Who and What is a Jewishly Jewish Hero?

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Sunday, February 19, 2006 • Modified Friday, April 28, 2006

In Jewish afternoon and all day schools, we "educate" our young people to believe, belong, and behave consistently with the school's ideological mandate. Affiliations and loyalties are served and sown in Jewish education. Jewish education espouses indoctrination, or the imposing of doctrine which is appropriate to the vision and version of Judaism that philanthropists and clergy within the Jewish community feel to be deserving of institutional support. The subjects taught, the allocation of time for specific subjects, and the attending attitudes that accompany what is taught are designed to forge the next generation of Jews who will hopefully share the organization's professed institutional vision.

In Haredi Orthodoxy, or the ultra-Orthodoxy that equates acceptance of non-Jewish culture with a compromised commitment not only to religious culture, but the Sinai covenant, the student is taught to obey God, to be loyal to God's messengers, the great sages of Israel, and to walk the walk, talk the talk, and dress the dress of what is presented to be Torah faithful Judaism. In Reform Jewish education, the student is asked to identify as a proud, autonomous Jew who chooses options recorded in the canon of Jewish values, history, books, and ideas. The student is encouraged to think morally as a Jew, bringing credit to God, Torah, and the Jewish people. These two very different approaches to Jewish education project two very different Jewish ideals which, according to Rabbi Jacob Neusner, are different Judaisms, or Judaic systems of Jews.

The difference between Orthodox Judaism's two competing trends, the Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, and the modern, or cosmopolitan Orthodox, is reflected in their pulpit messages and in their schools. Unlike Liberal Judaism, the Torah provides the structure of Judaism's religious and cultural ideals, and not the larger culture in which we live. God really is the Commander in Chief. But how that structure ideals is shaped, how authority is localized, identified and applied, and how the larger culture is to be engaged, are issues that are hotly debated within the Orthodox community. The modern Orthodox Jew sees a living God acting in history, and is therefore Zionist, s/he endorses secular education as a worthy end in itself and not merely as a means to make a living, and responds to issues of our day, like Feminism, with a traditional yet open mind. This Judaism looks to the revealed canon of Torah, the holy books that the Rabbinic sages of antiquity believed to be God's word, for instruction, inspiration, and direction. The Tradition that is religiously binding is located in the law, is found in the canonical documents of the Dual Torah, which ends with the Babylonian Talmud. The culture Tradition that continues after the Talmud has changed, it has a voice but not a veto, and is subject to review against the benchmarks of the canonical documents of the Judaism of the Written and Oral Torah.

Haredi Judaism argues that "Tradition" is revealed both at Sinai and in the inspired intuition of contemporary great sages, called gedolim—and not ordained Orthodox rabbis, Rabbi Herschel Schachter of Yeshiva University claims that today's rabbis are policemen, or teachers and enforcers of authentic Judaism, and not poseqim, or authorities with the right to define authentic Judaism. The great rabbi has the Daas Torah authority right to rule with his intuition, and the common rabbi, lacking this intuition, has no right to an independent opinion. In Hareidi Judaism, the student is taught to honor the great rabbi, who is the culture hero. One does not become a great rabbi by intellectual prowess and individualistic study of Torah, but by a demonstrated commitment to the ideals of Hareidi society. This Judaism's leaders provide the salvation, the way and the life style for its adherents, with no one pleasing God except by their sacred prescriptions.

In Haredi Judaism, gedolim are uniquely qualified to parse the pages of the canon to determine how, what, and when the mandates of the historical past are applied in order to inform the present. In additional to canonical books written in the past, there are canonical people who, by being connected "Tradition" to the idyllic good old days of Eastern Europe, have both the right and the obligation to divine the Divine in our day. They remind us to be subservient to their divinely inspired rabbinic authority, to nullify ourselves before their canonical elite, and to accept the expected beliefs and behaviors of the living culture of Orthodox Judaism. Those not properly recognized as great sages do not have a right to make an opinion. It as though we suffer from spiritual vertigo, our religious judgment is flawed. Our modern, secular biases pervert the way we read our canon. Just as the devil is able to quote Scripture, canonical citations of holy books by those not recognized to possess the theologically correct disposition offer demonic, unorthodox renderings of Torah application. One may ask how to observe, but one must not ask why we observe a specific act, especially if that act is not recorded in the dual Torah canon. [like the kaporos ritual before Yom Kippur] And one may certainly not ask why the plain sense of the canon may happen to contradict what we are commanded by community to believe and do in the present. [like avoiding the priestly blessing on Sabbath and weekdays that do not occur on Festivals] Piety toward God is expressed by acting loyally and obediently to what living human beings in the present demand of us. In this Judaism, we do not recognize as legitimate non-Jewish religions, non-Orthodox Jewish streams, and we certainly do not dialogue with our irreligious opponents. Rabbi Simon Schwab of the Frankfort German community in New York, who once served as a Rabbi in Baltimore Maryland, expressed this ideal eloquently in his collected letters. For Rabbi Schwab, not only non-Orthodox Judaisms are not recognitized as Jewishly legitimate, but one must avoid the Federation, the secular Jewish community, as well. I am unware of a source in the Jewish canon that recognizes "recognition" as a legitimate religious category.

