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38
FRIDAY, MAY 10, 1991
DAVID MARGOLIS
Special to The Jewish News
The physicians and staff of
Qates:
Orthodox Thinkers
Stopped Before Starting
Featured Product
Subject To Prior Sale.
T
he establishment of a
Modern Orthodox
"think tank" — a
group of well-known rabbis
presenting a liberal alter-
native to Orthodoxy's domi-
nant right wing on both
halachic and and communal
issues — set some Orthodox
hearts aflutter with hope for
a traditional Judaism in-
creasingly responsive to con-
temporary realities. In other
Orthodox hearts, however, it
sent blood pressure racing.
Now the Orthodox revo-
lution may have ended
almost before it began. The
Orthodox Round Table, as
the "think tank" has been
called, has been reorganized
— some say co-opted — as a
commission of the Rab-
binical Council of America,
the country's primary Or-
thodox rabbinic association.
Composed of about 20
"liberal Orthodox" pulpit
rabbis, including such in-
fluential figures as Shlomo
Riskin of Israel, Reuven
Bulka of Ottawa, and Yitz
Greenberg and Sol Berman
of New York, the Round
Table, which began about
two years ago, aimed first to
provide pulpit rabbis with
information and source ma-
terial on a broad range of
communal and halachic
issues. But it had a more
controversial, though
unspoken, agenda as well: to
provide a counterbalance to
Orthodoxy's current right-
wing leadership.
"The roshei yeshiva are
out of touch," charged one of
the group's members, referr-
ing to the deans of the more
traditional yeshivas. "We
want to make Halachah
(Jewish law) available that
is sympathetic to the basic
social reality in which Or-
thodox Jews now live."
The first two papers issued
by the independent Round
Table, though apparently
about minor matters, dem-
onstrated the group's philo-
sophical vector by providing
a liberal alternative to
halachic decisions already in
existence:
• The first, acknowledging
the reality of the AIDS epi-
demic, dealt with whether a
ritual circumciser's tradi-
tional oral contact with the
infant's blood could be elim-
David Margolis is senior
writer at the Los Angeles Jew-
ish Journal.
Mated. (Answer: Yes, the re-
quired extrusion of blood
could be performed
mechanically.)
• The second, acknowledg-
ing the necessity of engi-
neering bridges across Jew-
ish denominational lines,
considered whether a child
adopted by non-observant
parents could be given an
Orthodox conversion. (An-
swer: Yes, if they agreed to
send the child to yeshiva.)
In the meantime, the
group was at work on a
range of other issues, in-
cluding: • what constitutes
a community's obligation to
make institutions and ser-
vices accessible to the han-
dicapped;
• how far the rhetoric of
disagreement between.
Torah scholars may go
before it becomes libel;
• whether smoking is
permitted halachically and
whether smoking in public
Rabbi Marc Angel,
president of the
Rabbinical Council
of America,
insisted that the
Round Table "no
longer exists."
places constitutes a "public
hindrance" to others;
• how access to heart
transplants should be decid-
ed and whether organ dona-
tions are halachically per-
mitted, or even recom-
mended;
• and whether synagogues
may discriminate in giving
charity — whether they can
they choose, for example, to
deny help to non-Zionist
yeshivot.
The hottest issues, those
relating to the status of wo-
men, were still to come —
the problem of the agunah,
the "chained" wife whose
husband will not give her a
divorce; whether women
may serve on boards of syn-
agogues and schools; and
issues relating to women's
participation in religious
ritual.
Given the questions it ex-
pected to ask and answer,
there was no surprise that
the Round Table was viewed
in certain Orthodox circles
warily, at best. Rabbi Moshe
Tendler, professor of Talmud
at Yeshiva University and a
widely respected scholar,
characterized the rabbis of
the Round Table as
"mavericks" and "upstarts"