One Noah Feldman writes about marrying a non-Jew and the world erupts...

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Background:

See the Wikipedia articles about:

Dr. Noah Feldman at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Feldman
and about his wife:
Dr. Jeannie Chi Yong Suk at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeannie_Suk

See also:

http://www.abovethelaw.com/jeannie_suk/
and/or
http://www.abovethelaw.com/noah_feldman/

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The wedding:

The New York Times
Archives
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E6D71539F936A2575BC0A96F958260

"WEDDINGS; Noah Feldman and Jeannie Suk
Published: August 15, 1999

Dr. Jeannie Chi Yong Suk, a daughter of Song Nam Suk and Dr. Chang Ho Suk of Great Neck, N.Y., is to be married this afternoon to Dr. Noah Raam Feldman, a son of Dr. Penny H. Feldman and Dr. Roy E. Feldman of Cambridge, Mass. Harold Hongju Koh, an Assistant Secretary of State, is to preside at the ceremony in the Harvard Club in Manhattan

Dr. Suk, 26, was until June a visiting lecturer on cultural exchange and interaction in literature at Yale College in New Haven, and an affiliate scholar at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in Manhattan.

In September, she will become a law student at Harvard University. She graduated from Yale and received a doctorate in philosophy in modern languages from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall scholar. She is keeping her name.

Her father is a gastroenterologist in Flushing, Queens. Her mother manages the practice and is a director of the Flushing branch of the Y.W.C.A.

Dr. Feldman, 29, was a clerk for Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court in Washington until last month. He is now a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows in Cambridge, where he is conducting research on legal theory and history. He graduated from Harvard and received a doctorate in Islamic thought from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. He also holds a law degree from Yale.

His mother is a vice president of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and the director of its Center for Home Care Policy and Research. His father is the president of Behavior Analysis Inc., a social policy consulting company in Cambridge."

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Orthodox Paradox

By NOAH FELDMAN

Published: July 22, 2007
The New York Times Magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/magazine/22yeshiva-t.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=65c2da82af1f612d&ex=1186113600&adxnnl=0&adxnnlx=1185989885-jsnZxT0nRAAp2LVR422dBA

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A number of years ago, I went to my 10th high-school reunion, in the backyard of the one classmate whose parents had a pool. Lots of my classmates were there. Almost all were married, and many already had kids. This was not as unusual as it might seem, since I went to a yeshiva day school, and nearly everyone remained Orthodox. I brought my girlfriend. At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from first grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, then looked again. My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found.

I didn’t want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend, to whom I was by that time engaged. So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.

Not long after, I bumped into the photographer, in synagogue, on Yom Kippur. When I walked over to him, his pained expression told me what I already knew. “It wasn’t me,” he said. I believed him.

Since then I have occasionally been in contact with the school’s alumni director, who has known me since I was a child. I say “in contact,” but that implies mutuality where none exists. What I really mean is that in the nine years since the reunion I have sent him several updates about my life, for inclusion in the “Mazal Tov” section of the newsletter. I sent him news of my marriage. When our son was born, I asked him to report that happy event. The most recent news was the birth of our daughter this winter. Nothing doing. None of my reports made it into print.

It would be more dramatic if I had been excommunicated like Baruch Spinoza, in a ceremony complete with black candles and a ban on all social contact, a rite whose solemnity reflected the seriousness of its consequences. But in the modern world, the formal communal ban is an anachronism. Many of my closest relationships are still with people who remain in the Orthodox fold. As best I know, no one, not even the rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand. What remains of the old technique of excommunication is simply nonrecognition in the school’s formal publications, where my classmates’ growing families and considerable accomplishments are joyfully celebrated.

The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. Our advanced Talmud and Hebrew classes were interspersed with advanced-placement courses in French literature and European political history, all skillfully coordinated to prime us for the Ivy League. To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years.

That aspiration is not without its difficulties. My own personal lesson in nonrecognition is just one small symptom of the challenge of reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity — of Slobodka and St. Paul’s. In premodern Europe, where the state gave the Jewish community the power to enforce its own rules of membership through coercive force, excommunication literally divested its victim of his legal personality, of his rights and standing in the community. The modern liberal state, though, neither polices nor delegates the power to police religious membership; that is now a social matter, not a legal one. Today a religious community that seeks to preserve its traditional structure must maintain its boundaries using whatever independent means it can muster — right down to the selective editing of alumni newsletters.

Despite my intimate understanding of the mind-set that requires such careful attention to who is in and who is out, I am still somehow taken by surprise each time I am confronted with my old school’s inability to treat me like any other graduate. I have tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere. As a result, I have not felt myself to have rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done so by virtue of my marriage.

Some part of me still expects — against the judgment of experience — that the individual human beings who make up the institution and community where I spent so many years of my life will put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries. The school did educate me and influence me deeply. What I learned there informs every part of my inner life. In the sense of shared history and formation, I remain of the community even while no longer fully in the community.

If this is dissonance, it is at least dissonance that the modern Orthodox should be able to understand: the desire to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence. After all, the school’s attempt to bring the ideals of Orthodox Judaism into dialogue with a certain slice of late-20th-century American life was in many ways fantastically rich and productive. For those of us willing to accept a bit of both worlds, I would say, it almost worked.

Fitting In

Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world. You must strive to be, as a poet of the time put it, “a Jew in the home and a man in the street.” Even as we students of the Maimonides School spent half of every school day immersed in what was unabashedly a medieval curriculum, our aim was to seem to outsiders — and to ourselves — like reasonable, mainstream people, not fanatics or cult members.

This ambition is best exemplified today by Senator Joe Lieberman. His run for the vice presidency in 2000 put the “modern” in modern Orthodox, demonstrating that an Orthodox Jewish candidate could be accepted by America at large as essentially a regular guy. (Some of this, of course, was simply the result of ignorance. As John Breaux, then a senator from Louisiana, so memorably put it with regard to Lieberman during the 2000 campaign, “I don’t think American voters care where a man goes to church on Sunday.”) Whatever concerns Lieberman’s Jewish identity may have raised in the heartland seem to have been moderated, rather than stoked, by the fact that his chosen Jewish denomination was Orthodox — that he seemed to really and truly believe in something. His Orthodoxy elicited none of the half-whispered attacks that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism has already prompted in this electoral cycle, none of the dark hints that it was, in some basic sense, weird.

Lieberman’s overt normalcy really is remarkable. Though modern Orthodox Jews do not typically wear the long beards, side curls and black, nostalgic Old World garments favored by the ultra-Orthodox, the men do wear beneath their clothes a small fringed prayer shawl every bit as outré as the sacred undergarments worn by Mormons. Morning prayers are accompanied by the daily donning of phylacteries, which, though painless, resemble in their leather-strappy way the cinched cilice worn by the initiates of Opus Dei and so lasciviously depicted in “The Da Vinci Code.” Food restrictions are tight: a committed modern Orthodox observer would not drink wine with non-Jews and would have trouble finding anything to eat in a nonkosher restaurant other than undressed cold greens (assuming, of course, that the salad was prepared with a kosher knife).

The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance the observant person from the rest of the world. When followed precisely, as I learned growing up, they accomplish exactly that. Every bite requires categorization into permitted and prohibited, milk or meat. To follow these laws, to analyze each ingredient in each food that comes into your purview, is to construct the world in terms of the rules borne by those who keep kosher. The category of the unkosher comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say, almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not. You cannot easily break bread with them, but that is not all. You cannot, in a deeper sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring the body through food.

And yet the Maimonides School, by juxtaposing traditional and secular curricula, gave me a feeling of being connected to the broader world. Line by line we burrowed into the old texts in their original Hebrew and Aramaic. The poetry of the Prophets sang in our ears. After years of this, I found I could recite the better part of the Hebrew Bible from memory. Among other things, this meant that when I encountered the writings of the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I felt immediate kinship. They read those same exact texts again and again — often in Hebrew — searching for clues about their own errand into the American wilderness.

In our literature classes we would glimpse Homer’s wine-dark sea, then move to a different classroom and dive headlong into the sea of the Talmud. Here the pleasure of legal-intellectual argument had no stopping place, no end. A problem in Talmud study is never answered, it is only deepened. The Bible prohibits work on the Sabbath. But what is work? The rabbis began with 39 categories, each of which called for its own classification into as many as 39 further subcategories. Then came the problem of intention: What state of mind is required for “work” to have occurred? You might perform an act of work absent-mindedly, having forgotten that it was the Sabbath, or ignorantly, not knowing that action constituted work. You might perform an action with the goal of achieving some permissible outcome — but that result might inevitably entail some prohibited work’s taking place. Learning this sort of reasoning as a child prepared me well, as it has countless others, for the ways of American law.

