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DECISION MAKING IN PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM John D. Rayner

Encounter with Modernity

There is only a limited extent to which we are called upon to make decisions, since most were made for us before we arrived on the scene, and we simply go along with them.

Of course, the extent varies from person to person. Some people are more inclined than others to question past assumptions and rules of behaviour.

It also varies from period to period. There are times in history when the conditions of life change so drastically that they require a paradigm shift in previously accepted ways of fhinking and acting.

In the history of Judaism, one such time was the first century, which saw the destruction of the Temple, the end of the Second Commonwealth, the dispersion of our people, and the rise of Christianity.

Since then there have been other major upheavals, but none as significant for our

purpose as the Emancipation: not only because it changed the political and social

conditions of Jewish life but also, and chiefly, because it brought us face to face with modern European culture.

European culture, we have to remember, had undergone a huge transformation in consequence of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the rise of Humanism, of Secularism, and of Modern Science, particularly cosmology, biology and history, including biblical history.

For the sake of simplicity, let us call this modern European culture ‘modemity’ and

speak of our delayed encounter with it: delayed because the three centuries during which the transformation took place correspond to the Ghetto period of Jewish history

Responses to Modernity

To this delayed encounter with modernity Jews could and did respond in seven different ways.

One way was to reject modernity. That was and is the way of ultra-Orthodoxy, whose founding father was the Chatam Sofer (1762-1839) and whose motto may be said to be his famous pun mm 10 "non mm, that "anything new is forbidden by the Torah”.

Another way was to say yes to modernity, but on the understanding that Judaism had

nothing to learn from it and hence no cause to allow itself to be modified by it; in other words, to keep Judaism and modernity in wggerfight comparjcments. That was and is the way of Modern Orthodoxy, founded by SQJp§on RaphaeyI-Iirsch (1808-1888) with his ‘ motto, rm 11": up rmn.

A third way was to allow Judaism to become modified by modernity, but as little as possible and in far as only so the impersonal‘lforces 95 hjsmry brought change about, as it were, of their own accord. That was the‘way pf the “positive—historical school', founded by Zacharias Frankel (1801-1875), and is today the way of Conservative and Masorti Judaism.

A fourth way was to take positive steps to bring about an integration of Judaism with modernity. That was and is the way of Progressive Judaism, to which we shall return.

A fifth way was to side-step the problem by retreating into Academia, where Judaism was an object of study rather than a way of life, and therefore no practical decisions needed to be made. That is still the way of many Jewish academics who, in their ivory towers, keep aloof from Jewish communal life.

A sixth way was to turn from Judaism as a religion to a mostly secular Hebrew or Yiddish national culture, in short Haskalah, and ultimately to Zionism. In the State of Israel individuals can think and do what they like about modernity, without either their Israeli citizenship or their Jewish identity being affected.

A final way, in more senses than one, was to abandon Judaism altogether and embrace Christianity or some secular ideology such as Marxism.

So these are the seven possible responses to modernity: rejection, co-existence, adualism,‘integration, academicism, Zionism, and apostasy. It is the way of integration that we need to explore.

Evaluation of Modernity

The early Reformers evidently saw modernity - or, more precisely, modernity minus Christianity u as something wholly to be welcomed. They embraced it uncritically.

In retrospect, that was a mistake. For not everything about modernity is to be applauded. Among other things, it brought forth Romanticism, Fascism, Materialism,

Marxism, and Colonialism. Paradoxically, therefore, it produced both an individualism that devalued the community and a collectivism that devalued the individual.

Positively, however, modernity meant above all a spirit of free inquiry; placing truth above tradition and conscience above dogma; individual autonomy; toleration of diversity; democracy; equal rights for citizens of different races and religions, and for men and women; and social justice.

And to be fair to the Reformers, it was chiefly these positive values inherent in modernity that they espoused and sought to integrate with their Judaism: values which, moreover, are to some extent rooted in Judaism itself.

There is, for instance, freedom of speculation in Jewish tradition on its aggadic side. There is a democratic impulse discernible in the Prophets’ critique of monarchy, in the institution of the Council of Elders, and in the governance of the Synagogue. And there is a clear tendency gradually to raise the status of women. Modernity merely pointed to the need to carry these trends forward towards their logical conclusion.

