Cultures in Collision and Conversation

Front matter

CULTURES

IN COLLISION AND CONVERSATION

Essays in the Intellectual History of the Jews p ed

Contents

Introductión arueraa oP e ea a A a a ARA ix

Identity, Ideology, and Faith: Some Personal Reflections on the Social,

How Did Nahmanides Propose to Resolve

Introduction

The cultures that collide and converse in this book range temporally from antiquity to the present and geographically from Israel to Europe to the United States. As Jews embarked on a physical trajectory that they defined as exile, they simultaneously set forth on a rich and complex intellectual voyage that required them to confront the worldviews of their neighbors along with internal differences of doctrine and philosophical orientation that were themselves often born—at least in part—out of engagement with the external environment. Thus, the culture of a small and sometimes insular people took on an almost global character.

The first section of this volume addresses Jewish approaches to the proper parameters of interaction with the values, beliefs, and intellectual life of the larger society. The longest of the essays is an almost book-length endeavor to provide an analytical overview of the range of positions on this question in all the centers of Jewish life from the dawn of the Middle Ages to the eve of the Enlightenment. In its most intense form, the struggle over this issue erupted in a fierce controversy centered on the works of Maimonides. Despite the passions engendered by these debates, the orientations of the major protagonists were often far from one-dimensional, and two of the essays in this section attempt to capture the nuanced position of Nahmanides, one of the central figures of the Jewish Middle Ages, and to assess the impact of the philosophical milieu on one of his seminal doctrines. If the stance of an individual thinker can defy easy classification, characterizing entire subcommunities is all the more challenging. In the larger study, I set forth the evolving scholarly position that no longer sees medieval Ashkenazic Jewry as isolated from

Cultures in Collision and Conversation its environment, but the essay on Ashkenazic modes of thought cautions against allowing the pendulum to swing too far.

With the rise of the Jewish Enlightenment or haskalah, resistance to significant acculturation came to be restricted to the segment of Jewry labeled “Orthodox”—perhaps even to the smaller subdivision assigned the particularly problematic label “ultra-Orthodox.” With some hesitation, I have incorporated a youthful essay published in a student journal assessing the complex position on haskalah and secular learning of a rabbi and biblical commentator of considerable influence who clearly belongs in the company of uncompromising traditionalists but was nonetheless sufficiently cognizant of contemporary intellectual currents that some adherents of the Enlightenment saw him as a model whom the traditionalist community should strive to emulate. While the classical Maimonidean controversy has long faded into the distant past, Maimonides himself remains acutely relevant to any discussion of Judaism’s embrace of “external” culture; in an essay based on an address to a non-academic audience, I attempt to limn and assess the multiple images of his persona proffered by contemporary Jews often seeking themselves in the great medieval legist and philosopher.

Academic Jewish Studies are a quintessentially modern development with an ambivalent relationship to movements of acculturation in the medieval and modern past. If I am not entirely comfortable in describing this field in its fullness as my ideological home, it is surely my professional home. The first section of the book begins and ends with ideologically charged essays with deeply personal elements addressing the challenges and significance of an enterprise that thoughtful Jews ignore at their intellectual and even spiritual peril.

The second, briefest section deals with the interpretation of the Bible, but it decidedly reflects the theme of cultural interaction. The understanding of the wisdom of Solomon among medieval commentators varied in intriguing ways that mirror the philosophical—or nonphilosophical— orientation of the exegetes in question, and in the case of Isaac Abravanel may even reveal traces of his experience in the royal courts of Portugal and Spain. As to the charged question of the morality of biblical heroes, I argue that Jewish perceptions were profoundly affected by the nature of external challenges in both medieval and modern times.

And then there is the End of Days. While the beliefs and movements

Introduction analyzed in this section are almost bewildering in their thematic and chronological variety, they all reflect the impact or at least relevance of ideas and forces in the larger society: Rome as the paradigmatic enemy of Israel in late antiquity; the effect of medieval rationalism on portraits of the messianic scenario; the plausibility or implausibility of ascribing differences in messianic activism to rationalism and non-rationalism; the degree to which the modern redemptive movement called Zionism could color academic analysis of the distant past; and the factors—both sociological and religious—that have enabled a contemporary messianic movement espousing doctrines once excluded from authentic Judaism to achieve legitimation in the bosom of the Orthodox community.

