‘Dual Loyalty to Halakha and the State: Rabbi Goren’s Ruling as a Test Case’ (2015)

Aviad Hollander’s essay about halakhic decision-making in the Religious Zionist world is also an inquiry into the constitutional and theological crises generated by modern Jewish sovereignty: can Halakha function as the governing moral and legal language of a modern democratic state without either losing its internal integrity or rendering itself socially unworkable? Hollander approaches this problem through the jurisprudence and public career of Rabbi Shlomo Goren, especially through the explosive “brother-and-sister” Langer mamzerut affair of 1972, yet the implications of his analysis extend far beyond any single ruling. What emerges is not merely the portrait of a controversial rabbi, but the anatomy of a broader struggle over sovereignty, legitimacy, and the transformation of rabbinic authority under conditions of Jewish statehood.
The central achievement of Hollander’s essay lies in his refusal to reduce Goren either to heroic visionary or reckless ideologue. Instead, he reconstructs the internal logic of Goren’s worldview while also exposing its institutional dangers and jurisprudential tensions. Hollander’s key insight is that Goren did not experience loyalty to Halakha and loyalty to the State of Israel as competing allegiances requiring compromise between sacred law and secular necessity. Under the influence of Religious Zionist theology, especially the legacy of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Goren understood the Jewish state itself as part of the redemptive unfolding of Jewish history. The state was not external to sacred history. It was one of its instruments. Once this premise is accepted, rulings that appear to critics as “politicized” or “state-serving” become, from within Goren’s framework, entirely authentic expressions of Halakha operating under transformed historical conditions.
This point is decisive because it distinguishes Goren from both conventional pragmatists and secular nationalists. He believed sovereignty altered the conditions under which Torah must be interpreted. In exile, Halakha had functioned primarily as the legal and ethical system of dispersed minority communities living under foreign rule. Its institutional orientation was communal continuity, ritual discipline, and boundary preservation under conditions of political weakness. Goren believed the restoration of Jewish sovereignty fundamentally changed the historical situation. A sovereign Jewish state required Halakha to govern not merely ritual life, but armies, borders, warfare, citizenship, public legitimacy, and collective destiny. The old diasporic posture of juridical caution and communal defensiveness could no longer suffice.
Hollander’s biographical material therefore carries enormous interpretive importance. Goren was not simply a yeshiva scholar commenting on sovereignty from afar. He was formed by the state physically and emotionally. Hollander traces his journey from Poland and Jerusalem through elite yeshivot, military service, and eventually the highest religious institutions of the Israeli state. Unlike many Haredi rabbinic authorities, Goren inhabited sovereignty existentially. He served alongside combat forces, participated in Israel’s wars, entered the Old City in 1967 carrying a Torah scroll and shofar, and interpreted military victory through openly messianic language. The state, for Goren, was not merely an administrative framework for Jewish survival. It was a sacred national project through which Jewish history itself was reawakening.
Hollander cites Goren’s repeated insistence that the defining challenge facing modern rabbinic authorities was proving the compatibility of Halakha with democratic Jewish sovereignty. Here Goren articulated one of the central assumptions of Religious Zionism: Torah must demonstrate that it can govern actual Jewish collective life under conditions of power. A Halakha incapable of sustaining sovereign national existence would become historically marginal and spiritually alienating.
For this reason, Hollander’s discussion of Goren’s concept of “the eternity of Halakha” becomes foundational to understanding his method. Goren argued that the permanence of Torah lies in its interpretive elasticity. He invoked the rabbinic tradition that Torah was intentionally not given “cut and dried,” but with multiple interpretive pathways because rigid legal immobility would render Jewish life impossible across changing historical conditions. The task of the posek was therefore not mechanical obedience to precedent, but discerning which possibilities latent within Torah corresponded to the needs of the historical moment.
Hollander provides a taxonomy of Goren’s jurisprudential method.
