The God Who Hates Lies: Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition: Confronting & Rethinking Jewish Tradition

by David Hartman, Charlie Buckholtz

Covenant & Conscience—A Groundbreaking Journey to the Heart of Halakha

“Anyone curious about the Jewish way of life, yet dissatisfied with much of contemporary Jewish theology and practice—repelled, perhaps, by the cheap and vulgar apologetics of those who seek to justify and sustain some of the tradition’s systematic immoralities, who smugly deny expression to any doubt or uncertainty, claiming a monopoly on absolute truth—is invited to join me on this pilgrimage.”

—from the Introduction

In this deeply personal look at the struggle between commitment to Jewish religious tradition and personal morality, Dr. David Hartman, the world’s leading Modern Orthodox Jewish theologian, probes the deepest questions at the heart of what it means to be a human being and a Jew.

Dr. Hartman draws on a lifetime of learning, teaching and experience as a social activist to present an intellectual framework for examining covenantal theology as it is applied to religious life. As much an expression of his impassioned commitment to Jewish law as it is testament to a lifetime of intellectual questioning and courage, this bold examination of the halakhic system offers fresh insights into Judaism and the quest for spiritual nourishment.

Genres: Judaism, Judaica, Religion, Nonfiction

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2011

Reviews

[Paul Sánchez Keighley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I will certainly be recommending a lot.

It’s an inspiring example of how to a) look critically at the faults in your religion and b) attempt to amend said faults by utilising the tools provided by religion. One needn’t run straight to the embrace of secularism or atheism in the face of Judaism’s injustices, but for people who have faith and genuine love for the Torah it can be difficult to remain blind to the damage certain halakhic trends are causing once you start noticing them.

Rabbi Hartman, an Orthodox Jew, bravely explores the brambly and uncomfortable middle path to this dilemma in this dense little book filled with empathy and open-mindedness. He does this by focusing on two big issues that have caused endless grief to Orthodox Jews the world over in recent decades, namely the status of gerim (‘converts’) and the problem of aguna (a woman cannot divorce a man without his consent), and explores why in these two cases upholding religious tradition has ended up at odds with personal morality.

These two halakhically clear but morally outrageous issues are problematic because of modern Orthodoxy's unwillingness to update halakha to better suit modern times. Hartman takes this notion apart and makes the reasoning behind it simple to understand even for the non-Orthodox. In a nutshell, it comes down to seeing halakha (Jewish religious law) as eternal truth, completely uninfluenced by historical circumstance.

Hartman puts forward some well-meaning but ultimately weaksauce solutions, such as striving for a halakha infused with the spirit of G-d’s Thirteen Attributes of Mercy as enumerated in Exodus 34:6-7. While nice in intention, to me it seems a feeble arm to wield against the steadfast tenets of Jewish law, a corpus iuris that, since Sinai, has evolved pretty much independently of G-d over the centuries and at best pays lip service to his attributes while in actuality blindly contradicting them (aguna being a clear cut case).

It’s funny how much of this book ends up being about rabbi Joseph ber Soloveitchik. Hartman studied under Soloveitchik and the impact the Rav made on him is more than apparent. (It’s also ironic that I learnt much more about rabbi Soloveitchik in this book than in Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a book by the same author dealing exclusively with Soloveitchik’s works and ideas.) Hartman greatly admired Soloveitchik as a halakhist and theologian, yet, as we discover, holds him almost exclusively responsible for crystallising this notion of halakha as eternal truth among modern Orthodoxy.

The book points to the Rackman-Soloveitchik debacle that took place during the Rabbinical Council of America convention in 1975 as a watershed moment. Here rabbi Emanuel Rackman (an Orthodox leaning more toward modernisation than Soloveitchik, but less than Hartman) put forward the notion that the law forbidding women to divorce without their husband’s consent came from a time when it might have made more sense for it to be so, arguing that in the Talmud this law is constructed upon a hazaka (‘presumption’) of the time, paraphrased in the form of a popular saying in no less than two different instances (BT Ketuvot 75a and BT Yevamot 118b): “This is what the women say: ‘It is better to dwell with two bodies than as a widow.’” Rackman thus sees this as a law that might have made sense in a certain historical context, but not anymore, bygone social presumptions not exactly being the stuff of solid legal footing. In short, he believed halakhic rulings should be guided by the reality of the human situation.

