One of the most moving religious moments I have witnessed as an adult took place a few years ago at a conference on “Progressive Halakhah” that my colleagues and I organized at Harvard Law School. The final panel of the conference, the one everyone was waiting for, was titled, “Who or What Is an Orthodox Rabbi?” The debate was about how and whether women can become rabbis, specifically in the Modern Orthodox world.
The subject holds great significance for understanding the boundaries between different Jewish worldviews. Among Traditionalist Jews, the very notion of women serving as rabbis engenders (pun intended) a clear and definitive rejection. The tradition as they understand it did not feature women rabbis, and a transformational change would mark an unacceptable deviation from that tradition. There are no Traditionalist women rabbis acknowledged today. If there ever were to be in the future, that would represent an epochal alteration in Traditionalism.
To Progressive Jews, at the other end of the spectrum, women obviously must be ordained as rabbis. The traditional past needs to be updated in the light of egalitarian feminism. Many hundreds of women rabbis have been educated and ordained by Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and nondenominational seminaries since 1972, when Hebrew Union College ordained Rabbi Sally Priesand.1
That makes the question of women rabbis a burning one primarily for people whose beliefs lie somewhere between Traditionalism and Progressivism. The four panelists all fell into that category. One was a woman who had passed rigorous examinations in technical questions of Jewish law to become a yo‘etzet halakhah, a female Jewish law adviser qualified to render opinions for Orthodox women on what is called “family purity.” (That is, the halakhah connected to sex, ritual purification, and menstruation.2) A second was a male Modern Orthodox rabbi who is a prominent senior figure at Yeshiva University and had helped write an official policy paper on women rabbis for the Orthodox Union, the official organization of Modern Orthodox congregations. The policy flatly stated that no congregation could retain its affiliation if it appointed a woman as a rabbi or to a position of synagogue leadership equivalent to a rabbinic role.3
The other two panelists were Orthodox Jewish women rabbis. Both had passed the full panoply of tests given to Modern Orthodox rabbis. Both had been ordained by other Orthodox-ordained rabbis, thereby becoming links in a chain of ordination that is basic to the logic of Jewish rabbinic authority. Both had chosen to use the title “rabbi” or its Hebrew equivalent, rav, rather than alternative titles used by some other similarly situated women in recent years. The two women were among a tiny number of people occupying a position defined by many Orthodox Jews as impossible.
In the course of the discussion, which you can watch on video if you like,4 one of these two panelists, Rabbi Rahel Berkovits, found herself telling the Yeshiva University rabbi why she believed that, having studied and received rabbinic ordination, she should be counted as a rabbi. I knew Rahel from when we were schoolmates. I hadn’t seen her much since, and I recalled her from our teenage years mostly as the fun-loving, kind, extremely popular cocaptain of the girls’ basketball team. In my memory, she was always smiling and laughing. So I was listening especially carefully to what she had to say as Rahel, now Rabbi Berkovits, passionately yet patiently explained the core of her worldview to the rabbi who had written the policy invalidating her:
For me, as a religious woman, one of the greatest experiences of the divine that I have in this world is the fact I exist. That I’m alive. That I’m created by the divine and in the image of the divine. And so when I see [traditional Jewish texts that treat women as unequal], I have to either annihilate myself [or] annihilate my view of God or I have to say that those texts have been influenced through time by human beings.
This powerful opening presented the core experiential and intellectual argument of Jewish religious feminism: women are equal before God. Consequently, religious sources that present women as unequal must reflect not God’s unchanging word but human influence.
Berkovits went on to tell the senior rabbi:
When you say that [Maimonides] had a specific problem with [appointing women as synagogue officials], that problem stems from a view [of women] which I am 100 percent unwilling to accept is ratzon Hashem [God’s will]. I am unwilling to accept that.
Rabbi Berkovits was invoking her belief in God and God’s will in service of her ultimate argument: the God who created her could not possibly consider women unequal. From this followed her conclusion:
For me, if halakhah is playing out the divine word of God, I want there to be congruence [with] what I believe to be ratzon Hashem [God’s will]. You could tell me I’m mistaken. But for me, all I have is myself and my understanding of the divine in this world.5
The moment brought tears to my eyes—in fact I’m fighting back tears as I write this—precisely because Berkovits believes. She has devoted her life to teaching the Torah for more than two decades at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Both she and the senior rabbi she was addressing believe in God. And it was precisely because that believing rabbi could recognize her belief that he had no meaningful answer to make, and wisely did not try to give one. How could he tell Berkovits that her experience of God was any less valid than his own, when her learning and her love of the Torah were so deep and genuine?
The school Rahel and I attended produced a number of rabbis and teachers in my generational cohort, alongside an embarrassment of doctors, lawyers, and PhDs. It was in that moment at the conference that I realized Rahel must be the most profoundly religious of them all. I didn’t see it coming when we were kids, likely because I couldn’t then break out of sexist convention and imagine an Orthodox woman rabbi. Perhaps by coincidence, but probably not, she is also descended from an important Modern Orthodox theologian, Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, whom she quoted during the panel. She embodies everything that the Maimonides School was trying to teach us: love of God, adherence to Jewish law, the effort to reconcile tradition and modernity. Whether our Modern Orthodox school would acknowledge it or not, Rahel’s place in the vanguard of Orthodox women rabbis is a tribute to her extraordinary education by truly wonderful, religiously sincere teachers.
What Berkovits believes about God, God’s will, and their relation to Jewish law differs from the beliefs of either the Traditionalists or the Progressives while having something in common with each. Like the Traditionalists, she accepts that God’s will is expressed in laws that are binding on her by virtue of their divine origin. Progressive Jews may find the halakhah inspiring, but they do not feel legally bound by it. Berkovits does. Like the Progressives, Berkovits believes that human beings play a role in interpreting God’s will and that halakhah therefore can and should change over time as human interpretation shifts, a view that Traditionalists reject.