The first mechanism was expansion of source range. Goren did not openly reject the authority of the Babylonian Talmud or classical halakhic precedent. Instead, he widened the operative canon by incorporating sources often treated as secondary in mainstream decisional culture: the Jerusalem Talmud, aggadic literature, Tosefta, Geonic writings, and minority precedents. The significance of this move was subtle but profound. Goren would rarely rule directly against dominant precedent. Rather, he surrounded dominant precedent with a dense field of alternative ancient voices until a different pathway became visible within the tradition itself. In effect, he redistributed interpretive authority within the canon. The result was not abolition of precedent but pluralization of precedent.
The second mechanism was purposive interpretation. Goren repeatedly sought to uncover the underlying aims or moral telos of halakhic institutions and then interpreted sources in light of those larger purposes. This allowed him to argue that rulings which appeared formally innovative were in fact preserving the deeper objectives of Torah under transformed social conditions.
The third mechanism was selective decision-making. Hollander’s analysis here is particularly important because it moves beyond accusations of arbitrary leniency. Goren often faced situations in which multiple legitimate halakhic pathways existed simultaneously. The controversy was therefore not usually over whether a lenient opinion existed somewhere within the literature. The controversy was over which opinions deserved elevation to governing norm. Hollander emphasizes that when confronted with competing principles such as “the lenient has someone to rely upon” versus “the stringent shall be blessed,” Goren consistently selected the path most compatible with the needs of sovereign Jewish life. These were not accidental choices. They reflected a conscious jurisprudential orientation.
Yet Hollander also introduces a critical corrective often missed by admirers and critics alike. Goren’s creativity operated within invisible traditionalist restraints. Hollander notes the internal brake captured in the phrase “me-heyot tov al tehi ra,” roughly “better to be good than bad.” Goren did not believe he was revising Torah in response to modernity. He believed he was uncovering dormant capacities already embedded within Torah itself. This distinction matters enormously. Goren was not a proto-Reform rabbi or liberal religious modernizer disguising innovation as continuity. His self-understanding was restorative rather than revisionist. He believed diasporic conditions had artificially narrowed the operational range of Halakha, and that sovereignty permitted suppressed dimensions of the tradition to reemerge.
Goren’s solution to dual loyalty was not compromise between state and Halakha. It was denial that authentic contradiction truly existed. If Torah appeared incompatible with the needs of Jewish sovereignty, then the interpreter had failed to excavate Torah deeply enough. The problem lay not in Halakha but in excessively frozen interpretive habits. The “forty-nine faces” of Torah meant that the tradition already contained the resources necessary for sovereign national life.
The Langer affair became the great public test case for this worldview. Hollander reconstructs the episode in considerable detail. Brother and sister Hanoch and Miriam Langer had been declared mamzerim by rabbinic courts because their mother had allegedly remarried without receiving a valid divorce from her first husband. As mamzerim, they would be permanently barred from marrying most Jews under halakhic law. The case became a national scandal because the siblings were ordinary patriotic Israelis, including military personnel, whose exclusion appeared morally intolerable to much of the Israeli public.
For Goren, the issue was not merely compassion for two individuals. The deeper issue was whether Halakha could absorb the pressures generated by sovereignty without fracturing. A democratic nation-state cannot easily sustain hereditary categories of permanently excluded citizens who participate fully in national life yet remain barred from the communal marriage structure. Goren understood instinctively that unresolved cases like the Langers threatened the legitimacy of religious marriage law itself.
This explains why Goren repeatedly linked the case to the danger of civil marriage legislation and fragmentation of Jewish identity. Hollander quotes Goren’s explicit concern that rigid handling of such crises would strengthen anti-religious movements and create competing systems of marriage and Jewish status. In his mind, the stakes were civilizational. Excessive rigidity risked severing masses of Israeli Jews from Torah altogether.
Haredi leaders did not merely criticize Goren’s legal conclusions. They described his actions as “burning the Torah,” staged symbolic mourning ceremonies, and declared his rulings void. Such rhetoric reflected an awareness that something larger than mamzerut doctrine was at stake. The real issue was the nature of rabbinic authority under sovereignty.
