A Tour Guide for the Perplexed

In the nineteenth century, a fascinating and significant minor genre of Hebrew literature emerged to address the seismic historical changes that were challenging modernizing European Jews’ fealty to God, Torah, and the Jewish nation. The new reality demanded guidance, and so guides were produced.

Two particularly intriguing and impressive ones stand out. Nachman Krochmal, the philosopher and essayist, composed his classic A Guide for the Perplexed of Our Times (Moreh Nevukhei ha-Z’man), which was edited and posthumously published in 1851 by his friend the great scholar Leopold Zunz. Just five years later A New Guide for the Perplexed (Moreh Nevukhim he-Hadash) by Krochmal’s fellow enlightened Galitzianer Solomon Rubin appeared. Both authors, as their books’ titles suggest, aimed to help young Jewish intellectuals struggling to adapt their ancient faith and its classical texts to the intellectual upheavals wrought by the Enlightenment by producing successors to Maimonides’s medieval philosophical masterpiece The Guide of the Perplexed (Moreh Nevukhim).

The original announced title for Noah Feldman’s new Jewish primer was “Bad Jew: A Perplexed Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People,” but he, or his publisher, apparently decided to strike a less cheeky, if still Maimonidean, note and hit on To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People. In the end, it is not so much a guide, in Maimonides’s or Krochmal’s sense of teaching about fundamental matters, as it is a tour guide. “We need a new map today,” Feldman writes, “because we are, globally, in the midst of a series of significant transformations in Jewish life and thought.”

Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is a prolific scholar, unique in specializing in both constitutional law and the modern Middle East, and a well-known commentator, indeed player, in American politics. Among many other things, he helped the Iraqi Governing Council frame an interim constitution and testified at the 2019 presidential impeachment hearing. He also has a long-standing  and deep interest in Judaism, and runs an eclectic program for the study of Jewish and Israeli law at Harvard.

Feldman reports having been, on occasion, called “a bad Jew” and even having “days of feeling like a bad Jew,” because of his departure, in various ways, from the Modern Orthodoxy in which he was raised. But if Feldman’s book originated in a wound, it is quickly salved by the historical example of the “Master of the Guide” and namesake of his famous Boston day school, Moses Maimonides:

The sad truth, however, is that to some who read Maimonides’s work in his lifetime and in the centuries after, this great master of Jewish law, this innovator in the use of the Hebrew language, this towering genius, was in fact a bad Jew, one whose philosophical beliefs ought to be suppressed. . . . The takeaway is that if Moses Maimonides could be denounced as a bad Jew, anyone can be. . . . The feeling of being a bad Jew is therefore archetypally Jewish—and simultaneously a misreading of the Jewish way of engaging the world.

In recruiting Maimonides as a philosophical poster boy for his vision of a pluralist Judaism, Feldman conveniently overlooks the fact that he was also the author of the closest thing in rabbinic literature to an official catechism, the famous thirteen principles of faith in his Commentary to the Mishnah. Later, in the Mishneh Torah’s “Laws of Repentance,” he offered a systematic and comprehensive classification of heresies and their punishment. Of those he considered bad Jews, he wrote: “It is a mitzvah to kill sectarians and heretics. . . . If that is not possible, one should develop a plan so that one can cause their deaths.”

Although Feldman is not a faithful Maimonidean—and why should he be?—he does match Maimonides in brazen intellectual self-confidence. “On nearly every page,” he writes, “I make small or middle-sized new arguments about Jewish history, contemporary Jewish faith, and what one might want to think about God or the Jews.” The perplexed audience for whom Feldman has crafted these various-sized arguments appear to be young, largely left-wing American Jews who find themselves not only unmoored from their Jewish heritage but increasingly alienated from Zionism and Israel, especially since October 7. In each of the book’s three parts—on God, Israel, and the Jewish People—Feldman adroitly applies his wide (if occasionally less than deep) Jewish knowledge as well as the experience of his own painful, sometimes public struggles with his Jewishness to help them grapple with theirs.

