Steven Gotlib
Review of Raphael Jospe, Accepting and Excepting: On Pluralism and Chosenness Out of the Sources of Judaism (Academic Studies Press, 2025)[1]
In 2022, Jeffrey Bloom and others published Strauss, Spinoza, and Sinai in response to Professor Leo Strauss’ 1965 defense of Orthodoxy against Spinoza. In their words,
On one hand, [Strauss] seems like he comes as a friend. Here is someone with tremendous stature in the non-Orthodox world arguing that the Enlightenment can only mock what it cannot decisively refute. On the other hand, he seems to leave behind something of a mess. While the Enlightenment cannot refute Orthodoxy, neither can Orthodoxy make a decisive case for itself against the claims of the Enlightenment. It can believe its own claims, but in Strauss’ telling it cannot claim to know them decisively. Everyone has their own religion: some choose to believe in the Enlightenment, others choose to believe in Orthodox Judaism, but there is no way to objectively evaluate the validity of one choice versus another.[2]
While there was disagreement as to what threshold of knowledge had to be met, all eighteen of the book’s contributors refused to accept Strauss’ defense. The verdict was clear: Orthodox Judaism based on mere faith is unsustainable. In order for Orthodoxy to be meaningful, its adherents have to know that it’s true. In a new volume, collecting a lifetime’s worth of experience, Professor Raphael Jospe presents an alternative.
It should be noted from the outset that Jospe rejects the label of Orthodoxy for himself. The term, after all, implies that “other approaches are accordingly heterodox or even heretical” and that Orthodox Jews “do not deny the existence of other ideologies, but may well (and all too often) question their Jewish legitimacy” (iv-v).[3] Thus, by the end of the book, Jospe is crystal clear that he is “anything but ‘orthodox’ in the technical sense of ‘correct belief’ … While I find meaning in the traditional observances guided by halakhah… I also differ from much of the Orthodox community (among whom I live in many other respects) both theologically and halakhically” (492-493).
Why, then, discuss Jospe’s new book in an Orthodox publication? A close examination of his approach, I believe, has much to offer our community in contemplating the beliefs we hold dear.
Orthodox or not, there are two important questions that Jospe wrestles with throughout Accepting and Excepting. First, can one truly engage in “affirming genuine pluralism, while maintaining a strong, firm, and uncompromising – albeit eclectic – Jewish identity”? Second, “isn’t there an inconsistency or even contradiction between theoretical pluralism and the notion of chosenness?” (v).
Jospe first draws a distinction between tolerance and pluralism. To tolerate something “literally merely means to ‘suffer,’ ‘bear,’ or ‘endure’ dissenting opinion much as one is described as ‘tolerating’ pain.” Tolerance “implies no recognition of the legitimacy, let alone truth value of diverse opinions. We tolerate views that we reject as untrue and illegitimate on various grounds” (20). Pluralism, however, “goes beyond toleration in recognizing not only the need to respect the dignity and freedom of the dissenting person, but also in acknowledging – in some regard – the validity of the other person’s convictions” (24).[4]
Utilizing a famous Mishnaic teaching (Avot 5:17) and other sources, Jospe locates precedent for a pluralistic approach to Judaism. When an argument is truly for the sake of Heaven, he writes, “there is no winner, there is no loser. The truth can never be closed and final, and must always continue to be sought through the open exchange of diverse views” (55).[5]
Jospe, drawing on further support within the writings of Ibn Ezra, Al-Farabi, Rambam, and others, writes that even revelation itself “was not absolute or monolithic; it had to be adjusted to the subjective capacity of each individual to understand, and to the relative cultures of the various nations” (82). The resulting pluralism, he argues, “even if it entails a degree of moderate epistemic relativism, does not imply a strong relativistic conception of multiple truths, but of multiple perspectives on the truth, or what the rabbis call the ‘seventy faces of the Torah’ (shiv’im panim la-torah)” (112). There is thus one truth, perceived in vastly different yet equally legitimate (or, perhaps better, equally incomplete) ways by vastly different people(s).