Berkovits’s beliefs entail a third option, a middle way that lies between the other two. I call Jews who share her belief pattern Evolutionists. They believe that, as Berkovits put it, “halakhah is playing out the divine word of God” through conscious acts of human interpretation. Evolutionists want to acknowledge the ultimate authority of Jewish law while simultaneously seeking to accommodate liberal or at least modern beliefs. They want to create comprehensive, vital Jewish communities that are also in certain respects inclusive. They want to believe in and worship a God who is universal and rational but also chooses and singles out the Jewish people for special privileges and responsibilities.
What makes these people Evolutionists is that while they accept the binding, valid authority of Jewish law as interpreted by the rabbis, they consciously recognize that Jewish law evolves and that human choice plays a central role in that evolution. They see Jewish tradition as continuous from the era of the Bible and the earliest rabbis and see themselves as legitimate heirs to that tradition. Yet unlike Traditionalists, they do not believe that today’s gedolim, or greatest rabbis—or those of any era—enjoy near-prophetic power to channel the divine will. Evolutionists usually seek to accommodate strongly held moral beliefs in equality and freedom with their faith commitments. Yet unlike Progressive Jews, Evolutionists do not assume that any new moral truth settled upon by contemporary liberal thought must be an expression of God’s eternal will. Evolutionists recognize the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of tension between what Jewish tradition teaches and what contemporary liberalism maintains.
Like my other categories of Traditionalism and Progressivism, the category of Evolutionism doesn’t precisely map onto sociological movements within Jewish life. That’s because, like the other categories, it is primarily an interior or internal state of belief, an attitude of the mind and heart. You know Evolutionism is present when someone says he or she accepts the authority of God’s Law and also acknowledges that Jews at different historical moments have had very different beliefs about what that Law required or demanded—that normative Jewish belief and practice have changed and are changing still.
Evolutionism can sometimes be ambivalent about articulating the realities of evolutionary change. Evolutionists always want to present their interpretations as authentic readings of the tradition. That makes Evolutionism the hardest to pin down of the belief patterns I have described. But as we shall see in part II, it is also in a certain sense the most important for our historical moment. That is because Religious Zionism is a type of Evolutionism. It recognizes that Zionism is a modern development influenced by nationalism while simultaneously treating it as a divinely sanctioned expression of God’s will, mandated by the Bible and the rabbis.
THE ETERNAL GOD’S EVOLVING LAWS
Like Traditionalist and Progressive Jewish thought, Evolutionism can be captured in an evocative Talmudic passage. It goes under the odd title “the oven of ‘akhnai,” a specific type of earthenware oven constructed out of segments, with sand filling in the empty spaces. Imagine a South Asian tandoor (the word has the same etymology as the Hebrew tannur) made of layered sections that go around the structure like a coiled snake.
This sort of oven was the subject of a debate between ancient rabbis over whether it ought to be considered a complete, whole vessel, in which case it was capable of becoming ritually impure, or whether it should be conceptualized as incomplete, in which case it could not have the status of ritual impurity attached to it. The majority view among the rabbis was that the oven was functionally complete and therefore capable of impurity. Rabbi Eliezer, a powerful and influential rabbi with a penchant for independent thought, disagreed.
If the disagreement sounds obscure and minor, that is because it is. The Talmud abounds in debates about tiny, technical matters that seem almost unimaginably distant from philosophical or spiritual importance. Yet as the debate over the oven shows, it is the genius of the Talmud to connect these apparently unimportant arguments to matters of the deepest significance.
The Talmud recounts that on the memorable day of the dispute over the oven, Rabbi Eliezer provided “all the answers in the world” to the rabbis’ majority view, and nonetheless failed to convince them. Having exhausted rational argument, he sought argumentative support from the supernatural realm. The Talmud depicts Rabbi Eliezer as a powerful wizard. It narrates his efforts, and the rabbis’ responses, or rather nonresponses, to them:
He said: “If the law follows me, this carob tree will prove it.” The carob was uprooted [and flew] one hundred cubits—some say four hundred cubits. They [the rabbis] said to him: “One does not cite proof from a carob.”
He said to them: “If the law follows me, this stream will prove it.” The stream flowed backward. They said to him: “One does not cite proof from a stream.”
He said to them: “If the law follows me, the walls of the study hall will prove it.” The walls of the study hall listed and began to fall. Rabbi Joshua rebuked [the falling walls] and said to them: “If scholars are contending with each other in the Law, what have you to do with it?” The walls did not fall down out of honor for Rabbi Joshua and they did not straighten up out of honor for Rabbi Eliezer; and they are still [to this day] leaning [halfway] while standing.
Once again he said to them: “If the law follows me, it will be proven from heaven.” Immediately, a divine voice was heard saying [to the rabbis], “What have you to do with Rabbi Eliezer, for the law follows him in every instance!”
Rabbi Joshua stood on his feet and said: “It is not in heaven.”6 What does “It is not in heaven” mean? Rabbi Jeremiah said, “Once the Torah was given at Mt. Sinai, we pay no heed to a divine voice, because You [God] already wrote in the Torah, ‘Incline after the majority.’”
Rabbi Natan came upon Elijah [the prophet]. He said to him, “What did the holy One, Blessed be He, do at that hour?” He answered: “He smiled and said, ‘My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.’”7
This absorbing, spectacular passage has achieved iconic status for Evolutionist Jews. It poses the question of who is right, the majority of the rabbis or Rabbi Eliezer. To the extent the passage depicts God or his messengers taking a side, the answer is clearly Rabbi Eliezer. In support of his view, Rabbi Eliezer sends a tree flying through the air, makes water reverse its course, and even threatens to pull down the study house itself. To top it all off, a divine voice actually declares that the law ought to follow Rabbi Eliezer, not the other rabbis. There is no hint in the passage that these signs and wonders are dark magic of any kind. They show that on the matter of the oven, Rabbi Eliezer is right and the rabbis are wrong.
And yet, despite divine intervention, the rabbis stand their ground. They establish the law based on a rule they derived from a biblical verse: the majority rules. They will not bend that rule of decision even in the face of Rabbi Eliezer’s evident rightness.
