—

Over the past three essays, we have seen that even great people can make serious errors in judgment, that judgment can be cultivated, and that it depends in part on a wider environment of truth and trust. But we are only human, and we inevitably get things wrong. Good judgment therefore requires both habits that help us avoid mistakes and habits that help us respond when we make them.

The opening chapter of Sefer Shmuel offers both. Channah, it records, has no children, and her barrenness is a source of acute pain. During a family visit to the Mishkan in Shiloh, she rises to pray. Her lips move, but her voice cannot be heard. Eli the priest watches Channah and concludes that she is drunk. He rebukes her sharply.

We can understand how Eli comes to that conclusion. Evidently, worshipers usually pronounced the words of prayer aloud, making Channah’s silent prayer unusual. The verses also note that she had just come from eating and drinking. Eli notices these details and draws a plausible conclusion. But however understandable his interpretation, the evidence does not warrant it.

Channah corrects him immediately, explaining that she is not drunk but “a woman of sorrowful spirit” who has “poured out [her] soul before the Lord” (1:15). Eli immediately changes course, declaring: “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant your request that you have asked of Him” (1:17). The text never explicitly connects Eli’s blessing to what follows. But narratively, his self-correction is the turning point of the story: Channah leaves comforted, returns home, conceives, and gives birth to Shmuel, who is destined to become one of Israel’s great prophets.

Eli’s mistake and response illustrate three points. His initial judgment shows the danger of becoming too certain when the evidence is incomplete. Moreover, once Channah corrects him, he does not cling to his conclusion. This is especially striking given the difference in their status. As the priest presiding over the Mishkan, Eli could easily have dismissed Channah’s protest rather than acknowledge his mistake. Finally, by blessing her, he repairs the damage his error caused. The Talmud holds him up as a model for the latter two points, learning from his example that one who wrongly suspects others must not only appease them but bless them as well (Berakhot 31b). Good judgment therefore means determining whether the evidence supports the inference one makes from it; having the courage to admit error, especially when we have greater power or stature than others; and repairing the damage our errors cause.

This is especially difficult today. Our frenetic lives constantly require us to make judgments and come to conclusions without complete information. Social media encourages us to react quickly to clips, screenshots, headlines, and accusations, often before we have had much chance to figure out what actually happened. Worse, our culture often rewards those who “double down”, standing firmly by their mistaken judgments even in the face of contrary evidence. In politics and business, and on social media, admitting mistakes is often taken as a sign of weakness. Little wonder that there is a large and fast-growing literature on why we make so many errors in judgment – and why we find it so difficult to acknowledge them.

Still, the texts we have explored over this series suggest several practical habits that can help us make fewer errors – and respond better when we inevitably make some of them anyway:

• Separate what you know from what you infer. Ask which parts of your assessment are facts and which are interpretations. Eli knew what he was seeing (Channah praying silently), but not why Channah was behaving that way. As God teaches Abraham in the story of Sodom, good judgment begins with careful investigation.

• Check your own stake in the outcome. Ask whether you are already inclined to want a particular conclusion to be true. Are you emotionally invested in a particular outcome? As we have seen, Yoshiyahu’s extraordinary record of success may have made it particularly difficult for him to reconsider his judgment.

• Check the source. Where did the information come from – AI, journalism, a friend, social media, or some combination? How reliable is the source, and how can you check the facts independently? As the mythical town of Kushta reminded us, good judgment depends on reliable information and communal commitment to truth.

• Ask what would change your mind. Before committing to a conclusion, ask what evidence would cause you to reconsider it. Like Eli, we need to be willing to revise our judgments when new information comes to light.

• Consider the strongest argument on the other side. Before settling on a conclusion, ask how the most thoughtful person who disagrees with you would make the case. Yoshiyahu’s failure to consult Yirmiyahu illustrates the danger of failing to seek out perspectives that might challenge our assumptions.

• Leave yourself room to reconsider. The more publicly we commit ourselves to a judgment, the harder it becomes to revise. As we saw with Yoshiyahu, committing to a course of action can make it difficult to change our minds. Posting or sharing a story can have a similar effect. On the other hand, refraining from posting makes it easier to be honest with ourselves.

• When you are wrong, repair the harm. Changing your mind may not be enough. If, like Eli, your mistaken judgment hurts someone, do something to make things right.

Underlying all these habits, I would suggest, is something more fundamental: the importance of cultivating a stable inner life. The more grounded we are, the less vulnerable we become to outrage, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, impulsive certainty, and the pull of public validation.

Of course, none of these habits guarantees that we will avoid making mistakes. But they can make mistakes less likely, and they can make it easier for us to correct them when they happen.

These habits are more important than ever in an age of social media and AI. However sophisticated our tools become, we cannot afford to surrender our responsibility to think and judge for ourselves. The example of Avraham reminds us that, as his descendants, we are called to cultivate the capacity for judgment in every generation. As we build ever more intelligent machines, the opportunity before us is to become wiser human beings.

Last week, we learned from Avraham that good judgment can be learned. But even the most careful individual does not exercise judgment alone. We depend on others – journalists, teachers, experts, influencers, friends, institutions, and, increasingly, AI – to tell us what is happening in the world.

What happens when the environment itself becomes unreliable? How can we judge well when we no longer know whom to trust?

The Talmud (Sanhedrin 97a) addresses this problem in a passage describing the period before the messianic era, citing Isaiah’s lament that “truth is lacking” (Isaiah 59:15) and that anyone who turns away from wrongdoing will be regarded as foolish. Playing on the Hebrew word ne’ederet, “lacking,” the Talmud explains that truth will break into separate adarim, flocks or factions, rather than functioning as a shared societal standard.

Rava says that he once believed there was no truth in the world. But then a colleague, Rav Tevut, tells him about a remarkable place where he used to live named Kushta, Aramaic for “truth.” Its inhabitants never lied and no one died before their time. Rav Tevut moves there, marries a local woman, and has two sons. One day, while his wife is washing her hair, a neighbor asks where she is. Wanting to protect his wife’s privacy – discussing a woman’s personal preparations was considered immodest at the time – Rav Tevut says that she is not home. Soon afterward, their two sons die. The residents of Kushta ask what happened, and Rav Tevut tells them what he had done. They expel him, lest he bring death upon them as well.

The story is fantastical. Is the Talmud really asking us to believe that there was a town in which nobody ever lied and nobody died young? Kushta makes the most sense as an idealized picture of a society built entirely around truth. In such a community, people can simply trust one another. Truth, in other words, is not only a private virtue but part of the environment in which people live.

Kushta, I strongly suspect, is not offered as a practical model for ordinary life. Its demand for absolute truth is impossible to sustain in the real world; indeed, Jewish law recognizes circumstances in which one may or even must lie, particularly to preserve harmony, avoid bragging, or spare someone from embarrassment (Yevamot 65b, Ketubot 16b, Bava Metzia 23b). But precisely because Kushta is an extreme case, it reveals something important: when statements are routinely exaggerated, selectively framed, or invented, trust begins to erode.

The prophetic chapter referenced by the Talmud points to the same process on a larger scale. It begins with individual speech: “Your lips speak falsehood and your tongue utters distortion” (Yeshayahu 59:3). As falsehood becomes widespread, people can no longer assume that others are telling the truth: “Truth has stumbled in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter” (59:14). Finally, falsehood becomes so normal that anyone who insists on being honest appears foolish: “Truth is lacking, and one who turns from evil is deemed mad” (59:15).

This insight is urgent today. Of course, human beings have always exaggerated and lied. What is different is the scale and speed with which fabrications now distort our shared understanding of reality. Social media rewards the most sensational version of a story, and AI generates vast quantities of realistic photographs, recordings, videos, and written accounts of events that never occurred.

The flood of misinformation creates a dual problem. Fabricated evidence can lead us to believe what is false. But once fabrication becomes pervasive, genuine evidence becomes easier to dismiss as untrue. Both make sound judgment far less accessible.

That, I think, is the world the Talmud depicts when it imagines truth breaking into separate adarim. It is a world in which each group possesses its own sources of information and its own account of reality. In short, it is our world.

This is why judgment is not just an individual virtue. Indeed, the Talmud’s story of Kushta makes truthfulness a communal norm, not merely a personal virtue.

For this reason, responsibility does not rest with individuals alone. Journalists, communal institutions, technology companies, government agencies, and consumers all help shape the environment in which we judge. Each has a responsibility to help preserve a shared commitment to truth.

At the same time, institutional accountability is only part of the picture. Every time we forward a video on WhatsApp, repost an explosive news report, or share a quote without checking whether it is authentic, we contribute to the erosion of a shared culture of truth. In today’s information environment, verifying before sharing is a basic responsibility. Sometimes good judgment begins with something as simple as checking the source or deciding not to share something we cannot verify.

Yoshiyahu showed us, in this series’ first column, that judgment can fail, and Avraham that it can be cultivated. Kushta adds a third insight: even good judgment depends on a wider culture in which truth remains recognizable – one in which we all have a role to play.

But even in a healthy environment, we will sometimes judge wrongly. What habits can help us judge more carefully – and recognize when we have failed? Next week, in the final essay of this series, we will turn to the story of Eli and Channah and consider practical strategies for cultivating good judgment, beginning with one of the hardest: admitting that we were wrong.

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Last week, we saw that even Yoshiyahu, one of the greatest kings in Jewish history, made a catastrophic error in judgment. If someone of his righteousness and experience could get it so badly wrong, how are the rest of us supposed to learn to judge well?

The story of Avraham and Sedom offers the beginnings of an answer: judgment can be learned.

For millennia, Jewish thinkers have read Avraham’s confrontation with G-d over the fate of Sedom as a model of justice and moral courage, and rightly so. Avraham refuses to accept that innocent people should perish together with the guilty, demanding, “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” (Bereishit 18:25). But precisely because we know this as the great biblical story of justice, it is easy to miss another key element. To appreciate it more fully, let’s look closely at how the story unfolds.

The scene begins in an unusual way. Before sending angels to destroy the city, G-d pauses and asks rhetorically, “Shall I hide from Avraham what I am about to do?” He then explains that Avraham will become a great nation and that he has been chosen so that his descendants will “keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice (tzedaka u-mishpat)” (18:17–19).

Why involve Avraham at all? G-d, after all, has no need for consultation. One possibility is that He is simply sharing His plans with Avraham because of their special relationship. But the language of tzedaka u-mishpat suggests something more. Although commentators offer other readings, Professor Yehuda Kil’s interpretation in the Da’at Mikra commentary seems to me the most compelling: mishpat here refers not simply to moral goodness, but to the process of judgment. A shofet is a judge, someone who weighs facts and competing claims before reaching a decision. Tzedaka, then, refers to the righteous outcome we seek, while mishpat is the process by which we determine that outcome.

This is precisely the mission G-d has assigned Avraham: to teach his household “to do tzedaka u-mishpat.” As the Netziv points out (18:17 s.v. ve-hinneh), the destruction of Sedom offers Avraham an opportunity to learn how to judge before he can teach others to do the same. It is his apprenticeship in judgment.

The Torah emphasizes this process throughout the story. Before destroying Sedom, G-d announces that He will “go down and see” whether the city is truly as wicked as the outcry against it suggests (18:21). An omniscient G-d hardly needs additional information. The point, instead, is to model a basic principle of sound judgment: before reaching a conclusion, investigate carefully.

Avraham then “draws near” and begins to press his case. His first question is straightforward: “Will You sweep away the innocent with the wicked?” (18:23). Justice, he argues, requires distinguishing between the guilty and the innocent. But then he makes a different argument: perhaps G-d should “spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous” (18:24). The presence of enough righteous people, he suggests, should save the entire city. Why does Avraham pursue a second line of argument?

R. David Zvi Hoffmann suggests that Avraham is reasoning under conditions of uncertainty. He does not know whether G-d intends to judge each person individually or Sedom collectively. If G-d intends to judge each person individually, justice requires distinguishing between the righteous and the wicked. But if Sedom is being judged collectively, the presence of enough righteous people might be sufficient to spare the city as a whole. Avraham therefore tests one possibility and then the other. In other words, not only is he trying to save Sedom, his argument is an effort to understand the principles by which G-d will judge the city.

G-d accepts Avraham’s request in principle but says that there are not fifty righteous people in the city. Avraham then lowers the number step by step to forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, and ten; each time, G-d says that He would spare the city for their sake. If the only point were that Avraham tried unsuccessfully to save Sedom, the Torah would not need to preserve so much of this back-and-forth. The exchange itself appears to be part of the lesson: even after establishing the principle of the righteous sparing the wicked, Avraham probes its precise boundary by working through the problem incrementally and adjusting his argument as he learns more.

Yet the dialogue does not conclude with a neat formula. Avraham stops at ten, and the conversation abruptly ends. The Torah does not tell us why ten is the decisive number. Instead, we are simply told that G-d departs and that “Avraham returned to his place” (18:33). Why?

The Netziv understands “Avraham returned to his place” to mean that Avraham returned le’enoshuto – to his ordinary human state. For a brief moment, Avraham had been drawn into a divine courtroom. Now he returns to ordinary life and the judgments it requires.

Avraham’s exchange with G-d does not leave him with a specific rule for such ordinary judgments. Instead, it has taught him an approach: begin with general principles, ask questions, and adjust as the situation becomes clearer. With that lesson in hand, Avraham’s apprenticeship is complete.

Avraham’s education in judgment is especially relevant today. AI creates a powerful temptation to outsource not just the search for information but the work of judgment itself. If we skip that work often enough, we risk losing the habits Avraham models.

But judgment is never only an individual matter. We depend on other people for information, testimony, and expertise. What happens when it becomes difficult to know which people and sources to trust? Next week, we will turn from the habits of individual judgment to the kind of community in which good judgment can flourish.

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There has been acute concern in recent years about the challenges posed by technology, especially social media. The rise of AI is exacerbating many of those problems while creating new ones. There is widespread anxiety about the future of the workplace, the rapidly changing skills needed to succeed, and even the risks AI may pose to humanity and the planet. Meanwhile, it is easier than ever to produce enormous quantities of information and misinformation – and increasingly difficult to tell the difference.

Much of the conversation in our community has centered on when and how we expose our children to these technologies. But limiting exposure can only take us so far. We need to develop – and help our children develop – the skills to think for ourselves rather than allow AI to think for us: to evaluate whether the content we encounter is true and decide when and how to use these technologies.

One way to think about these challenges is through the lens of judgment: how we make sense of reality and decide how to respond, especially in situations of uncertainty. Good judgment requires us to recognize our biases, evaluate information and its sources, determine whether something may have been fabricated or designed to deceive, weigh competing interpretations, and resist premature conclusions. These skills have always been essential, but in the age of AI, they are more urgent than ever.

The Torah offers many models of judgment. In the coming weeks, we will draw on these to identify practical ways to strengthen our judgment. We begin with the sobering story of one of our greatest leaders.

Yoshiyahu, one of the last kings of Judea before the First Temple’s destruction, is an extraordinary figure. In approximately 640 BCE, he ascends the throne at the age of just eight after the disastrous, idolatrous reigns of his father Amon and grandfather Menashe, yet he seems almost entirely untouched by their influence.

While Yoshiyahu was still a young man, the high priest Chilkiyah discovers a Torah scroll. When it is read before Yoshiyahu, the king tears his garments. He gathers the nation, reads the scroll publicly, and commits to serve G-d “with all his heart and all his soul” (II Melachim 23:3). Yoshiyahu then purges idolatry throughout the kingdom and restores the national celebration of Pesach. II Melachim sums up: “Before him there was no king like him… nor did any like him arise after him” (23:25).

But then the story takes a tragic turn. Pharaoh Nekho of Egypt advances northward, apparently to assist the Assyrians against the rising Babylonian empire. His route takes him through Judea, and Yoshiyahu goes out to confront him. Pharaoh warns him not to interfere, even insisting, according to many, that he was sent by G-d.

But Yoshiyahu refuses. He is struck by Egyptian archers and carried back to Jerusalem, where he dies. Why did he make such a poor decision? While Melachim offers no explanation, II Divrei HaYamim 35:22 adds a crucial detail:

״ולא הסב יאשיהו פניו ממנו כי להלחם בו התחפש.״

“Yoshiyahu did not turn away from him, for he had disguised himself in order to fight him.”

Most commentators explain that Yoshiyahu had dressed for battle. But what is the connection between his refusal to turn back and his preparation for battle? On this reading, Yoshiyahu had already concluded that Pharaoh Nekho posed a threat. Even after Pharaoh’s warning, rather than reconsider, he put on his battle gear and pressed ahead. Yoshiyahu had already committed himself to a course of action, and turning back would require him to seriously entertain the possibility that he was wrong.

Yoshiyahu’s remarkable life may have made that even harder. Yoshiyahu had rejected the religious world of his father and grandfather, rediscovered the Torah, restored the Temple, and led a sweeping religious revival. After so many successes, he may not have seriously considered the possibility that this time he was wrong.

A classic rabbinic treatment reinforces this reading of Yoshiyahu’s error. The Gemara (Ta’anit 22b) explains that Yoshiyahu was punished because “he should have consulted with Yirmiyahu, but did not.” Yoshiyahu understood the Torah’s promise that “no sword shall pass through your land” (Vayikra 26:6) to mean that even a peaceful army would not cross Judean territory. But while the people outwardly participated in his religious reforms, many remained privately attached to idolatry. Yoshiyahu assumed that his campaign had fully succeeded and that his generation had merited the Torah’s blessing – and was so confident that he did not even consult Yirmiyahu. The Gemara thus adds two dimensions to Yoshiyahu’s error: he misjudged his people and failed to consult someone who might have challenged him.

Yoshiyahu’s extraordinary life, then, may ironically have become an obstacle to his success. We tend to assume that experience improves judgment, and usually it does. But sometimes a history of being right makes it harder to recognize when we are wrong.

And that is what makes Yoshiyahu’s story so unsettling. If even such a righteous king could become trapped by his initial assessment, how much more vulnerable are the rest of us? Social media encourages us to commit ourselves to a position accepted by our “tribe,” and AI can fabricate convincing images and generate arguments supporting almost any position we already hold. It may be easier than at any point in history to reinforce our own assumptions – and harder to reconsider them.

Yoshiyahu’s tragedy reminds us that neither a life of righteousness nor a track record of good decisions guarantees that we will judge the next situation wisely. Each decision requires us to examine our assumptions and reasoning anew.

But that leaves us with an uncomfortable question. If even someone as extraordinary as Yoshiyahu can fail so catastrophically, how do the rest of us learn to judge well? Is good judgment simply a matter of instinct, or is it a discipline we can cultivate?

The answer will wait until next week, when we turn to Avraham and the destruction of Sedom.

Rabbi Lamm appreciated these concerns. Indeed, early in his rabbinate, when American Orthodoxy’s future remained uncertain, he was often forceful in his criticism of the Reform and Conservative movements. (In a 2006 interview published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs as “Modern Orthodoxy and Its Future,” Rabbi Lamm was explicit about a change in emphasis over his career: “When I was younger, I stormed against Conservative and Reform, but I no longer do so.”) But he also thought that all the concern for “symbolic recognition” was overblown, and that it often obscured a more pressing question: what would the Orthodox community lose by opting not to cooperate with their fellow Jews?

After all, withdrawal had consequences too. It could weaken efforts to resist assimilation, deprive Orthodoxy of influence, and deepen divisions within the Jewish community. Rabbi Lamm wanted those costs to be included in the discussion. He also distinguished between the descriptive and prescriptive, arguing that acknowledging non-Orthodox movements’ place in Jewish life did not require accepting their religious claims.

The decades-long controversy over Orthodox participation in the Synagogue Council of America put his position—and the difference between his view and that of many of his contemporaries—into sharp relief.

The Synagogue Council of America

Founded in 1926, the Synagogue Council of America (SCA) brought Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform organizations together on matters of common concern. Orthodox participation in such bodies had been ongoing for nearly thirty years when Rabbi David Hollander, the new president of the Rabbinical Council of America, began pressing the RCA to withdraw in the mid-1950s.

In 1956, eleven prominent rashei yeshiva, including Rabbis Aharon Kotler, Moshe Feinstein, Yaakov Kamenetsky, Yitzchok Hutner, and Yaakov Ruderman, issued a ruling prohibiting Orthodox participation in interdenominational organizations. (Below is the pesak with a translation that appeared in the Jewish Observer.)

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik did not join the ruling. In Kol Dodi Dofek, published in 1956, he distinguished between matters of shared Jewish fate, on which Jews should cooperate, and internal religious questions, where cooperation could compromise essential boundaries. When the RCA asked him and Dr. Samuel Belkin, then-president of Yeshiva University, to rule on participation in the SCA, they declined to decide and returned the question to the RCA leadership for further deliberation.

Rabbi Lamm himself took up the issue in his 1966 sermon “The Things That Unite Us,” where he rejected two extreme positions. One was “separationism”: the view, analogous to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s nineteenth-century policy of Austritt in Germany, that Orthodox survival required withdrawal from non-Orthodox Jews and institutions. The other was “indifferentism,” which treated the denominations as equally valid forms of Judaism.

Between these positions, he argued, there was considerable room for cooperation. Orthodox Jews could acknowledge that non-Orthodox rabbis led substantial Jewish communities without accepting the religious claims of their movements. Our task, he explained, was to preserve both “the integrity of Torah” and “the integrity of Israel.” Subjects such as Israel, Soviet Jewry, antisemitism, Hebrew culture, and legislation affecting Jews offered areas of common concern. Cooperation that required surrendering religious principle, of course, was another matter.

Rabbi Lamm quickly came under fire for his relatively tolerant stance. Later in 1966, a group calling itself the “Torah Action Committee – YU Branch” threatened Rabbi Lamm over his agreement to appear as a guest of honor at a HaDoar dinner alongside Conservative and Reform rabbis in support of Hebrew education at Jewish day schools.

“We were shocked to read that YOU too are throwing overboard tradition and loyalty to the Gedolim,” the letter declared. Its authors gave him ten days to retract publicly. Otherwise, they would ask the Jewish Center’s leadership “to dismiss you because of your dissent and abrogation of Torah authority.”

Needless to say, Rabbi Lamm did not withdraw.

A January 1967 letter from a rabbinic colleague developed the objection more fully (and more respectfully). Whatever Rabbi Lamm said at the dinner, the writer warned, his participation would make Conservative and Reform Judaism “a little more respectable” in the eyes of the Jewish community. More people would remember that he had been honored alongside their rabbis than would remember his qualifications to the effect that this was not intended as an endorsement of the other denominations. Rabbi Lamm, his correspondent concluded, might become a “MACHTI ES HORABIM,” someone who leads the public to sin.

In response, Rabbi Lamm acknowledged that HaDoar’s original publicity had misrepresented his position and caused him “anguish.” But HaDoar had then corrected the announcement. Rabbi Lamm reiterated that he accepted the movements’ “sociological legitimacy” while withholding assent to their “theological and Halakhic validity.”

He also challenged the description of the event. “I am not ‘honoring’ anyone,” he wrote. He had been invited to receive an honor and was joining other Jews to promote Hebrew. To the extent that Hebrew could help resist assimilation, he wanted to support it. He could not be held responsible for those who might use him “as a prop for their ‘trinitarian’ sociology of Judaism.”

Rabbi Lamm added that he was losing patience with the recurring controversy. He defended his description of the debate as a “dull, obsessive litany,” unworthy of the time and talent devoted to it. He closed his response hoping the disagreement would not end the friendship between him and his correspondent: “We can continue to disagree without being disagreeable to each other.”

“Dirtying Your Hands”

In 1969, Rabbi Lamm was asked to serve on an RCA committee examining the SCA question. Writing to Marvin Herskowitz, he complained that American Orthodoxy reserved some of its strongest battles for relatively secondary symbolic issues. Rabbis had more urgent work to do.

In a 1973 sermon on the risks of spiritual leadership, he acknowledged that the earlier campaign against Conservative and Reform Judaism had made sense in previous decades, when those movements had been drawing away some of Orthodoxy’s best talent. But circumstances had changed, and Orthodox leaders needed to reconsider where they directed their energies.

On that basis, he criticized a planned rally of rabbis and rashei yeshiva that would protest the non-Orthodox denominations and campus missionaries. How, asked Rabbi Lamm, could its participants hope to influence young American Jews while discouraging their own students from attending college, cooperating with other Jews on Soviet Jewry, or entering the pulpit? “You cannot clean up the situation of American Jewry without dirtying your own hands,” he explained.

When Division Threatened Marriage

But Rabbi Lamm’s impatience with all the emphasis on “symbolism” did not mean that he regarded denominational boundaries as inconsequential.

This rose to the fore in the 1970s, when the SCA debate became increasingly entangled with the Israeli controversy over “Who is a Jew?” Incompatible standards of conversion, divorce, and Jewish status went well beyond questions of perception: one community might accept a person as Jewish, while another would forbid its members from marrying that person because it did not recognize that person’s Jewish status.

In fact, the issue was so explosive that in 1985, Rabbi Lamm questioned whether the accommodation Orthodoxy had sought could survive. In a draft address for the RCA convention, which it appears he never delivered, he recalled why Orthodox leaders had sought cooperation with the non-Orthodox movements: most Jews were not Orthodox, and they wanted to keep Klal Yisrael together wherever possible. But Reform’s 1983 acceptance of patrilineal descent made that effort much harder to justify. He wondered whether the resulting estrangement could become as consequential as the ancient split between Judaism and Christianity.

But within a short period of time, Rabbi Lamm was proposing a bold compromise solution to the “Who is a Jew” issue. In March 1986, Rabbi Lamm spoke at a CLAL conference in Princeton titled “Will There Be One Jewish People by the Year 2000?” In a professionally risky move, he appeared alongside leaders of the Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements.

In his address, published as “Seventy Faces: Divided We Stand,” he distinguished three categories. Functional validity meant acknowledging that non-Orthodox rabbis led actual Jewish communities. Spiritual dignity referred to the sincerity of their religious commitment and that of their followers. Jewish or rabbinic legitimacy, however, required accepting halakhah as binding. Recognizing the first two, he explained, did not necessitate accepting the third. Orthodox Jews could respect non-Orthodox rabbis’ leadership and admire their devotion without endorsing their religious positions.

