saying—because in the end I do want the ending to soar a bit—I’ll say perhaps something that one need not agree with. I think that in the end Rabbi Berkovits also had the right intuition in many cases, also in identifying and detecting the divine voice, not only striving toward it, not only hearing it, but revealing it. And I want to say one more thing: the place where Rabbi Berkovits discovered the divine voice in his halakhic study was precisely this voice of searching. Meaning, someone who claims he knows the divine voice probably doesn’t know the divine voice all that well. But someone who lives an ongoing experience of searching, in many ways finds the divine voice specifically within the world of Jewish law, because he knows and has the proper caution on the one hand, and on the other hand the necessary courage to recognize that the Holy One, blessed be He, expects me to keep walking. To recognize that the Holy One, blessed be He, expects me not to be a Sadducee, not to be a Karaite, not to be—in the Christian sense of the word—a fundamentalist, but to be a thinking Jew, I would even say a dreaming Jew, who seeks to hear the word of God within Jewish law today, now. Because it cannot be—it is existentially intolerable—to assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, threw us into darkness and stopped speaking to us. And therefore his ability to stand up and say: even though a hundred, two hundred, or three hundred years ago they did not say in Jewish law what I am saying, this is the voice of God now. And whoever claims otherwise bears the burden of proof, not me. Of course this comes from a place of caution, humility, and greatness in Torah—these are necessary conditions. And nevertheless, the eyes of all Israel are turned toward me as a halakhic decisor, which means they understand that the Holy One, blessed be He, is corresponding with me and speaking with me and speaking through my throat, which means they are probably right. Because as Rav Tzadok says, actually, as Hillel the Elder says in the name of his teachers in the Talmud in tractate Pesachim: if they are not prophets, they are the sons of prophets. And as the Jerusalem Talmud says, when the religious court does not know what to do, they go out and see what people are doing outside. That is even more radical than “go out and see what the people are doing,” because “go out and see what the people are doing” means what the people’s custom is. But here, when the religious court does not know the Jewish law, they go out and see what the people are doing, and thus they know what the Jewish law is. I’ll end with that because there is much more to say. Thank you very much for this special evening and for the privilege of being here. Thank you very much for everything I’ve learned from you, Meir, and from all of you. And I really thank the Holy One, blessed be He, for this privilege to meet and keep meeting—even today we met—and to hear more and more and to learn more and more words of wisdom and insight, and to keep hearing the voice of God. Thank you.

[Speaker A] Thank you, Rabbi Tzachi. This evening bears the provocative title “Renewal in Jewish law or the destruction of Jewish law.” Thank you, Yossi. This title can be read with an exclamation point, as standing at a crossroads that is happening now, a critical moment. If we do not renew now, heaven forbid, we will be destroyed now, or at least suffer great damage. The damage of alienation, the damage of detachment, the damage of irrelevance. And this title can also be read with a question mark at the end, and one can answer: what are you talking about, gentlemen? The way you’re talking about renewal in Jewish law—it itself is the destruction of Jewish law. Your plans to do with Jewish law as you please—that is what endangers, heaven forbid, the existence of the Jewish people in its Orthodox form. Abraham Berkovits, Professor Berkovits, wrote at the end of the book Not in Heaven, and Dr. Meir put it here at the end of the introduction, so it was easy to find: “It is a pity that all those authorities who seek to impose the laws of the Torah do not take to heart the need to understand the nature of the confrontation with the spirit of the times. They take the easy way out. They do not seek the word directed to this hour, to this generation. If they have the authority, they impose the way of learning that had meaning for yesterday, and in so doing they miss hearing the Torah’s eternal word intended for today, for this generation, for a new movement in the history of the Jewish people.” For Rabbi Berkovits, this is not only about coping with one solution or another; it is also, heaven forbid, about the possibility of broadly missing the whole divine voice that is being heard in this generation and needs to be heard in this generation. Some level of coping, of renewal, happens among all halakhic decisors, each in his own way. And the points of contact are in the dozens and hundreds—things that are the result of technological or scientific development, things that are the result of social developments, developments in self-perception, in value perception itself, assumptions about human nature, about human behavior, and countless other things. And it is very difficult to put them all in one basket. But we would like to hear some broad outlines of the possibilities for renewal in Jewish law. Rabbi Michael Abraham will begin—Rabbi Doctor, sorry, all the rabbis here are doctors; there are a few jokes about that, but we’ll skip them. In any case, Rabbi Neria said that by six months he’s older than you, I think, so he’ll begin from there. A few things you may not know about Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham: he was born in Haifa, he is a graduate of Netiv Meir, trained as an electrical and electronics engineer, with a doctorate in physics. You probably know that he deals with philosophy, logic, and Jewish philosophy. He has published a series of books, the best known of which are Two Carts and a Hot-Air Balloon, dealing with Judaism and postmodernism, and God Plays Dice, which grapples with evolution—books have been written about that. He lived for a long period in Bnei Brak and its yeshivot, and then for another significant period as a teacher at the hesder yeshiva in Yeruham. He has a very well-known username on one of the major forums, “In Haredi Rooms,” for anyone who wants to hear truly interesting things. And today he is a teacher at the Institute for Advanced Torah Studies. Please, Michael.