Crossing the Line
The Open Orthodox movement originally presented itself as a more liberal version of Modern Orthodoxy. But with time, it openly embraced a clear departure from halachah and mesorah, promoting ideas and practices that cannot be called Orthodox.
Last week, the Rabbinical Council of America targeted a central pillar of Open Orthodoxy with a resolution prohibiting female clergy, and the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah of Agudath Israel of America, went even further, placing the schismatic movement beyond the pale of Torah Judaism and denying the legitimacy of Open Orthodox-ordained rabbis. We met with three prominent members of the rabbinate to discuss these recent events and their implications for the Orthodox community.
For several years now, individuals and institutions affiliated with a movement known informally as Open Orthodoxy have roiled the American Orthodox Jewish community by adopting positions and practices that range from nontraditional, but still within Orthodox bounds, to openly heretical. In the last year, however, a steady stream of statements and actions by the movement’s leaders seem to reflect a decision to make a complete break with Orthodoxy.
Teachers and students at the movement’s rabbinical school, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT) and other Open Orthodox figures have publicly denied the Divinity of part or all of the Torah, disparaged the Avos, and rejected the authority of Chazal. Movement leaders have spoken out in favor of same-gender relationships, engaged in joint services with non-Orthodox and non-Jewish congregations, and innovated the “partnership minyan,” where men and women share equal roles in the prayer service. Full-fledged rabbinic roles for women have become a movement fixture.
This past week, the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah of America issued a statement declaring Open Orthodoxy a schismatic movement that no longer merits the title Orthodox and whose clergy cannot lay claim to rabbinic authority. Also last week, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) voted to prohibit its members from hiring women for any sort of rabbinic position or conferring ordination on women, a move clearly aimed at Open Orthodoxy.
With these steps bringing the confrontation between Open Orthodoxy and the mainstream Orthodox community to a head, Mishpacha sat down with three prominent figures in the rabbinic world to discuss what lies in store for Open Orthodoxy — and the implications of the movement for the American Orthodox community.
Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer is a rabbinic coordinator, group leader, and the chairman of the Dairy Committee at OU Kosher. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) and a member of the New York Bar. The opinions expressed here are his own.
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky is the spiritual leader of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun, Teaneck, New Jersey’s largest shul, and the author most recently of Tzadka Mimeni: The Jewish Ethic of Personal Responsibility.
Rabbi Yoel Schonfeld, a musmach of Lakewood Rosh Yeshivah Rav Shneur Kotler, is the rabbi of the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills. He has been a kashrus administrator at the OU for over 30 years and is a former officer of the RCA.
WHY DOES THE OPEN ORTHODOX MOVEMENT INSIST ON USING THE TERM “ORTHODOX” DESPITE PROFESSING BELIEFS AND ENGAGING IN PRACTICES THAT CLEARLY ARE NOT ORTHODOX?
Rabbi SP: I think the movement’s title comes from the fact that the founders were Orthodox, and almost all of them were musmachim of RIETS. So they just saw themselves within the framework of Orthodoxy.
But the term Orthodox is also a marketing issue. If they stop calling themselves that, it’s easy for people to draw a line and say, “Well, they’re not Orthodox; I don’t want that, I want to be Orthodox.” Once they call themselves non-Orthodox, they would lose the cachet, because people want to be Orthodox. But there’s only so much Orthodoxy can tolerate; after all, “Orthodox” means “correct belief.” Once you start diluting those beliefs, it’s no longer Orthodox.
They’re not going to change their name for the same reason that they’ve kept the mechitzah. Although one of the movement’s major imperatives is feminism and there’s nothing that sticks in the craw of feminists more than the mechitzah, the Open Orthodox retain some sort of mechitzah in every shul. Why? Because that’s a branding issue. Already in the late 1950s, early 1960s, it was established — if you have a mechitzah, you’re Orthodox, if you don’t, you’re not Orthodox. So to take away the mechitzah, notwithstanding the desire they would have to do that, would just brand them as non-Orthodox and that’s why they can’t do that.
