RELIGION Michigan Ear Institute Is Better Hearing and Speech Month Michigan Ear Institute invite you to join them in promoting better hearing health. Wednesday, -May-15' Saturday, May 18th, 1991 Location: ...Michigan Ear Institute, Troy 1350 Kirts•Blvd., Suite 140 Call: 2.44-93.9 fo r your free in ivi ua earing tes MEl's certified audiologists. One-of-a-Kinds, Floor Samples and Discontinued Quality Home Furnishings. Distinctive Additions To Any Home. Eilersen Sofa, Measures 87 1/2" x 37 1/2" x 28"H. Muted Grey Fabric. Value Was $3,385, The Quality You Expect From House Of Denmark At Closeout Prices, With A Variety That Will Keep You Coming Back. Quantities Limited. Delivery Extra. Only at Keego Harbor 3325 Orchard Lake Rd. (1 Mile North of Long Lake Rd.) 682-7600 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"