The Modern Orthodox world was caught by surprise earlier this year when a star alumnus of a flagship school publicly questioned why he should be ostracized for marrying a non-Jew. It was as if our collective jaw dropped at the strangeness of the challenge. After all, intermarriage is hardly embraced by the more liberal branches of Judaism, let alone by

How many people in this camp really understand the intellectual and religious stance propounded by Modern Orthodoxy?

anything that can call itself Orthodox. The suggestion that he should have been embraced as a true son of the Jewish tradition seemed so preposterous that we simply didn't know what to make of it.


We asked whether Noah Feldman was wittingly trying to malign the Jewish tradition from which he had become estranged. Or perhaps he was simply a idiot savant unable to discern the obvious contours of the forest for his brilliance in detecting the trees.


Whatever our explanation, no one of stature in the Modern Orthodox world could take seriously Feldman's conclusion that his choice to marry out was not at all a deviation from Modern Orthodoxy's attempt to come to terms with modernity. We could not think of Feldman as anything but a deviant and a dropout.


But perhaps we should ask ourselves whether Professor Feldman is really so much different from many of our other graduates who have not taken the admittedly radical step of marrying a non-Jew. They have not taken this step and would likely also ostracize Feldman. But on what basis? The big question we must ask is whether, possibly, unbeknownst to themselves, they also allow the values of humanism and classical liberalism to simply trump classical Jewish views whenever the two are in conflict. Is not their reaction to Feldman, then, just a knee-jerk emotional response, largely inconsistent with their own outlook on things?


In talking with a teacher who worked for me a few years back, he told me how he had enjoyed a musical production of "Fiddler on the Roof." Knowing this teacher to be a serious Modern Orthodox Jew, I asked him how he got around the prohibition of kol eesha, of listening to a woman sing. I was expecting him to tell me that he was relying on the opinion that a voice heard through a microphone is not a problem, or some other similar nuance. Instead, I was rather dumbfounded to see that he did not seem to even understand the question. He felt it axiomatic that one simply can't pay attention to such a halacha in modern society.


In my mind, such an attitude leads directly to the argument of Noah Feldman, who has perhaps a right to be puzzled when these Jews all of a sudden say "no" to a modern value. Feldman gently calls it a paradox, but what he really means is a contradiction. If one can simply dismiss one sacred Jewish law when it is in conflict with modern values, then why should this not be the case with another sacred Jewish law? Granted, one could say that the issue of intermarriage goes beyond halacha. But if Feldman and his wife were to do their utmost to raise their children as Jews, would we be any less likely to ostracize them?


Let it be clear that I come here to praise Modern Orthodoxy and not to bury it. But I remain unsure of how many people in this camp really understand the intellectual and religious stance propounded by Modern Orthodoxy's formative thinkers.

Values that cannot be organically integrated... must be fought and rejected unapologetically.



For example, Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks correctly points out that, "At the heart of Judaism is an insistence on standing apart from, sometimes maintaining an oppositional stance to, the secular ethos of the age." Based on this point, Rabbi Sacks attacks Conservative responsa for "rejecting a set of halachic assumptions in favor of an uncritical acceptance of a late-twentieth-century American view of what is sexist or undemocratic."(1)


Similarly, Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook points out, in perhaps more mystical fashion, "When a spiritual phenomenon encounters another spiritual phenomenon that negates is, if it swerves from its course to avoid a confrontation, it will necessarily be damaged and weakened."(2)


Thus, it is not only the evils of contemporary society that we must confront, it is also its virtues. Beautiful ideas such as equality, human rights, freedom of expression and personal autonomy can not, per force, be completely identical with our own. In fact, if one follows the developments of intellectual history, many of these values came out of the Protestant world-view inherited by most of the men who shaped them. It should be superfluous to say that the religious assumptions of that world-view are often, though certainly not always, in marked contrast to those of Judaism.


We should not have waited for the agreement of many recent political theorists to have known that modern Western values do not have a monopoly on that which is desirable. They conflict with other values, such as virtue, community, stability, tradition and respect for proper authority. Modern Orthodox Jews should not be the last ones to echo Christian Yale law professor Stephen Carter's challenge to the secular establishment: "[We] might reasonably ask why the will of any of the brilliant philosophers of the liberal tradition, or, for that matter, the will of the Supreme Court... is more relevant to moral decisions than the will of G-d."(3)


True Modern Orthodoxy is about the careful consideration of modern values, to determine which of them have a place in our own world-view. It must evaluate these values and reevaluate itself in view of any truths that come from them. Values that cannot be organically integrated, however, must be fought and rejected unapologetically.


If many in the Charedi world see complete rejection of modern values as the ideal, we must make it doubly clear that we are not advocating complete acceptance of modern Western values. When we applaud the values of the contemporary West, as we sometimes should, it should be done with nuanced caution and not with careless

True Modern Orthodoxy is about the careful consideration of modern values.

abandon. Modern Orthodoxy needs to be at least as orthodox as it is modern.


We have somehow failed to get this message across to many of our constituents. It is obviously much easier for the man in the street to understand complete acceptance or complete rejection. Still, intellectual honesty, as well as clarity, demand that we be as careful to explain the rejectionist side of our approach as we are in explaining its accommodationist side. Until we do that, the misconceptions about Modern Orthodoxy that Professor Feldman recently brought to a new extreme will continue to plague us.


Footnotes
1) "Creativity and Innovation in Halakha," in Sokol, Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy (Northvale NJ: Jason Aaronson, 1992), p.166.


2) "Fragments of Lights", in Bokser, Abraham Issac Kook (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 305.


3) The Culture of Disbelief (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. 226.