Soloveitchik brutally rebutted Rackman later during the same convention, interrupting his own lecture to give an impassioned speech on how the study of Torah should not be based on “logic” or “everyday will”, but on surrendering to the knowledge of the sages of the past. The thing is, as Hartman points out, Soloveitchik expressed very different ideas throughout his life. Hartman recounts a day when a student contradicted Soloveitchik in class, quoting one of the sages, and the Rav replied that if said sage were in his class, he would kick him out. So much for respecting the authority of the past.

So why the harsh words at the convention? Hartman believes Soloveitchik was trying to protect the Orthodox community from going astray or assimilating into American society. In other words, he weaponised his rhetoric to defend a view of halakha he may not even have full-heartedly believed in to create an armour of unwavering Torah zombies that would protect the heart of the community from dissipating in the tide of modernity.

Soloveitchik was a man filled with contradictions. He must have been well aware of the influence he held over the Orthodox community and willingly used it, despite saying publicly things he in practice didn’t apply. Although I greatly admire Soloveitchik intellectually, and often go back to reread his works, I cannot help but think, like Hartman, that he is greatly responsible for entrenching modern Orthodoxy in a state of stasis that does not befit it or the Jewish people at large. Ultimately, for a clever open-minded man as he was, hiding behind the skirts of tradition makes him come across as cowardly. And I write this with a heavy heart, for his works are indeed brilliant. But Hartman’s efforts to keep Judaism’s relevance afloat and stitch the moral holes torn by centuries of wear is much more praiseworthy.

[David]

Rabbi Hartman recently passed away and I read an obituary about his non-party line attitude within Modern Orthodoxy. The review said this book is his most personal and unapologetic. It was refreshing and invigorating to read a Modern Orthodox Rabbi discuss openly his issues with Orthodoxy and how he reconciles his lived experience with dogma. He openly discusses the most glaring differences between contemporary thought and Jewish religious law (halacha)- focusing primarily on women's roles within the Orthodox Jewish community.

He uses the halacha around divorce, in which women must wait until their husband creates a contract for divorce before they can be released from the marriage, in order to illustrate the wide gap between current understanding of women's empowerment and Jewish religious law. Jewish law states that a woman cannot initiate the divorce process and must wait for their husband to create the divorce contract- these laws about divorce were developed during a period of time when it was considered more beneficial to women to have a husband than not. If a husband does not have a contract made the woman cannot get remarried and therefore becomes trapped.

Using this injustice as a spring board Rabbi Hartman discusses alternative interpretations that allow women an ability to be released from a marriage by disqualifying the original marriage contract as faulty since her husband would be considered negligent by trapping her in an unhappy marriage. Hartman illustrates the bias that persists in a very conservative Orthodox Jewish world that denies this interpretation legitimacy. He shows that this conservative bias does not necessarily need to exist and that when mainstream Orthodoxy can start integrating new interpretations that overturn older interpretations then it will be able to innovate and become closer to lived experience. The sense in the mainstream Orthodox world that halacha must be timeless, that a decree written in the middle ages has more relevance and truth as our current understanding, is destroying creativity and developing conformist attitudes rather than unique independent thought.

I would love to understand better new methods in developing halacha that combines halachic precedent with contemporary issues. What is the spirit of these laws? How much variation in interpretation can be tolerated within Orthodoxy? What justifies deviating from previous rulings?

[Israel Drazin · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Hartman points out that Modern Orthodox Judaism has in many respects been frozen in suspended animation, refusing to budge and grow despite moral imperatives and logic, resulting in many people being harmed. A prime example of this phenomenon is the failure of Modern Orthodox leaders to address the problem of the aguna, the wife whose husband refuses to give her a Jewish divorce. The rabbis refuse to resolve this problem because of an ancient, now no longer true, presumption about women. I describe this issue, which deserves extensive discussion in an article about what Hartman considers “Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Mistake,” which can be found, among other sites, in my website at www.booksnthoughts.com.

The reason for the stultification of Judaism is the commitment of leading Orthodox rabbis to now outdated presumptions about human nature and their refusal to recognize the right of modern rabbis to develop creative solutions to modern problems. Jews, they insist, must accept illogical commands based, as Rabbi Soloveitchik claims, borrowing a phrase from the nineteenth century Protestant Soren Kierkegaard, on a “leap of faith.”

