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Antimodernism and Orthodox Judaism's Heretical Imperative: An American Religious Counterpoint

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2020

Zev Eleff and
Seth Farber
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Abstract

This article argues that the case of religious authority within Orthodox Judaism is an important counterexample to the broader and understudied developments in American religion during the final decades of the twentieth century. Using an array of untapped primary sources and drawing on themes addressed by scholars of American religious history and modern Jewish history, this article demonstrates how Orthodox Jewish elites used “approximational heresies” to police their faith community. In so doing, Orthodox leaders furnished “indicators” of apostasy that were unknown in previous epochs and served to stand in for traditional types that proved otherwise insufficient to counteract new trends in modern life and culture. Orthodox Jewish “antimodernism” was animated by a need to demonstrate what was “in” and what was “out” of bounds as well as by the emergence of a triumphalism that was unique among American faiths. Likewise, the rank-and-file abided because they either agreed with these measures or feared becoming “outsiders.” This outlook contrasts with the attitudes of other religious groups—on the “left” and the “right”—that absorbed a spirit of “inclusiveness” and, therefore, eschewed heresy hunting and the boldness evinced by Orthodox elites during this period. The article concludes that the pervasiveness of this counterculture among the Orthodox Jewish community was so powerful that it, counterintuitively, introduced the strategies of the antimodernists to the American-acculturated, so-called Modern Orthodox community.

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Type
Research Article
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Religion and American Culture , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020, pp. 237 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

In 1979, the social theorist Peter Berger singled out Orthodox Judaism's ability to withstand the “heretical imperative” of American life. He described a society full of choices, which made it difficult for other tradition-bound faiths to maintain control over their constituencies. Jewish Orthodoxy, claimed Berger, had a strong retention rate. He was, however, pessimistic about the long-term sustainability of the Orthodox resistance against modernist impulses. Berger doubted whether this group could continue to pull its adherents along a path of strict observance of the Sabbath and kosher dietary laws, to list the most well-known strictures, against the push of technology, secularism, and other social forces that continued to advance and provide people of relative means a plethora of opportunities. In Berger's estimation, “the orthodox precisely defines Jewish identity as destiny, while the social experience of the individual reveals it as an ongoing choice. The dissonance between definition and experience is at the core of every orthodoxy in the modern world.” He surmised, “The orthodox must then present to himself as fate what he knows empirically to be a choice. This is a difficult feat.”Footnote 1

Berger's was not the final word on the changing nature of religion as Americans moved into the 1980s. The social scientist Mary Douglas noted the reemergence of “traditional religious forms” and suggested that Berger had miscalculated the ability of religion to find “coherence” with the conformist culture generated in bureaucratic America.Footnote 2 What had also eluded Berger, in the specific instance of tradition-bound Judaism, was the role that antimodernist policing played in keeping order within Orthodox ranks.Footnote 3 It was no simple thing to patrol religious borderlines in the United States; citizenship and, to a large extent, social mobility in the New World was not linked to church affiliation and religious observance. Some suppressed the culture of contingencies—the power of an individual to choose—through leveraging strategic insularism. For instance, groups such as the Amish retained most of their youth by limiting education and providing a cultural rearing that was perceived to be untransferable to other areas of American life. Moreover, typically strict adherence to “shunning” defectors meant, for those willing to depart the Anabaptist fold, “severing cherished friendships and family ties.”Footnote 4 Similar to this, Hasidic Jews have raised children absent the necessary educational and social tools to gain a foothold in the world beyond their religious sphere. This renders it difficult, although not impossible, for Hasidic Jews to leave the world of their upbringing.Footnote 5

The strategies of the Orthodox subgroups addressed in the present article are not so severe. Here, we examine the efforts of the Orthodox Right and the Modern Orthodox to “maintain control.” The Orthodox Right is sometimes labeled “Ultra-Orthodox” or “Yeshivish,” all monikers that signal the centrality of the all-male yeshiva and its rabbinic leaders in religious life, as well as this community's retreat from liberal Western thinking. By contrast, the more acculturated Modern Orthodox embrace a “synthesis” of their Jewish and American identities. More willingly than the Orthodox Right, the Modern Orthodox have absorbed notions of pluralism and Western culture.Footnote 6 Yet, these synergies are not unconditional; Modern Orthodox Jews have established cultural limitations on their modern-orthodox amalgamation to protect their tradition-bound values.

To overcome the tensions of modern life, both Orthodox subgroups police borderlines. Their aim is to convince adherents that their regimented and regulated Jewish countercultures offer more religious meaning, family stability, and a richer social network than alternative sources.Footnote 7 Owing to its strong social bonds, Orthodox Judaism—and to a lesser but significant extent, the broader American Jewish community—provides its members with intricate systems of support: childcare, private schools, and summer camps; employment and other economic connections; friendships forged in synagogues and lifecycle moments; and welfare systems that range from charity to ambulance services. The price for this network is obedience to the cultural mores of the discrete varieties of Orthodox Jewish life.Footnote 8

This system endowed Orthodox elites with top-down power to draw redlines. As Orthodoxy grew more comfortable in its American environs, these elites expressed fears of modern life in new ways. What is more, they recognized that their followers would, in all probability, abide, unwilling as they were to surrender social status by deviating from determined (albeit changing) socioreligious norms. Calls of apostasy and the outlawing of behaviors were useful to define “insiders” and “outsiders.” In these instances, Orthodox Jews framed their heresy hunting with designs on eliminating modernist threats as pernicious “outsiderness.” A partial list of transgressions among the Orthodox Right, for instance, includes taking part in mixed-gender gatherings, enrolling in college, wearing clothing no longer considered modest (usually for women), and owning a television or other media devices capable of transmitting “inappropriate” popular culture. On occasion, rabbinic elites have been unable to dispose of some dangers, such as the internet, which have become too essential to eliminate in toto. In these cases, an unofficial “bargaining” has occurred, leading religious leaders and laypeople to compromise on website filters and limitations on “smart” technologies.Footnote 9

The rise of this Orthodox antimodernism had eluded Peter Berger. It certainly did not escape, however, the notice of religious leaders such as Yeshiva University (YU) President Norman Lamm, who had become a familiar target of religious inquisitions. In June 1979, as YU's ranking official and one of the leading champions of Modern Orthodox Judaism, Lamm addressed the matter before his colleagues at a conference held by the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA). There, Lamm urged the Modern Orthodox rabbinical group to fight back against those who seek out “some phantasmagoric heretic,” someone they could place beyond the borderlines of Orthodox Judaism.Footnote 10 In time, antimodernist policing entered Modern Orthodox life, despite its “modern” sensibilities, as well.Footnote 11 This points to the trend among a variety of Orthodox Jews to accept, perhaps subconsciously, degrees of policing and surrender to the modern notion of “choice” because it was worth the social and religious benefits of Orthodox living.

The formulation of this antimodernist agenda was not a small matter. Often, religious texts and traditions held scant amounts of ammunition to combat modern attitudes and behaviors associated with, for example, liberalism and feminism. The Orthodox Right could not just pinpoint a passage in scripture or a page of the Talmud (the authoritative digest of rabbinic law) to denounce a newfangled attitude or trend. Instead, the acculturated leaders of Modern Orthodoxy observed that their neophobic rightist counterparts had stretched the criteria for heresy to include “modern” ideas unaccounted for in the traditional taxonomy of rabbinic apostasies. This amounted to a detectable force and recurrence of severe charges of approximational heresies in the last decades of the century. To be sure, the approach was not new; it had migrated to the United States from Europe. Yet, the content and scope of the antimodernist rhetoric was unprecedented, taking advantage of a moment of heighted Orthodox triumphalism and readiness to abide by the changing contours of religious life. This reflected a growing awareness among Orthodox Jewish leaders that this strategy was necessary to deflect the challenges that well-positioned observers, such as Peter Berger, had presumed were too much to overcome. This article, then, explores this important counterexample in American religion. Unlike most other faith groups, Orthodox Jews leveraged their triumphalist high ground to police religious life and stomp out modernist impulses. To accomplish this, Orthodox elites seized on often creative interpretations of apostasy and furnished new “prohibitions” that approximated the modern threats to the stability of this faith group. A closer look at the socioreligious levers that produced these “heresies” reveals much that prior research of Orthodox Judaism has taken for granted.

