In 2013, Rabbi Aharon Feldman of Baltimore’s Ner Israel Rabbinical College wrote that “the greatest issue facing religious Jewry in today’s world” is that “many— too many—of us are observant, even punctiliously so—but not quite religious” and proposed several reasons for this tragic predicament:
“Man’s nature as a physical being with ego and bodily drives—his natural inertia, his desire for physical comfort and pleasure and his ego’s need to shirk obeisance to all others, including God.”
“Everything about our surrounding milieu militates against inner service of God. We are all naturally drawn to accept the values of our host societies, and it is safe to say that love and fear of God are not high in their hierarchy of values; those are usually left for the benighted religious fundamentalists who are the bane of such societies.”
“The Torah community does little to nurture its members’ ability to serve God with their inner selves. Our educational system emphasizes religious acts over religious devotion.”
These factors form a perfect storm that, for R. Feldman, is more dangerous than anything else for our people’s continuity:
the high cost of tuition, the “shidduch crisis” and youth at risk, each affect segments, albeit large ones, of our community. But superficial observance of Judaism is a far more serious problem, because it weakens our entire communal fabric and strikes at our essence as a nation of internally-focused spiritual aspirants devoted to the service of God.
While R. Feldman’s article caused some to raise eyebrows, a 2014 article by Jay Lefkowitz about “one of the fastest growing and most dynamic segments of the American Jewish community” - what he called “Social Orthodoxy” - made people truly worry:
Social Orthodox Jews fully embrace Jewish culture and Jewish community. And they are committed to the survival of the Jewish people. Indeed, that is their raison d’être. Furthermore, because religious practice is an essential component of Jewish continuity, Social Orthodox Jews are observant—and not because they are trembling before God.
… I had a conversation about religion with a devout Catholic friend. When I explained that I was an observant Jew and began each day by reciting the morning prayers but wasn’t really sure how God fit into my life, he was perplexed. When I admitted that these theological questions didn’t really occupy much of my attention and certainly weren’t particularly germane to my life as an observant Jew, he became agitated. And when I told him that I certainly wasn’t sure if Jewish law was divine or simply the result of two millennia of rabbinical interpretations, he threw up his hands and said: “How can you do everything you do, and live a life with so many restrictions and so many obligations, if you don’t even believe in God?”
I responded that there is a long tradition in Judaism of engaging first in religious practices and letting matters of faith come later. In the book of Exodus, after Moses has received the Commandments from God, he begins to instruct the Jewish people in the law; their immediate response is na’aseh v’nishma: “We will do first and understand afterwards.” I explained that while I understood that Catholicism, along with the other branches of Christianity, was essentially a religion based on the belief that Jesus is the son of God and the savior of humanity, Judaism is a complex blend of radical monotheism and peoplehood. In the Bible, the Jewish people are referred to not as a religious denomination, but as b’nai Yisrael, the children of Israel, the descendants of Jacob. Throughout history, Jews have referred to themselves as am Yisrael, the nation of Israel. The vast corpus of Jewish law, all 613 biblical commandments as well as the Oral Tradition, is a guide to how one lives a Jewish life as a member of the Jewish people.
