Author: Iscah Waldman

Iscah Waldman

Once again, the school year has come to a close, and I find myself reflecting on what worked, and what did not, in my classes. I currently teach at a Schechter-affiliated Jewish high school on the East Coast. For the majority of the twenty-six years since ordination, I have been teaching Talmud, Midrash, and halakhah to high schoolers in two similar schools. I regularly assess my classroom successes and missteps to refine my approach for the coming year, but every so often, I consider a complete overhaul. After many years of fine-tuning my current grade curricula, this feels like one of those years. Surprisingly, what I am considering an “overhaul” may bring me back to my earliest years of teaching.

As a newly minted rabbi, I came to my department head to learn the curriculum for what would be my first real job. I was handed two volumes of the Steinsaltz Talmud—Sanhedrin for ninth grade and Bava Metziʾa for eighth—and told, “there’s your curriculum.” A bit deflated but not entirely unprepared, as I had already spent years as an after-school teacher, I braced myself for the hardest year in any teacher’s career: the first one.

Back then, students had no laptops, and I had no Sefaria at my disposal. I laid out my source sheets manually, using CD-ROMs (remember those?), and even wrote out my own translations when necessary. I handed out Jastrow dictionaries and introduced them as their “new best friend!” I was developing my own set of tools, including something I called ATTWYFACP—Aramaic Tricks to Wow Your Friends at Cocktail Parties—and would create worksheets for the students to keep guided notes. The students were simply fascinated with everything I taught, because it was the “good old days.”

Oh, excuse me while I wake up from my own fever dream.

In teaching Talmud and halakhah, it has always been a struggle to get students to see the value in excavating the past in order to understand modern Judaism. My classroom has always had students of varying levels of religious observance and knowledge; some were living observant lifestyles, others only vaguely aware that Shemini ʿAtseret is a holiday. As a student and fan of Midrash, I would begin with the idea of drash as a basic unit to help them learn who the rabbis were and see rabbinic methods of interpretation as essential units of their methodology. One of the reasons I began there is that it helped students see that the rabbis treasured yet still challenged biblical texts as they balanced their own conflicted understandings of what God wanted from the Jewish people.

As the years have gone by, many of my colleagues have felt a shift in the student body, as it has become less observant or decreasingly familiar with a basic understanding of the relevance and workings of halakhah. Indeed, we have begun to notice that there are fewer and fewer students who are familiar with Shabbat or even High Holiday liturgy and practices. More concerning is that students seem to feel that rabbinic Judaism is a relic of a distant, irrelevant past. I have found this most difficult, as my entire job is to help them see themselves as very much part of this living, breathing, and ever-adapting system. So I decided to revise the curriculum to be more forward facing, inspired by my stint on the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS). The ninthgrade curriculum, for example, was refashioned to engage with the ethical and halakhic struggles of today’s Jewish community, and to help my students see that Jews still turn to Torah to negotiate these struggles. Judaism is dynamic and will continue to adapt to the many technologies around it, and they, too, will need to adapt. After all, their future will be far more like The Jetsons than my own 1980s upbringing. (I still want a hover-car.)

What this looked like depended on the years, but here are a few examples:

1. We studied Nevins’s lab-grown meat teshuvah as grounds to review the basics of kashrut. Students created their own Op-Docs—an opinion-based mini-documentary piloted by the New York Times in 2011—that had to answer the question of whether kashrut would be a relevant construct in a world where meat was grown in a lab.
2. We learned the thirty-nine melaʾkhot of Shabbat, pikuaḥ nefesh, kelaʾḥar yad, pesiq reisha, and other concepts that laid the groundwork for discussing how and when using electricity and other technology was problematic on Shabbat, and where concepts like grama or pikuaḥ nefesh might apply. Students then presented their own chosen piece of modern technology, ranging from Roomba vacuums and glucose monitors to advanced artificial limbs.
3. In a business ethics course, I put halakhic concepts such as hasagat gevul (“unfair competition”) and onaʾat mamon (“monetary oppression”) into dialogue with everyday business practices that surround them every day. Students choose contemporary business issues to explore how they believe the rabbis might respond to modern situations such as the arms industry, college admissions practices, or fast fashion.

My goal was to show students that however distant the Mishnah and Talmud may feel, the rabbis model adaptation—anchored in tradition, yet responsive to reality. Technology is rapidly changing our daily lives and includes unavoidable things like keyless-app entry to dorms, automated faucets, and even self-driving cars. I especially appreciated my time on the CJLS because I could bring what we were discussing into my classrooms. It was not particular teshuvot that inspired me but the model of engaging with a living tradition, with an eye toward the future.

I often joke that I live in the past (and that the middle ages were too modern for me), but my students do not. They live in a world that does have Sefaria, immediate translation technology, apps that start cars remotely, food cooked by robots—indeed, we ordered from the kosher Korean robot-cooking one in our neighborhood this week!—and myriad other examples of technologies that change lives for better and for worse. If we do not address the ever-changing world in which we all live, students will either ignore the Jewish perspective on these issues or turn by default to the most stringent voices. My goal is neither to promote nor dissuade, but to present different views and equip them with the tools to see how differing perspectives are reached. This has not always succeeded in every class that I have taught, but that it has been my intention.

I still believe in this approach, so where does the overhaul come in?

Nearly every year since I began teaching, I have noted that I tend to lose the forest for the trees. In my department office at work, I call this “going down the rabbit hole.” My colleagues know it means I went on a deep dive that led me to four or five crazy tangents while the original question was left hanging. In a classroom, I may be better about going back to the original question, to not lose my students. In the past few years, however, I have wondered about the cost of spending so much time on the finer details of issues like how cultivated meat is developed, when I have students who have forgotten who Rambam was. I teach the same basics each and every year in my day school classes, yet the students have difficulty distinguishing the Tannaim from the Amoraim. I am growing concerned that without a real grasp of the beauty of the halakhic system and the respect that the rabbis had for it, there will (sadly) be no real reason to worry about the students engaging with it in the future. The questions that remains are: What really matters in a Talmud or halakhah class? How do we leave space and inspire understanding of and respect for the methodology of halakhah? How do we encourage our students to consider how halakhah might adapt as things like AI and brain-computer interfaces take root in our everyday lives? We obviousy need a balance, but we also need to consider what our true goals are. The rest of this article lays out the goals on which I intend to base my classes in the next year.

The Value of Accessing Texts in the Original Hebrew

My father z″l has been gone for twenty-one years, but I will always have his voice and his deep love of Hebrew in my head. Like many, I have subscribed to the rather gendered phrase attributed to Hayyim Nahman Bialik: “Reading the Bible in translation is like kissing your new bride through a veil.” Students miss so much nuance when relying on outside translations, and, frankly, the translator wields too much power in relaying the intentions of the rabbinic authors. I love Sefaria and other rabbinic texts/translations available online, but I have found many mistakes in their crowd-sourced translations. Many of us have also had moments in professionally published translations where the English favors a much more recent commentary or does not adequately relay the point that was clear in the original language. In the best of all possible worlds, my students would not rely on those translations, which semiconsciously influence their reading of a text. However, I have only fifty minutes with these students, three times a week. Is that enough time to essentially sacrifice the possibility of accessing a wider breadth of texts for my students so that they can struggle to translate a couple of lines of text? At the risk of incurring the wrath of the experienced day school teachers out there, I would ask if they consider the Hebrew level of their students to be on par with what it was twenty years ago. (Remember, I have been teaching for twenty-five!) There are multiple reasons for what my colleagues and I have been experiencing regarding Jewish observance but also for the level of Hebrew fluency, so do we not owe it to our students to meet them where they are? There are so many new resources that were not readily available when I was younger, and my students can find them with a few taps. In addition, once I have four or five students who have learning plans that require them to use laptops, how do I keep them and their ḥevrutot away from those translations? In my department, we feel deeply the loss of student facility with translation in both Tanakh and rabbinics classes and have decided on a department-wide initiative of dedicating five minutes of every class to working deeply on translating even one or two core lines of text closely, at every grade level, and at every level of Hebrew. We have found that insisting on a whole day of translation causes students to lose interest quickly, while dismissing translation completely leaves students disenfranchised and alienated from ownership of these texts as their own. We do not yet know if this approach will work, but we are ready to work to find the right balance as we go.

Back to Basics

Like many teachers, I sometimes wonder if I am losing my mind. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I teach and reteach the basics every single year. Before I delve into the details of such matters as kashrut, Shabbat, or lending at interest, I cover the time period of the rabbis, the development of Mishnah and Talmud, how drash works, and a rough timeline of rabbinic works. This is my primary motivation for reconsidering my curricula this year: teaching students the basics in the beginning is not enough. Students need context for every single text so that they can understand the factors to which the rabbis are responding, both inside and outside the rabbinic world. Those of you who are currently muttering “obviously” under your breath right now cannot underestimate how hard this is to do in real life for students, every single day. I have a pet project in my mind that I have not yet translated into reality: a living timeline. I am envisioning a huge (think hallway-sized) physical timeline with both Jewish and non-Jewish markers on them, to which the students can add all year so that they can get a clearer sense of what is happening in the world around each text and its author. I believe that our STEM lab will begin actively avoiding me this year, because I will be using them to help make this a reality!

Students Still Crave Practical Knowledge

As department chair of a school that offers electives on many aspects of Judaism, including Yiddish language and literature, lesser-studied biblical books like Daniel and Judges, Midrash, and philosophy, I have learned a few things about which classes are the most popular choices among our students. Surprisingly, practical halakhah classes always run. The classes that fill up first are those that cover in Jewish life cycle, business ethics and bioethics, a deep dive into kashrut (basar beḥalav), and other topics within Jewish practice—these are the classes that fill up first. We have found that wherever students find themselves on the spectrum of religious observance, they are consistently interested in the practicalities of how Jews doJudaism. With this in mind, it has made me wonder if I have spent too much time on complex things like cultivated meat (especially as some states and foreign countries have been banning its development for political reasons) and not enough on truly understanding the ins and outs of how kashrut works even today. I still believe in having classic Jewish texts dialogue with modern concepts—for example, the current issue of banning artificial dyes could lead to more use of carmine in foods—but perhaps my balance needs to be shifted back to the ancient world.

Flexibility is Key

Maybe it is because I would get bored teaching the same thing every year, but I have always changed some texts, assessments, and even whole units in my classes. As a result, the overhaul that I am proposing for this year may not seem dramatic, but it still represents a mental shift, as I return to those basics that I worried would bore my students in an increasingly digital world. I asked them this year if they could not stand to think about lab-grown meat any more, and I was surprised to hear that they thought it was actually an interesting topic, but maybe too long of a unit. This may mean shorter, more focused units on contemporary topics, and tighter laptop restrictions in class. (Sorry, Sefaria.) It will definitely mean keeping my eye on student needs and interests and pivoting when necessary. It has always been my belief that I can teach the rabbis—their methods, ideology, and theology—no matter the text or topic, so I will remain flexible in order to pique students’I nterest and try to stay attuned to where I can fill gaps in their Jewish literacy.

This may not feel like an overhaul at all for some of you reading this, and perhaps that is my point. Students may change in every generation, with new realities and new technologies, but I must adjust, the way I know the rabbis did in their time. I will adapt so that my students may come to realize that Judaism will continue to adapt to the whirlwind of the life surrounding us—halakhically, ethically, and ideologically. Adaptation can also mean going back to what worked in the past. I do not yet know what will work, but in the meantime, I will dust off my Aramaic tricks (ATTWYFACP) and get ready to help my students see that rabbinic Judaism is not ancient history—it is a living conversation, one that they are invited to join.

Iscah Waldman is the Chair of Judaic Studies at the Golda Och Academy Upper School, where she also teaches courses in Talmud, Ethics, and Midrash. After being ordained at JTS, Rabbi Waldman completed her PhD in Education at NYU, writing on how Midrash was being taught in Jewish Day Schools. She lives in Teaneck, New Jersey with her husband Matt and their two children.

Lionel Moses

Our colleague, our teacher, and our friend, Rabbi Mayer Rabinowitz, spent his professional and academic career not just as a Talmud teacher and scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary, but also as a prolific halakhist who wrote many teshuvot for the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS). During this period, Rabbi Rabinowitz also served as the dean of the seminary’s List College and subsequently as the dean of the seminary’s graduate school. What is more, for just over thirty years, he served as the first av beit din of the Joint Beit Din (JBD) of the Conservative Movement, the beit din that took exclusive responsibility for certifying gittin and annulments (hafqaʿot qiddushin) in the Conservative Movement. The JBD was originally sponsored by the three national institutions of the Conservative Movement, namely, JTS, the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), and the United Synagogue of America, now the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. Over time, the JBD became the exclusive responsibility of the RA.

Rabbi Rabinowitz was born in the Bronx, the youngest child of Rabbi Simcha and Devora Rabinowitz. His father was a Conservative rabbi, ordained in 1931 at JTS. His mother was active in Mizrachi Women and became its national president, a voluntary position that she held for many years. He was raised in a traditional Jewish home and one that was ardently Zionist. After World War II ended in 1945, when Mayer was only seven years old, the family moved to British Mandate Palestine so that his parents could help in resettling and in educating children who survived the Shoah and who in many cases were orphans.

After the family’s first year in British Mandate Palestine, the British refused to renew the required visas that would have allowed Mayer’s family to remain in Palestine, and they were forced to return to the United States in 1947. Reluctantly, Mayer’s family returned to the United States, and his father took a pulpit in the New York area so that his wife could commute to the Mizrahi office in Manhattan and thereby continue her work helping the resettlement of children in Israel. When the State of Israel declared its independence, the Rabinowitz family returned to Israel to continue the work that they had started in 1946. Mayer completed his elementary school education and his first year of high school in Israel, after which the family returned to the United States again, where Mayer completed high school at Yeshiva University High School for Boys, after which he attended Yeshiva College, where he earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees.

Mayer’s family moved back and forth between Israel and the Bronx during the late 1940s and through the early 1950s to continue to support the immigrants who were arriving in Israel after the Shoah. Many of the children, especially children whose parents were murdered during the Shoah, arrived in Israel without family. Mayer’s father directed a residential school for these orphans. During this period, Mayer was housed in a dormitory room with boys his own age. He remembers vividly how his roommates would wake up screaming from the nightmares they were having, as they were reminded of their horrendous experiences during the war.

Although Rabbi Simcha Rabinowitz and his brother, Rabbi Hayim Rabinowitz, came from a long line of traditional rabbis, Simcha understood that women had important roles to play and important work to do so that the Jewish people could transition from the world of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and create a more modern and more vibrant Jewry, both in Israel and in North America. Simcha’s decision to remain a rabbi in the New York area so that his wife could continue her important work appears to have been a subtle, but significant factor in Mayer’s approach to expanding the role of women in public ritual once he became a rabbi, from counting women as part of a minyan to advocating on behalf of women being admitted to the JTS rabbinical school.

Mayer’s home life was a classical traditional, shomer Shabbat home. While he remembers studying with his father and his older brother, he particularly remembers the family singing zemirot on Shabbat and learning how to daven and how to read Torah from his father, so that he would later be able to serve as a baʿal tefillah and a baʿal qeriah during the Yamim Noraʾim. Singing zemirot at the Shabbat table became a tradition that Mayer and his wife, Renah, continued with their own children and Shabbat guests.

After he earned his M.A., Mayer spent a year in Israel, after which he applied for admission to the JTS rabbinical school, where he knew that he would have the opportunity to study with the great rabbinic luminaries of the day: Professors Saul Lieberman, Hayyim Zalman Dimitrovsky, and David Weiss Halivni. Mayer was ordained as a rabbi at JTS in 1967. Upon ordination, Rabbi Mayer Rabinowitz was invited to join an elite group of students at the Institute of Advanced Studies at JTS, which was dedicated to the advanced critical study of Talmud and its medieval critical commentaries. Rabbi Rabinowitz completed his Ph.D. in 1974, having prepared a critical edition of Sefer haMordechai on Massekhet Gittin. The dissertation was published by JTS in 1990.

Rabbi Rabinowitz spent his entire academic career at JTS. He was initially appointed to the department of Talmud, where he taught classes in Talmud and codes. After serving as the dean of List College and the seminary’s graduate school, Rabbi Rabinowitz was asked to serve as the chief librarian of the JTS library upon the retirement of Professor Menachem Schmeltzer from that post, in 1987 a library still renowned as one of the largest collections of Judaica outside of the State of Israel. In that role, Rabbi Rabinowitz began the process of digitizing the library’s enormous holdings, making them more accessible to serious scholars around the world. He also instituted exhibitions of some of the library’s rare holdings, whether at JTS or displayed around the world. In addition to Rabbi Rabinowitz’s teaching and administrative responsibilities, he made time to serve on the CJLS and to serve for thirty years (from 1989 until 2019) as the first chairperson and av beit din of the JBD, a post he filled until his retirement.