Combatting the Modernist Impulse

Rabbi Lamm's astonishment over the so-called assault on his religious camp mirrored earlier cases in American religion, of Protestant theologians who found themselves under siege solely based on, as the accused had interpreted it, their avowal of “modernism.” In the 1870s, before he was summoned to a trial before the Presbytery of Chicago, the Reverend David Swing had figured that his “new” and “modern” ideas were harmless. They did not, he contended time and again, violate any particular plank of Christian faith. “Nowhere in orthodox denominations,” noted Swing during his heresy trial, was there “any arraignment of individuals for departures from the faith.”Footnote 12 The Presbyterians acquitted Swing, but their inquisition set off a decades-long investigation into the fitness of preachers whose tone and tenor, to say nothing about the content of their sermons, appeared to align with a “modernist impulse.” Historian William Hutchison defined modernism as the “conscious, intended adaptation of religious ideas to modern culture.” Modernists tended to see God in “human cultural development” and a belief that “society is moving toward a realization of the Kingdom of God.”Footnote 13 They flourished, for example, in the Progressive era of the final decades of the nineteenth century, as a liberal religious spirit instructed Christians to blend in-vogue moral truisms such as self-determination and rationalism with faith and social gospel.Footnote 14 Importantly, Hutchison's interpretation matched the opinion of one Orthodox Jewish “rightist” pundit who broke down his own “passionate debate” with Lamm into those same three categories: the worthiness of formulating Jewish thought with the help of modern “secular” ideas, an embrace of contemporary cultural sensibilities, and an acceptance of religious Zionism and the emergence of the State of Israel as a major step toward the arrival of a messianic age.Footnote 15 In all these areas, the Modern Orthodox exercised a much greater willingness to look for God's hand in modern life and interpret the eschatological implications of God's continued engagement with Jewish destiny.

Hutchison also noted the tendency of fundamentalist-leaning critics to determine who was associated with modernism—a hard-to-define threat—by the style of their presentations and cultural posturing. The articulate spokesmen of the New Theology tended to trumpet the utility of “science,” stress a reliance on “knowledge,” and spoke with a more sanguine sense of the human spirit.Footnote 16 They sought out “indicators” in lieu of a full examination of the preaching and teaching of so-called modernists. These indexes of language and religious form approximated the more tried and tested, but also elusive, content associated with blasphemies. In time, these heresiological placeholders became, for some, standard measures of religious fidelity.Footnote 17

Likewise, Orthodox Judaism has had a long history of pointing out cultural indicators for modernist “heresies.” Rabbi Moshe Sofer of Pressburg, for example, became well-known in the first half of the nineteenth century for his mantra that “‘New’ is forbidden by the Torah.”Footnote 18 More precisely, the historian Jacob Katz highlighted the actions of members of the Orthodox rabbinate in Hungary, during the 1860s, to resist modernization by “resort[ing] to a generalized and rather emotional appeal to the community to remain steadfast to the inherited way of life.”Footnote 19 This meant outlawing vernacular preaching (as opposed to Yiddish) and the introduction of curricular reforms that augmented traditional Jewish education. The Ultra-Orthodox Hungarian rabbinate used these indicators of modernism to separate itself from other Western-educated orthodox and nonorthodox elements that encouraged these modernist trends, policing the opposition by lobbying their government, which had the final say on crucial matters such as school curricula and appropriation of taxes, to take a stand on Judaism as a state-sponsored religion.Footnote 20 Rarely did the Orthodox Right engage in theological exchanges about the divinity of the Bible or the oral traditions or Resurrection of the Dead, all items included in Moses Maimonides's established Principles of Faith.Footnote 21 This was purposeful. Their enemies did not violate these principles nor were these cardinal planks at the center of the debate. Like the concomitant burgeoning ultramontanism among the Catholics, this alternative strategy leveraged ecclesiastical charisma and enthusiasm to thwart the Hungarian Jewish modernists, disqualifying their religious sensibilities among Jewish political operatives and government officials in a manner that more traditional devices could not.Footnote 22

In the United States, rabbinic agitators could not pull political levers to suppress their opponents. The government did not legislate religious education, appoint chief rabbis, or direct funds to religious institutions. Nonetheless, members of the Orthodox rabbinate launched campaigns against modernism similar to those in Europe. In June 1904, the antimodernist Agudath Ha-Rabbonim issued a formal condemnation of “preaching in English or countenancing the teaching of the Jewish religion in any other language but Yiddish.” The group's intention, drawing from Hungarian ultra-Orthodox attitudes, was to censure the graduates of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) by focusing on religious actions that approximated, in their view, a form of modernist apostasy.Footnote 23 The Orthodox Right also seized on the rhetoric of rabbinic modernists, detecting language that, to them, appeared patently unorthodox. More than a dozen years later, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan characterized the charges levied against him as a shallow misunderstanding of his modern-style sermonizing:

I want to make clear to you that historical or traditional Judaism—Judaism in its continuity is what I stand for and what I work for. If in the interpretation of it I have said something that was different from what the hearer expected, the fact of the matter is that the hearer drew the conclusion that I am not advocating traditional or historical Judaism. We have become so used to a certain type of preaching, to a certain set of ideas or arguments advanced to prove the correctness of traditional or historical Judaism, that if we hear another kind of argument, another kind of defence is not advocating historical Judaism but some new kind of Judaism.Footnote 24

Orthodox Jews used indicators of modernism to censor Kaplan for espousing ideas that supposedly denied “some of the fundamental doctrines of religion.”Footnote 25 In both these cases, the concerns of the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim and the Kaplan critics proved correct. The latter instance moved faster, owing to shared sentiments among rabbinic and lay leaders.Footnote 26 The Orthodox retreated from Kaplan and did much to push the embattled rabbi from the community that had raised him. In short order, Kaplan himself surrendered his Orthodox rabbinical credentials, recognizing, quite plainly, that “I am not orthodox.”Footnote 27 Although it would take several decades, most JTS graduates eventually parted ways with Orthodoxy to formalize Conservative Judaism.Footnote 28 Many tradition-minded Jews followed their lead, usually in the suburban hinterland. Still, a significant number of the “winnowed” but committed population remained within the Orthodox camp and were better prepared because of the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim's earlier battles to identify what (and who) was “acceptably” Orthodox and who and what was not.Footnote 29

The success of these instances to produce heterodox indicators and an influx of Lithuanian-trained rabbis emboldened the Orthodox Right.Footnote 30 In 1956, eleven yeshiva heads issued a ban on intrafaith dialogue with Conservative and Reform groups without explicating exactly why such communication was forbidden.Footnote 31 The same was the case elsewhere. For example, British Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie's examination of the writings of Rabbi Louis Jacobs, at the behest of England's own religiously rightist breed, called out Jacobs's creative reinterpretation of the Sinaitic Revelation. Brodie turned down Jacobs for the principalship of Jews’ College (now the London School of Jewish Studies), claiming the modern scholarship and language used in Jacobs's work were decidedly untraditional. This rejection came despite Jacobs's able defense of the orthodoxy of his position.Footnote 32 Jacobs's arguments addressed his own traditionalism but did not acquit him of the charge of an allegiance to “heretical” modernism.Footnote 33 Similar cases abound in the Israeli experience, as well.Footnote 34 In all these instances, the indicators of heresy are the very same ones identified by the Hungarian Orthodox Jews in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 35 Why, then, did the Modern Orthodox express astonishment over the strategies of the Orthodox Right and its approximating forms of heresy hunting in the final quarter of the twentieth century?

The Decline of American Heresies

We contend that the reason for the Modern Orthodox cognitive dissonance was the changed expectations of religious toleration in the United States. By the 1980s, most American religious groups had absorbed a spirit of inclusiveness and had softened their stance toward “heresies” and “apostasies” to stymie attrition and remain relevant in a more “secularized” society. In fact, a softening of hardline theological border-patrolling among American religions was apparent in the 1960s. To illustrate, consider the Second Vatican Council's loosened requirements for Catholic confession. In June 1966, the Catholics abolished their list of prohibited books. This anticipated changes among other Christian groups, specifically in the United States. Elites within the Episcopal Church, for example, attempted throughout the 1960s to excommunicate Bishop James Pike for his liberal views on women and homosexuals. A decade later, Episcopal leaders with increasing regularity adopted a position of “inclusiveness” and “accomodationalism,” choosing to ignore proscriptions against female clergy and severe descriptions of homosexuality among the rank-and-file. Christian catechisms published in this era in each major denomination tended to deemphasize denominational differences with respect to resurrection and atonement. Interfaith dialogue started to incorporate rituals of Eastern faiths, once anathema to Western religions. Fear of declining numbers and loss of financial support trumped concerns of possible heresies in most churches.Footnote 36

By the 1980s, the change in Christian religious policing had affected even those conservative denominations that had experienced growth in numbers and had expanded educational operations in the prior decades. Committed as they were to ecumenism and inclusivism, the leaders of the Christian Right seldom used terms such as heresy and blasphemy and no longer exercised determined pursuit of eradicating modernism. “We tend to think that each other are going to hell.” But, explained theologian William Marshner, “what we insist on is that if the American proposition proves anything at all, it proves that people can be good neighbors and can cooperate civilly without attaching salvational value to each other's religion.”Footnote 37 When religious conservatives did cry heresy, it was typically fired in political contexts as Evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson rallied their followers to the polls to vote against politicians who supported issues like abortion rights.Footnote 38 Even as neoconservative theologians unleashed considerable criticism against the group of liberal scholars who founded the Jesus Seminar, which explored the “human” side of their faith's founder, most of their censures stopped short of declaring those efforts heretical.Footnote 39

