Post 1: And We're Back...
Part 2 will be a whole different ballgame
That was fun, wasn’t it. But now it’s time to get serious – and I mean that in a very specific way.
I used to enjoy reading the late Israeli thinker, Yeshayahu Leibowitz. He held no views that weren’t extreme. Even when he decided that some extreme view of his – for example, his early support for theocracy in Israel – was wrong, he wouldn’t switch to some less extreme view, but rather to the opposite extreme – for example, radical separation of religion and state. He was never boring – until you caught on to the game and then he was often boring.
The advantage of slightly cartoonish characters who stake out extreme views is that extreme views are challenging. They force us to think about the lazy assumptions that underlie many of our more mainstream opinions. Every now and then some extreme view has intrinsic merit, but usually the main value of such views is as intuition pumps.
The characters in my story are intended to be cartoonish (and inebriated) precisely so that they would take their utopian (or dystopian) arguments far enough to make us slightly uncomfortable. Indeed, even the narrator is a cartoonish version of me (or at least that was the intention).
But now it’s time to do the less glamorous job of offering plausible solutions to the very real challenges the characters are concerned with. Let me restate the challenges now without the narrator’s convenient crutches of inebriated buffoonery and snide bemusement. This restatement mirrors the four axes that emerged in the earlier discussion.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of codifying halacha, are current codes suited to our circumstances, and how might we do better?
How is halacha extended to novel cases, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using AI for this purpose, and what might be the ideal way of doing that?
How does Jewish political autonomy impinge on halacha, what are the advantages and disadvantages of involving a Jewish state in the development of halacha, and what might be the ideal way of doing that?
Is the identification of Jewish civilization with halacha too reductive, ought we be striving to broaden the horizons of Jewish civilization under current circumstances, and do we have a clue about how this might be done?
In the coming chapters, I’ll begin by showing how the above are all facets of a single overarching framework: Judaism’s development depends on the interaction of collective intuition with occasional formalization and this development is challenged by cultural shifts that strengthen formalization at the expense of intuition. Within this framework, it will be clear why the sequencing of the questions is critical, why the party had to take place in Jerusalem and not, say, New York, why these challenges are more apt now than they were in the past, and why [various other questions that probably have crossed your mind].
But once we get past the (important) throat-clearing, I won’t be beating around the bush. I’m actually intending to offer concrete solutions to each of the first three problems. I will demonstrate how halacha ought to be (re)codified; I will demonstrate an AI agent that responds to questions about Judaism with a well-calibrated balance of ambition and restraint; I will offer a full-blown constitution for the State of Israel that anchors limited interaction between religion and state.
Finally, I will explain why it is too soon to suggest a solution to the fourth challenge.
I expect to post about once a week. Here goes.
Nice. I enjoyed the first bit.
Although I think the narrator, who makes things into neat dialectics, needs a counterpart to interject that it's all really messy and a lot of people don't map neatly onto axes.
And then the narrator can respond that dialectics can be useful anyway...
Looking forward
Thank you, professor, for these incredibly insightful posts--I particularly appreciate your adaptation of the Scott Alexander "house party" format for this essential subject matter. :)
While I trust that you'll address in a future post, I want to ask about "why the party had to take place in Jerusalem and not, say, New York" as you've written above. As an American Jew, many of these questions are equally vital, though perhaps fall along additional or slightly different axes as the ones you've aptly identified.
Of particular interest (to me) is more the archetype of Heidi (from Judaism Straight Up) or perhaps (I'm just guessing here...) her more Zionist older brother at the Conservative synagogue on the other side of town. As you've noted here and in the book, halakha can serve the sociological function of establishing in-group boundaries and loyalty. Within the (predominantly American) liberal Jewish denominations, where halakha is of greatly diminished salience, it seems to me that particular political beliefs have become the shibboleths for in-group membership, in lieu of halakha. This might be progressive politics or activism within the Reform movement, or Zionism within the Conservative movement.
I think there are a ton of negative downstream effects here and would love to hear your thoughts on how this plays into the bigger picture for the Jewish people as a whole, especially given that Reform and Conservative Jews in the US might together make up something like a quarter of all Jews worldwide. Moreover, I think this dynamic might play into the shifting support for Israel in the US, which obviously has major follow-on effects for Israel geopolitically.
Thank you!!