Lieberman begins by saying that he had not written to R. Herzog—who was a very close friend[3]—because he did not want to create difficulties for R. Herzog by bringing him into the controversy swirling around his proposed ketubah. He explains that certain non-Orthodox rabbis had begun to perform marriages for women who were only divorced civilly. This led people to think that the obligation of a get was not a serious matter. Lieberman notes that in circumstances where the husband does not want to give a get, it is usually possible to convince him to do so. The problem is that these “menuvalim” demand so much money to issue the get, that the women are unable to pay this: ואין מי שיתבע את עלבון העלובות
Lieberman then turns to what in his time was a well-known agunah case. I do not wish to go into details but only mention that the woman involved was the famous Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, who after her experience became a critic of the Orthodox approach in Jewish marriage and divorce law. In Lawrence Grossman’s great new book, Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945-2025, p. 204, he writes that Weiss-Rosmarin was “perhaps the first woman from an Orthodox background to publicly demand the wholesale revision of the system [of Jewish divorce law].” In Weiss-Rosmarin’s 1953 article, “Wanted: Equality for Jewish Women,”[4] and in her later article “The Agony of the Agunah,”[5] she called for batei din to assume the authority of issuing divorces instead of husbands. She further claimed that “Jewish law is male-made and inevitably the male prerogatives are protected at the expense of the rights of women. While Jewish law is chivalrous in certain areas, ‘chivalry’ is not enough for the modern woman.”[6] Because of her strong stand in the matter of agunah, Weiss-Rosmarin has even been called the “the first feminist Jew and the first Jewish feminist.”[7] You can read about her here.
Lieberman says that when he saw how the rabbis did not do anything to help Weiss-Rosmarin, that he came to the conclusion that he must do something. His answer to the agunah problem was his ketubah. If the beit din orders payments based on the ketubah, he believed that this would be upheld by the secular court. Lieberman states that originally he wanted the beit din that would be in charge of this to have: רבנים יראי שמים ובקיאים בדיני גיטין וקדושין. He even reveals that R. Abraham Price of Toronto agreed to serve on this beit din, which means that R. Price accepted the halakhic legitimacy of Lieberman’s ketubah. However, the Rabbinical Council of America threatened to put the Orthodox rabbis in herem if they joined Lieberman’s proposed beit din.[8] Lieberman adds that since the RCA did not allow for Orthodox rabbis to join this beit din, there was no longer any possibility that the beit din would be able to write gittin. Rather, its only role would be to compel the man who refused to give a get to do so. He tells R. Herzog that he reformulated the ketubah, so that any recognized beit din can compel the man to issue a divorce and also require monetary payments.
Lieberman adds that the Orthodox assertion that Conservative rabbis wish to involve themselve in matters of gittin is laughable.
The piece reads as a case study in coalition discipline.
Lieberman has Herzog’s private agreement. Abraham Price of Toronto agrees to sit on the proposed beit din. Then the RCA threatens herem on any Orthodox rabbi who participates. The Orthodox side collapses. Herzog drafts a moderate objection. Reuven Katz demands a stronger version. Herzog signs a public condemnation calling the ketubah chutzpadik.
Nothing in the sequence turns on halakhic analysis. Herzog tells Brodie and Rabinowitz he had suggested something similar himself. He tells the Moetzet ha-Rabbanut that he sees no halakhic problem with Lieberman’s clause. He still signs the condemnation. The gap between his halakhic position and his public position measures the coalition pressure on him.
Shapiro frames Herzog as a man who lacked the strength to stand up to his right. The framing leans too individualized. Herzog faces a structural problem, not a character test. The American Orthodox rabbinate has just made any cooperation with Lieberman a coalition-defining boundary marker. Herzog can side with his old friend and lose his coalition. He can side with the RCA and lose his old friend. He chooses the coalition, then writes a private letter Lieberman never receives because no such letter exists. Shapiro records the absence with feeling. The absence is the point.
The driving teshuvah works as a parallel coalition document. Gordis sees this clearly. Changing the law to fit Sabbath violators amounts to amending the Constitution to fit anarchists. The majority of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards approves the responsum anyway, because the alternative requires telling congregants who already drive that they sin. The reasoning reads as reverse-engineered. Combustion is only rabbinic. The car’s heat is pesik reisha de-lo niha leh. Burning for power was not on the talmudic list. Synagogue attendance overrides rabbinic prohibition. The conclusion comes first. The argument arrives to dress it.