Each of the book’s three parts closes with a powerful and moving homily. In these eloquent perorations, Feldman argues for an ecumenical Judaism, a tolerant Zionism, a pluralistic Israel, and—above all else—a collective Jewish humility. These are wholly admirable and eminently arguable aspirations. I wish that I could have shared some of these chapters with congregants when I was a practicing rabbi (Feldman is particularly good on the contemporary challenges of conversion and intermarriage). But I also wish that Feldman had argued forthrightly, like his exemplar Maimonides, for his particular vision of Judaism. Instead, his book is premised on a pledge of nonallegiance to any particular ideology as he guides his readers through the array of beliefs, denominations, political ideologies, and social structures that constitute the contemporary Jewish world.

The problem with this is that Feldman’s book reveals him to be not without his own strong opinions. Moreover, the many varieties of Judaism he surveys are not all—most often, not at all—compatible. Why should he not argue for a theory of Judaism, as Jewish thinkers since Saadia Gaon have done? His guide purports to be only a map or a menu, as if a hungry person could be satisfied by eating a menu.

In his book’s first and most overtly theological part, Feldman boldly renames and reclassifies the major schools and denominations of contemporary Judaism to see them afresh. He divides the Jewish religious world into a kind of Hegelian triad of Traditionalists, Progressives, and Evolutionists, who attempt to synthesize a commitment to rabbinic tradition with an allegiance to modern ideals. “I’m limning these patterns, instead of using the more familiar terminology of Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and so forth,” Feldman writes, “because the old group descriptions are not the right tools to use in deciding what to believe for yourself, if they ever were. . . . This might not fully solve your perplexity, but it should help you determine what you are perplexed about, assuming you are.” It is a somewhat useful simplifying schema, but simplification can also lead to perplexity.

Feldman begins his discussion of the traditionalist haredi world with an anecdote about visiting his relatives in Borough Park as a boy:

I could already make out that the way they dressed stood for Jewish authenticity: the idea that there was a right and a wrong way to be Jewish and that theirs was the right way. In particular, I envied the crisp black fedoras the boys were given to wear when they became bar mitzvah. My own family identified as Modern Orthodox, which meant that we followed the law fairly rigorously but didn’t wear the black-and-white uniform.

Young Feldman craves the certainty of a black hat. His father buys him a fedora, but a gray one, “as if to say to my relatives, and the world, that we weren’t fully with the program, but somewhere betwixt and between.” What follows is a largely lucid discussion of Traditionalist theology with its imagined unbroken tradition leading back to the revelation at Sinai of a “God of black and white.” Feldman is particularly good at pointing out the ways in which haredi Judaism insists on heteronomy, whereas the classic talmudic texts tell a more complicated story about the tension between divine authority and human autonomy.

It is when he proceeds beyond the haredi black-and-white God to the details that Feldman leads his perplexed readers astray. Those who have spent time in this territory will discover all kinds of errors in his map of Traditionalist Jewish life. In contrasting the two major streams of haredi Judaism, the “yeshiva world,” which originated in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, especially Lithuania, and the Hasidic world, Feldman introduces the reader to his (and my) teacher Isadore Twersky’s concept of “meta-halakha.” The meta-halakhic question is: what is the purpose of halakha? Feldman notes that the tradition of Jewish mysticism provided one set of answers to this question and asserts, far too reductively, that “Kabbalah is the meta-halakhah underwriting all forms of Hasidism.” It is when he turns to the other form of Traditionalism that Feldman goes entirely offtrack.

“Mysticism does not, however, underlie Yeshivish practice,” Feldman writes, “which is so law-focused that it might be said that its meta-halakhah is halakhah itself, or that it rejects meta-halakhah as an idea.” He justifies this common and cartoonish description with a quick, crude reading of Chaim of Volozhin’s Nefesh Ha-Chaim, in which the nineteenth-century founder of the modern yeshiva movement propounded a complex theory of Torah Lishmah, or “Torah for Torah’s Sake,” one that climaxes—not entirely unlike Maimonides’s Guide—in religious ecstasy. Feldman compares this to the nineteenth-century aesthetic doctrine of art for art’s sake and asserts that it leads to arid legal gymnastics and rote submission, a meta-halakha that does not move beyond halakha.

This distorts the theology of Reb Chaim (to use his “yeshivish” appellation) as well as his heirs. Feldman’s sources on Torah Lishmah surprisingly do not include Norman Lamm’s landmark study. Lamm showed that, far from neglecting the need for religious transcendence, Nefesh Ha-Chaim’s theory of talmudic study transformed it from a purely cerebral activity into a positively mystical experience, during which passionate devotion to understanding God’s will through mastering his revealed word resulted in a scholarly variation of the central Hasidic ideal of devekut, or mystical union. This became not merely the yeshivish response to Hasidism’s more rapturous spiritual exercises but a conservative theological alternative to Spinoza’s naturalized Amor Dei Intellectualis.