Similar accommodations took hold in major sectors of American Judaism. Motivated by a distress of diminishing numbers, the Conservative and Reform movements had come to fear the “specter” and “peril” of intermarriage and disengaged membership in the 1960s.Footnote 40 In 1975, the Reform Movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) replaced its longstanding prayer book with a version that included options to suit a wider swath of worshipers. The new prayer book reflected Reform Judaism's commitment to satisfy the “polydox” proclivities of “basically Conservative to Reconstructionist, to neo-Hasidic.”Footnote 41 For many within the CCAR, the rabbinical group's decision, in 1983, to widen the scope of who could consider themselves Jewish by “descent” was motivated to embrace women and men who did not—and were not—considered Jewish because their mother was a non-Jew.Footnote 42 In 1984, the Conservative Movement followed its Reform counterpart's decision (earlier, in 1972) to ordain women.Footnote 43 A few years later, Conservative leaders produced a pamphlet to concretize their beliefs but, in a bow to pluralism and inclusivism, made it clear to at least one observer that the “acceptance of the Statement of Principles as a whole or in detail is not obligatory upon every Conservative Jew, lay or rabbinic.”Footnote 44 The set of religious planks was, therefore, agreeable to those who had expected a “sickeningly monolithic document” but, instead, happily found something “tolerably diverse.”Footnote 45

The Orthodox Triumphalist Exception

In contrast, an invigorated spirit of triumphalism convinced many Orthodox Jews that they were just fine, without a need to absorb the methods of inclusivism in vogue in American life.Footnote 46 In this sense, the Orthodox adopted a unique separatist stance. Once mired in predictions of demise, Orthodox leaders obtained an invigorated self-confidence in the 1960s.Footnote 47 They boasted day schools, synagogues, and other social infrastructures that more than satisfied the religious and social needs of its members and reportedly halted intermarriage in Orthodox quarters.Footnote 48 These systems resembled a Catholic model. But, whereas Catholics relaxed policies on intermarriage that revealed certain insecurities about postwar disaffiliation, Orthodox rabbinic leaders felt that their social institutions satisfactorily reinforced their communal sustainability, emboldening them to point to population studies and other social scientific data that seemed to confirm their confidence.Footnote 49

Orthodox triumphalism was not borne out in increased numbers. In 1970, Orthodox Jews represented just 11 percent of America's 5.8 million Jews. By 1990, that figure dropped to 6 percent, even though the total Jewish population had remained the same.Footnote 50 Yet, it was also the case that the rank-and-file Orthodox Jews in this period were, by and large, a more committed group, reinforced by a wave of “returnees” (ba'alei teshuva) to Orthodox Judaism.Footnote 51 In a word, an increasing number of self-identified Orthodox Jews abided by a larger share of the accepted dictates of Jewish law and ritual, known as Halakhah. This situation meant “stabilization.” Sociologists Daniel Elazar and Charles Liebman tabulated and determined that there were more religiously committed Orthodox Jews than “Conservative Jews in the world who live up to the standards of observance set by the Conservative Movement.”Footnote 52 Orthodox laypeople understood how they rated compared with their non-Orthodox counterparts. In September 1978, a Modern Orthodox woman told a Reform-affiliated journalist, “I don't even think about you. I hate to be mean, but when I stop and think about it, I say you must have a hell of a problem. I've got it made.”Footnote 53 The Orthodox's siloed, triumphalist perspective also differed from the equally self-confident Christian Right. Falwell's Moral Majority and likeminded groups did not engage in heresy hunting, supposing that a softer stance could convert liberal Protestants to their cause.Footnote 54

The major concern for Orthodox elites was to maintain a level of religious enthusiasm to counteract the modern challenges that religion scholars such as Peter Berger had anticipated. Triumphalism empowered this group to create approximational heresies unknown to the Hungarian Orthodox who had set this strategy into motion in Europe or to the earlier American Orthodox Jews who had adopted the Hungarian approach, although without the political mechanisms of enforcement. Leveraging greater amounts of ecclesiastical capital than perhaps ever before, the Orthodox Right, in the final decades of the twentieth century, redoubled its efforts to furnish “prohibitions” unsourced in the Bible and unknown to prior rabbinic codifiers.Footnote 55 This intensified attempt to produce indicators of modernist heresies was convincing to adherents who also feared modernist infiltration of their countercultural community and wished to retain the perceived social privileges of an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle available to those on the “inside.” Terms such as heresy were useful for Orthodox Judaism to maintain control of who was “in” and who was “out”—or, in Michel Foucault's terms, to maintain surveillance—while they were concomitantly unhelpful to other, less emboldened religious communities looking to create more porous portals of entry to prospective members.Footnote 56 All in all, the Orthodox attempt to uproot individuals and once-accepted cultural behaviors within the confines of their religious community represented a certain awareness of Peter Berger's “heretical imperative” of modern life. Their vigorous labors also reflected the lengths to which Orthodox Jews were willing to go and the costs they were willing to pay to preserve their tradition-bound faith in American climes.

Da'as Torah and the Orthodox Right's Elimination of Modern Choices

The Orthodox Right designated its extrahalakhic proclamations as Da'as Torah—literally, the “knowledge of Torah”—although, ironically, stated quite deliberately without basis from the Bible or the Talmud. In April 1979, Rabbi Henoch Leibowitz of New York's Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim spoke about the supreme role of rabbinic intuition to help guide members of the Orthodox Right and negotiate the choices of everyday modern life. A Jew, explained Leibowitz, “if he is attached so to speak to that chain of communication, and he accepts daas Torah, and he is willing and understanding to consult superior judgment in Torah and all its aspects in relation to the world, then it's additional insurance for the world for greater protection from the depraved pressures that may be exerted upon him.”Footnote 57 Just as it had earlier in Europe, Da'as Torah helped the Orthodox Right approximate heresy among religious modernists when a more precise measurement could not be ascertained. Furthermore, the heightened religious authority endowed certain rabbinic personalities with the power to identify who and what was “in” and “out” in Orthodox Judaism.Footnote 58

This did not jibe with the moods of more malleable American faiths.Footnote 59 Yet, Orthodox Jews were in a different place, overcome by a wave of religious triumphalism and energized with an invigorated devotion to clericalism. Perhaps more than in any prior period, a wider but incalculable swath of Orthodox Jews accepted a form of increased rabbinic authority, a type, referred to by Rabbi Leibowitz, that extended well beyond regular matters of Jewish law and ritual and helped bracket and police the boundaries of this faith-based group. Another pundit described Da'as Torah as a divinely inspired wisdom, bordering “on the periphery of prophecy,” reserved for the highest of echelon of rabbis. These rabbis’ extralegal statements and pronouncements on domestic life and politics were embossed with “special endowment or capacity to penetrate objective reality, to recognize the facts as they ‘really’ are.”Footnote 60 Not everyone adhered to the divined powers of this elite sector of the Orthodox rabbinate, especially the Modern Orthodox. But the Orthodox Right accepted this, sometimes lobbying, but never to this point insisting, their more moderate-leaning coreligionists to consider Da'as Torah–informed policies.Footnote 61

The difference between the situation in prior epochs and in the “Age of Fracture” of the polarized 1980s was the intensity of the pursuit.Footnote 62 Rabbi Moshe Sherer, of the right-wing Agudath Israel, described adherence to Da'as Torah as a genuine article of faith. Disobedience was a form of blasphemy. For Sherer and others among the Orthodox Right, it was an absolute “religious obligation” to defer to his organization's Council of Torah Sages, and anything less was a breach and outright “rebellion” against Judaism. Another advocate among the Orthodox Right claimed that the “denial of the supreme role of Torah leaders of each generation was tantamount to the negation of the very essence of Judaism.”Footnote 63 Earlier iterations of Da'as Torah did not go so far as to frame resistance to rabbinic authority as heretical.