While this may sound similar to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s oft-quoted aphorism of Judaism being a religion of 613 deeds but no creeds, Lefkowitz credits a different thinker with this approach of living Jewishly while leaving doctrine at the door:
for me, and I imagine for many others like me, the key to Jewish living is not our religious beliefs but our commitment to a set of practices and values that foster community and continuity. In this way, both Modern and Social Orthodoxy owe an ironic debt to Mordecai Kaplan, perhaps the most iconoclastic American rabbi and thinker of the 20th century. In the first decades of that century, Kaplan occupied pulpits in two of the most prominent Orthodox synagogues in New York City—Kehilath Jeshurun and the Jewish Center—and he was one of the founders of the Modern Orthodox “Young Israel” synagogue movement. He taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the center of Conservative Judaism. And then he made the radical move of creating an entirely new movement, Reconstructionism…
Kaplan’s Reconstructionist movement, from its inception, has remained a tiny minority within a minority. And yet, nearly 70 years after his excommunication, Kaplan’s perspective is surprisingly resonant within that of the Modern Orthodox world. As both the UJA and Pew data revealed, many Modern Orthodox Jews are more focused on living a Jewish life than they are on theology or a rigid set of rules. Modern Orthodox day schools teach evolution unapologetically, notwithstanding the literal text of Genesis. And they have begun to accommodate gay and lesbian students, notwithstanding the literal text of Leviticus, with one school even establishing a club as a forum for students to discuss matters of sexuality and identity. Notably, in Modern Orthodox day schools, much to the chagrin of their teachers, many students have taken to observing what they call “half shabbos”—the practice of going to synagogue and keeping the Sabbath, but using their iPhones and Blackberries to text on the Sabbath, despite the rabbinical prohibition on using electronics… Yet despite such halachic foot-faults, these same Modern Orthodox Jewish teenagers and their families lead lives that are completely focused on Jewish values, ideals, and rituals. The adults attend synagogue regularly, participate in Torah and Talmud classes organized by their synagogues, donate significantly to Jewish communal organizations, and travel to Israel frequently. Their children study in dual-curriculum schools (often for 13 years); many then take a year off before college to study Talmud in Israel; and a great number spend their summers in Zionist Orthodox camps.
In perceiving the need to root American Judaism in something more tangible and rational than pure faith, Kaplan foresaw American Jewish practice that was focused primarily on community and secondarily on God. Many of his innovations, which still flourish today, gave structure to his reconstruction of Judaism. He instituted the practice of giving girls bat-mitzvahs (his daughter had the first one in 1922); after long resistance, Modern Orthodoxy has figured out ways to accommodate this ritual. Kaplan organized the first synagogue-as-community in America in 1916 when he founded the Jewish Center on the Upper West Side—the first “shul with a pool.” That innovation has been adopted widely in the Modern Orthodox community, with every synagogue now running a wide range of educational and social programs for adults and children.
… What Kaplan called “civilization” and Ahad Ha’am called a “national culture” is what moves many of us. We behave as Jews so we can belong as Jews. Some of us may even come to believe. The key, however, is that we live Jewish lives so we will not be disconnected, and we will never be alone.
Religious life for Kaplan, though, was hardly easy. Kaplan eventually left Orthodoxy entirely, and left Halakhah with “a vote but not a veto” in Jewish life precisely to escape the turmoil that he found himself in while attempting to live an Orthodox life. Indeed, Kaplan confided in his journal that already by the time he began at KJ he “had become disqualified, in my own mind and conscience, to function as an orthodox rabbi” and yet carried on for the sake of his parents (with whom he had confided his situation as “an Orthodox rabbi who preached about and supported traditional teachings and ideas to which he personally no longer subscribed”):
O God! What an inveterate hypocrite I have become! My sin weighs me down. My heart is town by the conflict, and all for the sake of my parents! … I ask not for riches, I ask not for fame, only that God should open the eyes of my parents to see how they are slowly permitting my soul and spirit to die within me… [my parents] believe that my ideas will change… but I tell [them] that ideas are as subject to natural law as bodies, and it is by the fatality of things that I believe as I do, and can never change. But yet they hearkened now, and I still go on my weary way.
He even often found himself wondering “what would Kehilath Jeshurun say [if they knew that] I find it necessary to desist occasionally [from the course of daily prayers] in order to be able to recite it all without getting the nausea.” So much was his stress over his situation that Kaplan immediately accepted his academic role at JTS because “the post offered… redemption from… spiritual plight…” and “so anxious was I to get away from Orthodoxy that I was glad to do anything for a living.” Whatever else he was, Kaplan was surely relieved to finally be, in his own words, “emancipated from Orthodoxy.”
