28 Mark Washo fsky

Moshe Sofer(the Chatam Sofer ) in his campaign against the innovations introduced by the Reform movement during the early nineteenth century.’® Rabbi Ouziel here emphatically renounces Sofer ’s rejectionism in favor of a different vision of halakhah, one that supports an open and positive relationship to the“new,” to the challenges posed by the experience of modernity.

Ouziel’s attempt to justify his halakhic activity against the attacks of critics to both his left and his right closely resembles my own depiction, at the outset of this article, of the situation faced by today’s liberal halakhist. Indeed, I think liberal halakhists share much in common with Ouziel’s vision of himself as occupying a middle ground between more extremist positions. Yet for all his talk of a dynamic and flexible halakhah, a rhetoric that is quite congenial to our own, let us not forget that Ben Zion Ouziel was not a liberal rabbi. He was an Orthodox halakhist, kasher lemehadrin, a chief rabbi of the state of Israel . Like all Orthodox halakhists, he denies that he is an mnovator, and he opposes the conscious introduction of change that is,“reform” into the corpus of Jewish law. He describes his approach as nothing more or less than the traditional process of masa umatan that has been the hallmark of halakhic thought for centuries. Similarly, we should not forget that the entire Zionist halakhic endeavor was an Orthodox product, promoted by Orthodox rabbis faithful to the halakhic system in its accepted Orthodox version. Rejecting calls for reform and innovation, the Zionist rabbis speak of their work as berur (“study,”“examination,”“clarification”), a term that comprehends traditional halakhic masa umatan.*’ Their traditionalist stance does much to explain their astonishment at the profoundly negative response by other Orthodox halakhists to the Zionist halakhic program. Despite all the effort invested by the Zionist rabbis to derive a Jewish legal basis for the new state of Israel , their opponents, a group that included the preponderant majority of the gedolei hador (the recognized halakhic authorities), greeted their writings with indifference, silence, and outright hostility.*® We hear the echoes of