Modern Orthodoxy in crisis: a test case

Judaism, Summer, 2002 by Edward S. Shapiro

Even the Orthodox in America were pessimistic about Orthodoxy's future, and for good reason. Orthodoxy seemed to have little appeal to their children and grandchildren, who were flocking to Conservative and Reform congregations, seemingly at the drop of a hat. When Immanuel Jakobovits resigned the pulpit of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York in 1966 to become the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, he recalled that the major challenge he faced when he arrived in New York in 1958 had been "to make Orthodoxy elegant and fashionable and to show that you don't have to live on the Lower East Side in squalor to be a strictly traditional Jew." (8)

By the 1960s, however, it was clear that the sociological model identifying right-wing religion with low social and economic standing was no longer credible. (9) Much to the surprise of sociologists, various forms of right-wing religion found among both Christians and Jews were perfectly compatible with higher education, economic and social mobility, and cosmopolitanism. And by the 1960s, Orthodox Judaism had transplanted itself to suburbia and had become the religion of choice of a surprising number of physicians, lawyers, engineers, academicians, and other professionals. When Marshall Sklare brought out a second edition of Conservative Judaism in 1972, he declared that the laws of religious sociology had seemingly been repealed. "Unaccountably," he wrote, "Orthodoxy has refused to assume the role of invalid. Rather, it has transformed itself into a growing force in American Jewish life. It has reasserted its claim of being the authentic interpretation of Judaism." (10)

To the surprise of the non-Orthodox who viewed Orthodoxy as an anachronism, the Orthodox now exhibited a spirit of triumphalism born of the conviction that they, and they alone, were the future of America, and that other forms of Judaism were illegitimate and doomed. This elan resulted in Orthodox "outreach" activity among Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews, particularly among the young. Now it was the non-Orthodox who felt under siege. (11)

At the same time that Orthodoxy was coming of age, Modern Orthodoxy, the branch of Orthodoxy identified with Yeshiva University and with this institution's underlying philosophy of "Torah u-Madda" (the coordination and even synthesis of traditional Judaism and western culture), was itself being challenged by a sectarian Orthodoxy centered in the yeshiva world. Modern Orthodoxy is differentiated from right-wing Orthodoxy by its approval of secular higher education, its acceptance of middle-class norms of enjoyment, social relations, and dress ("think Yiddish but dress British"), and by its willingness to grant non-Orthodox forms of Judaism a modicum of legitimacy. For the sectarian Orthodox, Modem Orthodoxy reflected an assimilationist outlook unable to withstand the pressures of acculturation and secularization.

The sectarian Orthodox were not entirely wrong. Modern Orthodox Jews have sought, often unsuccessfully, to reconcile the demands of Halakha with the attractions of American materialism, to live a lifestyle which Charles Liebman has described as "half-pagan, half-halakhic." (12) The sociologist Samuel C. Heilman, himself a Modern Orthodox Jew, agreed. The Modern Orthodox Jew, he wrote in 1979, "has learned to live with the sociological ambivalence inherent in his dualistic identity. A genuine homo duplex, burnished with a cosmopolitan parochialism, he waits for the Messiah to solve his problem." (13)