Importantly, Kaplan was far from the only person to struggle with balancing internal heterodoxy with external Orthodoxy. Ayala Fader's 2020 book, "Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age" presents a fascinating anthropological study of Orthodox Jews who experience life-changing doubt; doubt in their religious worldviews so strong that it requires them to take action. While many who experience such doubt go completely "Off the Derech," Fader’s book focuses on those who choose to more or less stay within their communities. Despite appearing Orthodox in their public lives, they privately embrace a whole new reality. Many of them create new identities on social media and blogs before becoming more adventurous - meeting up in person outside of their communities, changing how they dress, and ultimately living two different lives at once.
Fader explores the repercussions of this experience on multiple fronts. For individuals, it's a process of personal growth and exploration that they were unable to have in their teenage years. For spouses, it's about navigating a relationship in which both parties are committed to making things work but in completely different internal places. For parents, it's about making sure that their children are able to think critically and make informed decisions about their religious lives. For children, it's about maintaining a relationship with a parent they feel is sending conflicting and sometimes dangerous messages in communities that do not tolerate public difference. Here were some interesting takeaways that it's worth keeping in mind:
Life-changing doubt does not have to be about belief in God. Often, it began with doubting word-for-word revelation or in communal acceptance of stringency to the exclusion of legitimate lenient options.
Living a double life in response to such doubt can happen in the Hasidic, Yeshivish, and Modern Orthodox worlds alike. All three of those communities are overwhelmingly of the opinion that no one who is healthy would publicly leave observance because of doubts alone, so they each in their own ways do everything in their power to keep doubters within their respective communities.
The internet helps facilitate identity exploration but is not itself a cause of the doubts people face. Many of them only went to the web after they found no answers in their communities.
Life-changing doubt is more common than anyone realizes. Fader mentions businessmen and women, homemakers, kollel scholars, and even rabbis and poskim who live double lives.
Utilitarian arguments for religion are good enough to keep some people publicly invested in the system but are not necessarily strong enough to stop them from privately exploring new options.
Related to these takeaways, one of the religious leaders profiled in Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola’s Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind is Sherm, “an Orthodox rabbi in his 30s who plans to remain in the rabbinate until his retirement.” Sherm “fell out of belief… naturally, during conversations with a member of his community who had a way of interspersing his own controversial beliefs with disturbing questions.” Though privately a non-observant atheist, Sherm opted to continue publicly leading an Orthodox life (and is presumably still leading an Orthodox shul somewhere) because he saw value in character traits that Orthodox Judaism holds dear:
They are universal: kindness, you know, not getting angry, getting control over your emotions. Values I think any good person would want to instill in their own children. There are ways that Orthodoxy presents those things which is very nice - and even intellectually stimulating.
He also found himself able to stay publicly Orthodox because
It’s easy to disguise yourself as an Orthodox Jew, because 99 percent of what makes you Orthodox is your actions. It’s what you do. It’s such a practice-based religion. I do everything Orthodox Jews do…. I do all these things. And nobody would ever think twice.
Like Kaplan, Sherm found it difficult to continue to pray, but he couldn’t stop because that would be noticeable to his congregants. Instead, he took to davening as quickly as possible and then reading from other books. Also like Kaplan, Sherm emphasized a sense of worry as to what would happen if he became public about his lack of belief:
Sometimes I feel its a little ridiculous - a little bit like playing games. But right now I just tell myself it’s just part of my job.
It’s not so easy. A lot of what I’m doing, I believe, is just what it is: made up by farmers and barbaric, ancient people. It’s just - strange.
If I were to come out, I believe that my father would probably never talk to me. It’s very, very possible. If he would, I would be shocked.
What unites Lefkowitz, Kaplan, and the “Hidden Heretics” like Sherm is an approach to life called pragmatism. For Kaplan,
The question “What is Judaism?” … resolves itself into the question “How do these beliefs and practices function?” For the first time we are getting at the very essence of Judaism; for the function of a thing practically constitutes its essence.