The punch line, for Evolutionists, is the verse cited by Rabbi Joshua (the same Rabbi Joshua we saw deferring to Rabban Gamliel in I:1): “It is not in heaven.” The “it” in question is nothing less than the Torah, the Law, itself. The Torah emanated from heaven. It came from God. But once given to humans, the Torah is no longer in heaven. It is in the world. And in the world, the Torah is in the hands, under the control, of the rabbis and their majority.
What does God think of all this? The Talmud answers that question with a report straight from heaven. It is delivered by the prophet Elijah, who in the Talmud can move between the heavenly and mundane worlds because, rather than dying an ordinary death, he ascended into heaven in a whirlwind while still alive.8 In Elijah’s telling, God Himself smiled at the whole exchange. When God said His children had defeated Him, He did so with (rueful?) joy or even pride, as a father who anticipated and welcomed, or at least accepted, His children’s victory. The point of Elijah’s report is that the rabbis have defeated God in rabbinic dispute. They have quoted His own Torah against God to prove they need no longer listen to Him in interpreting His own words.
To Evolutionists, what has happened in the story is that the rabbis have, by acts of interpretation, made interpretation itself the ultimate authority in understanding God’s Law as law, over and against God Himself. To be sure, the rabbis are being faithful to God. It is God, after all, who told them to follow the majority in cases of dispute. Evolutionists are committed to God’s authority, in principle.
On closer examination, however, it is the rabbis who have interpreted the Bible to say they must follow the majority. God’s communications in the oven dispute would seem to suggest they should follow Rabbi Eliezer, who is correct about the Law. Yet the rabbis seize for themselves the authority to tell God that He has no place in the study hall, based on His own words. Ultimately, on this view, it is interpretation all the way down. The law to be followed, as opposed to the Law as heaven conceived it, is what the rabbis say it is, no more and no less.
Here is the key takeaway for Evolutionists: The rabbis, not God, are in charge of interpretation. And if the law follows the rabbis, not God’s intention, whatever it may have been, then the law is capable of evolution. Whatever the Law regarding the oven was before the day of the dispute, the law now follows the rabbis. The rabbis must act in good faith, seeking to understand the Torah. Ultimately, however, they need not be bound by divine intent, even should it somehow become miraculously manifest. In a postprophetic age, human, rabbinic interpretation is the Torah.
The consequence of this conclusion is that one may be faithful to the Torah and God and tradition while still acknowledging the capacity of the tradition to change. That in turn enables, in theory, the emergence of communities that are simultaneously traditional and in touch with their historical moment. The members of these communities can be true and faithful and also live contemporary lives in dialogue with the latest ideas of science, morality, and culture.
As a sociological matter, the aspiration to live in this way is shared by Jews who belong to a range of different institutional communities. The greatest number consider themselves Modern Orthodox, affiliating with institutions like Yeshiva University that affirm rabbinic authority while insisting on an interpretation of the Torah that strives to be compatible with living as a modern person in the modern world.* Such otherwise disparate figures as Joe Lieberman, Mayim Bialik, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Ben Shapiro identify as Modern Orthodox Jews. They wear ordinary clothes and work in mainstream jobs and go to secular colleges and graduate schools, all while professing observance of binding Jewish law.
In Israel, the overwhelming majority of Jews who fall into the Evolutionist category are Religious Zionists (in Hebrew, dati le’umi, meaning religious nationalist), who reconcile rabbinic tradition with modern nationalism. Naftali Bennett, who served briefly as prime minister of Israel, is a Religious Zionist (the first to serve in that office, incidentally). Itamar Ben-Gvir, as of this writing Israel’s minister of national security and head of the ultranationalist Jewish Power party, is a Religious Zionist. So is Bezalel Smotrich, the right-wing finance minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, head of the party known officially as Religious Zionism. I will have much to say about this group and its ideology in part II. For now, what matters is to note that Religious Zionists accept the authority of God’s tradition while acknowledging that their Jewishness, infused as it is by practical and theoretical devotion to an actually existing Jewish state, differs from that of their premodern predecessors.
Some American Evolutionists belong to the Conservative movement, so called because its founders wanted to differentiate themselves from Reform Judaism through conservation of the authority of Jewish law and its traditions. A small but growing number of what might be called left-wing Evolutionists associate themselves with cutting-edge startup congregations and schools, mostly in the United States but some in Israel, that can best be described as egalitarian-Evolutionist: men, women, and nonbinary people participate equally in services and study that, apart from the participants and tweaks to the liturgy, resemble Modern Orthodox practices. Their communities, such as Hadar, Yeshivat Maharat, and Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, are small in number but have an outsize indirect influence because of the intellectual-spiritual pressure they place on American Modern Orthodoxy to take a stand on whether to be more inclusive. Among other things, these communities maintain that women may become rabbis, a point that differentiates them from mainstream Modern Orthodoxy.
I am categorizing Evolutionists together, despite knowing that some members of these different subgroups will not want to be included with the others, for the same reason I grouped Traditionalist and Progressive Jews: based on belief pattern, not identity. By grouping today’s Jews based on their beliefs about God, I want to help you, the reader, determine what you might believe, not where you feel you might belong. You could, in my analysis, be an Evolutionist Jew who is politically liberal or one who is politically conservative. But you would have to combine belief in God’s authority handed down via rabbinic tradition with the belief that God wants us, human beings, to evolve the tradition consciously in the right direction as we see fit. Blu Greenberg (b. 1936), an influential Orthodox feminist thinker, captured this vision in an adage so much quoted by Evolutionists that it could almost be described as their credo: “Where there’s a rabbinic will, there’s a halakhic way.” She meant that when rabbis committed to the tradition choose to evolve the tradition, they can always find the means to do so within the rubric of Jewish legal thought.