The production of new heresies and Da'as Torah pronouncements was linked to historical change. Take, for example, an issue that confronted the Orthodox Right as many of its constituents obtained considerable wealth.Footnote 64 In October 1982, Rabbi Yisroel Shemano wrote about the “meaningless waste” of extravagant floral arrangements and other frills that had become quite common at Orthodox Jewish weddings. He recalled the efforts of his late mentor, Rabbi Shneur Kotler of Lakewood, New Jersey, who, in the late 1970s, advanced a new approximational heresy when he railed against excessive consumerism in major public discourses.Footnote 65 Materialism was not a cardinal sin that could be pinpointed in Judaism's canonical texts, but, nevertheless, to a growing number of Orthodox elites, it betokened a nod to modern culture that was at odds with their tradition-bound faith. His followers listened to Kotler's Da'as Torah because not doing so threatened their social standing amid the quick-changing cultural tides of Orthodox Judaism. By the 1980s, it was typical to read Orthodox censures of the “misguidedness” of families who plan elaborate bar mitzvah celebrations but fail to provide their young son with even the “cheapest pair of tefillin.”Footnote 66 The very same author who condemned ornate bar mitzvahs on theological grounds—namely, that rabbis said so—blamed consumerism for sidetracking Orthodox Jews from Torah study and religious observance. A longstanding feature of American life, consumerism in the final quarter of the century “seemed to be exerting a more powerful influence than ever before.”Footnote 67 This worried many, but few articulated a position like this Jewish commentator. He called attention to what he observed as a narrow-mindedness that strayed Jewish women and men from proper parenting practices and could, ultimately, again in his view, result in assimilation and even intermarriage.Footnote 68

Consumerism, therefore, approximated more intelligible threats to the persistence of Orthodox Judaism.Footnote 69 Other members of the Orthodox Right decried gross materialism as a distraction from the spiritual aspects of life, relabeling the culture as a more carnal and “sinister” type of “devourism” that promoted a form of “apikorsus.” They were deeply bothered by the absorption of a culture that introduced, from their perspective, far too many choices and empowered social and economic forces beyond the decision-making powers of rabbinic elites. According to one writer:

Take the universal need to sell, add to it the trick of selling your product by changing the customer's ideas, and there follows a nation in which almost everyone is trying to influence others for his own profit. Most of the alien and negative values that threaten our own and our children's spiritual health come from somebody who is trying to sell us something.Footnote 70

The demonization of consumerism as an approximational heresy intended to remove it as an option for the Orthodox Right. Other religious societies and their leaders struggled to remove unwanted choices. The central fear was availing laypeople options to explore in the open cultural marketplace. Yet, the tug of modern life outworked the pull of ecclesiasticism. The Orthodox efforts mirrored the rhetoric of erstwhile evangelical fundamentalists such as the Reverend John Rice who, in the 1940s, had reminded his listeners and readers that “men are not equal in authority. They ought not to be and cannot be. . . . These ‘that have the rule’ over the Christians, are their spiritual advisers and pastors, watching for their souls, since preachers must give an account to God for their people!”Footnote 71 Both Rice and the leaders of the Orthodox Right, in the intensified materialism of the 1980s, leveraged the charisma associated with top-down religious authority in place of firm religious rationale to compel the rank-and-file.

Another helpful example of the Orthodox Right's determination and capacity to establish protective indicators to oust modernism was its changed stance on higher education. In an earlier period, young women and men belonging to this group attended college. Its rabbinic leadership felt it had no choice but to accommodate. To be sure, some still tried to discourage higher education. The fiercest opponent was Rabbi Aharon Kotler (Rabbi Shneur's father) of Lakewood's Beth Medrash Govoha.Footnote 72 But most yeshiva heads did not adopt Kotler's hardline approach to higher education.Footnote 73 The sociologist William Helmreich, in the 1970s, tabulated that just a slim minority of yeshiva men did not attend college. “Even those yeshivas,” concluded Helmreich, “such as Lakewood and Telshe, which forbid college attendance for those in residence at the school, have substantial numbers of alumni, perhaps even a majority, who attended college either before they enrolled or after they left the yeshiva.”Footnote 74 Attempts to deter young men from entering college because of the cultural inconsistencies with religious life were rebuffed on the grounds that college was a gateway to a career and that the Orthodox young people who attended college do not “socially identify with their fellow college students on anything more than a superficial greetings level.”Footnote 75 Others disregarded such unpragmatic recommendations, claiming they originated from some imaginary address in “Wishville.”Footnote 76

This changed in the 1980s at a moment when higher education was under siege by conservatives and liberals alike and a more affluent Orthodox Jewish community took college for granted.Footnote 77 Rabbi Shimon Schwab, in Manhattan's Washington Heights, warned of the “spiritual risks” lurking inside college classrooms.Footnote 78 Schwab insisted that there existed many opportunities in the business world that did not require a college education. Another popular writer dismissed “justifications and rationalizations” for college attendance, believing that “there is no question that the parent is unable to calculate and foresee the damage which will be inflicted upon the child's soul once he is exposed to the immoral environment of the university and the decadent philosophies cleverly espoused by sophisticated professors.” Once careful not to take a solid stand on the matter, the Agudath Israel printed articles in its monthly magazine that expressed anticollege positions. One rabbinic author cautioned against sending “eighteen-year-old sons and daughters to colleges or offices where we do not control the environment.” Still another called into question the pomp and regalia of collegiate culture, supposing that the “caps and gowns at college ceremonies remind me of nothing other than the garb of some of the members of medieval churches.”Footnote 79

The rank-and-file followed suit. For the determined academic-minded reader, one Orthodox writer recommended junior college to earn a “quickie degree” to avoid the “dangerousness” of college life. This recommendation, however, was still a concession and best avoided. Another commentator expressed herself in categorical terms: “Have you ever seen an individual who became a finer person by going to college or by getting a job?”Footnote 80 The Orthodox Right reported on the struggles of young men, caught in limbo between parents who encouraged college and their teachers who adamantly discouraged it.Footnote 81 Similarly, all-girl Bais Yaakov schools in New York and elsewhere, which had once sent young women to college, changed their minds and actively discouraged higher education by the 1980s.Footnote 82 One Orthodox Jew shared that she and other women in her neighborhood had attended all-female Bais Yaakov schools in which “college is discouraged both openly and implicitly.” Content with limited education and work opportunities, these women reportedly happily earned a living by teaching, babysitting, basic bookkeeping, and “selling things at home.” Just a “very, very small percentage is of the college-educated, career-pursuing variety.”Footnote 83 In short, by pursuing approximate heresies, the Orthodox were denying the very legitimacy of the way of life that was normative just a generation prior.

Modern Orthodox “Heresies”

The sea change disturbed the Modern Orthodox, especially in the realm of higher education.Footnote 84 Perhaps even more troubling to leaders such as Rabbi Norman Lamm and others in this camp was that the antimodernist impulse had found its way into Modern Orthodoxy.Footnote 85 Lamm, himself, complained in the late 1970s that his rabbinical faculty at YU were “directing students inward,” veering pupils away from the modernist sensibilities that he had hoped to instill. He privately asked a piqued colleague, “What can I do?”Footnote 86 It was a period marked by the Moral Majority and the pervasive force of conservatism.Footnote 87 That milieu, along with the emboldened self-confidence of the Orthodox Right, made it difficult for Lamm's colleagues to flatly deny the credibility of Orthodox antimodernism.Footnote 88 The result was the cultivation of a top-down religious culture that deployed heresy-hunting tactics that were similar to (although softer than) those developed earlier by the Orthodox Right.

Several examples of the antimodernist turn are demonstrative. In December 1984, five young rabbinic faculty members of YU's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) signed a responsum addressed to President Louis Bernstein of the RCA. The head of the Modern Orthodox rabbinical group had petitioned to rule on the permissibility of women's prayer groups. Rabbis Nisson Alpert, Abba Bronspigel, Yehuda Parnes, Hershel Schachter, and Mordechai Willig were all noted scholars. The so-called RIETS Five outlawed prayer groups on the grounds that “these practices are intended to emulate the ways of the gentiles, since these customs are derived from the feminist movement.”Footnote 89 This was an apostasy unknown to earlier rabbinic elites, an example of the production of new heresies within American Orthodox Judaism.

The originators of these prayer services, such as Rabbi Shlomo Riskin of Lincoln Square Synagogue in New York, sought to furnish a ritual that could provide meaningful worship for women who felt marginalized in the male-dominated formal prayer setting but would also defer to the dictates of Jewish law.Footnote 90 They were careful to demarcate women's prayer and Torah reading from an official, quorum-style prayer led by men. For example, women's prayer groups eliminated the kaddish prayer and other responsive portions of the service. These were central elements of Orthodox prayer, and omission threatened to render prayer groups second-rate rituals. Yet, this religious posturing was essential for these women, who eschewed feminism and desired to remain in good standing in the Modern Orthodox community.Footnote 91

Despite these ritual measures, rabbinic forces within the Modern Orthodox community decried women's prayer along the same lines that the Orthodox Right sought to uproot other perceived threats to their religious enclave. The Modern Orthodox rabbinic demonization of feminism and its effective reception among most of the rank-and-file owed much to threats and changes in the world surrounding it. First, the feminist movement in the United States was at a nadir.Footnote 92 In 1982, the Equal Rights Amendment, which guaranteed legal gender parity, failed a series of state ratifications. Despite their triumphs in the 1970s, feminists were branded “antifamily.” Hugely empowered conservative pundits lashed out against liberal politicians who “do not want to help families meet the increasing costs of raising children.”Footnote 93 Second, JTS, the flagship rabbinical school of Conservative Judaism, had, after a protracted debate, decided to admit women into the seminary.Footnote 94

The heads of the women's prayer movement anticipated the backlash against these realities. They eschewed any kind of “feminist”—the “F-word”—designation.Footnote 95 Rivka Haut of Brooklyn, the movement's most prominent champion, was especially careful of this. She would often shrug and explain that she and her colleagues did not take their cues from feminism or Conservative Judaism. “I can't help what it looks like,” Haut once explained. “If we wanted that we could go to Conservative shuls.”Footnote 96 Yet, the cultural currents were too strong to halt dissent. One prescient writer anticipated this after JTS's decision to ordain women, predicting that the widely discussed “women's issue” would stir up controversy in Orthodox circles:Footnote 97

We may see a widening of the gap between right and left-wing Orthodoxy. Anytime two divergent parties are involved in an essentially unsolvable argument, each party becomes increasingly self-righteous about its position. With the Orthodox community, each side will respond to the challenge differently, and each side will see its position as the only correct one.Footnote 98

Owing to this, women's prayer emerged as a major issue in the 1980s. Close by to YU's Upper Manhattan campus, several grassroots efforts in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Riverdale, and Teaneck had received ample attention in the Jewish press, from proponents and detractors alike.Footnote 99 In 1982, the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim banned women's prayer, disparaging it as a ritual imposter. The Orthodox Right rabbinical group charged that a “daughter of Israel may not participate in such worthless ceremonies that are totally contrary to Halacha” and threatened to “take the strictest measures to prevent such ‘Prayers.’”Footnote 100 This kind of rhetoric was expected from leaders among the Orthodox Right who tended to issue these sorts of proclamations to help maintain control and stability for their flock amid the dangers of modernism and feminism.

