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Jewish Political Studies Review Abstracts
Volume 8, Numbers 1-2 (Spring 5756/1996)
"Judaism and Modernity"
In this essay a comparison is proposed between the positions
of Jewish Orthodoxy in modernistic Western society before and
after World War II. It is assumed that the differences arise as
a result of major changes in the cultural nature of modernity.
The differences are defined, and it is then claimed that they
have led to a radical change in the role of all the Jewish modern
Orthodox movements. (As a specifically successful example of
integration between Orthodoxy and modernity before the war the
changing role of the religious kibbutz movement is particularly
examined.) The conclusion is drawn that the modern Orthodox
movements can no longer function directly as "bridges" between
the religious and the secularistic movements through their former
types of synthesis between religiosity and modernity; therefore
they seem to lose their position as a unifying factor in Israeli
society and much of their influence. Moreover, since Orthodoxy
must not pay in our day a visible outward price for its
integration in modernity, in terms of faithfulness to the
accepted halakhic norms, and since it must not respond to the
spiritual challenges of modernity, it is paying an enormous inner
price in terms of spiritual quality and cultural creativity.
However, it is believed that the modern Orthodox movements can
confront the challenges and regain their former position as
"bridges," but only if they will dare to change their strategies
and redefine their religious and cultural messages.
This article describes how halakhah functions as the
normative component of Jewish life. It presents the modalities -- intellectual as well as social -- through which halakhah
operates as well as sketching its general approach to the
different topics it regulates. The method is phenomenological,
though changes in historical reality are integrated into the
presentation.
What is the place of religion in the American polity? Which
view of this matter is good for America, and which for the Jews?
This essay first elaborates the now-dominant libertarian vision
of religion in the American republic, a view prevalent among Jews
and endorsed by the Jewish polity, by means of a discussion and
critique of Leo Pfeffer's God, Caesar and the Constitution: The
Court as Referee of Church-State Confrontation. It is argued
that the Constitution is improperly understood as a blueprint for
a secular "open society," founded on the principle of radical
individual autonomy, to be protected against both church and
state by a supreme, rights-defending judiciary. Crucially absent
is an account of the ever-necessary consent of the governed, a
"second constitution," required not only at first to ratify the
written constitution but continuously to command allegiance to
the polity. The ruling opinions of the American people who
consented to the Constitution combined biblical-Protestant
notions of covenantal community built around common faith with
natural-rights notions of individual liberty, notions tied to
conflicting anthropologies -- one theological, the other
philosophical -- each offering a different but equally
cosmopolitan account of our humanity. The essay then traces the
progressive shift in our ruling opinions, and shows how the
unstable covenant built on these two cosmopolitanisms veers in
the direction of libertarianism. It explores the meaning and
dangers of the emergent hegemony of radical individual autonomy,
with special attention to problems of civility, confused
identity, arrested adolescence, loss of self-restraint, the
intolerance of enforced respect, and, finally, fracture of the
community into warring camps, religious and secular. The final
section explores the future of the Jewish polity under these
changed conditions. It argues that Jewish common opinions
concerning anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the State of Israel
are an insufficient basis for Jewish survival in an America
governed by the now-ruling opinions of modernity. The well-being
of Jews, both as Jews and as human beings, would seem to require
a commitment to wisdom of the sort embodied in the practice of
traditional Judaism.
Haredi, or so-called "ultra-Orthodox," Jewry contends that
it is the most strict and therefore the most authentic expression
of Jewish Orthodoxy. Its authenticity is insured by the devotion
and loyalty of its adherents to its leading sages or gedolim,
"great ones." In addition to the requirements of explicit Jewish
law, and, on occasion, in spite of those requirements, the Haredi
adherent obeys the Daas Torah, or Torah views of his or her
gedolim. By viewing Daas Torah as a norm within the Jewish legal
order, Haredi Judaism reformulates the Jewish legal order in
order to delegitimize those halakhic voices which believe that
Jewish law does not require a radical countercultural withdrawal
from the condition of modernity. According to Haredi Judaism,
the culture which Eastern European Jewry has created to safeguard
the Torah must be guarded so that the Torah observance enshrined
in that culture is not violated.
The breakdown of traditional Jewish society and belief has
led to the need to find new common ground for halakhic
interpretation if the Jewish people's halakhic framework is to be
in any respect preserved in any reasonable manner. One possible
way in which that might be done is by applying the canons of
constitutional interpretation developed for modern constitutions,
allowing for the differences between the comprehensive character
of the Torah as constitution and the more limited character of
modern frames of government. This article suggests six basic
halakhic positions in the contemporary Jewish world that have
brought us to where we are and then suggests a fourfold method of
constitutional interpretation involving, in order, the plain or
literal meaning of the constitutional text, the intentions of the
text's framers, the accumulative interpretations of later
legitimate interpreters subsequent to the framers, and the sense
of what would fulfill the text's purpose in light of the present
situation, while at the same time not doing violence to the
text's plain sense and the intentions of the framers. After
discussing all three in some detail in comparison with the
interpretative processes applied to the modern constitutions, it
concludes by discussing the interpretive debate surrounding these
four elements as suggestive for the Jewish situation.
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