The introduction to a collection of this sort would normally incorporate ruminations about the personal factors that triggered the author’s interest in the field as well as the evolution of his or her work over a period of decades. In this case, however, I am excused from this task because I have already fulfilled it. A companion volume published by Academic Studies Press last year (Persecution, Polemic, and Dialogue: Essays in Jewish-Christian Relations) begins with an introduction that— at least in part— engages precisely these questions. More important, the opening chapter of this book provides considerable detail about the unfolding of my scholarly work and its connection to my deepest commitments. Finally, the epilogue about my father reveals the wellsprings of my eventual career in a way that a routine introduction could never convey. At this point, I will only add that the atmosphere and ideology that suffuse Yeshiva University, where I was educated and currently teach, place many of the issues addressed in this book at the center of their universe of discourse, and I cannot fail to underscore the effect of this unique institution on my approach to scholarship, to religion, and to life.

This volume, like the earlier one, is not an exhaustive collection of what I have written about its theme. First of all, several articles in the volume on Jewish-Christian relations qualify as discussions of the intellectual history of the Jews, and they are naturally not included here. Many short pieces are not of a sufficiently scholarly nature even though they touch upon relevant themes.! A case could have been made

1 “Missing Milton Himmelfarb,” Commentary 123:4 (April, 2007): 54-58; “Introducing Michael Wyschogrod,” Modern Theology 22 (2006): 673-675; “On Marriageability, Jewish

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Cultures in Collision and Conversation for the inclusion of three review essays and several fairly substantive reviews, but I decided to leave out material that does not stand on its own.? One full-fledged article whose genesis is described in the opening chapter does not appear here despite its decidedly scholarly content and direct relevance to the issues addressed in the first section of the book because it is predominantly religious rather than academic in character and motivation.

For the same reason, I hesitated before deciding to include the article about Lubavitch messianism. During the last fifteen years, I have devoted much time and energy with what can generously be described as mixed results to a religiously motivated effort to deny religious authority within Orthodoxy to believers in the Messiahship of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Religious polemic of this sort does not belong in this volume. However, the article that I incorporated proffers a relatively irenic, primarily sociological analysis of the reasons for a phenomenon that at first glance appears difficult to understand. Including it in this volume provides the reader with a window into an important dimension

Identity, and the Unity of American Jewry,” in Conflict or Cooperation? Papers on Jewish Unity (New York, 1989), pp. 69-77; “Response” in J. Gutmann et al., What Can Jewish History Learn From Jewish Art? (New York, 1989), pp. 29-38 (a scholarly piece, but one that cannot really stand without the article to which it responds).

The following symposia: “What Do American Jews Believe?” Commentary (August, 1996): 19-21; “Reflections on the State of Religious Zionism,” Jewish Action 60:1 (Fall, 1999), pp. 12-15; “Reflections on the Six-Day War After a Quarter-Century,” Tradition 26:4 (1992): 7-10; “Divided and Distinguished Worlds,” Tradition 26:2 (1992): 6-10 (criticism and response, Tradition 27:2 [1993]: 91-94); “The State of Orthodoxy,” Tradition 20:1 (1982): 9-12.

2 ‘The full review essays are “The Study of the Early Ashkenazic Rabbinate” (in Hebrew) [a review of Avraham Grossman, Hakhmei Ashkenaz ha-Rishonim], Tarbiz 53 (1984): 479-487; “Modern Orthodoxy in the United States: A Review Essay” [of Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen, Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America], Modern Judaism 11 (1991): 261-272; “Must a Jew Believe Anything? [by Menachem Kellner]: A Review Essay,” Tradition 33:4 (1999): 81-89. (I note for the record that Kellner’s response to my review in the afterword to the second edition of his book leaves me thoroughly unpersuaded.) I did publish one review essay in the earlier volume, but that was because it contains an argument for the general reliability of Nahmanides’ version of the Barcelona disputation that should in my view have a significant, even decisive, impact on this longdebated scholarly crux. I am of course not holding my breath in the expectation that this will actually happen.

3 “On Freedom of Inquiry in the Rambam—and Today” (with Lawrence Kaplan), The Torah U-Madda Journal 2 (1990): 37-50. I would have of course needed Prof. Kaplan’s permission to reprint the article in this volume, but I believe that he would have allowed me to do so.