The YU responsum was altogether different. This document was produced by a segment of Orthodox Judaism that had balked at heresy hunting and decrees that encroached on extralegal matters in Jewish life. Like earlier attacks on prayer groups from the Orthodox Right, the RIETS Five responsum did not offer many traditional rabbinic sources from the Talmud and codes, a fact pointed out by several critics.Footnote 101 Instead, it primarily relied on identifying women's prayer groups as a form of feminism, and feminism as a “falsification of the Torah.” Two of the responsum's authors, Bronspigel and Schachter, wrote separate essays on the subject at that time. Both writers took even stronger stances, declaring women's prayer outright “heresy.”Footnote 102 In Bronspigel's presentation, he amplified the contemporariness of the so-called heresy, claiming that the prayer groups' break from Orthodox social norms—a traditional prayer quorum—was a form of “deception” (ona'ah). To him, the distortion of common ritual practice, although it did not tread near principles of faith, was a kind of blasphemy.Footnote 103

Observers recognized that the RCA and the RIETS faculty members had used tactics of approximational heresies usually deployed by the Orthodox Right. One writer was puzzled that a Modern Orthodox culture, which privileged greater autonomy and in which “rabbis have the right to disagree with others, suddenly opted for a monolithic approach.”Footnote 104 Perhaps a major reason for the reorientation was the disappearance of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik from the public scene. After four decades of leadership as Modern Orthodoxy's leading voice, Soloveitchik retired from his post at YU in December 1985 but was already unwell and discreet during the commotion over women's prayer groups.Footnote 105 Both sides claimed that Soloveitchik had earlier offered his support, a point of confusion that proved irreconcilable.Footnote 106 Moreover, it was also the case that, from the 1950s until the 1970s, when Soloveitchik sat atop the rabbinic hierarchy of the Modern Orthodox community, he rarely issued declarations and statements articulating strict public policy that tended to approximate religious borderline drawing.Footnote 107 In all probability, Soloveitchik's departure unleashed a desire to exercise a type of rabbinic control over this section of America's Orthodox community that more closely resembled the methods of the Orthodox Right. The ban on women's prayer groups forced the leaders into an “outsider” position, leaving proponents to scramble to one another for support and to generate momentum to lobby for institutional Orthodoxy's support.Footnote 108

The Modern Orthodox identified other approximational heresies in this pivotal period. In fact, this group's assault on new and amorphous forms of blasphemy placed high-profile individuals in its crosshairs in the same manner as its counterparts within the ranks of the Orthodox Right. For example, the editor of a Baltimore Jewish newspaper reported on the attacks launched against the oft-touted Rabbi Riskin by “heresy hunters” animated by the “triumphalism among the rightwing, or fundamentalist, Orthodox camp that seeks to discredit those who do not share their views.” On this occasion, protesters circulated flyers to prevent Riskin from speaking at Congregation Shomrei Emunah. The leaflets reportedly relayed “that Rabbi Riskin had been labeled a heretic by several Torah sages and urg[ed] the sponsoring congregation to rescind its invitation.” To no avail, the newspaper editor stood up for Riskin, denouncing this “Religious McCarthyism.”Footnote 109 Throughout the brief affair, the censures of Riskin omitted the particulars of his religious infractions. The reference to the concerns of past Torah sages presumably alluded to the declarations of heresy issued by Israel-based rabbis who took umbrage to a number of Riskin's serialized articles on biblical personalities and the invitation he had extended in 1984 to Nechama Leibowitz to lecture at his rabbinic seminary in Israel. Riskin's opponents claimed that both offenses were heretical but struggled to identify just what was so blasphemous. Relying on indicators rather than substance, they cited the promulgation of “objectionable” material and the propriety of a woman teaching a gathering of men—neither item counted among any traditional set of Jewish theological principles.Footnote 110 These antimodernist impulses migrated from Israel to haunt Riskin in the United States.

A third example of approximational heresies in this religious sector involves several of the same Modern Orthodox figures but brings to light a different indicator of Orthodox heresy. In 1985, Rabbi Hershel Schachter published an attack on Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg.Footnote 111 Greenberg's pluralistic activities and writings deeply disturbed Schachter, whose condemnation of Greenberg intended to render him an “outsider” and dissuade his YU students from participating in Greenberg's National Jewish Conference (CLAL; later renamed the National Jewish Resource Center):

Just like it is inappropriate to join together Jews who converted out, heaven forbid, and connect them together with believers, since those who converted out are no longer part of the Jewish people (Klal Yisrael), so too it is inappropriate to join those who have removed themselves from the faith, even if they did not convert out. For in truth, a Jew who declares his Jewishness, but claims that he has a different basis of faith than the accepted ones, that is, he does not accept that the Torah is from heaven or of God's existence or prescience, this is exactly as if he converted out . . . and he is no longer part of the Jewish nation.

To establish firmer borders between the Modern Orthodox and Greenberg, Schachter designated Greenberg an outright blasphemer, seizing on this Orthodox modernist's ecumenical efforts to soften the lines between Judaism and Christianity. At the outset of the 1980s, Greenberg had made claims that Judaism could learn some valuable ideas from Christianity. To justify this, Greenberg rejected that Jesus had been a “false messiah.” He instead preferred to describe Jesus as a “failed messiah,” like, according to Greenberg, Abraham, who could not convert the whole world to monotheism; Moses, who never reached the Promised Land; and Jeremiah, who could not stop the destruction of the Temple. These “failed messiahs” did not fulfill the entirety of their life's mission: “A false messiah is one who has the wrong values: one who would teach that death will triumph, that people should oppress each other, that God hates us, or that sin and crime is the proper way. . . . A failed messiah is one who has the right values, [and] upholds the covenant, but who did not attain the final goal.”Footnote 112 Greenberg's approach had clear echoes of “adaptation of religious ideas to modern culture” that historian William Hutchison wrote about in his research of modernist impulses. The theological language, however, was provocative and unusual, by then, in Orthodox circles. Schachter seized on this, decrying that Greenberg preferred to cite modern philosophers like Martin Buber rather than rely on the sages of the Talmud who preferred to paint Jesus and Christianity in a far dimmer light.

The polemic against Greenberg is noteworthy for what is included and what is not. First, Schachter did not deem it necessary to explain just what was specifically heretical about Greenberg's position. Surely, an argument could have been proffered that Greenberg's Judaization of Jesus was inconsistent with a number of Maimonides's creedal planks (most notably, the twelfth, concerning the Messianic Era). Presumably, Schachter did not need to get involved in that theologically thorny thicket because he could, instead, make use of the widened scope of heresy speech among the Orthodox. Second, it was crucial for Schachter to explicitly draw boundary lines and remove Greenberg. Concluded Schachter: “Those who want to deliberately merge to a ‘singular klal’ (i.e., CLAL), believers with non-believers are like joining forces with the Christians into ‘one nation.’ Go observe what happened to the ‘rabbi’ who claims he is Orthodox. In the end, he sought out of Judaism to incorporate some of the spiritual things of the Christians.” Noteworthy, as well, Schachter's rabbinic Hebrew drew on terms associated with the “wayward son” (ben sorer u-moreh), whom the Bible condemns to death for his unredeemable transgressions against his parents. Greenberg, and the “Orthodoxy of which he is a leader,” were illegitimate.Footnote 113

Schachter called on the RCA to expel Greenberg and persisted in his campaign to oust him from the Modern Orthodox ranks, indicating to colleagues just how “perturbed” he was by Greenberg's writings on Jesus.Footnote 114 At his and others’ behest, the RCA dispatched a committee to investigate Greenberg's Orthodox credentials. In June 1987, Greenberg wrote to YU's Lamm to ask for help. Both men were leading Orthodox thinkers and had been since the 1960s. Less than a month earlier, Greenberg had received a curt request from the RCA's Vaad Hakavod, the committee that oversees religious conduct of its members, to appear before it. In the interim, Greenberg had “learned” that the summons was an “organized attempt to challenge my legitimacy as an Orthodox rabbi.”Footnote 115 It was, then, something akin to a heresy trial. Like the conditions of Protestant antimodernists a century prior, at stake was Greenberg's “insider” standing among his faith group as well as the “Orthodox” bona fides of the thousands of Jews who read and admired him.