He went on to revive an idea Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and Rabbi Saul Lieberman had discussed in the 1950s: a national beit din, with local branches, whose rulings on Jewish marriage and divorce would be accepted across the movements. The earlier plan had foundered, but Lamm hoped a shared court could establish procedures for gittin that all communities would recognize.

Following the conference, Rabbi Lamm continued pressing the idea. In December 1986, he urged Herbert Tenzer, chairman of Yeshiva University’s Board of Trustees, to attend meetings on a joint beit din, represent the Orthodox position, and insist that any arrangement remain strictly committed to halakha.

After the 1988 Israeli election, Rabbi Lamm joined an initiative backed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and coordinated by Cabinet Secretary Elyakim Rubinstein. Representatives of the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements explored a process for prospective converts planning to immigrate to Israel. A joint committee would assess candidates and refer those it approved to a beit din established by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, so that their conversions would be valid under halakha and accepted in Israel. The negotiations made substantial progress in 1989, but a published account of a purported agreement, which the negotiators denounced as a forgery, sparked fierce opposition. Opposition from Agudah, figures within Yeshiva University, and parts of the Reform movement helped bring the effort to an end.

“Maximum, Not Total Agreement”

The conversion crisis of 1997 offered Rabbi Lamm another opportunity to champion cooperation. Reform and Conservative groups were seeking recognition for conversions performed in Israel, while proposed legislation would give the Orthodox rabbinate exclusive legal authority over those conversions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed a committee to seek an agreement before the bill or pending court cases proceeded. Appearing before the committee, Rabbi Lamm warned that any workable agreement would leave both sides dissatisfied. The goal was “maximum, not total agreement.” Neither side could expect the other to surrender its fundamental commitments.

His proposal divided responsibility between two bodies. A panel including non-Orthodox representatives would educate and interview prospective converts according to an agreed curriculum. A beit din approved by the Chief Rabbinate would perform the conversion.

This division allowed the movements to participate without requiring Orthodox authorities to recognize their conversions. It also required the non-Orthodox participants to accept that the conversion itself would take place under Orthodox auspices.

Rabbi Lamm requested accommodation from the Orthodox side as well. The dayyanim should be chosen for their understanding approach. They should dispense with accumulated chumrot and draw on legitimate bedieved positions where appropriate.

“We must be as open to other Jews as the Halakha permits us,” he argued that year. In “Integrity or Unity: Which?,” delivered in 1998, he again described the situation as a sha’at hadchak requiring legitimate halakhic flexibility.

The Limits of Engagement

Rabbi Lamm continued to defend engagement even when other Orthodox leaders objected. In 2003, he exchanged letters with Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu, head of the London Beth Din, over Orthodox participation in Britain’s pluralistic Limmud conference. Dayan Ehrentreu opposed such participation, but Rabbi Lamm argued that teaching there gave Jews who might otherwise never encounter it a chance to hear Torah from an Orthodox voice. He rejected the idea that appearing alongside teachers from other movements meant endorsing their views. Consistent with his views “symbolism,” he went on to teach at Limmud despite the opposition.

The Limmud exchange brought Rabbi Lamm back to the question that had followed him since the SCA debates: When may an Orthodox rabbi share a platform with people whose religious views he rejects? For Rabbi Lamm, as long as doing so did not imply religious or halakhic endorsement – and he did not believe teaching at Limmud did – it was not only permissible but laudable.

Rabbi Lamm drew firm lines on questions of Jewish status and religious law. But he refused to treat every shared platform as a breach of those lines. From Hebrew education to conversion and Limmud, he asked what cooperation could accomplish and what withdrawal would cost. For him, preserving “the integrity of Torah” meant taking seriously “the integrity of Israel,” even when doing so invited heated criticism from within his own community.

My thanks to my colleague and friend Dr. Tanya White for reading an earlier draft, sharpening the argument, and saving me from some consequential mistakes.

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What Happened to Covenant?

Covenant is everywhere in modern Jewish thought. For many twentieth-century Jewish thinkers – and Christian thinkers too, but that is another story – berit was a central category with which they thought about revelation, autonomy, morality, Jewish history, the Holocaust, the State of Israel, politics, and relations with other Jewish denominations and religious traditions.

But Rabbi Lamm is something of an exception. He certainly valued covenant, but he generally developed his major theological projects through other categories. In fact, considering the extraordinary range of his writings, covenant plays a decidedly modest role. It is easily eclipsed by Torah lishmah, devekut, creativity, Torah Umadda, divine immanence and transcendence, and the visibility of the “divine face” in our lives.

This is striking because so many thinkers close to Rabbi Lamm’s intellectual world made significant use of covenant. Even setting aside non-Orthodox theologians such as Rabbi Eugene Borowitz, the list is impressive.

The Covenantal Landscape

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Rabbi Lamm’s teacher, certainly made significant use of covenant. In Kol Dodi Dofek (1956), he distinguished between berit goral, the covenant of fate that binds Jews through a common history, and berit yi’ud, the covenant of destiny through which the Jewish people embrace a common purpose.

Rabbi Walter Wurzburger, a devoted student of the Rav and Rabbi Lamm’s successor as editor of Tradition, drew on covenant most notably in his 1994 Ethics of Responsibility: Pluralistic Approaches to Covenantal Ethics. Wurzburger was responding to a familiar criticism of Orthodoxy: that its emphasis on law reduces morality to obedience and leaves too little room for ethical responsibility beyond the letter of the law. He set out to show that a theonomous Judaism can demand precisely that responsibility. Interestingly, the concept of covenant does not seem indispensable to Wurzburger’s argument. His argument is that we must use our ethical judgment to determine what God might want from us even when no specific rule dictates the answer. Still, it is telling that he uses the language of covenant to convey this idea.

The title of Rabbi David Hartman’s A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism captures much of the way he utilized covenant. Hartman believed Rabbi Soloveitchik had not gone far enough in drawing out the implications of human agency. Sinai established not a relationship of mere command and obedience – what Hartman called an “Akeda” theology – but an ongoing relationship between God and a mature covenantal community capable of creative interpretation. Because the covenant was “alive,” it could account for development within the tradition.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg developed a different covenantal theology, with history playing a considerably larger role for him than for Hartman. For Greenberg, the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel could not simply occur within the accepted framework of covenant; they had profound implications for the covenant itself. His earlier theology spoke of a “voluntary covenant”: after Auschwitz, the covenant could no longer rest simply on overwhelming divine authority but had to be freely renewed by the Jewish people. More recently, in The Triumph of Life, he has spoken in the more moderate language of a “transformed covenant.” Across three historical “eras” – the biblical, rabbinic, and modern periods – divine intervention recedes and human responsibility increases.

Eliezer Berkovits is a different case. It may be misleading to call him a covenantal thinker in the same sense as Hartman or Greenberg, because the term “covenant” is not prominent in his theology. Berkovits instead uses the language of encounter: Judaism begins in the concrete encounter between God and Israel, paradigmatically at Sinai, and halakha embodies that continuing relationship within history. Still, the structure of his theology is covenantal even if berit is not his preferred term.

Michael Wyschogrod places covenant and election very much at the center of his thought. His theology begins with God’s concrete love for Abraham and his physical descendants. The election of Israel is not an abstract philosophical principle but a biblical claim about God’s relationship with a carnal people. Covenant is therefore inseparable from the embodied existence of the Jewish people through history.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks took covenant in yet another direction. His distinction between covenant and contract is a good starting point. A contract joins parties because each has something to gain, whereas a covenant binds them through shared identity and mutual responsibility. Sacks carried covenant far beyond narrow theological questions about God and Israel. Over the years, it became a key element in his thinking about marriage and family, civil society, national identity, politics, social responsibility, and interfaith relations. More than the other thinkers here, Sacks used covenant as a framework for thinking about politics and constructing community.

Against the background of all these contemporaneous covenantal thinkers, Rabbi Lamm’s comparatively limited use of covenant as an organizing category becomes more interesting.

Covenant in Rabbi Lamm’s Own Words

An important qualification comes from his 1960 sermon “Barter, Contract or Covenant?,” where Rabbi Lamm called berit “one of the most important words in the whole of the Jewish religious vocabulary.” Covenant, he explained, presupposes a living God who enters into a relationship with humanity. How a person understands that relationship reveals the quality of his religious experience.

In the sermon, Rabbi Lamm distinguishes among three understandings of the word berit. Barter reduces religion to occasional transactions with God, such as giving charity in exchange for financial success or fasting in exchange for health. Contract makes the relationship between the two parties ongoing but retains a transactional character.

The third meaning, covenant, goes deeper. Drawing on Rabbi Joseph Albo’s interpretation of the covenant between the pieces in Bereshit chapter 15, Rabbi Lamm describes an indissoluble bond between God and humanity. Its defining quality is intimacy: God is not merely a philosophical abstraction or a distant “Father in Heaven,” but a living presence with whom our destinies are intertwined. Circumcision supplies a second quality of covenant for Rabbi Lamm: permanence. Each Jewish child enters an existing covenant rather than negotiating a new one. Finally, he says, covenant binds Jews together as a people.

The sermon rules out any simple claim that covenant was absent from Rabbi Lamm’s thought or unimportant to him. It also gives us an explicit account of what covenant meant to him: intimacy with God, permanent obligation, and Jewish solidarity. But this only begs the question as to why a category he described so emphatically did not become a more important organizing principle of his theology.

Some Initial Answers

One place to begin is with the Rav. While it is true that Rav Soloveitchik uses covenant at crucial moments, it is just one category in his thought – one overshadowed by a number of others. True, in Kol Dodi Dofek, it gives him a language for Jewish solidarity and responsibility and helps frame his discussion of interdenominational cooperation. But elsewhere he turns to other frameworks. Halakhic Man grounds human creativity in tzelem Elokim and the halakhic personality. The Lonely Man of Faith develops its account of community through the two accounts of Adam in Genesis and the dialectic between Adam I and Adam II. The Halakhic Mind draws extensively on (all-but-impenetrable) neo-Kantian philosophy. The Rav’s vocabulary thus extends well beyond covenant. From that perspective, Rabbi Lamm’s relative lack of emphasis on it is not especially surprising.

There is also a difference in the questions these thinkers are asking. Wurzburger is deeply concerned with ethics, a subject that occupies considerably less space in Lamm’s theology. Hartman wants to make greater room for human autonomy and development within Judaism. Greenberg wants to do that too, and is also concerned with how enormous historical transformations – above all the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel – affect the relationship between God and humanity and the responsibilities borne by each side. And while Rabbi Lamm valued autonomy and creativity, his center of gravity lay elsewhere. He was generally less interested in explaining how new circumstances might alter our account of the fundamental relationship between God, Torah, and Israel than in exploring creativity within a basically stable halakhic framework.

All this is certainly part of the story. But I think there is a deeper answer, one that has less to do with covenant per se than with where modern Jewish thinkers found the categories with which to construct Jewish theology.

Where Does Jewish Theology Come From?

Many of the thinkers discussed above share something important despite their enormous differences: none takes Kabbala or Hasidism as the primary conceptual language of his theology.

That creates a challenge. Kabbala developed an extraordinarily rich and continuous intellectual tradition, feeding into Hasidism along the way. Medieval Jewish philosophy did not leave behind a comparably continuous tradition upon which modern thinkers could build. There were important figures along the way – Moses Mendelssohn, Shadal, and others – but nothing comparable to the continuity of the mystical tradition. In fact, some scholars have proposed (I suspect somewhat oversimplistically, but there’s still more than a kernel of truth here) that the Spanish Expulsion was the breaking point of the medieval rationalist tradition and the point from which Kabbala became the dominant strand of Jewish thought.

Where, then, could a modern Jewish theologian who did not begin with Kabbala and Hasidism find a distinctly Jewish conceptual vocabulary?

One possibility was to return to the medieval rationalists, especially Maimonides. Another was to draw on modern European philosophy – Kantianism, neo-Kantianism, existentialism, and other schools. But both attempts raised a set of hard questions, as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and others highlighted: how much of the resulting theology was distinctively Jewish, how much was grafted from the outside, and how much did it matter?

And then there was Tanakh. Here was an unquestionably Jewish text that did not depend on Kabbalistic metaphysics or categories borrowed from classical or modern philosophy. Once modern Jewish thinkers turned to Tanakh for theological categories, covenant was sitting right there.

It was also remarkably flexible. Covenant could encompass God and Israel, Torah and obligation, history and peoplehood, divine command and human responsibility. It provided a way to organize Jewish theology around the relationship between God and the Jewish people without relying on Kabbalistic metaphysics. It could reinforce the modern embrace of autonomy. All this, I suspect, is part of the reason covenant proved so attractive.

The thinkers we have discussed solved the problem in different ways. Greenberg and Wyschogrod draw especially deeply on Tanakh. Hartman turns toward rabbinic interpretation, together with elements of Maimonidean thought. Wurzburger relies heavily on Maimonides, Soloveitchik, and halakha as a source of Jewish values. Sacks is far more eclectic, drawing on Tanakh, rabbinic literature, medieval Jewish philosophy, modern liberal thought, Habad, sociology, economics, political theory, and contemporary social science.

Berkovits is again something of a unique case. He recovered an older Jewish conceptual system, above all that of Rabbi Judah Halevi. Halevi’s emphasis on revelation and concrete encounter offered an alternative to a religion grounded primarily in abstract philosophical demonstration. This enabled Berkovits to construct a theology structurally similar to covenantal thought without making berit the dominant term.

And then there is the Rav. Rav Soloveitchik drew on Tanakh, a creative reading of Maimonides, neo-Kantian philosophy, and some Kabbala and Habad thought. But above all, he also had something the others did not, at least not to nearly the same degree: the inherited intellectual world of Lithuanian and Brisker Talmud study, which he ingeniously transformed into a source of Jewish theology.

Rabbi Lamm Already Had Another Language

Where does all this leave Rabbi Lamm?

Rabbi Lamm already possessed a rich set of conceptual traditions from which to build a theology. Hasidism, in which he was steeped as a boy, was a living language for him, supplemented by Kabbala, Rav Hayyim of Volozhin (who himself drew extensively on Kabbala), Rav Kook, the Rav (to a more limited degree than one might have expected), and medieval Jewish thought.

Rav Hayyim gave him a framework for thinking about Torah lishmah, moderation, and intellectual independence. Hasidism gave him a language of religious creativity, the sanctification of ordinary existence, and even Torah Umadda. Medieval Jewish philosophy helped him formulate questions about humanity’s place in the cosmos in light of modern science.

Kabbala also supplied one of the deepest themes in Rabbi Lamm’s thought: unity. Beneath the apparent fragmentation of reality lies a deeper unity, and part of the religious task is to overcome divisions that appear absolute but are ultimately provisional. This becomes especially important for a thinker committed to bringing together opposing worlds – sacred and secular, Torah and general knowledge, intellect and religious experience.

Here Rav Kook was especially important. Rabbi Lamm drew from him a powerful form of ontic monism: a vision in which reality, for all its apparent divisions, ultimately participates in a deeper divine unity. This gave Rabbi Lamm a theological basis for synthesis.

The Rav supplied yet another set of resources, especially his account of human creativity, the religious significance of tzelem Elokim, and the possibility of self-creation.

As a result, Rabbi Lamm was able to address questions that other thinkers addressed through covenant – human creativity, individuality, the relationship between Torah and the religious personality, and the encounter between tradition and modernity – with categories he already possessed.

The Heschel Parallel

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel offers an illuminating parallel to Rabbi Lamm. Heschel also never made covenant the master category of his theology. He had another rich Jewish vocabulary: Hasidism, Kabbala, rabbinic aggada, and the prophetic tradition. He could speak of divine pathos, wonder, radical amazement, prayer, holiness, and God’s search for man without requiring covenant to carry the weight of his theology.

More importantly, Heschel did not simply study Hasidism historically. As an heir to the tradition, he thought with it. Mystical and Hasidic categories were a living language through which he could construct a contemporary Jewish theology.

Heschel therefore points to another path in twentieth-century Jewish theology. One did not have to recover a biblical category such as covenant and make it the organizing principle of a modern theology. One could instead continue thinking from within mystical and Hasidic traditions. In this respect, his approach resembles that of Rabbi Lamm.

Inherited Conceptual Worlds

Covenant, then, was especially useful to modern Jewish thinkers who did not operate within a living, continuous theological tradition. It gave them a biblical starting point from which to address modern questions. But Rabbi Lamm’s starting point was different. He could build on traditions that he had imbibed from childhood on. He valued covenant, but had less need to make it the foundation of his theology.

—

Materialism, we know, is an acute problem in American Orthodoxy. I need not rehearse at length the risks of allowing the blessings of prosperity to devolve into an unhealthy preoccupation with wealth: the pressure to keep up with the Joneses, the social strain on children whose families cannot afford a lavish simcha, the neglect of spirituality and intellectual depth, and the lessons children absorb about status and self-worth.[1] But I sometimes wonder whether our communal conversation starts one question too late. What if materialism is not only a cause of these problems, but also a symptom of something deeper? And if that’s the case, making progress requires us to ask not just how to combat it but how to understand it in the first place.

This is where I think Rabbi Lamm is helpful. Over the course of his rabbinate, including his tenure at The Jewish Center, once dubbed a “rich man’s club,”[2] Rabbi Lamm addressed materialism in roughly a dozen Sukkot sermons. But he was not content simply to decry the problem. His willingness to dig deeper, I want to suggest, has much to offer our conversation today.

The Perils of Prosperity

In two of those sermons, Rabbi Lamm connects Sukkot with the need to be less reliant on material comforts. In one, he points to an irony: while his apartment-dwelling Upper West Side congregants are unable to build their own sukkot, “it is specifically for sophisticated, secure, twentieth century, middle class citizens that the message of Sukkot is most relevant.” Citing the debate between R. Akiva and R. Eliezer as to whether God protected the Jews in the desert with literal huts or Clouds of Glory (Sukka 11b), Rabbi Lamm proposes that the rabbis are not arguing; instead, each is emphasizing a complementary theme. R. Akiva suggests that the literal huts teach that we can get by on bare subsistence, even in a mere hut. R. Eliezer agrees, but he emphasizes the inverse: while we can flourish without many unnecessary material goods, there are spiritual goods – represented by the Clouds of Glory – that we cannot live without.[3]

Seen from this perspective, Rabbi Lamm contends, Sukkot extends the central theme of Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur teaches us to get along without food and other bodily comforts; Sukkot teaches us to go without the shelter of our homes and thereby to prioritize matters of the spirit over our creature comforts.[4] As Rabbi Lamm explains:

I take the purpose of Sukkot to be a continuation of that of Yom Kippur. Just as on Yom Kippur, the various deprivations or afflictions teach us to rely upon God and be independent of material satisfactions… so on Sukkot do we learn that it is, after all, possible to do without our well-built apartments, our beautiful homes, our well appointed chambers; that even in a mere hut or booth we can attain simhah (joy) if we rely upon God. So is it true of all our worldly possessions: they are good to have, but they are not necessary for survival or even for the attainment of happiness.[5]

There is nothing wrong with our homes and material possessions, Rabbi Lamm stresses time and again, but nor are they essential for our survival or our happiness.

Elsewhere, he inverts the argument: just as our worldly possessions are not essential for our well-being, we are not always essential to the functioning of our workplaces. We are often tempted to believe that our businesses cannot function without us, even for a few days. But Rabbi Lamm insists that often enough, this is simply not true. Those who run businesses with multiple employees, for example, can have others carry the load for a time. Leaving our homes for the sukka reminds us that we can step away from our sources of security – especially our jobs – for a week, and everything will turn out okay. This is both humbling and liberating: humbling because it suggests that we may not be essential for our businesses’ success, and liberating because it frees us up to explore other facets of our lives beyond the boardroom.[6]

The Implications of Materialism

Rabbi Lamm also points to two implications of materialism. One is the modern tendency to measure success in artificial, quantifiable ways. Adopting a superficial perspective, he observes, we often measure a shul’s success materially: by its numbers, size, and furnishings. But instead of relying on these external measures, he urges us to pay the most attention to the depth of worshipers’ experiences and the effect on their souls. Spiritual success is exceedingly hard to quantify. But if we measure a synagogue’s success merely using observable data, we allow materialism to shape our values in ways that are inconsistent with the spiritual ideals at the heart of synagogue life.[7]

The second is the danger of becoming preoccupied with business matters during the holiday. Rabbi Lamm cites the Gemara (Yoma 21b), which teaches that before taking leave of the Temple at the end of Sukkot, the people would look to the direction the wind blew as a mysterious indicator of their anticipated prosperity in the year to come. Yet he warns against letting worries about the coming year intrude on the joy of the holiday. Today, we might call this mindfulness.[8]

The Search for Meaning

But Rabbi Lamm refuses to let the matter rest with the costs of materialism. In a sermon on Kohelet, he suggests that we sometimes pursue possessions to fill a hole in our spiritual lives. The author of Kohelet lived an incredibly opulent life, but it did not help him attain the happiness he sought. As Rabbi Lamm puts it, “Buying all your heart desires, attempting to distract yourself from the harsh realities of life by multiplying possessions, simply will not work.” If material excess is sometimes an attempt to find happiness or to distract ourselves from what is missing, then addressing it requires something positive beyond simply calling for restraint.[9]

Rabbi Lamm points to two ways to loosen materialism’s hold. The first is faith. He cites a classic Zohar (Tetzaveh 186b) which teaches that the sukka provides tzila dimeheimnuta, shade of faith. This, for Rabbi Lamm, is the essential theme of the holiday. Sukkot teaches not just that we can get along without our material possessions, but that we can do so because our financial security ultimately depends on God. Nor, he adds, is this only true of financial security. We also face physical, spiritual, social, and societal insecurities. Faith that God ultimately guides our lives can offer a measure of emotional equilibrium.[10]

Rabbi Lamm’s second insight goes even deeper: we sometimes turn to possessions to fill a void in our spiritual lives. After quoting John Kenneth Galbraith, who called his generation “the affluent society,” Rabbi Lamm asks:

Are we fulfilled or serene? Look at the picture: a dreadfully high rate of mental disease, an increased suicide incidence, growing crime and delinquency in our cities, a “beat” generation that considers all of contemporary culture a silly joke, and intellectuals who wallow in the deepest despair. And all this not because we have a great deal, but because we have not a clear conception of what is enduring and what is ephemeral in all that we have. We have failed to discriminate between the essential and the expendable, between what we can do without and what we can not and ought not be able to do without. The proper appreciation of the meaning of Sukkot can, therefore, make the difference between a life of happiness, contentment, serenity, and meaningfulness on the one hand or disillusionment, hunger, misery, and a sense of futility on the other.

In other words, acquiring more possessions cannot, by itself, fill the absence of meaning in our lives. At most, it may merely distract us from noticing that absence.[11]

Rabbi Lamm explains that this is why we leave our homes for temporary dwellings, where we can step away from our routines and attend to higher matters. In this context, he mentions the “dead hour,” in which Breslov chasidim used to designate one hour each day when they were “dead” to the world and free to focus on personal reflection. “One dead hour a day,” Rabbi Lamm added, “can make all of life worth living!” Living in the sukka likewise gives us room to reflect on our priorities and renew our spiritual lives.[12]

What Lies Beneath Materialism

What would it mean to take Rabbi Lamm’s diagnosis seriously? If possessions promise security, telling people to want less will likely be ineffective. For Rabbi Lamm, bitachon offers a way to loosen the hold of material security. The sukka allows us to experience our dependence on God for a week.

And if possessions substitute for the emptiness of a life without enough meaning, Rabbi Lamm asks what else might bring people a sense of fulfillment. I find it striking that Thank You Hashem has resonated especially in some of our more affluent communities. Its appeal in those settings suggests that material comfort may sometimes appear precisely where people lack a sense of meaning. That in turn suggests that richer spiritual lives are also likely to make material pleasures less compelling.

Of course, the cost of Orthodox life, the pressure to keep up, the challenge of raising children with strong values who include others, and the ordinary desire to acquire more all remain important parts of the conversation. But Rabbi Lamm’s insights suggest that materialism may be both a cause of real harm and a symptom of deeper needs we have yet to properly address.

In Parshat Ekev, Moshe warns that once acquire wealth, we may come to worship idolatry (Devarim 8:11–14). This suggests that prosperity can lead us to forget God. But immediately before that warning, the Torah commands: “You shall eat, be satisfied, and bless Hashem your God” (8:10). The next verse begins, hishamer lekha pen tishkach – take care lest you forget. Read in order, the blessing over food seems to offer a way to guard against the forgetting that prosperity can cause. In fact, Midrash Lekach Tov makes this connection explicit, reading the warning against forgetting God as referring to someone who eats without reciting a prayer or a blessing, thereby casting off the yoke of Heaven.[13]

A blessing acknowledges that even what we have worked to acquire ultimately comes from God. It also places the enjoyment of what we have within the framework of a larger meaningful religious life.[14] The Torah’s insight – and that of Rabbi Lamm – is that faith and a life rich in meaning have a key role to play in keeping material comfort from becoming the center of our lives.

—

[1] The increased attention to this subject in no way diminishes the very real challenges of poverty in the Orthodox and wider Jewish community, as well as the cost of the North American Orthodox lifestyle, which is increasingly prohibitive and severely stressful for so many.

[2] See Jacob J. Schacter, “‘A Rich Man’s Club’? The Founding of The Jewish Center,” in Zev Eleff (ed.), A Century at the Center: Orthodox Judaism and The Jewish Center (Toby Press: Jerusalem, 2019), 211–251.

[3] This, Rabbi Lamm suggests, is why one who is uncomfortable (mitzta’er) is exempt from the mitzvah of sitting in the sukka. Sukkot teaches us to manage with a bit of discomfort and strive for higher religious goods. If we cannot do so, we have failed to learn the purpose of the mitzvah, and we may as well return inside.

