Home Home / Divided We Stand (1986)

Article

September 26, 1986

Divided We Stand (1986)

Jewish Unity Orthodoxy & Other Denominations
View The Text

This content is currently available in its original PDF format. As we expand the library, we plan to add a text version as well.

RELATED CONTENT

Article

Defining Dissociation

The bitter debate evoked in American Orthodox circles by the suggestion of the president of the Rabbinical Council of America, at its Atlantic City convention to withdraw from the Synagogue Council and the New York Board of Rabbis has not yet abated. Members of the Council will deal with this difficult question at its forthcoming annual conclave in Washington. I am confident that they will consider all the important questions on the agenda that demand clarification both from the practical implications of separation as it affects American Jewry as well as all expressions of previous Jewish thought pro and con joint activity with non Orthodox institutions.This article will not probe the core of this complicated subject, nor will it offer unsolicited counsel. Which path the writer of these lines, a member of the Rabbinical Council, treads is of no concern. He will merely analyse one argument that is widely marshaled: "Do not dissociate yourself from the com- munity." It appears that all major Jewish questions can be re- solved by this statement as though it were a political slogan or a magic formula.Leading Reform and Conservative spokesmen were the first ones to place the question of withdrawal in the category of "dissociation from the community." One Reform rabbi en- visioned a dark fate for Orthodoxy: "Its lot will be that of the Karaites." And this because they cut themselves off from the community. Many have chastized Orthodoxy with the rod of their wisdom and proclaimed the imminent danger to KTal Yisrael, and particularly the Orthodox themselves because of their "dissociation". I hear the sound of shouting, but I do not know whether it is the shout of strength or of weakness. On the other side, the argument from the Rabbinical Council podium in Atlantic City proclaims that "they" separated first by breaching the wall of traditional Judaism. However, this argument is hard- ly valid, for the problem does not hinge upon chronology. Whatdifference does it make who …
Jewish Unity Orthodoxy & Other Denominations

Speech

Integrity or Unity: Which? (1998)

I am grateful to you for the tribute extended to me, especially since I have been associated with the Union, one way or another, for almost my entire career. And I am pleased that my working relationship with the O-U leadership, from the visionary days of Moe Feuerstein to the enormously focused and effective era of Mendy Ganchrow, has been felicitous, friendly, and fruitful. I feel even more honored by being included in the group of distinguished rabbis who are my co-honorees. As one who has been in the pulpit rabbinate for 25 years, and out of it for over 20 years, I am in a good position to evaluate the worth of the pulpit rabbis to the American Jewish Orthodox community. And I tell you, without exaggeration, that these eleven men are the unsung heroes of Torah Judaism in America. As the Passover Haggada has it, “Who knows eleven? I know eleven—eleven are the stars of the heavens.” They are truly stars, representative of the hundreds of our pulpit rabbis throughout the country who are so often taken for granted, working assiduously, usually outside the confined perimeters of the bustling centers of Jewish life and the Yeshivot with their consuming intensity. They are, in many ways, truly the sentinels of Yiddishkeit in America. I am proud that the Orthodox Union is recognizing these rabbis and the colleagues whom they represent. They, and the Orthodox Union, are worthy of our most heartfelt approbation.The Problem of UnityPermit me to share with you a problem that has been the cause of deep distress to me. We stand today at a critical juncture in the history of our people. Our generation must make a fateful decision: will we remain one people, or will we be fragmented to two or more peoples unable to marry each other and therefore permanently divided from each other?Since the beginning, it has been Torah, our ancestral faith, that has kept us as one, despite all the centrifugal forces threatening to pull us apart. With the weakening of Torah study and observance…
Jewish Unity Orthodoxy & Other Denominations

Article

Seventy Faces (1986)

It is with a troubled heart that, as an Orthodox Jew, I address a concern that unites us, namely, those issues that disunite us from each other. The predictions of an unbridgeable and cataclysmic rupture within the Jewish community agitate all of us who love and care for and worry about our Jewish people and its future. The twin issues of conversion and of Jewish marital legitimacy – proper gittin (divorces) and, in their absence, subsequent adultery and the blemish of mamzerut (bastardy) – should give us no rest. The non-marriageability of a significant portion of the Jewish peo- pie with the rest of am Yisrael is too horrendous to contemplate-and yet we are forced to do just that lest our fragile unity, such as it is, be shattered beyond repair. We have to try our very best, within the limits of our integrity, to promote unity and to oppose the seemingly inevitable disaster that looms before us. The critical phrase is “within the limits of our integrity." 1 am an advo- cate of enhanced Jewish unity. But no honorable person can afford to dispense with his or her integrity even in the pursuit of unity. The issues are too critical to permit us to indulge in a Jewish equivalent of the old "interfaith” meetings in which warmth substituted for light and good fellowship for genuine understand- ing. It is too late for that kind of good- will posturing. It is a given that we must relate to each other in friendship and fraternity. Now we must also be honest and truthful with each other. The great Rabbi Saadia Gaon pointed out 1,000 years ago in the Introduction to his Emunot Ve'deot, in analyzing the causes of skepticism and disbelief, that the truth is bitter and distressing and it is more convenient to ignore it. But without it we are wasting our time; more-without it we are lost. So, if my thesis proves disappointing and unpopular to some, or even to all, it is Norman Lamm is President of Yeshiva University׳. His words appeared in moment in September 1983 ("Why You?"). …
Jewish Unity Orthodoxy & Other Denominations