Therefore the integration the Reformers sought was not between two mutually hostile or incompatible value systems but two similar and converging ones. Nor is that surprising when you consider what James Parkes once wrote, that "the Jews were Europeans before the Europeans were Europeans”; in other words, it was Hebraism, albeit largely through Christianity, which made Europe what it became when it ceased to be pagan. The question, then, is how the Reform movement set about this task of integration.

Reform in Germany

— — As we all know, it was started in Germany as well as other countries by Jewishly educated lay men and women with a single agenda: to modernise Jewish worship in the hope of stemming the drift away from the Synagogue.

To this end they took what seemed to them the obvious steps: they shortened the services, conducted them partly in the vernacular, gave regular sermons, likewise in the vernacular, introduced choral singing with organ accompaniment, and allowed men and women to sit together. They instituted these reforms in the belief that the situation demanded them and that they were Jewishly legitimate.

Were they Jewishly legitimate? Well, yes, if one disregards the principle of the sovereignty of mm, which could indeed be invoked to prohibit any innovation. But given a reasonably liberal interpretation of the Halachah, it was not difficult to justify in its terms alrl; the reforms so far mentioned.

Fpr instance, from the Mishnah until Shneur Zalman of Lyady’s Shulchan Aruch ha-Rav, published posthumously in 1814, halachic literature consistently permitted prayer in the vernacular. And Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), in his Die Gottesdienstlichen Vortrz'ige der laden (1832) had no difficulty in proving that the vernacular semen was merely a revival of an ancient Jewish practice.

Indeed, already in 1818 one of the Reformers (Eliezer Liebermann) had elicited from four leading rabbis, including Aaron Chorin (1766-1844) of Hungary, a halachic approbation of their innovations. This was published under the title P137! rm: and confirmed them in their belief that they had acted with ’shining righteousness’,

But two things happened to change the situation. One was the publication in 1919 of man ‘13"! m, a volume of responsa in which 22 rabbis of the old school, led by the Chatam Sofer, roundly denounced the reforms, with special reference to the newly founded Hamburg Temple. According to them, it was absolutely forbidden to pray in any language other than Hebrew, to change the text of the liturgy by a single word, or to play a musical instrument on Shabbat. This led to ’The Battle of the Proof Texts’, as Jakob Petuchowski called it (Pruyerbook Reform in Europe, Chapter 5; for a fuller account see Alexander Guttmann, The Struggle over Reform in Rabbinic Literature) in which the Reform leaders, although still only learned laymen, gave as well as they got.

The other new factor was the emergence of a new generation of university-educated rabbis who not only, like Aaron Chorin, sympathised with the nascent Reform movement, but actively championed it and took over its leadership: men like Abraham Geiger (1810- 1874), to mention only the greatest of them.

These rabbis did two things. First, they compiled prayerbooks. Admittedly, the lay founders of the Hamburg Temple had already done that in 1819 and again in 1841. But now almost every Reform rabbi produced a prayerbook for his own community, and each one involved confronting controversial issues such as the Return to Zion, the ‘ Rebuilding of the Temple, etc. In other words, each one involved decision making. Secondly, they convened rabbinic conferences in which, with like-minded colleagues, they debated a much broader agenda than merely the cosmetic improvement of synagogue services: an agenda which included, for instance, Sabbath and Festival observance, marriage and divorce, burial and mourning.

It was at these conferences that many of the decisions of Progressive Judaism were made, and they revealed a broad consensus on the historical, halachic and theological

. issues involved. Therefore, to see Progressive Iudaism’s decision-making process at work, one has to read the proceedings of these conferences.

It was at the Frankfort Conference in 1845 that a great debate took place about the use of the vernacular. The question was unfortunately worded. If it has been whether prayer in the vernacular was permissible, or whether the continued use of Hebrew was nevertheless desirable, everybody would have agreed. But the question was whether Hebrew was "objectively necessary”; in other words, whether Judaism was totally

dependent on it; and this elicited a negative vote which prompted Zacharias Frankel to walk out and found his positive-historical school.

— So it happened‘that, of the three tendencies within the Reform movement right, left and centre, the rightist tendency was hived off, eventually to become the Conservative movement. This left in Germany only two tendencies: the leftist one represented by Samuel Holdheim, which, however, remained virtually confined to a single congregation in Berlin, and the centrist one, represented by Abraham Geiger.