[4] “On Doing Without,” 1960. All sermons cited in this essay appear on the Lamm Legacy site, lammlegacy.org.

[5] “Sukkot Without Suffering,” 1975.

[6] “Indispensability: Myth and Fact,” 1963. Elsewhere, he uses this idea to propose another explanation for the exemption of mitzta’er. People who suffer or are sick often quickly recalibrate and focus on the most essential things in life. One who learns that she has a day to live will often radically reorder her priorities. For a similar reason, the mitzta’er has already been reminded about life’s ultimate priorities. Such an individual has therefore learned the lesson of the sukka and is exempt (“The Ark and the Tablets,” 1962).

[7] “Save and Prosper,” 1959.

[8] “Which Way the Wind Blows,” 1966.

[9] “What Happiness Is Not,” 1964.

[10] “In the Shadow of Faith,” 1959.

[11] “On Doing Without,” 1960.

[12] “Indispensability: Myth and Fact,” 1963.

[13] Lekach Tov to Devarim 8:11: “זה הפורק עול מלכות שמים אוכל בלא תפלה בלא ברכה.”

[14] For a related mystical connection between the divine name in this verse and the language of blessing, see Rabbeinu Bahya to Devarim 8:11: “כבר ידעת כי משה יזכיר בכל משנה תורה ה׳ אלהיך והוא העולם אשר קדשנו במצותיו בסוד הברכה, והבן זה.”

עברית

נִכְנַס‭ ‬לְמָקוֹם‭ ‬שֶׁנִכְנַס
וְעָמַד‭ ‬בְּמָקוֹם‭ ‬שֶׁעָמַד
רָחַץ‭ ‬יָדָיו‭ ‬רַגְלָיו
,טָבַל‭ ‬עָלָה‭ ‬וְנִסְתַּפַּג
בָּא‭ ‬מִמָקוֹם‭ ‬שֶׁהוּא‭ ‬בָּא
וְהָלַךְ⁠‭ ‬לְמָקוֹם‭ ‬שֶׁהָלַךְ⁠
פָּשַׁט‭ ‬בִּגְדֵי‭ ‬הַחֹל
לָבַשׁ⁠‭ ‬בִּגְדֵי‭ ‬לָבָן
‭ ‬
וְכָךְ⁠‭ ‬הָיָה‭ ‬אוֹמֵר
אָנָא הַשֵּׁם,‬ כַּפֵּר‭ ‬לַחֲטָאִים‭ ‬לַעֲווֹנוֹת‭ ‬וְלַפְּשָׁעִים
,שֶׁחָטָאתִי‭ ‬לְפָנֶיךָ⁠‭ ‬אֲנִי‭ ‬וּבֵיתִי
וְאִם‭ ‬אָדָם‭ ‬הָיָה‭ ‬יָכוֹל‭ ‬לִזְכֹּר
אֶת‭ ‬הַפְּגָמִים‭ ,‬אֶת‭ ‬הַחֶסְרוֹנוֹת
אֶת‭ ‬כָּל‭ ‬הַפְּשָׁעִים‭ ,‬אֶת‭ ‬כָּל‭ ‬הָעֲווֹנוֹת

בֶּטַח‭ ‬כָּךְ⁠‭ ‬הָיָה‭ ‬מוֹנֶה
אַחַת‭ ,‬אַחַת‭ ‬וְאַחַת‭ ,‬אַחַת‭ ‬וּשְׁתַּיִם
,אַחַת‭ ‬וְשָׁלוֹשׁ⁠‭ ,‬אַחַת‭ ‬וְאַרְבַּע‭ ,‬אַחַת‭ ‬וְחָמֵשׁ⁠
יָשָׁר‭ ‬הָיָה‭ ‬מִתְיָאֵשׁ⁠
כִּי‭ ‬לֹא‭ ‬יָכוֹל‭ ‬הָיָה‭ ‬לָשֵׂאת
,אֶת‭ ‬הַמְרִירוּת‭ ,‬הַחֵטְא
אֶת‭ ‬הַבּוּשָׁה,‬ אֶת‭ ‬הַפִסְפוּס
אֶת‭ ‬הַהֶפְסֵד

וְהַכֹּהֲנִים‭ ‬וְהָעָם‭ ‬הָעוֹמְדִים‭ ‬בָּעֲזָרָה
כְּשֶׁהָיוּ⁠‭ ‬שׁוֹמְעִים‭ ‬אֶת‭ ‬שֵׁם‭ ‬הַשֵּׁם ‬הַמְפֹרָשׁ⁠
,יוֹצֵא‭ ‬מִפִּי‭ ‬כֹּהֵן‭ ‬גָּדוֹל
הָיוּ⁠‭ ‬כּוֹרְעִים‭ ‬מִשְׁתַּחֲוִים‭ ‬וְנוֹפְלִים‭ ‬עַל‭ ‬פְּנֵיהֶם
בָּרוּךְ⁠‭ ‬שֵׁם‭ ‬כְּבוֹד‭ ‬מַלְכוּתוֹ⁠‭ ‬לְעוֹלָם‭ ‬וָעֶד

פָּסַע‭ ‬לְמָקוֹם‭ ‬שֶׁפָּסַע
פָּנָיו‭ ‬לַקֹדֶשׁ⁠‭ ‬אֲחוֹרָיו‭ ‬לַהֵיכַל
,בְּלֹא‭ ‬רְבָב‭ ‬הָיוּ⁠‭ ‬שָׁוִים‭ ‬פִּיו‭ ‬וּמַעֲשָׂיו
בָּא‭ ‬מִמָקוֹם‭ ‬שֶׁהוּא‭ ‬בָּא
וְהָלַךְ⁠‭ ‬לְמָקוֹם‭ ‬שֶׁהָלַךְ⁠
פָּשַׁט‭ ‬בִּגְדֵי‭ ‬לָבָן
לָבַשׁ⁠‭ ‬בִּגְדֵי‭ ‬זָהָב
‭
וְכָךְ⁠‭ ‬הָיָה‭ ‬אוֹמֵר
אָנָא‭ ‬הַשֵּׁם, ‬כַּפֵּר‭ ‬לַחֲטָאִים‭ ‬לַעֲווֹנוֹת‭ ‬וְלַפְּשָׁעִים
,שֶׁחָטָאתִי‭ ‬לְפָנֶיךָ⁠‭ ‬אֲנִי‭ ‬וּבֵיתִי
וְאִם‭ ‬אָדָם‭ ‬הָיָה‭ ‬יָכוֹל‭ ‬לִזְכֹּר
אֶת‭ ‬הַחֲסָדִים‭ ,‬אֶת‭ ‬הַטוֹבוֹת
אֶת‭ ‬כָּל‭ ‬הָרַחֲמִים‭ ,‬אֶת‭ ‬כָּל‭ ‬הַיְשׁוּעוֹת
‭
בֶּטַח‭ ‬כָּךְ⁠‭ ‬הָיָה‭ ‬מוֹנֶה
,אַחַת‭ ,‬אַחַת‭ ‬וְאַחַת‭ ,‬אַחַת‭ ‬וּשְׁתַּיִם
אַחַת‭ ‬מֵאֶלֶף‭ ,‬אַלְפֵי‭ ‬אֲלָפִים‭ ,‬וְרֹב‭ ‬רִבֵּי‭ ‬רְבָבוֹת
נִסִים‭ ‬נִפְלָאוֹת
שֶׁעָשִׂיתָ⁠‭ ‬עִמָנוּ⁠
יָמִים‭ ‬וְלֵילוֹת

וְהַכֹּהֲנִים‭ ‬וְהָעָם‭ ‬הָעוֹמְדִים‭ ‬בָּעֲזָרָה
כְּשֶׁהָיוּ⁠‭ ‬שׁוֹמְעִים‭ ‬אֶת‭ ‬שֵׁם‭ ‬הַשֵּׁם ‬הַמְפֹרָשׁ⁠
,יוֹצֵא‭ ‬מִפִּי‭ ‬כֹּהֵן‭ ‬גָּדוֹל
הָיוּ⁠‭ ‬כּוֹרְעִים‭ ‬מִשְׁתַּחֲוִים‭ ‬וְנוֹפְלִים‭ ‬עַל‭ ‬פְּנֵיהֶם
בָּרוּךְ⁠‭ ‬שֵׁם‭ ‬כְּבוֹד‭ ‬מַלְכוּתוֹ⁠‭ ‬לְעוֹלָם‭ ‬וָעֶד

יָצָא‭ ‬מִמָקוֹם‭ ‬שֶׁיָצָא
,וְרָעַד‭ ‬בְּמָקוֹם‭ ‬שֶׁעָמַד
פָּשַׁט‭ ‬בִּגְדֵי‭ ‬זָהָב
לָבַשׁ⁠‭ ‬בִּגְדֵי‭ ‬עַצְמוֹ⁠

וְכָל‭ ‬הָעָם‭ ‬וְהַכֹּהֲנִים
,הָיוּ⁠‭ ‬מְלַוִים‭ ‬אוֹתוֹ⁠‭ ‬לְבֵיתוֹ⁠
וְיוֹם‭ ‬טוֹב‭ ‬לְאוֹהֲבָיו
כִּי‭ ‬נִסְלַח‭ ‬לְכָל‭ ‬עֲדַת‭ ‬יִשְׂרָאֵל

אַשְׁרֵי‭ ‬הָעָם‭ ‬שֶׁכָּכָה‭ ‬ל‭ וֹ⁠
,אַשְׁרֵי‭ ‬הָעָם‭ ‬שֶׁה’‬ אֱלֹקָיו
אַשְׁרֵי‭ ‬הָעָם‭ ‬שֶׁכָּכָה‭ ‬ל‭ וֹ⁠
אַשְׁרֵי‭ ‬הָעָם‭ ‬שֶׁה’‬ אֱלֹקָיו

כְּאֹהֶל‭ ‬הַנִמְתָּח‭ ‬בְּדָרֵי‭ ‬מַעְלָה‭ – ‬מַרְאֵה‭ ‬כֹהֵן
,כִּבְרָקִים‭ ‬הַיוֹצְאִים‭ ‬מִזִיו‭ ‬הַחַיוֹת‭ – ‬מַרְאֵה‭ ‬כֹהֵן
כִּדְמוּת‭ ‬הַקֶשֶׁת‭ ‬בְּתוֹךְ⁠‭ ‬הֶעָנָן‭ – ‬מַרְאֵה‭ ‬כֹהֵן
כְּחֶסֶד‭ ‬הַנִתָּן‭ ‬עַל‭ ‬פְּנֵי‭ ‬חָתָן‭ – ‬מַרְאֵה‭ ‬כֹהֵן

וְהַכֹּהֲנִים‭ ‬וְהָעָם‭ ‬הָעוֹמְדִים‭ ‬בָּעֲזָרָה
כְּשֶׁהָיוּ⁠‭ ‬שׁוֹמְעִים‭ ‬אֶת‭ ‬שֵׁם‭ ‬הַשֵּׁם ‬הַמְפֹרָשׁ⁠
,יוֹצֵא‭ ‬מִפִּי‭ ‬כֹּהֵן‭ ‬גָּדוֹל
הָיוּ⁠‭ ‬כּוֹרְעִים‭ ‬מִשְׁתַּחֲוִים‭ ‬וְנוֹפְלִים‭ ‬עַל‭ ‬פְּנֵיהֶם
בָּרוּךְ⁠‭ ‬שֵׁם‭ ‬כְּבוֹד‭ ‬מַלְכוּתוֹ⁠‭ ‬לְעוֹלָם‭ ‬וָעֶד

English

He entered the place he entered
and stood in the place he stood.
He washed his hands and feet,
immersed, came up, and dried himself.
He came from the place from which he came
and went to the place to which he went.
He removed his mundane clothes
and put on white garments.

And this is what he would say:
Please, God, atone for the sins, the iniquities, and the transgressions
that I have sinned before You, I and my household.

And if a person could remember
the flaws, the deficiencies,
all the transgressions, all the iniquities,
surely this is how he would count:

One, one and one, one and two,
one and three, one and four, one and five.

He would immediately despair,
because he could not bear
the bitterness, the sin,
the shame, the missed opportunities,
the loss.

And the priests and the nation standing in the courtyard,
when they would hear the Explicit Name of God
emerge from the mouth of the High Priest,
would kneel, bow, and fall upon their faces:

Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever.

He stepped to the place to which he stepped,
his face toward the sacred, his back toward the Sanctuary.
Without blemish, his mouth and his deeds were aligned.
He came from the place from which he came
and went to the place to which he went.
He removed the white garments
and put on garments of gold.

And this is what he would say:
Please, God, atone for the sins, the iniquities, and the transgressions
that I have sinned before You, I and my household.

And if a person could remember
the acts of kindness, the goodness,
all the mercy, all the deliverances,

surely this is how he would count:

One, one and one, one and two,
one out of a thousand, thousands upon thousands,
myriads upon myriads.

Miracles, wonders
that You have performed for us,
days and nights.

And the priests and the nation standing in the courtyard,
when they would hear the Explicit Name of God
emerge from the mouth of the High Priest,
would kneel, bow, and fall upon their faces:

Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever.

He emerged from the place from which he emerged
and trembled in the place where he had stood.
He removed the garments of gold
and put on his own clothes.

And all the nation and the priests
would accompany him to his home,
and it was a festival for those who loved him,
for the entire congregation of Israel had been forgiven.

Fortunate is the nation for whom it is so.
Fortunate is the nation whose God is the Lord.
Fortunate is the nation for whom it is so.
Fortunate is the nation whose God is the Lord.

Like a tent stretched across the heavenly realms – the appearance of the priest.
Like flashes of lightning emerging from the radiance of the celestial beings – the appearance of the priest.
Like the appearance of the rainbow within the cloud – the appearance of the priest.
Like grace bestowed upon the face of a bridegroom – the appearance of the priest.

And the priests and the nation standing in the courtyard,
when they would hear the Explicit Name of God
emerge from the mouth of the High Priest,
would kneel, bow, and fall upon their faces:

Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever.

Analysis

The traditional Avoda devotes enormous attention to sacrifices, blood, sprinklings, and the precise order of the service. Ribo largely omits the sacrificial mechanics, keeping the material that allows the Avoda to unfold as relatable spiritual drama.

The song begins, Nikhnas lemakom shenikhnas ve’amad bemakom she’amad – “He entered the place he entered and stood in the place he stood.” Ribo does not name the place, and he tells us almost nothing about the person entering it. The Kohen Gadol simply enters and stands.

Then rachatz, taval, ala venistappag – he washes his hands and feet, immerses, rises, and dries himself. The focus shifts from the space around him to his body.

Next comes a close parallel to the opening: Ba mimakom shehu ba vehalakh lemakom shehalakh – “He came from the place from which he came and went to the place to which he went.” The first and third parts of the stanza mirror one another: nikhnas/amad, then ba/halakh. Both describe movement through unnamed places.

The fourth part similarly parallels the second. First rachatz, taval, ala venistappag – he washes, immerses, rises, and dries himself. Then pashat and lavash – he removes his ordinary clothes and puts on white garments. In both cases, the language describes a physical change in state: first through purification of the body, then through a change of clothing.

So the stanza progresses from movement to transformation to movement to transformation. The first and third parts describe where the Kohen goes, the second and fourth what he does as he goes.

Counting Sin

Then we hear the Kohen Gadol’s confession: Vekhakh haya omer: Anna Hashem – “And this is what he would say: Please, God.” From there, Ribo shifts to imagining what would happen if a person could remember all of his failures and shortcomings.

That leads naturally to the counting. In the Avoda, the Kohen Gadol counts the blood sprinklings to make sure that each set is performed the prescribed number of times: achat, achat ve’achat, achat ushtayim. Ribo borrows that sequence and applies it to a person counting his own failures. The result is overwhelming. By five, Ribo says, a person who could really remember it all would despair.

Then we are outside again: Vehakohanim vehaam haomedim baazara. The Kohen acts inside, while the people wait outside. When they hear the Divine Name emerge from his mouth, they respond by falling together to the ground. The drama moves back and forth between the lone Kohen and the people waiting for him.

Stepping Back

But now the Kohen begins to withdraw: Pasa lemakom shepasa, panav lakodesh ve’achorav laheikhal – “He stepped to the place to which he stepped, his face toward the sacred, his back toward the Sanctuary.” The verb is now pasa. It is a smaller, perhaps more tentative movement than the opening nikhnas. He backs away without turning his face from the sacred.

Ribo adds, Belo revav hayu shavim piv umaasav – “Without blemish, his mouth and his deeds were aligned.” The wording recalls the rabbinic phrase piv velibbo shavin – one’s mouth and heart correspond – familiar from the laws of vows. For the first time, we get a glimpse of the person inside the ritual, although Ribo still does not tell us what he is thinking.

Again we hear, Ba mimakom shehu ba vehalakh lemakom shehalakh. The Kohen is still coming and going, but we have come to understand more clearly that he is in the midst of a spiritual odyssey.

Counting Again

Then the confession returns, followed by another Ve’im adam haya yakhol lizkor. This time Ribo asks what would happen if a person could remember all the kindness he has received. Again he invokes the Kohen Gadol’s counting formula, but then draws on the language of Nishmat: achat me’elef, alfei alafim verov rivei revavot – “one out of a thousand, thousands upon thousands, myriads upon myriads.” The ritual count has become a count of divine kindnesses too numerous to enumerate.

Then the language begins to expand. The passage started with adam, but it ends with the miracles she’asita immanu – “that You performed for us.” Again the priests and people bow.

Emerging

Then the language of the opening returns one last time: Yatza mimakom sheyatza veraad bemakom she’amad – “He emerged from the place from which he emerged and trembled in the place where he had stood.” At the beginning, he entered and stood, but now he trembles. Ribo does not tell us what happened to him internally, but the change in verbs is enough for us to know that it was profound.

Then, Pashat bigdei zahav, lavash bigdei atzmo – “He removed the garments of gold and put on his own clothes.” After all the entering, standing, stepping, coming, going, and changing of garments, the nearly anonymous Kohen who entered at the beginning now puts on bigdei atzmo, his own clothes.

The people accompany him home, and the song declares that the entire congregation of Israel has been forgiven.

Ashrei Haam and Mareh Kohen

Now, the tension breaks into Ashrei haam shekakha lo. The mood is suddenly exuberant. And in Ribo’s recording, when Mareh Kohen begins, the words Ashrei haam echo in the background. The Kohen’s and the people’s joy are one and the same.

Ribo is selective in the lines he takes from Mareh Kohen. He chooses the heavens, lightning, the rainbow in the cloud, and finally the grace on the face of a bridegroom. The Kohen is somehow both supernatural and profoundly human, all at the same time.

Then the song returns one final time to vehakohanim vehaam. The song closes on that note.

Taking a step back, the structure looks like this:

Or: A – B – C – D / A′ – B′ – C′ – D′ / A″ – E – F – D″.

Competing Narratives?

Having worked through the song closely, we can now see how unexpectedly puzzling it is. Most of “Seder HaAvoda” tells the story of the Kohen Gadol and the people. But alongside that story is Ribo’s personal meditation on sin and gratitude. Each is compelling in its own right, but it is not obvious how they fit together.

In fact, “Seder HaAvoda” has generated a fair number of articles and published sermons, some of which have noted this difficulty, but none quite so pointedly. One reading I have seen treats the passages beginning Ve’im adam haya yakhol lizkor as the inner thoughts of the Kohen Gadol. On this reading, the traditional Avoda tells us what he did, and Ribo imagines what he might have been thinking as he counted – first about sin, then about divine kindness. Another interpretation I have seen goes in the opposite direction. According to this approach, the Kohen Gadol and the Temple service are primarily the context for Ribo’s larger meditation on guilt and gratitude. The Avoda supplies the language, but the real subject is the contemporary worshipper, who first reckons with his failures and then with the overwhelming abundance of divine kindness.

To my mind, neither reading is persuasive. If the two meditations belong to the Kohen Gadol, why does Ribo switch from the High Priest to “adam”? When Ribo wants to tell us something about the Kohen himself, he does so directly. And if the Kohen is mainly a frame for Ribo’s meditation, the proportions of the song are hard to explain. The lion’s share is focused on the Kohen, and it is his emergence – not either of the personal meditations – that provides the climax.

To better understand the relationship between the song’s two narratives, then, I think it’s instructive to step back and look at the interviews Ribo gave when the song first appeared. Authorial intent does not exhaust the meaning of a composition, but here his comments are unusually helpful, particularly because they illuminate the interplay between the two parallel narratives. Ribo explained that the idea first came to him during the Avoda in Yom Kippur Musaf two years before the song was released. He found the experience extraordinarily powerful on a personal level, and it inspired his own reflections. He wanted to take what he had experienced and share it with others.

In the interviews, he also pointed to another motivation for the song. The sacrifices, blood sprinklings, and technical details can make the Seder HaAvoda difficult to approach. Ribo said that his goal was to make the Avoda accessible in a simple way and to bring his listeners into the experience – especially the Kohen Gadol entering the Holy of Holies once a year and the tense onlookers praying that he would complete the service and emerge safely. The orchestral arrangement and large choir, Ribo added, were meant to heighten that drama and give the listeners a taste of the atmosphere of the Leviim’s service in the Temple.

A year later, Ribo was asked whether he had imagined people who seemed far from Judaism singing “Seder HaAvoda” with such spiritual intensity. He answered that by then he had stopped classifying some songs as “for dattim” and others as “for chilonim.” Once he saw how strongly people with very different religious backgrounds connected to explicitly Jewish songs, he came to feel that dividing them that way was artificial and missed the point.

This account fits the song remarkably well. The two strands are not two explanations of the same event. They are two narratives running alongside one another. The first is the drama of the Kohen Gadol. The second is what that drama awakens in Ribo.

That, I think, is why the song moves so smoothly from the Kohen’s confession to Ve’im adam haya yakhol lizkor. Ribo is accompanying the Kohen, and the Kohen’s Avoda generates his own reflection. The Kohen counts the sprinklings to perform the ritual correctly. Ribo takes the same achat, achat ve’achat and begins counting personal failures and divine kindnesses.

But unlike his own, Ribo is notably restrained about the Kohen’s own inner world. At first, he gives us almost nothing but choreography. The Kohen enters, stands, washes, immerses, changes clothes, comes, and goes. That is precisely how Seder HaAvoda can strike the modern worshipper – as a long description of external movements whose inner meaning is difficult to see.

Gradually, however, the choreography begins to disclose an inner experience. The hints we have already seen – the journey and outfit changes, the purifications, piv umaasav, the movement from standing to trembling, and bigdei atzmo – suggest an intense spiritual journey whose precise contents remain hidden from us.

That also influences how we understand the drama of the people waiting outside. At first they simply stand in the courtyard while the Kohen performs the service inside. But once we begin to sense what is happening to him, their presence takes on greater tension. He is passing through an overwhelming religious experience seeking forgiveness on behalf of the nation, while they can do nothing but wait, listen, and bow.

The end of the song, then, is a release from all the tension that has been mounting. The Kohen emerges, and the people accompany him home in celebration. Ashrei haam breaks out. The ecstatic description of the Kohen and the exuberance of the onlookers are one.

There is a final paradox. The Avoda is arguably Judaism’s most formal piece of religious choreography. The Kohen Gadol secludes himself for seven days, wears prescribed garments, enters and exits prescribed spaces, performs prescribed actions, and recites prescribed words. We might assume that such a ritual leaves little room for personal authenticity. But Ribo suggests the opposite. Belo revav hayu shavim piv umaasav: the formal act and the person performing it are in perfect alignment. And when the service ends, the Kohen does not simply return to bigdei chol, ordinary clothing. He puts on bigdei atzmo, his own clothes.

Then comes Mareh Kohen. The Kohen Gadol is compared to heavenly lightning, a rainbow in the cloud, and a bridegroom. He is at once otherworldly and unmistakably human. The Avoda has not erased the Kohen Gadol’s personal identity. If anything, its intensely prescribed form has mysteriously brought him closer to himself, even if we may never know exactly how.

That helps explain why “Seder HaAvoda” resonates so strongly with religious and secular Israelis alike. Unlike our initial impression of the Avoda, outward religious behavior does not exhaust a person’s inner spiritual life. The people standing outside cannot see what is happening within the Kohen Gadol, just as we cannot know what another person experiences before God – including someone who may not be halakhically observant.

This is how, even as the song narrates two parallel stories, they are deeply intertwined. Ribo wants to recover the inner spiritual dimensions of the Avoda. The Kohen, he suggests, has one private encounter with the Avoda, largely inscrutable to everyone outside it. Ribo encounters the Avoda millennia later and finds within it his own meditation on failure and gratitude. Another listener may find something else. The ritual is fixed, but what it awakens in the person is deeply personal – and not always visible to others. Ribo’s gift is to let us glimpse that inner life from the outside, and to invite us to find within the Avoda a meaning of our own.

In his early song “Tocho Ratzuf Ahavah,” Ishay Ribo reverses that intuition. Rather than treating Yom Kippur as an exception, he sees it as a model for the rest of the year. The compassionate God we encounter at Ne’ilah does not appear for one extraordinary hour and then disappear. He is the God we encounter all year long.

To see how Ribo makes that argument, let’s look at the lyrics, first in Hebrew and then in English.

