← New Books Network
New Books Network
Zev Eleff et al. eds., "The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law" (Oxford UP, 2025)
01:14:56
Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello, everybody, and welcome to a new episode of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Geraldine Goutifin. Today I'm delighted to welcome three distinguished scholars, Zev Elif, Roberta Qual and Chaim Semen, to discuss their edited volume, the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law, which was published by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2025. This substantial volume, spanning more than 800 pages, offers a sweeping and deeply interdisciplinary exploration of Jewish law, or halacha, a legal system that has developed over nearly two millennia across continents and cultures. Far more than a body of ritual practice, Al Akha addresses virtually every dimension of life, from ethics to commerce to war and family life. Bringing together scholars of law, history, and religion, the handbook examines foundational questions about authority, interpretation, and the continuing vitality of an ancient legal tradition in the modern world. Drawing on classical as well as contemporary debates across denominations, the volume offers a rich state of the field account of one of the world's most enduring legal system. So before we begin our conversation, let me introduce briefly our three guests. Zev Aleph is president of Graz College and Professor of American Jewish history. Roberto Kuhl is Raymond P. Neuro professor of Law at DePaul University College of Law, and Chaim Semin is the Chair in Jewish Law at the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. So, Zev, Roberta, and Chaim, congratulations on these publications, and welcome to this show.
- [01:37]
A
Thank you.
- [01:38]
B
So, first of all, I would love to hear from all three of you about who you are and how you came together on this project to produce this quite voluminous handbook. Roberta, why don't you start?
- [01:54]
A
Well, I think this was maybe nine years ago at this point, that the seeds for this book actually were planted. What happened was I had gotten a message from an editor at Oxford University Press wanting to meet with me when he was in Chicago on his, you know, country visits. And I had recently published a different academic book with Oxford called the Myth of the Cultural Jew. That's, I think, why he wanted to meet with me. And basically he pitched the idea of my editing the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law. Now, I have to say I thought that was hysterical because though I did write a book about Jewish law, and I did, in order to write that book, get a master's degree in Jewish Studies, I clearly haven't sat in a yeshiva for 15 years, and I just thought it was so funny that they were coming to me for this. So at first I thought, no, there's no way this would ever work. But then I actually thought about It. And I, I do believe that we're presented with opportunities for reasons. And I thought, you know, this could really be a good thing generally. It could be a good thing for me professionally because I wanted to really be moving into the Jewish law and Jewish studies space.
- [03:10]
C
So.
- [03:11]
A
So I thought to myself, gee, I can't do this alone. Clearly. I mean, no person could do this alone. As you said, it's voluminous. But I thought about who would be the best people for me to work with because though I haven't sat in the yeshiva for 15 years, I need people that actually did. So I had recently met Zev at the Jewish history conference that we were talking about before we started taping. And he was based in Chicago at that point. And yes, he's not a law professor, but he's a history professor and I really liked him and I thought, well, we could work really well together. So I approached Zev and Zev was really excited at that point and interested and that was great. Chaim, I had known, I can't remember exactly. I was trying to think about this, Chaim, when you and I met, I can't actually remember that, but I know we had met, we had been in each other's company, we had good conversations. And so Chaim, in the law world was the person that really jumped up at me for also partnering this. So Zev said immediately, right away, as I recall, I think we had a twist, Chaim's hand a little bit. And, and Chaim actually said something that at the time I didn't want to believe. But he said, bob, you know, this project is going to take. I, I don't know whether you said eight years, nine years. It was some ridiculously high number of years. I thought, oh, that's not going to happen. Of course not. But that's how we. So I'll let you talk to Zev and Chaim actually about their perceptions. But that's my recollection of how we all came together.
- [04:34]
B
Chaim.
- [04:34]
A
What? Yeah.
- [04:35]
B
What is your, what is your recollection of how the project came about?
- [04:39]
D
Sure. So not fundamentally different from what Bobby said. And I remember we met in Chicago to sort of hammer it out. And to me, one of the. I was very interested in this idea of a Oxford handbook on Jewish law. Now, as you mentioned, I teach in a law school, but I would say 90% of the. In the academic sphere, 90% of the people who study the materials we might think of as halacha or Rabbinic Judais, reside in arts and sciences, either in history or religious studies. Or sometimes there's a Jewish study center or something like that. And therefore it's very much. Though the materials are legal, the primary point of access is typically historical. And so much of the field is dominated by that. And at that point, I don't remember, I think I was finishing up my book called Halacha, the Rabbinic Idea of Law, which was trying to think about the phenomenon of Jewish law from the perspective of a legal system and what it is and what it isn't and how it works and how it doesn't. And therefore I thought that this would be a great opportunity to try to think more deeply about what, not an Oxford handbook on Jewish studies, but an Oxford handbook on Jewish law, which means to some degree taking the legal framework both in terms of substance and methodology and somewhat confronting that and somewhat recessing the sorts of things that are typically done in handbooks or similar field that think of Jewish studies in which law then is a way of telling that story but is not the center of the story itself. On the other hand, and this comes up in the way the volume is structured, of course, there's a deep historical dimension to Jewish law. It's very hard to compare things that have been 2,000 years ago with the way things happen now. And particularly in English, when we. Or in law school land, when we talk about law, we mean the law as it is at this moment. So part of our discussions, and I think a driving force in sort of the way the different sections of the book work together, is trying to sort of balance these two perspectives. And that's like sort of my own interest in trying to see Jewish law through a variety of perspectives, a perspective common in university departments, the perspective that makes maybe Shay Mormon Law School, and also to bring in the perspective of the people who practice and adhere to this. So we try to give some voice to all three of those in the book.
- [07:24]
B
Great. And we will return to the question of interdisciplinarity and how those different perspectives can shed light on our understanding of Jewish law. But, Zev, I wanted to turn to you and ask you because you were trained as a rabbi first, if I'm not mistaken, and then as a historian. So how do those two perspectives, how did they inform your, you know, this project from the beginning?