I think the adjective “Open” is really problematic because it implies everyone else is closed. But I don’t see myself as “closed Orthodox.” On the contrary, to say that you are open and others are closed is itself divisive.
We need truth in advertising, and you cannot advertise something as Orthodox in any sense when both the hashkafah and the implementation of the hashkafah are not Orthodox. I think I was the one who, three or four years ago, coined the label for this movement as “neo-Conservative,” because they are actually recreating the nascent Conservative movement of over a century ago.
The similarities are actually quite eerie. Many of the early JTS graduates and members of the early Conservative movement were not only Orthodox, many of them had learned in yeshivos in Europe like Slabodka and Lomza. They came to America, and they began to absorb the different values of Western culture that ultimately impinged on the way they understood Yahadus.
I see the exact same thing happening with this movement. One of the things that catalyzes the movement is the introduction of foreign, Western doctrines into the Torah milieu and the sense that somehow the Torah has to accommodate those views even if it means tampering with fundamental ideas and practices of Yahadus. They’re making the same mistakes as the Conservatives did, making the Torah a tool to further a secular agenda. They think they’ll have a different outcome, but of course, they won’t.
WHAT IS THE APPEAL OF OPEN ORTHODOXY TO THE AVERAGE MODERN ORTHODOX JEW?
Rabbi Gordimer: A defining aspect of Orthodoxy is deference to Torah authority, and that doesn’t exist in Open Orthodoxy. They’ll have a 25-year-old who culls sources from the Bar-Ilan database and, based on that, puts together a whole new approach to geirus, which they then actually implement in practice, regardless of how things have been done since time immemorial and what the Torah greats of today say. That runs counter to everything Orthodoxy stands for.
Rabbi Pruzansky: But that’s the issue: From where are they going to derive a deference to authority when the whole Western culture today militates against the acceptance of authority? You’re saying one of the catalysts of the movement should be undone, but if you remove that, the whole movement falls because it’s premised on the fact that there’s no higher authority.
There’s always an attraction, of course, to a religious system in which there’s no authority figure and the laity rule and whatever you want to do you can do, ish kol hayashar b’einav ya’aseh. When you have flexible psak, you’re going to have a much happier laity, because anything goes and if it doesn’t, we’ll find a way to make it go.
Rabbi Gordimer: Also, while I agree with Rabbi Pruzansky that feminism may have been the original impetus for this movement, now a lot of their current graduates have turned the various social justice issues, which have a lot of popular appeal, into religious issues. Whether it’s ethical kashrus, same-gender relationships, or any other liberal social issue, they have made these into hashkafic imperatives.
Rabbi Pruzansky: Yes, it’s the dream come true of the liberal Jewish media to have a quasi-Orthodox rabbinate that is essentially propounding the former’s agenda of social justice. And it doesn’t matter that it’s not actually Orthodox, the fact that they call themselves Orthodox means that Reform, Conservative, and Open Orthodox are on the same page, and now the media can really castigate and ostracize those who are not on that page.
IS OPEN ORTHODOXY A REACTION, TO SOME EXTENT, TO THE SHIFTING IN RECENT YEARS OF MUCH OF THE MODERN ORTHODOX COMMUNITY TOWARD THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE RELIGIOUS SPECTRUM?
Rabbi Schonfeld: I think it is, rather, largely a result of the failure of a significant number of institutions within Modern Orthodoxy to develop a serious curriculum of love for limud haTorah, and even Torah-rooted love of Eretz Yisrael, beyond populist Zionism. This has left a void of meaning and spiritual purpose, and Open Orthodoxy is filling that void with its deviations. I have been complaining about this for years to Modern Orthodox educators.
