How Modern Orthodoxy Can Chart Its Course Without Jonathan Sacks

All religious denominations are subject to the forces of schism and disharmony, with parties uniting and dividing around controversies of belief and observance. Among Jewish denominations, Modern Orthodoxy in particular is marked out by a high frequency of ideological disputes that tear at its fabric. The latest Modern Orthodox controversy erupted last June, when the London School of Jewish Studies, an Orthodox-affiliated college, announced that one of its teachers would no longer serve there after she completed a s’mikhah (rabbinical ordination) course in the U.S. The basis for this decision was a ruling made a few years earlier by Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s chief rabbi, that rabbinic ordination for women was a practice that lay outside the boundaries of Orthodoxy. In response to the LSJS’s decision, a wave of denunciations followed, accusing the college and the chief rabbi of marginalizing women and alienating them from Judaism. And in response to that, the college rescinded its decision, not giving any clear reason beyond having had time to “re-examine what it means to be dually a religious institution guided by the chief rabbi and also an academic institution, upholding its academic freedom.” Thus the teacher was reinstated, and the dispute finally blown over.

It is safe to say, however, that this will not be the last in a long line of conflicts within Modern Orthodoxy over the status and role of women. Similar disputes about conversion, about the place of gay and lesbian Jews in the community, or about biblical criticism look, just as intractable, with each recurrence layering on déjà vu like some strange lasagna. The never-ending crisis of Modern Orthodoxy calls for explanation that goes beyond observing the paradox inherent in trying to reconcile modernity with a revelation received in the bronze age. As a sympathetic observer of Modern Orthodoxy, I want to frame the problem in a way that I hope points towards, if not quite resolution, a more sustainable model of conflict management.

Objectively speaking, Modern Orthodoxy is a small movement comprising a tiny fraction of the Jewish people. But it punches well above its weight in the global Jewish conversation for a number of reasons. Not only are Modern Orthodox Jews, pound for pound, more interested in Jewish observance and practice than most other Jewish groups, they also combine it with an unusual interest in Jewish theory and ideas that underlie that practice. Secondly, Modern Orthodox thinkers and writers tend to represent the voice of Orthodoxy as a whole, at least in English-language debate, because the more numerous Ḥaredim are not interested in doing so and have an extreme paucity of individuals who could take up such a role in any case. Thirdly, Modern Orthodoxy speaks on behalf of a larger body of Jews who neither accept its core theology nor accede to its demands for halakhic observance, but nevertheless identify with Modern Orthodoxy as the denomination that provides them with their need for communal worship and religious fulfillment. This happens to be especially the case in England, where the Orthodox United Synagogue has for more than a century maintained institutional dominance as the sole provider of prayers, burials, and other religious services in most Jewish communities, meaning that for median Jews, the shul they went to on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and their son’s bar mitzvah was Modern Orthodox.