It is through his writings for the CJLS and his work on the JBD that Rabbi Rabinowitz’s halakhic impact is most apparent. He authored or coauthored fourteen responsa, including one promoting the idea of ordaining women as rabbis. Rabbi Rabinowitz rarely missed a meeting of the CJLS, and, while the discussions at the meetings were unfortunately never recorded, I distinctly remember his active participation in the discussions, asking questions and raising halakhic precedents that either supported or countered the opinions of responsa written by other colleagues. Rabbi Rabinowitz’s own teshuvot that were approved at the meetings of the CJLS were subsequently published by the RA in two volumes of responsa dating from 1980 through the year 2000. Most of his responsa relate to hilkhot ʿorekh ḥayyim, but he has also written responsa related to the other three sections of Shulhan Arukh. From his teachers, especially Professors Lieberman and Halivni, Rabbi Rabinowitz not only learned how to read a text—whether a gemara, a text from one of the Rishonim or citation from Shulhan Arukh or one of the other codes and their keilim—but he also learned the fine skill of extrapolating from the classical text to demonstrate how it should best be applied in a contemporary situation.

Even when Rabbi Rabinowitz knew that his teachers would disagree with his understanding of how the text applied today, and even when he disagreed with the position taken by a colleague whose teshuvah was being discussed at a meeting of the CJLS, he remembered that at least some of his teachers would always show respect and due deference to an opinion with which they themselves would disagree. Mayer learned this deferential attitude from attending faculty meetings and watching the interactions of his colleagues, and he applied it when he evaluated the opinions of his own colleagues and members of the CJLS, with whom he sometimes sharply disagreed. Moreover, when students would ask Mayer a halakhic question, he often did not give a pesaq din but instead sent them to the colleague whom Mayer felt would give them the answer they needed—which was not necessarily the answer written in one of the codes or the answer that he might have given himself.

Among the many teshuvot that Rabbi Rabinowitz authored, the one that has had the most impact and is the most widely known is his Pesah Guide, written in 1984, either because laypersons read it almost every year or because congregational rabbis use it as their basis for answering questions about Pesah preparations and restrictions. While the Pesah Guide teshuvah is updated every year to incorporate new situations, Rabbi Rabinowitz’s original responsum provided the impetus for creating an all-inclusive guide for Pesah observance that is grounded in traditional restrictions and leniencies but addresses questions and provides answers that specifically incorporate the legal thinking of Conservative rabbis and halakhists.

Reading Rabbi Rabinowitz’s responsa, we immediately see his familiarity and comfort with reading and understanding the sources and then analyzing the relevant texts so that he can make a clear pesaq halakhah. In his responsum on whether a kohen is entitled to the first ʿAliyah midʾoraita or mid’rabbanan, Rabbi Rabinowitz concludes that the practice is mid’rabbanan. Nonetheless, despite it being a long-standing tradition that a kohen receive the first ʿAliyah, Rabbi Rabinowitz concludes that, “as historical and sociological realities change, so we must adapt our application of the principle of mipnei darkhei shalom, which served as the the justification of the gemara for the reason that kohanim receive the first ʿAliyah.” He therefore writes that where a rabbi feels that his/her community is better served by substituting “rish-on” for “kohen,” that rabbi has the authority as the mara dʾatra to call up a non-kohen for the first ʿAliyah. Rabbi Rabinowitz follows the opinions of Tosafot, Tosafot haRosh, and the Rivash that always calling a kohen for the first ʿAliyah is only a minhag. The kohen’s ḥazaqah on having the first ʿAliyah is based on an asmakhta derived from the word וקדשתו in Leviticus 21:8. The school of Rabbi Yishmael taught in a baraita that the context in which the word וקדשתו appears in the Torah implies that kohanim have first order of position in any act that could be considered a mitzvah whose performance enhances qedushah (religious sanctity). This, the baraita argues, would mean that, according to the Torah, a kohen is always entitled to the first ʿAliyah. Rabbi Rabinowitz argued that an asmakhta is exactly that, a rabbinic support, and not the basis for a “Torah-based” ruling. Instead, it was a rabbinic enactment intended to maintain peace in the community, so that there would be no arguments about who was worthy enough to be entitled to the first ʿAliyah to the Torah. Therefore, the local rabbi has full authority to make the change and call someone other than a kohen to the Torah for the first ʿAliyah; he or she is not violating a Torah-based obligation to exclusively call a kohen for the first ʿAliyah, since such a Torah-based obligation does not exist. While this move is implicit in the text, Rabbi Rabinowitz makes this permissibility explicit, thereby expanding the application of what was implicit, but not typically applied in the orchestration of the Torah service.

In yet another teshuvah Rabbi Rabinowitz demonstrates his independence in rabbinic judgement when he demurs on the postion of his friend and colleague, Rabbi Joel Roth, on a question about whether the daughter of a kohen may be called to the Torah for the kohen ʿAliyah. While Rabbi Roth permits the daughter of a kohen to be called to the Torah for the kohen ʿAliyah, his teshuvah concludes that daughters of kohanim and leviyim are entitled to the same ʿAliyot as their fathers and to none of the other six ʿAliyot. Their status as bat kohen is inalienable, even if they are married to an Israelite. Rabbi Rabinowitz voted against Rabbi Roth’s opinion, perhaps in light of his own teshuvah that the entitlement of kohanim to the first, so-called kohen ʿAliyah, is only a rabbinic enactment and is not mandated by the Torah.

Finally, Rabbi Rabinowitz’s teshuvah on the permissibilty of the ordination of women is remarkable in many ways. As a member of the Talmud faculty, he was by far in the minority in supporting the ordination of women. More significantly, he tackles four distinct roles that rabbis are typically asked to fulfill: mesadder qiddushin, counting as one of ten persons to make a minyan, serving as a shaliaḥ tsibbur, and serving as an ʿeid. Rabbi Rabinowitz responds to each of these potential obstacles seriatim, using classical rabbinic sources together with logic and sound reasoning to undermine, if not to refute, the thinking behind these classical objections to the ordination of women. Rabbi Rabinowitz’s more liberal and modern approach to these and other issues that were raised to attempt to block the ordination of women at JTS may very well have been influenced by the active role his late mother took in the community outside the home and his father’s willing accomodation to the expanding role of women in contemporary society.

Rabbi Rabinowitz’s most stellar contribution to the growth of the status of halakhah in the Conservative Movement and to the necessity of freeing women from the possibility of becoming ʿagunot was in his exemplary work as the av beit din of the JBD. At the urging of then-chancellor Ismar Schorsch to reestablish a central beit din co-sponsored by all three arms of the movement (JTS, the RA, and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism), Rabbi Rabinowitz accepted the challenge of negotiating with all three arms so that they would agree to create one independent beit din that would take exclusive responsibilty for all questions relating to Jewish divorce. While the late Professor Edward Gershfield had been the unchallenged mesadder gittin for the movement for over twenty years, ever since the passing of Professor Boaz Cohen in 1968, there were only two or three mesadderei gittin who had been trained by Professor Cohen who were handling gittin across North America.

Rabbi Rabinowitz set up a number of parameters for organizing the JBD. First, there would be nine members on the JBD, three appointed by each of the partners. Second, all members of the JBD would need to be ordained rabbis and members of the RA, but they did not need to be certified mesadderei gittin. Finally, other than a few colleagues who had trained under Professor Cohen and been certified by him as mesadderei gittin (no more than four), all other members of the RA who had been writing gittin independently would be required to submit a file summarizing their training, their experience, their professional practices as mesadderei gittin, and copies of a number of their gittin.

Among the early questions faced by the JBD was how to handle cases that involved recalcitrant husbands who absolutely refused to participate in the get process, or who set conditions such as demands for money from their former spouse before they would consider participating in the get process. Another tricky issue was what to do when the former husband could not easily be located or when either spouse was mentally incapacitated or had returned to his/her former religion after being civilly divorced.

A third challenge was training a new cohort of mesadderei gittin. In 1989, besides Professor Gershfield, there were only three known active certified mesadderei gittin: Rabbi Ben Zion Bergman (z″l), Rabbi Yehezkel Musleah (z″l), and Rabbi Israel Silverman (z″l). Others would surface as we began the certification process, but all of them were retired or approaching retirement. Much to our chagrin, we also discovered that there were RA colleagues who had no formal training in the laws and procedures for writing and delivering a get, yet who were advertising their services as experts in Jewish divorce. What is more, ever since the CJLS approved hafqaʿat qiddushin as a halakhically viable means of annulling a Jewish marriage when it was impossible to gain the cooperation of a former husband to authorize the writing and delivery of a get so that his former wife could move on with her life unencumbered by being “bound and anchored” (agun) to a man to whom she was no longer married, the JBD discovered that a number of our colleagues were using hafqaʿat qiddushin as their first choice alternative rather than requiring a get for a divorced woman to remarry with huppah and qiddushin. In light of all the laxity in the area of gittin, and in light of how few RA members were certified mesadderei gittin, Rabbi Rabinowitz asked Rabbi Silverman to arrange a course to train a new cohort of mesadderei gittin. Within a year or or so, nearly a dozen RA members had completed their training and were certified. With the increase in the number of mesadderei gittin, the number of cases, not surprisingly, increased.

Keeping track of all gittin was yet another challenge. Rabbi Rabinowitz saw to it that the RA would create a database and use student volunteers to input the data submitted by the mesadderei gittin. Student volunteers, even paid volunteers, were often hard to find, and there was regularly a backlog of unfiled submissions. Adding to the frustration was the fact that at least once or maybe twice, the database crashed, and the work of inputting the data had to start all over again. Eventually, the certified mesadderei gittin were taught how to input the data on their own. In this way, Rabbi Rabinowitz made the database a more complete resource for colleagues who needed to check if a get had been issued so that a divorcée could remarry halakhically.

Rabbi Rabinowitz was committed to the idea that gittin issued under the aegis of the JBD would meet all the standards of gittin issued by Orthodox batei din, but would be conducted with the dignity and compassion becoming two partners whose dreams of a lifetime together had been shattered. Rabbi Rabinowitz was aware that some of the rabbis who served on Orthodox batei din effectively ignored the women who were being divorced, and he insisted that our mesadderei gittin organize their own batei din, taking into consideration the emotional pain and stress each of the former marital partners would be experiencing before they met the beit din.

Rabbi Rabinowitz’s halakhic contribution and his Weltanschaung regarding the ongoing development of halakhah is best appreciated in his persistant advocacy for women. During his tenure as the av beit din, he advocated for the training of additional mesadderei gittin. Two cohorts have completed their studies. Already in the first cohort, at least two women were certified as mesadderot gittin, and one of them, Rabbi Karen Reiss Medwed, was the first mesadderet gittin to be appointed as a dayanit to the JBD. Currently, there are three women rabbis who serve as dayanot on the JBD. Rabbi Rabinowitz’s advocacy for the full and equal status of women in all aspects of rabbinic work has been manifested in the visible role they now play in the area of gittin and hafqaʿat qiddushin. To further protect the identity of women who serve as mesadderei gittin or as witnesses to the writing and/or the delivery of a get, the policy of the JBD is never to identify any of the mesadderei gittin or ʿeidim by name but, if asked who the officiants were, to simply say that they were halakhically kosher officiants. All those efforts have been the result of Rabbi Rabinowitz’s principled stance on the equal status of men and women in all aspects of halakhah.

Over the course of Rabbi Rabinowitz’s tenure as the av beit din of the JBD, he advocated for a broader use of hafqaʿat qiddushin when obtaining a get appeared to be impossible. At first, the JBD was reluctant to use hafqaʿat qiddushin in all but the most urgent situations. Rabbi Rabinowitz advocated on behalf of women who were becoming ʿagunot, because the negotiations with the former husband for his participation in the get process had become so protracted. He helped the members of the JBD develop a standard procedure for engaging with the former husband that could be achieved in a reasonable amount of time, and that would lead to hafqaʿat qiddushin when negotiations failed or dragged on for too long a period of time.

As a teacher and as a talmudist and halakhist, Rabbi Mayer Rabinowitz leaves his mark on Conservative Judaism. Always humble, never a self-promoter, he has been my teacher since I began rabbinical school more than fifty years ago. He has over the decades also become my colleague and my friend, as he has to many of us in the rabbinate and in the community. To this day, he continues to have an impact in the same way as he always has—humbly, quietly, and forever effectively.

Rabbi Lionel Moses is the Rabbi Emeritus of Shaare Zion Beth El Congregation in Montreal, Quebec where he has served for over 30 years. He was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1977 and previously served congregations in Mamaroneck, New York, Jackson Heights in Queens and in Sacramento, California. He served more than fifteen years on the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, as well as two terms on the Executive Council and the Nominations Committee. He has been a member of the Joint Beit Din of the Conservative Movement since its inception in 1989 and has been its Chairperson and Av Beit Din for the past seven years. He has been involved in interfaith work in all the communities in which he has lived and has served as the President of the Montreal Board of Rabbis. Rabbi Moses is a Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he studied for three years. Rabbi Moses is married to Dr. Joyce Rappaport and they are the parents of three sons, each of whom works in the Jewish Community.

Lisa S. Malik

Sitting next to the heart-shaped bathtub in my dying congregant’s home, I started to consider some of the halakhic questions about her impending funeral that she and her husband posed to me during hospice care. While some of these inquiries may have had clear-cut answers, others could not be resolved so easily. As I had done so many other times during nearly two decades of serving as a pulpit rabbi, I called Rabbi Joel Roth. As always, Rabbi Roth was accessible, attentive, compassionate, informative, comprehensive, and nuanced in his response. He did not just provide “the answers,” he also gave me a front-row seat to his thinking and approach to halakhic decision making. For Rabbi Roth, halakhah is not just a compendium of Jewish laws and observances; it is the process by which decisions are made within the Jewish legal framework.

This personal vignette encapsulates the larger intellectual and spiritual commitments that have defined Rabbi Roth’s life and legacy. For over half a century, he has been a formidable presence in the world of Conservative Judaism, bridging the traditional demands of halakhic fidelity with the evolving needs of contemporary Jews. The interviews, conducted in Jerusalem in April 2025, offer rich autobiographical and ideological insights into Roth’s career and halakhic worldview.1 This article synthesizes and analyzes key themes emerging from the interviews, highlighting Roth’s impact on Jewish law and the Conservative Movement, with an emphasis on the teaching of halakhah to rabbinical students, rabbis, and lay people in Conservative communities.

Early Life and Educational Background

Although Roth’s immediate family members were not Shomrei Shabbat, they kept a kosher home and supported young Joel’s Jewish education and increasing religious observance. Growing up in Detroit, Roth’s grandparents played a significant role in his Jewish development. His maternal grandparents, who lived in the same house, were founding members of the Conservative synagogue, B’nai Moshe. His paternal grandparents, who were Orthodox, lived just a short walk away. For ten years, Roth attended Camp Ramah in Wisconsin. Roth’s early role models and formative experiences provided him with the building blocks for his lifelong commitment to balancing Jewish tradition and innovation.

Roth’s Jewish education in Detroit began in an Orthodox day school, but he spent most of his childhood studying at a Conservative supplementary school. His Hebrew school experience was generally positive, especially in Hebrew language and Jewish history, but he found it lacking in core content. As he recalls, “I didn’t learn any halakhah. I didn’t learn any Talmud.” From an early age, he craved access to classical Jewish sources.

A critical turning point in Roth’s religious and intellectual formation occurred when his father, who had previously attended night school with a gifted teacher named Rabbi Paneth, arranged for young Joel to study Talmud with Paneth privately for over ten years. It was the extended one-on-one tutelage from Rabbi Paneth that gave Roth a strong foundation in talmudic analysis, which later enabled him to enter the rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in 1962 on an accelerated four-year track for budding Talmud scholars. These formative years set the stage for a young scholar’s growing realization that Jewish law was not just a set of religious observances but, first and foremost, a process of methodical reasoning and set of analytical insights that would become central to Roth’s lifelong project of upholding and teaching halakhah as a legal system.

Academic Career

Roth’s academic career at JTS began even before his ordination, which was strategically delayed by his supervisors to enable him to teach younger rabbinical students and to avoid military conscription. “They wanted to appoint me to the faculty,” he recounted, but they said, “if we ordained you in ’66, you’d have to go into the army.” Instead, a clever workaround enabled Roth to begin teaching rabbinical students in the mekhinah program in 1965 and to continue serving on the faculty even after his ordination, since working at JTS was considered “a hardship pulpit.”