In the course of the nineteenth century the centrist tendency veered somewhat towards the right, and by the time of the Weimar Republic this conservative Liberal Judaism had become normative in Germany. Its last great exponent was Cesar Seligman (1860-1950).

It was he who convened the Posen Conference of 1912 which produced the Richtlim'en, probably the most comprehensive of all the Progressive platforms. And it was he who in 1929 was the principal editor of the Einheitsgebetbuch.

These two, the Richtlinien and the Einheitsgebetbuch, may be regarded as the mature summation of a hundred years of Progressive Jewish activity in Germany.

Reform in America

In America, where Reform Temples established themselves in all the major cities from the 18405, there were again two distinctive tendencies, since before the end of the century the rightist one had become the Conservative movement. The founding father of the leftist tendency was David Einhom (1809-1860); the founding father of the centrist tendency was Isaac Mayer Wise (19194900). Here, too, the Reform rabbis did two things — and a third.

First, they produced prayerbooks. Einhom produced his Olaf Tamid in 1856, Wise produced his Minhag America in 1857 but later conceded that Einhom’s Olat Tamid, with the original German translated into English by his son—in-law Emil G. Hirsch (1851- 1923), should become the basis of the Union Prayerbook.

Secondly, the American Reform rabbis, like their German counterparts, convened conferences and produced platforms. Of special importance is the Pittsburgh Conference of 1885, dominated by Einhorn’s other son—in—law Kaufmann Kohler (1843- 1926), and the very radical platform it produced. With its Einhom-inspired prayerbook and its Kohler-inspired platform, American

Reform was predominantly leftist, and remained so until the 19305. It is only since the

Columbus Platform of 1937 that it has veered back towards a centrist position.

The third thing that happened is that the Central Conference of American Rabbis established a Responsa Committee which, since 1890, has produced many hundreds of responsa authored by rabbinic scholars of great stature such as Kaufmann Kohler, Jacob Lauterbach, Israel Bettan, Solomon Freehof and Walter Jacob.

This activity was and is a laboratory of Progressive Jewish decision making on a huge variety of topics. It is obviously of the greatest importance for our subject, and we shall return to it presently. But first let us look at the situation in Britain.

Reform Judaism in Britain

Here, too, there have been two distinct tendencies. But the older one, represented by the West London Synagogue, founded in 1840, was until recently rightist rather than centrist.

It is true that those who founded it invoked the precedent of the Hamburg Temple, but I don’t think they were greatly interested in its reforms. It is also true that the Minister they hired, David Woolf Marks (1811-1909), took the neo-karaitic line of affirming the authority of the Written Law but denying the authority of the Oral Law, and so justified the abolition of the Second Day of the Festivals.

But otherwise the West Londoners were quite content just to have a house of worship within walkin distanceof their comfortable West End homes, where services were conducted wi due/decorum but entirely in Hebrew, and by men only, with women looking on from the gallery, according to an abridged version of the Sefardi liturgy.

And that is essentially how things remained for half a century. After that, under Morris Joseph (1838-1930) and even under Harold Reinhan (1891-1968), in spite of his American Classical Reform background, the West London Synagogue and its affiliates, who in 1942 united to form the ASGB, later RSGB, became only slightly more adventurous.

It is only since the 19703 that the RSGB has embraced liturgical creativity, equal rights for women, outreach, and social action, and so moved from a rightist to a slightly—right- of-centre position within the Progressive spectrum. More recently, the Masorti movement has begun to occupy the terrain so vacated.

Liberal Judaism in Britain

The JRU, on the other hand, adopted from the start a radical stance, based on the thinking of Claude Montefiore (1858-1938). Typical of this is the manifesto it issued under Montefiore’s name in 1909. Especially important for our purpose is the following extract:

"We stand for a fresh and changed attitude towards authority, and especially towards that particular type of authority which is of central importance in orthodox Judaism, the authority of the Book and the Code. We need accept nothing which does not seem to us good. The' authority of the Book, so far as it goes, is its worth, and so far as that worth reaches, so far reaches the authority. The book is not good because it is from God; it is from God so far as it is good.”

7 Thus we can see that, while David Woolf Marks treated the Bible as sacrosanct but was prepared to take liberties with the Talmud, Montefiore adopted a reverent-but-critical attitude towards the Bible itself.

This leftist stance was reinforced when Israel Mattuck (1883—1954) came over from America to take charge of the Us and the JRU.

