The Zoom-Seder Ruling Reveals New Fractures and Coalitions in the World of Jewish Orthodoxy

I am honored that my essay on the Zoom seder and its implications for Shabbat in the digital era merited careful consideration by a distinguished group of scholars. In particular, I am grateful that Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, one of the signatories of the original ruling, had the opportunity to present the background and motivations behind it to an English-speaking audience.

In their responses, both Rabbi Bouskila (delicately) and Rabbi Shlomo Zuckier (directly) bring up the tensions between Ashkenazi and Sephardi approaches to halakhah and the marginalization of Sephardi rabbinic culture by the Ashkenazi clerical elite. At some level, it is hard to argue with their assessment. One need only open up the standard European printing of Rabbi Joseph Karo’s authoritative 16th-century code, the Shulḥan Arukh, to find that the Sephardi halakhist’s lean text is literally crowded out by a phalanx of Ashkenazi commentaries who occupy most of the real estate on the page. Sephardi commentators are either relegated to the outer margins or to the back of the book—if they make it in at all. As for Sephardi and Mizraḥi rabbis themselves, many have literally and figuratively adopted Ashkenazi rabbinic garb—the black hat and the black coat or kapote—and sometimes even the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew, while very few Ashkenazi rabbis have done the reverse.

I also agree with Aryeh Tepper’s assessment that this controversy has a great deal to do with debates within the Sephardi world. Most Ashkenazi reactions—whether ḥaredi or centrist/modern Orthodox—were relatively tame, whereas the sharpest critiques came from Sephardim. For instance, the Casablanca-born former Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Amar wrote that he “could not believe that there were rabbis who permitted this,” going so far as to call one of the signatories a “Reform rabbi”—hardly a compliment in his view.