After being officially appointed to the faculty in 1968, Roth continued his studies at JTS as a doctoral student in Talmud, graduating with his Ph.D. in 1973. He studied with many of the gedolim (“great ones,” or luminaries) of the Conservative Movement, including Professors Saul Lieberman, Louis Finkelstein, Hayyim Dimitrovsky, and David Weiss Halivni, whom he considered to be his rav muvhaq, or the teacher from whom he received most of his knowledge. Roth taught at JTS for nearly five decades, leaving an indelible mark on generations of rabbis. For four of these years, he served as dean of the rabbinical school.

Considered an expert in halakhah, Rabbi Roth was appointed to the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS) in 1978 and served as the Law Committee’s chair for eight years. Between 1981 and 2006, he wrote twenty-one teshuvot (responsa) on various topics, including Torah reading by minors (1982), synagogue honors for intermarried Jews (1984), the ordination of women as rabbis (1984), the status of daughters of kohanim and leviyim for ʿaliyot (1989), organ donation (1999), and the status of homosexuals in Jewish law (1992 and 2006). In addition, Roth authored Sefer ha-Mordecai: Tractate Kiddushin (1973) and The Halakhic Process: A Systemic Analysis (1986). Three of his essays, including “Is Theology the Handmaiden of Halakhah?” (2013), are included in HaKol Kol Yaakov: Responsa and Essays (2023) by Joel Roth, along with nineteen of his teshuvot.

Other positions that Rabbi Roth held during his illustrious career include rosh yeshivah of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem and the director of the Melton Research Center for Jewish Education. In addition, for nearly twenty-five years, he taught at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires during the summers.

Philosophy of Halakhah, Halakhic Methodology,
and Halakhic Change

While interviewing Rabbi Roth and asking him to reflect upon his pedagogical approaches to teaching halakhah, it became clear that the term “halakhah” itself needed to be defined before we could even begin to discuss pedagogy. It seems that many rabbis, educators, and other leaders in the Conservative Movement may not have been successful in properly educating both laity and clergy in the definition, principles, and methodology of halakhah. “Halakhah is not a checklist of observances,” he insisted. “It is a system—a legal system—governed by rules and precedent.”

As Roth lamented, “The number of Conservative Jews who even know the word ‘halakhah’ is probably so small…it could be under 10%.” For those who do recognize the term, he added, “they do not understand it to mean a functioning legal system. They probably understand halakhah to mean something like observances, such as lighting Shabbat candles or keeping kosher.” This lack of awareness among the laity, Roth contended, undermines the very premise of one of the Conservative Movement’s ideological foundations. He elaborated: “I doubt that there are very many Conservative Jews who know that the Conservative Movement is ideologically committed to recognizing and accepting and living by this functioning legal system.” Roth acknowledged that “there are Conservative Jews who keep kosher. There are Conservative Jews who light candles for Shabbat and there are some who may daven.” However, he noted that “they may not recognize that the Conservative Movement affirms that that’s obligatory….and they are probably considered by others who belong to the shul as being Orthodox.”

He recalled his experiences at Camp Ramah and in adult educational settings, noting the absence of courses or discussions that addressed halakhah as a legal methodology. “I do not remember having a course in camp on halakhah and how the legal system works,” he reflected. “I just don’t think that Conservative Jews understand that that’s what the term means.” In the interviews, he recounted how few adult education courses in Conservative communities engage directly with codes literature or the halakhic process.

Roth emphasized that this gap is not confined to the laity. “That applies somewhat to rabbis too,” he said, expressing concern over rabbinical students’ discomfort with halakhic material and insufficient training in applying the interpretive tools of halakhah. He believed that greater fluency would enable rabbis to model and transmit halakhic thinking to their congregants.

It also seems, according to Rabbi Roth, that most Conservative Jews (including perhaps some rabbis) may be ignorant of the distinction between deʾoraita and derabbanan laws. During the interviews, Roth was particularly animated in discussions of how to assess whether a law was deʾoraita (Torah-based) or derabbanan (rabbinically instituted), using real examples from classical and modern texts. For Roth, it is critical to understand the distinction between deʾoraita and derabbanan when attempting to make halakhic changes or grant halakhic leniency in a particular case.

I remember on one occasion, when my father z″l, was hospitalized on a Friday, I called Rabbi Roth and inquired if there was any way to halakhically justify driving to the hospital to visit my father on Shabbat. Rabbi Roth’s response to me was similar to one that he had recently given to a colleague in a similar situation that involved driving on Shabbat:

What I thought would be acceptable, not that this is something that I would recommend constantly, but if you make a prearrangement with a cab driver to pick you up at such-and-such an address on Saturday morning at such-and-such a time and you have prepaid him, then I think the isur (“prohibition”) would only be derabbanan. It would be a deʾoraita transgression if you call the cabbie on Saturday morning or if you pay the cab driver when you get to the location.

This response reflects Roth’s desire to balance a responsiveness to real-world concerns with commitment to halakhah. In The Halakhic Process, Roth similarly bridges fidelity to tradition with responsiveness to real-world concerns when it comes to enacting halakhic changes.

During the interview, Roth referred to chapter 9 of that book (“Extralegal Sources in the System”), which describes two primary patterns of halakhic development that have been, as he told me, “utilized from time immemorial to bring about changes in deʾoraita laws. The first pattern says: When the original justification is the only defensible rational reason for the observance of the law, and it no longer obtains, the norm can be modified or abrogated.” He cautioned that this pattern requires precision, since most laws in the Torah do not explicitly state their rationale. “There could be a maḥloqet between posqim on what the original justification for the norm was,” he noted. Even if consensus forms around the original rationale, one must still determine whether any secondary rationales justify continued observance. Roth told me that he often warned his students: “You’re going to give sermons that say the original reason no longer applies—but others will argue there are new compelling reasons to keep it.” The second pattern, he said, is more subjective but equally important: “When compliance with the norm would be more detrimental than noncompliance, the norm can be modified or abrogated.” By “detrimental,” he meant that adherence to legal norms may sometimes unintentionally lead to human suffering or other consequences that may appear immoral.

Roth emphasized that both patterns must operate within the halakhic system, not outside of it. Halakhic change must emerge from within the system, not from external ideological commitments. If a law is changed just because of societal pressure, without using the halakhic process, that undermines the authority of our sacred foundational texts.

In the book-lined study of Rabbi Roth’s Jerusalem apartment, a room that doubles as a mamad,2 there is a humorous plaque that was gifted to him by his children. It bears an image of the Ten Commandments, headed by the quip, “I didn’t call them the Ten Suggestions.” The phrase “ten suggestions” is sometimes used dismissively by anti-religious people to indicate that the commandments are not unconditionally binding, as opposed to the more traditional understanding of the Ten Commandments being absolute moral laws that were issued by God. While Rabbi Roth, like other Conservative rabbis, believes that some aspects of the commandments are open to human interpretation, he also believes that there is a divine element to these laws, and that rabbinic interpretation must have legal accountability and be done within certain parameters. Beneath the humor of the quote on Roth’s plaque, there is a serious conviction: the Torah is an authoritative sacred source of Jewish law.

Reflections on Controversial Teshuvot

In Roth’s remarks about the other 2006 teshuvot on homosexuality, he critiqued Rabbi Gordon Tucker’s responsum as departing from halakhic parameters by questioning the authority of biblical texts.3 While acknowledging the pressing pastoral concerns underlying Tucker’s teshuvah (“responsum”), Roth argued that to deny the halakhic authority of verses in Leviticus was to step outside the halakhic system itself because, as Roth expressed, “it claimed that the verses in Leviticus were P, and P is not reflecting the will of God.” For Roth, this placed the paper outside of acceptable halakhic discourse: “That’s unacceptable within the halakhic system. It means that even the Torah itself is subject to debate over whether it applies or doesn’t apply.”

Making an analogy to the American legal system, Roth said,

It would be roughly the equivalent of the Supreme Court saying, “The passage in the Constitution that says that you have to be thirty-five years old to be the president of the United States is age discrimination. Age discrimination is immoral and the world has changed, and therefore we, the Supreme Court, undo the requirement.” That would be outside of the parameters of the framework of the American legal system. If the Supreme Court wants to stay within the way the legal system functions, the only way to change the age requirement would be through an amendment.

The analogy in Jewish law is a taqqanah, which is a halakhic change whereby one tries to undo something that the Torah says. “To undo something that the Torah says is very difficult,” asserted Roth, “but it sometimes can be done if the change is made within the parameters of the halakhic process.”

In contrast to his rejection of Tucker’s teshuvah on homosexuality, Roth affirmed the legitimacy of other more methodologically grounded responsa, even when he personally disagreed with their conclusions. “I don’t think that the Dorff-Nevins-Reisner teshuvah was outside the framework of Jewish law. I’m just saying that they misunderstood certain texts and that they ignored alternative views that should have been weighed.” This capacity to distinguish between within-the-system and outside-the-system argumentation is central to Roth’s approach and his halakhic integrity. As he explained, “You can disagree with me—say I’m wrong in my reading of the Gemara, or that I misapplied a Tosefta—but if you’re inside the system, you’re still doing halakhah.” The interviews made clear that, for Roth, staying within the halakhic system is not only a methodological discipline but a theological imperative.

This conviction is reflected in Roth’s reflections on his own landmark responsum on the ordination of women as rabbis (1984). He posited that women could voluntarily accept upon themselves those religious obligations from which they were traditionally exempted; namely, the positive time-bound commandments (mitsvot ʿaseh shehazeman geramah). Roth recalls the critical support of Professor Halivni, who, despite his opposition to women’s ordination, endorsed Roth’s halakhic reasoning as valid within the system. After Roth’s teshuvah was distributed to the whole JTS faculty, he approached his mentor multiple times. In his final conversation with Halivni before the vote, Roth asked, “Mori, Rabbi, please tell me. I presented fifteen sugyas in this paper. Did I misunderstand any of those sugyas?” Roth described the rest of this interaction with Professor Halivni in vivid detail, as follows:

Then I asked, “Well, is Lieberman going to say to me, “Why did you ignore so-and-so about this sugya?” or “you quoted the Munich manuscript. Why didn’t you quote the Budapest manuscript, which would have led you to a very different conclusion?”

He said to me, “No.”

Then I said, “I quoted the Tosafot, and I quoted the Rif, and I quoted the Ran. Did I misunderstand any of the things that they said?”

And he said, “No.”

Well, when we finally got to the day that the faculty was discussing all these papers and were going to vote on whether or not I had made the case for women to be ordained as rabbis, all of my teachers disagreed with me. Finkelstein, Lieberman, and many others, they didn’t want women admitted to the school. And I had no idea how the vote was going to come out.

Towards the conclusion of the meeting, Professor Halivni said, “You all know that I am not really in favor of the ordination of women. But if we’re gonna do it, we should do it Joel’s way because that way is at least halakhic.” Halivni could accept Roth’s view because he was demonstrating fealty to the halakhic process, even though he may have disagreed with Roth’s conclusion. Following in the footsteps of his mentor, Roth similarly sets the same standard when evaluating teshuvot written by others.

Pedagogy

In the classroom, Rabbi Roth’s teaching was marked by a distinctive pedagogical method. He insisted on clarity, consistency, and intellectual honesty. Among the many courses that Roth taught to JTS rabbinical school students were Talmud, Introduction to Codes Literature, Critical Methodologies, Senior Codes Class, and halakhah lemaʿaseh (“practical halakhah”) in topics such as the laws of mourning, kashrut, and daily prayer. Rabbi Roth viewed teaching not merely as the transmission of content, but as a mission to inculcate a halakhic worldview and provide students with the methodological tools needed to engage in the traditional halakhic process. His pedagogy emphasized the importance of rigorous textual analysis, conceptual precision, and deep moral responsibility. His classes also reflected his signature commitment to halakhah as a living legal system.

During the interview, it was noted how few halakhah classes rabbinical students were required to take during Rabbi Roth’s tenure at JTS.4 Most Practical Halakhah courses at JTS, including courses in such fundamental areas as Shabbat and kashrut, were merely electives. In his reflection on rabbinic training, Roth also highlighted the lack of halakhic methodology instruction. “I don’t think we learned enough about how to do halakhah,” remarked one of his former students during the interview. Roth agreed. “If rabbinical students had gotten more and felt comfortable with it, they would have transmitted some of it…to their lay constituents.”

As an example of how important it is to teach methodology, Roth first reflected upon the way he taught Introduction to Talmud. In these classes, Roth selected dozens of sugyot across many different subject areas, but, as he pointed out,

What I was doing in that course was emphasizing the words and phrases that would be helpful for students who are trying to learn how to study Gemara. For example, if you know that hatanya means you’re going to raise a qashya (“difficulty” or “challenge”) from a baraita and that hatnan means you’re going to raise a qashya from a mishnah, that helps you understand what the argument is. And that’s what I tried to emphasize in all of those sugyot—not that I didn’t want interesting content, but I didn’t pick them davqa for the content, but as much for what they had to say about how a sugya works.

Roth applied the same pedagogical philosophy to his Introduction to Codes Literature course. He utilized texts to demonstrate how the halakhic system works. In describing the texts he used and the types of points he tried to emphasize in class, Roth recounted:

I spent some time working on the Rif, some time working on the Rambam, some time working on the Tur, some time working on the Shulḥan Arukh, and each of them with their nosei kelim, or commentaries on each of these legal codes. If, for example, we read something in Rambam’s Mishneh Torah, where the Rambam says X. And you have one noseh kelim say, “Here’s his source,” and another noseh kelim say, “No, here’s his source,” I would emphasize….that it was very important to understand how this system functioned to be able to figure out: What do I believe is the source of the pesaq [or, Jewish legal decision]? And then: what are the implications of saying that that is the source?

Furthermore, Roth noted, “I would point out what this noseh kelim is likely to be focusing on, as opposed to what this noseh kelim is likely to focus on, so that you can anticipate what are the types of things that they’re gonna argue about.” After highlighting the aspects of the commentaries that Roth deemed to be important for halakhic analysis, he would then prompt his students to consider: What would be the difference if two nosei kelim understand the Rambam somewhat differently? Could that distinction lead two later posqim (halakhic Jewish legal decision makers) to give conflicting pisqei halakhah lemaʿaseh (practical halakhic legal decisions)?

Another example of how Rabbi Roth would teach halakhic methodology to rabbinical students in a codes class is reflected in the following comment, in which he once again spoke animatedly about the distinction between whether a law is deʾoraita (“from the Torah”) or derabbanan (“from the rabbis”):

If we were studying the nosei kelim on the Rambam, one might say something like, “It seems like the Rambam is calling this law deʾoraita.” And the other one might say, “No, it looks like the Rambam is calling it derabbanan.” And then I would say, “Now I want to do two things: One, on what grounds did this commentary say it was deʾoraita and on what grounds did this other commentary say it was derabbanan? And [secondly], what is the practical implication of saying that the Rambam is claiming that this law is deʾoraita or derabbanan?

The ensuing class discussion would revolve around the following questions that Roth would present to actively engage rabbinical students in understanding the halakhic process:

• What methodology could lead to a difference of opinion between two commentaries on the Rambam as to whether a law is deʾoraita or derabbanan?
• On what grounds might a later posek decide whether it is deʾoraita or derabbanan?
• What difference would it make if it is deʾoraita or derabbanan?
• What would be the halakhic implications of that distinction?
• What would be the difference in terms of the right of the poseq to modify, to simplify, to take a more maḥmir (“stringent”) or a more meqil (“lenient”) approach?
• On what grounds might a later poseq undo an earlier decision?

In describing the details of how he would teach codes classes, Roth was passionate about accentuating how the halakhic system works and providing his rabbinical school students with methodological tools they could use to analyze texts.

