“When you’re a member of the very society you’re reporting on, every word is laden with responsibility. Personal and professional are always mixed”
In my eight years as an Orthodox journalist writing mainly about Orthodox life for non-Orthodox publications, I have lived this every day. When you’re a member of the very society you’re reporting on, every word is laden with responsibility. Personal and professional are always mixed. It means that when you go to a wedding, you’ll […] continued…
“…halakha is currently paying a steep price for Orthodoxy’s exclusion of the queer community”
…halakha is currently paying a steep price for Orthodoxy’s exclusion of the queer community. Halakha’s *discriminatory attitude toward the gay community alienates many of MO’s younger generation. It could very well be that halakha is willing to incur that expense (יעקור הדין את ההר; יאבדו מאה כמותו ואל יאבד אות אחת בתורה וכו), but when […] continued…
“…in recent years, two issues have risen to the forefront of our communal consciousness that have proven to be stressors of” Modern Orthodoxy
Modern Orthodoxy is hard to understand and harder to live. Orthodoxy is a set of views and behaviors that is governed by precedent and authority. It is most comfortable with stasis. Change irritates the system, and especially change that is based on what best can be described as modern sensibilities. In contradistinction, the fuel for […] continued…
“Material affluence, and the anxiety (and feelings of precarity) that surround that affluence, in the modern Orthodox world are not specific phenomena of a particular religious subgroup”
To understand modern Orthodoxy, we must view “Orthodoxy” within its larger social, economic, and cultural contexts. For example, if you read modern Orthodox Jews’ disinvestment from American citizenship as being, at best, a manifestation of a centuries-old relationship of Jewish ambivalence toward the society around it, and, at worst, hostility toward that society, we miss […] continued…
Modern Orthodoxy’s “future will likely be as ambiguous and complicated as its complex, tension-filled philosophy”
Despite Rabbi Lamm’s eloquent and intellectually sophisticated elucidations of the Modern Orthodox world view, Modern Orthodoxy has failed to attract as many adherents as ultra-Orthodoxy—the American ultra-Orthodox population is currently twice as large as (and growing faster than) the Modern Orthodox population—a challenge to the movement that Eleff does not ignore. The ideology of Modern […] continued…
“…it is, I think, the biggest, the one most central to the debates within Orthodoxy today, and the most personal”
It is impossible to credit the claim that it doesn’t matter at all to the content of the halakhic system that those admitted into the tent of Torah, those with a seat at the table, those with a voice in the conversation, have been exclusively male. What does it mean that endless deliberations about women’s […] continued…
“We need to believe that Torah U’Madda was not a limited-time offer that expired sometime in the last century…”
Today’s Centrist Orthodox world–the world of Yeshiva University, the world that produces the overwhelming majority of the Modern Orthodox world’s rabbis and Torah teachers–would generally be comfortable with an academic approach to Jewish history. Normative Orthodoxy would reject historicizing the text of the Torah itself. And, in between, we have the hakhmei hamesora and the […] continued…
“Among the many things that characterize modern Orthodox Jews…perhaps the most-defining is our embrace of the Talmudic maxim hokhma bagoyim ta’amin…”
Among the many things that characterize modern Orthodox Jews: religious Zionism; engaging with the secular world; commitment to expanding religious opportunities for women within the context of halakha; perhaps the most-defining is our embrace of the Talmudic maxim hokhma bagoyim ta’amin: if someone tells you that there is knowledge and wisdom among the nations, believe […] continued…
“One of the most salient features of Orthodox Jewish life at the turn of the twenty-first century is the halakhic handbook designed for the layperson”
One of the most salient features of Orthodox Jewish life at the turn of the twenty-first century is the halakhic handbook designed for the layperson. For the past twenty or thirty years or so, it is this genre of religious literature (in Hebrew for Israelis and in English for Americans and other English speakers), and […] continued…
“Unity and comity are good things, but I am not at all convinced that the community is better served by a false front that tries to conceal or patch the deep discord behind it than by frank acknowledgment of irreconcilable differences”
Ultimately, as many areas of common ground as we can find, and as much agreed-upon progress as we can make, the divisions around women’s ritual participation and leadership roles may not be paper-over-able, and the differences may be irreconcilable. But if divorce must come, let it be a conscious uncoupling. … In the case of […] continued…
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