Hareidi Judaism reads the canon conceptually, and modern Orthodox rabbis who are properly trained read the canon philologically, applying the tools of our time to understand what the canon commands to current situations. Since Conceptualizations are conjectural, the Haredi position is textually subjective so that the ideology of the canonical text will never conflict with the ideology of what has become a virtual canonical person.

The mission of Jewish education is to create a contemporary Jewish person. The curriculum is the instrument whereby this new Jewish ideal, or cultural and religious hero, is forged. According to a simple reading of the Hebrew Scripture, the ideal Jewish hero is Moses. My biases are grounded in the values encoded in Israel's textual canon, and it is to those values I defer. These are the lessons, rituals, ethics, and dispositions taught in Judaism's official holy books.

The philological reading of our sacred writings must be applied to determine what our canonical writings actually mean. Exegesis refers to "reading out," or what the writer or Writer actually intended. Isogesis refers to "reading in," of how the reader integrates and applies the exegetic reading. Contemporary Judaism must be bound by the philological, or exegetical reading of the Bible and the Isogetic reading of the Talmud. We are not bound by post-Talmudic opinion that addressed specific times and places. Sinai is sacred, Vilna is not. The religion of Sinai is forever, the religion of the past may be adopted to our needs and realities in our present. The culture tradition of the historical Jewish memory may not be confused with the Tradition of the canon, which came to closure with the end of the Amoraic period. [.c.a. 500 CE]

There are three ways in which the Bible may legitimately be read. Like the medieval monks, who glossed their sacred texts, Rashi was a glossator of Scripture and Talmud. Like the medieval scholastics, the Tosafists engaged in dialectic, in which assumptions and postulates were tested against the philosophical implications of the canon. In the post Amoraic level of our Talmud, the anonymous Aramaic Talmudic narrative both glosses and subjects to dialectic the Amoraic material. And like the early modern Erasmus, who applied philology to the Greek of Christian Scripture, R. Yosef Caro, the early modern Renaissance rabbi of Safed, demonstrated what it means to be a modern and Orthodox Jews. In his Bet Yosef, or legal excursus on Jewish law, he applied text criticism to Judaism's canonical documents in order to understand what God actually commands in those documents. R. Caro was a giant standing on the shoulder of giants. His intellectual and religious giant, who fused rationalism and mysticism, critical thinking and passionate belief, a commitment to truth moderated the realization that compromise is sometimes the living truth of our reality, is the precedent for the Union for Traditional Jusaism's signature saying, that the authentic religious Jew in the condition of modernity stands for "pure faith and intellectual integrity." Rabbi Jacob Neusner taught me, one cannot do good theology with bad scholarship. R. Caro's modernism is a latter day instance of the Mosaic model of religious integrity. The text critical method of analysis that appears in Bet Yosef is therefore the paradigm for Orthodoxy's moderns, fusing a commitment to God's will, the academic, or objective study of God's documents in order to insure that they are being read correctly, and an open conversation with all concerned to insure that the values of God's documents are applied appropriately. The canonized documents define devotion. When one looks at the Biblical Moses, one finds a model of Divinely ordained authentic Jewish piety, individualism, and religious commitment. Similarly Maimonides' approach to law is the method adopted by Orthodoxy's moderns. Talmudic law is inviolate, but post-Talmudic legislation may be reconsidered. What is not forbidden by the Talmud is permitted. We follow the opinion not of our ancestors, not of Sefardics or Ashkenazi Jews, but the view that "makes the most sense." Some suggest that we are too biased to rely on our mind, that we must follow our ancestors blindly. We in fact have to obey God, as we and not our ancestors understand God's command. After all, we live in a world very different than our ancestors.

"Tradition" is not inherited culture; it is the oral Torah recorded in the canon. For R. Judah ha-Levi, it is the oral Torah transmitted by "many from the many," the public oral Torah, and not private conventions. Moses our teacher and our hero taught that there are no secrets in the law, the law is not in heaven, and is not subject to addition or subtraction. Therefore, when a person is awarded the "Yoreh Yoreh" rabbinic ordination, his teachers affirm that he is worthy of making his own reasoned, defensible opinion.