In a 2012 rebuttal to Jospe’s work, Drs. Jolene and Menachem Kellner adamantly pushed back against their friend and colleague. In their words,
To be a consistent pluralist of the Jospean sort one must tell the religious Other that they do not hold their religious claims as seriously as they think they do, since they must hold them to be true only for themselves (and their co-religionists), but not true in any absolute, exclusive sense. Jospe may want to make that claim for himself, but is there not an element of chutzpah in making it for others? If he does not make the claim for others, his is a one-way street sort of pluralism: recognizing the truth of other faith-claims, while not insisting on similar treatment of his own.[6]
The Kellners also call attention to what would seem to be a fatal flaw with Jospe’s self-described moderate epistemological relativism:
We do not see how Jospe can formulate a Jewish argument against assimilation, intermarriage, and religious syncretism. If Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and so on are different paths to the same truth, or competing but complementary truths, or complicated combinations of truth and falsity each, then why prefer one over the other? For Jospe it would seem to boil down to a matter of choice. If one chooses to abandon Judaism altogether, through assimilation or through outright apostasy, or if one chooses to become a Jew for Jesus, on what grounds can Jospe complain?
This brings us to the more significant point… Given the frightening resurgence of worldwide antisemitism to which we are unwilling witnesses, does anyone have the right to raise children as Jews unless they are convinced that Torah has something uniquely beautiful and true to teach to the world, something worth living for and even, God forbid, worth dying for?[7]
In Accepting and Excepting, Jospe responds to the Kellners’ critiques::
What are these “uniquely beautiful” and essential truths of the Torah that make being Jewish “worth living and even… worth dying for?” Belief in God? That is affirmed by many non-Jews, and denied (at least in its conventional, theistic sense) by many Jews today. Belief in creation? Ditto. Believe [sic] in the revelation at Sinai? Many Christians… affirm it factually while many Jews, including not a few who observe the Torah’s commandments, do so without affirming the facticity of the revelation at Sinai in a literal sense. The doctrine of ethical monotheism is widely affirmed (even if not practiced) in the world by many non-Jews as well as Jews. What, then, remains of the “uniquely beautiful and true” teachings of the Torah for the world, except in the sense of their Israelite origin? They may be “uniquely beautiful,” but they are [not] (or at least are no longer) uniquely Jewish. (113-114)
Why, then, be Jewish as opposed to one of those other equally compelling religions? Jospe answers:
I love my family because they are mine, not because I’ve surveyed all other families and determined that mine is superior. By analogy, I love my people, my community, my culture, my religious tradition because they are mine, and they endow my life with meaning and purpose. This does not prevent me from appreciating, learning from, and at least in some cases appropriating, and thereby being enriched by, the wisdom of other cultures and religions…Yes, “the Torah has something uniquely beautiful and true to teach the world,” but so do other religions and cultures, and the Jewish philosophy which Menachem Kellner and I have devoted most of our professional lives [to] studying is indebted to a philosophical tradition and method the roots of which were in Greece, not Israel. (115-116)
Therefore, for Jospe, “there is no need for me to justify who I am” (119). At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, Jospe continues to insist that Judaism is still ideal for those born into it. As he writes in the book’s Afterword:
[M]y approach is diametrically opposed to that of a Jewish colleague, a person heavily involved in inter-religious dialogue and activity who said to me in a private conversation years ago that the most important thing for him is a personal connection with God, and he would rather a child of his be a Christian than a secular Jew. For me this is absolutely unacceptable. I am a Jew, a member of the people of Israel of course first by birth, but by identification (vertically over the centuries, horizontally with kelal yisra’el), by loyalty, and by conviction… Within Jewish tradition there is a rich, almost (but not quite) limitless spectrum of ways to belong, affirm, and express that identification with the Jewish people, its history, and destiny, and clarify one’s personal values and beliefs.
However, this fundamental identity neither includes agreement with some, or even much, of the tradition (especially as interpreted and lived in certain circles today), nor does it preclude appreciation, albeit from a distance of the truth and beauty that can be found in other traditions (465). At no point, though, does Jospe address at all why an individual who, for whatever reasons, feels no special relationship with the Jewish people, culture, or traditions in any of their many permutations ought remain Jewish. One is left wondering what, if anything, a Jospean moderate epistemological relativist could say to convince someone like that to stay within the fold rather than apostacizing.