The yeshiva world seems to worship halakha, the Jewish legal system, rather than God. While the Torah teaches love of neighbor and even stresses love of a stranger 36 times, these rabbis focus on halakha. They teach that Jews must realize that generations decline in intellect. The further Jews are removed from Mount Sinai the weaker their intellect is and the less able they are to know the truth. Thus Jews dare not reject the views of former rabbis, and must unthinkingly accept what they say.

Thus a Russian immigrant to Israel who always thought he was Jewish and who followed Jewish law, who served in the Israeli army as a commander, who was killed defending his country, Israel, was refused permission to be buried in a Jewish cemetery because some rabbi discovered that his grandmother was not Jewish. The rabbis apparently didn’t consider the Torah mandates of love, respect, and thankfulness. Thus a middle aged Jewish man whose family tradition was that he is a kohein, a priest, a descendant of Aaron, Moses’ brother, was refused permission to marry the woman he loved, who had long ago converted to Judaism, because of the ancient rule that a kohein cannot marry a convert.

Thus, yeshivas and many synagogues refuse to allow the Torah commentary of Rabbi Joseph Hertz in their building and even toss it on the floor yelling treff, “unkosher,” simply because it contains the views of non-Jewish scholars along with those of traditional commentators. Some of these misguided people did the same to the books of Moses Maimonides for the same reason. Hartman points out, as did Maimonides, that the truth is the truth no matter what its source and “without a grasp of the worlds of Christian and Muslim…out of which (the Jewish) commentators emerged, it was impossible (for rabbis and students) to fully understand their interpretations and halakhic verdicts.”

Thus women are still excluded from many Jewish practices. Hartman asks, “Could I worship a God who considered half of the Jewish community to be not fully human and responsible?”

Hartman states that the rabbis who hold these views generally acknowledge “the gender discrepancy within traditional Judaism, (but then claim) that the discrepancy actually favors women.” Some say that women don’t need the commands; they lack the baser instincts that men have; and, therefore, men need the biblical commands to keep “them off the streets.” The rabbis argue that, as stated in Genesis, women were created as a helper to men. She was meant to be servile, “subservient to his (her husband’s) will.”As disturbing as these views are, it is even more disturbing to note that many women have been brain washed to believe such notions. Who is guilty if these halakhot are violated – the Russian soldier, the kohein, the woman, the aguna - or the rabbis who have an opportunity to treat people properly and refuse to do so?

Hartman notes that: “For Maimonides, halakha plays an important, but secondary, role in the religious process, its function is to create the conditions of individual and social character optimal” for growth. He writes: “We find within halakhic history divergent attitudes…based on distinct theological conceptions of God, covenant, and the nature of the soul. The choice of which of these attitudes to emphasize as we create our own halakhic history is in our hands.” Differences of opinion should be respected, but not when people are harmed. Will we allow certain views of halakha to stifle our growth and the rights of every human being?

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book consists of six essays, many of which criticize modern Orthodoxy for not honestly addressing changes in society- in particular, the nationwide change in the status of women. The most interesting essay in this book is the discussion of the agunah ("chained woman") problem, and in particular a conflict between two leading Orthodox rabbis of the late 20th c., Emanuel Rackman and Joseph Soloveitchik.

Under traditional Jewish law, only a husband can grant a divorce- which creates big problems when a marriage is obviously nonfunctional but the husband decides not to grant the divorce. Rackmnan proposed treating such a marriage as a "mistaken sale"- a transaction annulled because of mispresentation. The Talmud refused to apply the "mistaken sale" doctrine to the divorce context, based on a presumption that a woman always prefers marriage to being alone, even if the husband was a leper. Rackman argues that in today's context, women are far less willing to be alone, and that this presumption should be rejected as a matter of factual honesty. Soloveitchik argued that apparent psychological facts are simply irrelevant: that if the Talmud says loneliness frightens women, "it is still true, and it will be true 8,000 years from now." Most Orthodox rabbis came out on Soloveitchik's side; the authors disagree, based on various passages in which both prophets and sages look at factual reality rather than ideology.