Moses, the hero of our canon, questions authority. He challenged the court and order of Pharaoh, and denied the order of Horus/Pharaoh and the winged sun-god, Re. The Egyptian god for "justice," Maat, is in fact judged. According to Egyptian religion, Maat's feather decrees that those whose soul is heavier than her feather is condemned. The God of Israel makes heavy, or judges the heart of Pharaoh, and exacts judgment against the gods, the ideology of enslavement that burdened our ancestors. God took us out from under the burdens of Egypt, teaches R. Menachem Mendl Morgenstern, the Kotzker Rebbe, by empowering our ancestors to no longer tolerate the bondage of those who demand blind belief in a system that teaches that piety is self-nullification in the face of self-proclaimed authority. The Egyptian word for religion, waab, came into Hebrew as to'eba, abomination.

By killing an Egyptian who had beaten an Israelite. Moses was not parochial in the exercise of his moral compass. He called the Israelite who is about to strike his fellow, just because he could get away with it, an evil person. The moral man and woman do mix into the actions of others if those actions are improper. Moses even saves pagan Midianite women from bullying shepherds. For Moses, morality is everyone's business. He chose to identify with right, the persecuted slave, and not with the might of Imperial Egypt. If one finds that the community is wrong, does one take positive action, or is the act of questioning disloyal, impious, or heretical. For the magicians of Egypt, Moses was a heretic. For the biblical Mosaic model of the ethical hero, we are cosmopolitans, not parochials. Morality is not just for us, for unzer, but for all. A sincere Orthodox Jew must stand up to right the wrong of the weak and downtrodden, Jew and Gentile alike. The Torah commands that we obey God's law, it does not command us to ignore the world around us.

Moses the man could not oppose Pharaoh. No one can argue with Pharaoh, who, with Joseph's concentration of money and manpower under the Pharonic throne, monopolized the power and religion of Egypt. In Pharonic religion, Moses had no right to ask the question "why is there hierarchy, privilege, slavery, and injustice?" When wicked elites challenged, they tremble and dissemble. When his medieval namesake, Moses the son of Maimon, made the oral Torah accessible to all who could read Hebrew, the book was banned because it gave people the information and power to ask important questions. While one has a right to reject any given Maimonidean opinion, one must do so on the basis of reason, not rote. One must explain why his or her reading of the binding Orthodox canon is superior to Maimonides', and not invoke the "tradition" of culture inertia. God commanded Torah, and not conditioned inertia, at Sinai. In the ancient Near East, the pagan myths were designed to convince people to accept the authority of the status quo. Both Moses and the Torah's Author regarded human authority as conditional, questionable, and subject to thoughtful review.

In Moses swansong that became Deuteronomy, Moses is revealed in his monologue as the ultimate man of law. He earlier accepted the dissent of Medad and Eldad. He is happily subject to review, because it is God's will, the Law, that rules Israel and not his private whim. Ever the model for ancient and modern unchanging Orthodoxy, he encouraged dialogue with the unbelieving Korah. People who refuse dialogue imply, against Torah doctrine, that they are not subject to review. Again echoing R. Neusner, the Torah is both a code and a map. When we are told that we may not have conversations with those with whom we disagree, [1] we find no legitimating source in the canon, and [2] we find in the Korah narrative a source that actually rules otherwise. Is Orthodox Judaism articulated by rabbis who do not quote sources of canon, or is it's theology manifest in its canonical documents?

Moses is the most modest of men, while the Pharonic statuary was immense. When we call our leaders "your highness," your "holiness," or "great one's," or gedolim, we are not being particularly modest. There exists no icon of Moses, our teacher and hero. Moses transmitted a canonical book, which we study. Some religions canonize people, an make images, pictures, and objections of veneration. My Yeshiva study partner once spoke of immodest women with long sleeves. He echoed Hayyim Nachman Bialik, who claims that how we conceal ourselves is often very revealing who we in fact really are. For example, most Jews are unaware that canonical Jewish law does not authorize the women's wig as a legitimate hair covering! One Rosh Yeshiva proclaimed to his class that the wig "is the badge of the Orthodox woman," but when questioned, privately conceded that he does not raise the issue with his wife, lest "she pour soup on my head," indicating that for some within Orthodoxy, the command of the community is sometimes more powerful than the command of the Commander. Some approaches to Jewish education stress religious honesty and fidelity to the canonical book; other approaches to Jewish education stress the identity that is forged by conformity, and demand fidelity to the canonical look. Jackie Gleason of the "Honeymooners" was "the great one." For Maimonides, the gadol is the first of equals in a court, and possess no special, uniqiue, or privileged authority. The Talmudic R. Eliezer the Great was so great that that he was called "the Great" and God revealed a legal opinion to him by oracle. By appealing to this confirmed voice of God in legal debate, R.Eliezer was ruled out of court and ejected from the rabbinic community. If R. Eliezer could read the mind accurately and nevertheless be considered a heretic for making the demonstrated and justified claim that his inspired intuition is more correct than the rabbinic consensus, how much more so are those "great one's" of today to whom God does not speak, and whose intuitions are not demonstrated, are to be questioned by serious religious Jews who take God seriously.