Beyond the complementarities of Jewish learning and secular knowledge, our remarkable teachers also offered access to a wider world. Even among the rabbis there was a smattering of Ph.D.’s and near-doctorates to give us a taste of a critical-academic approach to knowledge, not just a religious one. And the teachers of the secular subjects were fantastic. One of the best taught me eighth-grade English when he was barely out of college himself, before he became a poet, a professor and an important queer theorist. Given Orthodoxy’s condemnation of homosexuality, he must have made it onto the faculty through the sheer cluelessness of the administration. Lord only knows what teachers like him, visitors from the real world, made of our quirky ways. (In the book of poems about his teaching years, we students are decorously transformed into Italian-Americans.)

In allowing us, intentionally or not, to see the world and the Torah as profoundly interconnected, the school was faithful to the doctrines of its eponym, the great medieval Jewish legalist and philosopher Moses Maimonides. Easily the most extraordinary figure in post-biblical Jewish history, Maimonides taught that accurate knowledge of the world — physical and metaphysical — was, alongside studying, obeying and understanding the commandments, the one route to the ultimate summum bonum of knowing God. A life lived by these precepts can be both noble and beautiful, and I believe the best and wisest of my classmates and teachers come very close indeed to achieving it.

The Dynamics of Prohibition

For many of us, the consilience of faith and modernity that sometimes appears within the reach of modern Orthodoxy is a tantalizing prospect. But it can be undermined by the fragile fault lines between the moral substructures of the two worldviews, which can widen into deep ruptures on important matters of life and love.

One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.

This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient’s life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.

Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.

Nothing in the subculture of modern Orthodoxy, however, brought out the tensions between tradition and modernity more vividly for a young man than the question of our relationship to sex. Modernity, and maybe the state-mandated curriculum (I have never checked), called for a day of sex ed in seventh grade. I have the feeling that the content of our sex-ed class was the same as those held in public schools in Massachusetts around the same time, with the notable exception that none of us would have occasion to deploy even the most minimal elements of the lesson plan in the foreseeable future. After the scientific bits of the lesson were over, the rabbi who was head of the school came in to the classroom to follow up with some indication of the Jewish-law perspective on these questions. It amounted to a blanket prohibition on the activities to which we had just been introduced. After marriage, some rather limited subset of them might become permissible — but only in the two weeks of the month that followed the two weeks of ritual abstinence occasioned by menstruation.

After that memorable disquisition, the question of relations between the sexes went essentially unmentioned again in our formal education. We were periodically admonished that boys and girls must not touch one another, even accidentally. Several of the most attractive girls were singled out for uncomfortable closed-door sessions in which they were instructed that their manner of dress, which already met the school’s standards for modesty, must be made more modest still so as not to distract the males around them.

Whatever their disjuncture with American culture of the 1980s, the erotics of prohibition were real to us. Once, I was called on the carpet after an anonymous informant told the administration that I had been seen holding a girl’s hand somewhere in Brookline one Sunday afternoon. The rabbi insinuated that if the girl and I were holding hands today, premarital sex must surely be right around the corner.

My Talmud teacher — the one who took the physician to task — handed me four tightly packed columns of closely reasoned rabbinic Hebrew, a responsum by the pre-eminent Orthodox decisor, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, “in the matter of a young man whose heart lures him to enter into bonds of affection with a young woman not for purposes of marriage.” Rabbi Feinstein’s legal judgment with respect to romantic love among persons too young to marry was definitive. He prohibited it absolutely, in part on the ground that it would inevitably lead to nonprocreative seminal emissions, whether intentional or unintentional.

What Feinstein lacked in romantic imagination was more than made up for by Moses Maimonides, who understood the soul pretty well. He once characterized the true love of God as all-consuming — “as though one had contracted the sickness of love.” Feinstein’s opinion directed my attention to a passage in Maimonides’s legal writings prohibiting various sorts of contact with women. The most evocative bit runs as follows: “Even to smell the perfume upon her is prohibited.” I have never been able to escape the feeling that this is a covert love poem enmeshed in the 14-volume web of dos and don’ts that is Maimonides’s Code of Law. Perfume has not smelled the same to me since.

Difference and Reconciliation

I have spent much of my own professional life focusing on the predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while simultaneously cleaving to tradition. Consider the situation of those Christian evangelicals who want to participate actively in mainstream politics yet are committed to a biblical literalism that leads them to oppose stem-cell research and advocate intelligent design in the classroom. To some secularists, the evangelicals’ predicament seems absurd and their political movement dangerously anti-intellectual. As it happens, I favor financing stem-cell research and oppose the teaching of intelligent design or creationism as a “scientific” doctrine in public schools. Yet I nonetheless feel some sympathy for the evangelicals’ sure-to-fail attempts to stand in the way of the progress of science, and not just because I respect their concern that we consider the ethical implications of our technological prowess.

Perhaps I feel sympathy because I can recall the agonies suffered by my head of school when he stopped by our biology class to discuss the problem of creation. Following the best modern Orthodox doctrine, he pointed out that Genesis could be understood allegorically, and that the length of a day might be numbered in billions of years considering that the sun, by which our time is reckoned, was not created until the fourth such “day.” Not for him the embarrassing claim, heard sometimes among the ultra-Orthodox, that dinosaur fossils were embedded by God within the earth at the moment of creation in order to test our faith in biblical inerrancy. Natural selection was for him a scientific fact to be respected like the laws of physics — guided by God but effectuated though the workings of the natural order. Yet even he could not leave the classroom without a final caveat. “The truth is,” he said, “despite what I have just told you, I still have a hard time believing that man could be descended from monkeys.”

This same grappling with tension — and the same failure to resolve it perfectly — can be found among the many Muslims who embrace both basic liberal democratic values and orthodox Islamic faith. The literature of democratic Islam, like that of modern Orthodox Judaism, may be read as an embodiment of dialectical struggle, the unwillingness to ignore contemporary reality in constant interplay with the weight of tradition taken by them as authentic and divinely inspired. The imams I have met over the years seem, on the whole, no less sincere than the rabbis who taught me. Their commitment to their faith and to the legal tradition that comes with it seems just as heartfelt. Liberal Muslims may even have their own Joe Lieberman in the Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.

The themes of difference and reconciliation that have preoccupied so much of my own thinking are nowhere more stark than in trying to make sense of the problem of marriage — which is also, for me, the most personal aspect of coming to terms with modern Orthodoxy. Although Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is especially definitive.

The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern Orthodox community in the liberal modern state. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent. The solution adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not to ask) as by what they do.

Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation — itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust — marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community. Marrying a Jewish but actively nonobservant spouse would in most cases make continued belonging difficult. Gay Orthodox Jews find themselves marginalized not only because of their forbidden sexual orientation but also because within the tradition they cannot marry the partners whom they might otherwise choose. For those who choose to marry spouses of another faith, maintaining membership would become all but impossible.

Us and Them

In a few cases, modern Orthodoxy’s line-drawing has been implicated in some truly horrifying events. Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was a modern Orthodox Jew who believed that Rabin’s peace efforts put him into the Talmudic category of one who may be freely executed because he is in the act of killing Jews. In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn. (In a classic modern Orthodox twist, the same distinguished school has also produced two Nobel Prize winners.)

Because of the proximity of Goldstein’s background and mine, the details of his reasoning have haunted me. Goldstein committed his terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.

This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon: God’s directive to King Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter, God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I was in synagogue, too.

Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s policy of population movement at the time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical recurrence: “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” The Jews’ enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.

To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as well as similarity. According to one newspaper account, when he was serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people, “Clean of hands and pure of heart.”

It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense. After the Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment — said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs buried below.

Lives of Contradiction

Recently I saw my oldest school friend again, and recalling the tale of the reunion photograph, we shared a laugh over my continuing status as persona non grata. She remarked that she had never even considered sending in her news to our alumni newsletter. “But why not?” I asked. Her answer was illuminating. As someone who never took steps that would have led to her public exclusion, she felt that the school and the community of which it was a part always sought to claim her — a situation that had its own costs for her sense of autonomy.

For me, having exercised my choices differently, there is no such risk. With no danger of feeling owned, I haven’t lost the wish to be treated like any other old member. From the standpoint of the religious community, of course, the preservation of collective mores requires sanctioning someone who chooses a different way of living. But I still have my own inward sense of unalienated connection to my past. In synagogue on Purim with my children reading the Book of Esther, the beloved ancient phrases give me a sense of joy that not even Baruch Goldstein can completely take away.