For Jospe, however, such a trade-off may be worthwhile given that the moderate relativism is a feature of his approach, rather than a bug. Jospe cannot take a strong stand on why someone should have strong epistemic reasons to remain within their birth religion. If he attempted to do so, it would call his entire project into question. Indeed, Jospe happily pleads guilty to his position resulting in some degree of relativism and acknowledges that under his assumptions “the burden of proof shifts to those who still, despite all evidence to the contrary, wish to maintain absolutist epistemic claims, which I regard as intellectually untenable, and even potentially morally dangerous to our religious coexistence” (111).
This brings us to Jospe’s second question. How does this commitment to pluralism, at the admitted expense of epistemic certainty, deal with the idea of Jewish chosenness? Is it not, as he asked in the book’s introduction, inconsistent to speak about such pure pluralism while continuing to insist that the Jews are God’s chosen people?
Jospe’s solution, based on Mordecai Kaplan’s method of revaluation,[8] is to re-interpret the idea of chosenness as a national relationship with God on the basis of “greater responsibilities and accountability, not greater privilege” (41). This accountability, he writes, “is not directed externally in comparative terms, but internally as a moral challenge” (42-43). This allows for a “ritual exclusivity in this world, and a spiritual inclusivity of salvation in the world to come” by allowing for various communities to have their own particular doctrines which push them to moral heights in their own ways while also maintaining universalism in the righteous of all nations having a place in the World to Come (46).[9]
Within this understanding, the concept of avodah zarah also becomes revaluated, “not as an external category applying (or not applying) to other religious traditions, but as an internal Jewish category” (122). Yet just as there “is a pluralism about what is wrong for Jews to think and do, by extension there must also be a pluralism about what is right for Jews to think and do” (159). Jospean avodah zarah, thus, becomes the flip-side of Jospean chosenness as “the ever-present danger of our tendency toward primitive belief and behavior” (160). Differing Jewish communities must, thus, be free to disagree about what constitutes avodah zarah in their midsts and work to eradicate that within their own unique contexts.
Though not explicitly calling it avodah zarah, Jospe identifies contemporary anti-Zionism as “the most dangerous ideological threat because it claims – and its adherents may sincerely believe – that it speaks in the name of universalism, liberal values, human rights, justice, and peace.” It is thereby present “even within certain sectors of the Jewish community, and thus threatens the Jewish people from within” (396-397). This, in Jospe’s opinion, is tantamount to “propos[ing] that the Jews return to the emancipatory framework, which culminated in the Shoah” (398-399) and he “simply fail[s] to comprehend the purported morality of those (including some Jews) who suggest that the Jewish people, once again, literally stake their lives, and the lives of their children and grandchildren, on the good will of others, and who would have only the Jews again test with their lives the hypothesis that human nature has fundamentally changed despite all evidence to the contrary, including renewed Judeophobia in Europe, and in the Arab and Islamic world.”[10] For Jospe, then, engagement with “contemporary anti-Zionism is merely another transformation of old antisemitism” (399) and it is hard to imagine Jewish support of it not falling well under his definition of avodah zarah.[11]
Jospe also takes a strong stance against the Reform Movement’s permission of intermarriage and acceptance of patrilineal descent as determining Jewish status. For him, “we have an absolute ethical obligation to the children of Jewish fathers who face danger because of their Jewish connection. But in ethical terms, as long as we offer them all our protective resources, we need not necessarily recognize them as Jews any more than we recognize as Jewish the professing Christian spouse of a Jew who has an equal claim as the spouse to our protection” (410). Jewish peoplehood, for Jospe, “is established by common birth, not by ritual behavior, although we all recognize that membership in a people may entail subsequent obligations to behave in certain ways and not in others” (416-417) and the standards of determining that must be consistent. “There is,” to him, “no Jewish faith or religion independent of Jewish peoplehood” (417). Here is where Jospe once again, without explicitly naming it, aligns the Reform position with avodah zarah:
