The Art of Being a Modern Orthodox Intellectual: A review essay of Lippman Boddoff's The Binding of Isaac, Religious Murders, and Kabbalah: Seeds of Jewish Extremism and Alienation?

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Monday, July 3, 2006 • Modified Monday, July 10, 2006

This masterful collection of essays accomplishes three very important tasks. It shows how a Jewish learned layman possess the pure faith and intellectual integrity to confront his literary past as a religious Jew with a critical, open and well informed mind. By tackling hard questions in Jewish history, evaluating how Jews acted and wrote, both as religionists and secularists, against the benchmarks of Judaism's religious canon, the author provides a living model of how to be Orthodox and modern. And by treating as valuable and with respect secular Jewish learning, Lippman Bodoff reinforces the model of Rabbi Norman Lamm of Yeshiva Univeristy's call for a tolerant engagement of those who do not share his world view.

The essays are organized by their historical context. While open to everything academic and tradition, the author cites but not not address Biblical criticism. Unlike many exponents of the "Science of Judaism" school, the author's Jewish pride precludes his reading of the Tradition as an aversarial outsider. But as an Orthodox Jew who stuided Judaic humanities at the Conservative Jewish Theological Semimary, Boddoff was exposed and became well lettered in the entire range of Jewish scholarship, literature, thought and history, mastering the primary texts and secondary research on the entire range of the Jewish literary canon. He is also a thoughtful educator, always careful to explain to the reader what and why he writes the way he does.

Emerging from his many essays is a unique lay theology of a religious, enlightened, thoughtful and generous intellectual whose religion prompts him to teach the truth as he sees it, a quality very rare in contemporary Orthodoxy. Boddoff argues that Abraham knew that God would not really demand that he sacrifice his son, as God is a life affirming Being. He argues his case vigorously, and uses the narrative to harshly critique the medieval Tosafists, who encouraged suicide over conversionary torture. In the interpretation of narrative, the Jewish tradition allows wide lattitude. To my view, Abraham learned that the God of the entire world will indeed act justly. By reporting that the entire city of Sodom surrounded Lot's house in order to commit homosexual rape, violating human morality as well as the ancient secular hospitality code, we are informed, en passant, that there were no righteous men in Sodom. And once Avraham, who protested on the grounds of justice, that Sodom be spared, realized that God his indeed just but justice may be hidden from human perception, Avraham willingly takes Isaac to the Moriah altar, with Isaac walking willingly with his father, together. The narrative underscores that the God of life desires life, and taught this lesson to Avraham as an act of love. Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac has been a lifelong concern of the author. His assumption, that God would not really ask Abraham to undertake such an outagous act, informs his understanding but ultimate rejection of the Tosafist willingness to legitimate suicide. For this reviewer, this sensibility is precisely what distinguishes modern Orthodoxy at its best from Orthodox pretenders to legitimacy, piety, and authenticity. For cookie-cutter Orthodoxy, the Orthodox Jew is a cheerleader for God, unlike Abraham and Moses. For cookie-cutter Orthodoxy, the learned layperson and communal rabbi are asked to accept the opinion of great sages whose views, however problematic, are not to be questioned. For authentic Orthodoxy, the Judaism of the Dual Torah canon is not only theologically correct, it provides the map whereby living Jewish culture is measured. There can be no warrant for suicide, even though one might understand what would drive some one to commit suicide.

The rabbis who justified rather than "understood" Judaism are, for Boddoff, standing outside of Dual Torah Judaism. When confronting my teacher of medieval Ashkenazi Judaism, Professor Robert Chazan of NYU, these rabbis' approach to Jewish law was "aggressive." In many yeshivot, we are told that these rabbis are holy, and their actions are therefore legitmate and may serve as precedents. By applying Torah principles to judge rabbinic authorities, Boddoff sees Torah the way the rabbinic sages did, as an empowering tool. Following the researches of Prof. Haym Soloveitchik and his student, Prof.Karnerfogel, the impulse to suicide was based upon influences prior to the First Crusade.  That Orthodoxy's "traditional" heroes allowed the forbidden due to environmental influences is a claim that Orthodoxy's self-understanding would regard to be problematic, at best. Boddoff regards Maimonidean rationalism as religiously legitimate, because this medieval Judaism resonates in the Talmudic canon. His rejection of medieval mysticism and Hassidism, as evidenced of his endorsement of Prof. David Berger's challenge to Chabad messianism, reflects what some might call audacity, but others would regard to be heroic. For the cookie-cutter version of Orthodoxy, God's will is revealed in religious people, who alone are allowed to interpret, apply and cite canonical texts. For Boddoff's modern Orthodoxy, any Jew who can read has a right to an opinion, subject to peer review.