It is more than a little strange, feeling fully engaged with a way of seeing the world but also, at the same time, feeling so far from it. I was discussing it just the other day with my best friend — who, naturally, went to Maimonides, too. The topic was whether we would be the same people, in essence, had we remained completely within the bosom of modern Orthodoxy. He didn’t think so. Our life choices are constitutive of who we are, and so different life choices would have made us into different people — not unrecognizably different, but palpably, measurably so.

I accepted his point as true — but for some reason I resisted the conclusion. Couldn’t the contradictory world from which we sprang be just as rich and productive as the contradictory life we actually live? Would it really, truly, have made all that much difference? Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions? My best friend just laughed.

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Stop ostracizing the intermarried

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

THE JERUSALEM POST
Jul. 22, 2007
http://joi.org/bloglinks/Stop%20ostracizing%20the%20intermarried%20%20Jerusalem%20Post.htm

This column would not have been written had its subject not first described himself and his predicament in this week's New York Times magazine.

Noah Feldman was a brilliant, Orthodox Jewish Rhodes scholar who arrived in Oxford in my fourth year as rabbi there in 1992. We quickly hit it off. For one thing, there was scarcely a subject - Jewish or secular - upon which Noah did not have some profound knowledge. We studied Talmud together several times a week and I made Noah a kind of secondary rabbi at our L'Chaim Society, such was the range of his Jewish erudition and his phenomenal capacity for teaching.

Noah was one of the most accomplished young students I had ever met. He was valedictorian of Harvard, a Rhodes and Truman scholar, and completed his Oxford doctorate in about 18 months, which may or may not be a university record. It was a source of great pride for me that Noah was observant and wore a kippa. We all marveled every Shabbat at Noah's incredible ability to read any section of the Torah at our student synagogue.

After graduating from Oxford, Noah went to Yale, where his observance began to wane. I heard from some of his classmates that he was dating a non-Jewish girl. Hearing that he was quite serious about her, when his girlfriend in turn came to Oxford as a Marshall scholar, I made a point of reaching out to her and inviting her to our Shabbat dinner.

My thinking was that Noah was far too precious to me and to the Jewish people to lose. If he was dating a woman whom he wished to marry, then it was our duty to try and expose her to the friendliness of the Jewish community with a view toward her exploring whether a serious commitment to our tradition was something that would suit her.

SADLY, OTHERS took a far different view. A mutual friend of ours who was a rabbi in Noah's life essentially told him that if he married outside the faith he would have to sever his relationship with him. Apparently, many of Noah's Orthodox friends made the same decision. The net result was that one of the brightest young Jews in the entire world was made to feel that the Jewish community was his family only if he made choices with which we agreed.

Of course I had wanted Noah to marry Jewish, and I took pride in the fact that I had helped to sustain his observance during his two years at Oxford. But the choice of whom he would marry was not mine to make. Before his wedding I wrote him a note that said, in essence, that we were friends and my affection for him would never change.

I told him that he was a prince of the Jewish nation, that his obligations to his people were eternal and unchanging, that whether or not his wife, or indeed his children, were Jewish, he would never change his own personal status as a Jew. I added that I knew he would do great things with his life as a scholar of world standing, and that he would always put the needs of the Jewish people first.

We remain good friends until today. I admire and respect Noah, and my wish is that perhaps, some day, his brilliant wife might see,of her own volition the beauties of our tradition and how family life is enhanced by husband and wife being of the same faith and practicing the same religious rituals.

True to my prediction, Noah went on, in his thirties, to become one of the youngest-ever tenured law professors, first at NYU and then at Harvard, and was chosen by the American government to serve as the consultant to the Iraqi provisional government in drawing up their constitution. Today he ranks, arguably, as the one of the youngest academic superstars in the US.

How tragic, therefore, that Noah's article in The New York Times magazine is a lengthy detailing of the alienation he has experienced from his former Orthodox Jewish day school and friends, who even cut him out of a class reunion photograph in which he participated.

FOR MORE THAN two centuries now, since the Emancipation, Jews have been debating how to deal with those who marry outside the community. The conventional response has been to treat them as traitors to the Jewish cause. We are all familiar with the old practice of sitting shiva for a child who marries out, as if he or she were dead, made famous in Fiddler on the Roof.

The extreme practice of ostracization was justified by the belief that only by completely cutting off those who married out would we be making a sufficiently strong statement as to the extent of their betrayal, thereby dissuading those who might follow suit.

There is one problem with this practice. Aside from the ethical and humanitarian considerations, it does not work. We have been practicing this alienation for decades, and yet intermarriage has grown to approximately 50 percent of the Jewish population! Worse, the practice is a lie insofar as it propagates the false notion that our Jewishness is measured only in terms of our being a link in a higher chain of existence, and that our Jewish identities have meaning only through our children. This absurd notion would deny the idea of Jewish individualism and how we are Jews in our own right.

I AM WELL aware of the fact that intermarriage is a direct threat to the very continuity of the Jewish people. But that does not change the fact that those who have chosen to marry out are still Jewish, should still be encouraged to go to synagogue, should still be encouraged to put on tefillin and keep Shabbat, should still have mezuzot on their doors, and should still be encouraged to devote their lives and resources to the welfare of the Jewish people and the security of the State of Israel.

And as far as their non-Jewish spouses are concerned, do we really believe that by showing the most unfriendly behavior we are living up to our biblically-mandated role of serving as a light unto the nations? Is there any possibility that a non-Jew married to a Jew will look favorably at the possibility of becoming halachically Jewish if he or she witnesses Orthodox Jews treating their husbands or wives as pariahs?

I am proud today to call Noah my friend. I do my best to reiterate to him the message that even with his marrying out, we are proud of his achievements and need his participation in Jewish organizational life. And it is my fervent hope that given the love and respect we show him, he will choose to show his wife and two children the glories of the tradition he knows so well with a view toward impressing upon them a desire to have them join in our eternal faith.

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Does Noah Feldman deserve to be hated?

By SHMULEY BOTEACH

The Jerusalem Post
Jul. 29, 2007 Updated Jul. 30, 2007
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1185379033599&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The writer is currently filming his new television program 'Shalom on the Road' in Alaska. His most recent book is Shalom in the Home ( http://www.shmuley.com/ ).

A torrent of criticism greeted my column last week on the subject of Noah Feldman and my argument that we should not ostracize those who have intermarried. I was taken aback by the level of hatred shown to Prof. Feldman, and by the number of people who are personally offended by his action in marrying a non-Jew. Some went so far as to suggest that Feldman deserved the fate of Zimri in the book of Numbers who was gored to death for having relations with a non-Jew.

I will ignore such embarrassing idiocy in this column and respond instead to my intelligent critics who believe that, first, those who marry out are traitors to Judaism, and second, that going soft on those who marry out will open the floodgates of intermarriage.

The first mistake they make is to totally misunderstand intermarriage. For the overwhelming majority of Jews who marry non-Jews, there was no conscious effort to betray a tradition. They simply fell in love.

My critics fail to distinguish between an immoral sin and an irreligious act. To steal, to lie, to murder is deeply immoral. But would we say the same of someone who desecrates the Sabbath? Does driving on Shabbat make you a bad person, or a nonobservant one? Does failure to attend synagogue make you into an irreligious Jew or a flawed human being? To be sure, if you practice no religious ritual you could hardly call yourself religious. But are you wicked?

THE SAME applies to those who marry outside the community. What immoral or evil act have they perpetrated that we should treat them with such venom? Whom did they murder? You will say that their action spells death to Jewish continuity. I will respond that our ostracization does far worse. It consciously cuts off from our community those who are still and forever Jews.

The greatness of the Lubavitcher Rebbe was his genius in distinguishing between religious and moral sin. Before the Rebbe those who ate non-kosher were treated as though they themselves were unkosher.

The Rebbe understood that these were not bad people. They were simply irreligious people. And they had to be shown love and respect. Not just in order to bring them back to the fold, but because it was righteous and Jewish to do so. Why should those who marry out be treated any differently?

I spent the past Shabbat in Anchorage as guest speaker of Rabbi and Mrs. Yoske Greenberg, a heroic Chabad couple who have brought Judaism to the wilds of Alaska for the past 16 years. There is no sign on their door that bars those who have married outside the community, and indeed in most Chabad outposts around the world a significant percentage of those attending have married out. Thanks to the Rebbe, they have somewhere to go that is warm and inviting and reconnects them with their people.