Even more egregious is the omission of so much as an allusion to the modern mussar movement, a truly major meta-halakhic spiritual phenomenon, as Twersky long ago recognized. It was inspired by the ethical writings and example of Zundel of Salant, Reb Chaim’s student in the Volozhin Yeshiva, and founded by his disciple Rabbi Israel Salanter, a towering father figure in the yeshiva world to this day. The curriculum that Salanter and his students developed drew upon an eclectic library of medieval and early-modern ethical and pietist literature, including Bahya ibn Paquda’s Chovot Ha-Levavot, Jonah Gerondi’s Shaarei Tshuva, and Israel Alnaqua and Isaac Aboab’s identically titled works Menorat Ha-Maor, among many others. A considerable network of mussar yeshivot emerged in Lithuania, America, and Israel from the late-nineteenth century, which not only incorporated the study of mussar classics in their curricula but set periods for mandatory musser pe’ulos (spiritual exercises), as many of them still do.

“Would the loss of Traditionalism be a loss to the world?” Feldman asks. His answer, which will certainly surprise his more liberal readers, is “a qualified yes.” He rightly points to the haredim’s great service in preserving the piety, talmudic learning, and Yiddish language of the all-but-lost world of pre-Holocaust European Jewry. Feldman goes beyond this to argue that a thriving Traditionalist community greatly enriches contemporary Jewish life, not despite but because of its authoritarian version of Judaism. This is because “all strands of Jewishness relate in some important sense to the idea of tradition,” and haredim, in their naive absolutism, show “what the tradition would look like if taken to extremes.” They are, in other words, a both endangered and dangerous species whose role in the Jewish ecosystem is to provide a living reductio ad absurdum.

A chapter titled “The God Whose Law Evolves” begins by describing what Feldman calls “one of the most moving religious moments I have witnessed as an adult.” He was attending a panel on “Who or What is an Orthodox Rabbi” at a Harvard Law School conference he had organized, which included a rabbi from Yeshiva University, who had helped draft the Orthodox Union’s policy forbidding the hiring of female rabbis, and Rabbi Rahel Berkovits, a leading Orthodox feminist and teacher at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem. Feldman’s epiphany came in hearing Berkovits reply to the Yeshiva University rabbi’s arguments for excluding women from the rabbinate:

“For me, as a religious woman, one of the greatest experiences of the divine that I have in the world is the fact I exist. That I’m alive. That I’m created by the divine and in the image of the divine. And so when I see [traditional Jewish texts that treat women as unequal], I have to either annihilate myself [or] annihilate my view of God or I have to say that those texts have been influenced through time by human beings. . . . When you say that [Maimonides] had a specific problem with [appointing women as synagogue officials] . . . which I am 100 percent unwilling to accept is ratzon Hashem [God’s will]. I am unwilling to accept that. . . . For me, if halakhah is playing out the divine word of God, I want there to be congruence [with] what I believe to be ratzon Hashem [God’s will]. You could tell me I’m mistaken. But for me, all I have is myself and my understanding of the divine in this world.”

This is, indeed, moving, though Traditionalists might argue that the way to experience the divine is, as the kabbalists say, precisely by “annihilating” one’s self (Bittul Hayesh) rather than marveling at it. Feldman writes:

The moment brought tears to my eyes—in fact I’m fighting back tears as I write this—precisely because Berkovits believes. Both she and the senior rabbi she was addressing believe in God. And it was precisely because [of] that . . . he had no meaningful answer to make. How could he tell Berkovits that her experience of God was any less valid than his own, when her learning and her love of the Torah were so deep and genuine?

What is striking is that as a constitutional scholar, Feldman is not fazed by a theory of jurisprudence whose fundamental adjudicative principle is that the law be congruent with an individual’s inner experience and entirely subjective notion of God’s inscrutable will, rather than the interpretation and application of legal texts. Even scholars who interpret the Constitution as a “living document” would reject decisions based solely on personal experience.

