When the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly was set to vote on the matter of ordaining women, then-JTS professor Rabbi Dovid Weiss Halivni z"l wrote a letter to the seminary faculty explaining why he felt he could not participate in the discussion.
First, he notes that halacha is the privileged, primary Jewish means for achieving relationship with God - for attaining God-consciousness: “A Jew knows no other way of reaching out to God other than through halachah… In the course of that engagement he may experience a sense of elevation, a touch of ecstasy, a feeling of being near to God. That is his greatest reward. While it lasts, he is desirous of nothing more. Indeed, nothing else exists.”
However, Halivni warns, understanding halacha as a means for experiencing God’s presence does not mean that it can be tailored to better fit our subjective realities. Just the opposite: It is precisely out of the need to sustain halacha’s mandate as a channel for God-intoxication that we must guard its integrity with the greatest care and concern. He writes,
“How does a mitzvah catapult one into such religious heights? What is prayer? Nobody knows any more than we now when looking at the sunset, or at a smiling child, how and why we are gripped, riveted to the scene, transformed in a foretaste of the world to come. Our religious and aesthetic experiences are shrouded in mystery. We are put on fire, but do not know how the fi re is being kindled. The mistake of reform is that it claims that it knows how the fire is being kindled; that, as a result it can control the flame. When it actually tried to control the flame, alas there was no fire; everything was so cold!”
