Award: Best use of a physics analogy in a halakhic or metahalakhic teshuvah

The subject line speaks for itself. The 2006 award goes to Rabbi Gordon Tucker's teshuva, "Halakhic and Metahalakhic Arguments Concerning Judaism and Homosexuality". This post does not address the content of the teshuva or the politics surrounding it, but only the use of a physics analogy that most rabbis of any denomination would not have been able to come up with.

The context is a discussion of the role of legal positivism in halakha.

So for the broadest range of questions that may arise – be they queries about the kashrut of microbial enzymes, or the use of a shaliah le-kabbalah in giving a get, or the permissibility of driving on Shabbat to be a shomer for a corpse – the teshuvot are bound to be written in the positivist style. In addition to there being many good reasons to reason this way, there are, in the large majority of cases, no good grounds not to. We are all positivists in the same way that we all use Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics to solve the broadest range of problems in the configuration of space and in the dynamics of motion. Euclid and Newton are not only perfectly suited to the small scale of the billiards table; their relative simplicity and linear quality serve us well in most of the tasks we face. But despite the fact that Euclid and Newton are splendid and irreplaceable tools in most ordinary matters, we need to know that their “local success” does not necessarily translate into “global success”. When Einstein measured, during a solar eclipse, the light of a distant star that passed very near the large mass of the darkened sun, he demonstrated that we either had to concede that space was not Euclidean, or that light did not travel in straight lines near large gravitational fields. We know, in other words, that there are those phenomena that lie outside the domain of normal observation, that lay bare to us the need for more sophisticated, less simple tools of analysis that can be extremely disorienting at first. But that is the only way that progress is made.

This is the sense in which we are all positivists in law. It is a splendid and irreplaceable tool for the ordinary questions that law is called upon to answer. But then there are the analogues of Einstein’s landmark experiment, the hard cases of law, hard cases like the one before us in this paper. For we are dealing with a case in which the logic of the system and its precedents do not fit well with the personal experiences and narratives of gay and lesbian Jews, and with the growing moral senses of the community.

As far as I am aware, the physics is entirely correct. Classical mechanics is an elegant and internally consistent theory. It also happens to match up well with the physical universe, for a limited range of cases. These properties don't necessarily have to coincide -- one could come up with elegant and consistent theories that have no relationship to physical reality (like a universe in which F=mj, or heck, this is what they once thought non-Euclidean geometry was), and though we assume that physical reality is consistent (or else all bets would be off when it comes to science), it's not necessarily going to obey the simplest or most elegant laws possible.

And, in fact, the correspondence between classical mechanics and physical reality falls apart when you look at very small or very large things, travel at high velocities, etc. Classical mechanics as a theory is unharmed, and continues to be useful in the same cases in which it was useful, but new theories (quantum mechanics; special and general relativity) are required to describe the physical universe in those other domains of observation.

So Tucker is making this same point about halacha. (I'm not sure I agree with him -- i.e. my own views are even less "Newtonian", i.e. the opposite reason from why the other teshuvot submitted to the CJLS would disagree with him --but my opinions are beyond the scope of this post.) He would define a "classical" theory of halachic jurisprudence that is useful in everyday cases, but recognize that this theory does not correspond to reality in all cases, and develop another theory that applies to those cases.

Where is the boundary between the "ordinary questions" and the "hard cases"? It's an old question (aka challot devash me'eimatai mitame'ot mishum mashkeh? This cryptic reference to be explained in another post upon request. Hint: Psalm 19:10-11), and different people may arrive at different conclusions.

Another point that Tucker doesn't mention but that may strengthen his analogy: The "exceptions" to classical mechanics aren't just freak occurrences, but appear all the time. For example, atoms and molecules can't be explained with classical mechanics, and require quantum mechanics. Many famous things are made of atoms and molecules! Likewise, gay and lesbian people aren't anomalous; they're everywhere.