Shapiro asks the right question and stops short of the answer. Why not ignore driving rather than permit it? The Orthodox synagogues with parking lots did exactly that, and many of those drivers’ children became fully observant. The Conservative movement could not afford to look the other way because it competed with Reform for the same suburban families. Telling congregants their drive constituted sin invited them to the Reform temple where no one judged them. Permitting the drive while gesturing at sanctity gave congregants a story they could tell themselves. The story did not last a generation. Schorsch concedes the mistake in 2003. By then the movement has lost its halakhic claim and most of its members.
Lieberman saw all of this and stayed. The Hebrew word rabbiyim he reserves for RIETS musmakhim and Conservative rabbis carries his contempt for both groups. He needed both to function. He held neither in high regard. The letter to Herzog reads as the most candid statement we have of where his loyalties sat. He calls the husbands who refuse a get unless paid off menuvalim. He calls Mordecai Kaplan an ally of the RCA against him. He offers to accept a beit din of Herzog, the Brisker Rav, and a third rabbi they agree on. The Brisker Rav has no chance of agreeing to sit. Lieberman knows this. The offer is a rhetorical move. He names judges his opponents cannot reject and accepts a verdict that will never come.
The Italian belief about girls born on Friday operates at a different scale but along the same logic. The community needs the marriage to hold. The husband’s claim of mekah taut threatens the bride and her family. The belief that Friday-born girls lack betulim arrives to absorb the threat. Lampronte, who is also a doctor, calls it sheker gamur. Tierni, who has lived all over Italy, reports that everyone records Friday births anyway and that even the non-Jews do it. The belief survives because it solves a social problem, not a medical one. R. Joseph Hayyim’s responsum on the bride who used someone else’s blood on the sheet is the candid version. The rabbi rules the marriage binding and instructs the family to keep the husband in the dark. R. Schwadron rules the same way for an orphan with a child out of wedlock. The halakha here works as social repair. Telling the truth shames the bride. Lying preserves the family. The poskim choose the family.
The throughline across the whole post is that halakhic argument tracks coalition need with high fidelity. Lieberman builds a clause that solves the agunah problem and gets crushed because his coalition signal points in the wrong direction. The Conservative rabbis approve a driving teshuvah they cannot defend because their congregants already drive. Italian rabbis carry a folk belief they cannot source because their brides need protection. Herzog signs a condemnation he privately rejects because his coalition demands it. Shapiro tells the story as a series of personal failures. The pattern reads as something more structural than that.
One small note on the riddle. Sasson’s answer about raw fish in the comments looks right and sources to Shabbat 128a directly. Worth checking Yalkut Yosef on this if you want to see how Hacham Ovadia’s circle has handled the question, since the sushi-era logic has shown up in their recent halakhic literature.
What are some Orthodox Jewish coalitional needs that look insane from the outside but work logically within the Orthodox coalition?
The metzitzah b’peh case is the cleanest one. Direct oral suction on the circumcision wound has transmitted herpes to multiple infants in New York and killed at least one. From outside, no defense exists. The practice can be performed with a sterile pipette and the religious requirement satisfied. Inside the Haredi coalition, the pipette concession would set the precedent that secular medical authority can override rabbinic continuity. The cost of that precedent exceeds the cost of dead infants to the leadership, since the dead infants are individual and the precedent threatens institutional authority across a much larger field. Modern Orthodox rabbis adopted the pipette years ago because their coalition does not stake itself on rabbinic supremacy over medicine. The Haredi coalition does, so the suction stays.
The agunah system is the example Shapiro’s piece pointed at. The structural arrangement, where a husband can hold his wife hostage for life by withholding a get, fails any ordinary moral test. Lieberman tried to fix it without altering the text of the get. The American Orthodox rabbinate crushed his proposal, not because the halakha forbade his clause, but because accepting a fix from a Conservative scholar would have conceded that contemporary moral intuition can drive halakhic change. The coalition needs to hold that halakha drives morality and not the reverse. Women trapped in dead marriages are the cost of holding the line. The leadership making the calculation is not made up of trapped women.