Can and should Reform Judaism be so inclusive as to mean all things to all people, and thus nothing distinctive, or should it rather say not only to the Orthodox rabbinate, but more important to the larger Jewish community, and most important to its own people and the assimilated Jews in its midsts and on its periphery: We can only be true Reformers if we are true Jews, loyal members of and responsible to Kelal Yisrael. Must Reform persist in interpreting vox populi as vox dei? (420).[12]
Finally, Jospe draws significant parallels between the Chareidi concept of da’at Torah and Roman Catholic papal infallibility as well as Evangelical biblical inerrancy, albeit the former comes with “none of the built-in restrictions and safeguards of the two Christian concepts” (421). Da’at Torah, as Jospe understands the concept, is a “claim that any opinion of a gadol is by definition halakhah” and that “its authority rests on the infallible personal authority bordering on prophecy of the gadol in all areas because he is so immersed in the world of Torah that anything he thinks and says is ultimately divinely guided” (439). No doubt, “the fundamentalist claims to unchanging truth and certainty provide an anchor of stability for individuals and a community” in the face of a scientific method that “offers conclusions which are always tentative and subject to revision” (440). It also, however, represents a Jewish fundamentalism representing “absolutist claims to exclusive truth (and in various cases also to exclusive salvation), rejection of the spiritual validity of other religions (i.e., external pluralism) and of other interpretations within their own religion (i.e., internal pluralism); interpretation of Scripture as the true, eternal, inerrant, and unchanging “word of God”; rejection of historical, literary, scientific study of religious texts; denial of “progress” in religion; rejection of pluralism as “relativism”” (432). It is thus the antithesis of Jospe’s approach to Judaism in particular and, indeed, to religion in general.
Jospe’s project is, then, in some sense paradoxical. He affirms a Judaism that allows a degree of epistemic relativism in order to reject moral relativism, but insufficiently unpacks how to arrive at one without the other. He retains the concept of avodah zarah, and clearly views several ideas as beyond the pale of pluralistic Jewish discourse, yet stops short of explicitly identifying them with it despite using a similar framing. Even when it comes to those ideas, is it so impossible for Jewish communities that reject Zionism, embrace intermarriage, or believe in Da’at Torah to remain within the broader camp? Anti-Zionists, Reform Jews, and even the strictest Chareidim all remain at least grudgingly accepted within various contexts and do not appear to be going anywhere any time soon. We are thus left with a question of how consistent a Jospean approach to Jewish pluralism truly is.
At the same time, Jospe succeeds at laying the groundwork for a Judaism free from fundamentalism, which embraces its own uncertainty and is able to confidently say that it is enough to believe in Judaism even without knowing it to be true. That is an invaluable gift for many who find themselves unable to accept various truth claims but nonetheless want to be part of the Jewish community in good conscience. For Jospe and those like him, Accepting and Excepting is an accessible and exceptional addition to the Jewish library even if it may confuse those looking for greater certainty in their religious experiences.
[1] All in-text citations are from the volume under review.
[2] Jeffrey Bloom, Alec Goldstein, and Gil Student (eds), Strauss, Spinoza, and Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith (Kodesh Press, 2022), viii.
[3] Furthermore, Jospe calls attention to the fact that “one of the paradoxes of Jewish life is that both polar modern movements, the Orthodox and the Reform, consciously, or unconsciously adopted Christian terms for their names” (iv n12).
[4] This, Jospe writes, can be accomplished in several ways: through recognition “that the confrontation of conflicting ideas can lead us dialectically to greater understanding of the truth”; through admission that “any perspective (even one’s own) is inherently limited”; or by acceptance that “diverse people and cultures have different needs and ways of expressing the truth” (24). There may well also be pragmatic reasons:
This era of the “global village” and weapons of mass destruction is one in which borders between people and nations are no longer meaningful, but at the same time it is contaminated by contempt and terrible violence directed at people of differing beliefs and traditions. If the religious communities cannot find ways to see in “the other” not only persons of equal dignity, but also individuals and communities whose understanding of the truth differs from ours but is still a legitimate perspective on the truth, then the religions of the world will contribute not to peace, but to even more destruction. (28)
[5] Arguments not for the sake of Heaven, on the other hand, “as when a person sues another person for a debt, must be resolved by the court, closure attained, and justice served.”