Not only was he a radical in the tradition of Samuel Holdheim, David Einhom and Kaufmann Kohler, but he was a man of rigorous integrity, who had little sympathy with compromisers. As he said in his induction sermon, "Liberal Judaism must insist upon honesty and tmth and sincerity in religious practice. What we cannot honestly adhere to we must discontinue. To sacrifice principle to conformity would jeopardise our cause."

Accordingly, the Liberal Jewish Prayer Book he compiled in three volumes in the 19205 was éven more radical than the American Union Prayerbook, and more individualistic than its Olaf Tamid prototype.

Such was British Liberal Judaism when I first became involved in it, and it underwent little change, after Mattuck’s retirement in 1948 and death in 1954, under his son-in-law and successor, Leslie Edgar (1905—1984).

But in the 19605 a new mood, largely induced by the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, asserted itself among an increasing number of our members as well as the younger generation of rabbis: a felt need for stronger identification with Jewish tradition, K’lal Yismel and the State of Israel.

So it came about that we compiled a new, more traditional but nevertheless creative liturgy, beginning in 1967 with Service of the Heart; we gave greater emphasis to Hebrew in our worship and education; we organised ULPS tours to Israel; we became more active in the Board of Deputies and Zionist organisations; and we reintroduced - in appropriately modified ways — a number of previously discarded rituals, for instance, Oneg Shabbat, Havdalah, Tikkun Leyl Shavuot, Tish’ah b’AV, Purim, Yom ha—Atzma’ut, Bar and Bat Mitzvah, and a kind of Ketubbah.

In short, while the RSGB moved from a rightist to a slightly-right-of—centre position within the spectrum represented by the World Union for Progressive Judaism, we moved from a leftist to a slightly-left—of-centre position, so that the distance separating us has become relatively small.

Perfecting the Formula and Dealing with New Problems

This, then, is Progressive Judaism as we know it today. It is the end-product of a historical process, going back two hundred years, which has involved much learning, much heart-searching, much debate, much controversy, much trial-and~error, much decision making, all directed to one end: to achieve the best possible integration of what is of abiding validity in tradition with what is of abiding validity in modernity.

This is the Progressive Judaism we have inherited. We know it is not perfect, and one of the glories of belonging to it is that it is still malleable, that all questions are in principle re-openable, that we can still shape it. Nevertheless, by and large we are satisfied with it. If we were not we would look

elsewhere. Of the thousands of decisions that have gone into the making of it, the great majority are acceptable to us, and we are happy enough to go along with them.

But when there is again, as .there has been in the past, a change in mood or circumstances wh‘iychv’causes‘us .to feel dissatisfied with an existing policy; or when new problems arise, for'instance, as a result of advances in medical technology; or when we become aware of a problem which, though not new, we have not yet tackled, such as same sex commitment ceremonies: how should we go about the process of decision- making?

When this Kallah was first planned it was suggested that I should discuss how our

founders, the Three Ms, did it, but I declined the suggestion partly because it seemed to me parochial and backward—looking, but chiefly for two other reasons.

One is that we don’t really know much about how our founders arrived at their decisions, since the records only show what they decided. There are of course exceptions. It would be interesting, for example, to look up the minutes of the LJS Council about its historic decisions in 1918 and 1920 to allow women to preach and to conduct services. Perhaps Lawrence Rigal or Rosita Rosenberg will have done so for

their forthcoming history. But in the main it would be a matter of guesswork.

The other and main reason is that to my mind Progressive Jewish decision making is - or ought to be — in large part about Halachah; but the three Ms were not much into Halachah; and therefore, although we have a lot to learn from them in other respects, we don’t have a lot to learn from them in that respect.

The Relevance of Halachah

Let me try to justify what I have just said. I have been assuming all along that our focus is on deciding what to do, rather than what to believe; that the context in which we are considering it is that of Progressive Iudaism; and that the capacity in which we are considering it is that of rabbis.

That being so, I don’t see how we can ignore the Halachah. For the Halachah is that part of our heritage which has dealt with matters of doing as distinct from believing. We "I may not alwa 3 agree with it, but we surely have a lot to learn from it. To say, am Jewish, but I ave nothing to learn from, and therefore am not interested in, what my ancestors have had to say about correct behaviour,” seems to me both self-contradictory and arrogant. And who, if not Progressive Iudaism's rabbis, can be expected to study this halachic heritage and try to bring its wisdom to bear on the problems that need to be tackled?

