Successfully Unsuccessful: The Paradox of Modern Orthodoxy

Jonah Rocheeld

I was sitting in my professor’s office as an undergraduate, discussing the nature of Judaism. A steaming mug of tea sat in front of each of us, and my professor was in the middle of one of his reminiscences, talking about the collapse of Conservative Judaism.

“You can’t occupy the middle ground for too long,” he observed. “In my opinion, the reason Conservative Judaism collapsed is that they tried to do exactly that and ultimately lost everyone—“those on the left drifted toward Reform Judaism or secularism, while those on the right moved toward Ultra-Orthodox fundamentalism or Modern Orthodoxy.”

Something bothered me at the time, though it didn’t coalesce into a meaningful thought until years later—we were sitting in his office at Yeshiva University, arguably the most important institutional proponent of Modern Orthodoxy in today’s Jewish landscape. But wasn’t Modern Orthodoxy trying to straddle the fence in precisely the way my professor had just criticized? Were we doomed to end up the same way Conservative Judaism did?

I felt the ripples of this conversation play out in my life for years afterward. Friends of mine who had grown up in Modern Orthodox households began to veer further and further to the right, adopting increasingly maximalist religious and ideological positions, shunning secular conventions of achievement in seeking higher education and employment, and dedicating their lives to Torah study. Meanwhile, within Yeshiva University, battles raged over what it meant to be “truly” Modern Orthodox. Which Jewish laws could you keep or not keep and still consider yourself Orthodox? How much Torah study was “enough”? What were the non-negotiables?

What prompted my friends to stray from their Modern Orthodox roots was the paradox that lay at the heart of those discussions at university: that of an ancient, embodied religion in a modern world. This paradox is what made Modern Orthodoxy so compelling as a religious ideology, but it may ultimately be what tears it apart.

The problem stems from the following: We have far more access to information today than people did in the past. We have libraries, both physical and virtual, with thousands of books and manuscripts against which we can test our assumptions and beliefs. And when presented with the opportunity to optimize, we do. We optimize our Sabbath observance, our prayer, our standards of kosher food. We are inundated with knowledge and expected to apply it to our lives.

It is easy to forget that the Jews of yesteryear, for better or for worse, did not have access to a fraction of the resources we do. Most towns were lucky to have a single set of the Talmud, and the idea of hundreds of laymen regularly studying Torah from the text was inconceivable. While Judaism has always been a demanding legal system defined by Halakhah, the limitations of the past meant that people’s lives could not be dominated by the analysis of religious minutiae as they so often are today. Their religious knowledge came through the rabbi’s sermons and his community guidance, but their day-to-day lives were characterized by an individual and collective experience of the divine.

For example, we begin our requests for rain and sustenance on Sukkot. Many of us likely imagine some far-flung corner of the earth where our food is grown before being packed onto a ship and transported thousands of miles to be placed on grocery store shelves. Granted, we appreciate food and pray for it, but the experience is not embodied; it is understood theoretically. Far more important for many Modern Orthodox Jews today are the technical aspects of the prayer for rain: On what day of the year do we begin praying for rain? What if one forgets to recite the appropriate prayer? Must the prayer be repeated from the beginning, or may one continue?

On the other hand, Jews of the past lived that struggle. The agrarian lifestyle, by its nature, is entirely dependent on conditions beyond one’s control. Drought, blight, and famine are all-too-familiar specters that hover over ancient agricultural communities, along with the starvation and malnutrition that accompany these disasters. In a world like that, if one forgot the prayer for rain, the idea of debating whether one had fulfilled the legal criteria necessary to justify repeating it would have been inconceivable. The encounter with God’s unknowable mercy was lived and, most importantly, deeply felt.

Religion is the interface between the mundane, knowable human experience with the unknowable divine. Religion is not meant to be “optimized” any more than art or music is. Religion is meant to be felt before it is meant to be resolved.

It is a subtle but important point that the incoherence I am describing is not meant in the sense of contradiction or intellectual sloppiness. Halakhah exists today precisely because of the stubborn insistence of Jewish scholars on internal consistency and rational inquiry. Incoherence in the lived sense is perhaps better characterized as “tension”—the tension that we feel in the face of the unknowable.

Modern Orthodoxy, at its core, tries to align two forces that are fundamentally misaligned: the modern tendency to optimize and understand, and the need for emotional connection to the unknown. When coherence becomes the primary engine of meaning, emotional connection can get crowded out. Coherence demands closure; emotion demands uncertainty. The Orthodox Jews of the past understood this implicitly because they lived it. With our modern perspective, it is all too easy to mistake coherence for meaning. In some ways, the two could not be more different.

We have treated the Torah like a codebase to be debugged and optimized for maximum legal efficiency. But in the process of fixing every “error” and reconciling every contradiction, we have accidentally deleted the soul. We insist on praying three times a day without demanding embodied thankfulness in the moments that actually inspire it. And when we do pray, our minds are bombarded by small worries: “Did I recite the correct addition for rain? Did I insert the Ya’aleh Ve-yavo in celebration of the new month? I’m not sure if I did, so I suppose I have to restart my prayers from the beginning.” Whatever emotion was stirred by our first recitation is certainly gone by the second.

Legal categories expand, laws metastasize, and more of our day-to-day comes under the purview of Halakhah—but we are left feeling emptier than when we began.

I realize now that this is why those high school peers of mine sought out a life of minimal subsistence studying in kollel—it was not a rejection of the power of reason, but rather an affirmation of the feeling of religious fervor that so many of us have lost. The kollel, while obviously demanding serious intellectual engagement, more significantly embodies a sense of dynamism in the spiritual and mystical realms that Modern Orthodoxy eschews in favor of terminal rationality. Conversely, the Modern Orthodox systematizers seek to codify criteria for Modern Orthodox eligibility, iterating and analyzing until the soul is lost.

Modern Orthodoxy promised coherence, and it delivered it. Tragically, as is so often the case, we did not understand what we had until we tore it apart and inspected its insides. But try as we might to reassemble the system and reach the spiritual highs of the past, the feeling we seek remains stubbornly out of reach. Nevertheless, we humans are denied the privilege of “unknowing.” We must move forward with these lessons in hand—not seeking a bug-free existence, but living with tension, embodying uncertainty, and hopefully rediscovering the route to Paradise.