A Personal Tale of Modern Orthodox Judaism
The author is a law professor at Harvard. His story is about the contradictions inherent in reconciling his orthodox education with his participation in the "real world".
It's an interesting read especially in light of Israel Shahak's much more critical work on Orthodox Judaism, Jewish History Jewish Religion - The Weight of Three Thousand Years.
It's nice to see this kind of soul-searching published, couched as it is in apologetics...
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"and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations."
Why is this no surprise. He tries real hard to sound conflicted yet his attempt falls flat.
I love this part...
"One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.
Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.
This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient’s life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.
Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them."
totally forgot to mention the CFR thing...
but yeah, you tell me what that means! I think we have to give him credit for even broaching this subject and mentioning that asshole who only thought it was bad because he was revealing the "secret" to non-Jews.
while you won't hear these things discussed in the same breath as the much more common condemnations of any unsavory element of Islam, it's a start...