עברית

חוֹשֵׂךְ שִׁבְטוֹ, מִבְּלִי לַחֲשֹׂךְ אֶת אַהֲבָתוֹ
מוֹשִׁיט אֶת שַׁרְבִיטוֹ, לְכָל הַפּוֹשֵׁט יָדוֹ
עַיִן לֹא מַעְלִים, מֵעַל צֹאן מַרְעִיתוֹ
גַּם כְּשֶׁאָנוּ שִׁבְרֵי כֵלִים, עוֹדֵנוּ כְּלִי חֶמְדָּתוֹ

פִּזְמוֹן: תּוֹכוֹ רָצוּף אַהֲבָה, רָצוּף אַהֲבָה
בֵּיתוֹ צָפוּף לִרְוָחָה, צָפוּף לִרְוָחָה
מַמְצִיא לָנוּ מְחִילָה, לֹא רַק בִּשְׁעַת הַנְּעִילָה
לְךָ דוּמִיָּה תְהִלָּה

יָדָיו רָב לוֹ, וְאֵין רֵאשִׁית לְרֵאשִׁיתוֹ
גַּם הַשִּׁירָה כְּחוֹל הַיָּם, הִיא רַק מִקְצָת שִׁבְחוֹ
לִפְנִים מִשּׁוּרַת הַדִּין, מַנְהִיג אֶת עוֹלָמוֹ
וּמִלִּפְנֵי הַמַּלְאָכִים, דּוֹרֵשׁ בִּשְׁלוֹם עַמּוֹ

עָתִיד הוּא לָתֵת פְּאֵר תַּחַת אֵפֶר
שֶׁמֶן שָׂשׂוֹן תַּחַת אֵבֶל
מַעֲטֵה תְהִלָּה תַּחַת רוּחַ כֵּהָה

English

He withholds His rod, without withholding His love.
He extends His scepter to anyone who extends his hand.
He does not avert His eye from the flock of His pasture.
Even when we are broken vessels, we remain His cherished vessel.

His interior is lined with love, lined with love.
His house is crowded for spaciousness, crowded for spaciousness.
He grants us forgiveness, not only at the hour of Ne’ilah.
To You, silence is praise.

His hands are great, and there is no beginning to His beginning.
Even if song were as abundant as the sand of the sea,
it would be only a fraction of His praise.
Beyond the strict line of justice, He leads His world.
And before the angels, He seeks the welfare of His people.

He is destined to give beauty in place of ashes,
oil of joy in place of mourning,
a mantle of praise in place of a faint spirit.

Analysis

The opening line, Chosekh shivto, mibeli lachasokh et ahavato, draws directly from Mishlei: “Chosekh shivto soneh beno, ve’ohavo shicharo musar” – one who withholds his rod hates his son, while one who loves him seeks to discipline him (Proverbs 13:24). But instead of simply quoting the verse, Ribo reverses it. In the verse, chosekh shivto and ohavo are incompatible: withholding discipline indicates a lack of love. Ribo, however, says that God can withhold the rod without withholding His love for humanity.

The next line develops the image of the rod: Moshit et sharvito, lekhol haposhet yado. The internal rhyme between sharvito in the second line and shivto in the first makes the two lines a natural pair. The scepter, of course, comes from the book of Esther. Esther approaches Achashverosh knowing that her life depends on whether the king chooses to extend his golden scepter. Ribo casts God in the role of Achashverosh, except that the suspense has disappeared: this King reliably extends His scepter. This is a pattern Ribo will repeat throughout the song: he takes familiar biblical or rabbinic language and recasts it in the direction of greater generosity.

Then, more subtly, Ribo folds in another Purim phrase: kol haposhet yado, the rule that on Purim anyone who extends a hand is given charity. We do not stop to investigate whether the petitioner is deserving. We are Esther approaching the King and the poor person standing at the door, and God does not interrogate us before extending His favor.

Broken Vessels

Where the first two lines seem to be remarkably broad – any person who extends a hand is received – the last two lines in the stanza turn more narrowly toward Israel:

Ayin lo maalim, me’al tzon mar’ito
Gam keshe’anu shivrei kelim, odenu keli chemdato.

God does not turn His eye away from “the flock of His pasture.” Even when we are broken vessels, we remain His cherished vessel.

The next line, another Yom Kippur echo, sharpens the same reversal. Ayin lo maalim recalls the High Holiday piyyut Vekhol Maaminim: hasovel umaalim ayin misorerim, in which we say that God averts His eye from those who rebel against Him. Ribo, however, reverses the language and says that He does not avert His eye from the flock of His pasture.

There is no sense that tzon mar’ito contradicts kol haposhet yado. God’s openness to whoever approaches and His special attachment to Israel are simply different expressions of the same overflowing divine generosity.

Shivrei kelim calls to mind several rabbinic texts. Vayikra Rabba 7:2, drawing on the biblical image of the brokenhearted, says that while human beings prefer to use whole vessels, God, in His generosity of spirit, specifically makes use of broken ones. In a parallel vein, the Talmud (Berakhot 8b, Menachot 99a) insists that a Torah scholar who has forgotten his learning must still be treated with honor, because luchot veshivrei luchot munachin baaron – both the whole tablets and the shattered tablets were placed in the Ark. By implicitly comparing the Jewish people to the shattered luchot, Ribo underscores that we remain sacred and beloved enough to belong at the center of God’s presence in this world.

Then Ribo draws on Rabbi Akiva in Pirkei Avot: “Chavivin Yisrael shenitan lahem keli chemdah” – Israel is beloved because it was given a precious vessel, namely the Torah. Ribo redirects the image from the Torah to the Jewish people. And chemdah is a vivid phrase, suggesting something desired or treasured. Even when they are broken, then, Israel remains the object of divine chemdah; their relationship is not merely instrumental. The syntax reinforces the point: gam… odenu. Even when… still. Israel’s brokenness does not alter the relationship.

Tocho Ratzuf Ahavah

With the refrain comes the phrase that gives the song its title: Tocho ratzuf ahavah. The words come from Shir HaShirim 3:10, but Ribo is especially drawing on a long tradition of rabbinic interpretation that connects the verse to the sanctuary and the objects at its center. Shir HaShirim Zuta, for example, reads “Tocho ratzuf ahavah – elu haluchot” – “its interior is lined with love” refers to the tablets. Yalkut Shimoni identifies the verse variously with the merit of Torah and the righteous, and with the Divine Presence. Rashi, drawing on Chazal, makes the Temple setting explicit: “Tocho ratzuf – sadur beritzpat ahavah, aron vekapporet ukheruvim veluchot” – its interior is arranged with a floor of love: the Ark, its cover, the cherubs, and the tablets.

On these readings, tocho ratzuf ahavah evokes the innermost space of the sanctuary. And the cherubs too are associated by Chazal with an explicit image of divine love and intimacy. Yoma 54a says that when Israel came to the Temple for the pilgrimage festivals, the curtain was rolled back and they were shown the cherubs intertwined with one another, while the priests told them, “Re’u chibbatkhem lifnei haMakom kechibbat zakhar unkeva” – “See how beloved you are before God, like the love of a male and female.”

The next line, beito tzafuf lirvacha, is one of the richest in the song but also the hardest to decipher. It plays on two statements in Pirkei Avot. The first appears in Avot 1:5: Yehi veitkha patuach lirvacha, veyihyu aniyim benei vetekha – “Let your house be open wide, and let the poor be members of your household.” The second appears in Avot 5:5, among the miracles of the Temple: omedim tzefufim umishtachavim revachim – the pilgrim worshippers stood crowded together but had ample room when they bowed.

Ribo ingeniously combines the two. Beito evokes the home that is patuach lirvacha, giving the Temple an almost domestic quality. God’s sanctuary is His home, open to all who approach in need. The poor person who extended a hand at the beginning of the song has been welcomed inside the house.

Ribo also subtly transforms the Temple miracle. Avot describes the worshippers as omedim tzefufim umishtachavim revachim; Ribo compresses the entire phrase into tzafuf lirvacha. He condenses the language in a way that embodies God’s behavior: Ribo too constricts the words in order to communicate the expansiveness of the Divine. Ishai’s phrase is also stronger than the original: the people are not merely crowded yet spacious, but tzafuf lirvacha – crowded for spaciousness, as though God created the initial constriction only to perform a miracle and give relief to humanity. Here again, we find the theme of reversal: the crowded place becomes spacious, and the outsider becomes a member of the household.

Yom Kippur Beyond Yom Kippur

Then Ribo says explicitly what the song has already implied: Mamtzi lanu mechilah, lo rak bish’at haNe’ilah. This phrase rewrites one of the best-known lines of Ne’ilah: Hamtzeh lanu mechilah bish’at haNe’ilah. Ribo adds two words: lo rak. God creates forgiveness for us not just at Ne’ilah but all year round. What’s more, in another reversal, whereas the prayer requests mechilah, Ribo inverts it and asserts that God does, in fact, forgive us.

In the final line of the refrain, the song shifts register. Until now, God has been described almost entirely in the third person: shivto, ahavato, sharvito, beito. Then suddenly we hear, Lekha dumiyya tehilla – To You, silence is praise, a direct quote from Tehillim 65:2. Here, Ribo is no longer describing God but addressing Him directly. It seems that all the language about God’s love and generosity ultimately leads to a deeper relationship, to standing before Him. The line is also far shorter than all the others in the song, enacting its suggestion that adequate praise ultimately gives way to silence.

Yadav Rav Lo

The next stanza seems, at first, to shift gears: Yadav rav lo, ve’ein reishit lereshito, gam hashirah kechol hayam, hi rak miktzat shivcho. These lines seem to introduce a different theme: divine greatness. But as Ribo will soon make clear, these themes are really one and the same. The God whose mercy Yom Kippur reveals is also the God whose greatness the stanza now celebrates.

Ve’ein reishit lereshito closely echoes Yigdal: rishon ve’ein reishit lereshito – God is first, with no beginning to His beginning. And gam hashira kechol hayam, hi rak miktzat shivcho recalls Nishmat: Illu finu male shira kayam – even if our mouths were filled with song like the sea, we could not adequately thank God.

The phrase yadav rav lo comes from Moshe’s blessing of Yehuda: Yadav rav lo, ve’ezer mitzarav tihyeh (Deut. 33:7). Ribo takes language originally describing Yehuda’s strength and applies it to God. But the continuation of the verse is suggestive: ve’ezer mitzarav tihyeh – “and may You be a help against his foes.” The verse moves from strength to divine assistance. Ribo compresses the two ideas: God’s greatness lies not simply in power, but in the use of that power to help others.

Ribo continues, Lifnim mishurat hadin, manhig et olamo. Having just described a God whose greatness is beyond measure, he now explains the nature of that greatness. And notably, that greatness is not manifest in creation, military power, mastery over nature, knowledge, or wisdom. Instead, it is the fact that He governs His world lifnim mishurat hadin.

Indeed, Ribo’s language appears to be playing on Berakhot 7a, which depicts God Himself praying that His mercy overcome His anger and that He conduct Himself (mitnaheg) with His children lifnim mishurat hadin.

The song does not leave Yom Kippur behind when it turns to divine greatness. The God revealed at Ne’ilah – the God who forgives rather than insists on strict judgment – is precisely the God whose greatness Ribo is now describing. Divine greatness, in other words, is expressed in mercy.

The King Becomes the Advocate

The next line goes further, in dramatic fashion: Umilifnei hamalakhim, doresh bishlom ammo. Jewish tradition often imagines angels serving as prosecutors or advocates in the heavenly court. Michael, in particular, serves as Israel’s defender. But a few Midrashic texts go further. Midrash Tehillim 20 imagines Michael falling silent before the accusations against Israel, at which point God Himself takes up their defense. And Yalkut Shimoni (Devarim 852) has God declare that in the future, “ani bikhvodi naaseh lakhem sanegor” – “I Myself, in My glory, will become your advocate.” Ribo seems to be invoking that radical imagery: God loves the Jewish people so much that He does not merely sit as Judge but also advocates for His people.

In this line, the Purim language reaches its climax. At the beginning of the song, we recall, God played the role of Achashverosh and extended His mercy to anyone who asks, like on Purim. Now He is doresh bishlom ammo, which recalls the description of Mordechai at the end of the book of Esther: doresh tov le’ammo vedover shalom lekhol zar’o. God here is changing roles. He is not merely the King before whom Israel pleads; He now takes on the guise of Mordechai, the one who seeks the welfare of the nation.

The repeated interplay between Purim and Yom Kippur is, of course, not incidental. The Tikkunei Zohar famously links the two days, declaring that “Purim is called after Yom haKippurim,” a connection later developed into the familiar reading of Kippurim as kePurim, like Purim. If Purim – a day that could hardly look more different from Yom Kippur – reveals the same divine compassion, there could be little greater testament to the fact that God’s mercy extends throughout the year, even at times when the divine presence is hidden.

Redemption as Reversal

And then, in the transitional music, the song turns to the future: Atid hu latet pe’er tachat efer, shemen sason tachat evel, ma’ateh tehillah tachat ruach kehah.

The language is taken almost directly from Isaiah 61. But we can appreciate Ribo’s choice even more when we see the biblical context:

Ruach Adonai Elohim alai, yaan mashach Adonai oti. Levaser anavim, shelachani lachavosh lenishberei lev, likro lishvuyim deror.

The spirit of God rests on the anointed messenger so that he may bring good news to the afflicted, bind up the brokenhearted, and proclaim liberty to captives.

Then comes the sequence Ribo quotes: beauty instead of ashes, joy instead of mourning, praise instead of despair.

This redemptive vision is remarkable for what it emphasizes: to bind the brokenhearted. The image also calls to mind the rabbinic tale (Sanhedrin 98a) in which Eliyahu identifies the Messiah as the person sitting among the afflicted, carefully wrapping his bandages one at a time.

That takes us directly back to shivrei kelim. At the beginning of the song, God continues to cherish what is broken. At the end, redemption means healing the broken. And the prophet imagines that redemption, once again, through a series of reversals punctuated by the word tachat, in place of.

There is a neat correspondence here between Ribo’s language and his theology. Throughout the song, he takes traditional language and turns it toward mercy. The messianic ending is the culmination of that pattern: God’s greatness is expressed in repeatedly turning one apparent opposite into another – discipline into love, brokenness into preciousness, constriction into spaciousness, and judgment into mercy. In the messianic future, that same divine capacity will operate once more: mourning will turn into joy, ashes into beauty, and the brokenhearted will be healed. The mercy revealed most intensely on Yom Kippur is present throughout the year and will ultimately transform history.

The Final Silence

In Ribo’s performance, the song ultimately fades back into Lekha dumiyya tehilla. That is the perfect ending.

The song has tried, line after line, to describe the extent of God’s love. But the point is ultimately larger than any human description. If this mercy is not an exception reserved for Yom Kippur but something fundamental to how God interacts with humanity, then no catalogue of divine kindness can exhaust it. Earlier, Ribo had already suggested that even an ocean of song could capture only a fraction of God’s praise. And so fittingly, at the end, the song itself falls silent.

But “If I Were a Prophet” is noteworthy not only for its soaring oratory, but also for the ingenious way it handles one of the hardest problems of religious leadership, one that is especially acute on the High Holidays. These days are meant to unsettle us, and a rabbi who never challenges his congregation is not doing his job. But rebuke is a tricky thing. Push too hard and people become defensive; speak too softly and the message loses its force. How can a preacher tell people what they need to hear without making them feel attacked?

Rabbi Lamm’s answer is to cast the problem as a tension between two equally authentic modes of religious leadership. He opens the sermon by portraying the two great themes of the High Holidays: Rosh Hashana as yom hadin, the day of judgment, and Yom Kippur as yom harachamim, the day of compassion and forgiveness. These two divine qualities are represented by two models of religious leadership, embodied by Moshe and Aharon respectively. Moshe, the Navi, stands firmly on principle. Aharon, the Kohen, understands “the stubbornness of circumstances, the failings of flesh, and the frailty of human nature.” “The Prophet is the angry critic,” Rabbi Lamm says, “while the Priest is the tolerant teacher.” A rabbi must somehow be able to do both – to “reproach his people and encourage them; criticize them and inspire them; judge them and love them.”

Rabbi Lamm then turns the question on himself: “Have I done justice to the historic blend of judgment and compassion, of Kohen and Navi?” If he were to “don the mantle of the Prophet,” would his people understand? Would he draw them closer to Judaism, or alienate them from God?

Then he steps into the prophetic mode:

“O, if I were a Prophet! If I had the courage of an Isaiah and the fearlessness of a Jeremiah!” He would attack American Jewish assimilation, misplaced communal priorities, and Jews who turn holy days into mere holidays or come to shul only to discuss the stock market or their neighbors’ clothing.

“Those are some of the things I might say if I were a Prophet,” he says. “And they should be said, especially on this yom hadin.” But the prophet is not the only authentic Jewish personality. A rabbi must also be the Kohen and “find genuine sources of rachamim, of encouragement.”

And so he defends the very people he has just criticized. Some may aspire to become WASPs, but most would like to be better Jews “if only we were a bit stronger.” Jews should spend far more on education than on fighting antisemitism, “but who can blame Jews who are still frightened only one generation after Auschwitz?” People may “desecrate the service by their foolish conversation,” but at least they come, and perhaps with time they will mature.

Then comes another round. If he were governed only by din, Rabbi Lamm says, he would attack those who call themselves “good Jews” – the religiously observant who fail in other areas, the occasional synagogue-goer who thinks he has done his duty, and even the daily minyan attendee who is deficient in middot. He invokes Yeshayahu’s stinging question: Mi vikkesh zot miyedkhem remos chatzeray, “Who asked you to trample My courtyard?” (Yeshayahu 1:12).

“But,” he reminds himself again, “I am not a Prophet. I am a Rabbi.” Instead of Yeshayahu’s denunciation, he turns to Tehillim: Barukh haba beshem Hashem, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” (Tehillim 118:26). However rarely someone comes to shul, however badly he has fallen short, he is still a child of God and welcome in God’s house. He is invited to “come again and again and again.”

Then the prophetic voice returns one more time. Rabbi Lamm rails against the materialism and self-centeredness he sees in contemporary Jewish life. Citing a survey in which Jewish college students placed economic security and career advancement above serving God, he erupts: “No God, no Torah, no Israel, no mankind!” Their creed is the “unholy trinity of I-Me-and-Myself.”

But this generation, he continues, also has real virtues. It has created extraordinary philanthropic institutions and generously supported yeshivot whose significance many donors barely understand. Rabbi Lamm cites Rav Elimelech of Lizhensk’s reading of akh tov vachesed yirdefuni: the goodness already within a person can “pursue” him, driving him to even greater acts of goodness. So too, the “benevolence and decency and charitableness” already present in Jews can lead them “fully and completely to God and Torah and Synagogue.”

Returning to his opening tension, Rabbi Lamm now widens his argument. “This is not merely a professional dilemma for Rabbis,” he says. “It is the Torah itself which speaks to us in two voices” – Navi and Kohen, din and rachamim. Some people need the direct challenge of the prophet; others respond better to the gentleness of the priest. Neither suffices on its own.

This brings Rabbi Lamm to the shofar, which, he points out, also speaks in these two voices. First is the shofar of the prophet. Its question is ayeka, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9): “What have you done with your life? Where are you going? What is your purpose?” The shofar confronts us with “the Truth we have been evading.”

But Rabbi Lamm also hears a second sound in the shofar – not God thundering at us, but God weeping for us. He tells the story of the Maggid of Mezeritch, whose young grandson cried because he had hidden during a game of hide-and-seek and his friend never came looking for him. “Ah,” the Maggid told him, “that is why God too weeps.” God waits for us to seek Him, “and He waits and waits and waits,” but His children never come looking.

Rabbi Lamm continues his descent by returning to another familiar Rosh Hashana duality: servant and child. The prophet calls on us to stand before God as servants of the divine Judge, the priest as children of a loving Father. Some of us will respond to the blast, others to the sob; some to “the steel of din,” others to “the velvet of rachamim.”

The sermon concludes with Avinu Malkeinu. God, he observes, is both Father and King. Rabbi Lamm and his congregation ask together for a year of “peace and truth,” of personal happiness and universal justice – for themselves, for Israel, and for the world.

Giving Rebuke

What makes the sermon so ingenious is the way Rabbi Lamm uses the prophet–priest dichotomy to resolve the problem of rebuke.

In fact, “If I Were a Prophet” can be read as Rabbi Lamm’s mature answer to a question he had posed to himself at the dawn of his rabbinate. In a September 28, 1952 sermon delivered as a visiting rabbi in Ottawa, the young Rabbi Lamm asked aloud whether, over the course of his coming career, he would “sacrifice [his] ideals in order to please and placate others,” whether fear of offending congregants would lead him to “let the principles perish and preach the platitudes.” More than a decade later, he offered a sophisticated answer to his own question. Sometimes, he came to understand, one need not choose between principle and placating: a savvy rabbi can deliver the hard truths without alienating his congregants.

He does this in a number of ways. First, he starts with himself. Before telling his congregation where it has failed, he asks whether he has fulfilled his own job as a rabbi. By scrutinizing himself first, he accepts responsibility for his own failures and lowers the congregation’s defenses.

He then eases into the prophetic role, wondering whether he should speak at all. He acknowledges the “spirit” agitating within him and asks what he would say “if” he were a prophet. Even as he begins speaking like a prophet, he never explicitly claims the mantle. This resembles an oratorical technique called praeteritio – saying something while claiming to pass over it. (The word comes from the Latin praeter, meaning “past” or “beyond,” the same root found in preternatural, something beyond the natural.) Here, that “if” does a tremendous amount of work. If I were a prophet, this is what I would say. Except, of course, that he is about to say it!

The “if” also allows him to direct his criticism at people ostensibly outside the room. Instead of saying you, he speaks about “the higher social classes of American Jews.” But given the highbrow constituency of the Jewish Center, the audience could hardly have missed the point that he was talking about them.

Rabbi Lamm even uses pronouns to help him manage the tension. In the prophetic sections, he often speaks about them – “the higher social classes of American Jews,” “those who.” When the priestly voice takes over, the language changes: “we are God’s covenanted people,” “we may occasionally fail,” “some of us may aspire to be Jewish WASPs.” The prophetic voice creates distance; the priestly voice brings him back alongside them.

He also distributes the rebuke widely enough that it feels equitable. The shomer Shabbat neglects tzedakah; the philanthropist neglects Shabbat; the occasional shul-goer thinks he has done enough; even the daily attendee may well be deficient in middot. In this way, no one feels singled out.

Then Rabbi Lamm does almost the opposite: in addition to softening the rebuke in the prophetic sections, he also subtly uses the priestly sections to continue delivering the rebuke in another form. “Who can blame Jews who are still frightened only one generation after Auschwitz?” is a very compelling defense for the Jewish overemphasis on combating antisemitism, but it ultimately leaves intact Rabbi Lamm’s argument that this generation is neglecting their children’s Torah education. And when he says that people who talk in synagogue may yet mature, he is still calling their conversation a desecration. In this way, he grants the defense without surrendering the charge – what those who study rhetoric call concession.

The priestly responses also deepen as the sermon unfolds. In the first round, Rabbi Lamm offers mitigating circumstances: Jews are still scarred by Auschwitz, and at least the talkers are in shul. In the second section, he makes a positive argument, emphasizing that sinners still have a place in the religious community: however badly someone has fallen short, he remains a child of God. In the third set, Rabbi Lamm goes even further, identifying charitable virtues in the generation he has just criticized and showing how those virtues can become a spur to religious growth. But, of course, precisely as he is complimenting them, Rabbi Lamm is again asking his community to extend their religious horizons.

Rabbi Lamm also makes it clear that neither voice is simply his own. The prophetic voice comes through Yeshayahu and later Amos. The priestly response comes through the Sages, Tehillim, and Rav Elimelech. Both come from Torah, which gives them authority and makes the rebuke feel less like a personal attack.

Another tactic Rabbi Lamm employs is to include himself in the rebuke. By emphasizing that the tension between din and rachamim is not limited to rabbis, but that “it is the Torah itself which speaks to us in two voices,” he places himself alongside his congregants as someone who must hear both the voice of din and the voice of rachamim.

The shofar section takes this one step further. It is the shofar, not Rabbi Lamm, that asks ayeka: “What have you done with your life? Where are you going? What is your purpose?” The rabbi may be addressing the congregants, but the shofar confronts layperson and rabbi alike.

Rabbi Lamm uses one final tactic that allows him to deliver his message more effectively: the two-voice model leaves room for different personalities. Some people, Rabbi Lamm says, respond to the prophet’s blast, others to the priest’s sob. Rabbi Lamm points to his congregants’ agency. They can hear both voices and decide for themselves which one they most need or naturally gravitate toward.

How to Build a Sermon

But the sermon’s genius extends even beyond the way it creatively delivers mussar in a relatively unthreatening way. Quite apart from what Rabbi Lamm has to say about rebuke, “If I Were a Prophet” is a master class in how to build a sermon. Every paragraph has a clear job, each transition is pitch-perfect, and the sermon develops its central idea throughout without feeling repetitive. Above all, it is extraordinarily tight, holding the audience’s attention while developing a single theme from beginning to end.

Rabbi Lamm begins talking about his subject without clearly announcing where the sermon is going. He starts with Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, moves to din and rachamim, then to Moshe and Aharon, and finally to prophet and priest. Each step follows naturally from the one before it while the listener gradually discovers the sermon’s larger argument.

The opening paragraph is exquisite and especially well crafted, establishing both the dual themes and the accompanying tight parallelism that will govern the entire sermon. Rosh Hashana is yom hadin; Yom Kippur is yom harachamim. Din is “harsh, demanding, unswerving”; rachamim is “patient, gentle, forbearing.” Each phrase contains three words and seven syllables, creating a sense of balance. Both din and rachamim are divine attributes, and a full religious life requires both. In just a few sentences, Rabbi Lamm establishes the polarity that will govern everything that follows.

The central rhetorical device of the sermon is antithesis. Rabbi Lamm builds the sermon out of opposites – Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, din and rachamim, Navi and Kohen, Moshe and Aharon. Similar to Rav Soloveitchik in some of his great essays, he presents two religious typologies toward opposite poles so he can develop each. The prophet is a radical, the priest a realist. The prophet demands, the priest understands. Moshe smashes the Tablets; Aharon picks up the broken pieces.

That is good sermon construction in its own right. A clear opposition gives the listener something memorable to hold onto as the sermon develops. But it also helps soften the rebuke Rabbi Lamm is soon to deliver. Before he says anything harsh, he has already established that both the prophetic and priestly voices are authentically Jewish. For that reason, when he later turns to rachamim, it does not feel like a retreat.