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Introduction of my recent work without, I hope, undue violation of the bounds of appropriate scholarly detachment.

I have thus far been careful not to repeat material that appeared in the introduction to the earlier volume, but there is no point in avoiding repetition when I need to express sentiments that I have already formulated to the best of my ability. Here then are the final paragraphs of that introduction with the joyful addition of a single word announcing Shira’s arrival into the world and the family:

I am grateful to Simcha Fishbane for inviting me to publish this collection of essays and to Meira Mintz, whose preparation of the index served as a salutary reminder of the thoughtfulness and creativity demanded by a task that casual observers often misperceive as routine and mechanical. Menachem Butler was good enough to produce pdf files of the original articles that served as the basis for the production of the volume. I can only hope that the final product is not entirely unworthy of their efforts as well as those of the efficient, helpful leadership and staff of Academic Studies Press among whom I must single out Kira Nemirovsky for her diligent and meticulous care in overseeing the production of the final version.

I am also grateful to the original publishers of these essays for granting permission to reprint them in this volume.

Finally, when publishing a book that represents work done over the course of a lifetime, an author’s expression of gratitude to wife and family embraces far more than the period needed to write a single volume. Without Pearl, whose human qualities and intellectual and practical talents beggar description, whatever I might have achieved would have been set in a life largely bereft of meaning. And then there are Miriam and Elie—and Shai, Aryeh and Sarah; Yitzhak and Ditza—and Racheli, Sara, Tehilla, Baruch Meir, Breindy, Tova, and Batsheva; Gedalyah and Miriam—and Shoshana, Racheli, Sheindl, Baruch Meir, and Shira. Each of these names evokes emotions for which I am immeasurably grateful and which I cannot even begin to express.

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THE CULTURAL

ENVIRONMENT:

CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE

Some Personal Reflections on the Social, Cultural and Spiritual Value of the Academic Study of

Judaism

From: Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, ed. by Howard Kreisel (Beer Sheva, 2006), pp. 11-29. Delivered as the English keynote address at a conference at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva. (The Hebrew keynote was presented by Eliezer Schweid.) The topic and essential title (“Personal Reflections on the Social, Cultural and Spiritual Value of the Academic Study of Judaism”) were chosen by the organizers of the conference.

Academic Jewish Studies are a pivotal anchor of Jewish identity. It hardly needs to be said that most identifying Jews are not practitioners of Jewish studies, while many, if not most, are not active consumers either. But even in a democratic age, the sort of identity that we mean when we speak of Jewishness is molded in large measure by the minority who seriously engage the traditions and texts of an ancient and challenging culture.

It is commonly stated that Judaism is an unusual and perhaps unique amalgam of peoplehood and religion and, as I once wrote in a different context, one advantage of commonplaces is that they are usually true. While secular Jews might want to replace the religious component with culture or civilization, it remains clear, or it should, that reading novels with Jewish themes, playing klezmer music, and even living in the land of Israel and speaking Hebrew do not in themselves confer a sense of Jewishness that provides sufficient continuity with the historic Jewish people. Moreover, the national component of Jewish identity is rooted not only in the reality and centrality of a millennial tradition focused on religion, but also in the very fact that Jews lived without a land for so many generations and had no choice but to define themselves through extraordinarily powerful cultural-religious norms. To shed those norms entirely or to understand them as altogether secondary is to denude Jewishness of the meaning that it has accumulated over all those generations. It follows, then, that even the most basic affirmation of Jewish identity requires some interaction with the historic culture of the Jewish people in its classical forms, though these forms might be transmuted to accord with the sensibilities of contemporary secular Jews.