The ambitions of Evolutionist Jewish life deserve to be honored. In some of their communities, Evolutionist Jews manage to combine the connection, love, and support of Traditionalist Jewish communities with a degree of inclusion and openness that would be unimaginable in Traditionalist circles. Evolutionist Jews are able to participate fully in mainstream society. Many espouse belief in political freedom and equality even while remaining committed to the authority of God’s Law as interpreted by the rabbis. Their most vibrant institutions are innovative and original. Their leaders are learned and intellectually serious. Their community members are actively engaged in the life of the mind and of the soul. Having been raised an Evolutionist, I can testify from direct experience to the remarkable intellectual and spiritual energies these communities generate.
At the same time, Evolutionism faces serious challenges, precisely because of its creative flexibility. While left-leaning Evolutionists make room for inclusion and equality, other, far-right Evolutionists like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich embrace exclusion and inequality. Both claim authority from the tradition as they read it. Neither can appeal to a definitive, final, human decision-maker to say they are right. All Evolutionists must rely on interpretation—their own interpretation of God’s words and God’s will.
What’s more, Evolutionism as a worldview can be extremely difficult to maintain, intellectually, spiritually, and logically. Not by coincidence, the most important characteristic of Evolutionism is internal contradiction. Traditionalists have to struggle against the external forces of postmodernity and against the natural human tendency to lose spiritual focus when fulfilling a multitude of detailed commandments. But they need not struggle much with internal contradiction. When there is an overt contradiction between the tradition and contemporary values, the tradition wins. Traditionalists trust God and the rabbis to have gotten it right. If a Traditionalist Jew loses faith, it creates a struggle between the benefits of staying within the community and the benefits of living sincerely outside it. That struggle, however, is not constitutive of being a Traditionalist Jew. It’s a symptom of losing one’s faith as a Traditionalist.
Similarly, a Progressive Jew may have to struggle with how best to understand social justice values. But Progressive Jews need not struggle internally with elements of particularist Jewish tradition that directly contradict equality or freedom. Egalitarian values win. Progressive Judaism teaches that unjust elements of the tradition can and should be purified out of Judaism, as a just and loving universal God would wish.
Not so the Evolutionist Jew who is faced with a contradiction between authoritative Jewish tradition and liberal commitments. Such an Evolutionist must seek to reconcile the God of the tradition with the God of universal love and human dignity. This Evolutionist wants the best of both worlds, comprehensive community and genuine inclusion. Yet those worlds can be in blunt contradiction, both as a matter of law and observed reality. To have them both requires tremendous intellectual and spiritual creativity—and an enormous amount of intellectual and spiritual effort. Indeed, being an Evolutionist often seems to require holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time.
MORAL INTUITION AND THE RELIGION OF REASON
Evolutionism can be glimpsed in contemporary movements that go back well over a century. But by its advocates’ account, Evolutionism’s origins date back to the earliest rabbis, who themselves evolved the law they found in the Bible. The key tool in this evolutionary process has been the rabbis’ willingness to rely on their own inner sense of moral logic and to interpret texts that troubled them in the light of their intuitions.
To see the way the rabbis used moral intuitions to evolve the law—and the ambivalence they retained about that practice—consider a well-known example that appears in the book of Deuteronomy and is discussed in the Talmud: the case of the stubborn and rebellious son. The Bible devotes just four short verses to this subject, but (trigger warning for teenagers) they are shocking. The text reads:
If a man should have a stubborn and rebellious son who does not listen to the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and they chasten him, and he does not listen to them; then shall his father and his mother catch him and bring him out to the elders of his city and the gate of his place. And they shall say to the elders of his city: “This our son is stubborn and rebellious (sorer u-moreh). He will not listen to our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then shall all the men of his city stone him until he dies. So shall you eradicate evil from among you; and all Israel shall hear and fear.9
The literal import of these verses is that parents who can’t manage their children can have them executed. The passage may sound fantastical. After all, what parent would do that? But the verses appear in a legal section of Deuteronomy full of utterly practical laws. The immediately preceding passage, for example, states that a husband who has two wives may not lawfully prefer the chronologically younger son of his favored wife over his firstborn when it comes to inheritance. There is no contextual reason to think the law of the rebellious son is anything other than black letter law to be applied like the law of primogeniture.
The Talmud begins its discussion of the rebellious son the way it often treats biblical laws, namely by filling in details. It states, for example, that such a son may not be executed until he has reached the age of majority, since he cannot be held liable for sinful acts committed as a child.10 Moving to the ethical plane, the Talmud argues that the rebellious son is to be executed for the sins he would eventually commit if left alive, not for what he has done already. This suggestion seems intended to answer the obvious moral question of how disobedience to parents could merit death.
After a lengthy, associative excursus on the ages of young people having sex and reproducing, and another about what sins of gluttony and drunkenness the rebellious son must have committed (which itself leads to a disquisition on wine), the Talmud eventually gets to the hardest question: Was the law of the rebellious son ever meant to be implemented in practice? The Talmud invokes a rabbinic dictum that asserts, “There never was a stubborn and rebellious son, and there will never be one.” Then it asks, “So why was it written” in the Bible? The Talmud answers: “Interpret it and receive a reward.”11
This perspective, associated with two different rabbis, prefigures Evolutionism because it shows the rabbis actively interpreting the Bible against its apparent meaning to produce a legal outcome that seems to them morally superior. The rabbis reread the biblical text so that it is no longer a practical legal passage but an occasion for rabbinic interpretation. Arguably, the idea is that the passage is there precisely so the rabbis may interpret it as not being practically applicable at all. On this reading, the “reward” of interpretation is the reward for understanding the text against its surface meaning.12
Notwithstanding the presence of this evolutionary strand in the Talmud, the rabbis also manifested a consistent counterview. In the case of the rebellious son, Rabbi Jonathan pithily rejects the notion that none was ever executed: “I saw him and I sat on his grave.” Rabbi Jonathan is asserting that he has direct knowledge of one rebellious son who was executed. By implication, others were too. The Law is the law. It is no mere object of interpretation.