The opening is also notably analytical, almost cerebral. Rabbi Lamm first establishes his categories and only then begins to raise the emotional temperature. The turn comes in the paragraph beginning, “On Rosh Hashanah, therefore, I wonder aloud, with you.” Even the syntax furthers the sermon’s goals. The word “if” appears five times, alongside variations on “would” and “were.” The rhetorical questions and conditional clauses build tension and soften Rabbi Lamm’s rebuke by delaying the moment the prophet will appear.

Everything has been building toward the centerpiece of the sermon: “O, if I were a Prophet!” Here, the syntax changes. In the prophetic passage, Rabbi Lamm repeatedly begins with “I would” – I would turn… I would accuse… I would thunder… This is anaphora, the repetition of the same words at the beginning of successive clauses, and it gives the passage its rhythm.

Rabbi Lamm combines that rhythm with variation. Rather than simply saying that American Jews are not serious enough about God and Judaism, he offers a host of examples: assimilation, communal priorities, synagogue conversation, Shabbat, middot, materialism, and parenting. The variety allows him to repeat one underlying criticism – that his congregants are simply not serious enough about their Judaism – without sounding as if he is hammering away at the same point.

The three rounds of prophet and priest then give the sermon its emotional rhythm. Each time, Rabbi Lamm raises the temperature with the prophet, lowers it with the priest, then begins again. The middle pair is the shortest of the three, giving the sermon a briefer rise and fall before the fiercer final prophetic section. The sermon never stays in one emotional register for long.

The shofar then comes in exactly the right place. It functions as the sermon’s peroration – the point where argument gives way to heightened image and emotion – while also moving naturally toward the mitzvah the congregation is about to perform. Rabbi Lamm takes the distinction he has been developing all along and turns it into the terrifying blast of the prophet and the sob of the priest.

Finally, the sermon settles into its conclusion. Hayom harat olam leads into the themes of servant and child, justice and tenderness, until the two poles come together in Avinu Malkeinu – Father and King.

Ultimately, “If I Were a Prophet” is Rabbi Lamm’s mature answer to the challenge he set himself in 1952. He still refuses to “let the principles perish and preach the platitudes.” But he has moved beyond the simple dichotomy between standing on principle and placating his people. The mature Rabbi Lamm understands that din and rachamim can both be expressions of religious seriousness, and that the real challenge is to say hard things in a way his audience can hear.

In a sermon about the mantles of prophet and priest, Rabbi Lamm shows us how to wear them both. And the whole achievement turns on the deceptively simple phrase that lets him rebuke his congregation while almost claiming not to rebuke them at all: If I were a prophet.

Money was a challenge from the outset. Rabbi Gotthold’s proposal put the estimated cost at $4,000, a figure the Orthodox Union thought excessive. Dr. Samson Weiss, the OU’s executive vice president, told him that “the figures quoted by you were not clear to us” and said that the OU would contribute as much as $2,000 if necessary. The commitment was conditioned on Rabbi Gotthold remaining in India for at least four months and Rabbi Kushelevsky for at least one.

Simply getting the rabbis to India required considerable diplomacy. The Bene Israel controversy had made the Israeli religious establishment suspect in many Indian circles. For that reason, Israel Kelman, the Jewish Agency representative in Bombay, arranged for Rabbis Gotthold and Kushelevsky to come under local synagogue auspices rather than as emissaries of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate or the Jewish Agency.

But despite Kelman’s best efforts, in April, B. J. Israel, a prominent Bene Israel critic of the plan, wrote to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs warning of an “impending intrusion” by the Israeli government into Indian Jewish religious affairs. He explained that he had no objection to a foreign rabbi coming to resolve complicated halakhic questions; the community badly needed one. His objection was to the involvement of Israel’s Ministry of Religious Affairs and Chief Rabbinate, which he feared would make it appear that Indian Jews owed religious allegiance to a foreign state.

When he heard about the attempted interference, Rabbi Lamm was livid. Writing to A. D. Jhirad, executive director of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of India, he praised Jhirad and Saul Penkar, another leader of the organization, for responding to the incident with “dignity and self-respect.” Privately, though, Rabbi Lamm was worried. In another letter, he warned that the situation “threatens to deteriorate unless someone with a strong hand is present on the spot when the Israeli Rabbis arrive.”

But the plan began to unravel even before Rabbi Gotthold took off. A hoped-for third rabbi could not be found, and Rabbi Kushelevsky ultimately did not go either. Rabbi Gotthold was left to conduct a one-man mission.

Getting Rabbi Gotthold to India also proved complicated. On May 22, the OU learned that he was in London, planned to leave for Bombay on the 26th, and needed $1,000. Because Rabbi Lamm had received reports that protests might greet Rabbi Gotthold on his arrival, the OU asked him to call Rabbi Lamm before proceeding. Rabbi Gotthold did not call when requested. On May 24, Rabbi Gotthold finally spoke with Rabbi Lamm and said he had decided to go. The OU cabled him the $1,000, and he left London on May 26.

Once he reached India, Rabbi Gotthold faced what Kelman later called “a number of incompatible requests.” Because the OU was paying, its leadership, both in the United States and in India, naturally expected Rabbi Gotthold to represent the American organization. Yet if he aligned himself too closely with any one communal faction, he risked becoming, in Kelman’s phrase, “personnae non grata” with other groups. Penkar and Jhirad wanted to form a beit din with him, but Rabbi Gotthold resisted.

The UOJCI quickly felt sidelined. Jhirad described its officers as “silent watchers” while Rabbi Gotthold conducted most of his work independently. They knew that Rabbi Gotthold was handling divorces and conversions in Bombay, Thana, and Ahmedabad, but they often did not know who had referred the cases to him or even who the parties were. When Penkar and Jhirad reminded him that Rabbi Lamm had hoped to establish a local beit din whose members could be trained in the proper handling of religious questions, Rabbi Gotthold instead asked the UOJCI for a mandate to conduct his work independently.

Still, Rabbi Gotthold was doing real work. By Kelman’s later count, during roughly two months in India he handled some thirty cases involving conversion and divorce in Bombay, Poona, and Ahmedabad. Before leaving, in a plan similar to what Rabbi Lamm and Haham Gaon of London had previously proposed, he tried to bring the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform organizations to an understanding that locals would stop arranging conversions and gittin independently and instead refer such matters to a small common body receiving rabbinic guidance from Israel or England. Jhirad doubted whether the arrangement would survive.

Meanwhile, Rabbi Gotthold’s relationship with the OU in New York was deteriorating. For weeks, they heard almost nothing from him. On July 5, Haham Gaon wrote Rabbi Lamm from London and asked: “Have you heard at all from Rabbi Gotthold?” The answer was no.

Then came the cables. Rabbi Gotthold first asked for more money. A second cable was considerably more dramatic: “PROGRAMS UPSET ACTIVITIES PARALYZED FOR LACKING FUNDS TERMINATING MISSION DUE YOUR UNCOOPERATIVENESS.”

Max Stern, chairman of the OU’s Joint Overseas Commission and one of the principal supporters of the India project, was furious. On July 11, he cabled Bombay that he was “ASTONISHED” by Rabbi Gotthold’s failure to report and “STRONGLY” rejected the charge of uncooperativeness. Rabbi Gotthold had agreed to receive $2,000 for a mission involving more than one rabbi, Stern pointed out. With Rabbi Gotthold now there alone, the $1,000 already sent should have lasted more than two months.

The dispute continued. On July 16, the OU sent Rabbi Gotthold another $500. Dr. Samson Weiss, the OU’s executive vice president, followed with a pointed letter. He wanted to know who was assisting Rabbi Gotthold locally, whether he had constituted a beit din, whether it had gained the confidence of the Bene Israel, and whether it would continue functioning after he left. “You cannot spend your time more wisely or productively than to keep us fully informed,” Weiss told him. Comically, though, the OU did not even have Rabbi Gotthold’s address in Bombay and had to send the letter care of American Express.

In mid-July, Rabbi Gotthold was preparing to return to Israel, far earlier than the four-month stay originally contemplated. Jhirad continued to be disappointed. The UOJCI, he felt, had never really been brought into Rabbi Gotthold’s work, and he was unsure whether whatever structures Rabbi Gotthold was trying to leave behind would function once the rabbi was gone.

The aftermath was also messy. Some people whose divorces or conversions Rabbi Gotthold had handled did not receive the documentation they needed. In Ahmedabad, local shul officials similarly complained that they could not proceed with marriages because the relevant certificates had not arrived. Other reports were stranger. One letter complained that Rabbi Gotthold had smoked inside a shul while preparing gittin. Another complained that he had effectively disqualified the local mikvaot: for a conversion, Rabbi Gotthold had arranged for approximately one thousand kilograms of ice from an ice factory, together with tap water, to prepare a suitable mikveh. Local leaders were left wondering whether this meant that the ritual baths they had been using were now considered invalid.

To be sure, the OU did not accept all the complaints at face value. Weiss asked Jhirad whether Rabbi Gotthold had actually declared the local mikvaot invalid or whether Jhirad had inferred that from his use of ice. Later correspondence also clarified that some Baghdadi mikvaot had been declared unfit for hygienic reasons by Bombay’s municipal authorities. And, as Weiss wrote to Jhirad, Haham Gaon strongly supported “the propriety of the halachic decisions and activities of Rabbi Gotthold.”

By the fall, relations between the OU and Rabbi Gotthold had improved. Moses Feuerstein, president of the OU, complimented Rabbi Gotthold on the tone of his recent letters, calling them a “dramatic change” that had made the OU’s work easier. But the larger problem remained.

Then, in December, Kelman sent Rabbi Lamm another characteristically bleak report. He credited Rabbi Gotthold with handling nearly thirty cases but complained that some certificates were still missing and that the UOJCI had shown “absolutely no activity whatsoever” for six months. Kelman could be dramatic, but his larger point was clear: after three years, he saw little organizational progress. In the end, if the OU was serious about India, it still needed a rabbi on the ground.

On January 2, 1964, Rabbi Lamm wrote Feuerstein that the Indian situation had become too complicated to discuss by long-distance telephone. “We are now heading to a point where, I fear, we shall have to ‘fish or cut bait,’” he wrote. He suggested that Weiss prepare a full report and that the Overseas Commission meet to decide what to do next.

Even then, Rabbi Lamm did not drop the matter. The following month, he was still following up on the old Baghdadi beit din records that Rav Unterman had asked him to investigate. And later that month, Rabbi Lamm wrote Kelman that he was glad Kelman had secured Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Nissim’s approval of Rabbi Gotthold’s actions in India thus far.

By then, however, the center of the Bene Israel story had shifted to Israel, where the marriage controversy came to a head in the summer of 1964. Bene Israel activists launched a prolonged protest against the marriage procedures. In August, Levi Eshkol, Israel’s prime minister, addressed the Knesset and declared that the government regarded the Bene Israel as Jews “in every respect,” including in matters of marriage. The Knesset overwhelmingly backed his position. Rav Unterman announced that the Chief Rabbinate would remove any specific reference to the Bene Israel from its marriage directives, and the Bene Israel protest was called off.

These developments effectively brought the OU’s India work to an end. With the marriage controversy resolved in Israel, aliyah accelerated dramatically. In 1971, only about 5,500 Bene Israel remained in India, down from Rabbi Lamm’s estimate of roughly 19,000 a decade before.

We do not know exactly how Rabbi Lamm or his colleagues at the OU understood what had happened. Their correspondence makes their frustration with Rabbi Gotthold plain, along with a certain embarrassment at how the mission had unfolded. Beyond that, it’s hard to say for sure. But by the time Rabbi Lamm wrote that they might have to “fish or cut bait,” one senses that the moment had passed and that the OU’s larger institutional strategy had failed: it never managed to establish the permanent rabbinic leadership or local religious infrastructure it had envisioned.

That failure should not obscure how much Rabbi Lamm had accomplished. During three weeks in India, at the age of thirty-three, he delivered more than thirty lectures and traveled from Bombay and Calcutta to Poona, Ahmedabad, and smaller communities, addressing hundreds of questions along the way. He saw the obvious religious needs – the absence of rabbis, the problems surrounding gittin and conversions, and especially the desperately low level of Jewish education – as well as the material ones. He explored possibilities for creating jobs, procured books and tefillin, arranged scholarships for young Indians to study abroad, and tried to develop local religious leadership. He was also willing to tell the community leadership directly where he thought it was falling short. And above all, he continued to insist that the future of Indian Jewry depended on serious Torah study.

After his visit, he went on to become one of the Bene Israel’s most persistent advocates. He spoke with chief rabbis, argued with Israeli officials, enlisted Haham Gaon and other rabbinic authorities, pressed figures like Rabbi Moshe Sherer, spoke out against the politicization of the halakhic process, wrote dozens if not hundreds of letters, and investigated old beit din archives.

At the same time, the years that followed Rabbi Lamm’s trip exposed the limits of the OU’s original vision. Rabbi Lamm and his colleagues seem to have assumed that enough energy, organization, money, and rabbinic relationships was likely to turn the recommendations of 1961 into a functioning system. They appear to have underestimated the internal politics of Indian Jewry, the complicated relationship between Indian Jews and Israel, the fierce pride of the Bene Israel in the face of perceived discrimination, and the political pressures that actually moved the Israeli Rabbinate.

But for all the struggles, what remains perhaps most impressive is the willingness of a thirty-three-year-old rabbi from New York to assume responsibility for Jews thousands of miles away – and then to keep fighting for them long after his three-week mission had ended. Whatever mistakes he and colleagues made among the way, that sense of responsibility may be the most remarkable part of the entire story.

There were important grounds for leniency. Earlier Chief Rabbis Yitzchak Herzog and Ben-Zion Uziel had ruled permissively, and Haham Solomon Gaon and Rabbi Solomon Sassoon in London were sympathetic. But when Rabbi Lamm reached Israel after leaving India and met on the issue with Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Nissim, Rabbi Lamm became concerned. Rav Nissim expressed reservations about the earlier responsa and pointed Rabbi Lamm toward an important unpublished analysis of Rav Shmuel Rozovsky of the Ponevezh Yeshiva. Rav Nissim said he would rule leniently if Rav Rozovsky were to publish his analysis and leading Israeli authorities accepted its permissive conclusion. Rabbi Lamm went to Bnei Brak, met Rav Rozovsky, and urged him to publish the material. He also met with Rav Isser Yehuda Unterman, then chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and soon to become Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, and asked him to get involved.

Back in New York, Rabbi Lamm followed up with Rav Unterman in a lengthy Hebrew letter on March 25. He described the danger that continued uncertainty would drive the Bene Israel away from Orthodoxy, perhaps even before a ruling could finally be reached. Rabbi Lamm had already written Rav Rozovsky repeatedly and, as he put it, “there is no voice and no answer.” He appealed to Rav Unterman “not to miss the moment” and to issue a clear ruling, whether permissive or prohibitive, and to use his influence to encourage other leading rabbis to do the same. A decision years later, Rabbi Lamm warned, would accomplish little if by then the Bene Israel had already despaired of traditional Judaism.

Haham Gaon shared Rabbi Lamm’s sense of urgency. In March, Gaon warned that if Orthodoxy failed to resolve the Bene Israel problem, the community might look to Reform or Conservative authorities instead. If that were to happen, Gaon wrote, “one indeed will not be able to blame them.”

In May, the issue exploded. Earlier that month, Ruth Hektin, a secular member of Knesset, had submitted a parliamentary question based on reports that Indian Jews were being barred from marriage because they were regarded as “impure Jews.” Once the issue had been raised in the Knesset, the minister of religious affairs was required to respond. Then, on May 11, the Indian Express carried a front-page report from Jerusalem under the headline “Marriage Bar on Indian Jews,” claiming that Israeli religious authorities regarded Indian-born Jews, particularly those from Bombay, as “not pure Jews” and were refusing them marriage licenses.

In response, on May 17, the UOJCI (Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of India) adopted a furious resolution accusing the Israeli religious authorities of branding Indians “Impure Jews.” It called on the Israeli government to remove the stigma and circulated the resolution to Israel’s leading political and religious authorities, the Israeli consul in Bombay, Haham Gaon, the OU and RCA, Rabbi Lamm and Rabbi Charles Weinberg (who had visited India before Rabbi Lamm), as well as the local press and Indian synagogues. The resolution also called for a mass protest.

Rabbi Lamm understood their anger, but he also worried that a public campaign against the Israeli Rabbinate would be counterproductive and make a solution more difficult. Writing to J. S. Ezra in Bombay later that month, he urged restraint. There was, he explained, no universally accepted prohibition against Bene Israel marriages. True, some Israeli rabbis were refusing them, but other major authorities permitted them. He believed a permissive ruling would eventually emerge, but until the situation became clearer he urged Indian Jewish leaders to avoid public statements that might backfire.

But the situation in Bombay was difficult to contain. On May 31, A. D. Jhirad wrote Rabbi Lamm that wherever local leaders went, they were being asked, “what is the Orthodox Union doing about this affair?” Jhirad had asked the Israeli consul to issue an immediate denial of reports that the Israeli government discriminated against Bene Israel, but the response came more than a week later. The UOJCI had adopted its resolution in part, Jhirad explained, to channel the anger before it produced mass demonstrations.

By then, Rabbi Zev Gotthold of Israel’s Ministry of Religions was becoming one of Rabbi Lamm’s most important contacts inside the Israeli religious establishment. Gotthold moved quickly after receiving the UOJCI resolution, cabling Bombay that the allegations were based on “unfounded misleading information” and calling reports of an official decision against the Bene Israel a “vicious and dangerous fabrication.” He also explained to Rabbi Lamm what had happened behind the scenes: Ruth Hektin’s Knesset query had helped ignite the controversy; the Ministry was preparing an official denial; Rav Itamar had answered the allegations publicly in The Jerusalem Post; and a delegation including Knesset members Rabbis Mordechai Nurock and Zerach Warhaftig and Dr. Aryeh Tartakower of the World Jewish Congress had approached Rav Nissim and urged him to adopt the permissive positions of Rabbis Herzog and Uziel. Rabbi Gotthold added that Rav Itamar had shown him Rav Rozovsky’s unpublished responsum, which ruled permissively.

Meanwhile, a broader group of Bombay Jewish leaders met and formed an action committee. They agreed to appeal to Orthodox authorities abroad, including the Rabbinical Council of America and Haham Gaon, and, at least initially, to avoid escalating the fight in the press. Even Dr. Elisha Nattiv, a Liberal rabbi who had publicly welcomed Rabbi Lamm during his visit, believed that Orthodox leadership abroad offered the best chance of reversing the restrictions. A. D. Jhirad expressed confidence in Rabbi Lamm and the American Orthodox organizations, writing that local leaders had “complete and implicit faith” that they would bring them “safely to shore from amongst this storm of conflict.”

On June 9, Rabbi Lamm thanked Rabbi Gotthold for “the dispatch with which you handled the ‘Indian purity’ affair.” He was pleased that Rav Nissim now seemed prepared to accept the heter, but baffled by the change. Rabbi Lamm had written Rav Rozovsky approximately four times without receiving an answer, despite Rav Rozovsky’s promise to respond when they met in Bnei Brak. Rav Unterman had not answered him either. He asked Gotthold to obtain Rav Rozovsky’s paper from Rav Itamar and expressed confidence that Gotthold would “urge the rabbinate to come to a decision – one way or the other – very quickly and conclusively.”

Two weeks later, however, Rabbi Lamm’s tone sharpened considerably. He told Rabbi Gotthold that he could not conceal his “great distress” that the Israeli Rabbinate had refused to budge when approached by Orthodox colleagues in America but now seemed to be “knuckling under completely with a sudden appreciation of the flexibility of the Halakhah when confronted by political pressure.” He was also worried about who would control the Orthodox response in India. A Conservative lay leader in Bombay, he observed, seemed to have “more influence with the Israeli Rabbinate than an Orthodox rabbi from the United States.”

Despite his mounting frustrations, however, Rabbi Lamm continued pressing through traditional rabbinic channels. On June 28, OU president Moses Feuerstein told him that Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, the Ponevezher Rosh Yeshiva, might still be in America and urged him to enlist Rav Kahaneman in securing the material from Rav Rozovsky.

On July 4, writing to Rabbi Gotthold, Rabbi Lamm’s irritation boiled over. When he had approached Rav Nissim directly in February on behalf of some twenty thousand distant Jews, Rabbi Lamm recalled encountering “cold, and even a bit callous, indifference.” His letters to Rav Rozovsky and Rav Unterman had gone unanswered. Yet once secular and political figures became involved, everything seemed to change. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, had taken an interest in the case, prompting Tartakower to intervene. “Goldmann winks, a Mapam member of Knesset makes a speech, and the Rabbinate is all ears,” Rabbi Lamm complained. Suddenly, Rav Nissim reconsidered and Rav Rozovsky’s unpublished responsum, “heretofore a military secret,” appeared in the hands of Rav Itamar and others. “My American naivete,” Rabbi Lamm wrote, “does not permit me to view with detachment this obvious and reprehensible politicization of the halakhic decision-making.”

Meanwhile, Rav Itamar continued supplying Rabbi Lamm with information from inside the Chief Rabbinate. In early October, representatives of the Bene Israel met Rav Nissim and a council of rabbis to present their case. In late 1961, the Chief Rabbinate Council determined that there was no general prohibition against marrying Bene Israel, although individual cases could still be investigated when there was a particular reason for concern.

On paper, this was a major breakthrough. But Rabbi Lamm understood that obtaining a pesak and getting the Chief Rabbinate to implement it were two different things. And so on November 16, he wrote Rav Itamar with a detailed series of questions: Was the decision truly final? Had instructions been sent to local marriage registrars and rabbinic courts? Could opposition from the more right-wing rabbis effectively undermine the ruling even after the Chief Rabbinate had adopted it? What pressure was being exerted on the Chief Rabbinate? Rabbi Lamm wanted whatever inside information Rav Itamar could provide.

Rabbi Lamm’s concern proved warranted. Haredi rabbinic opposition was increasing, and on November 20, Rabbi Moshe Sherer of the Agudah sent Rabbi Lamm a pamphlet written by Rav Moshe Sternbuch attacking the permissive approach. Rabbi Lamm had already read it and was unpersuaded. He told Rabbi Sherer bluntly that the pamphlet was not a genuine birur but “a high-pitched polemic which never even once rises to the level of dispassionate scholarship.”

Still, Rabbi Lamm was careful not to claim that the earlier prohibition had been driven by prejudice. “When lions prowl, little lambs should not walk,” he wrote to Rabbi Sherer, declining to offer his own halakhic judgment. He also insisted that “no one ought to dispute sincerity or motivation of the Beth Din” that had prohibited marriage to the Bene Israel. Still, he argued that the social setting was highly relevant. Indian society was organized around caste, race, wealth, and strict limits on social mixing, and the Baghdadi Jews had long lived apart from the Bene Israel. In Rabbi Lamm’s view, that helped explain why the divide between the two communities had become so deep.

Rabbi Lamm concluded with an irony he could not resist. Reports from Israel suggested that opposition to the heter had begun among yeshiva students in Bnei Brak. Yet the unpublished analysis that Rav Nissim himself had described as the most convincing basis for a permissive ruling had been written by Rav Shmuel Rozovsky, a Rosh Yeshiva at Ponevezh – in Bnei Brak. Rabbi Lamm pleaded with Rabbi Sherer to take the matter “out of the arena of Partisan Polemics” and rely on the decisions of the Gedolei Yisrael who had affirmed the heter.

Three days later, Rabbi Lamm received confirmation that the Chief Rabbinate had taken a definite lenient stand. On November 25, he and OU president Moses Feuerstein sent identical telegrams to Rav Nissim and Rav Unterman calling the ruling on Bene Israel marriages “of historic importance.” “Future generations,” they wrote, would be able to evaluate the impact of this “decisive pesak,” issued at a moment when “courageous leadership” was crucial. The decision, they predicted, would have a “most salutary effect upon isolated Jewish communities everywhere.”

The story then took an unexpected historical turn. One of the central pieces of evidence cited against the Bene Israel was the longstanding reluctance of Bombay’s Baghdadi community to marry them. At some point, however, Rabbi Lamm learned, the lay leaders of the Sassoon synagogues had apparently reversed the old policy and urged Iraqi Jews to accept Bene Israel as fellow Jews. Around the same time, records of correspondence with the Baghdad beit din had disappeared or been destroyed. Rav Eliezer Waldenberg and others pointed to the episode as evidence that the Bombay lay leaders had defied their rabbinic authorities and destroyed evidence suggesting that the beit din in fact had not permitted them to marry.

Rav Unterman was skeptical. The Baghdadi communal leaders in Bombay had themselves been observant Jews, he reasoned, and it seemed unlikely that they would simply overturn such a consequential marriage policy in rebellion against their rabbis. Rav Unterman therefore wanted to know what had actually happened to the files. After speaking with Rav Unterman by telephone, Rabbi Lamm undertook to investigate and wrote urgently to Rabbi Sassoon in England. Did he know what had happened to the old correspondence? Would the Sassoon synagogue leaders really have changed their policy without rabbinic approval? If the change had received rabbinic sanction, how was the disappearance of the records to be explained? Rabbi Lamm continued pursuing Rav Unterman’s question and would eventually learn that the records had apparently been discarded through neglect rather than deliberately destroyed.

By January 1962, the need for a rabbi on the ground had become increasingly urgent. At a meeting of the OU’s Joint Overseas Commission, Rabbi Lamm reported that although the general marriage prohibition had been removed, Rav Nissim still wanted a qualified Orthodox rabbi in India to supervise marriage and divorce procedures.

Meanwhile, finding such a rabbi continued to prove extraordinarily difficult. Dr. Tartakower of the WJC became involved in the search. Candidates were proposed and rejected. Chief Rabbi Nissim supported training a Bene Israel student in an Israeli yeshiva for eventual rabbinic leadership, but that could take years, and the community needed an experienced rabbi right away. The Israeli Ministry of Religions considered sending an Iraqi-born rabbi from Jerusalem for a short mission, but Israel Kelman, the Jewish Agency representative in Bombay, warned that in the current atmosphere an emissary identified with the Israeli religious establishment – especially an Iraqi rabbi – would encounter suspicion from the Bene Israel. An American or British rabbi, he thought, would have a far better chance of earning the community’s trust.