Daas Torah is the analytically richest case. The doctrine claims that gedolim have prophetic-grade insight on political and practical questions. The doctrine has been falsified many times. R. Elchanan Wasserman urged Polish Jews to stay in Europe in the late 1930s. Various gedolim issued contradictory rulings on the same political questions. The doctrine survives anyway because Daas Torah does not exist to track reality. It exists to solve the authority problem. Once secular expertise reaches parity with rabbinic authority on practical questions, the Haredi coalition has no way to distinguish itself or claim leadership over the broader Jewish world. So the doctrine has to hold even when predictions fail. Failures get reframed, attributed to the wrong gadol having been consulted, or quietly dropped from communal memory. Outsiders see willful blindness. Insiders see the coalition glue holding.
The Slifkin ban followed the same logic. Slifkin’s books defended Torah by accepting that Chazal sometimes erred on scientific questions, a position Maimonides held in his own form. From outside, this is a natural Orthodox stance and the books were obvious assets against atheist arguments. Inside the contemporary Haredi coalition, the position threatens the seamless authority of the Sages on all questions, and that seamless authority is what gives the kollel system its prestige and the gedolim their standing. Conceding error in Chazal lowers the floor under the whole apparatus. The leadership had to ban books that defended Orthodoxy against atheists because the books undermined the structure that supports the leadership.
The chumra ratchet on glatt kosher and chalav yisrael shows the same logic on the consumer end. R. Moshe Feinstein ruled chalav stam permissible. His ruling sits unchallenged on the merits decades later. The market still moves toward chalav yisrael because no kashrut authority can afford to be the lenient one. Each new chumra becomes the floor for the next round. From outside, the ratchet has no stopping point and the standards approach the impossible. Inside, each authority’s position depends on holding ground at least as strict as the next authority. Stringency signals seriousness, and seriousness translates to communal standing. Cost falls on the consumer, who pays double for the same product. The structure persists because no one in the system has an incentive to break it.
Mesirah, the prohibition against reporting fellow Jews to secular authorities, has covered for sexual abusers in Haredi communities for generations. From outside, the rule looks indefensible. Inside, the rule is the price of maintaining beit din authority over community members. If the secular state can hear cases that the beit din has not approved, the beit din loses standing as the community’s effective court. The cost of children abused gets internalized by individual families. The cost of losing beit din authority would land on the leadership. The leadership made the calculation that produced the rule. Recent shifts on the question track changes in the leadership’s risk calculation as civil suits and prosecutions made the cost of inaction land closer to home, not improvements in moral reasoning.
The Haredi IDF exemption is the existential version. From outside, the exemption is straightforward free-riding on Israeli national defense. Inside the Haredi coalition, conscription would put young men into army units where they would meet women, learn contemporary Hebrew slang, build loyalties with comrades outside the community, and discover that secular Israelis do not match the descriptions in their education. Two years of this destroys the community at population scale. The leadership has correctly identified conscription as an extinction-level event for Haredi life as currently constituted. The Torah-protects-the-nation argument that runs in public addresses external audiences. The internal calculation is demographic survival.
The shidduch crisis “explanations” run on the same logic. Demographers have shown the crisis is structural. Yeshiva boys learn longer before marrying and marry younger women, so each year the cohort of marriageable women exceeds the cohort of marriageable men. The math is not subtle. The community refuses to acknowledge the structural cause because the cause is the age-gap norm, and the age-gap norm is what allows older yeshiva men to marry into wealthier families and what underwrites the kollel economy. So the crisis gets blamed on women not being thin enough or men not being learned enough. From outside, the deflection looks willful. Inside, naming the structural cause requires admitting that the kollel system imposes a marriage cost on women, and the leadership cannot afford that admission because the kollel system is the coalition’s central institution.
The eruv question is smaller but illustrates the principle in clean form. Competent Orthodox rabbis build an eruv. Other competent Orthodox rabbis refuse to use it. Lieberman did not accept the Manhattan eruv. The same poles, the same string, the same Shabbat. The technical halakhic question is not what determines acceptance. Acceptance signals which coalition’s rabbinic authority you trust. Eruv controversies are coalition-affiliation tests conducted in halakhic vocabulary.
The pattern across these cases is the same. Each position looks like an epistemic failure or a moral failure from outside. Each position runs on a coalition logic that the leadership has correctly assessed. The leadership is not stupid or cruel in the personal sense. They have identified what holds their coalition together and they protect it at the cost of the people who pay for the protection. The cost is real and it falls on the abused child, the trapped wife, the woman who cannot find a husband, the family who buries an infant. The coalition functions because the people who decide are not the people who pay.