Having said that, I think the authors overlooked the three fears that might underlie Soloveitchik's point of view (or at least make it more popular than it otherwise would have been):
1. Fear of schism. If hundreds of modern Orthodox rabbis (but not all of them, or not ultra-Orthodox rabbis) had adopted Rackman's view, would the more traditional rabbis have been willing to consider the more modern ones part of Orthodoxy? And if not, would the resulting denominational schism within Judaism have been worth the benefits of a just outcome for a few individuals?
2. Fear of assimilation. American Conservative and Reform Judaism have not been successful in stemming the tide of intermarriage (ultimately leading to population decline) ; if modern Orthodoxy had been more open to halachic change generally, would Orthodox Jews suffer the same problem?
3. Fear of weakened family structure. As feminism became a more powerful social force in secular society, marriages have happened later in life and become less frequent, birth rates have declined, and divorce rates have increased. (Although the latter trend has stopped, the Rackman/Soloveitchik argument occurred in the mid-1970s when divorce rates were exploding). If modern Orthodoxy did more to accommodate feminism would it lead to these ills?
I think there are valid counter-arguments to these concerns, and no doubt valid counter-counter arguments ad infinitium. But I do wish the authors had been more sensitive to the social traumas that make more traditional Jews skittish about halachic change, especially changes related to women's roles.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books about Jewish practice I've ever read. Everything that Rabbi Hartman left unsaid or vague in previous books, he says outright, here. It is a courageous book, and one which makes me feel empowered to navigate my way through and into halacha.

[Ace Copperfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish he elaborated more on every part of this book.

[Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent exploration of how to maintain a religious commitment stepped in history and tradition (in this case, the general adherence to Jewish law, halakhah) while at the same time interfacing with modernity and dealing with reality. The author doesn't tell people what positions to adopt and what actions to take. He's interested in helping people orient themselves so that they can be receptive to asking the question in the first place and so that they can answer it well for themselves.

I am still confronted with conflicts and required to make choices. Where am I going to pray, and with whom? How am I going to relate to the parts of my extended family that have a different interpretation of Judaism than I do, informed by values that in some cases I find abhorrent?

To state the question in a broader, more essential form: How do I justify maintaining a commitment to the Jewish religious tradition in the places where it demands I violate what I intuitively feel and know? What place, if any, does my personal, subjective intuition have in a halakhic system—not just abstractly, but for someone who wants to live, day to day, within that system?

* * *

What is the weight of tradition when it conflicts with one’s deep moral sense? How does one maintain membership in the halakhic community while acting against the authoritative tradition? Is making choices that favor moral convictions equivalent to stepping out of the tradition? Conversely, to yield to the tradition, squelch the ethical impulse…what is lost? What is lost personally, what is lost to the community, and what is lost to the religion itself? (pp. 8-9, 13)

One way to begin is to question where the tradition itself comes from. If the tradition was not "given by God" in the sense of an external being imposing rules on humanity that are supposed to be valid for all time, but rather was formed by a series of human intuitions and reflections, then it may be a valid continuation of the tradition to modify the rules with the most up-to-date intuitions and reflections from the people who are actually alive and participating and based on their actual context in the modern world.

My own religious growth [as a yeshiva bachur] was measured exclusively by dedication to mastering the intellectual tradition of the Talmud: to formulate new svaras (analytical frames used to resolve Talmudic self-contradictions and unify disputes) and hiddushim (novel insights). Offering a conceptual breakthrough to explain a seemingly intractable disagreement between Maimonides and Ravad—this was literally my raison d’être. At the time it did not occur to me that the innovative mind of the yeshiva bachur, always active and engaged, is enlisted exclusively to clarify the internal contradictions and disagreements within the system. For example, we never asked second-order question: What is the epistemological basis of a given disagreement? What part of the tradition should be ascribed to revelation, what part to human creativity, and what might be the implications of how this question is answered for the development of communal religious practice? (p. 15)

All good questions. But if one asks those questions, is it still possible to say that the religious tradition still contains truth? For him, yes, given a pragmatic definition of truth:

"The tradition becomes true if it remains a plausible description of the world they live in." (p. 33)

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting & thoughtful discussion by a Modern Orthodox thinker of where Modern Orthodoxy has gone wrong. Dr. Hartman is the founder & head of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem (which, among other things, has published the "A Different Night" haggadah that many of us use).

[Darlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book thoughtful and forceful, and it has given me a great deal to think about regarding the halakhic process and what it means to modern Judaism.

[Foxglove · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't feel it was well developed, good ideas but I needed more information.

[Mindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoughtful exposition by a well-known Modern Orthodox thinker, focused on specific issues he grappled with in his life.