Question for Rabbi Tucker: Certainly, it's not convenient to use relativity or quantum mechanics to describe everyday situations at human scales (between atoms and galaxies), but it's possible. The correspondence principle says that quantum mechanics reduces to classical mechanics for large enough systems. Likewise, special and general relativity reduce to classical mechanics when v << c (velocity is much less than the speed of light) and we're looking at small masses and small chunks of space. Does your "enhanced halakhic method" obey an analogous correspondence principle? That is, if only the enhanced method were applied, would it arrive (albeit via more effort) at the same results as the positivist method would (in the cases for which you think a positivist approach is valid)? And if not, then would complementarity be a better physics analogy?

***

Going back to the physics, in addition to the obvious reasons why classical mechanics is useful even though "more correct" theories exist (an engineer building a bridge doesn't need or want to consider relativistic effects, which would make the calculations much more difficult), there are also pedagogical reasons for this, which are foremost in my mind as a high school physics teacher.

And maybe these reasons aren't so different: similar to the (discredited) theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, perhaps individual science learning recapitulates scientific development. For my master's project in science education, I looked at how students' mental models undergo Kuhnian paradigm shifts. (This idea wasn't original, and the conditions for a paradigm shift appear in a 1982 article in Science Education by George J. Posner et al., but I was looking more closely at the mechanism of this paradigm shift and the "reactive intermediates".)

So just as classical mechanics had to be developed before Einstein could come up with relativity or Schrodinger could come up with wave mechanics, perhaps students need a foundation in classical mechanics before they can understand "modern physics".

Some students who come into first-year physics with lots of enthusiasm about the subject struggle because they're not able to bracket the "hard cases" while first looking at a simplified model. We make simplifications all the time, and not just the kind where we use classical mechanics instead of quantum mechanics or relativity: high school physics is filled with frictionless surfaces and massless strings and rigid bodies and point masses and point charges and elastic collisions and negligible air resistance and negligible electrical resistance and such. Some students are always asking "But wouldn't it break?" or "But what about the curvature of the earth?" or "What if you were going near the speed of light?". And those are excellent questions to ask. After you get the basic concept and are ready to consider more advanced applications. But if you don't allow for some approximations on the way there (like the famous spherical chicken), you'll be paralyzed and will never gain mastery of the basic concepts. (One of my colleagues had to say to a freshman physics class "Einstein was never born!") It's important to ask questions all the time, and it means that these students are thinking seriously about how physics applies to the real world and not just plugging-and-chugging by rote, but it's also important to learn how to use a simplified model to come up with an approximate answer, and then evaluate this result to see whether it's close enough or whether we have to consider other parameters.

Sometimes this process occurs during first-year physics itself. When we start in the fall, we assume that Earth's gravitational field is uniform (so gravitational acceleration is constant, gravitational potential energy is simply mgh, etc.), and then in December or so, we do the "gravity" unit and see what happens when you get far away from Earth's surface that you can't assume that g is always 9.8 m/s² anymore.

That said, there's still some value in giving students a taste of more "advanced" physics even if they're not going to get all the way there from first principles, because these theories are such an essential part of our current understanding of the physical universe. Even though high school students certainly aren't going to master classical mechanics to the level that Einstein understood it just before publishing his groundbreaking papers in 1905, they should still get some appreciation of physics developments of the last century. For example, the standard Regents curriculum includes the Bohr model and a superficial look at the Standard Model. If there were more time in the school year, I would go further -- I would love to develop a way to teach quantum mechanics concepts (not the Bohr model, but the real thing) to first-year physics students, and I already do relativity with my AP students after the AP test.

So the point is that in physics education, there is a place both for using simplified models and looking beyond those models.

As I learned today from a student, we're not even consistent in the simplified models that we teach. In AP, we've been doing integrals to find the electric fields due to various charge distributions, and a student asked an excellent question: if charge is quantized, then what does "dq" (an infinitesimal amount of charge; essential for setting up an integral) mean, and how can we talk about these continuous charge distributions? She was totally right. We teach from the beginning (starting way back in chemistry) that charge is quantized, and there are these discrete little charged particles. But then we teach classical electromagnetism, which is really all about continuous charge distributions, with concepts like (finite) charge density. (Note: Maxwell's equations predate the discovery of the electron!) So the answer is that when we're talking about an infinite line of charge with linear charge density λ, we're ignoring the fact that charge is quantized and operating within a theory in which it isn't, and then we can argue that this is close enough to our universe when we're looking at macroscopic things, since the quantum of charge is really really small on that scale. (And "infinite" really just means that L >> r.)

