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| Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein (Patheos) |
How many prominent Charedi rabbis would join a Catholic nun
and together - see a remake of the movie, The Ten Commandments – and then do a review of
the movie from an Orthodox perspective? I know one such rabbi. Which is just
one of many reasons that I admire him. His name is Yitzchok Adlerstein, and
doing things like the above is part of his job.
Rabbi Adlertsein is the Director of Interfaith Affairs for the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. He is a Musmach (rabbinic ordainee) of
Chafetz Chaim, a Charedi Yeshiva. And the founder of and CEO of Cross Currents.
I personally heard this story from him during a visit to his office
last year. It shows that there is a place for interfaith interaction even in the
Charedi world. Both Rabbi Adlerstein and I agree that the Torah world’s view of Catholic and Christian attitudes towards us
is heavily skewed as being negative, when the reverse is more often the case (As
always - there are exceptions). One of the things he’s been trying to accomplish
is to change that attitude to a more realistic one.
As a suma cum laude graduate of Queens College in New York, and the Sydney M. Irmas Adjunct Chair in Jewish Law and Ethics
at Loyola Law School, …and based on the kind of job he has, Rabbi
Adlerstein could be described as the quintessential ‘moderate Charedi’. And I
am a huge fan.
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| Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer |
I bring this up in light of a lengthy comment he made on my
post dealing with Chabad, and Rabbis Gordimer and Eliezrie. Since that thread
is several days old, I felt it best to feature it here because I think there
are important things in it that should be read by all. Here it is in full:
Harry – I’m going to take responsibility for the
back-tracking on R Gordimer’s piece. It had nothing to do with any of the
reasons people offered.
There was no pressure from Chabad. Nada. Not a syllable.
None from R Eliezrie either – although he is a good friend,
and he could have tried. Before we accepted his piece, we told him that there
would be lots of criticism, and he would have to deal with it.
I asked R Gordimer to declare a truce (with or without
withdrawing the original piece; that didn’t matter as much) because I felt that
people would not understand his intentions.
Klal Yisrael owes him a lot for assuming the thankless job
of chronicling just how far removed from Orthodoxy is the entire Open Orthodox
enterprise. He gets lots of flack for it. While many understand why a line in
the sand has to be drawn between genuine Torah practice and belief and the OO (Open Orthodox) distortion, many still do not. They attribute all sorts of nefarious motives to
Rabbi Gordimer.
The truth is that he is a sweet soul with an unusual sense
of emes. He is aware of the stance taken by Gedolei Yisrael, by his own
rabbeim, and by rov minyan and rov biyan of the Torah world who regard OO as
both illegitimate and confusing enough to the undiscerning to be a threat to
their emunah and practice. He speaks not for himself, but for a constituency
that numerically swamps any adherents that OO will be able to generate.
I didn’t want people to think that R Gordimer is some sort
of passive-aggressive contrarian. He is anything but. He pointed out some
issues with Chabad. Some had merit; some I would personally disagree with.
But they are not as front-burner issues as demonstrating why
OO as an ideology must be kept at arms length (while we daven that its
adherents should keep up their practice of mitzvos, and gain the clarity to
come back to the fold.)
Pulling back from the Chabad issue was a statement that any
issues we have (and we do) are issues we have with those who clearly share the
most important aspects of Orthodox thought. His criticism, however valid,
should not be regarded as coming from some font of negativity. He could pull
back in an instant. He couldn’t from the condemnation of OO. He couldn’t and
wouldn’t.
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| Rabbi David Eliezrie (Torah Cafe) |
Rabbi Eliezrie read the piece before it came down. So did
thousands of people from within Chabad. Maybe a few of the lines hit home, and
some will give the criticism some thought. At least on the surface, there was
mutual admiration, and mutual concession that not all is perfect. That’s
positive.
At the same time, I fear that many misunderstood what R
Eliezrie meant by new “center” and “realignment.” He did not mean that Chabad
is replacing the ideological center – taking over for Modern Orthodoxy. I
believe that he meant that there are tens of thousands of Jews who are neither
Orthodox nor effectively heterodox. They have joined something in between, and
thus are part of that new center.
Granted, they are not fully shomrei mitzvos. Many are hardly
that even in any minimal sense of mitzvos bein adam l’Makom. Many are
intermarried. Many drop by for the socializing or the kiddush. But they are
aware that what stands behind it is a Yiddishkeit whose goal-posts don’t move
(as he put it), and places Ahavas Yisrael on a pedestal. That means that many
of their kids will go to a Chabad school, where at least some of them will move
on to something more. And many, many more will be slowed in their exit from Judaism,
c”v. By increasing their identification with Judaism and Jews, many (and their
children) will not be taking the final step so quickly.
The rest of us have not been interested in this kind of
triage. We’ve had different priorities. But we are now at the end of the
eleventh hour for millions of Jews. Chabad, at the moment, has the only game
plan for those masses.
They deserve credit for it.
I mostly agree with Rabbi Adlerstein here. My only
quibble is that he should have left the original post up. So that Rabbi
Gordimer’s and Rabbi Eliezrie’s responses to it would make more sense.
I stand by what I wrote in that post about Lubavitch – which
I do not believe contradicts anything Rabbi Adlerstein said – even as we might
disagree with a point or two I made. But Rabbi Adlerstein’s comments go far
beyond the issues with Chabad and addresses one of the hottest topics of
discussion in the Orthodox world: the legitimacy of Open Orthodoxy; its institutions,
and its products.
I believe (as does Rabbi Adlerstein) that the overwhelming
majority of legitimate rabbinic opinion about OO is that it is not a valid ‘stream’
of Orthodoxy for reasons I have stated here many times (which are beyond
the scope of this post). For the record, however, I do not impugn their motives…
which are in essence a form of outreach. Just the unacceptable compromises they
have made in order to achieve that goal.