Relations with Chief Rabbi Nissim also remained difficult. In June 1962, Tartakower reported that Rav Nissim, frustrated by his dealings with Bene Israel activists, had decided to stop searching for a rabbi for Bombay. “Let us simply wait and see,” Tartakower wrote. But Rabbi Lamm did not regard waiting as much of a plan. He and the OU continued searching, and Haham Gaon did the same in London. Gaon warned again that unless something concrete was done for Bombay, “we shall entirely lose this Community.” Bene Israel visitors to his office, he noted, were still deeply embittered by the treatment of their community in Israel.

The controversy continued to drag on. Toward the end of 1962, one rabbinic candidate seemed especially promising. Rabbi Simon Silas was a young Calcutta-born Sephardic rabbi serving as Haham Gaon’s assistant in London. He had studied in Israeli yeshivot and possessed semikha from Rav Tzvi Pesach Frank and Chief Rabbi Nissim. Those credentials could make him acceptable to the Chief Rabbinate. Although Silas was of Iraqi background, Gaon believed the Bene Israel would trust him because of his association with Gaon’s office, which had consistently treated them sympathetically. Gaon was so eager to make the plan work that he was prepared to hold Silas’s London position open for two years if he agreed to go. But for whatever reason, the plan ultimately did not work out.

And so, by the beginning of 1963, one conclusion had become increasingly difficult to avoid: with no permanent rabbi to be found, someone would have to go to India temporarily – someone who could handle the outstanding halakhic cases responsibly and help bridge the growing divide between the Israeli religious authorities and the Bene Israel leadership in India. By then, one of the men most deeply involved in the problem from Israel was Rabbi Gotthold. What went well – and what went terribly wrong – when he finally went is the story of Part III.

The India files, some of the most substantial and historically significant in the entire collection, show that side of him. More than 200 documents relating to Rabbi Lamm’s work with Indian Jewry appear on the Lamm Legacy website. This account draws on that larger collection, especially on two unusually rich sources: Rabbi Lamm’s report to the OU’s Joint Overseas Commission shortly after his return, and the painstakingly detailed record of his visit published in the February 1961 issue of Mebasser, the quarterly publication of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of India, the UOJCI.

In January 1961, Rabbi Lamm was just thirty-three years old and serving as associate rabbi of The Jewish Center in Manhattan. The Orthodox Union and Rabbinical Council of America sent him on a three-week mission to visit the Jews of India. Rabbi Leo Jung, his senior colleague at The Jewish Center, had visited Jewish communities in Iran and elsewhere, making it culturally normative for The Jewish Center’s rabbis to travel in support of far-flung Jewish communities. Max Stern, the longtime president of The Jewish Center and a great champion of Rabbi Lamm, chaired the OU’s Overseas Commission and was personally involved in supporting the Indian Jewish community. The previous summer, the OU had sent Rabbi Charles Weinberg of Malden, Massachusetts, to India.

The OU presence on the ground was quite new; Rabbi Weinberg’s successful visit had helped establish the UOJCI just months before. When Rabbi Lamm arrived, five of the seven shuls in Bombay and nearby Thana were affiliated with the UOJCI. There were also affiliates or prospective affiliates in Poona, Ahmedabad, and the towns along the country’s west coast. But the organization was still thin. A small group of local leaders – especially its president, Albert Menashe, vice president Saul Penkar, and joint secretary A. D. Jhirad – were trying to hold together a network spread across numerous communities, with little professional staff and no central rabbinic authority.

According to Rabbi Lamm’s estimate, there were roughly 22,000 Jews living in India, about 18,000 in the Bombay area, roughly 1,000 in Calcutta, and the rest scattered among Poona, Ahmedabad, New Delhi, and smaller communities. Of the 22,000, he estimated that some 19,000 were Bene Israel; the remainder were descended from Jews who had come more recently from Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East. The Bene Israel had lived in India for as long as anyone knew. Local tradition placed their arrival there roughly two thousand years earlier, after a shipwreck left a small group of Jewish survivors on the country’s western coast. Even though they were cut off from the main centers of Jewish life, they had preserved major elements of Jewish practice. They circumcised their sons, observed Shabbat, refrained from forbidden foods, recited the Shema, buried their dead rather than cremating them, and generally were strongly committed to their Judaism.

But the community was also in serious trouble. Jewish education was extremely weak. Many Bene Israel could read Hebrew but could not understand it. Government schools were not permitted to teach religion during school hours, and Indian children already had to study Marathi, Hindi, and English before they could even think about learning Hebrew. There were almost no local rabbis. Relations between the Baghdadi and Bene Israel communities had long been strained, and Liberal and Conservative leaders were gaining influence.

Poverty made everything harder. In many homes, an entire family of six or seven lived in a single room. In the smaller towns, conditions were even worse. Rabbi Lamm described the people as “terribly poor,” many of them rice farmers. In Panvel, local leaders explained that mechanization had devastated traditional handcrafts and impoverished skilled artisans.

Rabbi Lamm was particularly worried that the economic situation was further deteriorating. The wealthy Sassoon family and its industries were leaving India, unemployment was increasing “alarmingly,” and Jews felt increasingly forced to take jobs that required them to work on Shabbat. The devaluation of the rupee had also sharply reduced the value of the Sassoon trusts, which supported shuls, schools, and other local institutions.

Rabbi Lamm’s reception in Bombay was extraordinary. He landed at Santa Cruz Airport at 9:20 on the morning of Tuesday, January 17, aboard an Air India Boeing 707 called the Nanda Devi. Saul Penkar met him as he came off the plane; outside, Albert Menashe, A. D. Jhirad, J. M. Benjamin, and representatives of shuls from Bombay, Thana, Panvel, Alibag, and elsewhere were waiting for him. Though it was a working day and the UOJCI had told people that they need not come to the airport because a formal reception was scheduled later the same day, many came anyway, carrying garlands.

That evening, community leaders gathered at the Sir Elly Kadoorie School. Children serenaded Rabbi Lamm with a Hebrew song. Representatives of nine different organizations garlanded him. Rabbi Lamm, who had tried unsuccessfully to find someone in America to teach him Marathi, opened with a few sentences he had pieced together himself from a small textbook. He spoke about the state of American Jewry, explaining that the community had spent decades dealing with immigrant struggles, the Holocaust, and the establishment of Israel. Only now, he noted, did American Jews finally have the bandwidth to turn their attention to their “long lost brothers elsewhere.” After the program, Rabbi Lamm stood outside the hall so he could personally meet everyone who had attended.

Throughout the trip, audiences at his more than thirty talks were “large and receptive.” So many people surrounded Rabbi Lamm after events that his hosts sometimes had to keep them from getting too close.

Why such excitement over a young American rabbi? Part of the answer was simply how rare this kind of contact was; Rabbi Lamm later observed that Indian Jews “yearn for any reunion with their western Jewish brethren.” And because there was just one local Orthodox rabbi, a visiting Orthodox rabbi from America was an address for questions that had accumulated over months or years.

They really did ask him anything and everything. At one shul he was asked about the relationship between Written and Oral Torah, whether married and unmarried women should cover their hair, whether a shul could be moved to another location, and whether Jewish law permitted polygamy. Some wondered about the laws of the Nazirite; Rabbi Lamm met at least two during his trip. In Panvel, people asked him about the need for a mechitza and why a man recites a blessing thanking God for not making him a woman. At a lecture to the All-India Centre and the Indian Institute of World Culture, questions included reincarnation, divine immanence and transcendence, the Messiah, capital punishment, and humanity’s obligation to fight poverty. Almost everywhere Rabbi Lamm spoke he was asked about the Jewish view on reincarnation. Many Bene Israel believed in ghosts, amulets, and exorcising dybbuks, and they also asked for a Jewish perspective on these beliefs and practices.

Rabbi Lamm’s itinerary was incredibly intense. On the morning after his arrival, he visited the Sir Elly Kadoorie School in Bombay where he had been the evening before, and that evening he spoke at the Etz Haeem Prayer Hall in Umerkhadi. The next day he flew to Poona, addressed a Zionist gathering at Ohel David Synagogue, and then spoke after evening services at Succath Shelomo. He then returned to Bombay, spending Shabbat at Keneseth Eliyahoo and meeting with students and the executive committee of the new UOJCI youth group. On Sunday morning, January 22, some 750 to 800 people crowded into the Sir Elly Kadoorie School Hall for a lecture on tefillin, Halakha, and Jewish education. Rabbi Lamm presented the first pair of tefillin purchased for Indian Jews with $500 contributed in America to a young boy named David Moshe. Later that day he traveled to the Shaar Hashamayim Synagogue in Thana. The pace was so dizzying that the Mebasser write-up criticized the itinerary as “somewhat unimaginatively” planned and noted that Rabbi Lamm went to Thana against his doctor’s orders.

On Monday morning he flew to New Delhi, where he addressed the tiny Jewish Welfare Association and met the Swiss ambassador to India, with whom he discussed Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity. (He happened to be there during Queen Elizabeth’s visit. Asked later whether he had met Prime Minister Nehru, Rabbi Lamm joked that “the Prime Minister evidently preferred the company of the Queen to that of a Rabbi.”) From New Delhi he flew to Ahmedabad, spoke at the Magen Abraham Synagogue, and flew back to Bombay the same evening.

Rabbi Lamm’s primary message throughout these travels revolved around Jewish education. He told his audiences that the community’s miraculous survival did not guarantee its future. In a lecture in the town of Pen, he used the story of Elisha and the widow’s flask of oil to warn that without stronger Jewish education, Jewish survival could not be taken for granted in the next generation. The following evening, at the tiny Parel Prayer Hall, he drew on Eliyahu – a particularly beloved figure among the Bene Israel – and the “still small voice” to make a similar point. Religious commitment, he stressed, did not require noise or controversy. The real work was educational, and Jewish children had to be taught “with understanding, love and affection.” At schools, Rabbi Lamm examined classes and met administrators; at shuls, he urged leaders to organize Shabbat, Sunday, and weekday classes for children and adults. In Poona, he proposed that rather than waiting for a rabbi who might never come, a different congregant might prepare a short Jewish topic each week and teach it after the Torah reading on Shabbat mornings. Working with Israel Kelman, the Jewish Agency representative in Bombay, he envisioned not “just a few more classes, but a whole network of them.”

Throughout his visit, he also made recommendations for the long-term needs of the community. India needed books, so he proposed a central lending library in Bombay and asked the OU to supply English-language material for adults and children. India needed religious leaders and functionaries, so he selected young Indian Jews for advanced training abroad. One was to study in Israel as a teacher, mohel, sofer, chazzan, and shochet. Two others were slated for an intensive three- to four-year program at Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach’s Yeshiva Kol Torah that could eventually lead to rabbinic ordination. A fourth, a sixteen-year-old Bene Israel student who had graduated at the top of his class, was set to study at Yeshiva University and train for the rabbinate.

Rabbi Lamm was also concerned that the projects survive his visit; he worried that once he left, “the enthusiasm might die down and all plans be lost in a morass of disconnected details.” After consulting Max Stern, Rabbi Lamm proposed paying A. D. Jhirad $50 a month to take leave from his government job for six months to a year and serve as the UOJCI’s executive director. Jhirad would become the single address in India for all the projects Rabbi Weinberg and Rabbi Lamm had set in motion; Rabbi Zev Gotthold of Israel’s Ministry of Religions would play a similar coordinating role in Israel.

On Friday, February 3, Rabbi Lamm flew to Calcutta from Bombay. The Jewish population, once much larger, had fallen to about 900, with another 200 expected to leave by the coming Pesach. Instead of giving public lectures, Rabbi Lamm spent the weekend meeting communal leaders: the community was in crisis.

The rabbi, Ezekiel Musleah, had become embroiled in a bitter controversy. The local beit din had adopted a restrictive approach to conversion. Rabbi Musleah, however, favored a more lenient policy and had proceeded to perform a conversion without the beit din’s approval. The entire beit din resigned. Local chazzanim then began performing conversions on their own authority, and the pro- and anti-rabbi factions were barely speaking to one another.

Rabbi Lamm met with the competing groups and managed to persuade them to postpone elections for a new beit din. He proposed that the Calcutta shuls affiliate with the UOJCI and that the OU sponsor a reorganized beit din. Then, on February 6 – one day before leaving India – he wrote with a proposal “to reclaim the almost hopeless situation in Calcutta” to his colleague and friend Haham Solomon Gaon in London. Under the proposal, which Gaon accepted with minor modifications, difficult questions of conversion and divorce would be referred from throughout India to Gaon’s beit din in London instead of being handled on the ground. (There was a strong relationship between the two communities because India had been a British colony until 1947.) Rabbi Lamm was also troubled by the gittin being written in India. He sent examples to Gaon and proposed that, rather than writing the documents locally, Indian communities authorize a properly supervised get to be prepared in London.

On Monday evening, February 6, before Rabbi Lamm flew to Israel the next day, the community held a farewell event at Keneseth Eliyahoo. In his remarks, Rabbi Lamm urged Indian Jews not to be ashamed of their poverty. He had heard the subject mentioned so often that he worried it had become “almost an obsession.” Poverty was all too real, he said, but it did not define them. Indian Jews were part of the “indestructible stock” of the Jewish people. He flew to Israel on the 7th.

On February 23, Rabbi Lamm submitted his report to the OU’s Joint Overseas Commission. There are sections on organization, education, scholarships, schools, beit din, gittin, tefillin, youth groups, women’s groups, individual communities, employment, aliyah, and the search for a rabbi. Rabbi Lamm names people responsible for projects, calculates salaries, assigns follow-up, and identifies which problems should be handled in Bombay, London, New York, or Israel. He described the trip as “intensive, wearying, and expensive,” but concluded that it had been worthwhile.

Still, one far more complicated problem loomed over Rabbi Lamm’s head. For generations, the Bene Israel had lived without a proper rabbinic system of gittin and chalitzah. Some rabbis therefore worried that marriages between Bene Israel and other Jews might present problems of safek mamzerut. The issue had enormous practical consequences, particularly as Bene Israel considered aliyah. In fact, according to Rabbi Lamm, the biggest reason relatively few of the Bene Israel had made aliyah – as opposed to Baghdadi Indian Jews – was for precisely this reason. Until the question was resolved for once and for all, Rabbi Lamm observed in the report, “the future of the Bene Israels is uncertain.”

Rabbi Lamm raised the question with Haham Gaon and Rabbi Sassoon in London and with leading rabbis in Israel. He returned to New York promising in his report “to continue pressing for a Halachic decision by the Israeli Rabbinate.” By then, the three-week trip was over. But the mission had just begun.

But one unfamiliar name kept coming up: Michael Tabor. There were pages and pages of letters between Rabbi Lamm and this Englishman I had never heard of. Their correspondence, it turns out, began in 1969 and continued for at least forty-three years. Then I found a memo listing the correspondents Rabbi Lamm was considering including in a projected book. The list included prominent figures such as Elie Wiesel, Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, Professor Isadore Twersky, Rabbi J. J. Schacter, and Hanoch Teller. And there, alongside them, was Michael Tabor again.

Who was Michael Tabor, and what had kept the two men writing to one another for more than four decades?

The first letter, dated October 21, 1969, offered a clue. Tabor had read a number of Rabbi Lamm’s essays in Tradition, but he was especially taken with one: “The Unity Theme – Its Implications.” Tabor was searching for precisely that kind of unity in his own life and so, out of the blue, he wrote to Rabbi Lamm.

A baal teshuva, he had entered Gateshead Yeshiva at nineteen expecting the experience to resolve his religious questions. Instead, when he raised them with his teachers, they responded with what he considered platitudes. One assured him, “To believers no questions are necessary; to non-believers no answers are possible.”

Unsatisfied, Tabor continued searching. He read Carl Jung, Rabbi Louis Jacobs, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. He valued the learning and discipline he acquired at Gateshead, but had come to regard the yeshiva as an “oasis” cut off from the wider world. Most troublingly, it had failed to show him that the Torah sought shelemut, “the full development of the whole personality.” After two years, he left “depressed, disillusioned and mixed up.”

Now studying at the London School of Economics, Tabor played first violin in the school orchestra. Could performing Beethoven be part of a religious life, he asked Rabbi Lamm, or should those hours be spent studying Torah or helping others?

On November 10, Rabbi Lamm answered that the approach Tabor had previously encountered represented only one strand within Judaism. Rambam, he noted, had understood music as a legitimate means of expanding the mind, at minimum to combat depression. And Rav Saadia Gaon had described the ideal human being as a harmonious personality whose varied capacities were properly developed and balanced. If Tabor possessed genuine artistic gifts, Rabbi Lamm went so far as to write, developing them might be not merely permissible but perhaps even obligatory.

On November 16, Tabor replied with more about himself. He could listen for hours to Beethoven’s late string quartets, he said, but he had come to realize that Chabad’s devekut niggunim moved him even more deeply. Despite the poor quality of the recordings, he heard in them “the mystic yearning and spiritual longing” of Chasidut. “They penetrate into my very being,” he added.

He wore his kippah openly at the LSE – including while leading the orchestra, no small thing at the time – and organized a twice-monthly Jewish philosophy group led by his friend Rabbi Shmuel Lew of Chabad. Most of the group’s participants were not observant, but Tabor admired Rabbi Lew’s willingness to enter into genuine dialogue with them. “He does not view the students with condescension,” he wrote, “nor does he come out with all the old platitudes.”

In his next letter to Rabbi Lamm, dated December 24 of the same year, Tabor recalled a warning he had received at Gateshead: “Keep away from Chabad and university. Both are like dry rot. Before you know where you are, you’re infested!”

From there, he explored the relationship between freedom and religious commitment. Must a life of Halakha produce conformity or did it leave room for different personalities? Once again, he turned to music for a model. Every musician must submit to certain techniques, Tabor observed, but within those rules each performer develops an individual interpretation. Tabor wondered whether more than a cold, dry rulebook, Halakha might be understood in the same way – as a set of “stepping stones, not stumbling blocks.”

On February 12, 1970, Rabbi Lamm answered that Michael had largely answered his own question. True, some Lithuanian yeshivot presented one specific form of piety as the only legitimate one. Halakha, however, for Rabbi Lamm, could bring a person to “the point of dizzying freedom,” at which different personalities responded to God in different ways.

In another 1970 letter, Tabor confided, “Besides the Lubavitcher Rebbe, you are one of the few rabbis I can respect and to whom I can look for some guidance and inspiration.” Tabor could speak with scientists about science, philosophers about philosophy, halakhists about Talmud and Halakha, artists about art. But he wanted someone capable of correlating “all these disciplines into one magnificent unity. Am I expecting too much?”

At the time, Tabor was attempting to compose a musical work built around four themes, including “an especially lovely theme for the cellos and violas.” He could play it on his violin or his sister’s viola, but he lacked the technical knowledge to notate and arrange it. “This again illustrates the point that it is not enough to have intuitions and feelings,” he wrote. “There is a need also for a discipline, a technique and ability to express one’s true potential. Only in this way can it become manifest. Similarly with Halacha and the discipline of daily living.”

On April 29, 1970, Tabor sent Rabbi Lamm two articles he had written and part of a letter to Louis Jacobs. He described responding to a student named Maurice who had dismissed mitzvot as irrelevant beside problems such as Vietnam. Tabor engaged him rather than writing him off. The two became friends; Maurice subsequently arranged to sell his chametz and distributed matza to other students. “How’s that for quick work?” Tabor asked.

Tabor was also becoming known at Jewish student gatherings as the “Fiddler of IUJF.” He studied Chasidut with a Dutch student and taught him slow Chabad melodies – “the ones that turn you on!” Invited to lead a student trip to Yugoslavia, he joked that he would sustain the group on sardines and vegetables “in true Lubavitch style.”

On May 14, 1970, Rabbi Lamm welcomed the articles and praised Tabor’s “missionary” success with Maurice. “Despite my altogether too heavy work load,” he wrote, “I look forward to your letters with genuine pleasure.” He called this “the kind of hedonism which is completely kosher – even glatt kosher.”

Writing in early 1971, with Rabbi Lamm’s support, Tabor noticed that his connection with Chabad and his sense of personal shelemut continued to deepen. Whereas he had once looked to Christian thinkers such as Paul Tillich for a language of religious depth, he was now upset that no one had exposed him earlier to what he called the “philosophy and poetic approach of Chabad.” “I don’t want a Jewish Tillich,” he concluded. “I want to grow, man, grow.”

On May 26, 1971, Rabbi Lamm responded. He did not personally share Tabor’s growing identification with Chabad, but he also did not try to redirect him. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “that you are following the right and correct path by immersing yourself heart and mind in Chabad and getting out of it and putting into it as much as you can.”

Rabbi Lamm still believed that Jewish thinkers needed to relate the resources of Jewish thought “to the new complexions of our changing world culture.” But he did not insist that Tabor’s shelemut resemble his own. Chabad offered Tabor something he had not found in Gateshead, and Rabbi Lamm encouraged him to throw himself into it.

In the summer of 1971, Tabor came to New York. He visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe and also spent time with Rabbi Lamm and his family. He brought his violin, played for the Lamms, and even allowed them to record one of his compositions. “I cannot tell you how very pleased I was to make your acquaintance,” Rabbi Lamm wrote afterward. “My family was as delighted as I – an impression confirmed when we replayed the violin piece you allowed us to record!”

In 1972, Tabor moved to the city of Sheffield, about 35 miles from Manchester, for postgraduate teacher training. While in Sheffield, Tabor visited the local Carmel College, a Jewish boarding school, where he played Chabad niggunim for the students. The headmaster considered hiring him to teach general studies, Jewish studies, and perhaps music. There was only one complication: he advised Tabor to find a wife first, since life on campus could be lonely.

Tabor was drawn to Carmel’s beit midrash and to the possibility of teaching both Jewish and general subjects. Most of all, he hoped he might finally be able to learn and teach “without fears of suffocation.” Rabbi Lamm told him that his “gut feeling” and the fact that he was having fun suggested he had found the right path. He sent him a copy of his new Hebrew book Torah Lishmah and included the family’s regards to their “crazy fiddler!”

In early 1973, Rabbi Lamm also followed Tabor’s search for a wife. When one relationship ended, Rabbi Lamm responded with biblical jokes about the other fish in the sea. Tabor soon hinted that “very good news” might be coming “from the direction due N.W. of Manchester.” Rabbi Lamm replied, “The Lamm family is waiting for their friendly fiddler from afar” to explain the hint. They suspected what it meant and hoped it would mark “a new beginning with ever greater heights for happiness and achievement.”

By 1974, Tabor was married, teaching at Carmel, and distributing Rabbi Lamm’s articles to his students. His daughter was born soon afterward.

Music continued to be a running theme in their correspondence. When Tabor requested additional copies of Rabbi Lamm’s articles, Rabbi Lamm warned that he expected payment: “On your next reunion, you shall have to fiddle and fiddle and fiddle, with one melody for every reprint I have sent you.”

Rabbi Lamm mentioned that one of his daughters had begun composing music and wondered whether Tabor’s “memorable visit” had contributed to her “artistic flowering.” In 1975, Tabor sent the Lamm family a niggun that had become a successful lullaby for his daughter. Rabbi Lamm passed it to his own daughter Chaye. “I can’t wait for her to play it for me,” he wrote.

In the summer of 1976, Rabbi and Mrs. Lamm visited Carmel. Tabor referred it as “the 7th year of our correspondence.” Rabbi Lamm simply called them “old friends.”

In 1983, although the correspondence had slowed considerably under the weight of Rabbi Lamm’s responsibilities as president of YU, Rabbi Lamm quoted Tabor publicly. In a Chag haSemikha address, he attributed to “my friend Michael Tabor of Manchester, England” a memorable distinction: “You like because; you love despite.”

In 1985, Tabor sent Rabbi Lamm an extended interpretation of Fiddler on the Roof. He had been invited to play at a rally marking the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Tabor wanted to perform a Bratzlaver niggun that would not merely commemorate the past but offer “inspiration to us as Jews today + for the future.” When the organizers rejected the piece as incompatible with their preferred more somber style, he withdrew. The episode led him to reflect on the fiddler who remained on the roof, exposed to the weather but still playing. Tabor connected the image to the Tikkunei Zohar’s transposition of בראשית into שיר תאב – a song that longs. The search for truth, he wrote, requires “raw strength, perseverance, self discipline.” Torah provides the substance, while the niggun supplies “that salt + pepper” that sustains the traveler.

Rabbi Lamm teased Tabor that Fiddler on the Roof was “not quite worthy of that level of analysis.” But he took the basic idea seriously. Shir ta’ev, he wrote, accorded with Maharal’s definition of song as “the longing of the effect for the cause” – “the aspiration for holy transcendence.”

In time, their letters became even less frequent, but they continued to correspond from time to time. In 2009, Tabor sent Rabbi Lamm new information about the kabbalistic sources for shir ta’ev. Rabbi Lamm responded the very same day: “I’ve often thought about ‘Shir-Ta’ev.’”

Finally, in 2012, Tabor sent a message through Rabbi Lamm’s longtime assistant, Hilda Tejada (whom I remember well):

I know that Rabbi Lamm is not too well and that inevitably our 40+ years correspondence has dried up.

But if possible I would love you to be able to pass on to him my love and appreciation for our transatlantic relationship over such a long period. It was truly a most wonderful lifeline for me, full of inspiration and good advice. I miss his letters which became progressively shorter the more responsibilities he assumed.

To him and his wife Mindy my fondest good wishes.

Rabbi Lamm answered:

Dear Mike:

I was enormously moved by the email you sent to Hilda about my relative silence, which you interpreted as the end of our 40+ year correspondence. Your good wishes – to me and Mindy – are so palpably honest. I never even thought that our correspondence meant so much to you.