This emphasis on methodology was especially evident in the codes class that most senior rabbinical students were required to take, in which Rabbi Roth taught a methodology of “how to” read and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of teshuvot. Close readings of the sheʾeilot uteshuvot literature using the methodological tools that Roth provided enabled students to “reflect about how the halakhic system functions.” For the final project, students had to select a teshuvah that had been approved by the CJLS and evaluate it based on criteria that they learned during the course of the year:

• Does the teshuvah cite all of the relevant rabbinic and medieval sources from the Torah, Talmud, and codes literature to support his position?
• Are these textual supports applicable to this situation?
• Does the teshuvah demonstrate how this issue is similar to a previous teshuvah on a similar topic (or one that uses some of the same halakhic principles)?
• Does the teshuvah read the Gemara sugyot it is citing correctly? Or are any of the sugyot misquoted or misinterpreted?
• Does the teshuvah demonstrate how the halakhic change being proposed invokes a certain traditional pattern (from Roth’s book)? For example, do the benefits of overriding a halakhic norm outweigh the costs of overriding the norm? Are the consequences of complying with the law worse than the consequences of noncompliance?
• Does the teshuvah acknowledge all possible objections and dismiss them?
• Does the teshuvah adequately discuss and dismiss all of the possible halakhic objections that other posqim might have to this halakhic change?
• Does the teshuvah adequately describe and dismiss all of the possible objections that ʿamkhah (lay people; lit. “your nation”) might have to the pesaq?

In addition to evaluating a responsum based on its content, Rabbi Roth also equipped students with the methodological tools for assessing the strength of a teshuvah based on its form. For example, does the author of the teshuvah clearly differentiate between halakhic and extrahalakhic arguments (i.e., additional moral, psychological, and other reasons to support the halakhic arguments)?

Students consistently encountered this type of methodological framework in Roth’s courses on halakhic literature. Whether analyzing contemporary teshuvot, the Rambam, the Tur, or the Shulḥan Arukh, Roth emphasized the rigorous process that undergirded halakhic decision making. He modeled a system in which even maḥloqet (“disagreement”) was not a sign of breakdown but a feature of legal vitality, governed by internal logic and interpretive consistency.

Shortcomings in the Teaching of Halakhah to Rabbinical Students, Rabbis, and Lay People in the Conservative Movement

Interwoven in Roth’s reflections about his pedagogy was an acknowledgment of some of the shortcomings of the JTS rabbinical school’s halakhah curriculum during the years when he was a student, as well as when he was on the faculty. During that period, most halakhah classes emphasized content over methodology. In addition, most practical halakhah classes were not required; these were offered as electives.

Although Rabbi Roth’s primary audience during most of his career was rabbinical students and rabbis, he also had many occasions to teach lay people in the Conservative Movement—at Melton, Ramah, and the Conservative Yeshiva and during scholar-in-residence weekends at synagogues. In these contexts, he also noted some shortcomings in the teaching of halakha to lay people. Most notably, Roth lamented the paucity of classes on halakhah offered to members of Conservative synagogues: “That’s what I think that we as a movement have not done at all with our lay constituency. I mean, do you know of a synagogue that had an adult education course in codes?” Furthermore, Roth observed, “Terms like deʾoraita and derabbanan and minhag (“custom”) and horaʾat shaʿah (extenuating circumstances; lit. an exception just for the “hour”) rarely come up in rabbinic sermons that I’ve heard.”

Another shortcoming in teaching lay people, according to Roth, was the failure to address the theological issue of modern Bible scholarship and its impact on people’s understanding of halakhah and halakhic change in the Conservative Movement. One story that Rabbi Roth told about his experience as director of the Melton Research Center for Jewish Education reflects the challenges that he faced (and that he presumed other Conservative rabbis and educators may face) in integrating traditional approaches to Jewish text with modern scholarship. According to Roth, the Melton curriculum’s approach to teaching Bible was to focus on the construction of the Bible, based on the Documentary Hypothesis and source criticism. While Roth embraced these modern theories, these were his concerns:

I’m not rejecting the historical evolution of the document we call the Torah. The Melton curriculum did succeed in being able to teach how to read the text carefully, notice differences, and lead you to the conclusion that there may have been different authors…but it didn’t take the religious steps necessary to make it clear that the Torah didn’t lose its sanctity. If they [students] see evidence of J, E, P, and D sources in biblical texts, does that undo the sanctity of Torah, or can the Torah still be the constitutional basis of all of Judaism?

Roth admitted

I didn’t want to teach the kids in Conservative day schools or Conservative Hebrew schools with Orthodox underpinnings that I really don’t buy. But I also didn’t want to teach them with Conservative underpinnings that I do buy that might result in their thinking that the Torah is therefore worthless. That’s a big problem.

Suggestions for Improvement

To rectify some of these shortcomings in the teaching of halakhah and Bible to Conservative laity and rabbinical students, Roth advocates for an educational renaissance in Conservative Judaism, grounded in deep study of halakhic sources, interpretive methodology, and theological integration. He emphasizes that such efforts must present not only the “what” of halakhah but also the “how” and the “why,” including how rulings are derived and why they carry authority. As Roth repeatedly articulated throughout the interviews, “It is critical for our laity to understand that the Conservative Movement is committed to the authority and the required nature of Jewish law.”

Roth believes that congregational rabbis should teach their congregants halakhic concepts using real examples from responsa literature, present contrasting opinions on halakhic issues, and enable people to understand how interpretations differ depending on whether a law is considered deʾoraita or derabbanan. He urged educators to explore the question: “What would be some of the halakhic implications that could lead to different pisqei din5 in the next generation?”

Furthermore, Roth suggested:

I would prescribe that, educationally, we should really work out an adult ed course that teaches small sections of halakhic literature in such a way that enables them to see how the halakhic system actually works. For example, by analyzing two teshuvot written by two different posqim on the same question who disagreed with each other—that could be a starting point of talking about how the legal system allows for maḥloqet and embraces the concept of “elu v’elu divrei Elohim ḥayyim.”6

I want them to see that in any legal system, you’re going to end up having disagreements and arguments. I wanted them to be able to see what was the basis of the disagreement between this one and that one. And I wanted them to understand how to evaluate these different opinions. It is possible to reject one of these arguments by saying, “What X said is wrong because he misunderstood the Talmud.” But it is possible for someone else to react by saying, “No, both X and Y understood the Talmud in exactly the same way and correctly, but X believed that this law is deʾoraita and Y believed that this law is derabbanan.”

Then if I really had time and could pull it off, I would then show how posqim of the subsequent generation, some would follow the view of the one who said it was deʾoraita, and others would follow the view of the one who said it was derabbanan, and we could see if we could figure out what prompted this one to see that the guy who said it’s deʾoraita is correct, and what prompted this one to say that the one who said it’s derabbanan is correct. And this way, I would reinforce the idea that deʾoraita and derabbanan are critical elements of the halakhic system. And you have to understand that in order to understand how the system functions.

What I think that more rabbis should be willing to do [in teaching lay people], though parenthetically I do not think a lot are eager to do this, is to utilize the type of example I gave you [when describing how I taught rabbinical students]—to look at two different commentaries on Maimonides, when one ends up saying it’s deʾoraita and the other that it’s derabbanan, and then see how each of those got to the conclusion that they got to. And then deal with what would be some of the halakhic implications that could lead to different pisqei din in the next generation over a specific question. Because if I follow the one who says Maimonides said it’s derabbanan, then I can say since it’s derabbanan, we don’t have to insist on it being obeyed the way it’s stipulated because the things which are derabbanan are generally more meqil7 than things which are deʾoraita.

Roth is a proponent of Conservative rabbis incorporating these topics and messages into adult education courses to “help clarify what are the limits of legitimate argumentation within the legal system” and to underscore the essential role of halakhah and halakhic reasoning within the Conservative Movement.

Rabbi Roth’s Legacy

The April 2025 interviews encapsulate Roth’s unwavering belief in the viability of halakhah as the axis of Jewish life. His insistence on methodological integrity, his courage in engaging difficult questions, and his pedagogical passion render him a pivotal figure in Conservative Judaism. Roth emerges as a scholar who seeks not only fidelity to tradition but also intellectual honesty and communal responsibility. For him, halakhah is not a set of ossified rules but a living system of divine and human collaboration.

His reflections also underline the deep emotional and ethical weight that he attaches to the role of the poseq. “It’s not just about being a rabbi who knows some laws,” Roth told his interviewers. “It’s about being someone trusted to think carefully, honestly, and halakhically when people’s lives are on the line—emotionally, spiritually, even physically.”

Rabbi Roth has always taken his role as a poseq very seriously, in large part because he believes that halakhah reflects God’s will, in combination with human interpretation. During the 1984 deliberations on the ordination of women rabbis, Roth recalls asking Chancellor Gerson Cohen for a fifteen-minute recess when his teshuvah was being discussed. This is how Roth describes what he did during that break:

I ran down to what used to be called Stein Chapel. And in those days, we never locked the aron qodesh. So I opened the aron qodesh and I stood there in front of the sifrei Torah and said to the ribbono shel ʿolam, “What do you want me to do?”

Rabbi Roth’s commitment to remaining within the halakhic framework, even in the face of immense social and political pressure, reflects an integrity that has won him admiration even from ideological opponents. He never claimed that halakhah was static or unchanging; rather, he believed that change must arise from within—by using the tools of the tradition, not bypassing them.

Roth’s vision poses a challenge to the Conservative Movement itself—namely, to embrace its claim to halakhic legitimacy not only through rhetoric but also through rigorous education, transparent legal reasoning, and a recommitment to intellectual integrity. As he warned, without halakhic literacy and commitment, the movement risks becoming detached from the very tradition it seeks to preserve and renew. Roth’s unwavering belief in the viability of halakhah as a central component of Jewish life, his insistence on methodological integrity, his courage in engaging difficult questions, and his pedagogical passion elevate him to a prominent place among the luminaries of Conservative Judaism.

Roth’s legacy is both institutional and personal. He authored numerous teshuvot that have become foundational in modern halakhic discourse, and he shaped rabbinical education at JTS as a teacher of Talmud and halakhah to generations of Conservative rabbis. In reflecting on Rabbi Roth’s teaching, his former students fondly recall how he taught with humor and clarity. They also note how thorough he was and admire his halakhic integrity. Moreover, they characterize him as being passionate about his subject matter and caring toward his students. One rabbi, who had been a student of Rabbi Roth in the 1980s, commented, “There was a real caring about teaching halakhah that really came through. And that was something that I didn’t feel with most other professors or other teachers. You can’t dismiss the personal factor.”

In addition to being a dynamic classroom teacher, Rabbi Roth also served as an ongoing mentor and guide to his former students. His responsiveness to student and rabbinic inquiries—often through informal emails, phone calls, or conversations in hallways—demonstrated a model of Torah lishmah grounded in humility and availability to his students, former students, and colleagues. A rabbi who graduated from JTS in 2001 and who has, admittedly, written to Rabbi Roth with dozens of halakhic questions over the years, expressed this quite well in his comments, directed partly to Rabbi Roth himself:

He has always responded with a prompt and thorough and helpful answer. And sometimes the helpful answer was laying out what the issues were and saying, “Now you have to decide,” which is very empowering.

If we invited the other thousand students that could be sitting at the table right now and we asked them where they learned from you, they might be able to come up with if it was in a level three Codes class or whatever, but it’s important to recognize that there was another access point of learning and that is shared by all of those students—to be able to turn to you personally.

In a classroom, there are always two things going on. It could be the content itself. But for some—I’m going to say for almost all of the students—there was also the lesson of why learning this is great, why it’s exciting to be learning Gemara or halakhah or whatever it might be. I’m going to guess that sometimes when people turn to you with a sheʾelah, they might actually already know the answer but be excited by the opportunity to connect with you and to learn with you.8

The story with which I opened this article is but one of many that could be told by rabbis, students, and colleagues who have turned to Rabbi Roth not simply for answers, but for a personal connection and mentorship in how to think halakhically. “I don’t just want to tell them what to do,” Roth once said. “I want to show them how to think about what to do.” In that sense, Roth’s true legacy lies not only in his responsa or published works, but in the countless conversations in which halakhah came alive as a disciplined, compassionate, and sacred process. Whether teaching or advising students informally, Roth’s presence modeled what it meant to be a poseq—not just someone who answers questions, but someone who reasons through complex situations using the internal logic of halakhah.

Rabbi Roth’s legacy of teaching halakhah continues to inspire the students who were blessed enough to study with him. They not only learned valuable lessons from him in the classroom, but they have also continued to learn from him in their one-on-one interactions with him well after the classes were over. Indeed, Rabbi Joel Roth is truly the living embodiment of Yehoshua ben Peraḥiah’s teaching in Pirqei Avot 1:6: עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר, “Appoint for yourself a master teacher, and acquire for yourself a friend.”

Rabbi Lisa Malik is a passionate Jewish educator, pastoral counselor, writer, editor, Israel advocate, and lifelong learner. Lisa, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences and Wharton Business School, was ordained by JTS in 2004. Before ordination, Lisa earned a Ph.D. in Education at Stanford University, served as Education Director of Congregation Beth Sholom’s Religious School in San Francisco, and was a brand management executive at Procter & Gamble. For two decades, Rabbi Malik served as a congregational rabbi, first in the Philadelphia area and then in Aberdeen, New Jersey. She is currently on the board of the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition and works with Ethiopian Israelis as a volunteer for English B’Yachad.

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1. ¹ Special thanks to Rabbis David Ebstein (JTS 1988), Steven Schwarzman (JTS 2008), and Todd Zeff (JTS 2001) for participating in the second interview that I conducted on April 24, 2025. I graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2004.

2. ² A mamad is a bomb shelter inside a dwelling (in this case, Roth’s apartment). It is a Hebrew acronym that stands for makom mugan dirati.

3. ³ Roth authored two teshuvot on the status of homosexuality in Jewish law, one in 1992 and another in 2006 (“Homosexuality Revisited”). Roth’s 2006 teshuvah expressed empathy for homosexuals and the wish that he could have found a way to normalize the status of gay and lesbian Jews in a way that maintained the integrity of the halakhic system. Regrettably, after being unable to find a halakhic way to rule leniently, this teshuvah affirmed the Torah’s prohibition on homosexual activity, denied ordination to homosexuals, and prohibited same-sex commitment ceremonies and marriages. His was one of three teshuvot that were approved by the CJLS on December 6, 2006. Two of these teshuvot—the one authored by Roth and the one authored by Rabbis Elliot Dorff, Daniel Nevins, and Avram Reisner (“Homosexuality, Human Dignity, and Halakhah”)—obtained clear majority support; it retained the Torah’s explicit prohibition, which was understood by these rabbis to be a ban on male anal intercourse, but argued for the full normalization of the status of gay and lesbian Jews. Much of this teshuvah was rooted in the Jewish value of kevod habriot (or, respect for living creatures), which it argued could supersede rabbinic prohibitions for the sake of human dignity. Under their pesaq (“ruling”), gay and lesbian Jews could be ordained as clergy and their committed relationships could be recognized, although not as sanctified marriage. Roth’s teshuvah passed with thirteen in favor, eight opposed, and four abstentions. The teshuvah authored by Dorff, Nevins, and Reisner passed with thirteen in favor, twelve opposed, and zero abstentions. The teshuvah authored by Rabbi Leonard Levy passed with six in favor, eight opposed, and eleven abstentions. Other teshuvot that were not approved were those authored by Rabbis Myron Geller, Robert Fine, and David Fine; Rabbi Tucker; and Rabbi Loel Weiss. Rabbi Tucker’s teshuvah, “Drosh vekabel saḥar: Halakhic and Metahalakhic Arguments Concerning Judaism and Homosexuality,” proposes a radical “enhanced halakhic practice” to argue for the full normalization of gays and lesbians. In this teshuvah, Tucker not only permitted openly gay and lesbian individuals to be admitted to rabbinical school and ordained as Conservative rabbis, but he also advocated for complete sexual-preference egalitarianism in the Conservative Movement at large based on an overturning of the Torah’s prohibition against homosexual activity.

4. ⁴ This is based on the personal experiences of rabbis who studied at the seminary between 1983 and 2008.

5. ⁵ Pisqei din are Jewish legal decisions.

6. ⁶ “These and those are both the words of the living God’’ (b. Eruvin 13b).

7. ⁷ The word meqil means “lenient.”

8. ⁸ A sheʾelah is a question about Jewish law.

Gordon Tucker

This article will address two questions about the teaching of halakhah: Why should we teach it? and How shall we teach it so as best to fulfill our answer to “why”? In answering the second question, the focus will turn to matters that, I maintain, should be unsettling to anyone committed to halakhah as religious law, as I am. That is what led to the title of this piece. “Falls the Shadow” is the thrice-repeated phrase from T. S. Eliot’s well-known poem “The Hollow Men.” The shadow is said to fall “between the idea and the reality,” “between the motion and the act,” “between the conception and the creation.” For the purpose of making my present intention clear, I will add to those three all of the interstices that hold the realm of thought or potentiality apart from the realm of action and consequences. In thinking about how halakhah should be taught, I will focus on the ways in which law can often proceed from and live entirely within its internal, conceptual logic and allow itself a detachment from the real-world consequences that follow from that logic. The shadow that symbolizes that obscured vision can take on many forms, but the most vexatious of all are those that cause violence and pain, by which I emphatically also mean to include psychic pain. A critical distinction that will underlie these thoughts is one that has been axiomatic for more than a century in the philosophy of knowledge—namely, the difference between what is validated in the systems we build to model truth, and what manifests itself as true in the real world of our lives and cherished beliefs.