So do these rantings about physics pedagogy have any analog in the study of halacha? Perhaps the introductory Talmud student who is always asking "Did they really have to sacrifice an animal? That's sick and inhumane!" and "Does God really care?" and "Where are all the women?" is analogous to the introductory physics student who is always asking "But isn't light also a particle?" and "What about air resistance?" and "What about the rotation of the earth?". That is, they're both asking very very important questions (you'll have a hard time designing an airplane if you never stop ignoring air resistance!), but in order to develop an understanding of Talmudic methodology / physics methodology (which will assist later on in answering those important questions), it may be helpful to put aside those questions temporarily and focus on one thing at a time.

On the other hand, it's also important to develop, from the beginning, some understanding of the more complex questions, and to begin grappling with those questions, so that the student of halacha/physics understands that halacha/physics is not just a formal system or an intellectual exercise, but is intended as a model for the real world.

(model n. 1. a systematic description of an object or phenomenon. 2. a standard or example for imitation.)

Limmud NY: Reform halakhah panel: DVD extras

I blogged last fortnight about the panel on "The Role of Halakhah in Reform Judaism" at Limmud NY. Here are some other disconnected (and still somewhat raw and not 100% thought out) thoughts on the topic, which I was either prepared to say on the panel but the discussion never went in that direction, or which were clarified in other conversations over the weekend before and after the panel, particularly with LastTrumpet, ahavatcafe, and Saul.

ONE

None of the people who were actually on the panel would have taken this position, but I had been hoping that someone would say that they concur with the Pittsburgh Platform (which I also concur with on a meta-halakhic level, though not on a halakhic level) and that Reform Judaism means that we follow the ethical mitzvot (bein adam la-chavero) and not the ritual mitzvot (bein adam la-makom). To which I would respond, FINE. If your conception of Judaism doesn't include ritual mitzvot, that's up to you, I don't care. (It's between you and God, one might even say.) But then we could all stand to be more serious about the ethical mitzvot, the ones we all agree are important. Not just "doing a mitzvah", but letting these mitzvot pervade our lives. We should be studying and observing these mitzvot in the realm of halakhah (i.e. specific actions to put into practice) and not only in the realm of aggadah (i.e. more general statements about our values -- which are also extremely important, and which steer the ship of halakhah).

If one is going to make the claim that "Reform Jews are more makpid on the ethical mitzvot, since we're not expending all this energy on ritual mitzvot" (and I've heard various formulations of this claim, going back to the "apt rather to obstruct than to further" clause of the Pittsburgh Platform; I even saw an article that tried to use the rabbinic concept of ha-oseik b'mitzvah patur min ha-mitzvah to argue that Reform Jews are exempt from ritual mitzvot because they're so busy repairing the world that they don't have time to not eat shrimp or something like that, but Google is failing me - can anyone find it?), then this claim should be empirically verifiable. Reform Jews should in fact be more careful about ethical mitzvot than other Jews, and not just talk big. And for sure, the organized Reform movement is doing great things in this area (and it's an easy escape to find some self-identified Orthodox Jews who are violating these mitzvot and lowering the bar for everyone). But why did it take an Orthodox Jew to write this detailed article on calculating your tzedakah obligation? This type of halakhic analysis should be Reform Judaism's bread and butter. And are Reform Jewish businesspeople at the forefront of running their businesses according to ethical mitzvot? Why or why not? Reform Jews should be the ones writing the books on applying these mitzvot to contemporary practical situations, not just Orthodox Jews.

As liberal Jews, instead of just talking about how great we are (and I include myself in this tochecha), let's examine our actions and think about how we could be better at applying our big ideas to the real world. We shouldn't just say "tzedek tzedek tirdof", but we should be specific.

TWO

If Reform Judaism believes that halakhah is interpreted autonomously by each individual, then does Reform Judaism stand for anything? If you and I have different interpretations of halakhah, then do we have anything in common?