You are right that my responsibilities have increased and I therefore neglected my correspondence with dear friends. What happened is that I am no longer President, and my duties as Chancellor and Rosh HaYeshiva are far less onerous than before… BUT 2 things: First, I used to have 3 full-time people to assist me in my correspondence and now I have only Hilda as full time, and Gladys only (very) part-time. Unfortunately, Ida – a lovely and very loyal person – passed away. Second, while my official duties are reduced, I am overwhelmed by my literary undertakings – and they are truly difficult, time-consuming, and challenging.

But I concede that these are all excuses – good friends should not be neglected. Yet, we are only human and it is oh so easy to make mistakes, and my neglect of corresponding with you is clearly an example.

I shall treasure your letter and hope you will forgive my neglect of correspondence with you. Be assured of my deep friendship which I will always cherish.

Now, Mike, I am eager to send you a copy of one of my recent books. One is for Pesach – commentary on the Haggada; one for a number of festivals, and one for Megillat Esther. Tell me which one or ones you prefer and where to send it/them to you.

Keep up with your music and, once again, forgive me for neglecting you…

Biverakha,

NL

Rabbi Lamm’s final line still gives me chills. More than forty years earlier, Michael had written to ask whether music had a place in a life of Torah. That question was part of his larger search for shelemut, for a life that could interweave Halakha, philosophy, Beethoven, and Chabad. Rabbi Lamm had supported that search without insisting that Tabor’s shelemut resemble his own. Now he ended where they had begun: “Keep up with your music.”

—

Shortly after I discovered their correspondence, I contacted Michael. By then, sadly, he had been diagnosed with cancer, and while we exchanged brief emails, we never had the opportunity to speak.

But just last week, Rabbi Lamm’s son Shalom shared one final story. On Friday night, a visitor from England approached him in shul, saying: “I just heard that you are the son of Rabbi Norman Lamm. Is that true?”

When Shalom answered that he was, the young man began to cry. “I am Michael Tabor’s son,” he said. He had finished saying Kaddish for his father a few months earlier.

“We immediately hugged,” Shalom said. “It was actually quite emotional. It was really very, very moving.”

More than fifty years after their fathers began a conversation across the Atlantic, their sons met in shul and embraced.

Jews’ College London approached him to become its principal in 1961. The rabbinate of Durban, South Africa, arose in 1965, followed by another approach from Jews’ College in March 1966 and discussions of the British chief rabbinate later the same year. (His good friend Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits ultimately accepted the position of Chief Rabbi.) In 1967, after Rabbi Emanuel Rackman left Shaarey Tefila in Far Rockaway for Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Synagogue, rumors circulated that Rabbi Lamm had accepted the Shaarey Tefila pulpit, though I don’t know of any evidence that he considered the position.

In 1970–71, Rabbi Lamm took a mini-sabbatical from The Jewish Center. According to one of his children, its primary purpose was to explore the possibility of aliyah. He was subsequently considered for chief rabbi of Haifa in 1971 and for the Jerusalem Institute of Technology in 1972. A few years later, in 1975, he was also courted by the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie.

But none of these possibilities progressed nearly as far as the offer he received in late 1972 to become president of Bar-Ilan University. Accepting, of course, would mean leaving The Jewish Center, entering university administration, and making aliyah with his wife and four children.

By November 27, 1972, news of the offer was already circulating in Israel. Dr. Menachem Brayer, a close friend, wrote that he understood that Rabbi Lamm’s answer was expected soon and promised to support him whatever he decided. He also warned that Bar-Ilan’s Faculty Senate possessed powers afforded to no other university faculty senate in the world. It seems that many faculty members were opposed to appointing a president at all.

In another letter from late 1972, Rabbi Lamm told Dr. Menachem Kadari, Bar-Ilan’s rector, that he planned to visit Israel beginning January 16, 1973. The official purpose was a ceremony at which he would receive the annual Abramowitz-Zeitlin Prize for his books The Royal Reach and Faith and Doubt. But that was merely the cover. His primary purpose was to meet with Bar-Ilan’s leadership.

In the letter, Rabbi Lamm asked Kadari to investigate discreetly how the Faculty Senate viewed his election. He wanted “correct and candid orientation” before entering what he called the “lions’ den.” He indicated that he had already responded positively to the university committee, provided that certain unstated conditions were met. But he also confided that he remained deeply torn. “The truth is that I find myself in psychological – and perhaps existential – confusion,” he wrote. “Two paths lie before me, and I do not know along which they are leading me.”

On January 2, 1973, ahead of his trip, Rabbi Lamm assembled a guest list for the January 23 presentation of the Abramowitz-Zeitlin Prize at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute. The list included many of the figures surrounding his candidacy. He arrived in Israel on January 16 and met with Bar-Ilan’s leadership while further investigating the university’s internal politics. Rabbi and Mrs. Lamm also toured two houses near the university. They preferred a villa in Shekhunat Hillel whose owner was prepared to transfer it to Bar-Ilan in exchange for a monthly stipend.

On February 6, Danny Tropper, the director of Gesher, on whose board Rabbi Lamm sat, called from Israel to report on a conversation concerning Rabbi Lamm’s candidacy. Rabbi Lamm thanked him in a letter dated February 7. Although the information was “not supportive,” he wrote to Tropper, it was better to know the facts than to remain ignorant. He urged Tropper to contact him whenever he obtained further information.

On March 12, Rabbi Lamm informed another adviser, A. Leo Levin, a law professor at Penn, that his response to “the people of Ramat Gan” was, regretfully, negative. But despite this letter, it seems that his final decision had not yet been made. Significant efforts to salvage the arrangement continued.

On March 20, the real-estate agent who had shown the Lamms the two houses wrote to ask what had happened since their departure. In his reply later that month, Rabbi Lamm said that he and his wife were not interested in the Ramat Chen property, but that Bar-Ilan might still wish to acquire the villa. “No matter what happens with regard to other matters,” he wrote separately to Ludwig Jesselson, chairman of the Board of Trustees, the property was worth pursuing.

On April 26, Rabbi Lamm told Yehoshua Schachter, a professor at Bar-Ilan, that there was “nothing new to report in the matter of the Presidency of Bar-Ilan.” He also thanked Schachter and his colleagues for having encouraged him “both before and since” his January visit.

Three days later, on April 29, Rabbi Lamm apologized to Dr. Brayer for failing to answer two letters. The situation had grown so complex, he explained, that it would be better talked through over the phone than in writing. Nearly seven weeks after telling Levin that his answer was negative, Rabbi Lamm remained deeply torn.

The surviving agreements reveal how close he came to accepting the position. At some point during the negotiations, Bar-Ilan’s Board of Trustees offered him a five-year term. The contract and its addendum, intended to take effect in July 1973, provided a salary, furnished residence, car and driver, moving expenses, continued American pension and insurance payments, annual travel to America for each of the Lamms’ four children, and a year of income protection after his term ended.

According to Rabbi Lamm’s later account, the university also attempted at a late stage to reopen negotiations after an informal agreement had been reached. Its effort to revisit the agreement gave him reason to doubt that the relationship would work out as smoothly as he had hoped.

By May 24, news of his probable refusal had reached Israeli academic circles. Writing from Paris, Professor R. J. Zvi Werblowsky expressed his disappointment. Although he described himself as sometimes “militantly anti-Orthodox,” he wanted Rabbi Lamm and people like him in Israel – people who, even as ideological opponents, could be respected.

In early June, Rabbi Lamm formally informed Minister Zerach Warhaftig, who had been urging him to accept the position, that, after a prolonged struggle and weighty deliberation, he had concluded that the time was not right to accept the presidency. He hoped that Bar-Ilan would find “a true leader” capable of overcoming its obstacles and realizing its enormous potential.

On June 12, Rabbi Lamm confirmed his decision to Werblowsky. “As of now,” he wrote, “I simply do not see my way clear to accepting the offer.” The decision caused him “deepest regret” because “my family and I had been looking forward to aliyah.” Warhaftig replied the same day that he still regretted Rabbi Lamm’s refusal to assume the burden “despite the obstacles,” and so the episodes came to a close.

I’m not a big fan of what-if history. But it’s hard not to wonder what might have been. Three years after Rabbi Lamm declined Bar-Ilan, he and Rabbi Emanuel Rackman were the leading candidates to succeed Dr. Samuel Belkin as president of Yeshiva University. Had Rabbi Lamm made aliyah, perhaps Rabbi Rackman would have been chosen instead.

Ultimately, what ended up happening was precisely the reverse. In 1976, Rabbi Lamm won the Yeshiva University presidency. Rabbi Rackman made aliyah and, in 1977, accepted the position Rabbi Lamm had declined: president of Bar-Ilan. The rest, as they say, is history.

—

Many people familiar with Rabbi Lamm know about his relationship with Rav Mordechai Gifter, the longtime rosh yeshiva of Telz. Most famously, on Chol Hamoed Pesach 1988, Rav Gifter delivered a blistering attack on Rabbi Lamm and Yeshiva University following a New York Times article about Rabbi Lamm’s vision of Torah Umadda. The speech was later dubbed “Gifter Slaughters Lamm for Pesach.”

More recently, Zev Eleff has shown that their differences went back considerably further. In 1968, Rav Gifter respectfully challenged Rabbi Lamm over his interpretation of the classic Talmudic story of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and the cave – an interpretation Rabbi Lamm would revisit three decades later in his 1997 “caveman speech.”

But as it turns out, 1968 was not the first exchange between Rabbi Lamm and Rav Gifter. Nearly a decade earlier, when Rabbi Lamm was still in his early thirties, the two were already engaged in a debate over one of Rabbi Lamm’s early halakhic articles.

The story begins with Rabbi Lamm’s arrival in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1954. As he began his tenure at Kehillat Kodimoh, he noticed that many kohanim were not reciting Birchat Kohanim, the priestly blessing. Many of these kohanim were not Shabbat-observant, and the prevailing practice was for them not to ascend the duchan. The kohanim who still participated, Rabbi Lamm wrote, were “growing older in age and fewer in numbers.” He worried that this “beautiful, elegant and inspiring part of our holiday services” might eventually disappear altogether. And the problem was not limited to Springfield. Rabbi Lamm noted that the same phenomenon was widespread in many (Ashkenazic) Orthodox shuls across the country. (The 1950s really were a different time.)

Rabbi Lamm decided to do something about it. He wrote to the kohanim of his congregation explaining that he had researched the question and raised it with the Halacha Commission of the Rabbinical Council of America, which was chaired by Rav Soloveitchik. The commission unanimously accepted his argument that “all Kohanim should participate in the ‘Birchas Kohanim.’ Even if he not be a Sabbath observer, the Kohen may, and is required, to pronounce the blessing over his fellow Jews.” Rabbi Lamm therefore arranged a Sunday afternoon “training institute” at which he and an experienced kohen would teach them how to properly perform the mitzvah.

Rabbi Lamm subsequently published a lengthy Hebrew article laying out the halakhic basis for his position. He began his discussion with the classical status of a mumar, a Jew whose deliberate violations of Jewish law can cause him to be treated, for certain purposes, like a non-Jew. A Jew who publicly desecrates Shabbat can fall into this category, and Rambam also rules that a kohen who worshipped idols may no longer perform Birchat Kohanim, even after he repents. It was therefore tempting to reason that a public Shabbat violator should likewise be permanently barred from the duchan.

But Rabbi Lamm argued against this conclusion. A mumar, after all, is still fully Jewish. Rabbi Lamm therefore proposed a distinction between a Jew’s basic identity and his status as part of the larger fraternity of the Jewish people, or achavah. A mumar, he proposed, remained fully Jewish as an individual while losing certain rights or relationships that depend on his standing as a member of the Jewish community.

Rabbi Lamm then applied a similar distinction to the priesthood. He distinguished between shem kehuna, the underlying status of being a kohen, and kedushat kehuna, the additional sanctity associated with that status. A kohen could compromise the latter, Rabbi Lamm argued, and forfeit some of his priestly privileges and obligations without losing his basic identity as a kohen.

This distinction carried implications for Birchat Kohanim. Rabbi Lamm argued that Birchat Kohanim depended fundamentally on shem kehuna rather than kedushat kehuna. As a result, a kohen’s sins could compromise his religious standing without undermining the basic priestly status that entitled, and obligated, him to perform Birchat Kohanim. And as for Rambam’s permanent disqualification of a kohen who had worshipped idols, Rabbi Lamm understood this as part of his broader analysis of the status of a mumar rather than a model that could simply be extended to Shabbat violation.

He also pointed to one more fundamental reason for leniency. Rabbi Lamm argued that many nonobservant American Jews of his day should not be considered mumarim in the first place, because their Shabbat violation often reflected their upbringing rather than a conscious rejection of Judaism.

Rav Gifter was not persuaded. In October 1959, having read the article, he sent Rabbi Lamm a detailed critique. His basic objection was that Rabbi Lamm’s categories did not fit the sources as neatly as he claimed. Rambam, Rav Gifter pointed out, disqualifies a kohen who actually performed idolatrous worship even if he did so accidentally or under coercion. Such a person thus never became a mumar in the first place, and the permanent disqualification therefore could not arise from the loss of some broader Jewish or communal status. It had to be, as Rav Gifter put it, a pesul mesuyam, a specific disqualification created by the act of idolatrous worship based on a gezeirat hakatuv, a divine decree.

That point, Rav Gifter continued, in turn affected the Shabbat question. If the special permanent disqualification was unique to the act of idolatrous worship, there was no basis for transferring it to a kohen who had become a mumar by violating Shabbat. That was why Rambam implies that in the case of Shabbat repentance worked. A Shabbat violator who repented was no longer a mumar and could once again perform Birchat Kohanim, but repentance was still required.

Rav Gifter’s letter went beyond the technical arguments. At multiple points in his response, he respectfully but firmly challenged Rabbi Lamm’s willingness to innovate independently. At one point he wrote:

Vetimhani hei’akh hirsha kevod Torato le’atzmo lechadesh minafsheih.

I am astonished how his Torah eminence permitted yourself to innovate [this] on your own.

Rav Gifter was equally unhappy with Rabbi Lamm’s treatment of the Peri Megadim, whose interpretation of Rambam Rabbi Lamm had set aside. Rav Gifter responded:

Vechas milomar al haPeri Megadim, “shebimchilat kevod Torato lo dak.”

God forbid that one should say of the Peri Megadim, “with all due respect to his Torah eminence, he was not precise.”

Then came Rav Gifter’s broader methodological objection:

Veha’ikar she’ein lanu lazuz midivrei haShas verabboteinu hakadmonim, ve’aleinu rak lehavin divreihem hakedoshim kemo shene’emru venikhtevu, velo lechadesh sevarot mida’ateinu, af she“tziltzul” hasevara yafeh vena’im hu.

The essential thing is that we must not depart from the words of the Talmud and our early masters. Our task is only to understand their sacred words as they were stated and written, and not to innovate arguments of our own, even if the “ring” of the reasoning is beautiful and pleasant.

Rav Gifter was clearly questioning both Rabbi Lamm’s conclusions and his willingness to develop this kind of independent halakhic analysis in the first place.

But Rabbi Lamm had learned a different lesson from his own rebbe, Rabbi Soloveitchik. One of the lessons he took from the Rav was precisely the obligation to think independently.

The Manhattan eruv controversy, which took place just a few years later in the early 1960s, offers an excellent illustration of what Rabbi Lamm had learned from the Rav about interpretive autonomy. Rabbi Lamm recalled asking the Rav about the status of the eruv. The Rav responded that since Rabbi Lamm had studied the subject carefully, he should “rule according to your own judgment without fear.” When the Rav later studied the issue himself and reached the opposite conclusion, he still did not insist that Rabbi Lamm defer to him. As Rabbi Lamm remembered it, the Rav “did not demand that I submit to his opinion or honor. He did not rely upon his own ‘Torah authority.’”

His experience with Rav Aharon Kotler during the eruv controversy was very different. In October 1962, Rabbi Lamm and Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits met Rav Aharon in his sukka in Lakewood and pressed what Rabbi Lamm described as “the idea that it is possible to have different opinions on Halakhic issues.” They implied that Rav Aharon did not possess “papal infallibility.” Rabbi Lamm left the meeting describing Rav Aharon, in a memorandum, as “the ultimate in authoritarian character.”

Rabbi Lamm would later contrast the Rav and Rav Aharon Kotler on precisely this point. The Rav encouraged his students to exercise their own judgment, while Rav Aharon demanded far greater deference to gedolim. His exchange with Rav Gifter suggests that a similar divide was already present in 1959. Rabbi Lamm was prepared to offer a creative, independent reading of Rambam as part of his halakhic analysis, and Rav Gifter challenged him for doing precisely that.

For the next three decades, Rabbi Lamm and Rav Gifter would find themselves on opposite sides of some of the major issues dividing Modern Orthodoxy and the Haredi yeshiva world. Eventually, those disagreements would become far more public and, at least from one side, far more acrimonious. Their respective parts of the Orthodox community changed as well. But in 1959, Rav Gifter had already challenged a young Rabbi Lamm, and Rabbi Lamm had respectfully written back in defense of his novel understanding.

Long before their battles became public, the differences had been there all along.

The episode underscores one of the major challenges we face in America and elsewhere: these days, we hardly lack people willing to speak their minds. The harder question, as the letter-writers put it, is how to create a culture in which “questioning is welcomed, disagreement is expected, and advocacy remains vigorous” without disagreement devolving into “dehumanizing people.”

But our challenge was not always how to disagree respectfully. Back in the 1950s, the concern often ran in the opposite direction. Postwar American culture placed a premium on politeness and on being “normal” and “respectable,” raising the concern that people had become overly reluctant to say what they really thought.

It was this problem that a twenty-five-year-old Rabbi Norman Lamm took up on January 10, 1953, in an impassioned sermon at his first solo pulpit, the West Side Jewish Center, entitled “The Kind of Revolution We Need.” The sermon – and the letters it generated – offers a case study in balancing freedom of expression with the restraints that keep discourse non-toxic.

Rabbi Lamm begins by arguing that Americans have become far too cautious. Americans, he says, once spoke frankly; they were willing to call a spade a spade. (Where I come from, we usually call this a “sabra.”) But now they have become constrained by “superficial politeness” and “petty fears.” They need to recover what Rabbi Lamm describes as the childlike willingness to say plainly what needs to be said.

He humorously calls his proposal the “Diaper Revolution,” borrowing the expression from journalist Robert St. John’s account of wartime Yugoslavia. When Yugoslavia’s leaders aligned the country with the Axis during WWII, adults largely remained silent while schoolchildren protested by staging strikes, shredding pictures of Hitler, and denouncing the government. The children, in other words, said openly what their parents believed but were afraid to express. Rabbi Lamm points out that their “childishness” was precisely their advantage: they had not yet learned when respectable society expected them to remain quiet.

Rabbi Lamm argues that Americans need to regain some of that spirit, and he offers an example from what he calls the “crass commercial exploitation of religion.” Playwright George Kaufman, he says, had recently been fired from a television program after criticizing the performance of Christian hymns on secular television programs. While Kaufman had been the target of a torrent of criticism, Rabbi Lamm comes to his defense. “Christian hymns have no place on variety TV shows,” he insists, “and Eli Eli has no place in cabarets and nightclubs.” (Eli Eli, Jacob Koppel Sandler’s enormously popular Jewish lament, was widely performed throughout the first half of the twentieth century.)

Rabbi Lamm emphasizes that his objection is not to religious broadcasting, including Christian content. “To teach the word of God over radio and television is in itself commendable,” he says. His objection is to commercial sponsorship, such as using religion to sell television sets, and to religious songs appearing side-by-side with crass secular forms of entertainment. “It is ridiculous and profane,” he argues, “to suggest that a commercial establishment be given the opportunity to control the purse-strings of those who control the heart-strings of the faithful.” He suspects that some Americans share these concerns, but stay silent for fear of appearing “old fashioned” or like “chronic complainers.” Kaufman, he says, deserves credit for saying what others are afraid to call out.

Rabbi Lamm then invokes Moshe as a Jewish model of forthrightness. He portrays Moshe’s early life as a series of refusals to stay silent. One midrash describes the young Moshe boldly grabbing Pharaoh’s crown. Later, when he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and no one else is willing to intervene, he acts himself.

Rabbi Lamm recognizes that such directness carries risks. Another midrash describes Moshe burning his mouth on a coal and becoming speech-impaired. “While Moshe burnt himself and could not become an orator,” Rabbi Lamm observes, “let us remember that he also grabbed a crown and became a liberator.”

The sermon attracted significant attention. The New York Times reported on it the very next day under the headline “Rabbi Sees Abuse of Religion on Air.” The article focused on Rabbi Lamm’s point about religious broadcasting and described his criticism of commercial sponsorship as an “apparent reference” to Bishop Fulton Sheen’s popular television program Life Is Worth Living.

Letters soon began to arrive. Many seemed to confirm Rabbi Lamm’s suspicion that Americans were thinking things they hesitated to say in polite company. One correspondent wrote that it was “high time” someone protested the “crass commercial exploitation of religion.” A Christian woman explained that she and many of her religious friends could “hardly bear” what Thanksgiving and Christmas had become.

Gertrude Rosenfeld, who described herself as “a liberal Jewess,” offered a particularly thoughtful response in support. Although she did not regularly attend synagogue or observe the Sabbath, she had “the highest esteem for that which is sacred to people.” Rabbi Lamm’s sermon reminded her of Bar Mitzvah cakes shaped like Torah scrolls. “I think it is one of the most disgraceful things to do,” she wrote. “The first time [I saw it] I did not trust my eyes.” She asked: “Have you ever seen a New Testament baked into a cake – or a Crucifix?”

But other correspondents – many anonymous – were less receptive to Rabbi Lamm’s message. Anna McLaughlin accused Rabbi Lamm and Kaufman of trying to “denounce Bishop Sheen” and, “if possible, prevent Catholics from having any say in the matter.” She added: “Some [sic] you Jews, who were once the chosen people of G-d, seem to love to show your hatred of the Catholic Church.” She suggested that “during WW2 the Pope saved hundreds of Jews, [and] even kept them hidden in the Vatican from Hitler and his army,” and then reminded Rabbi Lamm that Jesus was a Jew whom the Jews had rejected. She advised him to “study the ten commandments and devote much less time to chasing the almighty dollar.”

Another correspondent, Arthur Hazelbower, similarly divided the controversy along religious lines. Rabbi Lamm, he predicted, would discover that “this is a Jewish viewpoint and a Christian one.” Christians did not need Rabbi Lamm to speak for them: “They have their proper representatives, who can speak out for them.” He reminded Rabbi Lamm of his place: “This is a Christian country and our customs are Christian.” America had helped make Israel possible, he added. “Be grateful.”

Others took Rabbi Lamm’s perceived attack on Christianity as evidence of communist sympathies – a familiar charge at the height of McCarthyism. One writer interpreted Rabbi Lamm’s criticism of commercialized religion as opposition to religion of any sort: “Of course Russia has your idea too ‘No Religion’ and see how unhappy that Nation is to-day.” The letter ended with a warning that Rabbi Lamm was “only causing more Hatred toward your Race.” Another correspondent was more succinct: “Rabbi Norman Lamm why don’t you and George S Kaufman go over to Joe Stalin for a change of sermon. God Bless America.”

And one final writer evidently decided not to hold any punches:

How dare you, you poisonous Jew, attack Bishop Sheen, the most respected Christian minister in the US? Why don’t you attack the Rosenbergs, the Greenglasses, the Fuchs, the Golds, and the other Jewish traitors? Your accursed tribe have a monopoly on traitorism, and the day is fast approaching when the American people as every other nation on earth has done will drive you out. Murder Incorporated was only a prelude to Traitors Incorporated. How much more can Americans stand? Hitler was right!

The vile antisemitism, less than a decade after the end of the Holocaust, speaks for itself. But the letters also provide an interesting test of Rabbi Lamm’s argument. He had urged Americans to overcome their inhibitions and say what they really believed. The responses revealed that what people were holding back was not always admirable – and that speaking freely and arguing responsibly were not quite the same thing. They also show how easy it is to say something cruel without being particularly thoughtful or constructive, especially under the cover of anonymity.

Interestingly, Rabbi Lamm himself acknowledges that forthrightness can be dangerous. Moshe grabs Pharaoh’s crown, but he also burns his mouth. Rabbi Lamm’s point is that the risk is worth taking: “While Moshe burnt himself and could not become an orator,” he writes, “let us remember that he also grabbed a crown and became a liberator.” The letters suggest a further challenge when we speak out. Sometimes the danger of speaking too freely is not that we burn ourselves, but that we burn others.

Seventy years later, the “Diaper Revolution” has largely succeeded. The challenge, in Lower Merion and elsewhere, is figuring out what comes next. Speaking plainly is a virtue, but so is knowing how to disagree.

There has naturally been a good deal of discussion over the last few days about what Rabbi Lamm might have said as attitudes toward homosexuality continued to change. A report of a conversation and two significant student newspaper articles were shared on my Facebook page. I did a bit more poking around and located an audio recording of a 2005 lecture Rabbi Lamm delivered to YU semikha students as part of the Contemporary Halakha program. (It’s now on the website.) To the best of my knowledge, this is his last extended discussion of homosexuality, and it offers a fairly full picture of where he stood toward the end of his career.

Before getting to the substance, a methodological note and a personal note. Methodologically, there are turns of phrase in this lecture that I suspect he might not have chosen in his prime, though it is impossible to know for sure. Personally, it’s hard for me to listen to Rabbi Lamm in these later recordings. He was simply not the same speaker he had once been – not even close. Mrs. Lamm used to mention how much she wished her grandchildren’s spouses, including me, could have heard her husband in his prime. If you never heard him in his prime either, I recommend listening to his 1993 eulogy for the Rav. You will get a sense for what she meant.

Three things stand out from the lecture. First, the basic thrust of Rabbi Lamm’s position is very much the same as it was in 1974; he refers back to his Encyclopaedia Judaica article throughout. Rabbi Lamm continues to use the language of illness and returns to the different categories of homosexuality he had previously laid out. He repeats his discussion of to’eva. He still believes that change is possible in some cases and even encourages homosexual men, where realistic, to at least consider heterosexual marriage. He notes, as he does in the 1974 article, that lesbianism is of a completely different order of halakhic importance from male homosexual intercourse. Interestingly, he is also critical of Trembling Before G-d (released in 2001), which he considers somewhat biased because it negatively portrays Orthodox Jews who are not accepting of homosexual activity.