YET I DETECT a growing trend in observant Jewish circles to dismiss and condemn those whose lifestyles contradict Torah living. Foremost on this list are gays and intermarrieds, both groups being treated as pariahs and abominations. But which orthodox Rabbi would have the nerve to ever tell a gay man or an intermarried man that he should not come to synagogue, that he should no longer keep kosher, that he should stop putting on tefillin, and that he should take the mezuza off his door? If there is such a rabbi, let him come forward now.

Unlike Christianity, which is based on a single precept - faith in Christ - Judaism is based on 613 separate and autonomous commandments. Our umbilical cord with God consists of these 613 strands. To be sure, the more we keep, the stronger the connection. But the key is to remain connected with even a single strand, even a single mitzva, and that is the power of the Chabad mitzva campaign: to give even the most distant Jews a single chord of connection.

It is disgraceful that men and women who marry out are not encouraged to keep the rest of the Torah's commandments. It is disgraceful that they are treated as if they consciously rebelled against the Jewish tradition when, in their minds, they simply followed the dictates of the heart.

The Jewish community's policy should be precisely the opposite. We should tell all Jews, in no uncertain terms, that the Jewish community is always their home. That just because they make choices that are profoundly injurious to Jewish continuity does not mean we do not love and cherish them. We are not only a religion, but a people. Not only a faith, but a family. And a family's members are forever.

MANY HAVE written to me that Prof. Feldman's circumstances are different, seeing that he was raised in an Orthodox home and went to an Orthodox Jewish day school. He should have known better.

I know something of this matter. The award I was honored to receive last year from the American Jewish Press Association for Excellence in Commentary came from an article I wrote which designated Jewish day school education as the single greatest bulwark against assimilation and intermarriage. But that does not mean it is foolproof. And not just for the Prof. Feldmans of this world, but for all of us.

How many who have written to me critical of Feldman are themselves guilty of lapses in Jewish observance? I know scores of Orthodox Jewish businessmen who take their yarmulkes off at their Wall Street and legal offices, even though they are stalwartly Orthodox in all other practices. But they still feel a need to make an accommodation with the world. And do they really want to be dismissed as goyim because they do so, or do they want their communities to be just a little bit understanding of the challenges they face?

In the final analysis, God's Torah in its entirety is what should be practiced. There are no excuses for our failures, save the fact that we are all human and try our best to navigate the vicissitudes of life. But how we respond to those who lapse will dictate the kind of community we become.

We can employ the iron rod and show that Judaism is a religious of fear and intimidation. Or we can employ the outstretched hand of love and demonstrate that Judaism is a religion of understanding and inspiration.

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On Feldman and Boteach

By AVI SHAFRAN

The Jerusalem Post
Jul. 30, 2007 Updated Jul. 31, 2007
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1185789792020&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The writer is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.

One can't help but feel sad for Noah Feldman. In spite of his considerable professional accomplishments - a law professorship at Harvard, three books, a slew of well-received essays and a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, to name a few - the young Jew is clearly stewing. A bubble of his own imagining has burst in his face.

What he imagined was that, in its embrace of both Judaism and elements of contemporary culture, the "Modern Orthodoxy" of his youth granted Jews license to abandon as much of Jewish religious observance as they deem appropriate. Expressing his anger - coolly, to be sure, but the hurt seeps thickly through the poised prose - in a recent New York Times Magazine piece, "Orthodox Paradox," Professor Feldman describes how the Boston Jewish school he attended as a child and teenager went so far as to crop a class reunion photograph to omit him and his non-Jewish Korean-American fiancée, whom he later married.

But the Photoshopped portrait is only the professor's anecdotal hook. What he really resents is that his erstwhile school, along with some of his mentors and friends, spurn him for his decision to marry outside his faith.

No one, he admits, is rude to him. None of his former teachers or friends, he writes, would refuse to shake his hand. But he knows that they deride him for the life-path he has chosen. And that offends and perplexes him.

Does not "Modern Orthodoxy," after all, embrace the "reconcil[iation of] Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere"? Should it not, therefore, regard his intermarriage as an expression, if somewhat extreme, of his effort at such reconciliation? Were he and his classmates not taught to see themselves as "reasonable, modern people, not fanatics or cult members"? Leaving aside whether un-"Modern" Orthodox Jews are in fact disengaged from the public sphere (a visit to any of a number of financial firms, law offices and hi-tech retail businesses in New York or other places with large ultra-Orthodox populations might yield evidence to the contrary), much less whether they are fanatical or cultist, Feldman's umbrage is misplaced.

There is a reason why, to Orthodox Jews (and many non-Orthodox no less), no matter how embracing they may be of the larger world, intermarriage represents a deep betrayal. It is more than a violation of Jewish religious law. It is an abandonment of the Jewish past and an undermining of the Jewish future.

Because marriage, arguably the most important choice in a Jewish life, is not a partnership but rather a fusing - "and they shall be as one flesh," in Genesis' words. Since a spouse is part of oneself, the personal consequences of intermarriage are profound. As, in Feldman's case, are the communal ones; his children are not Jewish.

JUDAISM views the Jewish People as a special and hallowed entity. Members of the nation are to care for all - "we are to support the poor of the nations along with the Jewish poor," as the Talmud directs. And the righteous among the other nations, the Talmud goes on to teach, will receive their eternal reward. But the Jewish faith is clear about the ultimate redemption of the world: It is dependent on the Jewish People's remaining a nation apart in fundamental ways. One way is in our basic beliefs - for instance, that God gave our ancestors His law, and never subsequently changed it. Another is in our commitment to the integrity of the Jewish people qua people. Our commitment, in other words, to marry other Jews.

A celebrated Orthodox television personality and pundit reacted to Feldman's article in a Jerusalem Post opinion piece with words of welcome. While he considers intermarriage "a direct threat to the very continuity of the Jewish people," he nevertheless considers Feldman "a prince of the Jewish nation"; and suggests that intermarrieds be treated no differently from the in-married, that they be offered our "love and respect." His suggestion stems from his Jewish heart but his Jewish head should have been more carefully consulted.

Yes, there is ample reason to feel sympathy for Jews who intermarry. Transgressions performed from desire, Jewish tradition teaches, do not reach the level of those intended to be transgressive. And on a personal level, there are reasons to not cut off connections to intermarried friends or relatives. (It is not unheard of for non-Jews married to Jews to actually guide their spouses back to Judaism and to themselves convert; precisely such a couple is the subject of Migrant Soul, a biography I was privileged to write.)

At the same time, though, there is simply no way - not in the real world - to warmly welcome intermarrieds without welcoming intermarriage. No way to make Feldmans feel accepted for who they are without making potential Feldmans view intermarriage as innocuous. No way to "devalue" the gravity of intermarriage without dulling the truth that every Jew is an invaluable link in the Jewish chain of generations.

If one begins with the premise that intermarriage is dangerous to the Jewish people and the Jewish mission, the intermarried cannot enjoy our acceptance. There may be quibbles about the means by which we express our rejection of their choice. But the absence of any communal expression of reproach is nothing less than an invitation to intermarriage.

TO MY lights, it doesn't seem extreme in the least for a Jewish school to make clear to an intermarried alumnus that, despite his secular accomplishments, it feels no pride in him for his choice to intermarry. I wouldn't expect an American Cancer Society gathering to smile politely at a chain smoking attendee either.

It is painful, no doubt, to be spurned by one's community. It is painful, too, for a community to feel compelled to express its censure. Sometimes, though, in personal and communal life no less than in weightlifting, only pain can offer - in the larger, longer picture - hope of gain.

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From some letters to the editor on the online Jerusalem Post:

*1. Poor Noah
Shmuel
07/31/2007 00:36

Both Noah Feldman and Jeannie Suk met as law clerks for Justice Souter, and this academically brilliant Jewish fellow ended up married to Ms. Suk. That was their private business. However, not satisfied with a perceived slight, Feldman used a magazine article in the NY Times to defame traditional Jews and misrepresent orthodox Judaism. Why such revenge? He is apparently upset that he cannot have his unkosher cake and eat it, too. Poor Noah. And to top it off, he has Shmuley Boteach using him.