- [07:46]
C
Like a schizophrenic version of RoboCop? No, I don't think. I think that certainly this is a non sectarian, dispassionate volume. Years of training and reading rabbinic texts allowed me to not just be the historian to unlock, you know, the scholars for my co editors that Chaim was discussing. But I do think the capacity to read texts in the original, not something that unfortunately many Jewish historians can do, is important. My own field of American Jewish history, there's only a handful of us who can read a monograph produced in Hebrew. So I think that is really central to the book and how really two really important legal scholars and historian really tried with this handbook to help catalyze a field. I'm thinking a lot of what Bobby and Chaim especially had just said is that take another Oxford handbook that just appeared, one in Geraldine, you're in my field in American Jewish history. The theme of that volume is to create a milestone work that can account for a half century of the professional writing of American Jewish history. That's not what this book does. Our work was really there is no real center of gravity in the history of halacha. There's certainly in Jewish studies, the historical turn of about 30, 40 years ago in which Chaim had indicated we tend as Jewish studies scholars to historicize these works. And I think what we found in the many, many pages of this volume is interesting, really formative attempts to try to bring together the textualism of legal theory and analysis with a healthy dose of historicization to really compel more work. We really, really don't think, and really do hope this is not the final word to the contrary. We're really hoping, at least I'm really hoping, that this will really encourage others to think differently and interdisciplinarily about the study of halacha of Jerusalem.
- [10:16]
A
Great.
- [10:17]
B
So I was wondering if from the outset you were set on perhaps dispelling some misconceptions about Jewish law and if that's the case, what those misconceptions were. And maybe I'll start with the related and very easy question to answer, which is what is halacha? You know, you have students who might not be familiar with it, so how do you explain it in simple words to people who are coming to this legal tradition with no prior knowledge? Roberta?
- [10:49]
A
Well, again, ironically, you're talking to the person who hasn't done that yeshiva for 15 years. Right? But I actually discuss this pretty much in every book or article that I've written on the topic, because you have to explain what it is to people. And you know, just parenthetically, I will say that that question, you know, what is halacha? Or what is Jewish law like? I was faced with that a lot when I started a center with a colleague at Depal in our law school. The center for Jewish Law and Judaic studies, and DePaul's a Catholic school. And people were coming up to me all the time, alums, even my colleagues, and saying, why do we have a Jewish Law center? We're not a Jewish law school. So, you know, my answer always was both in print and verbally. You know, Jewish law is not just about. It's not just about religion or religious practices, which is what most people assume, but it's really about an integrated system in terms of every single. Almost every single facet of human behavior, broadly speaking. Right. Not just the religious behavior, but any kind of behavior. So that would be how I've always explained Jewish law to people on a simplistic level.
- [11:57]
D
So, you know, and. And as, as I said before, this is something that I've thought, you know, a lot about, in part reacting to students. So I teach law students in a modern American law school, and I always tell them the term law is both under and over inclusive of what halacha is. It's over inclusive because we think law, we think state, we think enforcement mechanisms, we think structures and bureaucracies. And halacha doesn't always have all of that quite in the way that American law does. And it's also under inclusive because there's vast areas of life that as a matter of kind of Western legal, political theory, are deliberately outside the law.
- [12:41]
C
Right.
- [12:41]
D
We like to the idea of separation powers within the law. And of course, the creation of the idea of law is to say that belongs to some parts of life but not others. And certainly in American discourse, we're always trying to keep the law out of people's business. That's a very different set of assumptions from how Jewish law works, which, as Roberta says, at least lay claims to not only regulating everything, though it may do that too, but thought shaping, molding, and precisely some of these, which we deal with in the chapter, some of these distinctions, or lack of these distinctions, you know, the line between halacha and agadah, which is roughly something like the legal and narrative or theological or something like that, the fact that rabbinic discourse itself can be narrowly regulatory or broadly thought shaping. And then just as a historical matter, probably before 1800, the overwhelming percentage of words written by Jews that have been saved for posterity are in the Jewish law field, broadly defined. And exactly it's that broadly defined, which is why both law, I think, is a very important word here, because the character of many of these texts is irreducibly legal. And the way they're thinking about Things and what they're thinking about, and yet it covers so much more territory. So I think that's part of the challenge. Right. Because we cannot use the word law in our culture without having certain assumptions about it. And part of what, you know, I think one should try to do in Jewish law, certainly when you're teaching not to, you know, Jews were striving towards halachic observances to use this as a sort of counterpoint mirror to what do we mean by law? What things are, what jobs are we ascribing to law? What jobs are we not ascribing to law? Where else do they go? What. How does it matter whether more theological, philosophical ideas take the legal shape and legal form? How does it do to it? I always tell my students, you know, what does it mean to your religion when law is a central discourse? And what does it mean to your law when it has such deep interconnection to religious concepts?
- [14:43]
B
Yeah, great. Zev, how would you answer that very simple question.
- [14:47]
C
I think what's interesting, you know, our teacher Geraldine Jonathan Sarno quotes dianec. Other people said it beforehand, you don't understand one religion unless you understand 2. You don't understand a system of law unless you understand multiple. And that contextualization was something that we were striving for. There are obviously not just comparison, but contrasts. And I think much of the book, many of the essays, the chapters inside, really grapple with the idea of enforceability and how others read texts that came before. And there's really a. This is something that I've really been drawn to from a historical point of view, the role of authority, of individuals, of texts that can be charismatic people, that can be charismatic texts. And that's really front and center in the volume.
- [15:43]
A
Great.
- [15:43]
B
So let's talk a little bit about the what. We're not going to discuss every chapter, but I want to say at the outset that there are 32 chapters. So I wanted to hear from you a little bit about who the contributors were, where they're based, what their fields are, and we mentioned a little bit interdisciplinarity. So I'd love to hear more about the disciplines and methodologies that contributed to the volume and how they inform this kind of multifaceted perspective on Jewish law that you just provided.
