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November 27, 1988

The Responsibility of Leadership in the American Orthodox Community (1988)

Jewish Unity Orthodoxy & Other Denominations Principles of Leadership
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If one sees large numbers of Jews before him, the Talmudic sages taught (Ber. 58a), he should recite a blessing: “Blessed is He who in His wisdom discerns secrets.” What are these “secrets”? The Talmud explains: no two Jews look alike and no two think alike. It is a divine “secret” how such fiercely independent individuals can pull together as one people. I am moved to recite the same blessing, Barukh Hakham ha-Bazim, as I address this distinguished gathering this evening – some two thousand or more Jews and Jewesses who neither look alike nor share identical opinions, and yet labor together, in unison, for the welfare of our people. That certainly deserves a blessing! My theme this evening is both general and specific. I shall try to trace some of our current problems to a conceptual dichotomy that has been latent for centuries. I shall seek, thereby, to identify two constants that are prerequisite for Jewish leadership and for a viable Jewish community as we move into the closing decades of this century. In his The Great Chain of Being, a pioneering work on the history of ideas published almost 50 years ago, Prof. Arthur O. Lovejoy showed how two ideas conjoined in the philosophy of Plato lived side by side peacefully for about two millennia, only to come into violent conflict with each other as their implications were spelled out over the generations. Even in the realm of ideas, friends can become foes. Compatible ideas can break out into open opposition, and apparently differing concepts can later merge into one. I detect a similar process taking place in the thought and experience of the Jewish people. Two great precepts that lived harmoniously with each other have now become sharpened into two antagonistic forces that threaten to rip apart the fabric of our people. Only a deliberate and conscious effort on the part of Jewish leaders and opinion-molders to establish peace between these ideas – to embrace both of them harmoniously – can restore the wholeness of…
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Divided We Stand (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, care for, and worry about our people and its future. The twin issues of conversion and 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 people 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 must 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.” I am an advocate 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 understanding. It is too late for that kind of goodwill posturing.It goes without saying 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 Vedeot, 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 because I am trying to be honest in keeping to the truth as I see it, even while attempting to be as accommodating as I…
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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…
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