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Jonah Rank's essay on Yeshivat Chovevei Torah has been all over my facebook page. I've been mulling it over pretty carefully. I think my kneejerk reaction was insufficient. My kneejerk reaction, for what it's worth, is that the article is attempting to use the word 'halakhic' to cloak a demand that an Orthodox group abide by Conservative norms. My kneejerk reaction was that this was an inappropriate expectation.

There are a lot of reasons this is an inappropriate response, though.

-To start with, this comes in the context of a debate ranging in Conservative Judaism over the past year about the privilege that male halakhic Conservative Jews have to participate in Orthodox services without disruption. Committed female halakhic Conservative Jews don't have this option- if they go to an Orthodox service, they would be seated separately, they would not be permitted to pray for the congregation, etc...

For the reasons Rank notes, being a committed Conservative Jew can be a very frustrating thing. It means being part of a congregation where the vast majority of the members do not actually observe all the laws that the community's charter says they should. Purely visually, there is very little different between Conservative Judaism and Modern Orthodox Judaism in the prayer service except for how women are treated. The same prayers are recited to the same tunes, the same sorts of sermons are delivered by the Rabbis, aside from the mechitza there is little difference in the architecture of the synagogue, etc...

The reason for this, I think, is that at some core level Conservative Judaism was designed for the people who wanted to reject Orthodox doctrine but continue to feel like their service was traditional. Conservative Judaism was spawned by a backlash against rejecting Jewish norms, and it was designed to be a reforming movement that FELT traditional- the infamous story http://www.ajhs.org/ajhs-new/scholarship/chapters/chapter.cfm?documentID=241. I think that design is coming back to bite them now as the movement segments between its more liberal and more traditional wings.

So even though at a purely philosophical level it's inappropriate to try to demand that Conservative values be called Orthodox, the impulse is coming from a place where the traditional wing of Conservative Jewry is giving Modern Orthodox a try and blurring the boundaries in a practical sense. And I think the essay is largely intended to be directed toward Conservative Jews.

-The second reason this is an inadequate response is that Modern Orthodoxy and Open Orthodoxy ARE in fact misogynistic. I mean, you guys know this journal, we talk about this all the time. We live in a society that in many structural ways privileges men over women and Judaism is not a magical sanctuary from these problems. I don't believe that Modern Orthodoxy is worse than liberal secularism, and I don't believe it's worse than Conservative Judaism, speaking broadly and with wildly inappropriate generalization, and I believe (because women in the community have said this to me a number of times) that some of the specific programs that secular critics identify as problems with Orthodox Judaism's treatment of women are often actually sources of power for women in the community, but I certainly don't want to deny this truth. There are problems in the way Orthodoxy Judaism treats women, and there are problems with the ways specific Orthodox Jews treat women, and I don't believe they are an exact match to the problems that Rank identifies, but I think it is harmful to dismiss his article if it leads anyone to believe that we are claiming Orthodoxy isn't misogynistic.

- The third reason it's a bad response is because denominational lines in Judaism are blurry. My father always says (facetiously, I assure you!) that Jews don't have denominations, Rabbis have denominations, and if you got rid of Rabbis you'd be left with just a bunch of Jews. I don't want to say that the ideas Rank is talking about are not Orthodox because most of the time I haven't the foggiest idea what ideas are Orthodox and what aren't. In particular, the question of whether Open Orthodoxy is Orthodox is a contentious one that has consistently been asked by the right.

And ultimately I think that's what Rank's essay is about. Jews and credos don't go together very well. It's not easy to point to a checklist of ideas that Jews have to believe to be Orthodox. I mean, there is a checklist, it was written by Maimonides and it's probably among the reasons people wanted to excommunicate him. And nothing Rank is writing about is on Rambam's list, anyway. So in a sense it's worth talking about how YCT or YU goes about excluding students on doctrinal ground. I'm not saying they can't do it, obviously there's a long tradition in Judaism of excluding heretical ideas, and excluding these ideas is an important part of the way Judaism has maintained its sense of self over the past centuries. I'm just saying that Judaism is a long conversation about ideas and practices, and I think it is safe to say that now is a time for welcoming that conversation.