Since the era of the Talmud, another, closely related strand of Jewish interpretive thought has also existed, one that also anticipates Evolutionism: allegory, defined roughly as the interpretation of a text to reveal otherwise hidden meanings beneath its surface. In the Middle Ages, the banner of allegory was taken up by the philosophical rationalist Maimonides. His vision of God and Jewish tradition starts with reason, or rather with Reason. If God is truth, and truth is one, then all truths must be consistent with each other. If the divine revelation contained in the Bible is true, and if logical reason is true, the Bible must be consistent with the truths of reason derived by philosophy.
What challenged medieval rationalists like Maimonides (as well as Muslim and Christian philosophers like al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd, and Thomas Aquinas) was that, read literally, divine Scripture does not always correspond to the philosophical truths of reason. The philosophers’ God, for instance, is perfect: omnipotent, omniscient, and without form or body. The Bible describes a God who has hands, throws thunderbolts, flies on a cherub, becomes enraged, feels jealousy, expresses regret, changes his mind, and so on. The key to reconciling these different pictures of God was the idea of allegory. Scripture does not always speak in factual or historical terms. It can be read to include a set of symbolic statements or expressions that, if understood in their truest sense, actually correspond to the truths of reason. God does not have a body or experience emotions. Rather, Scripture speaks in this way to convey symbolic truths to those humans capable of understanding them properly.
For more than a millennium, this approach has enabled Jewish rationalists to accept the rational truths of science, philosophy, and even morality when they appear to differ from the teachings of the tradition. If the Bible can be read allegorically, so can many of the statements of the rabbis, which themselves include stories, allegories, and spiritual as well as philosophical speculation. At an intellectual level, this combination of the commitment to reason and willingness to interpret Jewish tradition allegorically has proven satisfying to many important and influential Jews. It is the cornerstone of contemporary Modern Orthodox thought. It was also the fundamental basis for the worldview of Conservative Judaism as it was originally formulated in the elite circles of its leadership.
The religion of reason is at its best when it is allowing committed religious believers to embrace the latest in scientific developments. Traditionalist Jews cannot easily accept the reality of Darwinian natural selection, or the astrophysicists’ account of the Big Bang, because they don’t fit the literal meaning of the book of Genesis. Rejecting these fundamental elements of the contemporary scientific worldview leaves Traditionalists in an awkward position with respect to the modern world more generally. Evolutionists have it much easier. They can, following Maimonides, accept the entirety of the scientific picture of the world, knowing that Scripture may be interpreted allegorically to correspond to it. When Genesis says God created the earth in six days, the days may be understood metaphorically or allegorically as eons. Seen from this allegorical perspective, even the Big Bang is potentially consonant with the idea of divine creation ex nihilo, from nothing.
At a practical level, then, Evolutionists are spared having to believe scientifically implausible claims about the world as the price of adherence to their faith tradition. This frees them to enter any intellectual or academic environment. It frees them to enter any profession. It frees them to participate in public life. It frees them, in short, to be fully functioning participants in contemporary society, all the while remaining faithfully, authentically Jewish. The only limiting principle, for Evolutionists, is that they must accept the binding nature of Jewish law and the rabbis’ right to interpret it. They cannot jettison a law that is part of the tradition; they can only seek to reinterpret it. And binding reinterpretation requires consensus of the rabbis, taken as a collective.
The result is that Evolutionist Jews can be part of broader liberal society without falling into what they—and the Traditionalists—consider the trap of “assimilation.” The term “assimilation” is loaded and means different things to different people. But to the Evolutionists, Jewish assimilation means taking in the essence of contemporary liberal society to the point where one’s distinctive Jewishness disappears or evaporates. After assimilation, the Jew may still identify as a Jew but will not be meaningfully distinguishable from non-Jewish neighbors, colleagues, or friends. From the standpoint of both Evolutionists and Traditionalists, the likely result of assimilation is marriage to a non-Jew, followed by the falling away of specifically and distinctly Jewish identity in the next generation.
I will discuss assimilation alongside Jewish concerns with marriage to non-Jews and collective self-reproduction in part III. For now, I am mentioning it to show how the religion of reason enables Evolutionists to avoid what they consider the pitfall of assimilation while still participating in contemporary society. Put simply, their beliefs about the makeup and nature of the world are such as to allow them to join in broader social conversations, whether personal, political, or professional. They can be both in the world and of the world, while simultaneously maintaining fidelity to Jewish tradition. What’s more, they can argue, with great plausibility, that Jewish tradition itself contains precedent for their way of thinking and being.
JACOB ALONE
In the relatively recent past, the most serious challenges to the Evolutionist worldview came from Darwinism, cosmology, and perhaps biblical criticism, the field of study that traces the human composition of the Bible to multiple sources and documents edited together. Today, the most pressing challenges come from moral ideas, not from scientific propositions. Homosexuality provides a ready example. To the extent that contemporary science posits that some people are gay and always will be, Evolutionists are able to accept that proposition, albeit not without some initial struggle. But the value proposition that gay people are entitled to equal treatment has been harder for Evolutionists. Not only does traditional Jewish law only recognize marriage between men and women, a verse in Leviticus, read literally, prohibits sex between men as an “abomination.” And the rabbis have long interpreted another biblical verse in Leviticus to prohibit sex between women.
Nevertheless, Evolutionists have the resources to allegorize Scripture even in relation to value propositions, and they have begun, gradually, to do so. A central figure in this process has been Rabbi Steven Greenberg, who in 1999 became the first Orthodox rabbi to come out of the closet and self-identify as a gay man. Even before that courageous act, Greenberg prepared the way with a 1993 essay, “Gayness and God,” that he published under the nom de plume Yaakov Levado—Hebrew for “Jacob alone.”13
I remember seeing the essay at the time and being powerfully affected by the name the author had taken, even before I began to read. “Jacob alone” is a reference to Genesis 32:25: “Jacob remained alone. A man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.” The sentence begins the famous account of Jacob’s struggle with a supernatural being that culminates in Jacob’s renaming as Israel, and also in his being injured in “the hollow of his thigh.” Greenberg’s chosen name invoked, to a close reader of the Bible, not only the notion that the author was alone in his struggles with God but the more radical idea, certainly never stated by Greenberg in the essay, that Jacob’s all-night struggle could be understood allegorically as an erotic encounter between men who were strangers yet conferred divinely sanctioned blessings upon each other.