[6] Jolene S. Kellner and Menachem Kellner, “Respectful Disagreement: A Response to Raphael Jospe” in Alon Goshen-Gottstein and Eugene Korn (eds), Jewish Theology and World Religions (Littman Library, 2012), 128.
It’s worthwhile to note that Professor Menachem Kellner is far from an Orthodox hard-liner. His own 1999 book concluded as follows:
Must a Jew believe anything? If ‘belief’ is a matter of trust in God expressed in obedience to the Torah, my answer to the question is that a Jew must believe everything. If ‘belief’ is the intellectual acquiescence in carefully defined statements of dogma, the answer is that there is nothing that a Jew must believe.”
(Menachem Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything? Second Edition (Littman Library, 2006) 9).
[7] Ibid, 131.
[8] In Kaplan’s words, “Revaluation consists in disengaging from the traditional content those elements in it which answer permanent postulates of human nature, and in integrating them into our own ideology. When we reevaluate, we analyze or break up the traditional values into their implications, and single out for acceptance those implications which can help us meet our moral and spiritual needs; the rest may be relegated to archeology.”
(Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (Wayne State University Press, 1994) 6.)
Interestingly, as Jospe notes, Kaplan never attempted to reevaluate chosenness as he did other religious concepts.
[9] This is particularly in contrast to Christianity’s notion of ritual inclusivity in this world by trying to bring as many as possible into the Christian fold while maintaining exclusivity in the world to come by only accepting those who had accepted particular propositions about Jesus in this world.
Jospe later writes on the need to “cultivate the special and unique – but not exclusive – relationship between Judaism and Christianity, not with the hope of eliminating our differences, but of enhancing them by greater mutual understanding and respect while at the same time rejecting a “dual covenant” applicable only to our two communities” (196-197).
[10] It should be noted that Jospe makes it clear that
Criticism of specific Israeli policies does not constitute either anti-Zionism or antisemitism. There are many Jews, Israelis, and Zionists (myself included) who are quite critical of various Israeli government policies and actions. These people strongly affirm the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland, and political sovereignty in the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, but also suggest that Israel would be strengthened (depending on their respective points of view) if only it were to become more religious or more secular, more socialist or more capitalist, more militant or more accommodating towards the Palestinians, with more government control of the economy or with more of a market economy. Such criticism does not render a person anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, or antisemitic. To the contrary, such constructive criticism is both the right and duty of the citizens and supporters of the Jewish State… Anti-Zionism means the denial of the right of the State of Israel to exist (in whatever form) as the state of the Jewish people. Unfortunately, even some Jewish intellectuals like Professors Noam Chomsky, Tony Judt, and Daniel Boyarin, affirm such anti-Zionism. The fact that they are Jews (and in some cases professors of Jewish studies) gives legitimacy, aid, and comfort to anti-Zionism in the eyes of non-Jewish opponents of Zionism and Israel. (397)
[11] If this reading is accurate, it is perhaps ironic that one of Jospe’s strongest supporting arguments on this subject is from the theology of Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar, who believed that avodah zarah is thus an active internal Jewish category (identified primarily with Zionism and the State of Israel, and tangentially with other modern movements like the Reform), which brought upon the Jewish people the divine punishment of the Shoah (153).
[12] In December of 2025, the Conservative Movement released a collective report from the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Rabbinical Assembly and Cantor’s Assembly encouraging the Movement’s Committee for Jewish Law and Standards to “[c]onsider explicit creative mechanisms for clergy participation, such as sharing blessings, words of encouragement, or song during the wedding” and to “[c]larify whether other paradigms of marriage besides kiddushin that the CJLS has already developed and approved might apply in the case of the union of a Jew with someone who is of another background.”
Patrilineal descent was not discussed in the report, but it strikes at least this author as inconceivable that it will not become relevant after a generation or two of half of the children of such marriages requiring conversion before their bnei mitzvot.
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