With all of that being said, I still think there's something about the way Rank uses 'halakhic' rhetorically that I find wrongfooting and incorrect. I think it's that Rank positions 'halakhic' as meaning the continued observation of longstanding traditional practices ("I was in the minority of Conservative Jews who prayed three times a day, kept kosher, and observed a Shabbat full of “Don'ts")- while simultaneously attempting to claim that his deviances from longstanding traditional practice are halakhic because they have an underpinning in an argument from Talmudic law ("If they want to read halakhic approaches to the inclusion of women, they can read the writings of Rabbis David Fine, David Golinkin, Susan Grossman, Joel Roth, Mayer Rabinowitz, Michael Rosenberg, Phillip Sigal, Ethan Tucker, and others. One would be hard-pressed to find an unsound halakhic argument in their responsa advocating for egalitarian Jewish practice.". )

These two things seem at odds to me within an Orthodox context. Halakhic innovation has a place within Orthodox Judaism, but it is a constrained place. If Rank is defining himself halakhically within the community of those who are rejecting centuries of tradition on the basis of a legalistic and moral argument, he is defining himself in opposition to the Jews who pray three times a day, keep kosher, and observe a Shabbat full of don'ts not only because we believe it was commanded by God, but also because it is what our parents did, and what their parents did, for tens of generations backward.

Rank writes, "In a world that so desperately needs change, YCT is too scared of making change happen."

And what I read from that is a person who believes that the only reason to be resistant to change is fear. I don't think it is too strong to say that a person who thinks that is a dangerous fool. There are many strong reasons to be resistant to change, many important reasons why conservatism, not the Jewish movement but the philosophical principle, is an important social glue.

That's why it feels in the essay like Rank is judging the Orthodox community by the wrong standards; somehow he expects Orthodoxy and tradition to work according to the expectations of a community that doesn't value tradition in the same way. It's like he thinks that obviously the only reason why YCT doesn't embrace full egalitarianism is because they're scared to do what they know is right; this is possibly true of some people in the community, but it is equally true that many in the community believe that they are doing what is right, that they are struggling to balance space for greater power for women with a powerful, important century-old tradition that has sustained the Jews of both genders in both dark and light times.

And "the religion of YCT—the religion of all Orthodoxy—is a God of hate" stings, regardless.

On Captain America 2:

So to start with the best part, Natasha open sourcing all of SHIELD's databases was of course the best part of the movie. That is exactly the thread I have been demanding from Agents of SHIELD all season- maybe secrecy isn't always the answer, maybe transparency is actually a weapon and maybe it's a weapon we should learn how to use! Maybe it's secrecy that leaves us vulnerable, maybe it's only when we don't tell the public that we are recruiting German scientists to our Cold War efforts that we end up doing things that shame America.

The relationship between Natasha and Steve, which was the movie's center, let them drive this theme in a really personal and effective way. Can Steve trust Natasha? Well, initially it's a simple yes or no question and initially Steve's answer is yes, of course. She's a good guy. She works for the good guys. She goes into battle with him and fights effectively on his side. Then it's a simple no. She lied to him, betrayed the mission, so therefore he can't rely on her. Then, starting with the vending machine scene, we get a more complicated development of their trust and friendship. She tells him in the pickup truck, in essence, that he can trust certain versions of her and can distrust others. It's as much a revelation to herself as it is to Steve. Natasha has spent so much time thinking of herself as being someone else that she's forgotten that it's by assuming different identities that normal people also figure out who we are. She doesn't figure it out here, either, but by the time she's open-sourcing her identity in front of Pierce and then in front of the congressional committee, she understands that the secrets that have handcuffed her don't have to keep handcuffing her. She can be a version of herself that she creates to fool herself instead of a version of herself that she creates to fool others. She can carry her ledger of red because it matters to her and figure out how to deal with the red on her own terms, instead of on Loki's or Nick Fury's or Congress's or even Steve's.

Meanwhile, even SHIELD as HYDRA's moral bankruptcy was only partial and ambiguous. We see an agency whose agenda has been hijacked yet has somehow managed to keep producing Agent Carters, Agent Hills, the technician who followed Captain Rogers's orders, Agent Wards and FitzSimmonses and Coulsons and Mays. That speaks to Nick Fury's leadership, that he could build an organization whose institutional values are strong enough to overcome the infiltration. Unlike the first Captain America, I cannot complain about the treatment of Holocaust here. Captain America 2 is a movie where "I was just following orders" is never a good enough answer.

I don't really have strong Bucky/Steve feelings, but I thought the story was effective at talking about recovery and the post-war life of soldiers, both through the Bucky/Steve flashbacks and Sam's position as a veteran's counselor. And I thought the Winter Soldier fight scenes were excellent, and in general I liked the action scenes. This was a good, fun movie. I approve.