Let us turn, then, to our two questions.

Why Teach Halakhah?

The short answer that best fits the contemporary society in which Jews live is “to cultivate a consciousness of obligation.” Consider that the phrase “no obligation” has virtually been a mantra used by advertisers of various products and services for a long time, because the emphasis on the right and the freedom to choose is among the foundations of contemporary culture in modern democratic societies. Our cultural setting is one in which autonomy is highly prized, and expected as everyone’s right. What was observed by Arnold M. Eisen and Steven M. Cohen more than twenty years ago is no less true today: “American Jews today are relatively more individualistic and less collectivist. Taken as a group…they regard the ever-changing selection of Jewish activities and meanings from the broad repertoire available as part of their birthright as Jews. They celebrate the autonomy of this choosing and do not worry about its authenticity.”1 In philosophical terms, the tension behind such observations is between the “autonomy” that is invoked here and its opposite, “heteronomy.” Here is a concise paraphrase of Immanuel Kant’s classical definition of the terms (as he famously advocated for one of the two): “instead of being obedient to an externally imposed law or religious precept, one should be obedient to one’s own self-imposed law. The former [Kant] called heteronomy; the latter autonomy.”2 Obligation to rules external to us has indeed fallen on hard times.

Let us look at a striking illustration of how a retreat from heteronomy made it, most surprisingly, into Jewish religious education. A song that many American Jews learned in our younger years was a Passover ditty called “ʿAvadim hayinu, ʿattah benei ḥorin” (“We Were Slaves, Now We Are Free People”). The song was composed in the secular kibbutz Ein Ḥarod in the prestate era by Shalom Postolsky. Although the first two words do indeed appear in the traditional Haggadah, all five are not found in that juxtaposition in the official Passover liturgy. So what actually is in the Haggadah? There are, as we know, two beginnings to the story. Both of them make it clear that we were in service, but to the wrong things—either to Pharaoh or to idols. When the story reaches its climactic conclusion, and we are prepared to leave the degradation of ʿavdut (“servitude”) and eat the bread of freedom, we raise the glass and prepare to bring it all to a triumphant conclusion with the Hallel. And how does the Hallel begin? Not by celebrating our status as benei ḥorin (“free people”) but with an exhortation to praise God that addresses us as “ʿAvdei Adonai” (“servants of God”). In other words, the careful composition of the liturgy for the festival of freedom makes the crucial point that we are not meant to be free of all service; the question is rather: To what will we be giving our service? To a tyrant for whom we are as nothing, and who brooks no questioning, or to a God who cares for us and whose commandments often come with rationales that explain their morality? However, the secular kibbutzniks of the Jezreel Valley in the 1920s and 1930s saw their history rather differently from that given in the implicit argument of the Haggadah. For them, the song celebrated their move from servitude to the religious law they associated with exile, to freedom from those shackles.

It is most remarkable that they taught us to sing this song each year in the Orthodox yeshivah qetanah I attended in Washington Heights, New York. Somehow they did not get that it undermined everything the carefully constructed Haggadah was trying to teach us—that the gift of the Exodus was the move from one kind of service to another, more worthy version. It was pointedly not the autonomy of benei ḥorin, at least in terms of what that phrase meant for the early Zionist pioneers, and what it continues to mean for so many Jews in the America of the twenty-first century.

Now, if the importance of teaching halakhah is to move people who prize their freedom to choose to a more positive consideration of obligation, then we will need to conceive of obligation in a way that is compatible with the autonomy our contemporaries are unlikely to give up.

The texts surrounding an apparently challenging teaching attributed to the third-century rabbi Ḥanina will turn out to be helpful. The dictum appears in b. Qiddushin 31a and three other passages in the Babylonian Talmud: “Of two people who both perform the identical act, the one who does so out of obligation ranks higher than the one who does so voluntarily.” This certainly seems counterintuitive to the contemporary mind, in which voluntarism elicits greater praise than obediently fulfilling an obligation. But the possible key to understanding this dictum in a way that is compatible with autonomy comes from considering the context in which R. Ḥanina’s teaching appears in two of those texts. It is the account of a colloquy that took place nearly a century after R. Ḥanina, between R. Yosef and his colleagues.

R. Yosef was blind, and in his day, it was as yet unresolved whether people who could not see were subject to the performative mitzvot. R. Yosef is quoted as saying that he was always rooting for the possibility that people like him were exempt from the mitzvot, so much so that if someone could prove to him that he was indeed exempt, he would throw a party in honor of his colleagues. And that was because he had always read things the way we naturally do today—namely, that doing something voluntarily when you do not have to is more meritorious than doing it because you are commanded to do so. But when he learns the unchallenged opinion of R. Ḥanina—that the one acting out of obligation actually ranks higher—he switches sides in what he roots for. Now he will happily throw the party if his colleagues could prove to him that he is also subject to the performative mitzvot even though he is blind.

But note that the only thing that is unresolved in R. Yosef’s mind is whether he is going to spring for the food and drink, because his name might show up higher in some ranking system by virtue of being obligated. What is not at all in doubt for R. Yosef is whether he is going to continue performing the mitzvot, irrespective of whether he was subject to a heteronomous command. Of course he would continue to do so! The crucial point that usually gets missed here is that the uncertainty is only about whether there is a party or not. R. Yosef, it seems, was going to continue his life of Jewish observance whether or not he was commanded to do so by God’s law.3 It seems that some kind of impetus to regular observance was operating on R. Yosef, independent of any external source of command.

We might well ask whether R. Yosef was committed to observance because of a desire to keep faith with and be trusted by his community, or because he had an inner sense of command that impelled him to do so. Perhaps it was both. However that may be, the essential point right now is that a meaningful sense of obligation seems to have some degree of independence from an outside source of command, and certainly from an expectation of either external reward or punishment.

A beautiful and compelling expression of this idea of an “autonomous heteronomy” was given in an essay by the contemporary Orthodox rabbi Elyakim Krumbein, a teacher at Yeshivat Har Etzion, that reflects on R. Ḥanina’s seemingly strange teaching:

A commandment has two polar aspects. One of these is rooted in the mysterious haze that enveloped Mount Sinai, out of which the voice of the Blessed Holy One broke forth. This aspect of the command is unresolved, since it will be fulfilled only in a reality not yet known. The second aspect is rooted in the immediate reality, which a person encounters after having wondered in suspense about when a moment of command would arrive, and in which that person now knows with exactitude what is required. When those conditions come into being—for example, the festival arrives and one is holding the four species, or when his son is before him on the eighth day of his life, with the circumcision implement present—it is then that a person apprehends the connection between the present reality and the voice of Sinai. The voice of the Commander then calls out from the present reality. The berakhah for the mitzvah is how this recognition is expressed. The Sages believed that one should not fulfill a mitzvah simply in reliance on an ancient command, as if it were a payment on an obligation taken on in the past. A person should be able to declare: “We were commanded concerning what is happening right at this moment.” That is, the command renews and completes itself in the immediacy of the present. But that can happen only if a person is attuned to it.4

The startling implication of this is that the one who responds to an ancient command for which he has not felt an inner compulsion in the present is not actually acting out of commandedness! It is only someone who is attuned to that which calls to him right now who can rightly say the berakhah “who has sanctified us with the commandments” and thus claim the status of one who acts out of obligation.

A true command is not something that comes to me from a tradition, not something that is “purely heteronomous.” Such an obedient act always threatens to become at best what Isaiah called “a commandment learned from humans by rote” (Isaiah 29:13). A true command touches me personally, lights me up, and impels me to say that I am being spoken to right now, irrespective of what my distant ancestors heard or did, and that I wish to respond to that which I sense to be part of who I am. This is nothing less than a recognition that a command, or a sense of obligation, must come both from the present moment and from within. It is what may have been thought to be a Kantian impossibility—an autonomous response to an external mandate—or what Michael Walzer, reflecting on the lessons of the Exodus and of Sinai, called being “freely bound.” But one must be attuned to it.

This, therefore, may be a way to avert the antagonism between the autonomy we cherish and the sense of obligation on which our tradition—indeed, any tradition—depends. This, then, would be a fitting answer to the first question posed at the outset of this article. We should teach halakhah because it is the framework of heteronomy that overlays our Jewish heritage and is shared by all the generations. But for it to have religious (and not merely historical) value, individuals must receive the commands personally and embrace them from their own selves and their own commitment. This is the bridge that we seek between the Jewish stress on obligation and the autonomy that no modern person will easily let go. It is important to teach halakhah because halakhah at its best seeks to attune us to a life of obligation that comes from within us.

How to Teach Halakhah

Now that I have suggested something crucial about why teach halakhah, we can take on the more complicated second question of how halakhah ideally should be taught. As we consider this question, it is especially important to attend to what Moshe Halbertal has argued concerning the history of halakhah and what he calls its “emergence.”5 The rough contour of his argument is as follows: Before the advent of rabbinic Judaism, Jews had the laws of the Torah. There was, for example, to be no labor on the weekly Shabbat, and the meager evidence that we have in the biblical period suggests that individuals were expected to drop their daily economic activities (e.g., Nehemiah 13:15). What we did not have until the activity of the rabbis was the meticulously detailed systemization of Shabbat rules that we find in the Mishnah and the Talmud. Here is how Mira Balberg describes this move from the more general and amorphous biblical law to rabbinic halakhah: “The biblical injunction is extremely terse: you shall not do any labor. The Mishnah then dissects the general category of labor into thirty-nine different subcategories of labor, and then continues to zoom in on each one of those categories and subcategories and scrutinizes it further.”6 The traditional view, which the rabbis themselves promoted, was that these rabbinic dissections were part of an oral tradition dating all the way back to Sinai. It is hard to see how to refute such a view, so it should never be disrespected. Yet it is equally hard to understand why, if such an ancient oral tradition were being passed down over more than a millennium, we would have no evidence of its existence in late biblical and Second Temple narratives and legal literature. Indeed, in the sequel, Balberg adopts Halbertal’s observation that the rabbinic systemization was in no way inevitable: “as Halbertal noted, there is nothing natural or inherently warranted about the notion that one must perform a commandment in a very particular and accurate way in order for one’s performance to count as a fulfillment of the commandment.”7 In other words, there need be no impediment to the conclusion that the move from the prerabbinic to the rabbinic world was a move from law to halakhah, where the word “halakhah” now denotes a very specific enterprise. It is best understood not just as a collection of laws, but as a considered and methodical enterprise of defining and systematizing what had heretofore been rather loosely stated laws of Shabbat, or of marriage and divorce, forbidden mixtures, or a host of other biblical rulings that lacked minute defining parameters.

Interestingly, Maimonides (Rambam), in introducing the laws of marriage in his code Mishneh Torah (Hilkhot Ishut 1:1) pointedly notes that there was an early time when marriage was the much less structured phenomenon of two consenting adults simply agreeing to live together in intimacy. That is exactly what the verse in Deuteronomy 22:13 depicts (“A man takes a woman to wife and cohabits with her”). The very traditional view was that all of the rabbinic rules for marriage (as set forth in m. Qiddushin, for example) were already given orally to Moses. But if one is not wedded to that idea—and, as noted, one would expect such ancient rules to find their way into prerabbinic literature—then the biblical law of marriage and the rabbinic halakhah of marriage neatly illustrate just what Halbertal is arguing.

This understanding of the origins of halakhah in the practice of the rabbis has important implications for how it should be studied and taught. We are in the realm of metatheory here. That is, we are not asking questions within halakhah but standing outside it and asking evaluative questions about what its goals are, whether it is accomplishing those goals, and other such matters. The important point to be made is this: Every instance of systemization in human intellectual activity is a project of constructing a model of that which is held to have an existence outside that system. So, for example, when mathematicians construct systems of axioms and rules of derivation that refer to numbers, geometric surfaces, or solids, they are seeking a way of capturing the truths about those things through derivations in the system. Similarly, when general concepts in a political constitution are systematized into codes of law with many fine details and nuances, those legal systems are intended to capture the truths held to be self-evident by the society that formulated and adopted that constitution. A way of summarizing this is to distinguish “validity” from “truth.” Being “valid” means that a thing—a proposition or a law, for example—has been correctly derived in the system. Being “true” means that it expresses that which is held to be the truth that the system was constructed to model in the first place.

These two things—validity and truth—are interdependent but not necessarily the same thing. Let us take one example: The Torah says: “No one misbegotten shall be admitted into the congregation of the Lord; none of his descendants, even in the tenth generation, shall be admitted into the congregation of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 23:3). “Misbegotten” is NJPS’s translation of the term mamzer. Whatever revulsion (likely related to lineage) this was expressing to those who first heard or read the word mamzer, later rabbinic interpretation created the halakhot that were based on what they took mamzerut to be—namely, the product of an adulterous or incestuous relationship. The creation of these halakhot out of the simple but ambiguous text in the Torah must have been intended to ensure that God’s will for a holy people would be sustained through an abhorrence of lustful faithlessness. So far, so good.

According to those halakhot, however, offspring were being stigmatized for the misdeeds of parents. Moreover, if a woman who was previously married then married again after a civil divorce but had never been told or taught of the need for a get to end the first marriage, her children from the second husband would also be barred from marriage in the Jewish community. Indeed, all the descendants of such a child would be similarly stigmatized ad infinitum. That compromised status of the children and the children’s children is a perfectly valid consequence of the halakhot constructed out of Deuteronomy 23:3. But now come the critical questions: Does that impairment of the children in fact express the religious value that is the intended point of the halakhah? and Why should we not consider the possibility that as valuable and edifying as a halakhic system may be, it also may on occasion fall short of the religious beliefs that we cherish? Such beliefs may even be written into our ancient literature itself, such as the principle that God should want to punish only perpetrators of crime, certainly not their innocent offspring (see Ezekiel 18).

Metaquestions such as these tend to make us uncomfortable. The best known illustration of this takes us once more to the Passover Haggadah, and how it treats one particular hypothetical child who asks a question pregnant with meaning. The child, whom the text calls “wicked,” asks the all-important metaquestion: “Why are you doing this?”—that is: What are your systemically valid practices really about? This is perhaps the most important question that one can ask about religious law. It asks what the validity of the norms and practices has to do with the truths of faith and belief that they are meant to express. The wicked child is the only one who gets no answer; this child only gets berated for asking the question. You cannot get more true to life than that. Metaquestions make us nervous. But that does not mean they are not crucial. So, in a reference to the great American congressman John Lewis, we might say that this so-called wicked child should always have been called the “good-trouble-making child.”

It is a consequence of the answer to our first question that legal systems, in addition to providing a consistent and predictable array of interrelated rules to keep order in a society, also help to strengthen community by promoting the cultivation of attitudes of obligation. At the same time, since they are (as noted above) simply fallible models of what the foundational principles of the society intend, what they produce is not guaranteed to be identical to those intended goals.

Let us get a bit more specific about how all of this plays out in legal systems. In the case of open, democratic societies, there are fundamental shared beliefs about what such a society should be, what its values are, what it stands for, and what it should mean to live a virtuous life as a member of that society. Beliefs such as these are the sorts of things that, to take a ready example, are set forth as self-evident in America’s Declaration of Independence. The need, then, is to systematize these beliefs in a language that maps them onto the kinds of behaviors that are taken to be consistent with those beliefs and visions. The hope, then, is that there is a strong, if not entirely perfect, correspondence between the legal system and the political and social beliefs—sufficiently strong that a rule validly generated within the system could reliably indicate that this rule expresses the society’s vision for itself. That is the reason and justification for the legal system.

