Yeshiva University Observer

While we were all enjoying our summer breaks, hopefully making a good name for the Jewish people in our excursions off the Stern campus, a fellow Jew chose to do the exact opposite. Noah Feldman chose to spend his summer making not only a bad name for the Jewish people and our practices, not only chose to air the Jewish people’s dirty laundry out for the whole world to see and criticize, but even worse: Noah Feldman’s article, “Orthodox Paradox,” printed in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday July 22, 2007, demonstrated some of the greatest faults of the Modern Orthodox movement. Noah Feldman, taken as the prototypical graduate of a Modern Orthodox yeshiva high school, demonstrated that in the battle between the “modern” and the “orthodox,” the “orthodox” is losing badly.

Feldman’s article explores the points of contradiction between leading an orthodox lifestyle and one governed by modern, democratic values. In the article, he asserts that he and his non-Jewish, Korean-American girlfriend were purposefully cropped out of an alumni photograph taken at a 1998 Maimonides School class reunion, a claim that later proved to be false. However, he does correctly report on the alumni newsletter’s purposeful exclusion of his family updates which he attributes to the school’s unwillingness to announce the births of his non-Jewish children. What Feldman conveniently fails to mention is that if his wife had converted prior to their marriage, he would have found many more doors open to him within the Orthodox fold. But Feldman omits that point, allowing the entire non-Jewish and uneducated Jewish population to believe that Judaism, and in particular, Modern Orthodox Judaism, is an exclusive, hypocritical religion. 

The approach I wish to take in response to Feldman's article is not one of attack.  There have been many who have done so quite eloquently in the past month. In particular, I would recommend Dr. Lamm's response in The Forward in which he takes direct stabs at the misrepresentations and baseless leaps that Feldman utilizes in his article when discussing matters of halakha and Jewish history. Dr. Lamm offers his most profound sympathies, not for the immature tantrum displayed by Feldman through his complaints about his exclusion from the alumni newsletter and picture, but for the fact that Feldman apparently views intermarriage as a very light crime in Orthodox Judaism and is therefore surprised at the social ostracism he encounters (As Dr. Lamm eloquently chides, "you want to have your cake and eat it too"). But Dr. Lamm also expresses deep regret that not only does Feldman demonstrate an oppositional attitude towards Orthodoxy (and has a history of anti-Orthodox actions to his name) but he does it in public, providing enough anti-Semitic material to last Americans for many years to come. 

No matter how many exposé’s are printed and no matter how many scathing responses are authored, it is too late. Feldman made his statement to the world and the world has already formed their impressions of the Modern Orthodox community based on his misleading words. I do not wish to denigrate Feldman, nor to explore his article’s focal halakhic and moral issue of Jewish particularity—the belief that the Jewish people are a chosen nation while the rest of the world is not, an inherently anti-democratic value and therefore a point of contradiction between the ‘orthodox’ and the ‘modern.’ But it is this balance, or possible imbalance, between tradition and modernity that I wish to explore; a theme palpably relevant to us as Yeshiva University students.  

In the co-existence of the “orthodox” and the “modern,” does one triumph?  Feldman calls the two words “hypocritical” and “contradictory.” Our movement’s great leaders call it a “dialectic.” My own personal experiences have led me to the simple description of “confusing.”

Noah Feldman is a man who attended one of the finest models of Modern Orthodox yeshiva high schools (started by YU’s own Rav Soloveitchik). He himself explains that the goal of the school was, "to try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school." And whether or not the administration of the school would agree with this exacting description is not the point. The impression that Feldman got and that I'm sure much of the student body received, was that the institution tried to blend the two worlds. So far, a tolerable thought, since this is what YU attempts to do as well. 

