The Closing of the Jewish Mind?

For most of my life, I have been hearing complaints about what has often been called “the shift to the right” in traditionalist Jewish circles. The gist of this complaint is that observant Jews are becoming progressively more committed to stringency, dogmatism and secluding themselves from the outside world, preferring this to a serious engagement with challenges stemming from the philosophy, science, morals and political ideas of the surrounding non-Jewish world.

By temperament, I’m not much of an enthusiast for stringency, dogmatism and seclusion, and over the years my wife Yael and I have been involved in a number of efforts to strengthen countervailing tendencies in Orthodox Judaism. We were active in establishing opportunities for women’s Talmud study; created a series of programs for the study of Jewish texts alongside great works of Western philosophy; and published new editions of works by Eliezer Berkovits, one of the last century’s most important Orthodox voices arguing for the flexibility and openness of the Jewish tradition. On the face it, these credentials should make me a good recruit for what is today frequently called “Open Orthodoxy”—an expression originating in a 1997 essay by R. Avi Weiss in Judaism magazine.1 While my own views diverge from those expressed in this essay on significant points, on the whole my intuitions have been, and still are, compatible with much of the vision articulated in Weiss’ original text.