The Search for Liberal Halakhah A Progress Report

Mark Washofsky

I; is appropriate, at the inaugural conference of the Institute

of Liberal Halakhah, to ask whether the concept of a"liberal halakhah" is anything more than a contradiction in terms. That is, can the system of rabbinic law accommodate contemporary values of justice, morality and progress? Is halakhah capable of the growth and development required to respond in a positive way to changing socio-cultural circumstances and ethical insights? Or does "liberality" suggest the translation(read: distortion) of Jewish religious law into a mechanism by which ethical values drawn from a secular culture may be draped with an appearance of sanctity? For some, it is an absurd notion that a legal system claiming divine origins can simultaneously"change with the times." There is, indeed, no shortage of thinkers on either the right or the left of the Jewish theological spectrum who deny the phenomenon of"creative change" in Jewish law. There are others, however, who view halakhah as dynamic and open to an affirmative encounter with modernity and its accompanying cultural transformations. These "liberals" are generally associated with liberal Jewish religious movements but are not restricted to them. Such"Orthodox" scholars as Emanuel Rachman and Irving Greenberg , for example, speak of the possibility of making directed changes,"within the frame and by its own methodology," in traditional Jewish civil, political, family and ritual law.

In Israel , Effraim Urbach calls upon observant Jews to ensure"the revival of the halakhah" to its historic vitality and its adaptation to the needs of a modern state by wresting Jewish law from the control of"extremists" who reject both modernity and statehood. The structures and problems of modern life require that