In his article, Feldman expresses deep respect towards his teachers and friends who were able to successfully balance the two dissonant worlds but then begins his next section by saying the following: "For many of us, the consillience 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." It is clear that to Noah Feldman, and I wish to take him as a paradigm for many educated Jews in America, the “modern” has clearly triumphed over the “orthodox.” For some, like Feldman, this triumph has resulted from a long and painstaking thought process. But for others, the “orthodox” becomes defeated by the “modern” because somewhere in their upbringing the emphasis was placed on the wrong word.

One obvious culprit of this misplaced emphasis, of this miseducation, stems from the attitudes of Jewish day schools all over the country. Trying to be "at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school" is impossible. Not only do I believe it to be halakhically impossible, a view I will not explore in these lines, but it creates an extremely difficult and problematic balance of values. Torah ends up being seen as equal, or even worse, subordinate to secular studies when both are placed side by side and are allotted equal time in a daily schedule. Feldman expresses his view that he really felt his studies allowed him "to see the world and the Torah as profoundly connected," which seems ideal, although we see what he has since resulted. So much for a perfect blend.

To be honest, a great part of this imbalance is due to the student body’s home life.  One can't expect a school to be completely successful in instilling proper values if those values are not being reinforced at home. But many of us know from experience that in our high schools, Torah was the loser. Admittance to Ivy League colleges was the goal and very often, chumash, navi and gemara classes were a joke.  They weren't as rigorous; they weren't treated as seriously by the staff and definitely not by the students, and time has told its own story: many of the alumni do not continue to lead frum (religious) lives. I recently had occasion to see many of my former classmates from high school. The emphasis was clear, or at least the emphasis had not changed. This attitude pervades the minds and lives of many graduates from such institutions and it will take much more than a year or two studying in Israel to correct the problem. 

Modernity and Orthodoxy cannot coexist in the way Feldman wishes them to. I do not see them as impossible to coalesce, but I do take issue with the balance some have tried to offer. The issue of "contradiction" that Feldman raises is a fundamentally important one and even though I clearly disagree with Feldman’s decision to let the “modern” triumph, I do agree with his conclusion that there are some rifts between the two words that cannot be mended. To think that one can go to shul (of what denomination, he does not specify) on Shabbat and holidays with his (non-Jewish) children, feeling a love and nostalgia for the sacred texts just won't cut it. “But he loves Judaism!" we want to scream; we want to give Feldman the credit he is so desperately searching for in his article. But no theories and intangible connections to Judaism are going to make his legacy continue on to the next generation. They have already ended with the births of his non-Jewish children.

I think even students at Stern suffer from a similar syndrome of misplaced emphases and warring between the “modern” and the “orthodox.” How many students view their Judaic classes as subordinate to their secular ones? How many try to take the easiest Judaic courses available to lighten their workload? Burdened by so many psychology papers and science labs, taking a rigorous course in parshanut (exegesis) seems laughable. Of course there are many students who do not fall prey to this attitude and do choose to take the rigorous, enlightening Judaic courses offered to us. But we must be honest with ourselves. Even at Stern, Torah is sometimes the loser.

Feldman, albeit quite distastefully and inappropriately, brings some very important issues to the forefront of our Modern Orthodox minds. He has reminded us what happens when we try to pretend that the modern world can mesh smoothly with Orthodoxy. His article forces us to take a look at the institutions which claim they can do so and to question such a confident statement. Feldman is just one of millions in this country who have given up on a life governed by halakha.  But Feldman's particular case gives our community much to condemn ourselves for, if such a person could result from what we think is a prime Modern Orthodox education.

The word “modern” is often misused as a colloquial label. For example, my mother will frequently use it in a sentence like, "There was a very modern crowd at that wedding. Lots of skin was showing and there was no mechitza (divider)." Now call me a stickler for semantics but my usual reply to such a statement is, "Mom, don't call them 'modern’. It gives a positive connotation to something that is blatantly prohibited. That awful word makes it sound like these people are doing the cool, hip, ‘modern’ thing. Call a spade a spade. They're just not frum."

Harsh? Maybe. Narrow-minded? Perhaps. But the emphasis is clear.

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