…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[…]
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,[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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,[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
The rift between centrist and open Orthodoxy, is thus not only about who is a gadol in the narrow sense, but about the nature of gadolhood and the structure of rabbinic authority more broadly. This[…]