Modern Orthodoxy, the strain of Jewish belief asserting that one can live by halacha amid secular surroundings (as opposed to social isolation), is being torn by forces from within challenging the existing divide between tradition and trendiness.
This struggle is being played out against a backdrop of Orthodox triumphalism –Orthodoxy in America is showing vibrant growth while the Reform and Conservative movements exhibit an ongoing decline.
Yet Orthodoxy’s projected growth will occur much more in the ranks of the haredim than among their Modern Orthodox counterparts. Haredim tend to marry earlier, have more children, and lead more insular lives (thereby reducing possibility of assimilation) than do the Modern Orthodox.
Still, America’s 250,000 Modern Orthodox Jews represent a formidable force. On every major college campus, Modern Orthodox yarmulke-wearing students are a visible presence. As high achievers, Modern Orthodox Jews hold top professional posts and are stalwarts of Jewish and Zionist activism. In public life, think of Treasury Secretary (and former White House chief of staff) Jack Lew and former Connecticut senator and vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman.
But that vitality is being threatened by increasingly divisive ideological battles within Modern Orthodoxy, the most contentious of which centers on the role of women.
The Jewish path to a life of holiness is governed by meticulous, highly detailed standards. These rules were first enunciated in the written Torah, developed in the Talmud, and updated by the religious greats of subsequent generations, usually rabbis who headed elite yeshivas. On gender-related issues, these standards disavowed a unisex uniformity, advocating instead guidelines under which the sexes followed separate but equal roads to sanctity.
It should, nevertheless, have come as little surprise that, given the allures of a welcoming secular America, pressure would build among elements of Modern Orthodoxy’s acculturated, sophisticated, and highly educated constituency for more modernity and less orthodoxy.
In recent years the movement known as Open Orthodoxy has sought to speak to that constituency by offering, in the words of its founder, a more “inclusive” religious experience by reaching out to “disenfranchised and alienated Jews searching for a vibrant and inspiring Judaism.”
Ordaining women, a non-starter through two thousand years of Jewish history, is the leading proposed reform of Open Orthodoxy, which has also called for softening traditional standards toward homosexuality (termed an “abomination” in the Bible), religious conversion, and the role of women in synagogue prayer.
The growth of feminism in Modern Orthodox circles followed by a decade or two the feminist advances in non-Orthodox denominations. In 1972, the Reform movement credentialed a woman rabbi, and the Conservatives followed several years later. That decision caused a storm in the then more traditional Conservative movement.
Professor David Weiss Halivni, Conservative Judaism’s foremost Talmudic scholar, resigned from its flagship Jewish Theological Seminary after the movement voted to add women to the Jewish clergy.
In his autobiography (The Book and the Sword), Halivni explained his opposition: “I searched for precedents trying to find in the rich Rabbinic literature opinions in favor of the reform. I would have gone along if these opinions had been held by a small minority, even if rejected by the overwhelming majority.…
In his 1983 letter to the Jewish Theological Seminary faculty assembly, Halivni could not have been more direct:
My position concerning women’s ordination is by now, I take it, well known to all of you assembled here. I am against it. It is in violation of halacha which to me is sufficient grounds to reject it.
Over the years, increasing numbers of Orthodox women have entered fields such as synagogue teaching and congregational counseling. But it has been the emergence of women knowledgeable in Talmud, the main course of study for Orthodox ordination, which has fueled Open Orthodoxy’s push for female ordination.
It is no negation of the educational accomplishments of such women to point out that the main role of a synagogue remains public prayer. The Torah defines a minyan, a prayer quorum, as consisting of a minimum of ten men. Open Orthodox leaders have yet to realistically address the incongruity of “women rabbis” who by definition are ineligible to be part of this basic unit of Jewish communal prayer.
In response to Open Orthodoxy, the Rabbinical Council of America, the nation’s leading Modern Orthodox rabbinic body, passed a resolution banning the ordination of women.
Giving context to its own disavowal of women’s ordination, the haredi Agudath Israel of America charged that the philosophy of Open Orthodoxy “writes [the movement] out of Orthodox Jewry…. Open Orthodoxy is a movement purporting to be Orthodox while espousing the theology of the Reform and Conservative movements.”
While the condemnations by these two rabbinic groups will likely slow down the acceptance of women rabbis, idealistic women committed to serving the Jewish community might want to take cues from gender-role formulas advanced by the dynamic Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Some four thousand married couples, known as shluchim (men) and shluchos (women), engage in global Jewish outreach marked by clear gender definitions.
Functioning as teachers, counselors, Sabbath meal hosts, and community organizers, shluchos do not feel relegated or shortchanged because it falls to their husbands to sermonize under a rabbinic hat. In both their personal and public lives, these women strive to sanctify God’s name as defined by halacha, not by title.