Berkovits is, in Feldman’s terms, an Evolutionist. Evolutionists acknowledge the authority of rabbinic law while recognizing that it has evolved not only in response to changing external circumstances (even the most hardline Traditionalists know that the talmudic sages didn’t know about riding on bicycles, subways, or airlines or koshering microwaves and air fryers) but in response to changing social and moral norms. Feldman elucidates this position through a familiar interpretation of the talmudic story of the Oven of Akhnai. The famous theological punchline of that story is uttered by Rabbi Joshua, who refutes Rabbi Eliezer’s miraculous enlistment of God to his side of the halakhic argument by quoting the biblical verse “it is not in heaven.” As Feldman writes, “The takeaway for Evolutionists [is that] the rabbis, not God, are in charge of interpretation.” Surprisingly, Feldman does not note that another takeaway of the story is that Rabbi Eliezer’s experience of God’s will has no legal standing, even when others can share that experience through public miracles.

Feldman’s discussion of Zionism and the Jewish state opens with a long account of the six weeks he spent alone in Israel after his bar mitzvah. “By the end of the summer,” he writes, “I had amassed . . . a professional tour guide’s knowledge of Israel.” Unfortunately, this section is marred by errors that one might forgive a tour guide but not a scholar. The most rudimentary and repeated of these is Feldman’s mischaracterization of Zionism as being inherently atheistic. He insists that atheism was not only doctrinally but also politically essential to Zionism from its inception and that the State of Israel’s (mostly) secular founders sought to replace the old, exilic worship of the God of Israel with a new, idolatrous veneration of the Land of Israel. Feldman begins by explaining the essentially secular nature of classical Zionism by observing that “many classical Zionists held genuinely radical views about the Jewish religious tradition.” This much is, of course, true, and—like the Haskalah out of which Zionism both emerged and from whose Eurocentrism it dissented—this produced a rich and heretical Hebrew literature. Although many of the contributors to this literature were ardent secularists, most were not, and only an extreme fringe among them—from the pagan Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichovsky to the
Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua—may be considered atheists. Zionism was for the most part neutral on religion, as it sought to unite secular and religious Jews in a common national purpose.

To illustrate his insistence on the Zionists’ alleged program to replace God with the nation-state, Feldman engages in a tortuous exegesis of the use of the traditional term Rock of Israel (Tsur Yisrael)  instead of one of the standard names of God in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Feldman says it was chosen precisely because it was not a standard term and described a physical sustainer of the Zionists’ replacement for God—the nation of Israel. However, when David Ben Gurion recited the text of Israel’s “scroll of independence,” which declared the state’s creation “be-ezrat tsur Yisrael,” he may have been thinking of Spinoza’s “God or Nature,” but that isn’t what the other framers were thinking. Among the six co-drafters of this historic document—which was written on parchment by a traditional scribe—were Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon, the cofounder of the Mizrahi movement, and Haim-Moshe Shapira, the politically liberal religious Zionist politician and Knesset cabinet member. These Zionists were no more atheists than was the fiery Calvinist polemicist Augustus Montague Toplady, author of the popular Anglican hymn “Rock of Ages.”

Ben-Gurion wasn’t really an atheist either. His lifelong study of the Bible and adoration of the ancient Hebrew prophets went hand in glove with his passion for Spinoza. He bridled even at being called a secularist. Moreover, although most of Zionism’s founders at the 1897 First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, were not religiously observant, by the time of the Fifth Congress in 1902, the religious Zionists of the Mizrahi movement had become an integral and important component of the World Zionist Organization. Its delegates represented the Congress’s third largest caucus and continued to do so for more than a half-century.

In his historical overview of religious Zionism, Feldman never discusses the Mizrahi movement, except to mention its founding in a one-sentence footnote. To do so would have undercut his portrayal of religious Zionists as messianic from the outset—for the first generation of religious Zionist leaders advocated not merely a nonmessianic but an actively antimessianic theory of Zionism. When, in 1903, Theodor Herzl presented the Uganda plan, which proposed a Jewish settlement in colonial Africa as a temporary, pragmatic goal for the Zionist movement, his proposal met with a storm of opposition. Yet the Mizrahi leader rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines supported the idea, reasoning that Zionism must not be confused with the messianic hope, but rather understood it as a political solution that also fulfilled one of the Torah’s most important obligations: saving lives.