Educated women in the chareidi world do not feel the need to become rabbis or spiritual leaders. But in the Modern Orthodox world, which embraces much of modern, secular values, women, and many men, have a sense of lack of fulfillment. Until this is addressed seriously in the Modern Orthodox world there will be a progressively greater void in the love of Torah and, yes, an emotional attachment to Israel.
Until the average Modern Orthodox high school student knows more about the Chazon Ish than about David Ben-Gurion or Derek Jeter, there will be a spiritual void that some other movement will seek to fill. Right now that movement is Open Orthodoxy, but it, too, will fail because it is a castle built on sand.
Rabbi Pruzansky: I never agreed with the notion of a “sliding to the right” in the Orthodox world. Perhaps I live in a bubble, but all I see is that my shul is packed day and night, every day of the week, with seven Shacharis minyanim and six for Maariv. People are in the beis medrash every night, there are shiurim every night. Was that the case 30 years ago? Probably not. But is it a slide to the right? No, it’s just that Torah is a magical document, and once exposed to it, people want more and more, there’s a cheishek, a yearning, for it, and invariably some of what the Torah says is going to permeate the learner and he’s going to want to live in a way that befits his learning.
But I think the core is still the same. What is Modern Orthodoxy? The saying goes that it’s “to be a Torah Jew in a Western milieu.” We’re all engaged in that in some manner no matter what camp we find ourselves in. It doesn’t mean we embrace everything in that milieu, just that we have to react to it somehow because you can’t not react to it. It need not change our hashkafah or practice, but it does demand a reaction, either that it’s neutral or that it’s something that can be embraced or that needs to be shunned.
Rabbi Gordimer: A central theme of the Open Orthodox agenda is to reverse what they see as the trend in Modern Orthodoxy toward strictness and have it revert to the way things were in the “good old days” of the 1950s and 1960s. But while there may have been a lot of laxity in halachah back then, there wasn’t the idea of theological compromise that Open Orthodoxy has introduced. No one in those times said it was okay to believe the Torah was written by several people or that it’s okay to question the halachic system.
OPEN ORTHODOXY HAS BEEN VERY SUCCESSFUL AT GENERATING LOTS OF PUBLICITY, BUT WHAT IS SOME OF THE PRACTICAL FALLOUT FROM THIS MOVEMENT?
Rabbi Gordimer: People ask why this is relevant to the yeshivah or chareidi community, but they don’t realize that the various segments of Orthodoxy do work in cohesion with one another on a lot of levels. So if Modern Orthodoxy is going to be ideologically and halachically compromised, the rest of Orthodoxy can’t work with them. In my work, I’m involved with the vaad harabbanim in many out-of-town communities and I’ve seen how when there is an Open Orthodox member with whom others are not comfortable for various reasons, it destroys the vaad’s cohesiveness, and some vaadim have become weakened for this reason.
I also know of cases in which rabbis have lost their pulpits because of Open Orthodoxy. In many communities, there’s only one Orthodox shul and a more liberal faction in the shul will apply pressure to bring in a YCT graduate, whose salary will be subsidized handsomely by supporters of Open Orthodoxy, and the existing rabbi is forced out. In other cases, an Open Orthodox rabbi comes to town and begins introducing reforms in his shul, leading the congregants in the other shuls to demand similar compromises of their rabbis and fire them when they refuse. I have two good friends who lost their jobs as rabbis this way.
The entire community is affected by this movement. I know someone who lives in a town where the only shul is led by an Open Orthodox rabbi and he feels he must now leave the community because he no longer feels he can eat in the shul kitchen and the rabbi is performing geirus without requiring kabbalas mitzvos.
Rabbi Pruzansky: One of the ironies of this movement is that it professes love of Jews, and I think they’re sincere in that, but they unwittingly have created such divisiveness, such a schism within the Jewish world that needs to be repaired, and they have to be the ones to repair it.
Rabbi Schonfeld: They profess a love of Jews as long as you’re in agreement with them. You cross their agenda and you’ll find yourself the subject of an op-ed in some non-Jewish publication. The head of YCT and some of his students have written in places like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal trashing Orthodoxy and attacking the Chief Rabbinate in Israel and the whole institution of shechitah.