*2. Shafran correct
SL
07/31/2007 04:54

Rabbi Shafran is correct, of course: every group has its rules, and wanton violation of the basic rule of marriage by this academic genius but practical idiot does not warrant acceptance. Boteach's cynical use of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe's innovative tactics is but another distortion--alas, he was booted out of the Lubavitch movement, so there is no one who can counsel him, and he worships the limelight, jumping into the fray whenever a celebrity has been spotted. Feldman & Boteach have issues

*3. Boteach the Apologist
Joe Goldberg - USA
07/31/2007 06:33

What is Boteach smoking? What an apologist! A Chamberline. He is simply looking for publicity. Maybe he should stay with his clients Michael Jackson and Madonna. There is a difference between not observing a particular Mitzvah for a period of time and intermarrying which breaks the bonds of the Jewish People in eternity.

*10. Noah Feldman - the Boorish Self Indulgent Imp and Tool of International Anti-Semites
Evan Stone
07/31/2007 12:36

Noah Feldman is accomplished - and he is probably smart. But he is also a boorish, pathetic and self obsessed bully. He attempts to use the rules of civility to oppress the rights of others and avoid his own responsibilities. I pray he does tshuva. But, his path is difficult - because he has chosen to attack and endanger the entire Jewish community. He should be ostracized and abandoned. But, I do not relish considering the ultimate punishment which he will face before G-d.

*40. Feldman Bringing His Goy Wife to the Reunion Was Like Bringing Scotch to an Alcoholics Anonymous Reunion
AJew in the US - USA
07/31/2007 22:34

By marrying a goy Feldman cut himself and his goy offspring out of the yiddishkeit he learned at school, such as shabbos (how can he keep shabbos with a goy in the house-- she is going to make a shabbos meal for instance?) he cut out of teaching his kids Judaism (can't- they are goyim) , he cut out of kashrus, etc. Also, bringing her was an "in your face" affront. He cut out Judaism for himself and offspring. All the school did is cut him out of a meaningless photo.

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Don't Turn Your Back On Your Community And Then Badmouth It In The New York Times

By Gil Student
Monday, July 23, 2007
http://hirhurim.blogspot.com/2007/07/dont-turn-your-back-on-us-and-then.html

Look, you're not stupid. After thirteen years in yeshiva, you knew very well that by marrying outside of the Jewish faith that you were committing the ultimate slap-in-the-faith to the community in which you were raised. It was and remains your choice. This is a free country and it's your life to live. But be a man and take responsibility for your choices. Don't for a minute act surprised and pretend that you don't understand the profound insult that your decision represents to the community that raised you and on which you turned your back.

The community in general does not want to completely cut off ties with you. But certainly a smart man like you knows that it can no longer hold you high as an example of one of theirs who succeeded. You didn't. Sadly, to everyone's great dismay, like many others before you, you failed.

Modern Orthodoxy is all about nuance; it's about combining Orthodoxy with modernity. But the key is that God always comes first. You don't go to school on Yom Kippur, even if it means failing a final exam. You don't eat non-kosher, even if it means that your department head gets offended and thinks that you are not qualified for a tenured position. And you don't marry outside of the religion. No one is perfect, and there are plenty of people who violate Jewish rules but are still accepted in our community. However, intermarriage is more than a mere violation of a technical law. It is more than failing to wear tzitzis or wearing a jacket that has not been checked for sha'atnez. Marriage is a life choice, one of the most important decisions you ever make. You alone made your choice and it was to exclude Judaism in a very public way and to hit the community in a place where it is already severely hurting. And you know this.

The door is still open. I am sure that there are plenty of people from your past who are more than willing to maintain relationships with you on a personal level. We want you to come to synagogue and participate fully in Judaism. But don't expect to be treated like a superstar by the community on which you turned your back.

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Modern Orthodoxy Under Attack

Noah Feldman's intimate critique in the Times seen as raising the question of how to deal with Jews who marry out

Gary Rosenblatt - Editor And Publisher
The Jewish Week
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 / 17 Av 5767
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=14347

However tempting, it would be a mistake to dismiss Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman’s personal and pointed critique of Modern Orthodoxy in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday (“Orthodox Paradox”) as merely The Big Kvetch.

His essay, sure to provide fodder for numerous sermons this Shabbat, is a long and bitter complaint that despite his numerous and remarkable professional accomplishments, he has been snubbed by the Brookline, Mass., yeshiva high school from which he graduated with honors in the 1980s.

Despite the fact that Feldman was valedictorian of his class at Harvard, a Rhodes Scholar and Truman Scholar who completed his doctorate at Oxford in record time and went on to help craft the Iraqi constitution, he and his then-girlfriend were literally cropped out of a reunion picture of Maimonides School graduates published in the alumni newsletter some years ago, and none of the personal updates he has sent in since have been published. Why? Because the girlfriend — now wife — is Korean-American. Not Jewish.

And Feldman, who aptly describes the yeshiva’s goals of “reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity” as seeking to combine “Slobodka and St. Paul’s,” maintains that he has been rejected by his community despite the fact that he has “tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere.”

Poor Noah, one may think on first read. How primitive and unfair for his former yeshiva to refuse to publicly acknowledge his successes.

But as one continues to read Feldman’s essay, we see that it is he who is unfair in expecting to be lauded by a community whose values he has rejected and in crafting an intellectually dishonest case for himself.

Still, the implicit and more lasting question raised by the essay is how should the Jewish community in general, and the Orthodox community in particular, deal with Jews who have married out?

Sending a message to our children that we deeply value in-marriage for social, religious and communal reasons is all well and good, but what do we do after the fact, once they’ve chosen a non-Jewish partner and conversion is not a part of the conversation?

Unfair Arguments

As for Feldman’s arguments, in insisting that Maimonides himself, the 12th century rabbinic scholar and philosopher, believed that knowing the world was the best way to know God, he ignores the fact that it was Maimonides who codified Jewish law, established the 13 principles of faith, and insisted on adherence to halacha.

Feldman then goes on at some length to cite Jewish law’s tensions over violating the Sabbath to save the life of a non-Jew. But he fails to mention that the dispute is Talmudic, not practical; no Modern Orthodox doctor would hesitate to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath.

Perhaps most upsetting, and unjust, the only allegedly Modern Orthodox Jews Feldman describes in his essay besides Sen. Joseph Lieberman are Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzchak Rabin, and Baruch Goldstein, the American-born physician who murdered 29 Arabs in Hebron in 1994. The two are cited as examples of men who took Jewish imperatives to their logical conclusion by committing murder.

“That’s like judging the peacock by its feces,” noted Rabbi Saul Berman, a scholar and former head of Edah, an organization that promoted Modern Orthodox values.

Indeed, no serious Modern Orthodox Jew is unaware of the tensions between upholding the Torah law and recognizing the values and benefits of Western democratic ideals. Rabbi Berman credits Feldman with pointing out the need to explore such tensions, which when unrecognized or out of balance can produce an Amir of Goldstein, “but it’s not fair to judge the system” by such aberrations, he maintains.

Psychic Pain

In the end, Feldman’s essay is less about Modern Orthodoxy than about his own psychic pain over being rejected. He wants it all: to be embraced if not applauded by the Jewish community whose values he has discarded by marrying out.

As Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, senior scholar at Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future, noted in a letter sent to The Times, “fealty to Jewish tradition requires more than a ‘mind-set’ expressing ‘respect and love’ for its teachings; it presupposes certain fundamental normative behaviors. America is a country of choices, but choices have consequences and not every choice is equal. It is unrealistic for Mr. Feldman to expect to maintain good standing in a community whose core foundational behavioral — as well as value — system he has chosen to reject.”

Judaism is not alone in this attitude. Witness, for example, the Catholic Church’s discomfort with former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a divorced Catholic who favors abortion rights, or any religious faith’s attitudes toward members who publicly violate its tenets.

But Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author and television personality (“Shalom in the Home”), cautions against alienating some of our best and brightest Jews who marry out. Rabbi Boteach has been a friend of Feldman’s since he served as a rabbi at Oxford University where Feldman studied for two years in the early 1990s. In an essay in the Jerusalem Post this week, Rabbi Boteach says that in addition to the “ethical and humanitarian considerations” regarding ostracizing those who intermarry, the approach is ineffective, with intermarriage rates so high.

He argues that the community has a far better chance of winning over the non-Jewish spouse and the Jewish partner through welcoming behavior rather than shunning the couple.

This inreach vs. outreach debate has been part of the American Jewish landscape for a number of years, but there are those who suggest a more nuanced approach.

“There is a difference between a personal and a communal response to intermarrieds,” noted one Jewish educator who knows Feldman from Maimonides School. It’s one thing, he said, to have a personal relationship (and one wonders if Feldman would have felt less hurt if someone from the alumni office had explained the decision not to print his picture). “But for the school not to crow about a graduate who married out — how could he think otherwise?”