- [16:11]
D
Sure. So I'll take a crack maybe at the opening sections, then hand it off, because the sections are a little bit done differently for exactly this reason. So one thing that we tried to grapple with was in thinking of the fact that both Jewish law is written over a very long period of time. But then one of the things that legal discourse does is it flattens time because any sort of source from any period is available as a kind of source of authority or source of precedent. That's true in American law and English law and in Jewish law as well. And therefore, I think these tensions between thinking historically and thinking legally sort of pervade all these discourses. So in part one, we tried to tell a more historically or periodized story, but from the perspective of how one layer of text reads texts that are seen as its precedent or its source of authority. So we started with, you know, first, just a chapter laying out the kind of theology of classical Jewish law, you know, for a beginner, like, who's, you know, who's on first, what's on second, how is it arranged? And then we went into, okay, how do the earliest layer of rabbis, the ta', im, the rabbis of the Mishnah, how do they read the Bible? And then we went to a chapter of how does the Talmudic rabbis read the Mishnah? And then how do the medieval rabbis read the Talmud? How do the codifiers read what came before them? How do the people who wrote responsa read what bec happens if you read from a kind of more mystical perspective? So the way we try to tell out the story is not to homogenize everything the way sometimes legal discourse does, but also not to refract everything into, well, in this century, but to see, okay, how are people reading their source of authority? And then how do those become sources of authority for the next layer, which is really part one, Part two tackles from a very different perspective, in other words, not from a diachronic perspective, but from a more synthetic perspective, which is to say, okay, what are some key features and institutions of Jewish law? And not necessarily say, how did it function in this century or that century? But can we get a handle on the concept itself? So we talked about here. We went back to rabbinic reading practices, but tried to typify them sort of more as what does Jewish law, what sort of practices emerge? We mentioned before halacha and agada, right? These are. And we picked here on things that are not so common outside of Judaism. The idea of Torah study, the idea of stringency, the way codification works, the relationship between formal law and communal customs. So these are anchor points of Jewish law that have less commonality or look very differently outside of it. And we thought to center those precisely to give a flavor. So if part one is a sort of More historical framing. Part two is a more kind of concept or idea driven framing of what are the sort of institutions that work within Jewish law and to help people get a picture of the discourse of the whole then. And then part three, which is, you know, at some degree as large, if not larger than the other two, really, then moves to the modern period. So it also has a structure of, you know, a kind of more classical structure up front, and then moves into the modern period. And I'll hand it off to my co authors to kind of, you know, talk about how we thought about things there.
- [19:40]
B
Roberta, go ahead. About. Yeah, this, this, this part of the, the handbook.
- [19:44]
A
So, yeah, part. I mean, the, the. Part three that. That's Jewish Law and Practice in Modernity. You know, this was a section in which we really, really needed to, I would say, grapple. We wanted essays that would grapple not just with the law, but also the, the impact of the law in society and particularly in modern society. And so this is where we really, you know, had. We have a section on, of course, the movements and denominations. You can't have a book about Jewish law because Jewish law means very different things to different types of Jews. And you can't get around that. And I do think that one of the strengths of our book is that, you know, we do have a range of authors in terms of their denominations and their practices and their level of observance. And that is, I think, somewhat reflected particularly in part three, although not exclusively in part three, you know, the idea of how halacha responds to modernity. And by the way, after we started planning for this, Covid hit, I think Covid hit maybe we were, maybe in year two of our planning, and there was Covid. And of course, that gave rise to having not just logistical difficulties, which it did, but also we even had an essay on the impact of COVID speaking of the intersection between modernity and the application of Jewish law. And also the modernity section enabled us to include a section on halacha and personhood and those personhood issues. Based on my research and the work that I'm doing now, those personhood issues really do seem to be front and center, not just in innovative interpretations of halachah, but even among communities that are looking at halachah in a more traditionally orthodox way, we're still seeing that personhood question emerging in different types of communities. And so I think that last section really, I think, does a very nice job of bringing in all these different kinds of discussions to the discourse that we try to shape in the book, I mean, one of.
- [22:03]
D
And I wanted to say.
- [22:04]
B
Go ahead, go ahead.
- [22:05]
D
Sorry, Just, just two points on that. So one of the things I think we did in the denomination section is we have a chapter on the impact of Zionism on Jewish law. And to think of Zionism as its own sort of denomination within Judaism, which is certainly when you're thinking in a kind of 20th century American sense, you wouldn't do that. But we felt that no, no, no. Zionism has its own take on what Jewish law is doing. And therefore rather than ask an older question of what does Jewish law think of Zionism? Right. We kind of flipped it and sort of like what has done and is doing to Jewish law. And same thing with the responses to modernity. We kind of try to break that up into attitudes towards non Jews in liberal societies. Science and technology, divorce and marital law, Covid and commercial law. So to try to say that we think that there's many different stories. There's not like Judaism and modernity, but actually, you know, our selection of the topics away because we saw that each one has a different trajectory sort of wherever you are on the denominational or, or you know, theological spectrum. And that's worth kind of spreading that out, you know, spinning that out in that way.
- [23:14]
E
My dad taught me a lot, including how easy it is to forget to cancel things. So I downloaded Experian, my bff. Big financial friend. Experian could help me cancel my unused subscriptions and lower my bills, so saving me hundreds a year. Get started with the Experian app today. Your big financial friends here to help you save smarter. Results will vary. Not all bills are subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. $631 a year average savings with one plus negotiations and one plus cancellations paid. Membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details.
- [23:42]
D
Experian.
- [23:44]
B
Great. And I have to say I think a lot of people associate halacha with Orthodox Judaism. And this is something I really appreciate about the handbook is you really complicate that notion that even outside of the orthodox denominations, different movements are still grappling with Jewish law and what it can mean for different people. So I thought the handbook really did a great job. Zev, I know you have to leave us soon. And so one thing I wanted to do was also to delve into your personal, your individual contributions because the three of you did contribute chapters to the handbook. So why don't we start with you. And actually what Chaim said is a really nice segue into this because your chapter is later on in the book. It's in part three and it's an essay on Judaism and the modern family. And you claim in that essay that family life is a prism to understand different approaches to halacha. So can you walk us through this essay a little bit before you leave us?
- [24:44]
C
Yeah. No. And it's a reminder. It's much easier to write about dead people from the 19th century. This one, Bobby and I especially were following Supreme Court cases in Live Moment and making edits. I think mine were the final edits to the volume because it needed to be updated lest it be out a day too soon. Similar to what Chaim had indicated about the role of Zionism, an older, more traditional question well, what would have been the influence of halacha on Zionism? You could also have asked, well, what is the. How does the role of halacha in various communities? Whether it's Mordecai Kaplan's famous quip, Jewish law gets a vote, not a veto or something that takes it at full blush. We flipped it in this chapter, which is to say is how do changes in perceptions of the family change, whether that be the rise of divorce in the Post World War II era, in vitro fertilization, which I'm surprised.
- [25:58]
D
It's always amazing.