That tells you everything you need to know about them. Their agenda is focused on their own advancement even at the peril of not just the rest of Orthodoxy, but of Judaism. People say about its founder, “Yeah, but he’s doing it l’Sheim Shamayim…” The fact is he has crossed every single red line and has never been made to pay a price for it.
WHAT PRECIPITATED THE RCA’S RESOLUTION PROHIBITING WOMEN CLERGY?
Rabbi Schonfeld: It was necessary because we have for too long tolerated an incremental expansion that has allowed the notion of female rabbis to gradually become acceptable conversation in Orthodox circles. When Rabbi Avi Weiss first began conferring “Maharat” status on women years ago, he promised the RCA he would never give them any kind of semichah. Slowly, he pushed the envelope and the RCA decided not to protest so as not to stir controversy or make him a martyr.
Now we have reached the point where some RCA members are proud to hire female “spiritual leaders.” How long can we continue to be polite? So while the RCA’s statement may seem rather strident or unnecessarily provocative to some, it’s the least we can do, in my opinion, to compensate for a lack of a determined reaction early on in the development of this phenomenon.
Rabbi Pruzansky: When I started writing about this topic four or five years ago, people called me to say, “You’re just fomenting machlokes. There’s so much going on in the Jewish world, Arabs, this, that, why are you causing machlokes? The hope is that the movement will wither and die, but machlokes is never a good thing.’ But nothing withers and dies without opposition; to the contrary, it gathers steam.
So you have to stand up and give people clarity and say “This is right and this is wrong,” or else the whole Torah world suffers. The ones making machlokes are the ones trying to expand the boundaries of what the Torah accepts far beyond what any other generation did and far beyond what the mesorah tolerates. They’re the ones who have to come back. We never want to write people out of Klal Yisrael or even out of the Torah world, but the onus is on them to come back.
WHY, THEN, HAS THE RCA LIMITED ITSELF TO ISSUING RESOLUTIONS ON SPECIFIC ISSUES LIKE WOMEN’S ORDINATION, RATHER THAN DECLARING OPEN ORTHODOXY ON THE WHOLE TO BE NO LONGER ORTHODOX?
Rabbi Pruzansky: It’s a good question. I don’t have a role there now, but I think they felt that since Open Orthodoxy is an amorphous tent and in many areas their own people don’t agree with each other, it would be a better approach to target specific doctrines. So in the last few years, the RCA has negated partnership minyanim and female rabbis, which are two big things, and there may be other things that will have to be addressed. But to have to issue a resolution, as the RCA did a few years ago, reaffirming that Torah is min haShamayim, reaches a point where it’s a farce.
Rabbi Gordimer: For the most part, the current generation of the Modern Orthodox rabbinate is not inclined to taking principled stands that may appear to be controversial even if privately they support them. So I don’t think that a clear declaration that Open Orthodoxy is no longer Orthodox could have gotten a majority in the RCA to support it.
The Rav [Rav Yoshe Ber Soloveitchik] may have believed in personal autonomy, but when it came to a threat to the integrity of the halachah, he took a stand without compromise. This is true whether the issue was the Rackman beis din, the mechitzah issue, Mihu Yehudi/geirus standards, or interfaith dialogue. Why today are we afraid to do that?
Rabbi Pruzansky: If JFK would have written his Profiles in Courage about the American rabbinate, it would have been a much thinner volume. But remember that the Moetzes is a small, cohesive group, whereas the RCA is a big tent with hundreds of members and every member has a voice. If one member of the Moetzes doesn’t agree with something, it’s 1 voice out of 11, but if 100 RCA members don’t like something, they can make a lot of noise, even if there are 300 members against them. And there are also Open Orthodox rabbis who are still members of the RCA, although they’re becoming a lot less comfortable there.