Yes. Not halakhah but aggadah. Despite diversity in Jewish practice, Reform/liberal Judaism has expressed a relatively coherent aggadah, so that liberal Jews can agree on Jewish values. (And if aggadah is going to steer halakhah, then this puts some constraints on how halakhah can develop, avoiding the "anything goes" situation that some fear.)

In contrast, perhaps Orthodox Judaism has (relatively) more uniformity in halakhah and less uniformity in aggadah.

THREE

"Patrilineal descent" was in the panel description, but didn't really come up except as a side point in a discussion of CCAR/URJ procedure. But if it had, I was just going to give my stock rant on the topic.

My personal position on the matter is that I (the only person I have any authority over) am Jewish, and if anyone else tells me that s/he is Jewish (and I have no reason to suspect malice), then it's not my place to question him/her -- how do I know his/her definition isn't the right one?

FOUR

"Interfaith marriage" was also in the panel description, but didn't come up either. This is a complicated one, especially if we look at it through a halakhic lens (the topic of the panel) rather than as armchair sociologists or marriage counselors. I can think of reasons why a Jew might want to marry another Jew (preferentially or exclusively), and why a third party might want Jews to marry other Jews, but that's not the question. There are two related halakhic questions here: "Is a Jew permitted to marry a non-Jew?" and "Is a rabbi (or other officiant in a Jewish capacity) permitted to officiate at the marriage of a Jew and a non-Jew?", and the fact that the questions are being asked presupposes that these two people want to get married. Let's also suppose for the sake of argument that the Jew in question has no potential Jewish partners (the alternative is staying single), so that we're assessing this marriage itself rather than its opportunity cost.

Of course, a rabbi (like any other clergyperson) is authorized by the state to perform a civil marriage between any two adults (with many states still imposing restrictions based on the genders of the parties, but not based on religious or ethnic identity). This civil marriage has no status in Jewish law, so it's no more or less permitted than living with a non-Jewish partner without any marriage. Many (most?) rabbis won't perform such a marriage unless both parties are Jewish, presumably because they don't see themselves as justices of the peace, and won't perform a civil marriage in the absence of a Jewish marriage, and won't officiate at a Jewish marriage unless both parties are Jewish.

So we're really not asking the question about civil marriage, but about Jewish marriage. Out of rabbis who won't officiate at this marriage, many probably have reasons based on social policy -- they don't think it's a good idea. Again, we're going to skirt the question of whether it's a good idea. If one comes to the conclusion that it is, is this marriage permitted? Is it valid?

Before we begin to answer the question (and I'm not going to answer it in this post), we have to think about what we as liberal Jews mean by "marriage" and by "Jewish".

Jewish marriage consists of two components: kiddushin and nisuin. Addressing them in reverse order: It's not 100% clear when and how nisuin takes place, but it takes place under the chuppah, symbolizing the home that the two partners create together. We already know that it is possible for a Jew and a non-Jew to create a home together; we have empirical evidence since it happens all the time. Nisuin requires a ketubah. Since this is a legal contract by which both parties agree to be bound, its terms are in effect regardless of whether the parties are Jewish. (It may or may not be enforceable, but the same can be said of a ketubah involving two Jews, if they live in a secular society.)

Kiddushin is more complicated, because what is it??? As liberal Jews, we don't understand it as a man acquiring a woman, but have we replaced it with another understanding (as distinct from nisuin)? Is it a mere "ceremony", or does it effect a real change in status? And what is that change? We have to figure out the big picture of what egalitarian Jewish marriage really means (not just weddings, but marriage) before we can address smaller details like whether it exclusively involves Jews.

Independent of figuring out what kiddushin really is, one might say that whatever it is, it can only apply to Jews, since it's "kedat Moshe ve-Yisrael", and only Jews are subject to that law. I would respond: As liberal Jews, do we believe that there are laws that are intrinsically binding on all Jews (regardless of what those Jews have to say about the matter) and not on non-Jews? (I'm not sure I do.) And if not, then if we use this argument to exclude non-Jews from kiddushin, then we should also exclude Jews who do not consider themselves bound by Jewish law (in any sense whatsoever -- as widely as you want to define this). But I have never heard of a rabbi who was not willing to officiate at a wedding of two secular Jews, even though (let us stipulate) their relationship to "dat Moshe ve-Yisrael" is no different from a non-Jew's relationship to it. So that can't be the whole picture.