Mel Scult wrote that “the goal of thought and action for a pragmatist is to improve our lot - a goal at the heart of both Kaplan’s ideology and his character. His assumption is that human life can be improved and that we have a responsibility to contribute toward that improvement.” This is what led Kaplan to feel such a profound need to reconstruct Judaism from the ground up:
Kaplan’s pragmatic and functional method is always to push toward the idea. He strove throughout his career to rework a concept, a ritual, or a prayer so that it would contribute to moral progress and well-being - in other words, to our collective and individual betterment. Sometimes Kaplan would come across a practice that he felt was beyond reconstruction. For example, he felt the division of Israel into fixed groups on the basis of their ancestry was discriminatory in its essence. Neither the priesthood not the sacrifices will ever function again, he reasoned, so what is the point of retaining the tripartite division of the Jewish people into priest [kohane], Levite, and Israelite. He believed this distinction should be eliminated completely, since there was no way to rehabilitate its function. Another example of his functional method was his continual questioning as to whether a particular mitzvah helps us cope. If it moves us toward shelemut - completeness or salvation - then we should embrace it with our whole being. If not, then it needs to be reconstructed so that it will function constructively.
Scult notes, though that pragmatism “presents us with some major epistemological difficulties. Namely, if we measure truth by the degree to which it contributes to our well-being, then truth is constantly changing.” Other problems with pragmatism, and now postmodernist neo-pragmatism, are noted by Miriam Feldmann Kaye in her 2019 study Jewish Theology for a Postmodern Age. Feldmann Kaye responds to neo-pragmatic thinker Avi Sagi, who wrote that the starting point of Jewish philosophy “is Jewish life rather than some imagined speculative theory” by pointing out that his “notion that theology should be pushed to the side because praxis is a sufficient condition for Jewish existence… signifies that demise of theology, which cannot exist without metaphysical properties.”
Feldmann Kaye also invokes critiques of neo-pragmatism by Gili Zivan and Cass Fischer. Zivan demonstrates that
the postmodern malaise [common in neo-pragmatists] justifies a rethinking of praxis and a reassertion of religious authority in absence of a sense of absolute ‘commanded-ness’. A classic example of neo-pragmatism is the notion that halakhic praxis generates religious faith. In a sense, halakhic practice has become a choice (since divine authority cannot be proven empirically). It is undertaken as if it could be empirically justified, since it is perceived to perpetuate religious commitment.
Additionally, Fischer argues that “the contemporary insistence on praxis at the expense of rheology reflects, more than anything else, the equally contemporary disenchantment with regard to theology” and Feldmann Kaye concurs with him that “the claim that Judaism always expressed greater concern for praxis than theology is in fact characteristic of a post-theological age. It therefore appears necessary to restore a Jewish non-metaphysical theology, for the sake of renewing the practice of theology in our times” when, in reality, it is the pragmatic turn that is a product of modernity and engaging in theology is the truly traditional approach.
Feldmann Kaye bemoans the fact that “too few alternatives to neo-pragmatism have been put forward to date, as a result of which many observant Jews find it difficult to justify their practices and beliefs in a meaningful manner.” This is why reconstructionism abandons halakhah, social orthodoxy so often slips into non-Orthodoxy, and Hidden Heretics feel the need to live double lives. Pragmatism, with its focus on maximizing satisfaction in the moment, cannot guarantee lasting conviction. But what can be done about this?
Feldmann Kaye’s response is to present a postmodern “visionary” Jewish theology that is capable of confronting neo-pragmatism without making claims about the underlying nature of reality. Her approach is visionary in that it attempts “to envision God, albeit in the absence of empirical evidence”, is “tentative and speculative - in other words, a mere vision”, and that it “emphasizes the believer’s ability to generate the divine in imagination and language” - centered around postmodern understandings of culture, language, and revelation.