Consequently, if we are seriously interested in the process of decision making in the

context of Progressive Judaism, it is the literature in which it has tried to do just that which must first and foremost claim our attention. And there is by now a considerable Progressive Jewish halachic literature: at least about twenty volumes which I have brought along to demonstrate its extensiveness.

Therefore, when we are called upon to make a new decision, we would be well advised to begin by looking up that literature to see whether the issue, gr a related one, has already been dealt with by one of our predecessors in the Progressive stream of modem .Judaism. At the same time that will conveniently__i lead us to the key passages in the classical sources. (Of course I don't mean that we should not also look up general halachic encyclopaedias and the like.)

Alleged Flexibility of the Traditional Halachah

Just now, however, we are not concerned with the details, but only with the question of the general hilqsaphy of Halachah appropriate to Progressive Judaism, and the methoddlégy tfiat 'flows from it. And here I find the literature, for all its impressive learning and generally sensible conclusions, sadly deficient. '

The general tendency is to treat the traditional halachic literature with a deference not very different from that which Orthodox exponents bring to it, but to look within it for those opinions that are most consonant with modern attitudes, and then to draw conclusions from these. And that is often a remarkably successful enterprise.

Here two books which I have just reviewed for the next issue of Manna are very relevant. One is the revised, paperback edition of Louis Iacobs’ monumental A Tree of Lie with its significant subtitle "Diversity, Flexibility, and Creativity in Jewish Law”. T e other is Moshe Zemer’s Evolving Hulakhah, subtitled “A Progressive Approach to Traditional Jewish Law”, a revised and enlarged English version of his earlier, Hebrew mam nzbn.

There is, as both books brilliantly demonstrate, a great deal of diversity, flexibility and creativity in the traditional Halachah — far more than one would ever guess from reading modem Orthodox responsa — and it is important for us to know that.

But the flexibility is often achieved by means which seem to me inconsistent with a fully and frankly liberal point of view.

For instance, Yochanan ben Zakkai abolished the Ordeal of Jealousy D‘aann 131m, “when adulterexs multiplied” (Sot.9:9). In other words, when husbands were no longer beyond reproach, as of course they had been in biblical times, there was no point in taking any notice of the accusations they brought against their wives. What he did not say is that the biblical institution is primitively superstitious and monstrously unjust.

Similarly, the decree against men marrying more than one wife, traditionally attributed to Rabbenu Gershom but now known to date from about a centuryvand-a-half later, only prohibited polygyny; it did not invalidate it on a par with polyandry, with outrageous differential consequences for the status of any subsequent offspring. Contrast that with the forthright declaration of the Philadelphia Conference: “Polygamy contradicts the idea of marriage. The marriage of a married man to a second woman can, therefore, neither take place nor claim religious validity, just as little as the marriage of a married woman to another man, but like this it is null and void from the beginning”.

Another case in point is the marriage of a kohen to a divorcee or a proselyte. Moshe Zemer cites with apparent approval several instances in which Orthodox authorities like David Hoffmann and Judah Leib Zirelson have made lenient rulings, allowin such a marriage, once contracted, to continue in preference to a greater evil which mig t result from insisting on its dissolution. To give him credit, he also makes the ’extra-halachid "a point that divorcée is no longer considered to be morally inferior” (p. 77) and that "the Reform and Conservative movements have ruled that a kohen may marry a divorcée" (p. 78). What he does not say is that the concept of a hereditary priesthood is undemocratic, or that the perpetuation of any kind of priestly status is incompatible with Progressive Judaism’s rejection of the traditional hope for the restoration of the sacrificial cult.

One more example will have to suffice. Moshe Zemer cites, again with apparent approval, several ways devised by ingenious halachic authorities of the past of ‘purifying’ a mamzer, including the nullification of the first marriage which caused the second one to be adulterous. He does not seem to be worried by the dishonesty involved in declaring non-existent efmarriage which, everybody knows, did exist.

Here, it should be noted, Louis Jacobs the Conservative is more forthright than Moshe Zemer the Prtogressive. He refers to the law of the mamzer as "intolerable within a legal system that prides itself on its passion for justice” (p. 246) and comments on the ’nullification’ stratagem: "Obviously, however, extreme remedies of this kind are only available in the minority of cases where there are reasonable grounds for invalidating the first marriage” (p. 253).