In conclusion, there are some key unanswered questions (from a liberal Jewish standpoint):

• What is kiddushin?
• What is the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew (ceteris paribus)?

Until we answer these questions, any attempts to answer more advanced questions (e.g. "Can there be kiddushin involving a Jew and a non-Jew?") are futile.

Limmud NY: Reform halakhah panel

(Crossposted to Jewschool)

Hi from the Catskills (or should I say, the Catskill)!

On Shabbat afternoon I was on a panel on "The Role of Halakhah in Reform Judaism", moderated by Rabbi Leon Morris of the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning. The other panelists were Rabbi Joan Glazer Farber of the Union for Reform Judaism, and Rabbi Mark Sameth of Pleasantville Community Synagogue. (So yes, I was the token non-rabbi on the panel.)

By request, here is some of the discussion from the panel as best I can recall. I'm mostly just going to post what I said (because I'm not worried about misrepresenting myself, but might misrepresent others), but if other panelists or attendees want to post their recollections, please do so in the comments.

There was no one on the panel representing a "Classical Reform" perspective or a "Reform Judaism isn't halachic" perspective, but the views expressed were far from homogeneous.

Some personal information, since people are wondering whether I belong on the panel: I consider myself a Reform expatriate. I practice what I consider to be Reform Judaism (as an ideology), though I am not currently affiliated with the Reform movement (as a set of institutions). So I focused my remarks on the former, not the latter.

We started by sharing our thoughts on the relationship between Reform Judaism and halakhah. Here's what I said: Often when we get into discussions about identifying one's own movement or other movements as "halakhic" or "not halakhic", these distinctions are about identity and politics and semantics, and not necessarily about substance, since there is not a single agreed-upon definition of what halakhah is, and it's just a question of how you define it. If we define "halakhah" by the Orthodox definition, then Reform Judaism is obviously not halakhic by that definition; if we line the denominations up on a scale from 1 to Orthodox, then of course Reform will come up short. If, on the contrary, we define "halakhah" as binding religious obligations, then all Reform views would agree that there is halakhah in Reform Judaism -- even if you hold like the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, which held that the ritual commandments in the Torah do not apply in our time, then you still would hold that the Torah's ethical commandments are obligatory.

So we can start from the assumption that there exists Reform halakhah, and that it is different in nature from Orthodox halakhah. I want to point out two significant ways in which the Reform understanding of halakhah is different from halakhah as understood by other movements:

1) There is a concept called yeridat hadorot (descent of the generations) that informs Orthodox halakhah. The idea is that the Written and Oral Torah were revealed at some time in the past, and each successive generation is farther and farther from the original revelation. This impacts halakhah because there is a mishnah in Masechet Eduyot that says that a beit din (Jewish court) cannot overturn a decision of a previous beit din unless the later one is greater than the earlier one in both wisdom and number. Since our generation is farther from revelation than previous generations, we are presumed to have less wisdom, and therefore we cannot supplant earlier halakhic decisions, but can only work within them. In Orthodox halakhah, the transmission of tradition can be compared to a game of Telephone, where the signal gets weaker each time it is passed on. Reform Judaism, in contrast, would compare this transmission to that game where you go around telling a story, and each person adds a word or a sentence. Instead of yeridat hadorot, the operative principle is, in Isaac Newton's words, "standing on the shoulders of giants". By this understanding, we are greater in wisdom than previous generations, because our generation knows everything that they knew, plus everything that we have learned since then. Therefore, the tradition continues to grow and develop. This is a small-p progressive rather than a small-c conservative understanding of halakhah.

