Commentary on Noah Feldman

Some of Noah Feldman’s “Orthodox Paradox” resonated with me. Like him, I am an alumnus of Boston’s Maimonides Hebrew Day School, which “made me who I am”. Like him, I have since struggled to integrate the precepts of two very different world views and value systems, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

Some of Feldman’s arguments are compelling. The rabbi who challenged a physician on treating gentile patients on Shabbat was guilty not only of a serious error of judgment, but also of perverting Judaism’s fundamental teaching that all of humanity are created in God’s image. I well understand Feldman’s discomfort with the injunction to exterminate the Amalekites, but long ago chose to historicize the teaching rather than struggle to discover its contemporary salience. To be sure his disingenuousness in claiming that he had been deliberately airbrushed out of the reunion photo badly undermines his credibility.

Although I attended Maimonides a full generation prior to Feldman, my sense is he does not do full justice to this flagship education institution of modern Orthodoxy. A high school history teacher taught me to think for myself rather than accept uncritically the words of authorities. A Talmud teacher both shared with me his own doubts and urged me to maintain connection to faith and heritage. A term paper for a Chumash class that required students to compare the Joseph epic in traditional Jewish commentaries with Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers constituted an incredible experience in the excitement of weighing two different types of source materials for what one could learn from each. In other words, the faculty were “fantastic”, and the experience constituted Jewish education at its finest.

What separates me from Feldman, however, are the choices he made – free choices that unavoidably carry consequences. Feldman acknowledges that minority faith communities require boundaries to sustain themselves. For individuals, the price of those boundaries may be tragic. Yet failure to create boundaries, including encouraging endogamy, which all the major Jewish religious movements support, imperils cultural distinctiveness. As Feldman well understands, historically those who have married out rarely produce Jewish grandchildren. Moreover, the richness of Judaic heritage is best transmitted when both marital partners share a commitment to it. Feldman acknowledges that all modern Jewish religious movements continue to oppose mixed marriage and encourage endogamy. The problem is hardly unique to Orthodoxy. Rather, the entire Jewish community struggles to balance respect for personal choice with articulation of communal norms.

For example, JTS has a firm rule that faculty members have Jewish spouses. HUC has a similar rule regarding rabbinical students. Thus Feldman, for all his impressive scholarship, would be excluded from the JTS faculty and HUC rabbinical student body. Nor does he demonstrate much sensitivity to the need for teaching endogamy. His article strengthens the hands of those who argue that intermarriage is inevitable, resistance is futile, and therefore only outreach and embrace constitute appropriate communal responses with not a word about conversion. Regrettably, the op-ed by Rabbi Shmuel Boteach suggests that this view has permeated even Orthodox circles.

Yet Feldman would do well to heed his own conclusion. All of life – not just Orthodox Judaism – entails numerous contradictions. The tensions of living with both tradition and modernity are both exciting and stimulating. Judaism should be viewed as a rich heritage which will speak differently to different people. Those who continue the struggle will find more in that rich tradition that speaks to them compellingly and meaningfully rather than less.

This comment was originally posted on Lookjed, the blog for the Lookstein Center for Jewish Education at Bar Ilan University (www.lookstein.org/lookjed.php).

Steven Bayme is director of AJC’s Department of Contemporary Jewish Life.