Greenberg could not comprehend the rationale for the inquisition. After all, such a proceeding seemed to betray Modern Orthodox Judaism's Americanized sensibilities. Greenberg might have expected this from the fundamentalist-driven Orthodox Right. Otherwise nonplussed, he appealed to Lamm and other leading Orthodox figures to defend him to the rabbinical group because “I am an Orthodox rabbi, not only because of my beliefs in Torah Min Hashamayim and Torah Sheh Ba'al Peh from Sinai, and my commitment to the totality of the tradition, but also by the record of my actual professional service.” By this, Greenberg asserted that his belief in the Sinaitic revelation, commitment to the Oral traditions of Judaism, and considerable rabbinic work confirmed his Orthodox bona fides. He admitted that his most recent labors for interfaith dialogue and Christian theology were provocative and debatable. Yet, Greenberg claimed that a review of his scholarly output would reveal that “there is nothing in those writings that is not justified by previous sources in the tradition.”Footnote 116 Some RCA insiders also launched “McCarthyist” investigations into other “liberal” members, as “personal attacks [had] become the hallmark of the rightwing offensive” within the rabbinical group.Footnote 117 Throughout, their claims raised the notion that there existed heretical forces within their Modern Orthodox enclave, and, for the sake of preservation, the internal threats required total elimination. In the end and after the involvement of many Orthodox leaders and legal counsel, the rabbinical charges against Greenberg and others were dropped. Nonetheless, the attempt to excommunicate Greenberg reflected the extent to which the antimodernist impulse had traveled within the Modern Orthodox orbit and marginalized figures deemed too dangerous to operate as religious “insiders.”

Conclusion: The Recurring Language of Modern Orthodoxy

The antimodernist rhetoric had a lasting influence on communal discourse. In particular, the Orthodox have made use of this rhetoric to guard against the resurgence of feminism, an item that was beyond the comprehension of Rabbi Sofer's circle of Hungarian rabbis or, for that matter, most Orthodox Jews before the final decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 118 In January 1997, for example, sixty-two members of the Vaad Harabonim of Queens met at a Forest Hills restaurant. The group convened in response to a query submitted by the principal of the Yeshiva of Central Queens. Rabbi Aaron Brander and members of the school's parent body were deeply concerned about the contents of a bat mitzvah invitation circulating among seventh graders. The note invited the girl's friends to join her at a prayer group where the young lady would be “called to the Torah to read.” Parents asked the head of school whether their daughters were permitted to attend this worship. Women's prayer groups, as we have seen, had garnered significant attention in the prior decade. Brander savvily submitted the question to the local rabbinical council.Footnote 119

The Queens rabbis banned the event, but not without some resistance. The twelve-year-old girl's rabbi defended the practice. Rabbi Simcha Krauss of the Young Israel of Hillcrest lectured the Vaad that there was nothing wrong with the ritual, so long as the women's group omitted all parts of prayer that could be recited only among a quorum of at least ten men. Krauss delivered the lengthy discourse to his fellow Vaad members, hoping that his lecture would set a sober tone in the meeting and keep the ensuing discussion grounded in a scholarly halakhic debate. Instead, Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld and other Vaad members explained that they preferred the more stringent position penned more than a decade earlier by the five leading YU scholars. The Vaad politely implied to Krauss that he was outranked. The majority sided against women's prayer groups and the girl's bat mitzvah. They resolved in line with an approximational approach that “these practices are breaking the boundaries of Jewish tradition and are prohibited.”Footnote 120

Observers complained that such stark pronouncements were out of step with their Modern Orthodox temperament, that the “Queens Vaad are supposedly not part of the fringe but members of an enlightened community.” One writer averred that the “edict” betokened the heresy approximating language of the Orthodox Right:

Such edicts have normally been limited to fundamental fringe groups. One has only to walk the sidewalks of the ultra-Orthodox Meah She'arim section of Jerusalem to find dozens of them splayed on the walls. A few weeks ago, a large group of such fringe rabbis in Borough Park issued an edict that commands Touro College to close its doors in Brooklyn, claiming that its presence is a provocation and a disgrace in a Torah-oriented community.Footnote 121

Two months later there was more opprobrium within the Modern Orthodox fold. YU rabbinic faculty members expressed outrage about an upstart think tank called Edah, an organization steered by progressive-minded scholars that aimed to “give voice to the ideology and values of modern Orthodoxy and to educate and empower the community to address its concerns.”Footnote 122 Speaking on behalf of his rabbinic colleagues, YU's Rabbi Moshe Tendler encouraged students to steer clear of Edah and its programs “because of its commitment to pluralism.” Using historical indicators to speak for the heretical nature of the present initiative, Tendler compared Edah to the ethical culture movement of the late 1800s and Reform Judaism in the early decades of the subsequent century that were responsible for a “spiritual holocaust.”Footnote 123

More recently, the Modern Orthodox have become embroiled in more so-called women's issues: the thorny matter of female congregational leadership. In June 2009, Rabbi Avi Weiss of Riverdale, New York, ordained Sara Hurwitz as a “Maharat,” a decidedly unrabbinic title for a congregational leader. Several months later, Weiss upgraded Hurwitz to “Rabba,” a feminized term for “rabbi.” The RCA countered, denouncing Weiss's actions and banning him or any other of its members from hiring a woman to serve in a rabbinic capacity.Footnote 124 Observers noticed that the RCA did not state that “women serving as rabbis is a violation of Halacha.” Instead, the rabbinical organization intimated that this was an indicator of an attitude beyond the bounds of Orthodox life.Footnote 125 Subsequently, Orthodox writers have been quick to brand Weiss and his likeminded so-called Open Orthodox coreligionists outright “heretics.”Footnote 126 Unlike Greenberg, Weiss did not wait for the RCA to begin procedures to oust him. He simply left.Footnote 127

One final example transpired at the conclusion of our research for the present article. In December 2018, the Rabbinical Council of Bergen County (RCBC), a board of northern New Jersey Orthodox rabbis that oversees kosher certification and religious conversions, adopted a new bylaw that would expel any RCBC member whose congregation had a female clergywoman on its staff. The rabbinical group had in mind to oust Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Teaneck, who had, for the preceding year and a half, mentored a female rabbinic intern.Footnote 128 Although the RCBC did not outright label Helfgot a “heretic,” the attempt to push an Orthodox rabbi in otherwise good standing outside the pale for actions unconnected to any traditional Jewish principles of faith was a result of religious changes among the Modern Orthodox in the 1980s. Far from exhausted, the spirit of triumphalism has remained an important feature of Orthodox Jewish life and, in some cases, emboldened its champions, first among the Orthodox Right and then the Modern Orthodox, and radicalized their rhetoric. The religious enthusiasm elevated rabbinic elites and enabled them to police borderlines for laypeople who abided for the sake of persisting in Orthodox life. Deliberate or not, they transformed socioreligious behaviors by using approximational methods to control the absorption of modernism and the boundaries of this faith group. It is, therefore, ironic that perhaps Modern Orthodoxy's most prominent target was Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, someone who had interpreted his “Third Era” of Jewish history (the biblical and rabbinic period before this) as one awash in a “spirit of pluralism.”Footnote 129 Although Greenberg's characterization had anticipated much of modern American life, his hope for Orthodox Judaism was wide of the mark.Footnote 130 Instead, pluralism, like other features of American culture, approximated heresy. It signaled how self-confident Orthodox Jews adopted their own kind of antimodernist “heretical imperative” to police its borderlines and rebuff the accommodationist attitudes that had otherwise seized American religious life.

References

Notes

We extend our thanks to David Bashevkin, Menachem Butler, Adam Ferziger, and Jonathan Sarna for reading earlier drafts of this article and offering helpful suggestions. We are also grateful to the editors of the journal and the anonymous referees for their careful review and constructive guidance.

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56 See Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 170–94Google Scholar.

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58 For a different approach to the dynamics of Da'as Torah, see Kaplan, Lawrence, “Daas Torah: A Modern Conception of Rabbinic Authority,” in Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy, ed. Sokol, Moshe (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), 1–60Google Scholar.

59 It was also unknown to Peter Berger when he underestimated the power and reach of Orthodox rabbinic authority, although he adjusted and accounted for it in a much later monograph. See Berger, Peter L., The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Bernard Weinberger, “The Role of Gedolim,” Jewish Observer, October 1963, 11.