2) Authority. All Jewish religious movements would agree that God is the ultimate authority, and would also agree that we cannot communicate directly with God. We have texts that were written (or Written) in the past, but all would agree that there are decisions to be made in the present time about our practice, and the question is about who has the authority to make those decisions. This is a case that challenges the way people typically line the movements up on a spectrum: the Conservative movement is at one extreme and the Reform movement on another, with Orthodox in the middle. (This is about the movement ideologies on paper, not necessarily about how people actually practice.) In the Conservative movement, there is a law committee that makes halakhic decisions for the movement. Even if they come up with multiple answers, they still define the range of options, and the local rabbi selects an option from this range, and the individual is supposed to follow halakhah as determined by this hierarchy. In the Orthodox world, there is no centralized committee, so this authority is more diffuse, but there are rabbis who render halakhic decisions, and individuals follow various rabbis' rulings. In Reform Judaism, the responsibility of interpreting Torah to determine the halakhah that is to be observed is on each individual.

Following up on this, Leon Morris asked a question about autonomy. He said he was talking about autonomy the way it should ideally work, since we all know how it works out in reality. I responded to this throwaway comment, saying that I'm not sure we do know how it works in reality. I don't think that informed autonomy has really been implemented in the Reform movement. One might look at Reform-affiliated Jews and say that they're acting autonomously, perhaps too autonomously, but I say we shouldn't confuse apathy with autonomy. Sure, people are choosing not to do Jewish things much of the time, but when they are doing Jewish things, they are entirely dependent on someone else to tell them what to do and to do things for them. Informed autonomy hasn't been implemented, because most Jews in the Reform movement are neither informed nor autonomous. Before we knock autonomy, first we should try it.

LM said that his view of how autonomy should work in Reform Judaism (and please correct me if I'm misrepresenting this) is that an HUC professor might say to a student "I noticed this morning at davening that you weren't wearing tefillin. Why is that?", and the student would respond with reasons why s/he doesn't wear tefillin. Thus, people should be familiar with the tradition, and autonomously define their relationship to it, and if someone wants to reject an element of it, s/he should have a reason. I disagree with this view of tradition. I said that to treat "The Tradition" as something static and monolithic is to commit an act of Artscrollization. Jewish tradition is something that has always evolved over time, and this tradition includes the last 200 years of Reform Jewish history, which have created their own facts on the ground for us to take into account, and the tradition will continue to evolve and develop into the future, and autonomy means that each of us is an active participant in that development.

We shouldn't assume that in the state of nature everyone is Orthodox, and that any difference from Orthodoxy requires justification. In the state of nature we're wherever we started, and we might change from that point. So for the first n years of my life I didn't wear tefillin, but I didn't have a specific justification for this; it was simply because I grew up not wearing tefillin, so that was the default.

One of the panelists asked me how I would define Kol Zimrah. I said that KZ is not affiliated institutionally with the Reform movement or any other movement, and doesn't identify itself with a movement label. It is the case empirically that people in the KZ community are exercising informed autonomy about their Jewish practice, but Kol Zimrah as an organization doesn't take an ideological stance about this. However, I have found that the independent Jewish communities I am involved in, like Kol Zimrah and the National Havurah Committee, are closer to what I would want in a Reform community (in that there is informed autonomy) than the actual Reform movement is.

LM asked about individuals giving up some of their autonomy for the sake of creating community. He gave the example of a community agreeing to adhere to some practice, even something that isn't when the community is all together, e.g. everyone agrees to daven mincha every day wherever they are, to connect them to the rest of the community.

I said that the Reform model of halakha should be not the Shulchan Aruch (a set of rules), but the Talmud (a conversation, where Rabbi X says this and Rabbi Y says that and they talk about their reasons). I think if the entire community in this example were engaged in a discourse about mincha, that would bring the community together just as effectively as everyone deciding to do it.

One attendee asked what the deal was with Kutz Camp having visiting day on Shabbat. I got to tell my story about visiting my brother at Kutz (both to address this question and illustrate what autonomous Jewish practice could look like), but said that it would have been more convenient if visiting day hadn't been on Shabbat.

Another attendee asked why this conversation was happening at Limmud NY, and not happening at the URJ Biennial. I said that we weren't the ones to answer that!

Someone pointed out the need for education for informed autonomy to be feasible, as well as for Reform Jews to operate in a pluralistic setting with other Jews. I agreed wholeheartedly, and said some of the stuff about education and identity from the end of Hilchot Pluralism Part VI.

That's all for now, since it's time to jam, but in a later post I'll say some of the stuff on this topic that I didn't get to say on the panel.