- [25:59]
C
You just assume somebody's written about this before. No, not really. Certainly the role of gender and homosexuality has really been changed in the last dozen or so years in popular perception. And Jody, as you point out, that's not just exclusive to the Orthodox but to all groups. How does Jewish law understand that Bobby's important article about the conservative movement, the Committee of Jewish Law and Standards and its role as an authoritative body, or maybe not, which is what Bobby really problematizes is really important. And so how do you. Does how. How in. In Chaims. I'm just going to pick on it again. It's how do all the different forces mediate Jewish law? Jewish law necessarily interacts with modernity and everybody's modernity changes over time. The modern moment changes. And so that's what this, that's what my chapter really looks at, I think with an honest analysis from the Lieberman class. Lieberman in the so called Lieberman clause of 1953, which was meant to somehow stymie the challenges relating to Agunot, which is another chapter in this book. Knowing and drawing on my colleague Ben Steiner's work of understanding how. What Lieberman had in mind was how to. How to keep the so called nuclear family intact when it was really being challenged by the rise of Modernity and certain facts of divorce, homosexuality. Various groups have looked at where halacha, or where the spaces in between halacha can move with regard to that, whether it's to actually transform matrimony in the face of it, which certainly the reform movement, the reconstruction movement took the lead to. How does a community like certain areas of the Orthodox, how do they keep their, what they would call the authenticity of Jewish law, but at the same time allow certain cultural norms to mediate the in between spaces of Jewish law and how those concessions work out. So hopefully I did something of it. One thing I want to just point out is that when we talked, it was sort of a light bulb moment. I remember where we were sitting in Chicago when Chaim came up with the idea of let's talk about the layered nature of texts. How do the epic of response to literature, that topic, how does it read earlier texts, earlier genres, how do they interact with one another? To my knowledge, that's not something that's been taken up before. And if there's one, whether it's the historical articles, the ideological, even in the case studies in the middle sections of the book, that's, I think some. I really hope that's something really novel that scholars and readers will pick up on, which is, I mean, scholars like to always make up words. The layer ality of Jewish law is something that we really strove for. And I think when that started to get articulated amongst the three of us, we were really, really excited and eager to see how that would play out.
- [29:40]
B
Well, in addition to what you just said, I think the distinction you have in your text between folk religion and Elliot religion, the idea that halacha is not just text or obviously many texts plural, but also liberality. So you talked about lived alacha. So I wonder how this distinction has informed the broader contributions in the volume. The idea that it's, you know, for so long we just look at Jewish law from the perspective of the texts that have been passed on to us. But what does it mean to look at what people do? And it's kind of a law and society approach to halacha. What kind of new insights do you think? And this is a question to all of you, this yields in our understanding of Jewish law, especially Jewish law in modernity.
- [30:28]
C
It's really hard as one goes back in time. Jacob Katz was probably the first to think about this. How do we square textualized Jewish practice versus lived religion? David Hall's work at Harvard for many years on that, it was definitely a mightier challenge. I think in the earlier. The chapters that deal with earlier periods to try to understand. Just because it says in the text, does that mean that it was observed this way? It's hard to tell. I think in the later chapters, Geraldine, is you into it? There's an opportunity to understand the forces at play. Bobby, I hope Bobby will talk about in a little bit. But certainly that's something that the conservative will need to be perhaps more so than any other group in any moment in time. It's always very hard to single out one, so I'm taking a little bit of risk here. That idea of lived religion versus the authority of text I think is a really tough nut to crack.
- [31:36]
D
And one of the reasons that we wanted to have an article there on Torah study is in some ways even in the classical period to frame this. Because again, when we talk about law, we're usually talking about things that happen in the world. And that is also true of Jewish law. But Jewish law has this other thing. It's not so interested in what happens in this world. It's a product of somewhat garble, a phrase, of an academic environment in which, you know, and that many of these texts are produced in that framework, which again sets up a tension that exists in every legal system, as Zeb and you have pointed out, but maybe in heightened ways in halacha. And here we'd of course tie in that the political background of so much of halachic production is exile and not governance. You know, in fact, halacha, and this comes out in some of the chapters, sort of inverts the traditional story where traditionally a polity has to govern and then creates law to govern it. And the story of halacha is almost inverted, right when the temple is destroyed and the second Kamil is destroyed, the flowering of halacha comes after that. And many scholars view either as a response to the loss of sovereignty or sort of, you can conceptualize different ways. But already from the beginning there's an inversion here which sort of sets the agenda and therefore, I think heightens some of these tensions between the world of text and the world of religion. And then especially because for so much of Jewish history you have weak or non existent enforcement mechanisms and in modernity no enforcement mechanisms. So I think these are why, I think how I think we're bringing out here is how the different parts of the book connect to each other, even though there are some differences, is because some of these issues are extremified in the, in the sense of, of the halachic system. And then when we know the reason you could write more about this in Maduri is because we have better evidence as to what people are doing and. And how these things interact and what happens when, you know, how do you create a legal system without enforcing mechanisms? Through, you know, authority. Through charisma. Charisma, as Zeb and Bobby mentioned. Right. So all these things. Which is why, you know, and I tell my students, you know, we all teach boat people who are Jews and non Jews who know lots of stuff and who know nothing and obviously where and how you're teaching it matters. But I could think you could make a totally, you know, secular comparative legal theory, a comparative law rationale for the study of Jewish law, and then you can make a very religious argument, and then you could mix, match and blend those. Which I think is sort of what this book tries to do.
- [34:17]
B
Absolutely. Bobby, I feel like you want to add something to this particular question.
- [34:22]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that this is such a rich, deep conversation that I'm enjoying and I really appreciate. But I think when you talk about Jewish law, you know, there's often, like, for me, for me speaking personally, you know, for me, without talking about Jewish law, without talking about transmission of the tradition, there's like, you know, Jewish law, to me, is not something that you just want to have in a little box and preserve for historical purposes. If we can't transmit. Transmit it to future generations in a meaningful way, then it's just a historical, you know, artifact. And that is not the purpose. That's not the purpose of Torah, as I read Torah. And so where it gets hard, where it gets challenging, is in our current. I mean, it's in modernity. It's in the modern period. And it's particularly challenging for, I'm going to say, American Jews, Jews much more so than Israeli Jews, for reasons that we, I think, you know, could all agree on. No matter how religious or religious you are in Israel, it's a very different environment. So to me, that's really the. That's really the issues we have to be grappling with, because, you know, if you're growing up in an environment in which Jewish law is being observed, you're going to have that transmission, at least according to Pew, for 60 to 6% of, you know, those communities. It's a whole different story when you get out of those communities. And I know that story well. I mean, I myself am observant. I don't even know if I would qualify as a Conservative Jew. I actually identify more as Conservadox. But I know the world of religiously liberal Jews very well. And I'm telling you that the challenge for me is always thinking, what is this going to look like in 10, 20, 30 years? What's it going to look like for my grandkids? What's it going to look like for their kids in here in the United States? And that's the issue that I think is such a critical one for American Jews today. And I think our book, though it's an academic book, you know, clearly I think it does speak to some of these issues, by the way we treat those topics.