IS THERE A SPECTRUM OF OPINION WITHIN OPEN ORTHODOXY OR IS IT A MONOLITH? AND ARE THERE PEOPLE WHO CAN BE REASONED WITH ABOUT THE GRAVITY OF WHAT THEY’RE DOING?
Rabbi Gordimer: I’m not an insider to that movement, but I believe there is one group, consisting more of the original people behind the movement, who simply wanted a more liberal Modern Orthodoxy and for whom YU is too yeshivish. And then there is another group who have introduced heresy and denial of halachic authority — things that are not at all part of what Modern Orthodoxy is meant to be.
Although these two camps in Open Orthodoxy don’t delineate themselves as separate factions in the sense of “us versus them,” I know that there are figures within the former group who are opposed to women’s ordination and partnership minyanim in which men and women have equal roles. What both groups have in common is that they’re comfortable in that movement because it’s liberal and egalitarian.
The first group is one that in theory we can work with, but the only way that can happen is if they recognize that the other group is not acceptable, having gone beyond the bounds of Orthodoxy. We can then discuss what is appropriate within those boundaries.
Rabbi Pruzansky: There certainly has been a deterioration since the early years of YCT. I personally know musmachim from those years who are horrified by the leftward turn. They thought they were going to an institution similar to RIETS, a little more modern and open but basically adhering to the mesorah. But now it turns out they’ve got an ordination that’s not accepted within the Orthodox world.
There’s also something else to keep in mind regarding the attraction of this movement — its founder. He and I don’t agree on hashkafah, but he’s a tremendous oheiv Yisrael. He’s been successful as a rabbi, in kiruv work, and in pastoral work. Part of the issue is that he loves Jews so much that he doesn’t want to say “no,” and if a person has a particular desire in the realm of Torah, he tries to find a way to accommodate him.
If a person without his reputation had started this movement, it would not have attracted the same support. The fact that he — albeit a maverick, but a very personable, outgoing, loving maverick — started such a movement, is a good part of the reason for its success.
WHY HAS OPEN ORTHODOXY MADE SIGNIFICANT INROADS IN SOME PARTS OF THE COUNTRY, SUCH AS THE WASHINGTON, DC/SILVER SPRING AREA, BUT NOT IN OTHER ORTHODOX COMMUNITIES LIKE TEANECK?
Rabbi Pruzansky: I can’t speak to what’s going on in Silver Spring, nor even in Teaneck, but I can say that we have been negligent in the way we responded to Open Orthodoxy over the last few years, which was with blandness, with reticence, with a sense that if we were to just give it time, it would destroy itself and go away, instead of with forcefulness. The reality is that this movement has a core audience, and as long as the established Orthodox community does not delineate it as outside the framework of Orthodoxy, the average person will say, “There’s chocolate and vanilla; I like chocolate, so you can keep the vanilla for yourself.”
Part of the reticence is due to the fact that the leaders of this movement are classmates, friends, sometimes even relatives, of the more established figures of Modern Orthodoxy. And no one wants to get involved in throwing mud or even being critical in an objective way because the balabatim just say either “a pox on both your houses” or “there’s truth on both sides” and neither of those reactions is good.
In a free society, people will make their choices. I think attempts have been made over the years, whether it’s the RCA statements or the articles of Rabbi Gordimer and even the Moetzes statement, to redefine them in the public eye since they’re not going to define themselves, and that will have to suffice. As long as we elaborate with clarity exactly what the differences are and why that’s not Orthodox, then we’ve done our hishtadlus.
Rabbi Schonfeld: When this latest RCA resolution was being discussed in an e-mail forum, a few of the respected rabbanim said that we have to be careful not to come across as too harsh, but I chimed in and said that this entire discussion should never have come to pass. It’s only because we soft-pedaled the issue of women’s ordination all along that we’re now reaping the results of that.