What neither of them says, though Louis Jacobs, as we have seen comes veg: close to doing so, is that the law of the mamzer is a scandalous misunderstanding of e Divine Will.

The point I want to make is that the much vaunted flexibility of the traditional Halachah, which liberally minded scholars are so fond of invoking, has been achieved, when it has been achieved, by means of legal fictions, rationalisations, and all kinds of circumventions which maintain in theory the divine authority of the Torah but in practice modify or abolish its application.

This is of course commendable in so far as it is motivated, as it often is, by ethical motives and by a desire to close the gap between law and life. It is also understandable that the interpreters should wish to maintain the myth of the divinity of the Torah since without that Judaism would lose its chief ’sanctum’ (to use Mordecai Kaplan’s term). Moreover, jurists like Bernard Jackson are always telling us that such devices are employed in every legal system.

Need for a Forthrightly Non-Fundamentalist Philosophy of Halachah

But whether or not “everybody’s doing it" in the world of secular jurisprudence, religion, I would maintain, demands a higher degree of integrity. It forbids us to treat as divine, even in theory (perhaps especially in theory) what we know to be reprehensibly human. My contention, therefore, is that Progressive Judaism requires a philosophy of Halachah, and a methodology to match, that are unambiguously non-fundamentalist. But though Louis Iacobs’ concluding chapter is entitled "Towards a Non- Fundamentalist Halachah” and Moshe Zemer maintains strenuously that his approach to Halachah is non-fundamentalist, I don’t find such a philosophy in either of their books.

Nor do I find it fully and frankly spelt out elsewhere in what, as I have indicated, is by now a voluminous Progressive halachic literature. Which is why I have tried to formulate at least the broad outline of such a philosophy in a series of lectures, beginning with my inaugural lecture as Chairman of the Council of Reform and Liberal Rabbis in 1970, all included in my little collection of essays under the title Iewish Religious law: A Progressive Perspective. Here I can only summarise, perhaps more clearly, what I have tried to say in the past. 10

My starting point is that we must be truthful, as Montefiore was, as to what the Bible is. It is not a divine literature. There is no such thing as a divine literature. It is a human literature, but one which resulted from the impact of divine revelation on our Israelite ancestors and of their efforts to understand and interpret the Divine Will. These efforts

were often successful and way ahead of their time, but not always. To put it bluntly, those who wrote it did not always get it right: sometimes they got it wrong.

From this it follows that the Bible (with special reference to the Pentateuch since that is where the biblical legislation is to be found) has for us neither an absolute or conclusive authority nor, on the other hand, no authority at all, but something in between which I call a presumptive authority.

That is to say, we should approach it with reverence and in the expectation that what it has to say will commend itself to us. How could we call ourselves Jews, let alone rabbis. if we did not believe that the foundation document of Judaism was in the main sound?

But then we must go on to ualify that and say that some of the biblical legislation stems

from an initial error whic invalidates all that follows from it. For instance, our ancestors were mistaken in believing that God required the innocent children of forbidden unions to be penalised as manzerim, or wives suspected of adultery by their husbands to be subjected to the ordeal of jealousy, or adulterers to be stoned to death, or homosexuals to be treated as criminals, or the scapegoat to be pushed over a precipice, or religious worship to take the form of sacrifices offered by a hereditary priesthood.

So when we say that the biblical legislation has a presumptive authority we must add: with certain systemic exceptions which do not even have a presumptive claim on us.

That is Stage One. Stage Two is to say much the same about Rabbinic Literature. It too has a presumptive authority for us. How could it be otherwise since Judaism is the- Hebrew-Bible-as-interpreted-by-the-Rabbis?

In so far as the Bible is sound, the Rabbinic interpretation is also likely to be sound, and indeed often turns out to be more so, since the Rabbis, living later, often brought to the interpretation a more refined ethical consciousness. Rabbinic literature is full of examples of that, and Moshe Zemer is right to stress, as he does again and again in his book, that by and large the Halachah is "an evolving process, essentially ethical” (p. 4).

On the other hand, where the Scriptural basis is, in our view, mistaken, the Rabbinic superstructure built on it is also likely to lack authority for us. So, for instance, the whole of the fifth Order of the Mishnah, Kodashim, is largely irrelevant for us, although of course it may nevertheless contain many pearls of wisdom here and there.