That the connectedness to the Jewish cultural past has been severely attenuated or lost among massive sectors of Diaspora Jewry hardly needs to be said, but it is only slightly more necessary to note that the same is largely true of the Jews of Israel. After an unbalanced religious soldier sprayed gunfire in a church in Jaffa, he was asked why he had done this. According to the Jerusalem Post, he “said it was a shame that he had to explain in court his motive for the shooting, which, he said, was self explanatory and written in the Torah. His motive, he said, was to destroy all idols, and anything which represented ‘foreign labor’ and did not relate to Judaism.”! Thus, avodah zarah, literally “foreign worship,” one of the foundational conceptions in Judaism, evoked no resonance whatever for an Israeli journalist, who thoroughly misunderstood the soldier’s intent. Moving to somewhat more esoteric knowledge, a Hebrew reference to the classic work of R. Saadya Gaon made use of the standard abbreviation for the author’s name, so that the citation read “Rasag, Emunot ve-De‘ot.” A scholar who studies medieval Jewish philosophy informs me that an Israeli translator understood the abbreviation as a number and rendered the reference into English as “263 Beliefs and Opinions.”

These anecdotes can be multiplied and, in the face of the depressing reality that they illustrate, questions of more than a straightforward educational sort arise. We must, of course, ask about what pedagogical reforms are needed to convey knowledge of Jewish culture and history, a question that lies outside the parameters of my assignment and of my competence. But we must also ask how the content of that history and that culture is to be preserved, recovered, and understood. The elementary reply is that one consults with experts and, in the modern world, expertise generally rests with people who have been trained, and

1 “Soldier who shot up church sent for psychiatric evaluation. Suspect says he was destroying idols,” Jerusalem Post, May 25, 1995, p. 12.

who often remain, in an academic environment. Thus, academic experts in Jewish studies should, it would appear, serve as the highest authorities in determining the parameters of Jewish identity, the content of Jewish culture, perhaps even the policies of the Jewish State.

This last sentence followed ineluctably, or so it seemed, from a chain of premises and reasoning so simple that affirming them appeared superfluous to the point of embarrassment. Yet the real embarrassment is the sentence itself, which cannot but elicit smiles, or worse, at the self-importance of what the late Governor George Wallace of Alabama described as pointy-headed intellectuals. Popular attitudes toward the role of academics, whose disciplines cannot easily be separated from their persons, are in fact marked by deep ambivalence. People consult experts, but they embrace those whose views accord with their own, and often, sometimes with good reason, direct withering contempt toward those whose positions they reject.

We would do well, then, to approach the question before us with due humility. Academics often disagree regarding the most fundamental realities at the heart of their scholarly discourse. The questions of objective meaning, of the interaction between the observer and the evidence, of the elusiveness of truth, have become so pervasive that many important scholars have essentially thrown in the towel, despairing of achieving certain knowledge and embracing a multivalent reality dependant upon the perspective of the observer. In extreme form, ideology determines reactions to the point where respected figures inform us that in light of the distortions in all autobiographies, Rigoberta Menchu’s wholesale fabrications and Edward Said’s repeated misrepresentations of his childhood are of no moment, that they are examples of the seamless web entangling subjective and external reality.

This approach aside, even unchallenged scholarly conclusions can be applied in very different ways in the arena of public policy, culture, or the life of the spirit. There are lessons to be learned from history, but they are filtered through values that are themselves rarely generated by academic investigation. Thus, the Holocaust has been seen as evidence that Jews must distrust, even despise, Gentiles, relying only on their own strength and resolve, and at the same time as evidence that Jews must treat others all the more sensitively in light of the unspeakable suffering caused by mindless bigotry. These differing conclusions are based on the examination of an unassailable historical reality recognized by both parties; it is other values that determine how that reality will be used.

Moreover, the broad range of the term “study of Judaism” complicates our discussion further, including as it does every discipline in the humanities and social sciences, every chronological period, every methodological approach. The social, cultural, and spiritual value of investigating the evolution of halakhah is not the same as that of studying the development of the Yiddish theater, though the latter is certainly understood by many Jews as a manifestation of Judaism; midrashic approaches to women and the nature of Israeli treatment of Arabs in 1948 both raise moral questions, but they can hardly be addressed within the same framework.