It’s unfortunate, in my opinion, that the lead role in fighting Open Orthodoxy was left to the chareidi world, people like Avrohom Birnbaum in Yated Ne’eman. Although it will ultimately affect all of us, the first to be impacted are the Modern Orthodox and for too long they’ve left the battle to others.
Rabbi Pruzansky: But I think there’s something else here too. The Jewish world is really divided between those who like the Torah and find it to be temimah, and those who don’t like it, or at least don’t find it temimah. If you think the Torah’s perfect, so you love the Torah and you want to embrace it and apply it to your life. And in my community of Teaneck, baruch Hashem, most people like the Torah and like the mesorah, including the women.
But if you don’t like the Torah or you don’t think it’s perfect, then you want to start making changes to it and you eventually find yourself outside the pale of Orthodoxy. We can deduce this from the level of anger that rises up from within the Open Orthodox movement.
I have no animus toward them, Rachmana litzlan, but there’s such anger and cynicism emanating from the movement that it’s something they’re going to have to work on. Sarcasm, name-calling, and insults aren’t going to fly when you’re trying to have a reasoned discourse. But more and more, it has turned to that, and the personal animus and verbal assaults have increased. That’s not healthy for the Jewish People.
IS OPEN ORTHODOXY STRICTLY AN OUT-OF-TOWN PHENOMENON, OR IS IT SOMETHING IN-TOWN RABBANIM HAVE FACED TOO?
Rabbi Schonfeld: What we did have in Queens many years ago, in a precursor to Open Orthodoxy, was a push to have girls celebrate bas mitzvahs in almost the same fashion as boys do. The Yeshiva of Central Queens posed the sh’eilah to the Vaad Harabbonim as to whether a girl could have a separate minyan at which she would lein and say a derashah. The Vaad said no, and a couple members who were strongly in favor of it broke away from the Vaad over that.
Rabbi Pruzansky: I was a rav in Queens then, and that’s a good illustration of where, when a controversy arose, a policy was enacted and the possibility of further deterioration was prevented through clear guidelines.
But some would say that the RCA has run afoul of the very problem of failing to set clear guidelines, because in the recent resolution prohibiting women rabbis, the RCA takes no position on the validity of women serving as yoatzot halachah, who are not ordained but train to render guidance in specific areas of halachah. Does the RCA expect the average layman to distinguish between the function of a rav and a yoetzet halachah, if there even is one? Hasn’t the RCA only muddied the waters and given ammunition to Open Orthodoxy with this resolution?
Rabbi Pruzansky: There were those, in fact, who opposed the resolution because it wasn’t clear enough in that regard, but I think that we have to move incrementally in setting clear policy. The RCA wanted to isolate the particular phenomenon of ordination because it symbolized a symmetry between men and women, with male clergy and female clergy and no difference between them. It was felt that that had to be arrested before moving on to other areas.
There are differing opinions as to acceptability of the yoetzet role even among the “right-wing” Modern Orthodox, with some opposing it because it is merely ordination with a slightly different look and others seeing great value, even necessity, in it. Since there is no consensus on this, the resolution neither endorsed it nor rejected it.
Rabbi Gordimer: There is great confusion in the Modern Orthodox world about issues of mesorah and of roles. It’s not delineated and it’s not taught, and people don’t have the clarity and the conviction to articulate the lines and the limits, until things get out of hand, as they have in regard to women’s ordination.
As an example, there are women who graduated from some of these non-ordination programs but later on entered actual ordination programs or even abandoned Orthodoxy altogether in favor of radical feminism. And the reason that happens is that whether or not those non-ordination programs are worthwhile — I personally don’t think so — no one ever delineated for these women what it is that makes them okay or not okay, and so confusion reigns, with people just attending these programs without thinking things through. This aspect of Modern Orthodoxy is, in my opinion, what has enabled things to spin out of control.