In that first, pseudonymous essay, Greenberg clearly articulated the Evolutionist worldview. He did not call for a halakhic revolution in relation to homosexuality. “As a traditionalist,” he wrote, “I hesitate to overturn cultural norms in a flurry of revolutionary zeal … Halacha, as an activity … is a society-building enterprise that maintains internal balance by reorganizing itself in response to changing social realities. When social conditions shift, we experience the halachic reapplications as the proper commitment to the Torah’s original purposes.” At the time, he thought, the “shift in social consciousness in regard to homosexuality is a long way off.” He called only for “deeper understanding” of gay people:
In order to know how to shape a halachic response to any living question, what is most demanded of us is a deep understanding of the Torah and an attentive ear to the people who struggle with the living question … There is no conclusive psak halacha [halachic ruling] without the hearing of personal testimonies, and so far gay people have not been asked to testify to their experience.14
And he predicted that “unimagined halachic strategies, I believe, will appear under different conditions. We cannot know in advance the outcome of such an investigation.”
As an Evolutionist, Greenberg set about rereading the tradition—including the Bible—in creative ways to seek the moral objective of equality for gay people. Allegory is the technique that makes this interpretive rereading possible. For example, in a book he wrote in 2004, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, Greenberg interpreted Leviticus 18:22, which forbids a man to lie with another man “as one lies with a woman,” as a moral directive intended to condemn “sexual domination and appropriation.”15 Seen this way, the verse need not be read to condemn gay sex per se, despite its using the word “abomination.”
Technically speaking, Greenberg was not, in 2004, saying clearly that the biblical verse actually permitted anal intercourse between men as a matter of Jewish law. Although such an argument could certainly be advanced, using allegory does not necessarily mean eliminating the literal meaning of a legal text. What allegory enabled for Greenberg (at the time, at least) was a shift in perspective. Evolutionists following Greenberg can therefore reread the Bible to downplay or even deny the morally negative assessment of homosexuality that was characteristic of many societies until recently. They may update their moral judgments using the same tools they have long used to update their scientific judgments. To make legal change with respect to gay sex, Evolutionists would need some rabbinic consensus about the legal meaning of the biblical text.
Faced with the Evolutionists’ strategy of updating by interpretation and allegory, progressive people—whether Jews or non-Jews—may be struck with a kind of repulsion. Wouldn’t it be better, they may ask, to jettison ancient texts that seem to be morally or scientifically false rather than allegorically reinterpreting them to fit contemporary beliefs? To full-on Progressives, Evolutionism can seem regressive and apologetic.
The Evolutionists’ answer deserves to be taken seriously. They want to believe, truly believe, in the divine origin and nature of Jewish tradition. They fear that Progressivism abandons what they consider the core component of Jewish continuity, namely the ongoing commitment to the validity and authority of the Law. They want to maintain the sense of all-encompassing community that comes with commitment to the Law, a sense of community sometimes lacking in Progressive Jewish communities. Evolutionists can also point to the social reality of their communities as proof that their method works. The vibrancy, connection, and mutually supportive nature of those communities tends to outpace that of most Progressive Jewish communities. If interpretation and allegory are the price of admission to such a rich form of life, they shouldn’t be dismissed as backward-looking. They should be embraced as the best way to move the tradition forward. Evolution, after all, can lead to progress.
NATURA NON FACIT SALTUM: EVOLVING THE LAW ONE STEP AT A TIME
As long as the basic challenge of reconciliation is in the realm of ideas, the Maimonidean rationalist approach is highly effective. Where things get complicated is where the reconciliation enters the space of actual Jewish practice—in particular, practice connected to the law. Maimonides himself believed that provisions of the biblical law could be interpreted to find deeper meaning. But he did not believe that interpreting the law meant one could shirk it. To the contrary, Maimonides maintained a laser-like focus on the preservation of Jewish law in its entirety, which he considered fundamental to the whole edifice of creating a functioning Jewish and human society. Maimonides was a giant of Jewish legal study and reasoning alongside his philosophical work and his day job as physician to Saladin, the famous conqueror-sultan whose seat was in Cairo. He served as leader of the Egyptian Jewish community, issuing opinions on matters of Jewish law and writing an enormously influential Jewish law book, the fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah. This legal accomplishment is why Maimonides remains a central figure in the Traditionalist canon, despite his radical philosophical beliefs. He is just too towering and influential a figure in the tradition to be sidestepped or marginalized.
That is not to say that Maimonides ignored the reality that Jewish legal tradition evolves. He was among the first to identify that evolution and describe it. Yet Maimonides always insisted that the tradition could not evolve away from observance of the commandments that make up the law. Rabbis could add new restrictions to existing legal practice, provided they did so in order to protect the law itself. Under the right circumstances, properly authorized Jewish leaders could temporarily suspend laws, but they must be clear that any such suspension was tied to the exigencies of the moment and would not survive for future generations. Hence the law could accrete new layers. But it could not slough off layers of practice or obedience.
To see how hard this is in practice, let’s return to Rabbi Rahel Berkovits. Evolutionism hasn’t yet solved the problem of how to accept her ordination in the framework of tradition. Indeed, viewed through a sociological lens, the ordination of women as rabbis is becoming the defining fault line in Evolutionist Jewish life. Conservative Jews and left-wing, egalitarian Evolutionists have accepted the ordination of women. So-called Open Orthodox or Liberal Orthodox Jews—few in number but disproportionately well educated, well connected, and intellectual—are most of the way through a transformational period in which they have gone from seeking a compromise in the form of halfway ordination to fully accepting women’s ordination as normative. But they are not (yet?) numerous enough to count as a full institutional movement. They have a handful of small yeshivas and a few scattered congregations, no more.