Cropping Feldman and his wife out of the photo was “unconscionable,” according to Steven Bayme, national director of contemporary Jewish life at the American Jewish Committee and a graduate of Maimonides School. But he noted that even Feldman acknowledged every minority group requires boundaries to maintain and preserve its own identity and that marrying out is viewed with disfavor by every denomination of Judaism.

“The price for the individual may be tragic,” Bayme said, “but the loss is far more destructive for the community in terms of cultural distinctions and communal cohesion if you remove the boundaries.”

Irreconcilable Issue

What Feldman’s essay points up is that intermarriage is the irreconcilable issue for those who argue that American and Jewish values are compatible. “We’ve sold a lot of Jews a bill of goods when we’ve told them there are no contradictions between being a good Jew and an American,” noted Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “In America you are taught you can marry anyone you fall in love with, but Judaism argues that we are a minority culture and will only survive if Jews marry other Jews.”

Sarna chairs an American Jewish Committee task force on attitudes toward non-Jews in the community, and asserts that with an estimated 1.7 million non-Jews living in Jewish households — to put it another way, about 23 percent of those living in Jewish households are not Jewish — this is “a very important debate” for the community to engage in.

Citing the “magnitude” of the issue and the “bitterness that drips out” of Feldman’s essay, Sarna suggests that perhaps it is time for the community to reconsider ways to draw people in rather than ignore or shun them, especially when there are indications that many non-Jews are supportive of raising their children as Jews.

Others would argue that the community already has tilted so far toward outreach and acceptance of non-Jews that there is little incentive left for them to convert to Judaism.

What Noah Feldman has done, consciously or not, is raise some important issues, less about his old yeshiva and Modern Orthodoxy per se than about dealing with Jews who do not see marrying out as leaving the fold.

Conversion is the most obvious and desired solution, but for those who eschew that option, we need to explore ways to encourage their positive exposure to Jewish life.

Feldman would argue that just because he intermarried does not mean he chose to separate himself from his heritage. But being Jewish means not only incorporating the values and traditions, but also remaining part of a community.

For all of Feldman’s candor in the essay, he has nothing to say about where he fits into the community, if at all; whether he wanted his wife to convert; whether they are raising their children as Jews or not; or his feelings about all this. He only owes us such information if he wants our understanding and empathy, which clearly he does.

He does owe Modern Orthodoxy an apology for pinning it with his anger over rejection, knowing full well the rules of engagement. But we in turn owe him a sense of gratitude for a wake-up call, however unpleasant, about the need to struggle more deeply and honestly with the moral and religious tensions and contradictions in Modern Orthodoxy that can never be reconciled, and about learning how to deal more sensitively with those on the outside who may be calling out — in anger and loneliness — for a way back in.

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Noah Feldman, Intermarriage and the Eternal Mission

Wednesday, July 25, 2007
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2007/07/noah-feldman-intermarriage-and-eternal.html

Orthodox Paradox , Noah Feldman's whiny New York Times piece is getting a lot of attention. Orthodox Paradox is at its root several pages of repetitive whining in which Noah Feldman dishonestly bashes Judaism and the Bible while endlessly displaying his childish frustration because his school failed to include his accomplishments in school bulletins and his girlfriend in reunion photos.

In an age where everyone is the victim, Noah Feldman creates a narrative of being victimized, excluded and shunned. Like most secularists who reject the absolute beliefs of a religion, he has no clue that those beliefs are more than a multiplication of values that can be infinitely recombined in any combination. Rather than understanding that he has made the choice to reject Judaism, he instead complains about being rejected.

"For me, having exercised my choices differently, there is no such risk. With no danger of feeling owned, I haven’t lost the wish to be treated like any other old member. From the standpoint of the religious community, of course, the preservation of collective mores requires sanctioning someone who chooses a different way of living."

What Noah Feldman simply fails to grasp that by sanitizing his departure from the Jewish people under the guise of "choices" and "lifestyles" he is ignoring the facts of the matter. By intermarrying Noah Feldman made a decision. A decision to leave the Jewish people. It is the consequences of that decision that have isolated him and set him apart. From a functional standpoint he is no longer Jewish. His children will not be Jewish. He may have an emotional wish to be treated like any old member but that is the same egotistical self-centered need for emotional realization that prevents him from understanding and accepting the meaning of his own choices.

By his own testimony, people at his old school have been more than cordial to him. But at the same time if you give up United States citizenship for French citizenship and then pay a visit to the United States, you will find that things have changed. Like most self-indulgent egotists, Noah Feldman feels the right to demand that he be allowed to make his own choices while demanding that he not have to deal with any of the consequences of those choices.

I have tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere. As a result, I have not felt myself to have rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done so by virtue of my marriage.

Noah Feldman's deliberate clueless is rooted in refusing to understand that Judaism is more than just a set of values, it is an absolute system of beliefs of divine origin. If you do not believe that, you do not believe in Judaism. Vague and nebulous statements about respecting and loving 'the wisdom of the tradition' are meaningless. A Jewish upbringing is not merely a means of passing on some general traditions. It is a devoted commitment to G-d and a people. Without those it has no meaning. By "virtue of his marriage", Noah Feldman had departed from G-d and his people. That forms his utter rejection of both G-d and the Jewish people.

Some like Shmuley Boteach, who is forever willing to serve as the enabler to people who have made bad choices in life, are happy to blame Judaism for "driving him away" by not accepting him, but you cannot drive away someone who has chosen to leave.

Although Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is especially definitive.The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern Orthodox community in the liberal modern state.

Again Noah Feldman seems determined to continue the same clueless refusal to recognize what is at stake. All Jews who believe in biblical literalism, that the Torah is the actual word of G-d reject intermarriage. Not because it defines some social borders or because it's some detail of Jewish law. The Jewish mission is not an individual lifestyle as the modern self-indulgent brats like Noah Feldman tend to see it as. It is a generational journey beginning with Jacob and on down to the latest baby born today. The resistance to intermarriage is not some antiquated Jewish prejudice. It is the definition of being Jewish, the passing of the legacy of one generation to the next, the binding chain of thousands of years. When you sever that chain, nothing is left.

The Jewish rejection of intermarriage is not a rejection of others, it is an acceptance of our mission. A mission that has continued on for much of the history of the world. Noah Feldman chose self-indulgence and his indignation at his community's refusal to accept him despite his departure from the Jewish people is hollow and self-serving as are his irrelevant excursions into sliming Judaism with ramblings about Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir which serve only to vent his spite and lay claim to his moral superiority. It is only fitting that Noah Feldman has ended up in the Council on Foreign Relations. Morally that is exactly where he belongs.

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Professor Noah Feldman and Cognitive Dissonance

Sunday, July 22, 2007
http://havolim.blogspot.com/2007/07/professor-noah-feldman-and-cognitive.html

We need to be grateful that Noah Feldman. Usually, when one’s life-choices are dissonant with one’s religious inculcation, the transgressor rationalizes his decisions by vilifying his religion. This is a natural form of denial, and is common to many instances of cognitive dissonance. Professor Feldman, happily, has been able to create a psychic niche, a safe harbor, for his self-esteem, without wholesale derogation of his religious education. Apparently, he is by nature a good soul, a man of deep and abiding honesty, and he is unwilling to fall prey to the bitterness so common to people in his position. His chiddush, his novelty, is to limit his patronizing bemusement to his hidebound or religiously constrained teachers and erstwhile society, while re-imagining what Judaism would be if it were more truly understood and fairer to people like, for example, him.

Having said this, it is interesting to point out what fools our hearts make of us. I am not interested in discussing whether his article skews to the disingenuous or to the subversive. But Professor Feldman is a bona fide illui, and even rarer, a disciplined illui with a solid and encyclopedic education. It is therefore instructive, indeed amazing, to see how knowing misrepresentations and failures of thought and imagination are pressed into the service of his need for validation.

Phylacteries. Do they have anything to do with instruments of torment? Is it the fact that both are made of leather? Assuming that the comparison was intended as a bit of humor, anyone with some respect for Jewish tradition would have to agree that it is in extremely poor taste. Mashal le’mah hadavar domeh: on that basis, burning chametz before Pesach is very much like Suttee. How remarkable that we share so much with the Hindus!

Professor Feldman’s remarks that our kashrut constraints mandate that we avoid eating with non-Jews, just as we avoid eating with Jews that do not adhere to the Kosher laws. He finds this to be divisive and dehumanizing. He does not mention that we are not constrained in any way from eating with anyone we want to at our own homes and in our own restaurants. There are a few minor restrictions that do pertain even to eating kosher food that was prepared by non-kosher-food-eaters. Ironically, one of the reasons for those proscriptions is to lessen the possibility of intermarriage.