This consideration, too, does not exhaust the complexities of our inquiry, since the value of the academic study of Judaism demands assessment in contrast to alternatives that differ from one another profoundly. One is the abandonment of Jewish study, an option whose consequences we have already encountered. Another is the pursuit of such study in a traditional mode. Thus, animated debates swirl in the Modern Orthodox, or dati-leumi, community about studying Talmud with a critical approach that points to layers of composition and development. A distinguished rabbi who advocates a traditional approach once reported a remark regarding this matter in the name of Jacob Katz. The Talmud asserts that for every forbidden food, God has provided a kosher alternative with a similar taste (“Kol mai de-asar lan rahamana shara lan ke-vateh”). Katz, after emerging from a lecture by an Orthodox scholar that was suffused with the critical approach to Talmudic study, remarked, “Kol mai de-asar lan rahamana shara lan ke-vateh. Asar lan biqqoret ha-Miqra: shara lan biqqoret ha-Talmud.” (“Whatever God has forbidden to us, he has permitted to us something similar to it. He has forbidden to us biblical criticism; he has permitted to us talmudic criticism.”)

A final alternative is attachment to Judaism and its past neither through a critical study of the tradition nor through an intense examination of its texts in the manner of the yeshivot, but through instinct and memory. This last word looms especially large in contemporary discourse as the alternative to history; it is understood roughly as the construction of a past filtered through the accumulated experience of a people, its rituals, its beliefs, and its psychic needs, with little or no attention to the findings of critical historians.

In his seminal Zakhor, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi concluded with a pessimistic peroration about the near irrelevance of academic history to Jewish life even in a modern age in which tradition has lost much of its force.2 But Yerushalmi’s lament, for all its rhetorical power and large element of truth, underestimates the degree to which historical study in an academic mode, working in tense but symbiotic concert with mythopoeic memory, has influenced and even transformed the ideology of Jews in the course of the last century. Jewish nationalism rested on nostalgic memories, transmuted messianic longings, and driving social realities, but it drew upon historical scholarship to a degree that should not be dismissed. I have never forgotten a striking formulation that I heard long ago from Arnold Band, whose field is not Jewish history but Hebrew literature. The Hebrew translation of Graetz’s History, he said, was the most influential novel in the annals of the Zionist movement. One can, of course, argue that this is the case precisely because that monumental study is suffused by ideology, but for all its manifold and evident biases, it is surely a work of critical scholarship. If Graetz’s blatant ideological Tendenz excludes him from the ranks of genuine, even great, historians, no less is true of Gibbon.

As the Zionist movement unfolded, it defined itself through a selective, creative reading of history. Some of this was no doubt dubious, but precisely because Zionism saw itself as a secular movement, and most of its leaders were in fact skeptical of beliefs held on faith, it relied on academic historians to validate its claims. David Myers, himself a student of Yerushalmi, has written much about the interaction between Zionism and historiography,’ and a coterie of scholars have examined the interplay between academic history and nationalist myth in the Zionist understanding of the Maccabees, Massada, Bar Kokhba, and Tel Hai.4 The nationalist moment is most blatant in the works of Joseph Klausner, so blatant that some uncharitable observers would deny him the status of academic historian at all.5 However that may be, the

2 Y. H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982), pp. 94-103.

3 D.N. Myers, Reinventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York and Oxford, 1995).

4 See, for example, Y. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago and London, 1994).

5 See my “Maccabees, Zealots, and Josephus: The Impact of Zionism on Joseph Klausner’s History of the Second Temple,” in the Louis H. Feldman Jubilee Volume. [Reprinted in this volume. ]

role of the academic enterprise in the evolution of Zionist ideology is beyond question.

In recent years, the historians’ debate about the behavior of Israelis in 1948 provides a contemporary window into the interplay between the pursuit of academic history and the ideological needs of a nation, or of its critics. As in the case of cold-war revisionism in the United States and the German controversy about the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its relationship to the Gulag, one does not have to be a professional historian to grasp the critical importance of the academy to the deepest interests and most fundamental self-image of a society. While one might argue that debates about the historical behavior of Jews are not the study of Judaism, the line in instances like this is indistinct to the point of irrelevance.

The relationship between academic study and the establishment of a Jewish state is not a one-way street. If the former affects perceptions of the latter, the latter can affect the practice of the former. The establishment of the state has allegedly provided some Israeli historians with a sense of freedom to examine what they see as problematic Jewish behavior with less concern for consequences than that of Diaspora scholars. Thus, we periodically hear that unapologetic history, such as Yisrael Yuval’s famous and controversial article arguing for a connection between the killing of crusade-era Jewish children by their parents and the birth of the ritual murder accusation, could only have been written in the Jewish State.6 Whether this is true remains uncertain, and whether the era of possible consequences has ended is regrettably even less certain, but the perception itself testifies to the complexity and significance of the interaction, in a new sense, between town and gown.

