Mark Washofsky
The era called the Enlightenment ’ marked a series of radical transformations in the ways in which citizens of the West (broadly speaking: the nations of western and central Europe and their progeny on other continents) began to imagine and to talk about their social and cultural world. One of these, the widespread secularization of society, is regarded as one of the most characteristic features of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment world. This is not to say that religion disappeared or became irrelevant to the peoples of the West . Rather, defined as“the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols,” secularization denotes the modern trend to divest religion of much of its power over intellectual and cultural life, the arts and the sciences, and the consciousness of individuals. Thus, while many in the modern West still understand themselves as“religious” in terms of their beliefs and personal practices, Western society is “secular” in that its citizens can successfully organize their lives and their world-views without any overt dependence upon religious authority. This tendency expresses itself through a variety of changes in social behavior. Among these are religious pluralism, the tendency among the citizenry to recognize that no one establishment of religion need have a monopoly upon divine truth;® political liberalism, the commitment to the primacy of individual choice and conscience in matters such as religion; and a noticeable decline in the level of religious observance among the members of the society.’
The process of secularization within the Jewish community has been explored in detail by historians.’ My specific focus here is upon the response of some halakhic authorities to that process: how did these rabbis, who understand their world and speak to their communities through the intellectual and linguistic medium of