Professor Feldman mentions that we are only allowed to desecrate the Sabbath on behalf of non-Jews in order to maintain cordial relations with the society we live in. This is an example of a half truth that a man with his intellect, if he had given it some thought, should have realized is utterly false and misleading. First of all, we cannot desecrate the Sabbath to save Jews either. The only reason that in practical Halacha we do so, is because one can desecrate the Sabbath in defense of the Sabbath. We desecrate the Sabbath to save the lives of those who themselves keep the Sabbath– not because of the primacy of the Jewish life, but because of the primacy of the Sabbath. Furthermore, his dialectic of universalism/particularism creates a false universe of options. What he calls ‘particularism’ is just another way of describing secular humanism, or selfish altruism. We desecrate the Sabbath in order to create a society in which human life is paramount, both for us and for the gentile world.

Rav Moshe Feinstein is accused of a failure of romantic imagination. Why? Because Rav Moshe recognized the inevitable metamorphosis of innocent friendship into sexual infatuation and its concomitant proscribed behavior. Having blithely disparaged Rav Moshe's warnings, Feldman demonstrates the honesty and truth of those warnings by reading into the Rambam-- the supreme rationalist to whom sexual relations were no more than an unfortunate, though necessary, nuisance-- the most absurd double entendre. His reaction to the Rambam, indeed his life choices, give resonance and credence to Rabbi Feinstein’s teshuva.

A massive intellect like Professor Feldman in entitled to look with derision upon the weak-kneed rationalizations of the evidence of an ancient world which were presented by his teachers. But he should not have stopped there. To a mind like his, informed by Einstein’s perspective of the connection between time and matter, would it have been that difficult to realize that, that the story of Genesis involved a bilateral temporal creation, the creation of a true past which, nunc pro tunc, actually occurred, along with a present and a future, all of which creation occurred at one specific moment in subjective time?

Professor Feldman refers to the Amalek commandment as explicitly genocidal. How convenient it is for a twenty-first century man to look back and misunderstand. It is also lazy. It wouldn’t take much effort to realize that in the ancient world, any survivor of a war would be duty and honor-bound to take revenge for the killing of his relatives, whether the war was justified by self-defense or not. Leaving an Amalekite alive was the equivalent of sending baby Hitler to an orphanage. And despite this imperative, Feldman’s beloved Rambam states that even an Amalekite who accepts the Jewish moral code is spared. To me, that is the surprising element in the commandment.

It takes very little sleuthing to prise out the sensual drives that hide behind and motivate the Professor’s allegedly thoughtful and reasoned j’accuse. Although I would, if there was a need for categorization, be placed with the ultra-orthodox, I am relatively cognizant of secular literature. Professor Feldman calls to mind Ishmael, in Moby Dick, as he skinned and rendered the whale. The two of them wear the same habiliment. The difference is that Ishmael didn’t decide that his hat had earned him a pulpit. Quite the contrary; in that position, it is more honestly said to "have no conscience."

I don’t know what the future holds for Professor Feldman. He is practically sui generis, a strange creature of the Modern-Orthodox movement, whose massive intellect and superb education has allowed to make peace between utterly incompatible feelings and concepts without too much damage to his psyche and his native character traits. He is indeed a treasure to the Jewish people and to humanity as a whole. He has my best wishes that God help him find his way home.

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Do as I Say, Not as I Do
Noah Feldman's puzzling compromise between religion and secularism.

BY STEVEN I. WEISS
The Wall Street Journal
Friday, September 2, 2005
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007200

If Roy Moore is to be allowed to place a 3,200-pound granite monument in front of a courthouse, why shouldn't Orthodox Jews be allowed to stick some small strips of plastic on telephone poles?
That's a question that could puzzle readers of "Divided by God," the latest volume from Noah Feldman. In the book, Mr. Feldman--the 33-year-old legal rock star and New York University professor who was chief adviser for the Iraqi constitution--proposes a Solomonic compromise. He urges legal secularists to abandon their fight against religious symbols on public grounds and asks "values evangelicals" to stop pushing for public funding of their programming. To take a couple of real-life examples where such a compromise might play a part: Even though some folks in Cleveland have won their battle to gain public funding for local Catholic schools, they shouldn't take the money. And the secularists who just managed to get the Supreme Court to throw the Ten Commandments monument out of a courthouse in Kentucky should let it stay.

Mr. Feldman's is a strange proposal, not only because there is no reason to believe that either side will make the concessions he calls for but also because of the fact that, not too long ago, Mr. Feldman offered his services pro bono to the city of Tenafly, N.J., in its fight against Orthodox Jews who wanted to have an eruv, or Jewish ritual boundary, placed around the town. (On the Sabbath, Talmudic law prohibits carrying objects outside a dwelling, but it is allowed if a boundary is placed around a number of dwellings.) In most modern urban landscapes, barely distinguishable pieces of plastic and string are added to telephone poles to create the eruv.

The Tenafly eruv went up in late 1999, but when the mayor found out about it a year later the borough council demanded that it be taken down, prompting the Orthodox community to file a lawsuit claiming religious discrimination. Eventually the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the borough had indeed violated the Orthodox community's right to free exercise of religion. The key to the decision was the court's finding that the city had pursued an anti-Orthodox agenda, using for the purpose a semi-enforced local ordinance aimed at keeping telephone polls clean.

Wasn't the eruv a perfect example of a religious symbol on public grounds? To judge by his own thesis, shouldn't Mr. Feldman have helped the Orthodox community in their lawsuit instead of Tenafly in its effort to ban the eruv?

It was the neutrality of the local ordinance, Mr. Feldman told me in a recent interview, that was the basis of his defense of the city and that led him to get involved "when almost no one else would touch the case." Mr. Feldman contributed what borough officials estimate to be $75,000 worth of his time. The Tenafly dispute, Mr. Feldman argues, had nothing to do with the Establishment or Free Exercise clauses of the Constitution and everything to do with the fact that "there is a neutral, generally applicable law in place."

But Mr. Feldman says he was especially "bothered to see what was essentially an intra-Jewish community problem . . . treated as a federal lawsuit." He wished that the eruv association had found a more civil resolution to their problem than "suing the Borough council members in their individual capacities and accus[ing] them--including the Jews on the council, a majority--in open court of being anti-Semites." He believes "the whole issue arose out of miscommunication and misunderstanding."

That may be. But it seems disingenuous of Mr. Feldman to write in support of greater freedom for religious displays in his book while using a technicality to argue against it in northern New Jersey. There is another inconsistency here as well. The argument of "Divided by God" is more political than legal. Mr. Feldman hopes to persuade activists on both sides of the church-state debate to rest their cases not on the outcome of litigation over the meaning of the First Amendment but on a sense of what is proper for American society.

If Mr. Feldman is so loath to use the legal process to sort out these issues, it is reasonable to wonder why he pushed a rather dubious case through multiple levels of appeals, pro bono, when, as he himself boasts, almost no one would take money to argue on the council's behalf. He could have offered instead to mediate between the two sides.

After Mr. Feldman's loss in court, he went on to write a book telling everyone else why they should forget their victories. It's not exactly a winning argument.

Mr. Weiss writes the religion blog Canonist.com and is editor and publisher of CampusJ.com.

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Who is Noah Feldman?

http://www.mentalblog.com/2007/07/who-is-noah-feldman.html
Tuesday, July 24, 2007

On the subject: mentalblog.com: At once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school:

Luke Ford points to the two year old article in the WSJ by Steven I. Weiss ‘Noah Feldman’s puzzling compromise between religion and secularism’ "…Mr. Feldman offered his services pro bono to the city of Tenafly, N.J., in its fight against Orthodox Jews who wanted to have an eruv..."

For many Jews who lack intellectual curiosity liberalism is the new religion. And strangely enough Maimonides is the school that cultivates these characters in spades. So in some way he is attacking the school that is the very embodiment of his own credo.

Ben Chorin I was planning to write some reflections on Jews in America but that disingenuous article by Noah Feldman has set me off in another direction.

My Obiter Dicta: Noah Feldman: Second Take (Tisha B'Av 7:40 PM)

Hirhurim: Don't Turn Your Back On Your Community And Then Badmouth It In The New York Times.