But if both Scri ture and Rabbinic Literature — or, in other words, the Written Law and the Oral Law - ave at best only a presumptive authority for us, how are we ever going to come to a conclusion? That is where Stage Three, the conscience, comes in.

Of course I don’t mean the ignorant conscience but the educated conscience, which has done its best to understand the intellectual presuppositions and social circumstances which prompted the biblical and rabbinic teachers to teach what they did, and to consider any relevant insights obtainable from modern scientific and historical knowledge. ‘

__, ll

Nor do I mean only the conscience of the individual in isolation but as checked against the consciences of others, at least of those who share a common non-fundamentalist freedom to seek the moral truth untrammelled by dogma; let us call it “the consensus of the open—minded”.

Even so qualified, the conscience is fallible, and therefore its authority, too, is only presumptive. A whole generation could conceivably mistake a passing fashion for eternal truth. And therefore, if our quest is for certainty, we have still not attained it.

But then it is precigely this which distinguishes modernity from medieval Scholasticism: that there is no esc‘élpe from the predicament of human fallibility, that we have to live with uncertainty.

— What I would nevertheless maintain is that if we consult all three Scripture, Rabbinic Tradition and the Contemporary Consensus — then it is from their interplay with one another that correct answers to the question, what God requires of us, are most likely to emerge. We may still go wrong sometimes, but we shall have done our best, and more than that God does not require of us.

Conscience Versus Community

And now a postscript. I have assumed all along that the decisions we are called upon to make are of a moral nature, or have a moral component. Let us now remove that sim lifying assumption. For of course not all questions are of that kind. The words ’rig t’ and ’wrong’ are often used in a non-ethical sense. For instance, the question, what is the right way to light Shabbat candles, or to blow a Shofar, or to build a Sukkah, are not moral questions. They are questions of custom or style or etiquette. Broadly speaking, all matters of ritual belong to that category.

And this distinction is vital to the question: where does the community come in? Both Louis Jacobs and Moshe Zemer lay emphasis, as one expects, on the communal dimension. Louis Jacobs, for instance, writes: "The ultimate authority for determining which Observances are binding on the faithful Jew is the historical experience of the Jewish people” (p. 230). Moshe Zemer writes: “There comes a moment in the observance of the commandments when Jews are called upon to express their sense of responsibility to their peeple, to the Covenant Community or kelal Yisruel” (p. 54), and again: “We must observe certain precepts for the good of the collective even when we have personal reservations about them”(ibid.).

I would go along with that, but only in matters of ritual which involve no ethical consideration. For if we are serious about identifying ourselves with the Jewish collectivity, we should not wish to deviate from the mores of that collectivity in the absence of some kind of ethical imperative to do so, that is to say, gratuitously. On that basis, for instance, if I were asked whether it was in order for a Progressive congregation to use a Safer Torah that is technically pusul, I should be inclined to answer: not for any length of time if it is possible for the congre ation to use another that is kasher or to have the damaged one repaired. (However, I migit also point out, incidentally, that according to the Mishnah it is permissible to use a sefer torah that is written in a language other than Hebrew; Meg. 1:8.)

But when the question is whether it is in order to discriminate against children of Jewish fathers in favour of children of Jewish mothers, or against homosexuals in favour of heterosexuals, I would argue that these involve issues of right and wrong in an ethical sense, and that in such matters we may not put conformity above conscience. Therefore

, _ 12

when Dow Marmur writes that if in such matters we don’t follow the practices of kelal yisruel, "we are in danger of turning ourselves into a Judaic sect, not a manifestation of authentic Judaism”, I would not only wish to ask him what he meant by words like ’sect’ and ‘authentic’, but I would also wish to say that it is better to belong to a sect that is right than to an Establishment that is wrong, and I would further maintain that that is a religious view.

However that may be, I hope we are agreed that, to say it just once more by way of conclusion, the purpose of the exercise is to combine what is best in Jewish tradition with what is best in modernity. In that sense we may, after all, adapt the saying of Rabban Gamliel the son of Judah the Prince (Avot 2:2), in the same way as Samson Raphael Hirsch did, but with a different connotation of the word DD, and say: r1“ Tn a» run .19”, "Excellent is Jewish Tradition integrated with modernity".

ULPS Rabbinic Kallah, Mickleton, 28Lh November 2000