- [36:39]
B
So actually, this is a great opportunity to discuss your essay, maybe in greater details, because your essay focuses on lawmaking in the conservative movement. So I wonder if you can expand a little bit on the claims that you make in the essay and what you're trying to argue. And then I'll talk to Chaim later on to talk about his essay and how about kind of halacha functions within Orthodoxy. So if you could tell us a little bit about your essay.
- [37:09]
A
Sure. So, you know, I'm going to just start with a very vivid memory I have while I was writing this chapter. And that is it was a winter Shabbat. It was, I don't know, several years ago. It was a winter Shabbat. I was sitting in our living room with my husband Saturday afternoon. I don't use electronics on Shabbat. And I had borrowed from my synagogue library the four volumes of the History of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative Movement. And I was spending Shabbat reading that entire volume. And I found a passage in there. And my husband was sitting across from me in our living room. And I said to my husband,
- [37:46]
B
I
- [37:46]
A
read him a passage, and I said, when do you think this was written? And the passage was basically, oh, you know, our membership is an observing kashrut. And that. It was like complaining about the membership. And I said to my husband, well, when do you think this was written? And my husband said, I don't know. You know, three, four, five years ago. I said, we'll try 1949. Right. Because that's when it was written. I was actually surprised because that was a little bit before some of those issues that are really pushing the buttons of the conservative movement in particular were emerging. But back then, the issue was, you know, travel on Shabbat and whether you're going to allow that in a vehicular travel on Shabbat. And the teshuvah came out. The opinion piece came out in 1950. So the conservative movement has always had this balance of basically, you know, dealing with a laity that was not particularly religious or observing Jewish law in a new stringency and then balancing what does the law do about it? And so that is sort of this middle ground. The middle is always the hardest place to be, and the Conservative movement has really documented that. I do think, however, that the challenges for the Conservative movement, and I've written about this, aside from the book, I've written many articles about certain positions that are being taken. The more society is pushing you leftward in terms of social policy, the harder it is to stay grounded. And Orthodoxy, modern Orthodoxy in particular, is having some of these challenges right now, but there's still a stronger framework. The Conservative movement is much more fuzzy, and the rabbis have a large spectrum of opinion. And frankly, the observance levels of Conservative Jews versus Reformed Jews are pretty much. They're similar. There's still more observance of Kashrut, there's still more observance of Shabbat and the holidays, but it's how long that will last is a good guess. And so I think when you're trying to reinterpret the law to suit your congregation, it becomes a very difficult proposition. And my chapter looks at that in the context of Shabbat travel, using vehicles and electricity to some extent, and also Zoom, Zoom services, which were widely adopted in the Conservative movement, including in the synagogue I attend most, which is a very traditional Conservative synagogue, the rabbis don't travel, the rabbis don't use electronics. But they did go to Zoom during COVID and I understood the reasons. And the last thing I'll say about this is when you're trying to balance law and norms, you really want to hit that sweet spot of what is going to allow people to continue to observe at. From a quote unquote, cultural slash religious standpoint. That was my book, the Myth of the Cultural Jew, in some ways, right. What's going to best accommodate that balance and yet have enough of the law piece that's infused in what people are doing. And the issues just keep coming because society keeps marching, you know, a little bit, you know, more in a way that was never really thought about in years gone by. And that's sort of the end of my chapter where I basically say, you know, look, right now, the norms of Conservative Jews on the whole, are still stronger religiously than is true in the Reform movement by the major markers that Pew and other studies assess. But is that going to continue? That's the challenge. And I really have my doubts about how we can make that work. And that's a message for. It's an important message for religiously liberal Jews, who constitute 70% of the American Jewish community. We have to figure that out if we want to have a meaningful, deep Jewish future that embraces tradition, which unless we're going to do that, my reaction to that is, what's the point?
- [41:53]
B
Right? I mean, to this point. And I think the point you're making about the difficulties of being in the centers, I think are very relevant. And maybe it's a bit impressionistic, but I feel like. And you are more familiar with the Pew studies and the recent numbers about membership in the conservative movement. But I feel like within the movement, a lot of people for whom Jewish law is important, they themselves or their children are very likely to move kind of to the right and join maybe modern Orthodoxy, something that is where there's a greater focus on Jewish law. And this is impressionistic. So maybe I'm wrong, but I think that that perhaps is one of the challenges that the conservative movement is facing today.
- [42:36]
A
I think you are correct. You know, I told a friend of mine at my synagogue recently who has a son who just had his bar mitzvah, and he's very into the Jewish thing, very into the Jewish thing. And interesting. His mom converted. She's a Jew by choice. And I said to her, I said to her one day at our kiddush or after Shabbat meal, I said, you know, I can see him going Orthodox. And she looked at me. She was like, I think kind of a little horrified. I said, no, no, because in the conservative movement, for people who are taking observance really seriously, I mean, people hear what I do and they think I am, like, literally, you know, and back to modern Orthodoxy. The other point there is that the head of the Nishma Institute, who does all the studies on the Orthodox community, Mark Trencher, he has said modern Orthodoxy is the most heterogeneous group within Orthodoxy, for sure, and probably within Judaism itself. And you do have that range even within modern Orthodoxy. But there's still a higher degree of embrace of those norms, like day school being one that comes to mind in particular, that does make a difference. Even if the kids kind of go off and veer and do their thing, oftentimes, they'll still come back. And that is different from the more religiously liberal movements.