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Q&A With the Author of “Orthodox Paradox”

Joey Kurtzman,
http://www.jewcy.com/daily_shvitz/questions_for_the_author_of_orthodox_paradox
July 23, 2007

Noah Feldman’s “Orthodox Paradox,” an article published in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, is a shanda fer da goyim, a skewed and distasteful takedown that invites non-Jews to gawk at the internal problems of a modern Orthodox Jewish community. Or maybe it’s a poignant and brave discussion of the challenges of bringing a traditional faith into modern life, written by a man who cherishes his people. Either way, it’s kicked up a storm of impassioned chatter throughout the interweb, where you can find both these judgments and many more.

“Orthodox Paradox” hits on themes close to Jewcy's editorial heart, what with Feldman trying to figure out what a cosmopolitan Jew’s to do with this bewildering, antiquated faith that we just can't seem to leave behind. So we had to pick his brain a bit. Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School who was raised modern Orthodox, agreed to answer my questions via e-mail.

In the hot seat: Noah Feldman

Why did you write this article?

These are issues I've been thinking about for a long time, and that have recurred again and again in my work on the U.S. and the Muslim world. My thinking on those topics is influenced by my education in the modern Orthodox world, and I came to think that others might be engaged with similar issues.

You were surprised when Maimonides—the yeshiva from which you graduated—airbrushed out you and your (non-Jewish) wife from a photo published in the alumni newsletter. Your surprise struck many readers as rather strange, since the community makes no secret of its rejection of intermarriage. It’s a bit as if you’d pulled out a bag of pork rinds, devoured them with relish throughout the evening, and then expressed bewilderment when someone asked you if you'd set them aside until later. What are your critics missing here?

My classmates are great. As it happens, the reunion was lots of fun and we were all warm towards one another, as one would hope. What is troubling about the view you describe—which I never sensed from my classmates—is its implication that somehow modern Orthodox people should be protected from my living my life as I choose. As if choice of life partner were as trivial as a snack. Going to a reunion is a perfectly normal part of life, and choosing not to attend, in order to shield people from my life, would be absurd. People who are comfortable with their own life choices don't get "offended" when others choose differently.

Along with some areas of the African-American community, Jews seem to be one of the only groups in America that can raise holy hell about intermarriage and get away with it. Why do you think this is? And if this aversion to intermarriage is harmful to our community, do you think we would benefit from more external criticism for it?

The comparison to the African American context is intriguing and complex—see Randall Kennedy's book Interracial Intimacies. I do think we need some serious reflection on how best to achieve the goal of continuity. Chabad certainly pursues this goal through practices of inclusion, and I think the rest of the Jewish world could learn a lot from them in this regard. As for criticism, from within or without, I think honesty is the best course.

A teacher of yours argued that Jews should only break Shabbat to save the life of a non-Jew if doing so protects the wellbeing of the Jewish community. He later apologized—but only because he’d said it in front of non-Jews. The idea is that we must watch our words around non-Jews, lest we reveal something about our traditions that will cause them to hate us or harm us. I’m struck by how similar this seems to the controversial Islamic concept of taqiya (utilized by Shia and Druze); that is, the deception of outsiders to protect the community. Is this an accurate comparison? Do Orthodox Jews essentially practice taqiya?

All oppressed communities must surely share the impulse to dissimulation. It includes taqiya but also, for example, casuistical texts allowing Catholics and Protestant to dissimulate when tortured by each other in early modern Europe. But in today's world of readily accessible information, little religious doctrine can remain secret. Anyone with a search engine could find plenty of texts dealing with the issues I discuss in the article—see for example, David Berger's scholarly article "Jews, Gentiles, and the Modern Egalitarian Ethos: Some Tentative Thoughts." What I find unconvincing is the argument that we are better off being silent about these lest they come into common currency or debate. They are already out there, and have been for centuries.

Throughout the piece you identify some very stark contradictions between what you call the "moral substructures" of traditional Judaism and modern life. For example, this debate about saving the life of a non-Jew on Shabbat conflicts drastically with the idea that all lives are of equal value. But then, after laying out these troubling contradictions, you finish the article by throwing your hands in the air and asking "Isn't everyone's life a mass of contradictions?" Isn't that a cop-out? If Judaism is anything, it's the refusal to live incoherently. If we’re serious about the business of adapting the tradition to modern life, don't we need to make tough decisions about what to do with these contradictions, and which aspects of the tradition ought to be deemphasized or reinterpreted? Is it really enough to say, "Gosh, life is so complicated!" and leave it at that?

By writing this piece I am precisely not "leaving it at that." Nor, I suspect, are the most thoughtful among the modern Orthodox and other streams of Judaism, who really are trying to live coherent lives, as I am.

Should Jews take a strong stand against the rules for breaking Shabbat to save a life of a non-Jew? Should religious leaders simply say that this teaching is obsolete and irrelevant, and that today we break Shabbat to save the life of a non-Jew for the simple reason that, as the Jewish doctor in your story said, "a human being is a human being"? And are Orthodox rabbis capable of saying such a thing?

I think my own ethical view is pretty clear. There are various positions in this debate, but the doctor's view could certainly have been expressed by someone with rabbinical ordination.

In your discussion of Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, you write that "It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for ultranationalist terror." But you also describe how Goldstein attended services in which he heard the Biblical commandment to "erase the memory of [the Amalekites] from beneath the heavens," and would have been taught that the Amalekites rise again in every generation as the Jewish people’s enemies of the day. So it seems fairly straightforward for Goldstein to have concluded, based on things he’d heard in synagogue, that the Palestinians were today’s Amalekites and that he ought to kill as many as possible.

So my question is this: There is much talk these days about the responsibility of Muslim scholars and holy men to promote a kindly, magnanimous version of their faith, one which will not incite violence against nonbelievers. Do you believe that the Goldstein affair indicates that the Jewish community also ought to examine our faith and teachings to ensure that we are promoting no hatred or violence toward non-Jews?

The Islamic ethics of violence are undergoing a rapid and worrisome transformation for the worse. Muslim scholars—and all Muslims—have a duty to examine their own tradition. Jews have an analogous responsibility. It is easy to let ourselves off the hook and think of Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir as isolated figures. But we need to reflect on how their actions were connected to the ultranationalist messianic settler movement and its ties to mainstream Judaism. And these actions have had global consequences. What would the Mideast look like today if Rabin had lived?

Do you think Mitt Romney's Mormonism is kookier than other traditional belief systems? Are there any traditional communities in the United States whose practices you would find worthy of scrutiny if one of their members were running for President?

There is nothing wrong with scrutinizing the beliefs of candidates who say their religion influences their political judgments, but there is also no reason not to vote for someone just because he is a Latter Day Saint. There is nothing inherently less convincing about ascribing prophecy to Joseph Smith than to Moses or Muhammad. It always requires faith—whether a leap or some other acrobatic movement—to enter into the full consciousness of the religious person.

Many blog posts have already been written about your article. Are there any that you found particularly insightful? Any that led you to rethink something you'd written in the article?

I spent the weekend playing with my kids and haven't read blogs.

I asked the senior writer of the Jewess blog, Rebecca Honig Friedman, if she had any questions for Feldman. The following three questions are hers.

In the article, you mention your rabbi's rather ridiculous reaction to your holding hands with a girl. How would you have the modern Orthodox world deal with the issue of teen sex? Are you familiar with the OU's http://www.negiah.org/ website, and what do you make of it?

I hadn't seen the site until just now. It is obviously reminiscent of the broader national abstinence movement, and another interesting piece of evidence on the cultural interplay between modern orthodoxy and contemporary Christian evangelicalism. The problem is more challenging with respect to gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews: it remains to be seen whether orthodox Judaism can avoid the cultural trend of the evangelical movement and be accepting and welcoming within the bounds of halakha. As for the question of teen sex, honesty is crucial here. The halakha is what it is, and it will inevitably create tensions with sociocultural reality.

How, in your observation, does the role of women play out differently in modern Orthodoxy versus ultra-Orthodoxy or more liberal forms of Judaism?

Books have been written on this, and more need to be. I think modern Orthodox women in some ways face the greatest challenge with respect to modernity and tradition. I don't want to speak on anyone's behalf, but I will say that much of the most creative Jewish engagement with tradition today is coming from women working within a halakhic framework.

Why write this article in the NYT Magazine? What relevance do you hope it will have to not-specifically-Jewish readers?

What community—religious, ethnic, racial, or otherwise—doesn't engage with similar issues of belonging and membership, tradition and modernity?

* This article (Q&A With the Author of “Orthodox Paradox”) was edited (by Joey Kurtzman) for concision since publication.

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Labels: intermarriage, Jewish assimilation, Modern Orthodox Judaism

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