The Case Against "Modern Orthodoxy" [Draft 1]

B"H

Today we are witness to the maturity, and the global dominance, of the young tradition called Modern Secular Humanism. No known community on earth, and no language spoken there, has escaped the influence of its logic, with which any and all cultural identities and worldviews now have to contend. Its theology, secular moral philosophy, is, in practice, a language you and I both speak and believe in to a considerable extent, whether we realize it or not. The same can be said of its political theory, liberal free-market democracy, and of its religion, Consumerism. Consequently, when we speak of "religious culture," it is implicit that we are speaking of religious consumer culture. If I ask, "what is your religion?" or, "what is your practice?" or, "where do you daven?" I can't help but really be asking, "what brand of religion/Judaism do you use?"

This is not to trivialize the question of religious brand loyalty. Money may be purely symbolic, but the power it symbolizes is not, and the power behind our money is invested as heavily in religious brand establishment as in nearly anything else. The religion market could hardly be less trivial.

It is significant, however, that Judaism as we know it is a consumer market, as fully commercial in its operation as everything else of spiritual value today. It is significant because this language of Modern Secular Humanism bears certain characteristic limitations, systemic distortions of Reality, which are different from the limitations of previous generations' languages. Without an understanding of linguistic paradigm shift, it is impossible to speak meaningfully of our own beloved "tradition," a subject that, by definition, must extend in its integrity across such shifts.

Each generation is born into a different dimension of consciousness across the matrix of history, and adapts language (imperfectly) to life with its unique historical inheritance from the Divine. I find myself visualizing "stratacut" clay animation, the film technique in which successive frames reveal advancing cross-sections through a massive block of clay, producing the appearance of kaleidoscopically evolving patterns of color. The clay block's third spatial dimension has been traded for Time; and the result is interesting to look at because we humans, lacking X-ray vision, get more from seeing an opaque object in motion than from trying to see through it.

Tradition maintains the epistemological wiring between one generation's language and another's. It is the color in the clay -- the way we can tell that, though we may be dealing with our own moment, our own unique slice, there is a referential continuity across the whole heritage, because it is all One block of clay. I am plugged into the same subsystem of G!d's Scheme as my forebears. This red form over here may morph into a different red shape over there, but we know they are both red because they are each part of the contiguous vein of red clay that threads through the larger block.

A familiar trope in "liberal" Jewish theory is that secular moral philosophy can also provide referential continuity across eras, and that this is a more rational, more pure continuity than that provided by any tradition. The flaw in this notion illustrates my argument: What we know as secular moral philosophy is, in fact, itself the theology of a particular cultural tradition. Just like all the rest, it has emerged over time from accretions of other traditions (including not a small amount of Torah); and, like many others, it imagines itself to be universal and on this point it is wrong. Consider that secular moral philosophy is greatly concerned with an individual's rights against his community, and not concerned in the slightest with the sanctity of Shabbat. Now it would seem to be glaringly obvious that the Talmudists had very different priorities from the moral philosophers, at least in this regard! But moral philosophy, requiring itself to be universal, would seek to translate the Talmudists' motivations, which it presumes to spring from a basic handful of universal human ethical requirements, into its own lexicon. This kind of translation is very popular (in kiruv, religious apologetics, and elsewhere), with all areas of halakhah, and I don't think it is a bankrupt exercise. I do, however, think it will always break down far short of legitimate success -- very much like translation of Hebrew Scripture into English. In fact, I defy any practicing modern-day Talmudist to honestly claim that the language of moral philosophy enabled him to perceive the essence of Talmudic worldview. Big prize money for that. (Bli neder.)

Secular moral philosophy derives strictly from within a particular canon of cultural experience and theory, which concerns the historical roots of Modern Secular Humanism. All claims to universality beyond that cultural boundary are simply Colonialist. My point, though, is not to denigrate moral philosophy, or Secular Humanism. My point is that Modern Secular Humanism is not concerned with the knowledge of my Talmudist ancestors (excepting certain slivers of overlap, such as with tort law or property rights) and, therefore, its language cannot bring me very deep into a knowledge of my own heritage.