Modern Orthodox Judaism, however, is overwhelmingly drawing the line at women’s ordination, just as it has so far drawn the line at allowing women equal participation in synagogue services. Among other things, crossing the ordination line would create an unbridgeable rift between Modern Orthodoxy and Traditionalism, a rift Modern Orthodoxy is not prepared to create. The way the gender line lends itself to human distinctions makes it particularly difficult to breach for any religious community committed above all to continuity. The Catholic Church, itself a religious body whose mystical character depends on its claims of unbroken continuity, does not seem close to accepting women as priests.
What remains to be seen is whether Modern Orthodoxy can remain Evolutionist at the same time as it continues to reject the ordination of women rabbis. An Evolutionism that stops evolving will look more and more like Traditionalism. A substantial part of what might be described as sociological Modern Orthodoxy has become increasingly Traditionalist in recent decades. Key leaders of the rabbinical seminary at Yeshiva University express themselves in Traditionalist idiom. In dress, manner, religious conservatism, and even higher education, “right-wing” Modern Orthodoxy has become increasingly hard to distinguish from moderate Traditionalism.
The background context here is that when Modern Orthodoxy established itself in American Jewish life in the 1950s and early 1960s, its mores were largely consistent with mainstream American public values. Women were educated equally or semiequally and took lesser leadership positions, much as in American society at the time. Gay people remained closeted, as was the case in mainstream America in the 1950s and 1960s. Religion was treated as an important sphere of private life, much as it was for many non-Jewish Americans in the same period.
In retrospect, the correspondence between Modern Orthodox norms and mainstream American norms in the 1950s and 1960s was more of a coincidence than the Modern Orthodox felt it to be. Equality between the sexes, gay rights, and trans rights left Modern Orthodoxy looking not only socially conservative but actively regressive and discriminatory. Once frozen in place, Modern Orthodoxy can continue to be “modern” in the sense of “1950s modern.” But arguably it cannot evolve to become postmodern. True Evolutionism would then become the preserve of a much smaller group of vanguard Jews, at least some of whom embrace what is, in effect if not in name, postmodern orthodoxy.
POSTMODERN ORTHODOXY AND THE QUESTION OF GOD
Does it make sense for a Jew to adhere scrupulously to God’s Law if that person does not believe in God? This might sound like a niche problem, but it’s one I care about a lot for reasons of personal biography. And as it turns out, it may not even be quite as niche as it sounds. Consider the situation of a Traditionalist who loses faith in God or perhaps never had it in the first place. Without God, there is no theological reason to follow the commandments. Yet there may be strong social and familial reasons to stay within a community that demands strict legal observance as a condition of belonging. Can one live this way in good faith? For how long? A surprising (or maybe unsurprising) number of Traditionalists quietly encounter this challenge at some point in their lives.
Now think about the situation of the Evolutionist without faith. Evolutionists, unlike Traditionalists, acknowledge the primacy of human interpretation in shaping the law. So it might be possible for them, in good conscience, to obey the evolving law on the basis of its own, human power, even if they do not believe that the law may ultimately be traced to God. This is the postmodern version of Mordecai Kaplan’s modern idea of Judaism as a civilization. For Kaplan, an encompassing civilization deserved to be sustained and maintained even if God did not will it or bring it into existence. For postmodern Evolutionists, Jewish life and thought are inherently valuable and worthy of adherence because they reflect the ongoing commitments of Jews throughout the ages and simultaneously because they can shape a contemporary life of community, spirituality, and human connection. They can say that they get value and meaning out of treating the law as binding, whether God commanded it or not.
This stance should, in theory, make postmodern Evolutionism into the most broadly accepting of all the currently existing versions of Jewish thought and practice. Genuinely Progressive Jews must believe that Traditionalists are getting it wrong in the eyes of God when they treat women or gay people or trans people unequally. Traditionalists necessarily believe that Progressive Jews are getting it wrong in the eyes of God when they deny the binding authority of rabbinic tradition. Postmodern Evolutionists can say that all Jews are trying, by their own lights, to find a rich and meaningful way of engaging with Jewish thought and Jewish life.
I acknowledge that there are not too many self-identified postmodern Evolutionists out there. If you want to create a functioning religious community based on adherence to God’s law, you might want to avoid saying publicly that you don’t exactly believe in the God whom you worship and obey. Nevertheless, notwithstanding its mildly esoteric character, I find the accepting and affirming aspects of postmodern Evolutionist thought appealing. Maybe that’s because I held it for an important chunk of my life. Maybe it’s because a few people I admire very much appear to hold it. The main reason I am discussing it here, however, is that it provides one possible grounding for the perspective I am advancing in this book. I’m trying, in these pages, to show the beauty and nobility of all the currently available modes of Jewish life, even as I point out their limitations and contradictions. This very goal has something in common with postmodern Evolutionism.
Another appeal of postmodern Evolutionism is that it allows you to evolve in your own beliefs over the course of a lifetime. Say you start by believing in God, fall away from your faith, then recover it in some new form. To a postmodern Evolutionist, none of this would require any great change in Jewish practice or attitudes toward other Jews and how they live. The idea is that on the days that you believe in God, you wake up, put on tefillin, and pray. On the days you don’t believe in God, you do the exact same thing. As the Talmud puts it in a slightly different context, mi-tokh she-lo li-shemah ba li-shemah.16 From acting not for the sake of the end itself one comes to the end itself.
The challenge for the postmodern Evolutionist, then, is to organize daily routine around the all-encompassing realities of the halakhah during the periods of life when belief is not forthcoming. You can tell yourself that it’s beneficial to pray even when you don’t believe your prayers are addressed to anyone: prayer is, after all, a form of meditation, and meditation is enriching. You can tell yourself that studying the Law is intellectually stimulating and emotionally regenerative and connects you to your past even if you don’t believe the Law ultimately has a divine origin. You can tell yourself that inclusive and encompassing Jewish community provides a sense of connection and collective meaning even if you don’t believe the community is constituted by its covenant with God. I promise you, these statements are and can be helpful. I’ve made them all to myself, like mantras, many times over. They are true, or let us say true in the sense they are intended.
