Choosing obligation: values and practice in a liberal observant Jewish community
Embargo Date
2025-02-13
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
This dissertation explores how American Jews who are both deeply engaged with rabbinic tradition and committed to liberal ideals relate to different forms of cultural and religious authority. It is based on participant observation, interviews, and an ethnographic survey that I conducted in a socially liberal, traditionally observant Jewish congregation called Minyan Kol Rinah. Members of this congregation took for granted many of the assumptions of contemporary cultural liberalism, expressed especially in progressive social values and a humanistic ethos. Against this background, they engaged self-consciously with the rabbinic discursive tradition. Most chose to obligate themselves to Jewish law (halakha), which they encountered not as fixed custom but as a dynamic, contested jurisprudential system. I argue that despite its traditionalism, Minyan Kol Rinah's religious culture is part of a broader phenomenon of religious liberalism in the United States. Minyan Kol Rinah was a partnership minyan, a 21st century innovation which allows more participation in public worship by women than conventional Orthodox synagogues. Minyan Kol Rinah bridged the Orthodox and non-Orthodox communities, and should be considered part of a “liberal observant” Jewish religious network that crosses denominational boundaries. This study uncovers the complex ways Jewish law functions in lived observant practice. It explores congregants’ pragmatic negotiations with a complex variety of sources of authority, including texts, public rabbinic conversations, rabbinic advisors, social models, and internalized moral commitments. I argue that liberal observant Jews typically experience Jewish law as a reified “external authority” which is partly independent of the rulings of contemporary rabbis.
Kol Rinah participants were both social and theological liberals. Humanism, that is, the ethos that prioritizes worldly human welfare and autonomy, was a common thread of their social and theological liberalism. In religious cosmology, humanism appeared in the way participants insisted on respect for individual choices, conceived of ethics and social justice as the essence of religion, and approached Jewish scripture and symbols from a historicist, relatively disenchanted perspective. Congregants engaged deeply with rabbinic tradition through liberal frameworks, showing that “liberal” and “traditional” are not opposites.
This study contributes an analysis of how different forms of authority, including religious law, work in practice in the lives of laypeople. It also shows the analytic importance of considering different modes of cultural authority, such as the difference between codified teachings and taken for granted “common sense.” Doing so helps us understand the complex ways people draw on and combine multiple sources of authority as they construct their religious lives.
Description
2024