The value of the academic study of Judaism is not limited to the national dimension. Since I was asked to provide personal reflections, let me turn now to another arena reflecting my deepest personal commitments and concerns: the intersection between the academic study of Judaism and the living religion itself. I did not go to graduate school in Jewish history because of an interest in history per se. I studied the economic history of the Jews ke-illu kefa’anni shed — as if the metaphorical demon was compelling me. The diplomatic moves of court Jews, the battles of Judah Maccabee, the vagaries of Jewish legal standing in the innumerable principalities of the Holy Roman Empire interested

6 See Y. Yuval, “Ha-Naqam ve-ha-Qelalah, ha-Dam ve-ha-‘Alilah,” Zion 58 (1992): 33-90.

me little if at all. Learning about them was an unfortunate price that needed to be paid to gain the necessary credential, although I have since learned to tolerate such study and sometimes even to experience more or less fleeting moments of mild interest. What I wanted to understand was my religion — its texts, its thinkers, its responses to challenge from within and without, and the parameters of its openness and resistance to change, although fascination with the relationship between Judaism and Christianity awakened an abiding interest in the interaction between the bearers of those faiths that extended beyond the realm of religion alone and into the often bloody streets of medieval Europe.

My own trajectory and motivations are surely not unique or even unusual. It is no accident that the greatest interest in the study of Judaism within the Israeli academy comes from the religious sector. One might assume that secular Israelis would want to pursue the academic study of their people and its culture no less than the religious; outside the area of Hebrew literature and some of the social sciences, however, this does not appear to be the case.

What, then, is the impact of academic Jewish studies on Judaism today? In the non-Orthodox religious movements on the contemporary Jewish landscape, the academic study of Judaism carries more weight and authority than in any other setting. I vividly recall a remark by Gerson Cohen at a public event held in the Jewish Theological Seminary when he was its chancellor. Jewish historiography in an academic mode, he said, is Torah as we understand it. Similarly, in response to initiatives within the Reform movement that advocated a turn toward traditionalism in a number of controversial respects, Robert Seltzer and Lance Sussman vigorously affirmed that a critical analysis of historical development stands at the core of Reform Judaism.’ Here again, we need to correct

7 “Just as our predecessors reconsidered their Judaism as a result of political emancipation, Reform Judaism should continue to acknowledge the implications of historical scholarship and the comparative study of religion, which have transformed our understanding of the nature of religion as such. Doing so is not measuring Judaism by an external and alien standard; it is a matter of courageous truthfulness in facing up to the intellectual breakthroughs of the modern world that have occurred since the Enlightenment. Modern historical consciousness requires that one always consider the setting and context of every classical work and phase of Judaism from the emergence of ancient Israel to the present.” (R. M. Seltzer and L. J. Sussman, “What are the Basic Principles of Reform Judaism?” in: J. S. Lewis ed., Thinking Ahead: Toward the Next Generation of Judaism: Essays in Honor of Oskar Brecher (Binghamton, New York, 2001),

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s poignant assertion that history, as distinct from memory, has little resonance in Judaism even today. At least for the intellectual leadership of Conservative and Reform Judaism, history takes center stage.

The social, even spiritual impact of this orientation became especially striking when the Conservative movement needed to decide whether or not to ordain women. Here was a decision of monumental religious significance, one that would presumably limn the contours of the movement for generations to come. Conservative Judaism’s rabbinic arm has a Halakhah Committee presumably empowered to decide matters of Jewish law. Yet, despite a largely successful effort to inject an ad hoc, non-academic body at a preliminary stage, this issue was ultimately to be decided by a vote of the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a faculty chosen almost exclusively by academic criteria and containing individuals whose adherence to the Conservative movement was dubious at best. Thus, a far-reaching decision determining the trajectory and ideology of a religious movement was to be made by academics. Now, I do not deceive myself into thinking that Conservative Judaism would not now be ordaining women had the Seminary faculty voted against this step several decades ago. Larger forces would surely have reversed such a decision by now. Nonetheless, this process is illustrative of the authority that academic training can confer in a movement that places it near the center of its values.