What connects me to the esoteric experience of those Talmudist forebears is the Jewish Tradition we hold in common. Only by incorporating with my life the same body of practical and theological elements (the colors of clay) that constituted their Judaism, can I hope to know what on earth they were plugged into. And only by struggling to reconcile those elements with the language of my generation can I hope to know how it is that my language and their language, while disparate, both represent being plugged into the same thing, the same eternal Chosenness.

It would be said (and I have said myself) that this compulsion to reconcile the whole of Jewish tradition with contemporary language makes me "Modern Orthodox." But I have decided that this is crap.

Leaving aside, for now, my complaints with "Orthodoxy," let's ask: what is it exactly that makes the Modern Orthodox uniquely "Modern?" Standard characteristics range from the superficial, like dress style or beard length, to the substantial, like learning or gender identity -- but all of these amount to one simple distinction, that the so-called Modern Orthodox purposefully maintain a conscious familiarity with the stuff of Modernity, its institutions, its insights, its arts, its technologies, its Language. Conventionally, then, we assume the non-Modern Orthodox -- I'll pick a fight and call them Frum -- to eschew the stuff of Modernity, because it is Secular and, therefore, Profane*. And this, I have decided, is absolute stinking crap.

The medium is the message. Frum Jews live and work in the same Modern cities and the same industrial workplace, engage the same Modern political apparatus and the same global economy, and depend upon the same Modern medicine and transportation and communications technologies as the rest of us. These media make their lives and experience Modern, to the core. If you took these media away, Frum society would collapse just as completely as would so-called Modern Orthodox society, or any other that is so thoroughly assimilated into the belly of Modernity. They would not know how to feed or clothe their families, build or maintain their homes and batey midrash, or ensure health and prosperity in their communities. Stripped of Modern media, we "Modern Orthodox" would be similarly disabled.

I want to illustrate the great extent to which this dependency determines worldview and, thereby, distorts the face of Tradition itself. My first example regards the practice of Torah learning. The recent appearance of ShasPod in the marketplace got me (and some others) thinking about the nature of today's Frum Torah library and how it is engaged. I suppose it is because the iPod is such an ultra-Modern medium that the ShasPod makes a sensational caricature of Traditional learning hijacked by Modern modalities. The more I think about it, though, the more it seems to me that the most powerful force of Modernity in Frum learning is the books.

With the strength of good timing and positively Grade-A marketing, ArtScroll has established its now-complete Talmud Bavli redaction as a must-own for any Frum household that means to be taken seriously. This represents a paradigmatic departure from the place of Talmud in religious family life of generations past. The change? Talmud has become a consumer item, one of the myriad accoutrements of the Orthodox lifestyle package. It is effectively more important to own it as merchandise, than to spend a lifetime wrangling with it even if only to truly grasp a single daf. The purchase functions principally as a vote of brand loyalty to Orthodoxy. If its function were principally the exercise of theo-ethical and analytical acumen, as it once was, then it would be normative for individual religious households to own far fewer volumes than we expect today. As it is, from the standpoint of cultural literacy and intellectual engagement, spending hundreds of dollars to buy more than only one or two tractates for the average Frum home is terribly extravagant and wasteful (think of the water-filtration you could buy for that!) -- because the average Frum home would not exhaust the study of even one. But the ingenious, if at first (and second) glance totally wacko, marketing coup known as Daf Yomi compels hundreds of thousands of dutiful Frum consumers to plow through tractate after tractate at a rate about 100 times too fast for them to retain much knowledge of use or deep meaning. And they say Sesame Street promotes short attention span.

By contemporary Orthodox standards, I own a tiny Jewish library, and this is bizarre to me. However small, the collection of sfarim I privately own would keep me in round-the-clock intellectual struggle for several lifetimes, if I actually tried to learn each one. And I'm a fast learner. We hold our Tradition's literature in the highest of sanctity available on earth, but this value is uniquely expressed in our time by the reproduction and distribution of a highly uniform canon on a massive industrial scale, targeted to a market base in which every member of the Orthodox brand community is expected to be a buyer (with special picture books for the girls, of course). And, perhaps most strikingly, the ratio of consumers to producers of religious literature has increased by orders of magnitude over the last several generations. This is all breathtakingly Modern.