61 See, for example, Murray Weitman, “A Position Paper on a Central Orthodox Agency Presented to the Agudath Israel,” Jewish Observer, December 1964, 9–10.

62 See Rodgers, Daniel T., Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1–14Google Scholar.

63 Sherer, Moshe, Bi-Shtei Einayim (Brooklyn: Mesorah, 1988), 247Google Scholar; Avi Shafran, “The Enigma of Moses Mendelssohn,” Jewish Observer, December 1986, 18.

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65 Yisroel E. Shemano, “The Rosh Yeshiva and the Time Factors at Weddings,” Jewish Observer, October 1982, 38.

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69 On this, see Satlow, Jeremy, Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 30–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 David Schaps, “A Nation of Devourers,” Jewish Observer, Summer 1987, 27.

71 John R. Rice, Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives and Women Preachers (Wheaton, IL: Sword of the Lord, 1941), 11–12. Our thanks to Lincoln Mullen for pointing out this source and offering very helpful context for this subject.

72 Kotler, Aharon, Mishnat Rebbe Aharon, vol. 4 (Lakewood, NJ: Mekhon Mishnat Rebbe Aharon, 2005), 212–13Google Scholar. See also “Kinus shel Roshei Yeshivot ve-Talmideihen lima'an Haganah al Kevodah shel Torah,” Hapardes 32 (July 1958): 39; and Meler, Shimon Yosef, Ha-Rav mi-Brisk: Toldot Maran Ri”z ha-Levi, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2011), 365–70Google Scholar. Kotler's well-publicized attack on college reportedly convinced a handful of young men to drop out. See Dershowitz, Yitzchok, A Living ‘Mishnas Rav Aharon’: The Legacy of Maran Rav Aharon Kotler (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2005), 155–57Google Scholar. On Kotler's influence on dissuading young women to attend college, see Leslie M. Ginsparg, “Defining Bais Yaakov: A Historical Study of Yeshivish Orthodox Girls High School Education in America, 1963–1984” (PhD diss., New York University, 2009), 227. On the influence of Kotler and his students on Kaplan, see Ginsparg, “Defining Bais Yaakov,” 131. See also Leibowitz, Danielle S. and Gliksman, Devora, Rebbetzin Vichna Kaplan: The Founder of the Bais Yaakov Movement in America (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2016), 424–34Google Scholar; and Finkelman, Yoel, “Haredi Isolation in Changing Environments: A Case Study in Yeshiva Immigration,” Modern Judaism 22 (February 2002): 61–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 See, for example, Gifter, Mordechai, Mili de-Iggerot, vol. 3 (Lakewood, NJ: Be'er Torah, 2005), 197–99Google Scholar; and Feinstein, Moshe, Iggerot Moshe (New York: Noble Book Press, 1996), 220Google Scholar. Although he supported college studies after students completed their education at Telshe, Gifter admonished his most promising pupils to remain at Telshe and engage in full-time Torah study. See also Bernard Weinberger, “The Yeshiva Bochur and College: A New Look at an Old Problem,” Jewish Observer, March 1966, 7.

74 Helmreich, William B., The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portrait of Orthodoxy Jewry (New York: Free Press, 1982), 220Google Scholar. See also Mayer, Egon, From Suburb to Shtetl: The Jews of Boro Park (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 78–79Google Scholar.

75 Jackie Fulda, “College: A Problem of Overstatement,” Jewish Observer, March 1974, 3–4.

76 Yerachmiel Wagner, “The Cheers,” Jewish Observer, March 1974, 4. See also Shmuel Hirsch, “‘The Child You Lose’ Not Realistic,” Jewish Observer, March 1974, 5; and Yonah Blumenfrucht, “Career and College Counseling for Yeshiva Students,” Jewish Observer, May 1974, 22.

77 For an able survey of the debate, see Messer-Davidow, Ellen, “Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education,” Social Text 36 (Autumn 1993): 40–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Schwab, Shimon, Selected Speeches: A Collection of Addresses and Essays on Hashkafah, Contemporary Issues and Jewish History (New York: CIS, 1991), 247Google Scholar. See also Schwab, Shimon, Selected Essays: A Collection of Addresses and Essays on Hashkafah, Jewish History and Contemporary Issues (New York: CIS, 1994), 142Google Scholar.

79 Weissman, Moshe, The Midrash Says: The Book of Vayikra (Brooklyn: Benei Yakov, 1982), 221Google Scholar; Nosson Scherman, “The World Is Watching,” Jewish Observer, March 1986, 16; Bernard Fryshman, “Second Looks at the Jewish Scene,” Jewish Observer, December 1988, 37.

80 Avrohom Y. HaCohen, “A Famine in the Land,” Jewish Observer, May–June 1980, 29; Batya Zimmerman, “On Being Beings,” Jewish Observer, November 1984, 34.

81 See Ruth Ben Avraham, “Baale Teshuva in Turbulence,” Jewish Observer, April 1983, 39. For a recent presentation on the curious history of Bais Yaakov, see Seidman, Naomi, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (Oxford: Littman Library, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 See Ginsparg, “Defining Bais Yaakov,” 104–13, 239–40.

83 R. Roth, “Beyond the Crossroads,” Jewish Observer, May 1982, 37.

84 See Gurock, Jeffrey S., The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 213–45Google Scholar.

85 In general, on the more recent tendencies of the Modern Orthodox to behave like those to the “right” of them, see Ferziger, Adam S., Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 211–23Google Scholar.

86 Marshall Sklare, interview with Norman Lamm, February 1977, Box 21, Folder 39, Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections Department, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.

87 See Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 180–220.

88 See “Lecture on ‘Daas Torah,’” Hamevaser, January 11, 1984, 1. On the described challenges facing the Modern Orthodox rabbinate, see Liebman, Charles S., “Extremism as a Religious Norm,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 22 (March 1983): 75–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On a repudiation of a harsh criticism of Da'as Torah within the Modern Orthodox fold, see Kaplan, Lawrence, “Rabbi Isaac Hutner's ‘Daat Torah Perspective’ on the Holocaust: A Critical Analysis,” Tradition 18 (Fall 1980): 235–48Google Scholar; and the letters published in Tradition 21 (Summer 1983): 180–87. Regarding Lamm's frustrations, it is little wonder, then, that he began to rebrand his group as “Centrist Orthodox” in the 1980s. See Lamm, “Some Comments on Centrist Orthodoxy,” 1.

89 Nisson Lipa Alpert and others to Eliezer Bernstein, 19 Kislev 5745. A copy of this text is in our possession. The writer David Singer coined the term RIETS Five. See Singer, David, “A Failure of Halachic ‘Objectivity,’” Sh'ma 15 (May 17, 1985): 108Google Scholar. Initially produced and disseminated as a one-page, mimeographed document, the responsum attracted significant attention and was then published in the RCA's Hebrew journal. See “Teshuvah bi- Inyan Nashim bi-Hakefot,” Ha-Darom 54 (Sivan 1985): 51–53. For a translation, see Eleff, Modern Orthodox Judaism, 379. On the attention the responsum received, see Larry Cohler, “Orthodox Rabbis’ Responsa Condemns Women's Prayer Groups,” Jewish World, February 15, 1985, 2.

90 Riskin, Shlomo, Listening to God: Inspirational Stories for My Grandchildren (New Milford, CT: Maggid, 2010), 193–96Google Scholar.

91 See Eleff, Authentically Orthodox, 185–202. From the perspective of women's prayer group advocates, moreover, there was little difference between a Bais Yaakov homeroom and their monthly gatherings in a member's home. See Irwin H. Haut, “The Halacha on Women Minyon,” Jewish Press, September 21, 1984, 42.

92 See Evans, Sara M., “Feminism in the 1980s: Surviving the Backlash,” in Living in the Eighties, ed. Troy, Gil and Cannato, Vincent J. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 85–97Google Scholar.

93 George Gilder, “An Open Letter to Orrin Hatch,” National Review, May 13, 1988, 34.

94 See Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis, 212.

95 See Fishman, Sylvia Barack, A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community (New York: Free Press, 1993), 158–68Google Scholar. For two notable exceptions that link feminism and women's prayer, see Cheryl J. Goldberg, “Should Women's Prayer Groups Be RCA Concern?” Jewish World, December 7, 1984, 29; and “Davening with Women,” Jewish World, November 9, 1979, 7.

96 See Larry Cohler, “Women's Davening Group Comes into Its Own, Despite Criticism,” Jewish World, July 13, 1984, 18. For accusations to the contrary, see Dvorah Shurin, “On a Minyan for Women,” Jewish Press, December 24, 1982, 5.

97 On the pivotal role of women and gender in determining the relatively recent fault lines of denominationalism within American Judaism, see Sarna, Jonathan D., “The Debate over Mixed Seating in the American Synagogue,” in The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed, ed. Wertheimer, Jack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 386Google Scholar.