But can you tell yourself all those things every day for your whole life? And even if you could, should you? Is living “as if” sufficiently meaningful and consequential to sustain just about all of your most important life choices? The Bible and the tradition enjoin us to love God with all our hearts. Imagine: What if you spent your life with a partner, telling the person “I love you” every day, while not actually loving the person in your heart? Would that be a true life of love, even presuming you always managed to act lovingly on the surface? Is it, in the end, respectful toward God to act as though you believe in the divine when in fact you do not? Or is it a form of disrespect to (a possibly nonexistent) God? To the community of believers? Is it respectful to the idea of sincere belief itself? Is it, can it be, respectful to oneself to live one’s whole life “as if” one believed?
Beyond the serious problem of sincerity, or rather insincerity, what happens if your deepest instincts begin to tell you that there are other possible lives available, lives that could not be lived compatibly with totalizing Jewish practice? If you truly believe that God commands you to obey the halakhah, that may be sufficient to keep you in obedience and overcome temptation. If you don’t, however—if you are instead resting your lifeways on a postmodern conception of what makes life meaningful—then how can you, in good conscience, refuse to explore those other lives?
The magnitude of this challenge explains, I think, why postmodern Evolutionism remains the publicly stated worldview of only a small number of Jews. Rabbi Rahel Berkovits, for example, is not a postmodernist. She is a believer at the evolutionary forefront of Evolutionism. Some of her colleagues in that vanguard (it’s impossible to say exactly how many) are postmodern Evolutionists. They have it harder than Rahel does, to the extent that they cannot address the problem of how far evolution should go by referring to their own inner light of faith. I would venture to suggest that the more Rahels there are in the vanguard, and the fewer postmodern Evolutionists, the better the prospects for the eventual survival and success of Evolutionism. The more God there is in Evolutionism, the better for the movement.
At the same time, the postmodern option is part of what makes Evolutionism appealing. Without it, Evolutionism runs the risk of devolving into merely being in the middle, just a way of living Jewish life that is between Progressivism and Traditionalism. In this picture, all three approaches believe in God; they differ only on what God wants from us: social justice, obedience to the tradition, or interpretive moral updating. If that is right, choosing among these Jewish options would seem to be a matter of faith alone. If you can answer the question “What do you think God wants?” then you know which form of Jewish life to choose. If your answer is “I am not even sure there is a God,” then you are out of options. Postmodern Evolutionism gives you a way to be religiously Jewish based on something other than faith. It subtly strengthens Evolutionism even as it subtly undermines it.
This account reveals, I think, the grave difficulties Evolutionism faces as a functioning system for Jewish communities. And once again, the Talmud can be read to have anticipated part of the challenge. As it turns out, the story of the oven and the rabbis’ interpretive victory over God has a dark postscript, one normally neglected by Evolutionists when they tell it.
On the day of the oven, the Talmud recounts, they brought all the vessels that Rabbi Eliezer had declared pure according to his legal view and burned them in the fire. This authoritative act of burning presaged an even more definitive rejection of Rabbi Eliezer himself. The rabbis consulted with each other, the Talmud says, and chose to excommunicate Rabbi Eliezer, placing him under a ban of total social ostracism. The rabbi whose views God had just endorsed was being excluded from the rabbinic community.
Rabbi Akiva, one of Rabbi Eliezer’s students, worried that an alienated Rabbi Eliezer might use his wizardry to “destroy the entire world.” Rabbi Akiva wrapped himself in black cloth, went to Rabbi Eliezer, and delivered the news as gently as he could. Rabbi Eliezer “ripped his garments, took off his shoes, dropped, and sat on the earth. His eyes dropped tears.”17 According to the Talmud, “the world was afflicted.” A third of the olive trees, the wheat, and the barley in the fields was destroyed by plague. Anyplace Rabbi Eliezer cast his eyes was consumed by fire.
Meanwhile, Rabban Gamliel, the prince who had presided over the excommunication, was at sea. His ship was suddenly engulfed. The prince uttered a spontaneous prayer to God, who calmed the sea and spared him. But the respite was temporary. Rabbi Eliezer’s wife, Imma Shalom, who was also Rabban Gamliel’s sister, feared that if her husband were to recite the daily tahanun prayer, a form of especially humble supplication, it would unleash divine punishment on her brother.
She was right. One day she found Rabbi Eliezer reciting the supplication prayer. “Arise,” she told him. “You have killed my brother.” As she spoke, a ram’s horn sounded from Rabban Gamliel’s house signaling that the prince had died. Rabbi Eliezer asked Imma Shalom how she knew that her brother had died. She replied, “Thus have I received the tradition from the house of my father’s father: All the gates of prayer may be locked except for [the prayer of those subject to] verbal humiliation.”18
Notice that Imma Shalom did not say that the rabbis’ excommunication of Rabbi Eliezer had led to the death of the prince. The true cause was the verbal humiliation Rabbi Eliezer had suffered at the hands of the rabbis on the day of the oven dispute when they rejected his views so starkly.
According to this reading of the entire story, the day the rabbis defeated God and took over interpretive authority, they disrupted the order of the natural world. Rabbi Eliezer was humiliated because God was displaced from his authoritative position. On this understanding, the Talmud acknowledges that when the rabbis take conscious control of the Torah, the risks to the overall religious order are substantial. If God is not enthroned and acknowledged, the rabbis’ very prince may be killed by God.
The allegorical lesson for the Evolutionist worldview is that consciously evolving the tradition carries foundational risks to the stability of the system. If God’s will is not fully respected, if God-consciousness is lost, then evolution will look and feel like a rebellion against God. God may let his children defeat him for a time. But his justice will only be deferred, not avoided. The oven, in this reading, symbolizes both the opportunities and the dangers of rabbinic interpretation. The Talmud sees both in total clarity.
Faced with this challenge, some Jews have always wanted to embrace a more radical solution: to dethrone God altogether. They have wanted to be Jews without God, or not to be Jewish believers at all. It is to these ways of imagining Jewishness, and non-Jewishness, that we now must turn.