So what is the message borne by these Modern literary media? (That's "media" in the MacLuhanian sense.) At base, it has to do with the nature of Orality in our culture. Where ownership of the literature tends to be expressed in more material than intellectual terms, the Frum Jew's relationship to the contents of that literature tends to be more regurgitative than discursive. In addition, the emergence of an enormous Orthodox-consumer class is married to the rise of an increasingly specialized and institutionalized industry of religious expertise and certification to serve those consumers' demand. I would argue, therefore, that "Oral Torah," in contemporary Orthodoxy, represents a much less Oral tradition than any past generation knew.

My other example is geographic (Mishkaneers, take note!): Practically all Frum Jews today live and work and pray in an urban setting. They may dress like (extremely well-off) 18th-century European farmers, but that is not the life they live by any stretch of the imagination. Frum communities, like almost all other communities in the privileged world, are utterly dependent upon Modern urban infrastructure, without which they would be totally unsustainable. No electricity, no municipal water, no imported beans and beef -- no Shabbos cholent.

My dear friend Barya once remarked to me that, "Judaism is such a sheep-based tradition, yet how many yeshivah bokherim have ever met the sheep who made their tzitzis?" In general, contemporary Frumkeit lives disconnected from most of the basic mechanisms of its sustenance. Frum farmers, ranchers, textile workers, scientists, and artists and designers -- to mention the first that come to mind -- are very few and far between. These critical functions are left to the Modern global economy (and, in Israel, in/famous public subsidy), in concert with institutionalized regulatory vendors such as the commercial hashgachot, to truck them into the community, wholesale, from outside its walls. This means the experience of those functions is left outside the community's consciousness, thereby restricting the scope of Torah's practiced application to the daily life of the world, and leaving the Frum community with an unprecedentedly shallow aggregate understanding of its own life on earth.

Well then, if contemporary Frumkeit is, in its branding, packaging, external support, and internal operation, so thoroughly Modern, what is this other thing we've been calling "Modern Orthodoxy?" Given that all known Orthodoxy in our time is functionally Modern, then the distinguishing criterion I offered above cannot separate Modern from non-Modern Orthodoxy. Rather, it separates consciously and purposefully Modern from passively and ignorantly Modern Orthodoxy.

The irony -- and this is why I think the term "Modern Orthodox" should be axed -- is that being conscious and purposeful, rather than passive and ignorant, of the place and function of Modernity in our lives, is actually what empowers us to choose the extent to which our worldview is governed by Modern biases. That is to say, Frumkeit is helplessly Modern, whereas I have choice. Having acknowledged it, I can choose to deconstruct the language of Modernity in light of my halakhic experience, and to likewise deconstruct my halakhic experience in light of the language of Modernity, in order to find out what insights this historical moment bears into the same Mystery of Torah that my pre-Modern ancestors struggled with. And, if Tradition should so compel me, I may then selectively disengage from Modernity. (For instance, I may choose to learn holistically and synthetically, rather than with industrial ShasPod speed. Or, in the shadow of the AgriProcessors shanda, I may opt to raise and shecht my own meat, to be certain of its integral kashrut.) In this sense, "Modern Orthodox" practice is far more concerned with Tradition, than is the practice of Frumkeit as we know it.

So, whither Modern Orthodoxy? I say, those of us apikorsim with the chutzpah to acknowledge Modernity's media and modalities in our lives should indeed buck up and claim the religious legitimacy that is rightfully ours. But we can't do that by picking up the Orthodox banner and flying it with this confused "Modern" asterisk tacked on. Moreover, the word "Orthodox" invokes uniformity, which is more a political than a theological concern, and it does not necessarily invoke Tradition. What would be a more apt on-one-foot summation of the deepest life of Torah consciousness? My vote is for "Slow Judaism."

But that manifesto is next week's adventure. :)

Shabbat shalom!

*Tune in next Friday for a special Purim rant on "Profanity!"