In the realm of culture, Feldmann Kaye calls on her readers to acknowledge that
Context plays an important role in determining beliefs and values, which implies that all reality is culture-bound and therefore in perpetual flux. The same applies to theology. Absolutist religion, as well as other forms of absolutism, necessarily involves the coerced imposition of one world-view or set of values on others. Its ethical shortcomings should be subject to the same critical examination as postmodern ethical relativism. Once an openness to different world-views develops - in a way that does not prevent individuals from adhering to their own value systems - the threat of relativism effectively loses its significance.
What of language? Feldmann Kaye write that it is
necessarily metaphorical, [but] it can nonetheless arouse powerful emotions or prompt intense reactions. How successful it is in doing so depends… on the individual’s temporality - a concept that effectively encompasses mindset, physical space, motivation, social environment, and more.
But if truth is culturally determined and language is necessarily metaphorical, what does one do with the concept of revelation which remains “at the threshold of Jewish belief”? Feldmann Kaye address this at length:
A postmodern theology configures an alternative understanding of the relationship between the collective and its canonical texts. It calls upon the community - as an incubator of meaning - to generate scriptural interpretations relevant precisely to the particular context in which the people find themselves. Former efforts to uncover a pure, contextless, essential reading of Scripture are effectively rendered null and void. This is a very conscious effort to subject the notion of ‘meaning’ to temporal circumstances, bolstering the collective’s role in shaping its own canon.
… What remains, then, that allows the Torah to qualify as divine? To a postmodernist, the answer to that question is precisely in the hands of the community. Jews resort to a unique language game when interpreting canonical texts, which follows distinct, carefully crafted rules. The truth-claims they formulate do not necessarily relate to any objective reality. Rather, they apply to a different realm which has a very concrete and significant impact on the lives of all those who, by the language they speak and customs they observe, inhabit the same space. In effect, revelation occurs each time a new generation creates a new layer of meaning by resorting to the same language game.
For Feldmann Kaye, then, the pragmatic question of “what does this practice do to better my life in the here and now?” is replaced by a postmodern separation between objectivity and lived experience. Once the former is tossed aside, we are free to live fully and unapologetically within our subjective Jewish community. Postmodernism, then, becomes an antidote to pragmatism.
But as we read in my last posting, postmodern approaches to Judaism are not without their own pitfalls. In absence of theological certainty, adherence to Torah and mitzvot cannot truly be justified. Are us contemporary Jews left with a choice between pragmatism and postmodernism, each with their own costs and benefits? I do not think so, but it will take an entire series of essays to explain why this is the case. Luckily, I’m beginning just such a monthly series thanks to Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin and the 18Forty podcast. Sign up on their website to join me on a journey in which I attempt to construct a truly reasonable faith, without giving up on our faith in reason.
This is great- I think its interesting to compare this to the Social Christian movement that is raising in parallel- the breaking news of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's article this week describing why she now identifies as Christian, Douglas Murray, even Jordan Petersom to some extent. All are answering pragmatism but in similar veins - the "God of your understanding" - loosely held, speculative, non-dogmatic. Reeping the social good and the increased life-meaning without getting too bogged down in theology. While I think it's well worth having these internal conversations, i think its worthwhile noticing this is part of a larger trend and others are grappling in a similar space
Great article. Of course, this post presents a dichotomy which is false (as you point out), claims that traditional Orthodox beliefs have been disproven - hardly a sure thing - and denies the possibility that halacha does in fact, posses metaphysical correctness, which in todays Judaism is based on kabbalistic understandings and tikkunim. Unfortunately, while it may be trivial to claim that, kabbala does provide a strong basis of belief and action, and I fail to see why the possibility wasn't even considered.
Rav Shagar embraces the kabbala precisely due to its strong metaphysical underpinnings. He resorts to postmodernism merely to assert that it does not require proof to others. But he never denies its essential reality.
In contrast, the postmodernism in this article starts off with the claim that Judaism isn't true, hence we must resort to increasingly outlandish theories why we should keep being Jewish anyways, which leads one to wonder what the point of this exercise is.