In his discussion of the rainbow, which occurred after the flood, attention is called to the rabbinic call not to peer at the rainbow, which is a "psychosexual symbol." [146] This insight is confirmed by Prof. Eliot Wolfson of NYU, who astutely calls attention to this imagery in Jewish mystical writing.

Boddoff's treatmemt of the Babel and Bruriah narratitives of a thoughtful and engaged religious intellect. Connecting insights from Hebrew Scripture and the Oral Tradition, we find, for Boddoff, three insights. God intended a plurality of cultures, He confuted the tyrannical culture of Babylon, and by recognizing free will of humankind on one hand ant the impulse to evil on the other, a divided humanity might evolve to make right moral choices. While this reading is adequate to the information cited, and is a lovely midrash on the human moral conflict, I believe a fourth possibility is plausible, based upon Assyriological evidence. With the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, social dislocation was evidenced by linguistic dislocation. While Babylon and Egypt retained their writing systems, Northwest Semitic cultures developed alphabets. Power shifted from river valley cultures irrigated by silt, but bereft of iron deposits, the Assyrian and Hittite cultures which were sitting on iron deposits needed for Iron Age weaponry.

Bodoff treats the Bruriah narratives as one corpus, according which Bruriah the proto-feminist who learned Torah was seduced by R. Meir's student. But this narrative appears in medieval Rashi's work, and not in the canon. For Bodoff, the story was eliminated from the Talmudic tradtion out of respect for R. Meir. It is more likely that R. Meir fled Palestine because of Roman concern. The medieval legend is precisely that, a medieval sexist denigration of a heroine of rabbinic antiquity whose independence violated rabbinic norms. But Boddoff's reconstruction is well informed, thoughtful and reflects to unite the traditions of evolving rabbinic culture into one seamless, if not complex, whole.

The strongest, most passionate, and compelling of Bodoff's narratives are his treatment of medieval suicide and medieval Kabbalah. In these narratives, he charts a course for Orthodox moderns in parsing and negotiating the historical medieval tradition which he does not take to be canon, but as a response, subject to review, of the rabbinic canon.

Most Jews see Orthodoxy and modernity as conflicting ideas. In his treatment of Jewish secular modernity as reflected in modern Jewish literature, Boddoff is probing eloquent, expert -read in the genre, and master of the secondary literature. His treatment of Agnon's "Bethrothed" in which somehow the magical Messianism of the Divine promise, as reflected in the Kabbalistic tradition, explain how the sacred land of Israel will unite Shoshana and Yaakov, the female and male archtypes of faith and secularity. Although no advocate of kabbalism, Boddoff find in Agnon an attempt to comfort and encourage Jewish nationalism and faith during the terrible days of the Holocaust. The close reader of Agnon's narrative notices that Agnon, an observant Jew, only finds in women's non-halakhic piety. This reader suspects a neo-Sabbatian moral substrate in Agnon's modern fusion of faith and contemporary reality.

Boddoff's treatment of Kafka is similarly sympathetic, not because Kafka is a traditional Jew, but because he struggles with tradition. Recognizing the reality of pluralism in modernity, Boddoff recognizes the legitimacy of any and all thoughtful Jewish voices.

Boddoff's range of interest is wide ranging, and his model of Jewish religious identity is particularly appropriate in modernity. He challenges Orthodox Jewry to confront its canon seriously, and he prods the secular community to consider the resources recorded in the Tradition. His model of modern Orthodoxy, of a commitment to believe, behave, and belong as an observant Jewish is never questioned, but he probes the questions of others. He rejects the canned conclusions of political and theological platforms, and affirms that God, through the canon, has something to say in modernity.

While presenting secondary commentary on the religious canon of antiquity and the culture canon of modermity, Lippman Boddoff has written a primary source of what it means to have the pure faith, religious integrity, Orthodox commitments, and moral courage. His work must be read and example taught in our schools and applied in our lives.

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