The Israeli Election of 1996: Some Preliminary Analysis and First Thoughts
The Peace Process and the “Right of Return”
Jewish-Israeli Identity Among Israel’s Future Teachers
Halakhic Interpretation from a Constitutional Perspective
The breakdown of traditional Jewish society and belief has led to the need to find new common ground for halakhic interpretation if the Jewish people’s halakhic framework is to be in any respect preserved in any reasonable manner. One possible way in which that might be done is by applying the canons of constitutional interpretation developed for modern constitutions, allowing for the differences between the comprehensive character of the Torah as constitution and the more limited character of modern frames of government.
Positivist Rhetoric and Its Functions in Haredi Orthodoxy
Haredi, or so-called “ultra-Orthodox/ Jewry contends that it is the most strict and therefore the most authentic expression of Jewish Orthodoxy. Its authenticity is insured by the devotion and loyalty of its adherents to its leading sages or gedolim, “great ones.” In addition to the requirements of explicit Jewish law, and, on occasion, in spite of those requirements, the Haredi adherent obeys the Daas Torah, or Torah views of his or her gedolim. By viewing Daas Torah as a norm within the Jewish legal order, Haredi Judaism reformulates the Jewish legal order in order to delegitimize those halakhic voices which believe that Jewish law does not require a radical countercultural withdrawal from the condition of modernity. According to Haredi Judaism, the culture which Eastern European Jewry has created to safeguard the Torah must be guarded so that the Torah observance enshrined in that culture is not violated.
American Modernity and the Jews
What is the place of religion in the American polity? Which view of this matter is good for America, and which for the Jews? This essay first elaborates the now-dominant libertarian vision of religion in the American republic, a view prevalent among Jews and endorsed by the Jewish polity, by means of a discussion and critique of Leo Vfeffer’s God, Caesar and the Constitution: The Court as Referee of Church-State Confrontation. It is argued that the Constitution is improperly understood as a blueprint for a secular “open society/’ founded on the principle of radical individual autonomy, to be protected against both church and state by a supreme, rights-defending judiciary.
Halakhah – The Governing Norm
This article describes how halakhah functions as the normative component of Jewish life. It presents the modalities ? intellectual as well as social ? through which halakhah
operates as well as sketching its general approach to the different topics it regulates. The method is phenomenological, though changes in historical reality are integrated into the
presentation.
Religion and Modernity in Our Day
In this essay a comparison is proposed between the positions of Jewish Orthodoxy in modernistic Western society before and after World War II. It is assumed that the differences arise as a result of major changes in the cultural nature of modernity. The differences are defined, and it is then claimed that they have led to a radical change in the role of all the Jewish modern Orthodox movements. (As a specifically successful example of integration between Orthodoxy and modernity before the war, the changing role of the religious kibbutz movement is particularly examined.)
