We’re Missing the Point: What’s Wrong with the Orthodox Jewish Community and How to Fix It by Rabbi Dr. Gidon Rothstein, OU Press, New York, ISBN 978-01-6028–202-5 ©2012, $25.00, p. 252
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California — Outsiders might wonder what could possibly be wrong within the Orthodox Jewish community. Until the Age of Enlightenment, about two hundred years ago, all of Judaism, by and large, could be considered Orthodox Judaism. Today, the designation Orthodox Judaism encompasses a range from Haredi Judaism on the right to Modern Orthodoxy on the left. While these religious philosophies differ, they are bound by the same religious belief and the same traditional and historical texts.
Rabbi Gidon Rothstein, an Orthodox Jew and author of We’re Missing the Point sees things differently. He notes that “I repeatedly meet Jews—Orthodox Jews—who wonder whether God really exists, whether the Torah is really divine, and how we can know.” To put Orthodox Jews on the right track, Rothstein seeks to find those kernels of unarguable, fundamental, and eternals truth that serve as a minimum belief structure for Orthodox Judaism.
He presents his book in two parts. In the first, he looks at halachic (legal) texts, the Torah and its mitzvot, and post-biblical rabbinic literature, such as the Talmud. Rothstein concludes that among the most basic Jewish beliefs is acknowledging the centrality of the Exodus story, accepting divine revelation and the divine origin of the Torah, reciting the Shema prayer, and welcoming the burden of writing a Torah. From these emerge the ideas of divine providence, reward and punishment, the Messianic era, and the World to Come. Rothstein also includes recognizing the overall message of the portions of the prophets chanted during the Sabbath and festival services, which is justice, charity, and privacy (as opposed to publicity and attention seeking.)
In the second part, he seeks to prove through traditional sources that God never wanted religious activity to be fully defined by the commandments, and offers the relatively new and still uncommon assertion that Judaism is like an adaptive complex system, which is able to acclimatize to changes in its “environment,” allowing its component parts to survive and thrive.
Rothstein chronologically orders part two, showing how God originally expected all people to figure out how best to serve Him through the so-called Noahide commandments. Only after seeing numerous violations of these laws, including those descended from Abraham, does God deliver to the world the Torah’s mitzvot, whose understanding according to Rothstein requires the use of intuition, making Judaism a religiously autonomous religion.
In part two, Rothstein diverges from his objective path and we see how he really feels about a number of important religious issues, including the role of prayer, Sabbath observance, and self-determination in the observance of holidays, and charity. He also, focuses in on the idea of religious autonomy as the key to understanding the lack of obligation of women to follow time-bound commandments. However, many might find his arguments less than satisfying, particularly since the Jewish Orthodoxy has begun to ordain women as Jewish clergy.
Rothstein makes a clear and compelling intellectual case for his section of Judaism’s unarguable kernel, but belief is emotional not academic. The autonomy that Rothstein proposes is really a fairly-narrow path bounded by the Torah and Talmud on one side and selected Jewish commentators on the other, which will certainly be summarily rejected by Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Judaism. Whether or not this road is a path that Orthodox Judaism’s various sects will follow remains to be seen.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.