- [43:52]
B
All right, so I want to turn to Chaim now and talk about quite, you know, different set of challenges, which is halacha as it's understood and practiced within Orthodoxy. And you talk about a very specific type of Orthodoxy. So I would love for you to explain this maybe perhaps a little bit more for the listeners. But the essay talks about what you call Allahic formalism. And I understood it as an attempt to situate Jewish law within a broader framework of modern legal theory. So I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about what you're trying to do in the essay and
- [44:28]
D
what you hope the truth is, I think, less disconnected from what Bobby was talking about than maybe you think. So I was motivated by the following. And this, you know, not so much with the orthodoxy, but of course it surrounds it because, well, one way to think of the non orthodox critiques of Orthodoxy is that they're excessively formalistic, right? And they're not sufficiently attuned to sort of the beats coming from the world, right? Which turns out to have a very long history in halacha. Maybe even before halacha, right? The prophets looked at the then religious establishment, said, you're only interested in these ritual forms and you're not interested in sort of the heart of the law. Jesus made similar critiques. The Talmud itself makes these critiques. Hasidic rabbis made these critiques, Zionists made these critiques, and Reform thinkers made these critiques. So this is sort of a long history. And I think as soon as you're going to say that we're going to wrap religious culture on the performance of these very specific rituals and kind of zone in on their character, their properties and the way the Rabbinic Judaism does, you inevitably are going to have this form of backlash. And I think it's both internal and external. And then when you start then reading, you get something very interesting, which is some people are like, no, Jewish law is way more formalistic than modern legal systems. And they're often talking about American legal systems. And then there's this other school of thought says, no, no, no, Jewish law is way less formalistic than modern legal systems and American legal systems, et cetera. I'm like, well, are we arguing by Jewish law about American law about both, like, what's going on here? So that's sort of what's motivated here. Because again, I think that whether we call it formalism or if we use the New Testament's terms, you know, the letter of the law, some element of this is sort of ever present it. And what I try to then do is say, okay, what are these words? At least the way that we're using now, Formalism? What does that mean? How does it map on to Jewish Law, is it a good match, is it not? And can we at least make some headway in trying to understand why? I think anyone who comes in, like, there's a reason people keep on thinking of halacha as formalistic, right? There's a there there, but, but there's also some more complexity there. And when we need to rely on formalism is something that I think is very relevant. So what I tried to say is a lot of this is coming, especially the last 30, 40 years, from the American legal discourse to the broader political discourse. Originals and textualism, these are words that start from lawyers, but emanate throughout. And part of what you see that modern law is designed to keep the law safe from the judges. And the judges are often framed as these unelected elites. Whether if you're more on the left, well, let's go the other way because historically if you're sort of like, well, first they were like elites of the old conservative right and then they became the elites of the kind of more liberal left. And now maybe they're back to being the elites of the right. And then the other party's always. And this is the way this discourse sort of goes. And therefore so much of the infrastructure of American legal theory and American law over the last 50 years is sort of like protecting the law from the judge. And I was like, you know, in Judaism that makes no sense, right? There is no legislative branch, there is no executive branch. There's not exactly judiciary either. There are these rabbinic interpreters that go gain authority through a kind of, you know, bottom up sense of who the community recognizes, the avatars of its sense of religion, its sense of mission, its sense of law and sense of authenticity. And those are the people that are constructing the law. So even if we're going to talk about formalism, like we have to like disaggregate it from some of these conceptions that dominate the modern sphere. Then there's other ones about a kind of, you know, interconnected system of ideas that I talk about. And I said, well, part of it is the way law and ritual interact here. That what you do have, what I landed on was that there is something about the importance of technique and that in modern law we are always looking for kind of functional reason for things, right? If we're going to insist on this regulation. And part of what happens in Jewish law is that no, because of the way it's theologically structured and oriented and you can have non functional reasons for things that they may be mystical or there's different ways to describe them. But the point is that the functional test is always. Or the questions about it are always there. And that is, to me, what is more typical of halachic formalism than a lot of the things that we're talking about. And it may not so perfectly correlate to the question of halachic change or not. And maybe just to back to the social point that Bobby was raising, one of the things you realize is, you know, this is about the middle, and modern orthodoxy is sometimes whether you experience the law as formalist sort of itself is a way to think about your underlying value. So I think about some of the issues with the lack of gender equality in classical halacha, we're talking about women participating in public prayer or any one of these things. And so in the reform and conservative movement, there's no tension because they simply changed the rules to allow for it. On the ultra orthodox right, there's also no tension because the halacha reflects the underlying normative commitment of the community. Now, where this all becomes very pressured is in modern orthodoxy, which is, on the one hand, committed to a halachic system that maintains gender inequality. On the other hand, you know, depending who and how you talk to, it sort of normatively buys into the more mainstream thing that, you know, we don't really think there's should be these differences. So this is where you see it, whether it's with homosexuality or with various gender. Now, of course, different people break on different issues, but to me, I think that's where, if you want to think about formalism, right, when you have to push everything on the law, not because you identify with its underlying norms, not because you've changed, right? But specifically, when there's tension between the law's underlying norms and the behavior it commands, that's where these questions of the law as authority as separate from the kind of social consensus on which it's based come up. So part of what I wanted to do was illuminate that and to disaggregate when you were following the law, because it's sort of what you would do anyway, maybe just give shape to things. That's a very different type of law. So I think of Shabbat law like this, right? So obviously Shabbat law within modern orthodox and orthodox communities sort of limits and frames things a certain way. But bottom, at the underneath that people, bottom, like they sort of deeply identify with the image of Shabb that is reflecting the law. And then here and there, the law comes in to kind of play traffic cop of this yes, this no. Do it this way, do it that way, as opposed to an area in which there's a wide gap between the sort of underlying social intuitions and where the law. And that's why these become the kind of friction points. And then questions of halachic formalism and identification and how you deal with the sort of law in the books and the law and actions and the people's demands and then the way the law shifts and changes due to those, that's where it becomes really interesting. So I think by disaggregating what we mean by formalism and sort of being able to shine a light on different acts of it, I think we could have just a better understanding of how the structure of Jewish law works, even though the piece is not really in society the way Bobby's is. But it's hopefully going to help understand these set of interactions and what we mean and what we don't mean and what we should be meaning. Meaning when we're using these terms.
- [52:35]
B
I really like what you said about modern Orthodoxy because it reminded me of a book I recently read called Holy Rebellion by Rooney Tirshai, about how those tensions are playing out in Israel between modern Orthodoxy and gender equality and how women, Orthodox, women in Israel are at the forefront of a really trying to carve greater space for women within an Allahic space. So I think that very much is in conversation with what you said and I think too, I think the case that you're making for this handbook, it really shows that Jewish law is something that is changing every day under the forces of modernity, and that the story you're telling in the book, through all those essays, it's not over. We're leaving through it. So thank you for making that point. Before we close the conversation, I wanted to return to a point that Zev made about authority, because you start the essay by ask. Sorry. You start the handbook in the introduction by asking how does Jewish law understand its own authority? And we could spend an extra hour talking about this, so we might not answer that question. However, I'm curious to hear from you about how reading and editing all those essays has perhaps shifted your answer to that question, if, if it has at all.