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hello everyone. Yossi sketched out a certain framework, and I’d like to bring things down a bit to the ground. Let’s start perhaps with the title. It’s a somewhat vague title. I mean, “Renewal in Jewish law or the destruction of Jewish law” reminds me of what Ariel Sharon once said: who is in favor of surrendering to terror? I think nobody here is in favor of destroying Jewish law. Meaning, if we take a poll—who is for the destruction of Jewish law and who is for the renewal of Jewish law—I think we’ve missed the point. Something is still missing at the outset. That is, what is this thing about which there can be a debate as to whether it is a renewal of Jewish law or the destruction of Jewish law? And that thing—in parentheses I’ll add—is probably, if I understand what Yossi meant, changes or adaptations in Jewish law. So if I amend the title now, I would say: changes and adaptations in Jewish law—are they the destruction of Jewish law or its renewal? And regarding that question, which is of course very, very broad, I debated a little whether to speak about one dimension in greater detail or to try to offer a relatively complete picture, as much as possible, of the discussion, at the price of a certain superficiality or telegraphic style. And I chose the second direction, although it still seems to me that often focusing on one point doesn’t allow us to see the forest. It’s worthwhile once to look at things from above, maybe that will help create a certain order for people who feel various things, perhaps even contradictory things, and don’t always know where to place them, how possible they are, where they come from. So I’ll try to suggest the order that, at least as I understand it, exists in this issue. I go back to the title. When we ask whether changes in Jewish law are the destruction of Jewish law or the renewal of Jewish law—changes, adaptations, I won’t repeat that double expression every time—we have already assumed something. Until now I only completed the title; now I’m criticizing it. Because essentially these two possibilities can at least imply a discussion that is fundamentally teleological. Meaning, I want to examine my attitude toward changes in Jewish law according to the question of what they will lead to—will they lead to renewal or to destruction? And I want to reject that method. I don’t think the discussion should begin with the question of where the thing will lead. I want to begin with a completely different discussion: is it right? Is change needed? Does reality—or Jewish law, not reality—require change from us? After that, we can move on to additional discussions: where it will lead, whether it will be destructive, whether it will be renewal, what the consequences will be. But first and foremost we are supposed to ask ourselves whether it is needed. Before I get to the next question of where it will lead, I think there is yet another question. Meaning, where it will lead is the third level. The second level is the question whether it is possible. So the first is whether it is needed, the second is whether it is possible, and only then do I get to the third question: will it harm or help, or what results will it bring? And then it may be that for one policy reason or another I won’t do something that is possible, or perhaps sometimes I’ll even do something that isn’t possible—“It is a time to act for the Lord; they have voided Your Torah,” or something like that. So it seems to me that first of all, as a general framework for the discussion, I already want to set out these three levels, because it seems to me that anyone thinking about this discussion must first of all situate himself on which of the levels he is speaking, and second, pay attention to the missing pieces required on the other levels. Meaning, someone can come and say: this will lead to destruction. But first, before you say it will lead to destruction, first check: is it needed? Because if it isn’t needed, then who cares whether it will lead to destruction? If it is needed—then ask: is it possible? If it isn’t possible, again, who cares whether it will lead to destruction? After that you can ask whether it will lead to destruction. The same goes for someone who begins with the first question: is it right, is it needed? Fine, excellent, it’s needed. Does that mean that tomorrow morning I’m going to make the change? No. Because it may be impossible. And even if it is possible, it may not be desirable—it may bring damage—and therefore I will freeze mechanisms that might perhaps make it possible to change or adapt Jewish law. And my feeling is that many, many discussions are conducted only on one of these three planes. I can tell you, I hardly know of any example of a discussion conducted on all three. Usually people focus on one of the three, and by definition that misses the point, because in the end, if you want to reach a conclusion, you have to go through all three stages, even on a specific question. You have to ask whether change is needed in this sense, second, whether change is possible, and third, what the results will be. That is the order of the discussion. Now I’ll continue to lay out the picture a bit more according to that order. I won’t need specific questions except as examples, but I’m not going to discuss any one specific issue. Maybe one more