In 1967, the famed sociologist Peter Berger declared that “secularization has resulted in a widespread collapse of the plausibility of traditional religious definitions of reality.”Footnote 1 Almost five decades later, in 2014, Berger was moved to conclude that this observation was simply wrong. He candidly admitted, “So-called secularization theory was mistaken in the assumption that modernity necessarily leads to a decline in religion.”Footnote 2 In his later work, Berger argued that the pluralism and fragmentation that marked the modern social condition led to the resurgence of traditional religion and a renewed quest for spiritual expression and meaning in the modern context. This development serves as a decisive backdrop for understanding the substance and importance of Social Change and Halakhic Evolution in American Orthodoxy by Chaim Waxman.
Waxman, who (along with Samuel Heilman) is the foremost contemporary sociological commentator on the state of Orthodox Judaism, writes as the paradigmatic “insider-outsider” in all his writings on Orthodox Judaism in the contemporary setting. In this volume, he draws brilliantly on this lifetime of scholarship to illuminate the history and character of Orthodox Judaism in America in a time of religious revival. His framework is self-consciously “sociological rather than ideological or religious-legal” (3). He emphasizes throughout his book that Orthodox Judaism cannot be understood apart from the contours of the sociological and historical contexts in which Orthodox Jews and their institutions find themselves.
Waxman's portrait of American Orthodox Judaism shows what distinguishes Orthodox Jews and Judaism from non-Orthodox Jews and Judaism in this nation while highlighting the breadth and diversity of American Orthodox Judaism itself. At the very outset of this volume, Waxman employs the familiar categories of “Modern Orthodox” and “ultra-Orthodox” as “ideal-types” for comprehending the nature of Orthodox Judaism both past and present in America. While each group displays a commitment to halakhic observance, the birthrates of each group, their economic success in American society, and their attitudes toward a whole host of social and cultural issues demonstrate the diversity of Orthodox opinions and practices.
Waxman illuminates what distinguishes all circles of American Orthodox Jews from the non-Orthodox by highlighting their demographic, political, and cultural-religious differences. He points out that in the New York area, the birthrate in the ultra-Orthodox community is twelve times that of the non-Orthodox world and that Modern Orthodox Jews have more than double the birthrate of Reform and Conservative Jews nationwide. Politically, the Orthodox world is much more heavily Republican than the non-Orthodox one, and it fails to support the traditional wall of separation between religion and state that is championed by a majority of American Jews. While Orthodox Jews have an average income lower than non-Orthodox Jews, Waxman reports that there are proportionately a larger number of households with annual incomes of more than $150,000 in the Modern Orthodox community than exist in the non-Orthodox Jewish world. This affluence among the Modern Orthodox, combined with bloc-voting among the ultra-Orthodox that assures patronage and grants from state and local governments, play key roles in sustaining ever-burgeoning Orthodox institutions and schools.
Waxman pays careful attention to history by pointing out how the immigration of Rabbi Aharon Kotler to the United States in 1941 and his establishment of the ultra-Orthodox Lakewood Yeshiva, along with the arrival of 140,000 Hungarian ultra-Orthodox Jews on these shores in the aftermath of the Holocaust, combined with the current-day economic and political developments mentioned above to strengthen all sectors of American Orthodox Judaism. The result of these demographic, cultural, religious, and economic factors is that Jewish day school education has become standard among the overwhelming number of Orthodox Jews in America, whether Modern or ultra-Orthodox. Orthodox Jews, unlike most of their non-Orthodox counterparts, therefore currently inhabit what can be described anthropologically as a “thick Jewish culture.” The phenomenon of “non-observant Orthodox Jews”—who belong to Orthodox synagogues but are not halakhically observant—is increasingly rare. This makes for stark cultural-religious divides between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews. These schisms show no signs of abatement, and they surely have significant implications for the future of the American Jewish community.
Social Change and Halakhic Evolution in American Orthodoxy is at its best when it describes the divisions that distinguish ultra-Orthodox from Modern Orthodox circles in present-day America. Waxman notes that there has been an overall “turn to the right” in both sectors of American Orthodoxy that reflects the phenomenon of ethnic revival in this nation as well as “the broader [worldwide] turn to the right and the rise of fundamentalism in a variety of different countries and continents” (81).
The near universal attendance of contemporary American Orthodox Jews at Israeli yeshivot following high school means that Orthodox youth are instructed by and exposed to both Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) and religious Zionists who are absolutely punctilious in their observance of the commandments. Furthermore, Modern Orthodox day schools and yeshivot largely depend on Haredi instructors. All this means that young Orthodox Jews are exposed to ultra-Orthodox viewpoints at a crucial moment in their religious formation.
Waxman also points out that outreach programs that attract baʿalei teshuvah to the Orthodox world are dominated by ultra-Orthodox organizations, and he indicates that most major rabbinic decisors (poskim) emerge from the ultra-Orthodox sector of the Orthodox world. These rabbis are overwhelmingly yeshiva heads and not community rabbis compelled to compromise their religious world views with a laxity of behaviors that might take place in a larger communal setting. The extensive dissemination in the Modern Orthodox community of works on “practical Halakhah” written overwhelmingly by ultra-Orthodox Jews, as well as the widespread use of prayer books, classical texts, and ḥumashim issued by Haredi publishing houses like ArtScroll further testify to this “turn to the right.” Thus, many who live a Modern Orthodox lifestyle—even the “social Orthodox” identified by Jay Lefkowitz, who do not share classical Orthodox views of revelation and belief—adopt Haredi attitudes in certain areas of their lives.
Even as Waxman identifies this overarching rightward trend in the Orthodox world, he is careful to note that there is still significant diversity in the community. Modern Orthodox Jews remain more open to secular education than their ultra-Orthodox counterparts. This leads them to grapple with biblical criticism in ways that would be unthinkable among the ultra-Orthodox. They are also more tolerant of LGBTQ persons and have more liberal sexual mores than their ultra-Orthodox brothers and sisters. Most significantly, they often insist that Jewish law sanctions a much more lenient attitude toward women than ultra-Orthodox authority would concede, and this frequently leads to Modern Orthodox approval of “partnership minyanim” and yeshivot like Maharat in New York that confer rabbinic ordination on women. Waxman notes the appearance of the “Open Orthodox” Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, founded by Rabbi Avi Weiss, and the increasingly popular publications of the Modern Orthodox Koren Press, which reflect the multitextured and ever-evolving nature of Orthodox Judaism in America.
Students of all varieties of Judaism in the modern world as well as Orthodox Judaism in America are surely indebted to Waxman for Social Change and Halakhic Evolution in American Orthodoxy. It will enrich the understanding of all who study religious traditionalism in the contemporary setting.