- [54:04]
A
I mean, that, that, that, that's a great question because I think, you know, in some ways that kind of gets to the $64 million question, which we haven't even touched on, but really, which in my mind underscores this whole conversation, and that's what's theology and what's the place of God? Right? Because the source of halacha, you know, it's clear what the source of halachah is in the torak, right? And even in the. In the rabbinic literature. So. And yet that's the question that Hayim and I actually had a recent phone conversation in which we touched on this very briefly. That's a question that is not a comfortable one for many Jews, including for Orthodox Jews. And I don't have an answer for that. I think I do want to write a book. My next book, I think, is I want to write a book about faith, particularly how it's different in Judaism perhaps, compared to perhaps Christianity. But I think that's a challenging one. I don't know why, but I do think that concept of faith, which relates to authority, that's, to me, what underscores the authority, because why do we do things? I mean, you know, I do think that's an uncomfortable one for many, many Jews. And beyond that, I don't know what else to say at this point except to flag it for something that, you know, it's easy to kind of get lost in what we do, the practice, but to sometimes not think about why are we doing this and where's that authority from? And I will just say that I think the Jewish community needs a lot more conversations about. About faith than I currently hear. And that's not just in religiously liberal circles. I would include the Orthodox circles as well with respect to that.
- [55:55]
B
Thank you.
- [55:56]
D
So I would say we do start the first chapter in the handbook is a little bit about the theology. Well, I'm not really disagreeing with what Bobby said, but we do kind of start there, because I think you have to at least understand the. The internal story or the different stories told, the different internal stories about the source. And of course, the source of halachic authority itself is, I would say, from a classical perspective, ultimately divine. But there's a lot of rabbinic innovation that, again, even in a very classical mode, is understand to be of rabbinic origin, and then discussions about how that hooks up to the divine. So that's. That's, I think, to some degree, always been a question in Jewish law. Because certainly if we look at the practical level, most of the things observant Jews do today or don't do are probably much more rabbinic in structure than biblical.
- [56:52]
A
Right.
- [56:52]
D
I mean, I always tell people, if you wanted to keep Shabbat the way the rabbis understand the Bible requires it. You know, there's some restrictions here and there, but it's a very different Shabbat than the Shabbat that we've come to know. So I think that that question is not just a modern question, is a sort of age old question of which the, you know, the tradition itself provides a variety of answers. For to some degree the debate between Hasidism and misnagadism is a little bit revolving around this, that the Misnagadim sort of had their theology, but that was like quite detached from how they spent their days or the ideal sense of the Torah study. And you know, you could go through the Talmud and I can't say you can't forget that God is there, but it's not operating at a theological language most of the time. Some does, but large tracts of it, of things that are similar to contract law and property law and bailment law. I wouldn't say they function exactly the way secular system does. That's not true. But they don't function in theological keys. And again, I think that goes back to some of these questions about formalism and what happens when you center law. And I would also go the other way. In other words, what does it mean to do that? Right. Why is law centered in such a direction which does come to the expense at some level, if not from belief in God, certainly from theological discussion as being the main stay of the discourse of the elites that then kind of filters down in some sense, right. If we went back, Bobby, you tell me if you disagree. 40, 50 years ago, theology was much more a public discussion amongst non Orthodox dreams than it regard Orthodox dreams. And maybe it's kind of flipped now. And there's a fair amount of theological framing and discussion that goes on Orthodoxy, but there's also the sense of, okay, but when we talk about Jewish law, we are not doing that in the most direct manner. At the end of the day, if you got to figure out a question of Jewish law within its own terms, the fact that God is the ultimate lawgiver and cares about whether you do or don't do something is true, but the mechanics of it are not done in a theological key. So I think that these are super important questions to ask and to discuss, and they go both ways. In other words, one could read Rabbinic Judaism as a pushback against a way of framing religion that is sort of always and exclusively asking ultimate questions. And maybe one of the things Rabbinic Judaism does, it breaks it down into the smaller questions that with a kind of more. So I think these are super interesting to talk about, maybe to go back to the beginning, whether we think about this in terms of Jewish law as opposed to Jewish studies, but whether we think about Judaism as opposed to its form of religiosity. And of course, anyone knows, there's often been reactions from well within Judaism. Again, we've talked about Hasidism and various forms of Kabbalistic thought and in various ways that aim to, in some sense, or maybe in broad senses, decenter the legal for these other discourses of mysticism, of Kabbalah. And I think Zionism, at least early Zionism, is its own way of thinking about that. So these are, again, discussions that are part of the Jewish canon, I think, since the prophet sort of said, why are you guys only focusing on these rituals? Where's the heart?
- [60:22]
A
Great.
- [60:22]
B
This is a great way to end. And my final question is about next steps. I understand they will be a conference related to the handbooks. I'd love to hear about that. I would also love to hear from you about what you identify as, like, the future directions in the study of Jewish law. And perhaps if you still have energy, talk a little bit about your current or future research agenda.
- [60:44]
D
Sure. So let me just start the conference room.
- [60:47]
A
Yeah, you should talk.
- [60:48]
D
Yeah. So in a couple, in about eight weeks at Penn Law School, we're going to do a kind of conference on the volume what we're not, you know, but not so much to rehash what's in the volume, but to try to put it in some broader context. So some of which we've talked about. So hopefully we're going to have a panel with the editors of handbooks on Islamic law and Christianity, the Law by Oxford, and other similar publishing assets to try to say, okay, what are these. Not this handbook. What are these handbooks trying to do? What does it mean to frame a religious tradition within legal terms whose audience is in some ways internally facing, in some ways externally facing? What do we want these to accomplish sort of globally, that's going to be one type of. The other one is related. But I would say 40 years ago and two, three generations ago, many centers of Jewish studies were located in the humanities. There's now a center for Jewish law, Jewish and Israeli law, at Harvard, at Yale and at Berkeley. So what happens when you move these things into the law schools? You know, what. What shifts and what changes? You know, what are the affordances of that structure, particularly when you look at Israeli law, as opposed to something that may have happened two or three generations ago, you know, a center for Jewish studies within arts and sciences. Then we also want to, you know, again, bring in some people who haven't been part of the book to kind of evaluate it from the perspective of, you know, how does thinking about, you know, using laws as the organizing framework shift? And then finally a more externally looking thing of sort of, you know, what do these handbooks, again, the religious ones as a whole, and what it says about modern religion in the sort of church, church, state sort of discussions that are a part of obviously America, but also globally. Right. This tension between ultimately religious law always challenges state law because it's a set of norms that has a different sort of organizing orientation that is not typically territorial, it's not really subject to the kind of things the states do. And it puts a whole other set of norms into the culture in a fairly organized way. And there's a reason why truth state issues are synagogue state, whatever, mosque state, whatever you're going to call them are ever present. And so we want to also use this as an opportunity to talk about that. And to some degree is that one of the points of these types of books to sort of inform the people who aren't within these traditions aren't really, but are just sort of part of the policy making class about how it is that we do and should think about these questions. So that's what we're going to be doing, hopefully in a couple weeks.