Until the elections of 1977, all of Israel’s religious parties were aligned with the socialist Mapai party. And even now, despite the foul salience of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Zionist radicals, there remain many important liberal religious Zionist rabbis and institutions in Israel—even in West Bank settlements, yeshivot, and kibbutzim, such as Otniel, Ma’ale Adumim, and the Etzion Bloc—who have been critical of the messianic politics and tactics of Gush Emunim.

Feldman’s determination to all but demonize religious Zionism is most manifest in his unduly long and detailed depiction of the racist, fringe, messianic, lunatic rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, who has been rejected even by the large majority of the rabbis and leaders of Gush Emunim. This, instead of paying any attention to a host of far more influential religious Zionist figures on the contemporary scene. To name just a few: the founding leaders of the Evolutionist Israeli rabbinical organization Tzohar, including rabbis Yuval Cherlow, Michael Melchior, Shlomo Riskin, and David Stav.

The book’s last section, “Of the Jewish People,”is an extended argument against a Zionist or nationalist conception of Jewish identity. Feldman prefers a rather inchoate notion of the Jews as a vast, extended, and neurotically eccentric family. The narrative charm of this conceit begins to wear thin when it becomes apparent that Feldman’s model of the open, inclusive, crazy “people-family” serves to obviate any serious effort to define Jewish identity, based on a sober account of religious, national, hereditary, and historical criteria.

Feldman insists that it was the creation of the Jewish state that rendered obsolete the historical notion that Jews worldwide constitute a nation. To avoid being suspected of mischaracterizing his surprisingly reductionist argument, I quote it at length:

Israel did become a nation-state. But it did not become the nation-state of the Jews as a whole. To the contrary, as we shall now see, Israel’s national development shows that whatever may have been true seventy-five years ago, the Jews today cannot be defined as a nation. The crucial fact for understanding Israel’s development as a nation-state is that not all the world’s Jews emigrated to Israel. . . . According to the original Zionist picture, all these Jews outside Israel were still members of the Jewish nation. . . .

Yet, over time, as Israel grew into a functioning nation-state it developed its own culture, its own language, and, ultimately, its own sense of contained selfhood. Jews outside Israel . . . did not partake of these. . . . So long as they stayed in their own countries, they did not take up Israeli citizenship. They were not, in fact, Israelis. . . . Israel’s flourishing over seventy-five years created a new national identity: the national identity of the Israeli. That identity, in turn, undercut the notion that the Jews today, including those non-Israeli Jews who live outside the country, are all members of a single nation. . . .

In other words, if Israel is a nation, and not all Jews belong to it, then the Jews today are not a nation, not even to today’s Zionist Israelis. The emergence of an Israeli nationality proves it.

Where to begin? Jewish peoplehood long preceded modern Jewish nationalism; our oldest documents refer to the Jews as an am, a people or a nation, regardless of where they happened to dwell.

Feldman speciously confuses the categories of state citizenship and national membership. Members of a single nation can live in different states. Together they constitute a transborder community. I use the prefix “trans” advisedly, because Feldman illustrates his new model of Jewish identity as a kind of heimishe meta-family, and his own opposition to Zionism’s allegedly too rigid and exclusionary concept of nationhood, this way:

Consider the queer and trans families organized into “houses” in Paris Is Burning (1990), the classic documentary of the New York City ball scene. These are families in the deepest sense of the word. They are chosen and also, in a sense, feel like they were destined or fated.

I am more than happy to consider them families, if Feldman would repay the courtesy and respect that the vast majority of Jews throughout their long exile have shared a common sense of national destiny and fate.

Just as Maimonides’s Guide and those that followed addressed what their authors deemed threats to the Jewish faith, Feldman’s book appeared in the midst of a worldwide eruption of what may fairly be considered the greatest threat to the Jewish state since 1948. In this context, his denial of the Jews’ status as a nation because most diaspora Jews are not Israeli citizens, and some Israeli citizens’ primary identification is national, not religious, is not only misguided but dangerous.

This negates the central premise of Zionism and the enduring promise of the State of Israel: to provide sanctuary and immediate citizenship to Jews in an emergency out of a sense of national solidarity. If Jews are, in Feldman’s convoluted, ahistorical theory, not (or no longer) a nation, then who will offer them asylum if the worst comes to pass? This is certainly contrary to Feldman’s intent—his passionate concern for the welfare of his fellow Jews is evident throughout this book. But I have no doubt that this rather new and more than middle-sized argument will be added to the arsenal of anti-Zionist ideologues.