What, if anything, changes when we are speaking of a religious culture? Then we find ourselves speaking of something at once especially important and especially elusive. For now it is not just a question of what a society’s self-image is, or what the will of the people is. In the case of religious law, it is a question of a set of beliefs concerning truths about a transcendent realm, and about the obligations that flow from those truths. Allowing, as we must, for a vast range of images of what we call God, let us say that this involves trying to express truths about what we take to be the will of God. In an era of prophets, there were individuals who presented themselves as God’s spokespersons, and those who were believed were taken to be conveying the divine will directly. As the Torah itself put it in speaking of a true prophet: “Just listen to him.” But prophecy could not suffice, for how was one to have a device for determining who the true prophet was? Without a procedure for determining what God’s will is for us, shared beliefs about that will would have to be mapped onto formalized codes of behavior. Now, those beliefs about God’s will—or, if you prefer, about what is a sanctified or redemptive life—are expressed in many forms, both written and oral, within the loosely defined archives of a religious society; in the Jewish tradition, this is called “aggadah.” And what is to express those beliefs and visions? The Torah itself is surely part of that story, and its eventual canonization is an early stage in the process of meeting that basic and urgent need. But only in the rabbinic period were rules and obligations systematized into halakhah, which has rooted itself in Jewish practice ever since. The hope and the intention were, and have always been, that the language and the normative force of halakhah would accurately capture what God’s will is.

That last sentence is the most honest answer we could give to the pointed and unsettling question posed by the good-trouble-making child: “Why are you doing this?” The answer is perforce unsettling because it raises a follow-up question: “Does it in fact accurately capture what God’s will is?” Now, it should be clear that there is no unequivocal and uncontroversial definition of God’s will. We have only our presumptions about what God’s will is, and those we have inherited by tradition. But they are very strong presumptions, and the more they are shared, the more we will risk for them. To put it another way, in the absence of direct communication from beyond, all we can rely on, trust, and have faith in are the shared beliefs and intuitions of our forebears about what God’s will is, and our convictions about how much we still share those same beliefs and intuitions, or modified forms of them. So we return to the follow-up question posed by the good-trouble-making child: How well does our language and system of halakhah capture those beliefs? In the end, that is halakhah’s sole vocation.

Here is how Barry Wimpfheimer put it in a recent book:

Codifiers of Jewish law have been driven by an assumption…that codes are the ideal form for representing law…. But law is not composed entirely of its normative function…. Codes present mandates and prohibitions, ignoring questions of genealogy, legal authority, and the relationship between theoretical law and lived life. Even the most well-conceived and executed codes can, as a result, still be found lacking.8

Moreover, the converse problem looms as well, and this one is much more serious for a society aspiring to live in accordance with the divine will. That problem is this: human apprehensions of the virtuous and moral life change, evolve, and deepen. As a result, particular systematizations of law will produce valid results that can, and often do, conflict with embedded (and certainly with evolving) intuitions about the virtue that is being systematized in the first place—for example, condoning slavery, corruption of blood, disadvantaging women, or not recognizing nontraditional family structures. The United States Constitution in its original form already responded to the perceived injustices inherent in corruption of blood, but it did not originally respond to what would in time become solid intuitions and convictions about slavery, women’s roles, and increasingly, the coexistence of different sexual orientations. It had to be amended and/or interpreted in ways that would resolve inconsistencies with the shared convictions that the laws were created to express in the first instance, as we became aware of those inconsistencies. Especially in an age when systemic validity was shown always to be inadequate as a formalization of truth (even in the readily systematizable field of mathematics!), it would have been foolhardy to claim that norms validly produced by our constitutional legal system were ipso facto faithful reflections of our political and moral beliefs. And it would have been even more bizarre to say that if they were not, we would have to adjust our belief system to fit our laws. It would be getting the causal arrow behind the creation of legal systems entirely backwards.

More dangerous still is the situation as it affects religious law, which is there to systematize not the will of a people—which could theoretically be ascertained through a properly constructed plebiscite—but a transcendent will. Convictions about what God’s will is can be widely shared as well, and they often are across religious communities. They also change, evolve, and deepen. So what are we to do when the honest answer to the follow-up question posed by the good-trouble-making child is that there are some validly produced and highly precedented norms of halakhah that no longer accurately express our convictions about what a sanctified and godly life ought to be, and about what human beings created in the divine image are entitled to? What are we to do when a received and justly venerated systematization of religious values instructs us to inflict corruption of blood on people whose parents have violated cardinal norms of sexual propriety and purity? (This is the aforementioned case of the mamzer, the child of even unwitting or technical adultery, which occurred because a previous marriage was dissolved in an invalid way.) What should our reaction be when the norms of halakhah would require us to consign a woman to celibacy because her husband has abandoned her or disappeared without granting the divorce he alone is authorized to grant? What should we contemplate doing if the valid and highly precedented norm of halakhah makes it impossible to approve, let alone sanctify, a loving relationship between two women or two men, even if we hold, on the basis of evidence, the belief that they are constitutionally built to love in this way? And what if that dissonance is further intensified by the fact that a large body of our own aggadah—namely, the sum total of the theological and moral teachings in our cultural archives—reminds us that the Creator intended people to love and to create homes and families, and that people’s lives should not be bereft of the pleasures and responsibilities that are the human birthright solely because of factors they could never control? Validity in such cases has failed to be congruent with truths as we apprehend them, and for which the systemic validity was designed in the first place. The crisis must be met. Indeed, it must first be acknowledged, which is no doubt exactly what the parent of the good-trouble-making child wants to avoid doing.

But we must acknowledge it, because, in these instances, as Robert Cover taught us, the systematized law sometimes threatens violence and pain. In these instances, we speak primarily not of physical pain but of the social and existential pain, which is more than anyone should have to bear. When such pain is entailed by the halakhic system, it is not in the name of halakhah but in the name of God. One might have the right to accept the fallacy of equating validity with truth if one were submitting to some pain and disability for oneself, in the manner of a martyr. Even that might be questioned. But it is impossible to justify indulging in that fallacy when it entails pain inflicted on others.

It would be one thing to reconcile to the doling out of pain and isolation on other human beings if one were convinced that it was being sanctioned by an inscrutable and infinite divine will that we receive directly. Adherents of the traditional view that the halakhic rules already existed and were communicated to Moses at Sinai have this option. But for those who, like most readers of this journal, adopt Halbertal’s view of the emergence of halakhah, it seems completely unjustifiable to reconcile to it on the basis of a systemic misconflation of validity and truth, as we profess belief in a God of compassion. Systems do not produce truth. They produce mappings of truth into norms, approximations to truth that may be exposed from time to time as just that: approximations. Cover, in his essay “Violence and the Word,” noted the urgent need for a “latent…structure to render the judicial utterance morally intelligible.”9 The latent structure can be a set of theological beliefs. But, as theology changes, we may be left with “the moral unintelligibility of routine judicial utterance when the structure is no longer there.” What would the good-trouble-making child have to say in the face of that?

One can only think of Martha Minow’s insight about these systemic arguments, an insight she formulated as follows: “Modes of analysis and argument that maintain their exclusive hold on the truth are suspect. By casting doubt on alternative modes, they shield themselves from challenge and suppress alternative ways of understanding. They also render ordinary and explicable all they encounter: ‘to a hammer, everything looks like a nail’”—even, apparently, when the nail may pierce not only the innocent, but also the image and reputation of the divine. Minow continues: “But some things are extraordinary and call for extraordinary responses. Methods of analysis that smooth out the bumps and subsume all under generalizations risk not only making this mistake but hiding it from view.”10

The first part of this article made the case for the importance of studying halakhah, which certainly means getting into its norms, its logic, the simanim in the codes, and the literature of the responsa. It is an essential part of a Jewish curriculum because it acculturates us to the importance of obligation in our lives. We have now come to the answer to the second question with which we began: “How shall we teach halakhah”? While we must recognize that halakhah will usually prove to be a faithful modeling of our intuitions about the will of the God we worship, we also must consider that the adequacy of that model is not guaranteed. We must also ascend to the meta-level and ask the “good-trouble” questions. It makes little religious sense to opt for saddling God with the responsibility for rules that inflict pain on the undeserving when there is a much better approach—namely, acknowledging that even the most conscientious human attempts at modeling the divine will sometimes get it wrong. Why would it not be the truly religious and humble way to get God off the hook for inflicting hurt by humbly considering the fallibility of our efforts to map God’s will onto human laws?

If we teach halakhah in this way, we can hope never to have to hear, at least in more liberal communities, the religiously untenable phrase “I understand the pain this will cause, but the clear halakhah compels me to accept it.” We can paraphrase Cover’s closing line in the essay cited above as follows: It is between the idea and the reality, between validity mistaken for truth and truth itself, that the shadow of pain and religious failure falls.

Rabbi Gordon Tucker is Vice Chancellor for Religious Life and Engagement at The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). He served as Senior Rabbi at Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York from 1994 to 2018, and is now Senior Rabbi Emeritus. From 1982 to 2007 he was a member of the Rabbinical Assembly Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.

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1. ¹ Arnold M. Eisen and Steven M. Cohen, The Jew Within (Indiana University Press, 2000), 184.

2. ² “Immanuel Kant,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/kantview/#:~:text=At%20the%20foundation%20of%20Kant's,of%20things%20we%20can%20experience.

3. ³ I am indebted to Dr. Sarah Wolf for this insight.

4. ⁴ Elyakim Krumbein, “On the Matter of Acting by Command” (Hebrew), Aggadot Ḥazal, http://www.daat.ac.il/chazal/maamar.asp?id=19 (translation and emphasis mine).

5. ⁵ Moshe Halbertal, “History of Halakhah and Emergence of Halakhah” (Hebrew), Dinei Yisraʾel 29 (2013): 1–23.

6. ⁶ Mira Balberg, “Ritualizing Law, Legalizing Ritual,” in Jewish Law: New Perspectives, ed. Suzanne Stone and Yonatan Brafman, Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts 26 (de Gruyter, 2024), 157.

7. ⁷ Balberg, “Ritualizing Law,” 158.

8. ⁸ Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 9.

9. ⁹ Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” in Narrative, Violence, and the Law, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (University of Michigan Press, 1995), 228.

10. ¹⁰ Martha Minow, “Stories in Law,” in Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (Yale University Press, 1996), 35.

Susan Grossman

Masorti Judaism has always viewed itself as a halakhic movement, faithful to Jewish law and tradition, as it navigates tensions between traditional Jewish practice and evolving social conditions and mores. This tension has been a dynamic part of the secret of Jewish survival. Thousands of generations of Jews and their religious leaders have sought the right balance between tradition and change, Jewish unity and diversity, and cultural accommodation and fidelity to Jewish identity and observance.

The Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS) has served as the Conservative Movement’s laboratory for navigating these tensions in ways that are consistent with Jewish values, halakhic tradition, and a deep commitment to yirʾat shamayim, or “fear of heaven,” the humility to question whether one’s decision is consistent with God’s will and how it might affect future generations. The toolbox at our disposal is extensive, encompassing not only the collective wisdom of thousands of years of Jewish biblical, rabbinic, and halakhic literature but also innovative advances in science, medicine, engineering, sociology, psychology, political philosophy, ethics, and more. One of the most essential elements in judiciously applying modern knowledge to Jewish practice is our understanding of metahalakhic values, biblically derived moral imperatives. Metahalakhic values such as piquaḥ nefesh (Leviticus 18:5 and 19:16, which prioritize protecting and saving a life) and betselem Elohim (Genesis 1:27, which affirms the equality of all humanity as created in God’s image) have guided the decisions of our movement through challenging times.¹

How we do halakhah distinguishes us as a Movement and is therefore just as important as the actual decisions we make. We deliberate and decide halakhah well, guided by the wisdom of past sages and the appointed body of contemporary rabbinic scholars and committed laypeople serving on our movement’s CJLS. Conservative Judaism was founded to conserve Jewish tradition and its commitment to the observance of Jewish law. Our challenge is not our halakhic process itself but how we engage our laity in that process in ways that inspire them to care enough and learn enough to guide their practice and decisions. How can we teach halakhah to reach ʿamkhah, our congregants and the broader Jewish community, in ways that inspire them to return for more?

I sat on CJLS for most of my thirty-three years in the pulpit, serving eight years with Genesis Agudas Achim in Westchester, New York, and twenty-five years with Beth Shalom Congregation in Columbia, Maryland, before becoming its rabbi emerita. The time commitment to CJLS was considerable, especially before the advent of Zoom and Google Docs. For years, meetings were held quarterly in person over two days in New York City, until we shifted to biannual multiday meetings. Each member was responsible for writing teshuvot (“responses” to questions of Jewish law and observance) in their areas of expertise and interest. In addition, I advised on and helped edit various teshuvot in my capacity as chair of the Sub-Committee on Women, Gender and Human Sexuality, and later as co-chair with Daniel Nevins of its successor, the Sub-Committee on Personal Status.

I wanted congregants to feel they had a stake in and could contribute to CJLS deliberations, rather than thinking of my time spent with CJLS as non-congregational business. I hoped that informing them of issues under consideration, to the extent appropriate, and inviting their input would inspire a personal stake not only in upcoming CJLS deliberations, but also in how halakhah could inform their lives and those of the larger Jewish community. What an opportunity for congregants to help shape Jewish history!

I sought to integrate the consideration of halakhah into all aspects of congregational life. Opportunities for teaching halakhah arose in formal and informal conversations with board and religious committee members regarding congregational policy. Some took place in conversations with congregants who had specialties in medicine and other fields related to issues CJLS was considering or I was writing about. Before lighting candles at congregational dinners, I explained the halakhic reasoning behind differences in Shabbat and holiday candle-lighting. The history, practice, and content of halakhah were integrated into adult education courses, interfaith events, and student, family, and parent programs. The most poignant moments occurred in hospital waiting rooms, by the bedside of loved ones, in mourners’ homes, and during office appointments, as congregants grappled with medical decisions and ethical dilemmas.

In classes, board meetings, and discussions with the religious committee, we explored the process of making halakhic decisions, the strengths and weaknesses of the Jewish predilection for allowing alternative or multiple “right” answers, and the parameters of personal, rabbinic, and communal authority. Only rarely did I feel the need to give an up or down, patur (“permitted”) or pasul (“prohibited”) decision. Usually, the collective wisdom of my leadership and congregants, the cooperative and respectful nature of our conversations, and the direct exploration of halakhic sources contributed to a consensus that was both acceptable to the congregation and halakhically defensible and reasonable from my perspective as mara deʾatra (“teacher of the place,” or, the halakhic authority of my community) and relevant CJLS decisions.

What follows are several case studies of how teaching halakhah in my congregations became an integral part of congregational life. Congregants and I walked a path of Jewish engagement and study, which helped us navigate change, clarify our values, strengthen connections to the larger Jewish world, and inspire individual and congregational Jewish growth.

Inspiring Jewish Questions to Teach Halakhah: Ask the Rabbi

Asking questions of rabbis is as ancient as the talmudic story of the first-century BCE sage Hillel, who was asked to teach the entire Torah while standing on one foot (b. Shabbat 31a), and as contemporary as the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof, who was asked what blessing to give the tsar. Anatevka’s fictional rabbi responds with a now-famous quip: “May God bless and keep the tsar far away from us.” Hillel, in his reply, teaches a fundamental Jewish value that, sadly, is less well known although much more important: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another.”

Throughout history, much of halakhah, as well as the Jewish values and practices it defines and guides, was taught in response to questions. Some questions and answers, whether real or imagined, were included in what became the foundational tomes of rabbinic literature: the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmud. In subsequent centuries, answers, and sometimes their initiating questions, were collected in a genre of rabbinic literature known as teshuvot (“answers”). As a movement, we continue this process of asking and answering questions of Jewish practice through teshuvot in the deliberations of our Israeli Vaʿad Halakhah and the CJLS, which guides our answers to questions for Masorti Judaism worldwide. Inspiring questions remains one of the most effective ways to teach halakhah, especially practical halakhah that guides personal practice.

How we answer questions is sometimes more important than the questions themselves. Rabbis are asked questions in a myriad of settings, often in response to a pressing need or pastoral concern. I encouraged queries in less urgent situations during scheduled “Ask the Rabbi” visits to religious school classes and, in my Maryland congregation, monthly during Friday evening services. I offered a carrot: a bag of candy to any student who could “stump the rabbi” on a question of Jewish history, belief, law, or practice. Religious school students insisted that their parents bring them to services to try to stump me. Adults got a kick out of seeing students so engaged, even as the adults waited to ask their questions.

Questions about the whys, wherefores, and origins of holiday observances, specific prayers, kashrut, Shabbat, tzedakah, and more offered opportunities to discuss halakhah, or how we walk in God’s ways through Jewish practice. Often, congregants’ interest in specific questions stimulated ideas for family and adult education programs. Offering a structured, nonjudgmental opportunity to ask questions helped build a congregational culture that embraced asking questions as a norm of our communal life, which in turn stimulated a hunger for learning more.

