Judaism: Unfreezing the Law

The Jews of Jerusalem danced last week in the synagogues and in the streets, bearing in their arms the scrolls of the Torah as they celebrated the end of the thanksgiving period of Sukkot.* The dancers were mostly men, but a few congregations allowed women to join in and carry the scrolls—to the bitter disapproval of the Orthodox. Women are forbidden to touch the Torah by an injunction of Halakah, that vast body of law that regulates Jewish life with a sweep ranging from lofty ethical norms to small dietary injunctions. Halakah, which means variously “the law” and “the way” in Hebrew, is considered by many to be the essence of Judaism, the cement that for centuries enabled the Jews of the Diaspora to keep their covenant with the Lord. Yet today Halakah is the most divisive factor in Judaism, mainly responsible for the deep chasms that keep the world’s Jews divided and often quarrelsome in their approach to their faith.

Jewnitarian Religion? In the current issue of the Conservative United Synagogue Review, Buffalo’s Rabbi Isaac Klein affirms the “central and normative role of Halakah in Judaism” but argues that Jewish law “was never intended to be frozen” and “must grow to meet new situations.” In fact, as Rabbi Klein points out, Halakah has been significantly modified over the centuries, by such sages as Maimonides and Joseph Karo, in order to adapt the written Talmud to the requirements of everyday life. The Conservative branch of Judaism considers Halakah of divine origin but believes in adapting it to the times by a less restrictive interpretation of custom. The Reform Jews go considerably farther, believe that it is the spirit rather than the letter of the law that matters and argue briskly that Halakah has no binding authority.

Orthodox Jews, of course, are generally the stern and unbending champions of an almost literal approach to Halakah. “On it and on it alone,” says Halakah Scholar Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz of Jerusalem, “we base our lives, our thoughts and our actions.” “Without Halakah,” Israeli Author Abraham Kariv told a Jerusalem symposium on Halakah last week, “we do not know how to believe, let alone how to express our faith in everyday life.” The Orthodox regard any watering down of Halakah as “the Gallup-poll approach to Judaism”—making the law conform to practice and thus, for example, permitting the eating of nonkosher food on the ground that roughly 60% of all Jews do not observe dietary rules anyway. Such relaxation, they believe, would create a “Jewnitarian” religion.

Stretching a Bit. Still, the demands of modern life are such that even the Orthodox have had to stretch Halakah a bit. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, parachutist chief rabbi of the Israeli armed forces, has ruled that soldiers can work on the Sabbath for the sake of national security and that electricity may be used on holy days because it is not the same as the fire whose kindling on the Sabbath was forbidden by Exodus. England’s newly elected Orthodox Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits (TIME, Aug. 26) recently got around the traditional Orthodox opposition to birth control by ruling that the Biblical injunction, “Be fruitful and multiply,” was addressed to men only—and that women are therefore free to use contraceptive devices to limit births.

In the U.S., the most open differences are in the approach to the Sabbath and dietary laws. Both are rigidly observed by the Orthodox, who eat no pork or shellfish and normally refuse to ride to the synagogue on the Sabbath. The Conservatives can drive on the Sabbath and, while they view the dietary laws as binding, do not observe them so strictly as the Orthodox. Reform Jews, of course, have no dietary proscriptions, treat the Sabbath much as Christians now treat Sunday. With the growth of suburbia and the resultant distances be tween homes and synagogues, however, more Orthodox Jews are driving to their synagogues. The difference between Conservative and Orthodox Jews in the U.S., says one rabbi, is nowadays only one block: the Conservatives drive right up to the synagogue, while the Orthodox park a block away and walk the rest of the way.

Cutting the Branches. Though their differences in approach to the law have frustrated anything like Jewish theological ecumenism, most Jewish scholars agree that the way must be cleared to make Halakah more meaningful for Jews. “The Jew,” says Rabbi Jack J. Cohen of Israel, “was not made for the law but the law for the Jew.” Israel’s Deputy Chief Justice Moshe Silberg believes that the time has come for a new Halakah code that would be “a secular legal creation based on principles of Jewish law with a clear dissociation from all the archaic layers that were heaped on Jewish law. The task will be to select the wheat from the chaff, to cut away the dried branches from the tree, which is still full of life.”

*In an unusual demonstration, 10,000 Jews also celebrated the festival in the streets of Moscow, an additional sign that since Khrushchev’s fall restrictions against Jewish religious activities have been somewhat relaxed in the Soviet Union.