Question

Hello,
I read parts of your impressive trilogy, and I shared with friends my feeling that I did not find in it any real challenge to my worldview, which could be defined as Haredi–Hardali.
In other words, you built a wonderful structure that probably suits hundreds of thousands of Jews today who hold a certain Western moral worldview and are troubled by all sorts of things in Judaism today, and you came and showed them, step by step, that they do not need to choose between two bad options; rather, they can remain with their worldview, because it is definitely possible to remain a believing Jew without violating even the slightest point. If they are troubled by attitudes toward gentiles, women, LGBT people, and secular Jews, then you offered them an elegant and sophisticated way which, in one sentence, says that today’s gentiles and secular Jews and women and LGBT people are not the same people to whom the prohibitions or the rules of Jewish law applied.
It is not hard to argue with that. It is not hard to say that it is implausible that the prohibition applies to someone who has no inclination, because someone who has no inclination is usually repelled by it, and it is not plausible that specifically such a person is the one the Torah prohibited; and from the plain sense of the words of the Sages as well, this revolutionary distinction does not seem to appear, and if they held it they should have stated it explicitly. It is not hard to say that the reason for the laws that distinguish between a gentile and a Jew, or between a secular and a religious Jew, is not only that the object itself is some kind of abomination, but because Jewish law wants to create a clear distinction and prevent religious influence, and create distance; and for example regarding secular Jews, it may be that they are coerced, but precisely because they are coerced in belief they are more threatening and endanger the community more, and there is more reason to distance ourselves from them and apply to them all the rabbinic laws, which do not necessarily stem from an essential definition of a thoroughly wicked person but from a desire to create distance and prevent influence.
(Regarding women, this is the most radical practical proposal in the book; the LGBT issue is presented there more as a possible line of thought, because it deals with a pure Torah law, but it is really the most plausible, because everyone is prepared to allow women to testify by enactment, so continuing to the next stage and allowing them as a matter of basic law is a formal leap, not a practical one.)a0
What I am trying to say is that a Haredi person who reads your books will say: okay, this Jew has a certain moral outlook, and various things bother him, so he found a non-Reform way to solve what bothers him. More power to you. There is no real challenge here, for the simple reason that the moral outlook underlying the entire book is not necessarily the moral outlook of the Sages. If the Sages and the medieval authorities were not troubled by most of the moral questions raised here—regarding a mamzer, or LGBT people, or the beautiful captive woman, or gentiles, or secular Jews, or women, or converts—then that is a clear sign that their moral outlook was different. They certainly believed that a person should be upright and good, and they held that proper conduct precedes Torah, but their outlook was that the good is not only material good but primarily the good of closeness to God—”for closeness to God is good for me”—and therefore one’s attitude toward someone whose goal is closeness to God is different from one’s attitude toward someone for whom that is not the goal, even if he is the nicest, most wonderful, most pleasant person in the world. The Western moral outlook, which sees humane behavior and pleasant, considerate behavior as the most important thing, is an outlook that a simple reading of the Sages and the medieval authorities shows they did not hold. The Western worldview, according to which morality is only direct harm to another person and not harm to the integrity of the world that God created, with pleasures intended for benefit and not just for fun, was not the outlook of the Sages. They were not troubled by this because they never saw a moral problem in distinguishing between people and between sexes. In their view, the world has a purpose: to fulfill God’s will. Part of God’s will is that a person be good and upright, but the primary criterion is what advances that purpose. Man was created for the sake of fulfilling the Torah, not that the Torah was created for the sake of man’s welfare. At any rate, from man’s side he must behave in a way that does what Jewish law says, and from God’s side He wants man’s good and happiness.a0
In my opinion, if one were to ask Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach—who, I think, no one disputes was a good person with fine manners—what he thought about LGBT people, he would say that in his opinion this is not only a religious problem, as you wrote as if it were obvious, but a human problem, because it goes against normality (the term of course belongs to Rabbi Tzvi Tau, though he holds that therefore even secular people ought to reject it, while I think that in a classic secular outlook the violation of normality is definitely overridden by the personal happiness of that LGBT person), and it harms the family and society in general, and also turns pleasures into a tool for ourselves rather than a tool for benefit and for fulfilling God’s will, in line with the attitude of quite a few of the medieval authorities toward the whole realm of marital relations; and even those who disagree admit that it is not proper when detached from holiness and benefit.
The fact that for you, simply, there is no moral problem with LGBT people proves clearly to me that this is not an innocent presentation of “proper conduct precedes Torah,” on the basis of which you built an entire approach, but a new conception of morality that is entirely a Western-Christian influence, and not the moral outlook of the Sages and the medieval authorities. This new morality assumes that man’s welfare is the only thing that matters, whereas in the Torah’s outlook man’s welfare matters, but the main question is what God wants and what serves His will.
And now to my question: from where do you derive that a person may hold a new worldview that is influenced from outside Jewish law, and on that basis come and find ways to change Jewish law? It is easier to change women’s disqualification from testimony for a technical reason—that today there is no reason to prevent women from testifying because it would only benefit the religious court—than to change the slightest point regarding gentiles as a result of a moral worldview that the Sages did not hold.
So yes, someone who believes that this is morality and that this is God’s will will obviously conclude that this is what God wants, and therefore it is obvious to him that nowadays such an attitude toward gentiles and secular Jews and women and LGBT people cannot be right. But when he notices and discovers that he thinks this way because he is influenced from outside, from where does he get permission to change Jewish law?