Engaging Congregants in Conservative Judaism by Teaching Halakhah: Qitniyyot

I wanted congregants to feel part of something greater than themselves, their families, and even our congregation and local Jewish community. I hoped that by inviting congregant input on questions currently being considered by CJLS, congregants would view themselves as part of the historic journey and continuous evolution of ʿam Yisraʾel, the Jewish people, and of Conservative Movement practice. With the enthusiastic support of our adult education committee, I began teaching an almost annual series of Friday evening programs titled “CJLS Hot Topics.” I chose topics based on teshuvot currently or soon to be considered, creating clever titles to encourage attendance. Congregants who rarely attended Friday night services came, especially for issues related to their areas of expertise or particular interest. Each session focused on a single issue currently before the CJLS. I briefly outlined the history of the question, shared a source sheet of relevant halakhic concepts and sources that we briefly studied together, and invited questions, comments, recommendations, and debate. In closing, I promised to share their input and update them on CJLS’s final decision.

Whenever a particularly controversial topic arose, my lay leadership and I would schedule these discussions during Friday and Saturday services, sometimes over different weekends, to maximize congregational participation. Such was the case when CJLS considered whether Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin) should be permitted to follow the practice of Sephardim (Jews of Spanish descent and/or from Muslim lands) who permitted eating qitniyyot (legumes, seeds, and rice) on Passover. In Israel, distinctions between Ashkenazi and Sephardi customs were waning. Masorti rabbinic scholar and then head of the Schechter Institute, David Golinkin (son of our congregation’s first rabbi emeritus, Noah Golinkin), had penned a teshuvah for the Israeli Masorti Movement lifting the Ashkenazic prohibition on eating qitniyyot during Passover, based on the cultural and family integration of Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Israel. Our question was: Should the same decision apply to Jews in ḥuts laʾarets, outside Israel?

The congregational buzz began when my newsletter article introduced the subject. Parents discussed it while waiting to pick up their children from religious school. Congregants queried me in supermarket aisles. Services were packed for each session. Congregants paid close attention as I walked them through the sources, from the Talmud to Maimonides, the Shulchan Arukh, and the thirteenth-century Ashkenazi poseq (decider of Jewish law) Mordecai ben Hillel haKohen, known as “the Mordecai” to modern Orthodox posqim like Moshe Feinstein and our own David Golinkin. We explored implications for vegetarians and vegans, as well as being considerate of the sensibilities of Seder guests. Following a lively debate, I took a straw poll. Congregants overwhelmingly favored ending the Passover ban on qitniyyot for Ashkenazim, although a significant minority disagreed. In closing, I emphasized that qitniyyot was not ḥamets (leavened items prohibited on Passover) and therefore did not affect the kashrut of a Passover kitchen. I shared the congregational policy that my lay leadership and I had already agreed on: regardless of CJLS’s decision and what congregants decided to do in their homes, we would not serve qitniyyot in the synagogue during Passover, so that everyone could feel comfortable eating here. As always, I promised to share their input with CJLS and inform the congregation of CJLS’s decision.

Following CJLS’s approval, dozens of congregants contacted me for advice on whether and, if so, how to include qitniyyot in their Passover plans.2 I inquired about their traditional family practices, health needs, and the sensibilities of Seder guests, helping them consider how their Seder menu could align with Jewish values of hakhnasat orḥim (hospitality) and shalom bayit (peace within the home and family). I reminded them that, while serving items containing qitniyyot might be challenging to manage during the Seder, eating qitniyyot at other times would not affect the status of their Passover kitchens, even for guests who strictly avoided qitniyyot on Passover.

Our community conversation about qitniyyot connected my congregants to Jewish practice in Israel and our larger worldwide movement, helping them appreciate their role in the evolving story of Jewish history. More importantly, the overwhelming interest in qitniyyot revealed how deeply congregants care about Jewish law when they see how it directly affects them.

Teaching Halakhah Experientially: B’nei Mitsvah Shabbatons

Each year, in both my congregations, my husband and I hosted parts of an annual Shabbaton sleepover for benei mitsvah students and their families with the help of congregational school staff and parent volunteers. Parents and children learned practical hilkhot kashrut as they helped shop, prepare, serve, and clean up Shabbat meals in our home and synagogue. They learned the reasoning behind Conservative approaches to using electricity on the Sabbath and why, in my home and our synagogue, we did not turn lights on or off or use electronic devices, which meant they had to leave devices at home. We discussed different approaches to driving and why students would walk with me to and from shul. If they became raucous on the walk through our quiet neighborhood, I seized the teaching moment to emphasize such Jewish values as kavod, or showing consideration and respect for others. After helping lead services, enjoying a morning kiddush luncheon followed by Birkat Hamazon (grace after meals), and participating in group-building activities, students and a few parent chaperones walked home with me for an afternoon of free time, socializing, and team competitions that taught and reinforced their Jewish knowledge, all fueled by plenty of snacks. In taking turns leading different parts of Shabbat Minḥah (afternoon prayer) as a student minyan, their confidence grew as they realized they knew more than they thought they did.

Before every Shabbaton, a considerable number of students complained about our ban on electronic devices. As parents returned to my house before students led Havdalah, I began debriefing students. What was fun? What was hard? How was it to unplug for twenty-five hours? Consistently over thirty-three years, students expressed surprise at how much fun they had with their peers, realizing that it was because they were without their devices, and begged us to schedule another Shabbaton soon.

Several factors influence Jewish engagement, including family observance and participation in Jewish summer camps. To the best of my knowledge, none of my students ever adopted a shomer Shabbat lifestyle as adults because of our Shabbaton. Nevertheless, our Shabbatons strengthened the class ties that inspired students’ continued study through Hebrew High confirmation, which in turn encouraged Hillel involvement and participation in Birthright trips to Israel in college, solidifying a Jewish identity that resulted, more often than statistics might predict, in students seeking Jewish spouses who shared their commitment to establishing a Jewish home and affiliating with a Conservative congregation.

Teaching The Evolving Nature of Halakhah to the Next Generation: Homosexuality and the “Oven of Achnai”

The Rabbinical Assembly (RA) had been considering the halakhic status of homosexuality since before I joined the CJLS in 1992. (Terms like LGBTQ+ were not yet part of the lexicon.) I became involved in the issue a few years later with my appointment as chair of the CJLS Sub-Committee on Women, Gender, and Human Sexuality. The issue was controversial and threatened to split the movement, which is perhaps why it was not until 2006 that the CJLS finally passed the first teshuvah to permit homosexual and same-sex marriages and homosexual and lesbian rabbis.3 Although not one of the authors, I partially credit the teshuvah’s passage with my encouragement of Rabbis Elliot Dorff, Daniel Nevins, and Avram Reisner to combine what were originally their three separate teshuvot into one coherent whole. The authors brilliantly utilized the metahalakhic value of kavod habriot (“human dignity”) as well as more technical rabbinic halakhic tools to supersede the literal biblical prohibition against same-sex relationships (Leviticus 18:22).

With the expanding discussion of gay rights reaching our public high schools, and given the explicit biblical injunction against same-sex relationships, our Hebrew High upper-class students had begun to ask about homosexuality in Jewish law. I was invited to address the students on this issue.

Traditional Jewish text study is inductive, based on pairs of students working to understand a text before hearing from an expert teacher. With this model in mind, I created an attractive study sheet showing an open Torah scroll with a rolled column on each side. In the center, I listed relevant biblical sources in Hebrew and English, such as Genesis 1:27 (“God said, ‘Let us create human beings betselem Elohim, in our image’”) and Genesis 2:18 (“it is not good for a human to be alone”), as well as Leviticus 18:22, which prohibits homosexuality. I included some of the talmudic sources cited in the teshuvah, including b. Berakhot 19b (“Great is human dignity”) and b. Bava Qamma 84a (“What is possible is possible; what is impossible is impossible”). In the left column, I listed Jewish concepts such as deʾoraita and derabbanan (biblical and rabbinic commands), betselem Elohim (the inherent worth of being created in God’s image), and mara deʾatra (the local rabbinic authority), among others.

After a brief introduction that invited student questions about the subject, I divided students into ḥevrutot, or small study groups. I instructed them first to review the texts listed in the center of the page and then the Jewish concepts listed in the left column. Next, they were to try to list in the right-hand column which Jewish values were most closely connected to each of the sources listed in the center. Students were intensely engaged throughout the class. I could see their shoulders ease as they made their way through the material in ḥevruta, realizing that the verses reflecting Jewish values they were proud of outnumbered the verses that troubled them, specifically the verse prohibiting homosexuality as an abomination. Upon reconvening, I invited students to share which Jewish values they had connected to different verses and how those values might influence them in various situations.

I then had them turn over the study sheet and take turns reading together what I consider one of our most significant rabbinic sources in the millennia-long struggle to counter fundamentalist biblical literalism. “The Oven of Achnai” (b. Bava Metziʾa 59a-b) is a case study in rabbinic change management. It recounts an incredible, or incredulous, story about the rabbinic sages living under Roman occupation, as they continued to face the challenges of maintaining Jewish survival, unity, and continuity a generation after the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE. During a debate on the ritual purity of a particular type of clay oven, a series of miraculous interventions supports Rabbi Eliezer’s position as a minority of one, culminating in a heavenly voice descending from above, as if to end the debate with a final, unambiguous heavenly decision. The controversy does not end there, though. Without missing a beat, Rabbi Joshua, spokesman for the majority and a leading rabbinic sage at the time, rejects divine intervention, arguing that the majority decision already made by the gathered rabbis must stand, according to God’s own words. He cites prooftexts from the Torah: Deuteronomy 30:12 (“it [i.e., the Torah] is not in heaven”) and Exodus 23:2 (“after the majority incline”).

As my students and I read through the story, we discussed how our holy texts were products of a particular time and place and what that implied about how we are to make sense of those texts when they seem discordant not only with contemporary mores but also with some of our most fundamental Jewish values. We briefly discussed the Jewish tradition of struggling with God as a sacred encounter and how grappling with a troubling biblical and rabbinic text is one way to enter that holy struggle. By the end of the evening, students not only had a better understanding of the basis for the CJLS’s decision to permit homosexuality. They had learned how Jewish law balances respect for tradition with the need for change through rabbinic tradition’s built-in safeguards against fundamentalist literalism, especially when it conflicts with such overarching Jewish values as compassion and respect for all.

I often teach the “Oven of Achnai.” It is one of the foundational talmudic texts establishing the collective authority of rabbinic leadership to continue adapting Jewish law and practice to changing times. It is thus a favorite in Conservative/Masorti Judaism, for we see ourselves as the heirs of these rabbinic sages, our contemporary decision-making process reflected in and authorized by their precedents. The God-given authority they claimed for themselves to judiciously redefine and even override the literal meaning of a biblical commandment underpins our halakhic process.

In its full talmudic presentation, the “Oven of Achnai” is a tragic and complex saga that acknowledges the ambiguity of balancing individual conscience with maintaining communal cohesion, even as it affirms the role of majority rule in sustaining that communal cohesion. A coda to the tale recounts a meeting between Rabbi Nathan and the Prophet Elijah, during which Elijah recounts that God laughed and said, “My sons have defeated me. My sons have defeated me.” The coda is usually interpreted and translated to show God celebrating the rabbis’ decision, like a proud parent celebrating a child’s independence. Yet the continuation of the story may also reflect an ambivalence about majority rule when it fails to carefully balance the need for cohesion with respect for diversity and difference, as well as basic human kindness. Rabbi Eliezer is excommunicated for refusing to abide by the majority decision, thereby socially isolating him, which causes him great distress, denies younger rabbis access to his vast storehouse of knowledge, and sets off a domino effect of other tragic events (b. Bava Metziʾa 59b, b. Sanhedrin 68a).4 We often skip this part of the story, as I did with my high school students. We might do so because of limited time or concerns about the content’s suitability for specific age groups. But when we do, we miss an opportunity to explore alternatives for navigating conflict and deeply held divergences of opinion in concert with such core Jewish values as kavod (respect) and a commitment to klal Yisraʾel, the unity of the Jewish people. Such reflection is particularly pertinent in today’s politically divisive world.

Inspiring Personal Observance By Teaching Halakhah:
Kashrut Workshops

I have found congregants to be exceptionally responsive to the teaching of halakhah when it is offered as a solution to their pressing problems. Sometimes, the impact of studying halakhah extends far beyond those initial concerns. Like many congregations, our Sisterhood assumed responsibility for managing and maintaining our synagogue’s kitchen and its kashrut standards. An influx of new members presented several challenges. Shopping volunteers unintentionally purchased unkosher items. Kitchen items were put where others could not find them. Sisterhood leadership relied on and appreciated new volunteers, but they were at their wit’s end. They wanted to be part of a solution that would not only protect the sanctity and usability of the kitchen but also make new volunteers feel appreciated and part of a Sisterhood that is justly proud of being warm, welcoming, and Jewishly knowledgeable. They came to me for help. Together, we developed a three-step plan to promote greater congregational knowledge and observance of kashrut by teaching the practical halakhah of kashrut.

First, we offered a kashrut workshop. I taught sources and the basic practical halakhot of hilkhot kashrut. A Sisterhood member shared tips for managing the separation of meat and milk in a kosher kitchen at home. Another brought various cans and boxes to practice shopping for kosher items. The wife of a recent convert shared kosher substitutes for favorite nonkosher recipes. Sisterhood offered to match congregants with experienced “kosher buddies” to answer practical questions of becoming kosher and help congregants kasher their kitchens, assisted by a team of Sisterhood’s experienced kosher members whom I had trained for this purpose. Conversion candidates and those seeking to expand their Jewish observance particularly appreciated these opportunities for support.

Next, we worked with Sisterhood and congregational committee chairs to develop and get board approval for two new congregational policies regarding our synagogue kitchens. The first affirmed our congregational commitment to klal Yisraʾel, or Jewish communal unity, by permitting only widely respected heksherim (symbols indicating kosher supervision) for foodstuffs and caterers in our kitchen. The second policy required a certified mashgiaḥ or a congregationally trained para-mashgiaḥ to be present whenever food was brought into the building and/or a synagogue kitchen was used. All kitchen volunteers, congregational committee chairs, and synagogue staff were to receive para-mashgiaḥ training.

In partnership with Sisterhood, our para-mashgiaḥ program trained dozens of volunteers over the years. I taught the basic rules of hilkhot kashrut, including the rationale and procedures for handling what I called “oops” mistakes. Under my guidance, Sisterhood members introduced the symbols of our accepted heksherim and identified which foodstuffs did not require a heksher. They explained kitchen procedures and cleanup protocols, including the importance of not exchanging kitchen utensils or food items between the meat and dairy kitchens. Participants had to pass an exam evaluating their knowledge of practical kashrut halakhah, how to manage potential dilemmas, and kashrut-related kitchen procedures before receiving their para-mashgiaḥ certification and being added to our list of approved kitchen supervisors.

To broaden wider congregational interest in hilkhot kashrut, I leveraged my already popular multiyear series of Friday night mini-lectures on “CJLS Hot Topics” to focus on upcoming CJLS kashrut issues such as lab-grown meat, eating dairy in unsupervised settings, and the ethics of kosher slaughtering, the latter a controversial topic in the news at the time. I also collaborated with committee chairs to develop policies for synagogue-sponsored events held off site, in congregants’ homes, and on school and youth field trips.

Throughout this multiyear project of teaching hilkhot kashrut, congregant kashrut observance increased, more volunteers assisted in the kitchen, and intergenerational friendships developed. Students became more confident about navigating the challenges of keeping kosher when out with their peers. A project that was initiated to protect the sanctity of our synagogue’s kosher kitchens yielded numerous unexpected rewards.

Resolving Controversy By Teaching Halakhah: Women’s Head Covering

Navigating shifts in generational and cultural attitudes requires empathy, patience, the capacity to listen, the ability to help everyone feel heard, and the congregation’s willingness to be guided by halakhah, as determined by the rabbi in her role as mara deʾatra, in consultation with the religious committee, congregational leadership, and members. Even when the CJLS has not yet addressed questions about congregational practice, the vast compendium of rabbinic material in the Bible, Midrash, Talmud, and later codes offers guidance for those willing to seek it. As Ecclesiastes 1:9 reminds us, “there is nothing new under the sun,” although there are often new ways of applying what has preceded us.

Although both my congregations had strong Sabbath attendance among men and women, very few female congregants initially wore kippot or tallitot in the early days following the rabbinic ordination of women. As the number of women wearing head coverings and tallitot increased during my Maryland congregation’s growth and concurrent influx of younger members, questions arose about what egalitarianism meant beyond simply counting women in the minyan. Some felt that if women wanted to be treated as religious equals, they should observe similar requirements to men, including covering their heads and wearing tallitot. Others argued that women should have autonomy over their bodies and clothing. Some women expressed dismay over being forced to wear any head covering, which evoked an Orthodox upbringing they had left. Boys resisted wearing kippot, arguing for equality since girls did not have to wear them. Girls resisted wearing kippot because they messed up their hair and were uncomfortable on top of barrettes and ponytails.

