Welcome to our new blog! Our goal at the Freehof Institute for Progressive Halakhah is to consider issues of halakhah from a liberal perspective and to explore how halakhah and halakhic thinking might contribute to the enrichment of liberal Jewish observance. If you share our commitment to the enduring connection between the halakhic tradition and liberal/progressive/Reform Judaism, please consider this an invitation to join in the discussion. (For more, see here).

Some, no doubt, will ask how we can we speak of such an “enduring connection.” We who occupy the left end of the Jewish religious spectrum have long had an ambivalent (and that’s putting it mildly) relationship with traditional halakhah. The progressive Jewish movements took shape by rejecting large parts of a Jewish legal tradition that seemed to run counter to the spirit of modernity. From our pulpits, in our classrooms, and around our discussion tables one generally hears the language of religious creativity and personal autonomy rather than that of legal obligation. Some of us today go so far as to describe our religion as a “non-halakhic” or “post-halakhic” Judaism. So what could be the point of the Freehof Institute? And why in the world is it starting its own blog?

For answers to these questions, we might look to the words of our teacher, Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof. Some five decades ago, he reminded us that the study of the Talmud and the halakhic literature has been the central preoccupation of the Jewish mind, “the essence and the climax of Jewish culture” for nearly two millennia. By leaving this study to other Jews, he argued, we Reform Jews “have abandoned a great intellectual vitality” (Reform Judaism and the Law, Louis Caplan Lectureship on Jewish Law, HUC-JIR, Cincinnati, 1967). Moreover, he cautioned, the very effort by Reform Jews to escape the halakhah by portraying Reform as a prophetic, “back-to-the-Bible” and therefore non-halakhic movement, was an exercise in futility:

(T)he self-description of Reform as being solely Biblical was simply not true. All of Reform Jewish life in all its observances was actually post-Biblical in origin… The whole of Jewish liturgy is an achievement of post-Biblical times. The religious calendar, based indeed on Scripture, was elaborated and defined in post-Biblical times. Marriage ceremonies and burial rites were all post-Biblical. The Bible, of course, was the source of ethical ideas, but the actual religious life was rabbinic. Early Reform may have rejected contemporary rabbinic authority, but it could not avoid the historic rabbinic constructs that lived in the pageantry of the Jewish mode of life. (Reform Responsa, pp. 15-16)

To restate Freehof’s point: you can describe Reform or Progressive Judaism in many ways, but “non-halakhic” is not one of them. The roots of all Jewish observance, including our own, lie deep within halakhic soil. The tradition through which Jews have constructed that observance – a two-thousand year old discourse of argument over the meaning of our sacred texts – is thoroughly Talmudic and halakhic. To practice Jewishly, in other words, means to think halakhicly. To skip over that discourse, to speak of our Judaism as somehow disconnected from that tradition, is to sever ourselves from the religious and intellectual history of our people and to ignore the nature of Progressive Judaism as a rabbinic – which is to say halakhic – product. There is much within the Orthodox understanding of halakhah with which we disagree. We may have our own ideas about what halakhah says to us and how it might or might not shape our Jewish lives. But to say that it is irrelevant to our Judaism or that we have somehow graduated to a post-halakhic Jewish age is to distort the tradition that we profess to teach and to live.

It would be better, Rabbi Freehof concluded in his Caplan Lecture, “to reestablish our bond” with halakhah, “this true home of our inherited tradition.” He urged that we learn to see the halakhic world through progressive eyes, to interpret the Talmud and the halakhic literature through the prism of our own ethical sensibilities. He called upon us to create a language of meaning that fuses our commitment to tradition and to modernity, a creative conversation between halakhah and the values of freedom, equality, and creativity that lie at the center of our Progressive Judaism. We at the Freehof Institute, which proudly bears our teacher’s name, seek to contribute toward that goal. That’s what this blog is all about.

We hope you’ll join our work.

— Mark Washofsky