Eliezer Berkovits Not
Eliezer Berkovits Not
Allan L. Nadler
ELIEZER BERKOVITS'
NOT IN HEA VEN
to assure that the Torah remains a meaningful, relevant and above all
humane system for governing Jewish national and personal life.
92
Allan Nadler
Too much concern with and too strict an allegiance to the written
codes of medieval Jewish law have rendered halakha impotent to deal
with the new realities of contemporary Jewish life, especially in the
State of IsraeL. Contemporary halakhists must shed their conservatism
and timidity and act boldly to harmonize the rule of law with the
needs of the modern Jew and Israeli. Now that the Jewish exile is
over, "the exile of halakha into literature"!! must be ended. Codes
were a necessary feature of galut halakha which Berkovits defines as
defensive and protective. They are however foreign to the spirit of the
new State of IsraeL.
Berkovits is harsh in his criticism of the timidity and conservatism
of his colleagues in the Israeli Rabbinate, and characterizes their
attitude to the sacred texts of Jewish law as "Karaitic." The attitudes
of contemporary Orthodox Rabbis has resulted in the estrangement
of the Jewish people from traditional life. Only the rabbis can re-unite
the Jewish people and the Jewish tradition:
To face the people and to -understand the innate desire of the halakha to
address itself to the life of the people may be the door-opener to free the
halakhic scholar from his Karaitic alienation from reality.I'
93
TRADITION: A Journal of Orthodox Thought
NOTES
i. Eliezer Berkovits, Judaism: Fossil or Ferment? I\ew York, 1962.
2. idem, Faith After the Holocaust, :"ew Y ark, 1973.
3. Gp. cit.
4. Idem, With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Death Camps, :"ew York, 1979.
5. idem, Tenai Benissu'in Uveget, Jerusalem, 1967.
6. idem, Not In Heaven: The Nature and Function of Halakha, 1\. Y., ¡ 983, p. 21.
7. ibid.. p. 32.
8. ibid.. p. 32.
9. Ibid.. p. 71
10. Ibid. p. 93.
I i. Ibid.. p. 88.
12. ibid.. p. 94.
13. ibid., p. 106.
14. ibid., p. 22
15. ibid., p. 29.
16. ibid., p. 107.
17. ibid.. p. 2.
18. ibid.. p. 107.
19. ibid.. p. 107.
20. Kiddushin, 70a.
97