98 Charles Abrams, “Women behind the Pulpit,” Hamevaser, December 2, 1983, 3.

99 See “Councilwoman Alter Announces First Women's Minyan in Brooklyn,” Jewish Press, December 10, 1982, 11; Susan Rosenbluth, “Orthodox Women's Tefillah Thriving in Teaneck Area,” Jewish Standard, January 27, 1984, 3; and Larry Cohler, “Women's Davening Group Comes into Its Own, Despite Criticism,” Jewish World, July 13, 1984, 18–19.

100 “Union of Orthodox Rabbis Condemns ‘Minyan’ of Women,” Jewish Press, December 24, 1982, 3.

101 See Chernick, Michael, “In Support of Women's Prayer Groups,” Sh'ma 15 (May 17, 1985): 105–8Google Scholar.

102 See Bronspigel, Abba, “Minyan Meyuhadim li-Nashim,” Ha-Darom 54 (Sivan 5745): 52Google Scholar; and Schachter, Zvi, “Tzei Lekha bi-Ikvei ha-Tzon, Beit Yitzhak 17 (1985): 119Google Scholar. Bronspigel's statement connecting women's prayer groups with heresy is drawn from a responsum authored in the 1970s by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. See also Ferziger, Adam S., “Feminism and Heresy: The Construction of a Jewish Metanarrative,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77 (September 2009): 494–546CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Adler, Rachel, “Innovation and Authority: A Feminist Reading of the ‘Women's Minyan’ Responsum,” in Gender Issues in Jewish Law: Essays and Responsa, ed. Jacob, Walter and Zemer, Moshe (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 3–32Google Scholar.

103 Bronspigel, “Minyan Meyuhadim li-Nashim,” 51–52. In addition, Schachter issued an attack on “Orthodox rabbis espousing anti-Torah views,” presumably the few among the Orthodox rabbinate who supported women's prayer groups. See Schachter, Hershel, “Where to Place the Menorah,” Beit Kotlei Ha-Yeshiva 3 (Kislev 1985): 26Google Scholar. For a Yeshiva University student's response, see Yosef Kanefsky, “Political Publications,” Hamevaser, December 1985, 2.

104 Yaakov Jacobs, Letter to the Editor, Jewish World, March 1, 1985, 4.

105 Soloveitchik often said that he would not censure people publicly, something that would enable both the modernists, on one side, and the antimodernists, on the other, to claim his legacy. On his reluctance to impose his position, see, for example, Joseph B. Soloveitchik to Irving Greenberg, September 29, 1965, Box 56, Folder 20, Papers of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, Widener Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. See also Farber, Seth, “Reproach, Recognition and Respect: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Orthodoxy's Mid-Century Attitude toward Non-Orthodox Denominations,” American Jewish History 89 (June 2001): 193–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Berman, Saul J., “The Approach of the Rav to P'sak and Public Policy,” in Mentor of Generations: Reflections on Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed. Eleff, Zev (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav, 2008), 61–66Google Scholar. For an important exceptional case in which Soloveitchik issued severe condemnation of colleague Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, calling his Orthodoxy into question, see Singer, David, “Emanuel Rackman: Gadfly of Modern Orthodoxy,” Modern Judaism 28 (May 2008): 134–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 In addition to the Riskin memoir and the YU responsum cited previously, see, for example, Judith Rosenbaum, “Oppose Women's Tefillah,” Jewish Standard, February 10, 1984, 3; and Meiselman, Moshe, Jewish Women in Jewish Law (New York: Ktav, 1978), 146, 197, n. 64Google Scholar.

107 Soloveitchik was inconsistent on issuing public policies in formal and informal ways. For example, he never did issue a public ruling on the limits of cooperation with non-Orthodox organizations and participation in the intradenominational Synagogue Council of America. See Louis Bernstein, “The Emergence of the English Speaking Orthodox Rabbinate” (PhD diss., Yeshiva University, 1977), 309–10. Critics of this presumed policy were aware of this. See also Nisson Wolpin, “When There Is a Need for Distinction,” Jewish Observer, May 1985, 7–12. In contrast, Soloveitchik was very clear about his position when addressing Christian missionizing in Israel. See Steven Prystowsky, “Rabbi Soloveitchik Wants Action against Missionary Threat,” The Commentator (December 4, 1963): 1. This article points out that this instance of Soloveitchik issuing a policy and speaking on “modern problems” was a rarity.

108 See, for example, Norma Baumel Joseph, “Letters,” Women's Tefillah Newsletter, August 1985, 4.

109 Gary Rosenblatt, “Religious McCarthyism,” Baltimore Jewish Times, November 22, 1991, 10, 16.

110 See Unterman, Yael, Nehama Leibowitz: Teacher and Bible Scholar (Jerusalem: Urim, 2009), 298–303Google Scholar. In many cases, the charges of heresy, such as the one involving Leibowitz's lecturing in front of men, were levied by Rabbi Elazar Shach, the head of the Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak and foremost leader of Israel's haredi Jews. In addition to his attack on Riskin, Shach issued bans on several of the “heretical” works of Rabbis Joseph Soloveitchik and Adin Steinsaltz. See Eleff, Zev, “Psychohistory and the Imaginary Couch: Diagnosing Historical and Biblical Figures,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80 (March 2012): 116–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shapiro, Marc B., “Of Books and Bans,” Edah Journal 3 (Elul 2003): 1–16Google Scholar.

111 Greenberg was a veteran target of YU rabbinical faculty members. See Singer, David, “Debating Modern Orthodoxy at Yeshiva College: The Greenberg-Lichtenstein Exchange of 1966,” Modern Judaism 26 (May 2006): 113–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 Greenberg, Irving, “The Relationship of Judaism and Christianity: Toward a New Organic Model,” Quarterly Review 4 (Winter 1984): 13–14Google Scholar. See a more developed position in Greenberg, Irving, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004), 145–61Google Scholar.

113 Schachter, “Gidrei Yohsin bi-Umma ha-Yisraelit,” 230–31. Interestingly, when Schachter republished his article in his collected essays, he omitted all references to Greenberg. One should also note that, in the original article, Greenberg's name is never mentioned explicitly. See Schachter, Zvi, Eretz Ha-Zvi (Brooklyn: Flatbush Beth Hamedrosh, 1992), 118–26Google Scholar.

114 See Don Well to Herschel Schachter, April 9, 1987, Rosh Yeshiva Search Committee File, Hebrew Theological College, Skokie, Illinois.

115 See Bernard Rosensweig to Yitzchak Greenberg, May 13, 1987, Box 14, Folder 9, Papers of Rabbi Irving Greenberg. See also Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, 33–35.

116 See Irving Greenberg to Norman Lamm, June 9, 1987, Box 14, Folder 9, Papers of Rabbi Irving Greenberg.

117 See Jonathan Mark, “Modern Orthodox Rabbis Claim Assault from RCA Right Wing,” Jewish Week, July 19, 1990, 29.

118 See Evans, “Feminism in the 1980s,” 94–95. The historian Jonathan Sarna has argued that “Judaism's treatment of women had long been viewed as a test of its ability to parry modernity's challenges.” See Sarna, Jonathan D., American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 240Google Scholar. For a good comparison between the gender-minded Jewish reformist attitudes in Europe and the United States, see Goldman, Karla, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 17–37Google Scholar.

119 See Jeff Helmreich, “Rabbinical Supervision,” Jewish World, January 31, 1997, 3; and Norimitsu Onishi, “Reading the Torah, an Orthodox Women's Group Takes on Tradition,” New York Times, February 16, 1997, 43.

120 See Elicia Brown, “The Politics of Prayer,” Jewish Week, January 31, 1997, 14.

121 Reuel Shinnar, “Exclusive Orthodoxy,” Jewish World, February 14, 1997, 8.

122 See Waxman, Chaim I., “Patterns of American Jewish Religious Behavior,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, ed. Kaplan, Dana Evan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 112–13Google Scholar.

123 Mordechai Fishman, “RIETS Adult Education Program Finds Itself Entangled in Controversy,” The Commentator, March 18, 1997, 6.

124 See Sarah Breger, “Do 1 Rabba + 2 Rabbis + 1 Yeshiva = A New Denomination?” Moment 35 (December 2010): 38–42, 60–63.

125 See Josh Nathan-Kazis, “Female Rabbis Banned, with Loophole,” Forward, May 7, 2010, 3.

126 See, for example, Daniel Retter, “Open Orthodox Is Openly Unorthodox,” Jewish Press, November 4, 2016, 10; and Yaakov Feitman, “A Window into Open Orthodoxy and How to Close It,” Yated Ne'eman, December 2, 2016, 26.

127 See “Rabbi Avi Weiss Quits Rabbinical Council of America,” Washington Jewish Week, July 2, 2015, 14.

128 See Elizabeth Kratz, “RCBC Draws ‘Boundary Line’ on Women Rabbis,” Jewish Link, February 7, 2019, 8.

129 “A New Era in Jewish History,” CLAL News and Perspectives, n.d.

130 See Hutchison, William R., Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 219–40Google Scholar.