Stephen Turner’s work on tacit knowledge and institutional legitimacy helps illuminate this dimension of the controversy. Much of the outrage surrounding the Langer ruling stemmed not only from substantive disagreement but from procedural and cultural norm violations. Goren bypassed ordinary institutional pathways by assembling a special court whose composition initially remained undisclosed. To critics, this resembled an executive intervention or “commando raid” into the rabbinic legal system rather than the slow consensual process characteristic of diasporic rabbinic culture. Uri Avnery’s mocking description of the ruling as resembling an elite military operation unintentionally captured something real about Goren’s style. He approached jurisprudence with the decisiveness, urgency, and state-centered mentality of a sovereign actor rather than the incrementalism of traditional rabbinic procedure.
This procedural style reflected a deeper transformation in authority structures. Diasporic rabbinic legitimacy evolved under conditions of fragmentation and political weakness. It depended heavily on tacit norms of deference, gradual consensus formation, and decentralized scholarly authority. Goren implicitly advanced a different model: a sovereign Jewish polity requiring decisive national religious leadership capable of responding to political emergencies and collective needs. The Haredi world experienced this not merely as a bad ruling but as an alien model of authority invading the rabbinic sphere itself.
Hollander’s discussion of the Temple Mount reveals Goren operating with an implicit theory of emergency sovereignty. Goren’s positions regarding Jewish ascent to the Temple Mount shifted depending on historical conditions and perceived threats to sovereignty. During moments of existential conflict or territorial uncertainty, he emphasized the overriding importance of conquest, possession, and national control, even at the cost of relaxing traditional restrictions. In more stable periods, however, he adopted more cautious positions emphasizing ritual boundaries, precise measurements, and purity concerns.
This distinction reveals a remarkably sophisticated jurisprudential instinct. Goren treated sovereignty as activating different halakhic priorities under different historical conditions. Emergency circumstances expanded the legitimacy of assertive national action. Routine conditions restored stronger restraints. In this respect, his thought resembles broader traditions of constitutional emergency theory in which exceptional historical moments temporarily reorder legal priorities.
Goren’s later Temple Mount writings functioned as a restraining mechanism against messianic extremism. By publishing a limited, scholarly treatment of the Mount in the early 1990s, Goren appears to have sought to provide a moderate halakhic framework capable of channeling nationalist-religious energies away from violent radicalism and underground activism. This complicates simplistic portrayals of him as merely a maximalist ideologue. Goren understood that uncontrolled messianic activism could alienate the broader Israeli public and delegitimize Religious Zionism itself.
The tragedy of Goren’s career is therefore inseparable from its ambition. He sought to prove that Halakha could sustain sovereign Jewish modernity without surrendering its integrity. Yet the very boldness required for that project destabilized inherited structures of rabbinic legitimacy. The Langer ruling solved the immediate political and human crisis, but at immense institutional cost. Trust between major sectors of Orthodoxy and the Chief Rabbinate deteriorated sharply. The institution Goren hoped to strengthen emerged weakened and contested.
Many of the dilemmas Goren identified remain unresolved precisely because his opponents never produced a compelling alternative capable of reconciling traditional Halakha with democratic sovereignty. Questions surrounding conversion, military service, marriage law, judicial authority, and the role of religion in Israeli public life continue to revolve around the same underlying issue: can Halakha govern a sovereign Jewish state without either becoming rigidly sectarian or dissolving into nationalism and political expediency?
Hollander’s essay demonstrates that Rabbi Shlomo Goren was not merely a controversial rabbi but one of the first major constitutional thinkers of Jewish sovereignty. His jurisprudence represented an attempt to answer a question scarcely confronted for nearly two thousand years: what becomes of Halakha when Jews cease being merely a dispersed religious community and once again become a nation exercising political power over territory, law, military force, and collective destiny?
Goren answered that sovereignty did not diminish Torah but demanded its fuller activation. His critics feared that this activation would transform sacred law into an instrument of political ideology. The enduring significance of Hollander’s essay lies in showing that both sides recognized real dangers and that the conflict between them was not merely political or legal, but civilizational. At stake was whether Judaism could survive sovereignty.