Congregational controversy was brewing. In partnership with my religious, adult education, and religious school committees, we decided on a period of congregational halakhic study beginning in the religious committee. David Fine’s 2002 teshuvah, establishing women’s equal obligation to minyan, was silent on the questions of women’s religious obligation to wear head coverings and tallitot.5 I created a detailed source sheet listing halakhic questions and rabbinic sources regarding women wearing head coverings and tallitot, as well as men covering their heads when praying, ascending the bimah, or engaging in other activities such as touching, reading, and studying holy texts. These sources examined personal piety, the sanctity of sacred spaces, the evolving rabbinic approach to men wearing head coverings and tallitot, women’s obligation to mitzvot, and what equality and egalitarianism mean. A thoughtful conversation identified options and outlined a tentative consensus plan based on the sources I had reviewed and our congregation’s commitments to egalitarianism and inclusion. We also devised a plan to maximize congregational input: I would write a newsletter article outlining the issues, invite feedback, and announce a schedule of study sessions that I would lead during several Shabbat services.

The sanctuary was packed for the study sessions, including a notable presence from the religious committee and board members. I explored relevant rabbinic sources that might inform our decision making, invited congregants to share their comments and questions on the sources and religious committee suggestions, and reiterated our shared Jewish and congregational values of inclusion, respect for differences of opinion, and commitment to abide by communal decisions. When possible, I prefer helping individuals make informed decisions between appropriate halakhic options rather than imposing a single way of doing things. Congregants were encouraged to speak with me and religious committee members in advance of the committee’s next meeting. In the interim, conversations took place over Kiddushes and as parents waited for their children after school. I often heard laughter as people shared their experiences with head coverings while growing up. In the interim, I taught a condensed version of the halakhic material to our b’nei mitsvah class. Girls were excited to learn that head coverings need only be as wide as the distance across one’s knuckles, allowing them to wear the wide headbands they liked.

When the religious committee reconvened, we clarified our halakhic bottom lines, considering congregant feedback and movement policies that officially included women’s equal obligation to minyan. A final policy was agreed upon, based on the initial draft proposal: head coverings would be required for all males, everyone ascending the bimah, and everyone wearing a tallit. Both head coverings and tallitot would be necessary for all Torah honors. Women sitting in the congregation would only be required to cover their heads when wearing a tallit. Given the parent and student uproar over kippot, we developed a compromise policy that reaffirmed the requirement for boys to wear kippot in synagogue and during religious school and Junior Congregation, adding the requirement for girls leading prayers or ascending the bimah to wear an appropriate head covering such as a kippah, lace “chapel cap,” wide headband, or nice hat. (All students were prohibited from wearing baseball caps during school and congregational services.) For female congregants, life cycle honorees, and guests uncomfortable wearing a tallit, we identified honors for which we would not require women to wear a tallit, such as ark openings and reciting the English Prayer for the Country.

The decision was communicated through congregational newsletters, b’nei mitsvah family workshops, and individual conversations to enthusiastic approval throughout the congregation. Sisterhood began selling feminine kippot. One congregant’s mother created handmade lace tallitot for female simḥah guests, a touch that families deeply appreciated. One teacher annually delighted sixth-grade pre-b’nei mitsvah students with kippot hand-calligraphed with their Hebrew names. Her choice of blue for boys and pink for girls, while too gender-specific to some adults, effectively engaged girls in proudly wearing their kippot in class and at synagogue. As time passed, more women and girls began to wear kippot and tallitot. Those who chose not to wear a head covering or tallit continued to feel welcome and included, reinforcing our congregational and Jewish values of hakhnasat orḥim (welcoming), kavod (mutual respect), and klal Yisraʾel, recognizing the unity of the Jewish people.

Informing Public Policy Debate By Teaching Halakhah:
Jewish Views of Abortion

How Jewish law and values guide our perspective on and participation in the political and social issues of our times and the larger communities in which we live has always been part of halakhic consideration. The obligation to obey the law of the land in which we live (dina demalkhuta dina, “the law of the sovereign government is the law”) has been a halakhic principle underlying individual and collective Jewish interactions with non-Jewish governments and their law for almost two millennia. This concept remains relevant to halakhic considerations and is reflected in several CJLS teshuvot addressing issues related to navigating tensions between secular law and halakhah.6

Being required to obey the law of the land does not mean we cannot have or express an opinion about it. In a secular, democratic society, Jewish legal and ethical imperatives ideally guide our views on contemporary issues and inspire our active involvement and advocacy. For millennia, rabbis have sought to educate their congregants and the broader community about Jewish values and halakhah relevant to contemporary concerns. Such teaching serves the best traditions of our prophets of old and our more recent inspirational models, among them Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America from 1945 until his death in 1972.

The 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing a federally protected right to abortion (Roe v. Wade) effectively allowed members of the Jewish community to follow our religious dictates.7 By the end of the 1980s, the CJLS had already examined many of the fundamental halakhic questions related to abortion and determined that it was permitted to protect the life and health, including the mental health, of the mother.8 Over the following decades, antichoice advocates around the nation sought to limit legal abortion access through intimidation, attacks on abortion providers (often Jewish doctors), and passing restrictive regulations on abortion clinics. They also sought to outlaw specific medically preferred procedures that complicated the Jewish community’s access to halakhically acceptable, and sometimes religiously required, health care.

The subject of abortion remained in the news, and my congregants and our larger Jewish community wanted to know where Judaism stood on these issues. Over decades, through sermons, my recurring Friday night series “The Jewish View” on Jewish beliefs and ethics, community lectures, addresses at our regional Women’s League gatherings, and opinion pieces written for local Jewish newspapers and those around the country, I shared what halakhah teaches about abortion as widely as possible in order to counter the misinformation being spread by those opposed to all forms of abortion.

I had written the 2003 CJLS teshuvah “‘Partial Birth Abortion’ and When Life Begins” in response to a 2001 teshuvah penned by Rabbi Avram Reisner, my friend and colleague, with whom I disagreed on the permissibility of one specific abortion procedure.9 Following the 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and thereby eliminate the federal right of women to have an abortion, the Conservative Movement website, Exploring Judaism, cited our two teshuvot in a short post as the most recent relevant CJLS abortion decisions.10 The juxtaposition of our two teshuvot implied to the casual reader that Masorti Judaism held different views on abortion, when Rabbi Reisner and I agreed on everything except when to justify the use of one procedure, which was already made illegal before Roe v. Wade was overturned.11 Rabbi Reisner, CJLS leadership, and the Exploring Judaism staff agreed with me that there was a timely need to communicate accurately and expeditiously our Movement’s consistent and unified halakhic position on abortion. Rabbi Reisner and I expeditiously coauthored a teshuvah summarizing the most salient points of our Movement’s unified halakhic stance on abortion, which was quickly and unanimously approved by the CJLS.12 Based on that teshuvah, we penned an article for Exploring Judaism, making available an accessible summary of the Jewish beliefs and halakhah underpinning our Movement’s views on abortion, including a list of the classic CJLS decisions on the relevant issues.13

I have continued to teach our halakhic approach to Jewish views of abortion during lectures and Shabbat talks in my synagogue and community, often sharing the exploringjudaism.org link to the article Rabbi Reisner and I wrote. Individuals express their appreciation for the opportunity to explore the issues in more depth than a brief Sabbath talk allows, as well as for the convenience of being able to revisit our online material as needed. The feedback emphasized to me the importance of building our Movement’s public digital footprint, especially regarding the teaching of our unique halakhic perspectives on contemporary issues of public concern affecting the Jewish community.

Spreading Our Teaching of Halakhah

Our greatest challenge recently, as a Movement, has been to effectively communicate the meaningful and groundbreaking work we do and all that we offer spiritually, intellectually, and halakhically to Jewish life, learning, and conversation. The advent of search engines and artificial intelligence (AI) has made it even more challenging for us to have our message heard. The website exploringjudaism.org is an impressive United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism/Rabbinical Assembly collaborative effort, marking the first step in bringing Conservative/Masorti Judaism to the digitally fluent masses. The site features attractively laid out articles and a section highlighting some CJLS teshuvot. Unfortunately, the site is not well publicized, even by our Movement organizations and congregations. Simple fixes could involve encouraging congregations and Movement organizations to add exploringjudaism.org to their websites and include it in their electronically distributed newsletters and weekly event schedules.

Even more remains to be done to strengthen our digital footprint. To give just one example, a Google search for “Jewish views of abortion” brought up, in order of presentation, sources from My Jewish Learning, National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), Brandeis, and Wikipedia. The only Conservative Movement source on the first page of the search was a link to a PDF of David Feldman’s 1983 CJLS teshuvah on abortion. No mention appears of any of our more recent teshuvot or the article Rabbi Reisner and I authored for Exploring Judaism, “What Does Judaism Say about Abortion?,” based on our most recent CJLS teshuvah.

For all our advances in transferring CJLS teshuvot onto the Internet, which was no mean feat, we need to up our digital game. Even the significant step forward of a searchable CJLS teshuvot database is inconsistent in its responsiveness. My test search of various spellings of the rabbinic dictum, dina demalkhuta dina (“the law of the land is the law”) yielded zero hits until I searched only for dina. Initially, eight links appeared, including two teshuvot that utilized the term I sought. My second attempt was worse, offering hundreds of links, too many to find what I sought quickly and easily. A different search of the word “homosexuality” failed to include the landmark 2006 teshuvah permitting same sex relations by Rabbis Dorff, Nevins, and Reisner, discussed above.14

Creating an accessible resource bank is another way to spread our unique Masorti approach to halakhah, albeit on a more local level. The process of writing a CJLS teshuvah is time-consuming, especially when dealing with a complex subject that has a long history of halakhic discussion. CJLS members often devote significant amounts of their limited free time to researching and writing compelling, comprehensive, and cogent teshuvot. It has long been a CJLS desideratum that authors would create resource sheets of their sources for teaching purposes. We have gotten better at meeting that goal. But I have been as guilty as others in not creating such sheets. I did not have time to cut, paste, and reformat the multilanguage sources I cited, particularly before the advent of Sefaria (sefaria.org). Congregational rabbis are also incredibly busy and often find it challenging to find the time to research and create attractive, succinct congregational study materials for all the halakhic topics they might wish to explore with their congregants.

I am always impressed with Sefaria. Its search engine adroitly finds whatever I am looking for: primary biblical and rabbinic texts, ancient and modern commentaries, and teaching resources. I am sure there are many Conservative/Masorti rabbis like me who have relied on its materials. Over the years, many of us have also developed teaching materials and source sheets on various halakhic topics for congregational programs. We could begin to address the lacuna of Conservative/Masorti halakhic study materials by encouraging colleagues to contribute their study sheets for posting with proper credit and providing the technical support to load and maintain them on Exploring Judaism and/or the RA’s CJLS site, linked and cross-referenced to relevant teshuvot and easily searchable through a refined and updated CJLS teshuvah database search engine.

Marketing experts recognize that an organization’s digital footprint and Internet search placement are crucial to its growth. It is undoubtedly essential to effectively communicate our unique message to those who are potentially open to and attracted by our halakhic approach. Such work helps build our movement, spreads our unique message, and strengthens our future. Limited financial resources need not be an obstacle. A national or international effort to assemble a top-level team of tech-savvy lay volunteers can leverage the connections of thousands of Conservative/Masorti rabbis and lay leaders to identify individuals who are excited about the potential opportunities of such an effort and are willing to volunteer their time and expertise. Challenges abound in getting our message out, but as Jews, we have a long history of finding creative ways to respond to almost any challenge.

Leaning Into Studying Halakhah as a Congregational Life Choice

I was honored and blessed to serve on the CJLS for so many decades and be embraced by two congregations whose members believed that the work I did there was important enough to lean in to share that halakhic journey with me. A rabbi need not serve on the CJLS in order to inspire their congregation in halakhic study, or to respond to appeals from congregational leaders willing to embark on that journey of Jewish exploration and growth. There are many ways in which rabbis and lay leaders can partner to encourage a congregational culture of asking questions and offering opportunities to develop a personal stake in halakhic study as a guide for navigating both congregational and personal life challenges. Complicated moral questions, hot topics of communal concern, and current events all offer opportunities to teach and learn halakhah. Prioritizing the questions, interests, and concerns of congregants encourages congregational investment in the effort required for halakhic study, even if that effort is limited to attending a class or lecture. Creating opportunities to elicit questions can nurture a congregational culture in which asking questions becomes second nature, feeding a desire to discover our movement’s timely answers to those questions and others. Finally, engaging in the teaching and communal learning of halakhah from a Conservative/Masorti perspective can foster a depth of reflection and consideration that helps us all become better individuals, better Jews, and a better people, contributing to the building of a kinder, better world.

Rabbi Susan Grossman served on the Committee of Jewish Law and Standards from 1992 to 2022. She was a member of the first class of women to enter the rabbinical school of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, from which she also earned her Doctorate in Hebrew Literature in Ancient Judaism. She is an editor of the Etz Hayim Torah and Commentary and Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue.

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1. ¹ On piquaḥ nefesh, see, e.g., the COVID-era teshuvah on the controversial issues relating to public safety by Elliot N. Dorff and Susan Grossman, “Wearing Face Covering, Physical Distancing, and Other Measures to Control the COVID-19 Pandemic,” HM 427:8.2121B, Rabbinical Assembly, CJLS, February 1, 2021. On betselem Elohim, see the landmark teshuvah by Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel S. Nevins, and Avram I. Reisner, “Homosexuality, Human Dignity, and Halakhah: A Combined Responsum for the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards. Rabbinical Assembly, CJLS, EH 24.2006b.

2. ² For the approval, see Amy Levin and Avram Reisner, “A Teshuvah Permitting Ashkenazim to Eat Kitniyot on Pesah,” CJLS OH 453:1.2015b.

3. ³ Dorff, Nevins, and Reisner, “Homosexuality, Human Dignity, and Halakhah,” op. cit. n. 1.

4. ⁴ For an interesting exploration of the tension between majority rule and individual conscience in the story, see Mark D. Friedman, “The Tragedy of Rabbi Eliezer,” in Come Now, Let Us Reason Together: Uncovering the Torah’s Liberal Values (Wipf and Stock, 2024):147–61.

5. ⁵ David J. Fine, “Women and the Minyan,” CJLS OH 55:1.2002. In 2019, CJLS passed the teshuvah by Jane Karanek, “Women and Head Covering,” CJLS OH 91:3.2019.

6. ⁶ Talmudic references to dina demalkhuta dina include b. Nedarim 28a (about taxes), b. Gittin 10b (about validating secular court documents for gift transfers), b. Bava Qamma 113b (about government confiscation of privately owned resources like trees for wood used in public works), and b. Bava Batra 54b–55a (establishing land ownership recognizing government regulations, including for confiscation of land). Various CJLS teshuvot discuss dina demalkhuta dina; see, e.g., Susan Grossman and Avram Reisner, “Understanding Jewish Views of Abortion: An Overview,” CJLS HM 425:2.2023 and Jeremy Kalmanofsky, “Participating in the American Death Penalty,” CJLS HM 2.1.2013.

7. ⁷ Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S.113 (1973).

8. ⁸ For the most recent summary of the Conservative Movement’s positions on abortion, see Susan Grossman and Avram Reisner, “Understanding Jewish Views.” op. cit. n. 6. It includes a comprehensive list of Movement teshuvot, official statements, and resolutions up to the passage of their teshuvah. For an accessible list and links to the classic 1980s CJLS teshuvot on abortion, see Susan Grossman and Avram Reisner, “What Does Judaism Say About Abortion,” Exploring Judaism, https://www.exploringjudaism.org/living/health/what-does-judaism-say-about-abortion/.

9. ⁹ Susan Grossman, “‘Partial Birth Abortion’ and When Human Life Begins,” CJLS HM425:2:2003b. See also Avram Reisner, “Ein Dohin Nefesh Mipnei Nefesh,” CJLS HM425:2:2001a.

10. ¹⁰ Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization 597 U.S. 215 (2022).

11. ¹¹ Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 Public Law No: 108-105 (November 5, 2003) affirmed by the Supreme Court in Gonzales v Carhart 550 U.S. 124 (2007).

12. ¹² See note 8.

13. ¹³ See note 8.

14. ¹⁴ See note 1.