- [63:41]
B
That's very exciting and I wish I could be there. Bobby, if there's anything you want to ask about. Sorry, if there's anything you wanted to add about maybe connected to what Chaim said, future Directions in the Field of Jewish Law, and how your work fits into it.
- [63:59]
A
Yeah, well, my current work, I mean, I mentioned I want to do something on faith, but that's down the road a little bit. My current work, actually, as I think I told you in a prior correspondence, I have a book coming out in October called why American Jews Are Divided and what to Do About It. This was something we touched on briefly during our conversation today, earlier, particularly in connection with the chapter that we have in our handbook on Zionism. But to me, the discourse, even in the. I started this book four, five, four and a half years ago. I've been working on it maybe since 2021, so it's been a while, but the trajectory completely changed after October 7th. And so I think when you talk about future directions in Jewish law, I think that question to me is inevitably entangled with the question of the place of Israel in the lives of the Diaspora and specifically the American Jewish Diaspora. And I think that's a really important question that we are just beginning to explore. There's been a noticeable trend that I have noticed just in the past seven, eight months about certain types of, of thoughts and perspectives on Israel becoming more normalized within the Jewish community, more anti Israel perspectives. I'm not talking about criticisms of the government. I'm talking about just the Zionist enterprise. You're hearing more and more mainstream media, including some Jewish media, about that. And I think, and I hope that that's a conversation that the majority of the American Jewish community can really push back on and really continue to embrace, you know, the importance of Israel, where half the world's Jews live and where the features of Jewish life are clearly going to be continuing. As I, as we talked about earlier, I don't know that we can say the same thing here in the United States. So I'm worried about that. I will just say briefly to conclude my thoughts on this is while I am worried about this, one of the trends that I note in my book is that I am seeing some future directions that I find very promising. You know, spaces where, you know, they may be Orthodox based or they're grounded in a deep sense of ritual and tradition and practice. You know, spaces like Hadar, for example. You know, one of the, the president of Hadar actually wrote one of our essays, Ethan Tucker and other spaces that are, you know, rich in practice. They're not. They can be Orthodox. They may be light Orthodox, but that can maybe be open enough for more American Jews who are serious about religion and religious transmission to be comfortable in. That's what I see as a promising future in addition to our Orthodox community. Let me be clear. I embrace Orthodoxy. I'm a huge fan of Chabad and outreach in Kiruv and elements like that. But I think we do need to think about what is that American, liberally religious American Jewish community going to look like. And if you look at the studies, it's not promising. And so I'm hoping that some of these spaces that can sort of take those people who are not ready to say I'm Orthodox, but find a place for them with a more serious level of ritualistic observance. That's what I would hope our future directions would look like for more, for more, not the majority, but for more American Jews.
- [67:43]
D
So I'll let Bobby worry about all that, but without disagreeing, but just in a somewhat different direction. What I'm interested in is something that we talked about sort of how is both presently and historically, how does halachic authority manifest? How do communities create authority? How do they raise voices that are seen as Authoritative, particularly now here where the modernity thing matters, particularly when there isn't state sanction. Right. So this to me, and I think that the tools of like big data and data analysis can be very, very useful here.
- [68:24]
C
Right.
- [68:25]
D
Everything's now digitized or digitizing. So can we trace, we'll say something like well Rabbi Moshe Feinstein was the greatest holothic authority in mid century America. Then it's probably true. Well how'd that happen? I grew up in a world where
- [68:41]
C
that was already a fact.
- [68:44]
D
But now thinking about well how does that happen? How did his chuvot, his responsa become the ones that are normative. Right. If we think of, I think Zev mentioned before of texts becoming charismatic. So they're typically not charismatic the days if they're written. Right. They become so part of what's so interesting that Judaism or Jewish law is sort of a legal system without the infrastructure of a legal system. But that just means it has its own infrastructure of texts, of rabbis, of communities. And I think, you know, I'm working now on, on a project on rabbinical courts in America. And you know, when I talk to lawyers, very interesting when I talk to lawyers, one of the things that they have such a hard time understanding is how does community create a structure of governance without the tools that modern bureaucracy thinks of as necessary for government. So to me this is like where I'm one of the places I'm headed in sort of understanding Jewish law is try to get a better handle on how authority and how buy in and it's not so different from what Bobby's talking about, but pitched in some different way. How's that manufactured? How's that generated? What happens? What causes people in a world of infinite choice to gravitate towards communities in a structured way to build up institutions that, that, that can carry authority. And I think particularly just in our world where we're now in a moment of the tear down of institutions all across society. Right. So, so Judaism or sincerely observant Judaism is this like interesting island to, to, to think about that. So you know, and again I, I do believe, and I'm not a big data guy, but that there's, there's much to learn that when all this response are available, right. Which set text with sources, how, who, when what arguments are working and you know, is, is just a, is just the next step to take. I think a lot of these things have been understood inchoately and, and I think now we could probably do a better job of getting a more fine grained analysis and nailing down and being more conscious of the process through which, you know, the authority and the connectivity of Jewish law and maybe even religious law generally works in societies such as our own.
- [71:08]
B
Thank you so much for these concluding thoughts. And we're back to the point we made at the beginning that you all made about the fact that the handbook is really a starting point for future scholarships. So thank you so much to all three of you for coming today. It was truly a pleasure to host you, and I want to thank our listeners for joining us as well. Thank you everyone, and have a great day.
- [71:28]
A
Thank you.