I have sympathy for religious mavericks like Rabbi Avi Weiss of New York, who for ordaining a woman as a rabbi, or “rabba” as he calls her, is under fire from Orthodox rabbinic colleagues on the Rabbinical Council of America. To be Avi Weiss takes guts. Unfortunately for him, as the New York Jewish Week‘s Jonathan Mark is anticipating, his gutsiness could result in Rabbi Weiss’s expulsion from the RCA.
There’s a simple reason why ordaining women as Orthodox rabbis will never catch on. Religions are like species of animals. Just as a particular species has its own integrity, coded in its genome, that makes it one kind of creature instead of another — a dog instead of a cat — so too with faiths. Orthodox Judaism has a spiritual genetic code that has insured its survival for millennia. That record of survival, as in the circular if nevertheless undeniable logic of Darwinism, attests to its survival fitness.
Whether you think women rabbis are a commendable idea or not, the notion if put into practice would represent a violation of the spiritual DNA of traditional Judaism. In an animal, mutations tend overwhelmingly to be either without effect or deleterious. As my friend and colleague Jonathan Wells observes, it’s pretty much a rule of thumb that a mutation in a mouse results either in another identical mouse, a sick mouse, or a dead mouse.
To adopt the metaphor, Rabbi Weiss seeks to mutate Orthodox Judaism in a radical fashion. But Judaism has survived precisely by resisting major change. Sure, Orthodoxy has experienced a certain kind of slow genetic drift over thousands of years, but nothing like the kind of instantaneous refashioning that Rabbi Weiss envisions. When radicals have sought to reform Judaism in the past, what you ended up with has always been either failure, or the splitting away of new religions. Judaism, for better or worse, is not subject to revolutions — at least, not successful revolutions.
You can only wish Rabbi Weiss well, but his cause is doomed.
My Forward op-ed is out now seeking the meaning behind the scandals that have plagued my religious community, Orthodox Judaism, with increasing intensity of late. The first comment over at the Forward website illustrates the extent to which many of us Orthodox Jews don’t seem to get what the problem is. A “Rabbi Dr. Rosenberg” complains, “There are good, bad and ugly among all peoples. Do not pick on Orthodoxy alone.”
But the whole point here is that if Torah is true, and I stake my life on its being so, then why do we not stand out from other people, as an illuminating presence in the world? Anyway, here’s what I said. It was painful to write. Please let me know what you think.
For all its outward vigor, the Orthodox community, which is my own, appears to harbor a sickness. You don’t have to be an ideological critic of traditional Judaism to wonder if the cause should be sought in Orthodoxy itself.
The past year has brought what seems like a never-ending stream of financial or sexual scandals. Prominent rabbis have been charged with money-laundering. The scandal unleashed by accounts of mistreatment of workers and animals in a kosher meat facility continues to reverberate. An influential rabbi specializing in conversions allegedly conducted a squalid relationship with a woman wishing to convert. There have been repulsive accounts of molestation of boys in yeshivas. Most recently, a prominent rabbi and communal powerbroker was charged with trying to extort money from a hedge fund.
Of course, not every allegation turns out to be true (and you certainly cannot believe everything you read, especially on the Internet with its bias in favor of grudges and witch-hunts). Yet the pattern of accusations can’t be coincidental.
For a convert or a baal teshuvah, like me, the greatest stumbling block to faith may indeed be the Orthodox community itself. If Torah is true, why do Torah Jews not stand out as particularly impressive? Deuteronomy says of our Torah observance: “It is your wisdom and discernment in the eyes of the peoples, who shall hear all these decrees and who shall say, ‘Surely a wise and discerning people is this great nation’” (4:6). No one would say such a thing of us today. How can this be?
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I’d never heard these two wonderful anecdotes, reported in a review by Michael Weingrad in the brand new (and quite impressive) Jewish Review of Books:
Although it might seem unlikely that anyone would wonder whether the author of The Lord of the Rings was Jewish, the Nazis took no chances. When the publishing firm of Ruetten & Loening was negotiating with J. R. R. Tolkien over a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938, they demanded that Tolkien provide written assurance that he was an Aryan. Tolkien chastised the publishers for “impertinent and irrelevant inquiries,” and–ever the professor of philology– lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.” As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that “I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”
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The Torah emphasized in last week’s reading, Terumah (Exodus 25:1-27:19), that the Tabernacle in the desert was to be held up by planks of acacia, or shittim, wood. Hasidic tradition notes that the verbal root on which that Hebrew word is built appears also in the word for foolishness, shtut. The Talmud has it that sin is committed through foolishness. But more benignly, a willingness to be found foolish is an essential ingredient of religious life. We like to think we have rational grounds for belief, and I think we do up to a point, certainly more than evangelists for secularism would have you think.
Yet one takes a considerable chance, in identifying with any spiritual teaching, of being totally mistaken in the end. Something I find incredible about certain versions of Christianity is the threat of eternal torture if despite the best intentions, and having earnestly sought to discern God’s will in the Bible, you nevertheless get things wrong. The idea that God could come up with such an “economy of salvation” is pretty hard to believe. In fact, the image of the Tabernacle, designed by God himself, suggests the opposite: that faith fails if you can’t take the chance of being mistaken in the end.
William James said as much in his famous 1896 lecture, “The Will to Believe”:
He who says, “Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys…..I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world….Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
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