WHY HAVEN’T THE VIEWS OF RAV YOSEF BER SOLOVEICHIK, WHO WAS MODERN ORTHODOXY’S PREEMINENT SOURCE OF GUIDANCE, BEEN INVOKED MORE FREQUENTLY IN RESPONSE TO OPEN ORTHODOXY?
Rabbi Gordimer: The Rav wasn’t alive or active when most of these issues arose, but I have, in fact, cited his views in my writings on Open Orthodoxy on those issues to which he did speak, such as women dancing with a sefer Torah. The response by people in that movement has been either silence or, in some cases, to say that the Rav lived in a different era or even that he’s not the only opinion on these matters. They have done everything they can to evade, dismiss, or even challenge his authority.
Rabbi Pruzansky: There’s a more complicated answer too, which is that the Rav never imposed his views on anyone because he was a big believer in personal autonomy. He might say “You’re wrong” or “You shouldn’t,” but he would never say, “You must.” That gave leeway to some of his talmidim of a more modern bent to take the nucleus of what he said and expand it beyond anything he ever imagined.
Rabbi Schonfeld: Here’s a case in point: One of my sisters went to a modern community for Simchas Torah and upon her return, told my father she had a hakafah. My father was not pleased, to say the least, and called up the rav of that community to ask how he had allowed this after the Rav had clearly come out against it. The rav told my father, “The Rav said women’s hakafos were not in keeping with kedushas beis haknesses, so we did it in the social hall.” So the Rav’s no became a yes. That’s why even the loyal talmidim don’t want to invoke his name, because someone else will come along and distort his views.
WHAT DO YOU SEE THE FUTURE HOLDING FOR OPEN ORTHODOXY AND HOW SHOULD THE ORTHODOX COMMUNITY RESPOND TO IT GOING FORWARD?
Rabbi Pruzansky: I think there was an underestimation of the potential growth of the movement. That being said, and although my perspective is somewhat limited because it doesn’t affect my life in Teaneck, I don’t think it’s making the inroads that people think it has and I don’t see it making exponential growth, especially if we consistently convey this message: “Buyer beware! Both the chareidi and Modern Orthodox worlds agree that this is not Orthodox. It’s a free country, so you can make your own choices, but know which path you’re heading down.”
This movement is heading toward a cliff and we’ve seen what happens at that cliff based on the history of American Jewry over the last century. We’ve traveled down that road and it cost us generations of Jews and it’s going to cost us more generations of Jews unless its leaders stop and say, “You know what? We did go too far in doing X, Y and Z. We need to come back into the fold, and we can be Modern Orthodox lite, but in terms of hashkafah we need to try to restrain the excesses, we need to be more careful in recruiting who we’ll admit to our semichah program and above all, we need to maintain fidelity to halachah.” Some may not listen, but some may take a second look.
The major issue for the Modern Orthodox world will be to focus on what hashkafos the yeshivos are imparting to their students. The message has to come from the parent body and from the major organizations like the RCA and the OU that schools need to monitor not just whether a rebbi can teach a se’if in Shulchan Aruch, but what hashkafah he is imparting to the children.
Rabbi Schonfeld: We don’t like to use the term “slippery slope,” but there is a slippery slope, and once you open the door, everything is going to find its way through that door. It was inevitable that it was going to reach this point, which is unfortunate. That’s why strong, unqualified positions have to be taken. Just as in politics and military conflicts, being nice to your adversary is perceived as weakness and is counterproductive, in religious matters it’s the same way.
Rabbi Gordimer: The rise of the Open Orthodox movement represents a moment of truth for Modern Orthodoxy. It compels the Modern Orthodox Jew to choose between, on the one hand, deference to mesorah and preeminent rabbinic authority, and, on the other, independence from the yoke of such authority in favor of a liberal/open path, into which the Torah is conveniently fit or modified as need be. I trust that the vast majority of Modern Orthodox Jews will opt for the first approach, which continues to be the unifying and defining characteristic of Orthodoxy of any stripe.
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 584)
Oops! We could not locate your form.
