124 Mark Washofsky

Rambam and Radbaz . Just as in that earlier case, the differing views proceed from two alternative narrative constructions of the raw historical data. Ettlinger and those who follow him tell the story of a cultural revolution. In this account, the Enlightenment has shattered an idyllic past in which Jews were educated in the ways of Torah and tradition and grew up understanding just what God expected of them. That world has been turned upside down. Masses of Jews , perhaps the majority, are now ignorant of many of the basic details of halakhic observance. Worse, the secularizing forces of modernity have shattered the values and assumptions that undergirded the traditional Jewish society, so that these Jews lack the means by which to process and evaluate such information that they do possess. They experience Judaism as a welter of conflicting interpretations, 2 chaotic hodgepodge in which Orthodoxy strikes them not as the obviously correct understanding of Judaism but as simply one approach among a number of competing and, in their eyes, equally valid alternatives. That they can attend Shabbat services and recite kiddush while simultaneously violating the prohibitions against work proclaims the depth of their confusion: they mean well, but they are incapable of perceiving the essential contradiction in their patterns of behavior. They are“captive infants ” just as Rambam declared the Karaites to be because, without the requisite intellectual foundation that would enable them to distinguish the true interpretation from those that are false, they cannot be held responsible for making the wrong choice. Those who dissent from Ettlinger’s view tell an alternative story that differs from the above narrative in one crucial detail. In this alternative story, the Enlightenment continues to exert its destructive force upon standards of religious observance, but it does not render the Jewish masses totally blind to the truth of Torah . The masses, that is, are well aware that Orthodoxy— a lifestyle characterized by halakhic observance as defined by the leading poskim and as lived by a specific, recognizable community of pious Jews — is the true and correct expression of Judaism . They recognize therefore that their own lifestyle is one of nonobservance, and they