remark that completes this point: often when someone raises for discussion a possible and necessary change in Jewish law, people discuss whether it is right to be lenient, stringent, conservative, innovative. I don’t want to discuss that either, because in my view none of the four is right. It is not right to be stringent, it is not right to be lenient, it is not right to be conservative, and it is not right to be innovative. What one needs to do is what is right. Sometimes what is right will be something conservative; sometimes what is right will be something innovative. Sometimes it will be a stringency, sometimes a leniency. By the way, innovation can also be stringent, not always lenient—that too is a common mistake. Therefore these categories, in my opinion, are simply irrelevant. In general, when people come to characterize the work of a halakhic decisor or some study hall and they speak in terms of they were strict, they were lenient, like the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel, or they were conservative or innovative—that may interest historians of Jewish law, the archaeologists of Jewish law, meta-halakhic researchers. It is not relevant to the work of a halakhic decisor, in my best judgment. A halakhic decisor should not be troubled by the question whether he is currently being stringent or lenient. He should be troubled by the question of what is right to do. And when someone later studies his work, he can say whether this person tended to stringency, tended to leniency, was conservative, was original, was innovative—let him file him under whatever category he wants. But halakhic decision-making itself should not use these categories at all. So I remove those categories from the discussion altogether; they don’t interest me at all. Whether one needs to be innovative, conservative, lenient, or stringent—those are completely irrelevant questions, in my opinion. So I’m not going to discuss that either. So what remains? Good. In order, then. The first stage is the question: is change needed? Fine. There are fundamentalist approaches—not in the Christian sense—that think no. Categorically no. Not on a specific issue; categorically no. Why? Because Jewish law is from Sinai; its details and general principles all came down from Sinai. There is room for enactments, there are breaches that arise from time to time. But not change. It’s perfect. What is there to change in something perfect? Meaning, know that what descends can descend. And of course this is connected to the discussion Rabbi Tzachi raised earlier, from above, about whether Jewish law is some finished thing that came down from above and is merely transmitted through the generations, or whether it is something that is gradually formed throughout history. Traditionally we are committed to the second view, although sometimes it seems to me that some people get confused about that. Now the question whether change is needed in general—again, I’m not talking about a specific issue—the feeling I have, and I think many people I meet around me feel this too, is yes. There is some sense of suffocation, a sense of distress, that arises in many contexts. And the density of these points of distress keeps growing over time, and it seems to me that the pace is exponential. Meaning, if once the pace of moral, cultural, and social change was slow, then the changes needed in Jewish law, the adaptations needed in Jewish law, were also relatively few. You could avoid responding for fifty, a hundred, two hundred years—nothing critical would happen. Another two hundred years, and at most if it turns out there is some problem, then they’ll sort it out, fix that issue, make the adaptation. But today, in the process of change we are in, the pace keeps accelerating all the time. The feeling is that the world is changing, our knowledge about it is changing, the values and social structure of the world are changing very quickly, and Jewish law is moving at its own pace—if I may put it understatedly, at most it is moving at its own pace. And this gap between Jewish law and the environment that demands some kind of response simply keeps expanding, because an exponential function minus a linear one—the difference obviously grows. And once the difference grows, the feeling of suffocation also intensifies exponentially. And therefore it seems to me not for nothing—and not because of wicked Reform Jews, and not because there are all kinds of schemers plotting to destroy Jewish law—there is a genuine feeling that if once it was small, today it is large. And the reason for this is entirely objective. Not only because of people’s desire to cast off the yoke—there are such things too, one can’t deny it. But I’m saying that’s not, I don’t think, the root of the matter. The root of the matter is that there is a gap opening up very rapidly, and it causes the feeling that very broad parts of Jewish law are becoming irrelevant. And there are various approaches—one could speak in very broad terms of basic approaches to how to deal with the matter. There are, of course, those who say: fine, you simply have to adapt—adapt, because indeed change is needed, and so on. That brings us to the second and third questions, which I’ll answer later. The fact that change is needed still does not mean that it is possible. The fact that something needs to be done—the feeling of suffocation is not a reason. If there is a feeling of suffocation, someone who wants to hang himself can hang himself on a great tree. Meaning, if there is a feeling of suffocation, take a pill. That is not a reason to change. At most it is a reason to ask whether change is possible, yes. But the feeling of suffocation in itself is not a reason for change; it is not a justification for change. It is, however, a motivation to investigate whether change is possible. We’ll come to the second question, and then to the third. I don’t want to sharpen it more than that here.