He also addresses the APA’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from the DSM and points to the tremendous pressure that was brought to bear around the decision. He contrasts the views of Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna as to whether a change in homosexual orientation is possible through therapy, presenting Freud as skeptical and Anna as claiming therapeutic success. And when discussing claims about a “homosexual gene,” Rabbi Lamm argues that we now know that no such gene has been discovered. In any case, he adds, even if a biological predisposition were demonstrated, that would not make homosexual conduct permissible any more than a biological predisposition toward other prohibited behavior would make that behavior permissible.

Second, Rabbi Lamm devotes even more of the talk to what happens when change is not possible. Here, he repeatedly refers back to what he calls the “genuine homosexual”: someone who did not choose his orientation. Such people, he stresses, can be good people and observant Jews. Even if they do act on their urges, they are struggling with something very difficult, and the rabbi must approach them accordingly. In this context, he also points to the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic and the importance of combating it.

He also clarifies what he means by invoking the category of oness. Rabbi Lamm explains that he is not claiming that homosexuality qualifies as oness in the narrow technical sense; the category of oness, after all, is quite limited when it comes to sexual activity. But he does think that we can use the concept of oness in a broader sense to develop an approach that is consistent with the ethos of halakha. In any case, he points out, in the absence of a Sanhedrin we are not trying to determine whether someone technically qualifies for punishment. The more relevant question is how we understand and respond to the person.

In a similar vein, Rabbi Lamm invokes the Talmudic teaching that a person sins only because a ruach shetut, a spirit of folly, has entered him (Sota 3a). While none of this changes the prohibition, he says, it does change the way we think about the person who violates it. Speaking about someone who has genuinely tried and failed to change, Rabbi Lamm asks the students: how many of us have tried and failed? Of course, the answer is all of us. For the genuine anus, he says, a great deal of compassion is therefore necessary.

Finally, the lecture contains a number of subtleties, some of which suggest developments in his thinking. For one, Rabbi Lamm notes that when he wrote his 1974 essay, he did not yet adequately appreciate the distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual conduct. By 2005, that distinction had become an important part of his thinking.

Could a gay man receive an aliya? Rabbi Lamm’s answer is yes, so long as he is not trying to make an issue of his homosexuality or use it to push an aggressive agenda in the synagogue. (This assumes the shul gives aliyot to those who are not Shabbat-observant.) He also emphasizes, as an aside, that we cannot assume a man is gay based on his clothing or effeminate mannerisms.

Asked about hiring a homosexual to teach the same sex in a school setting, Rabbi Lamm says that he would respond in the same way he would when hiring a heterosexual man or woman to teach the opposite sex: it depends on whether the person is responsible and able to control himself or herself. This point is especially significant since there is a 1994 report that he was hesitant to hire a gay teacher at YU.

Rabbi Lamm also makes an interesting observation about Rav Moshe Feinstein’s 1976 responsum. Rav Moshe had emphasized the extraordinary contempt with which homosexual conduct was regarded and used that fact as part of his argument about the nature of homosexual desire. Rabbi Lamm simply notes that this description no longer fits the world of 2005.

Interestingly, Rabbi Lamm thinks that changing circumstances also require greater stringency in another area. He notes that while the Shulchan Arukh rules that men may not sleep in the same bed, the Bach says we are no longer concerned with this because homosexual activity in the Jewish community is rare. In response to a student question, Rabbi Lamm says that since homosexual activity is prevalent today, boys should no longer sleep in the same bed unless there is no reasonable alternative.

More broadly, he emphasizes that homosexuality should not become the one prohibition that eclipses everything else. True, the Torah calls homosexual intercourse a to’eva, but it describes other sins in similar language. Rabbis need to maintain a sense of proportion.

So on the larger categorical questions, the Rabbi Lamm of 2005 sounds largely like the Rabbi Lamm of 1974. There are some important developments, including the sharper distinction between orientation and conduct. But what also comes through very strongly is his compassionate tone. Speaking to future rabbis, his concern is that they strike a wise balance between fidelity to the Torah and sensitivity to the people whose lives the Torah addresses.

—

In late 1967, a group of Episcopal clergy proposed that homosexual relationships be evaluated by the same standard as heterosexual marriage, namely whether they fostered healthy, lasting relationships rather than exploitation. Rabbi Lamm wrote his first essay on the subject of homosexuality – his 1968 article, “The New Dispensation: On Homosexuality” – in response. What troubled him was not just the proposed acceptance of homosexuality, but the larger shift in sexual morality that he believed it reflected. The Episcopal proposal made love and the quality of the relationship the primary standards of sexual morality, not traditional rules concerning marriage and the family.

Rabbi Lamm did not treat homosexuality as a standalone issue, but as part of a broader transformation in American attitudes, which he called the New Morality. He could therefore be harsh in his criticism of attempts to change traditional norms, particularly within religious communities, and at the same time understanding of individuals who did not live by those norms.

Early on in the essay, Rabbi Lamm described homosexual conduct as “morally abhorrent” while acknowledging that homosexual relationships could involve sincere affection. But he rejected the premise that affection could, in itself, legitimate a relationship. As he put it in another piece entitled “The New Morality Under Religious Auspices,” published in the same year, “There cannot be a morality based on motives alone; there must be rules.” Otherwise, one seeks “all the advantages of a halakhic approach without a Halakhah.” For Rabbi Lamm, judging homosexual relationships by the standard of love alone was inconsistent with the Torah’s understanding of marriage and the family.

In the essay, after briefly surveying halakhic sources concerning male and female homosexual activity, Rabbi Lamm asks why the Torah characterizes homosexual conduct as a to’eva, an abomination. Beginning with Bar Kappara’s interpretation of the word as to’eh atta bah, “you are going astray because of it,” he surveys three explanations. The Pesikta Zutreta understands the “going astray” as the frustration of procreation, one of the central purposes of sexuality. Tosafot and Rabbenu Asher interpret it as a married man abandoning his wife and disrupting his family to pursue homosexual relationships. Rabbi Baruch Halevi Epstein, in his Torah Temimah, emphasizes the act’s unnaturalness: “You are going astray from the foundations of creation,” since homosexual intercourse defies what Rabbi Lamm describes as the anatomical structure of the sexes. Rabbi Lamm himself offered a more basic explanation. He suggested that to’eva may designate an act the Torah considers “prima facie disgusting” and that “cannot be further reduced or explained.” It is, he proposes, “a category of objectionableness sui generis,” what he called “a primary phenomenon.”

At the same time, Rabbi Lamm was at pains to emphasize that moral condemnation of an act must not lead to hostility toward the person. Gay men and lesbians often suffer profound loneliness and shame, he observed, and therefore deserve compassion and care.

This distinction led Rabbi Lamm to the category of illness. Drawing an analogy to the halakhic treatment of suicide, he noted that later authorities came to regard suicide as a manifestation of mental illness without in any way questioning the Torah’s negative judgment of the act of suicide per se. Homosexuality, he suggested, should similarly be approached therapeutically rather than punitively. The proper communal response was “to treat the homosexual as a patient rather than as a criminal,” seeking, where possible, to cure the condition or redirect its energies into constructive channels.

Both the comparison to suicide and the description of homosexual orientation as something to be cured are deeply jarring from the standpoint of 2026. Still, Rabbi Lamm’s main point was that psychological compulsion (based on the halakhic category of oness, duress) could mitigate personal responsibility without changing the formal judgment of the act.

Here, Rabbi Lamm also argued that consensual homosexual conduct between adults should not remain a criminal offense in the United States – as it still was then in the majority of states – a conclusion he reached “more as a matter of consistency and expediency than as general outlook.” Since American courts generally avoided intervening in private conduct that did not directly harm others, and other sexual offenses such as adultery and incest were not prosecuted, he believed that homosexuality should likewise not be illegal. He was inclined in this direction even as he acknowledged that an unenforced law possessed “moral force and pedagogical value” and noted that decriminalization might remove the stigma of immorality from homosexual conduct. (We will see that he appears to have changed his mind in his 1974 essay; my thanks to Josh Shanes for bringing this to my attention.)

Rabbi Lamm closed by placing the issue in a larger context. He regretted Christianity’s “deterioration” on sexual morality, which he feared would weaken the moral fabric of Western society. Judaism, he concluded, had begun as “the standard bearer of morality in a world which mocked it” and now appeared destined to carry that responsibility into the twentieth century “with the same sense of isolation” – and, he prayed, “the same sense of determination.”

His frustration was especially evident when religious leaders embraced the sexual revolution’s underlying assumptions. Secular rejection of traditional morality was one thing; reinterpreting religion to conform to contemporary attitudes, quite another.

Criticism and Correspondence

In response to the article, Rabbi Lamm received a good number of supportive letters, as well as criticism from both sides. From the right, Rabbi Chaim Pincus, principal of Torah Vodaath – from which Rabbi Lamm had graduated twenty-five years earlier – questioned Rabbi Lamm’s opposition to criminal penalties after reading a newspaper account of his views. “It is the responsibility of the clergy,” he wrote, “to raise its voice and call an עבירה an עבירה, even if it is greeted with unpopularity, particularly when it is a matter of a הלכה מפורשת,” an explicit law.

Rabbi Lamm replied that the newspaper report had drastically condensed his position. He sent Rabbi Pincus the original article together with correspondence from critics on both sides and his responses. These materials, he wrote, supported his contention that “our attitude to this criminal must be one of condemnation and acceptance at the same time, or love and hate,” citing chapter 32 of the Tanya.

Rabbi Lamm also responded to two critiques in Jewish Life (now Jewish Action), where he had published the original piece. One writer, Morris Smith, argued that Orthodox Jews should support stronger legal enforcement of biblical morality. Another, Richard Israel, approached the essay from the opposite direction, arguing that Rabbi Lamm’s willingness to abolish sodomy laws made him more innovative than he was willing to acknowledge.

Rabbi Lamm rejected both. Jewish moral principles, he argued, need not be translated directly into contemporary American criminal law. “There is nothing Jewish about a jail,” he pointed out. Nor was his preference for rehabilitation a modern liberal invention; it was simply another name for teshuvah. Drawing on the Talmud’s discussions of capital punishment, Rabbi Lamm also argued that halakha demands compassion – “even love!” – even for a person being taken to his death. For this reason, once capital punishment ceased to function in practice, the community was not required to invent substitute penalties.

From a different direction, Rabbi Lamm received an especially interesting response from Rabbi David Hartman. Hartman focused on what he saw as a basic tension in Rabbi Lamm’s argument. If the Torah treated homosexual conduct as a capital offense, he asked, in what sense could homosexuality simultaneously be classified as an illness? “If so,” Hartman wrote, “it would appear strange that punishment for sickness is capital punishment.”

Hartman also pressed Rabbi Lamm to clarify what he meant by “sickness.” Was he speaking as a rabbi, as a psychologist, or as a physician? If “sick” was being used loosely, like we might call a murderer sick, perhaps it was simply another way of saying “disgusting.” Was homosexuality sick because “the Bible says it is repulsive,” Hartman asked, or because it failed psychologically to fulfill the individual? “These are two very different moves,” he wrote, “and I think it is very important that you clarify what your position is.”

Hartman also questioned Rabbi Lamm’s argument for decriminalization. If homosexuality was genuinely an illness, what did Rabbi Lamm mean when he defended decriminalization only on grounds of “consistency and expediency”? Would he support criminal penalties for homosexuality if American law punished those other offenses consistently?

Rabbi Lamm replied that his “major answer” lay in a distinction he had failed to make sufficiently clear. The biblical death penalty functioned primarily as “an index of the degree of reprehensibility of an immoral act, rather than as a penal instrument meant to be applied in all cases – or even in any cases.” Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon declared that, had they served on the Sanhedrin, they would never have imposed capital punishment. Halakha erected procedural barriers, such as the requirement of warning (hatra’ah), which were designed to make its application exceedingly rare. Recognizing homosexuality as an illness therefore did not, in Rabbi Lamm’s view, diminish the severity of the prohibition. But it did change the way we ought to perceive the individual and his degree of responsibility.

Rabbi Lamm then clarified his defense of decriminalization. By “consistency,” he meant that he likewise opposed contemporary criminal penalties for adultery and polygamy. And by “expediency,” he meant that prison was the wrong response to what he regarded as a psychological condition:

Since I believe homosexuality to be an illness, I do not think that our prisons contribute to the required therapy; in fact, they usually exacerbate the condition and make it far worse than it was initially.

Finally, Rabbi Lamm rejected Hartman’s claim that only the medical profession could define sickness, at least the way he was using the term. “I believe ‘sickness’ to be a quality of the entire personality,” he wrote, “and not necessarily of an individual organ.” Because he was using the term in this broader sense, he felt that such a judgment was not only the province of medical professionals.

The 1973 Exchange

The distinction emerges especially clearly in a 1973 letter about the place of gay Jews within the Jewish community. Rabbi Lamm compared them to meḥallelei Shabbat. Orthodox Jews had long found ways to work with Jews who violated Shabbat and other serious prohibitions, and he believed the same principle applied here.

What Rabbi Lamm would not accept was an organized group that sought to legitimate homosexual conduct. He distinguished sharply between accepting gay Jews as members of the community and accepting “as valid a group that seeks to justify – publicly and shamelessly” conduct prohibited by the Torah.

For Rabbi Lamm, violating the prohibition did not place a gay Jew outside the community any more than violating Shabbat did. What he opposed much more strongly was the effort to legitimate the conduct itself.

Psychology and Personal Responsibility

Rabbi Lamm returned to the subject in 1974 in “Judaism and the Modern Attitude to Homosexuality,” written for the Encyclopaedia Judaica Yearbook. After reproducing much of the material in his 1968 article, Rabbi Lamm sketches four possible broad responses to homosexuality:

Repressive: refusing leniency toward gay men and lesbians lest society’s moral fabric be weakened.

Practical: eliminating imprisonment and social harassment for pragmatic reasons while avoiding making any ideological commitments in any direction.

Permissive: embracing homosexuality as fully legitimate.

Psychological: recognizing at least some forms of homosexuality as illnesses and allowing that to influence the appropriate response to each individual case.

After critiquing the first three approaches, Rabbi Lamm adopts the psychological position, describing the ensuing discussion as an “expansion and modification” of the view he had advanced in 1968.

Rabbi Lamm acknowledges that three groups would reject his description of homosexuality as an illness: gay activists, who regarded it as condescending; psychologists such as Evelyn Hooker, who argued that gay people were no more psychologically disturbed than heterosexuals; and thinkers such as Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing, who challenged conventional categories of mental health and illness altogether. Rabbi Lamm nevertheless maintained that a significant number of gay men and lesbians could properly be regarded as ill.

Turning to its origins, Rabbi Lamm argues that no single cause of homosexuality had been established and that it likely resulted from a combination of factors. Still, at least based on the research available at the time, he considered the evidence “overwhelming” that homosexuality was primarily developmental rather than constitutional. He also rejected the prevailing pessimism about treatment, pointing to psychoanalytic and behavioral studies that had demonstrated significant rates of success.

Rabbi Lamm cautions, however, that not every case should be seen in the same way. Drawing on the psychiatrist Judd Marmor, he distinguishes among “genuine homosexuality,” transitory adolescent behavior, situational conduct (such as among prisoners or soldiers deprived of access to heterosexual activity), and “opportunistic” behavior for money or other favors. He then adds two distinctions of his own. Among those he classifies as “genuine homosexuals,” some experience their desires as a form of duress they want to escape, while others see homosexuality as an ideology, demanding recognition of its moral legitimacy. He also adds a final category: adults who engage in homosexual activity out of a desire to experiment and “try everything.”

According to Rabbi Lamm, these different cases called for different responses. Those who experienced what he called “genuine homosexuality” as an uncontrollable form of duress were regarded by Rabbi Lamm as ill. Opportunistic, ideological, and experimental homosexuality stood “at the other end of the spectrum” and seemed to him most objectionable. The intermediate categories, situational and transitory, did not qualify as illnesses but still called for greater individual sympathy.

Apparently reversing course from his 1968 essay, Rabbi Lamm concludes this essay by arguing that laws against homosexuality should remain on the books, even if they are not enforced. Repealing such laws, he writes, would imply “the removal of the stigma from homosexuality,” weakening society’s ability to guide the young toward acceptable patterns of conduct. Law, in other words, has an “educative function”: even an unenforced law expresses a society’s moral disapproval.

Rabbi Lamm therefore proposes a compromise: “the laws must remain on the books, but by mutual consent of judiciary and police, be unenforced.” He compares this to what lawyers call a “chilling effect” and to a familiar halakhic category in which an act is prohibited even though no punishment is imposed. Such an approach, he argues, “bridges the gap between morality and law.”

Other Orthodox Voices

For comparison, Rabbi Lamm was not the only Orthodox thinker of the period to respond to changing attitudes toward homosexuality, although written Orthodox treatments were rare.

Writing briefly in the Encyclopaedia Judaica in 1971, Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits (a close friend of Rabbi Lamm) shared Rabbi Lamm’s rejection of the new tendency to make love and mutual consent the primary standards of sexual morality. At the same time, he rejected Rabbi Lamm’s illness framework: “Jewish law,” he wrote, “rejects the view that homosexuality is to be regarded merely as a disease or as morally neutral.”

Rav Moshe Feinstein took a different approach in a 1976 responsum (O.C. 4:115) addressed to a young man seeking help overcoming homosexual conduct. Rav Moshe maintained that “in the essential creation of the human being there is no desire arising from his nature to desire homosexual intercourse” (my translation). Unlike heterosexual desire, which God implanted in human beings for the perpetuation of the species, he argued, homosexual desire was not natural. He instead attributed it to the yetzer hara – not illness.

Like Rabbi Jakobovits and Rav Moshe, Rabbi Lamm firmly defended the traditional prohibition. Unlike Rav Moshe, he distinguished between condemnation of homosexual conduct and condemnation of homosexual orientation. And unlike both, he devoted considerable attention to the diverse psychological experience of gay men and lesbians and to how those differences might affect personal responsibility and the proper communal response.

The Yeshiva University Controversies

During Rabbi Lamm’s presidency, these questions also arose institutionally at Yeshiva University. The first major controversy came at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In 1989, Einstein’s student-faculty senate passed a resolution calling for housing and other benefits for gay and lesbian couples. Rabbi Lamm declined to approve the proposed change.

Tensions erupted in 1995. There were gay and lesbian student groups at several of YU’s graduate schools, including Cardozo and Einstein, and they received the same student-activity funding as other clubs. That provoked strong criticism from some corners of the Orthodox community and from members of YU’s rabbinic faculty. Rav Chaim Dov Keller of the Telshe Yeshiva publicly attacked Rabbi Lamm for permitting the clubs, and RIETS’ rashei yeshiva published an open letter criticizing the clubs’ continued existence. Around the same time, students at Yeshiva College also began discussing the possibility of forming a gay club on the undergraduate campus. In response, as a matter of policy, Rabbi Lamm drew a distinction between Yeshiva’s graduate and undergraduate campuses, permitting the former and forbidding the latter.

Rabbi Lamm also penned an official letter in which he drew a distinction between his personal religious views and his responsibilities as university president. After explicitly referencing his 1974 Encyclopaedia Judaica article, he wrote: “As a rabbi, I cannot and do not condone homosexual behavior, which is expressly prohibited by Jewish law.” “But as president of a nondenominational institution,” he continued, it was his responsibility to ensure that Yeshiva’s procedures conformed to secular law. YU’s lawyers believed that, because the university was legally nonsectarian and received government funding, its graduate schools could not claim a religious exemption from New York City’s prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

A related controversy later developed over housing at Einstein, where unmarried same-sex couples were ineligible for couples’ housing. Two lesbian medical students challenged the policy, and the resulting case, Levin v. Yeshiva University, eventually reached the New York Court of Appeals in 2001.

The YU controversies placed Rabbi Lamm in a more complicated position than his earlier writings had. As a rabbi, he was opposed to legitimating homosexual conduct. As university president, however, he also faced legal and institutional realities that did not always match his religious views. This also reflected a broader characteristic of Rabbi Lamm’s thinking: he had little patience for ideologues who believed that every principle had to be applied in every setting without regard for other considerations. Sometimes practical compromises were necessary for the greater good.

Love and Law

For Rabbi Lamm, then, homosexuality was not a discrete issue. It was part of his larger thinking about sexuality and the Jewish family. The Episcopal proposal that first prompted him to write about the subject brought him back to one of his major themes: the relationship between love and law. Rabbi Lamm accepted that a homosexual relationship could involve sincere love; he just denied that love alone, without the boundaries of law, could make a relationship morally legitimate.

The same idea appears throughout his writings on nidda, marriage, modesty, and privacy. Rabbi Lamm rejected the then-popular notion that removing limits necessarily made people freer or happier. Quite the opposite: he argued that limits helped protect intimacy and allow love to thrive over the long term.

But that did not mean that someone who violated those norms stood outside the community. Rabbi Lamm sought to defend traditional sexual norms without defining a person first and foremost by his or her failure to live up to them. He could therefore be strict about the norm while being much more generous about who belonged within the community.

1. Career Advice

When he was unsure what career to pursue, Rabbi Lamm took a professional aptitude test administered by B’nai B’rith. He expected the counselor to recommend the rabbinate, philosophy, or science.

After reviewing the results, the expert confidently advised him to become either a shochet or a mohel.

Recalling the story later and not knowing quite what to make of the whole thing, Rabbi Lamm added simply, “Thank you, B’nai B’rith.”

2. Pious Heretics

After college, Rabbi Lamm studied Chullin and the laws of kashrut under Rav Dovid Lifshitz, the Suvalker Rav. Because Rabbi Lamm and his chavruta, Shmuel Sprecher, had both studied chemistry, they raised scientific questions about beli’ot, the assumption that taste can be absorbed into vessels and subsequently transmitted through heat.

Rav Lifshitz did not have the technical background to answer all their questions, but he recognized that they were sincere. He dubbed them di frume apikorsim, the pious heretics.

3. “It’s Not Kosher!”

Growing up in the sheltered Jewish world of Williamsburg, the young Norman Lamm experienced very little antisemitism. Once, after an Italian boy spat at him, he came home crying. When his father asked what had happened, Norman expressed the offense in the strongest language he knew: “It’s not kosher!”

4. The Bird That Nearly Won Him a Pulpit

In 1954, Rabbi Lamm interviewed at a newly established congregation that was alongside a beach. The unfinished synagogue was made largely of exposed cinder blocks and open spaces. As he began his sermon on Parshat Noach, a seagull suddenly flew into the sanctuary.

Rabbi Lamm immediately raised his voice and quoted God’s command to Noach: “Tzei min hateva” – leave the ark! The bird promptly flew past the Ark and out of the building. The congregation gasped. Apparently concluding that the young rabbi possessed unusual “connections,” they offered him the pulpit that evening.

But when Rabbi Lamm learned that the congregation insisted on mixed seating, he declined. Bird or no bird, he ended up in Springfield instead.

5. The “Farmers” at His Wedding

Rabbi Lamm and Mindy were married on February 23, 1954. The wedding was called for six o’clock, although Rav Soloveitchik, who officiated, arrived much, much later.

Rabbi Lamm had invited several couples from his new Springfield congregation. Unlike the New Yorkers, they arrived precisely at six. When Rabbi Lamm himself reached the hall half an hour later, the caterer was frantic: the “farmers” had arrived on time and were eating all the food he had prepared.

To the “out-of-towners,” six o’clock meant six o’clock. New Yorkers were apparently more sophisticated.

6. Orthodoxy Is Not a Gerontological Disease

Orthodoxy in 1950s Springfield was often seen as the fading religion of elderly immigrants. When a wealthy member of the local Conservative synagogue met the young Rabbi Lamm, he stared in surprise and asked how an Orthodox rabbi could be so young.

Rabbi Lamm replied that Orthodoxy was not a gerontological disease.

7. A Second Wife?

In Springfield, a young Christian couple lived upstairs from the Lamms. The husband, a minister, was called away for National Guard service as his pregnant wife was approaching her due date. Rabbi Lamm promised to help if necessary.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Lamm had just given birth to their first child, Chaye (my mother-in-law), at Wesson Maternity Hospital. On the day Rabbi Lamm brought his wife and their newborn home from the hospital, the upstairs neighbor went into labor. Around midnight, Rabbi Lamm drove her to Wesson and carried her suitcase inside.

The nurse who had discharged Mrs. Lamm and Chaye that morning stared at him in disbelief. As far as she could tell, the rabbi had returned hours later with his second wife also ready to give birth.

8. The Wrong Lamm Becomes President

Before Rabbi Lamm’s election as president of Yeshiva University was announced publicly, YU’s development director gathered his staff for an announcement. Rabbi Lamm’s father, who worked in the department, was present.

The director placed a hand on Mr. Lamm’s shoulder and announced that Rabbi Norman Lamm had been chosen as president.

Before he could finish, the room erupted. In all the excitement, they had not heard which Lamm had been chosen. Everyone began congratulating Rabbi Lamm’s father on his election to the presidency.

9. “I’ll Tell My Mother at Dinner”

Soon after becoming president, Rabbi Lamm was advised to telephone a wealthy board member and thank him for his generous contribution toward a university library that, Rabbi Lamm was told, had been named in memory of the board member’s mother.

Rabbi Lamm called and dutifully expressed the university’s gratitude. The donor replied that Rabbi Lamm was quite welcome and that he would pass the message along to his mother over dinner that evening.

10. A Nedava for a Donor

At the emergency meeting called to rescue Yeshiva University from bankruptcy, a series of donors pledged either $1 million or $500,000 apiece.

One major donor, however, refused. Max Stern – himself a leading donor and highly influential figure at YU – rose, removed his kippa, cupped it in his hands, and walked around the room asking the participants to contribute a nedava for the poor man.

The tension broken and everyone laughing, the reluctant donor agreed to pledge $1 million.