In the Orthodox Judaism of Orthodox moderns, the right to question has not been forbidden. Indeed, David was not chided for asking "my God, my God, why [lamma] have you forsaken me." The popular misread that emends the verse to mean "for what reason [le-ma] have you forsaken me" de-authorizes the Torah by misstating Torah teaching and by denying Torah's theological claims. Some cannot believe that God really permits such questioning. The following questions are always kosher to a heroic religious Jew: [1] is the claim being made recorded in the canon, [2] is the reading of the canon that is presented indeed accurate to the text, [3] appropriate to our reality, or [4] subject to a partisan, social, or political agenda? The authentic Jewish leader, like Moses our prophet and Moses our teacher, believes in God and is not afraid of people. When people do wrong, Moses will not fit in, but he has the courage and modern moral mind stand out as required by his Orthodox theological position. To be an outstanding Jew, one must do what is right, not what is accepted , expected, and demanded by the living community. We echo the plea of David, we put God's covenant and not social convention before us always.

The Jewish hero learns an unchanging Torah and applies Torah to changing times. The authentic Jewish education surrenders to the values of the canon and empowers the student to read her or his sacred documents with the aid of grammar, history, and literary theory as well as with the classical commentary tradition. Take, for example, the advice that Jethro gave Moses. We recall that Moses was standing and judging the myriads of Israel from morning to night, and Jethro offered the father-in-law advice that Moses required assistants, that he had to share power. Knowing the morality, character, and work ethic of Moses, Jethro told his son-in-law to appoint people [1] of talent (power and prowess), [2] piety (fearers of God) [3] integrity (committed to ruling according to truth] and [4]haters of chisling [hating those who want false profits, who cannot be "bought." [Exodus 18:21] These are precisely the values embodied by Moses and the Giver of the Torah. In contemporary Jewish life, who you know, i.e., your conntectedness and political network often means more than your talent, the rituals we observe speak more to the impressions others that we try to manage than obeying the commands of the Commander, we often lie to others because our integrity fails, and we unwittingly like to ourselves so that we not be overcome with guilt. No Jewish education of which I am aware would be happy with such an inconviently self-driven student, and few Jewish communities have the courage to be consistently Orthodox both ritually and morally.

Applying the model of Christian piety, the sociologist Max Weber argued that the first exponent or founder of religion is a charismatic who talks to God. Jesus and Paul were charismatic. But the institutions that are built are not based on the gift of charisma, but the regular rules of repeated religion. So it may be argued that the adherents to religion obey the institutional religious leaders who are the vicars of the charismatic founder. While this model might work for liberal Protestant religion, it does not work either for Judaism or Islam. In both Islam and Judaism, the human founders, Moses and Muhammed, built institutions. And Moses, the most modest of all men, began his career with an uncharismatic speech impediment. Moses' message is that God gave the law to all Israel, not to an elite. In this law, all Israel has a portion in the eternity to come, which his contingent upon obeying the public commandments. Rabbi Jacob Neusner has astutlely observed that for the Judaism of the Dual Torah, the community of Israel is sanctified by the commandments. Jewish life is about the individual and communal quest for sanctity, not the performance of ritual with socially approved virtousity. It is about making women and men of principle, ethics, and historically informed memory who choose to be good Jews. These Jews will not accept social control or manipulation or propaganda. These Jews will push for the good, doing what is right and good. A Jewish education that endorses the Five Books of Moses will present Moses as an ideal not only for conversation, but for current convention. A Jewish education that is modeled upon Moses will create Jews who will obey the law of Moses; an education of Jews to be members of the ethnic "club" will, with time become bereft of members.

All scholars ought to be respected, but respect must not be confused with deference. When scholars err, the student is requires to obey God and not the teacher. Following the model of Moses, we must turn and return to our holy books so that we might live holy lives, may we must the courage to be religious in our modern reality, and may have confidence in our canon to be honest to God and to our children, to inform, but not indoctrinate, to empower but not to impair, to make free and not to enslave, to study science and Torah and to study Torah scientifically, with pure faith and religious integrity.

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