The Politics Of Psak

Re the previous post - I excerpt a letter by my dear friend HaRav Ozer Glickman Shlita, Ra"m at Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan:

On the Politics of P’sak

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When Rabbi Katz published his invitation to the community to participate in Torah study and prayer on Shabbat ha-Gadol, I noticed it. The Torah was described as “progressive.” I guess that is a dog-whistle word to the base, i.e., proponents of so-called Open Orthodoxy, that the Torah would be to their social and political taste. Given our relationship of candor with one another, I wrote to him privately (eschewing the mores of social media which demand a snarky, arrogant dismissal, often anonymous) questioning whether Torah should be consciously anything other than Torah. We agreed to table the discussion.

When Rabbi Katz published his post on kitniyot, I noticed it again. Rabbi Katz offered one suggestion for those that self-identify as Modern Orthodox and another for those who self-identify as ultra-Orthodox. I again responded, this time in the comments but with respect and affection.
When I read his piece on nursing, I saw the trope again and this time I am moved to respond to him in more detail (I will at a later time comment on the specific textual readings he offers in his extraordinarily well-written teshuva).

It is clear that poskim operate on the basis of political (in the policy rather than electoral sense) views. As human beings who engage with society, they cannot help but have views on the societies in which we live. I do not believe, however, that a genuine poseik ever proceeds with a conscious political agenda. Poskim may intend their decisions for certain ethnicities within the Jewish people that maintain distinct halakhic traditions and practices but never for groups that self-identify sociologically. Writing a Modern Orthodox teshuva is not the same.

It reminds me of a cousin by marriage who is a Conservative Rabbi. When he has discussed halakhah with me, he never discusses the issues; he can only refer to decisions by the Rabbinical Assembly or the United Synagogue. There is no supposition that there is anything actually called Halakhah without a prefix.

I do not teach Modern Orthodox Halakhah in the Yeshiva and I suspect Rabbi Katz doesn’t in his either. I don’t write teshuvot (there are plenty of real poskim to do that) but when I teach Torah I attempt to teach the real thing, without a prefix. It isn’t Modern Orthodox and it isn’t even consciously Orthodox- it’s Torah.

This is a major difference between Rabbi Katz and me. He is much more taken with the notion of Modern Orthodoxy. This stands to reason. I grew up in a Conservadox community (the lines weren’t so clear back then) with a lifestyle very close to the one I live today, the major difference being knowledge. My rabbi was a YU musmakh. Whatever I didn’t do correctly during high school wasn’t because I held other beliefs; it was because I didn’t know better. Without being too personal, Rabbi Katz consciously affiliates with a group very different from the one in which he was raised. It is natural, I would think, that he is more conscious of his current affiliation than I am of mine.
But it is more than that. In my mind, Modern Orthodoxy is descriptive, not prescriptive. I would not ever say about any practice, “We don’t do that- we’re Modern Orthodox.” There is no Modern Orthodox halakhah. There are sociological descriptions of what people who identify themselves as Modern Orthodox do. That is more for sociologists than for poskim.

I note the observations that Rabbi Katz makes about “our women.” I do not think the identity between men and women that he describes regarding attitudes toward public prayer and Torah study are as widespread as he represents. If this is a teshuva for his kehillah, then he is well within his mandate. Teshuvot, though, are written for broad swaths of the Jewish people. The mores he describes are limited to small clusters. It may well be that we should aspire to these changes but I know vast swaths of the religious community that self-identifies as Modern Orthodox in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Los Angeles, Michigan, Canada, Massachusetts, Tennessee not to mention Yerushalayim, Beit Shemesh, Modiin… where nursing a baby in a minyan would offend.