In his second lecture on R. Joseph Mesas for Torah in Motion, professor Marc B. Shapiro says: “If R. Joseph Mesas made his rulings in America, we’d think he was a Conservative rabbi.”
“In Algeria in the 1920s, 1930s, the average Jew was carrying on Shabbos. It wasn’t any different from what was going on in the United States.
“The eruv (so that a Jew can carry within its domain) was established in the United States in St. Louis in the 19th Century. Then at the turn of the century, there was an eruv established on the lower East Side [of New York]. Until the 1970s, I don’t believe there was another eruv in the United States. I remember when the eruv went up in my home town of West Orange, New Jersey.”
“There was no pressure for an eruv in the 1950s, 1960s in the United States…”
“So-called Orthodox Jews were not very observant, not very educated.”
“It was only in my generation [born in the 1960s], those of us who went to day school and learned the laws of Shabbos, that people started insisting that we needed an eruv because people were taking Shabbos more seriously.”
“The Toronto eruv was the third eruv established in North America.”
“R. Mesas argued that in today’s day and age, there was no need for an eruv to carry on Shabbos.”
Orthodox Jews like to claim that they adhere to an unchanging tradition of laws and beliefs. Based on this understanding, it becomes possible to decide who “is in” and who “is out;” that is, who is part of the Orthodox camp and who must be placed in a different denomination. The term “Orthodox” itself, which is not part of traditional Jewish vocabulary but actually comes from the Christian lexicon, was adopted in order to distinguish different types of Jews. Yet what exactly defines so-called Orthodoxy is not so easy to pin down.
To illustrate the problem, let me give a few examples. When I was younger everyone knew that according to Orthodoxy, Jews were not permitted to ascend the Temple mount. Yet today many Orthodox Jews do precisely that, encouraged by great rabbis. A generation ago, the notion that women could read the Torah or get aliyot in an Orthodox synagogue would have been laughed at. In fact, it was precisely because of this that some women came up with the idea of a women’s prayer group, at which women would be permitted to read the Torah. Yet today we have Orthodox minyanim in which women are, in fact, called to the Torah. When I was younger it was axiomatic that Orthodoxy could not accept women rabbis. Every Orthodox Jew knew that this was an impossibility. Seeing all the changes that have occurred in my lifetime, I don’t think that I am going out on too much of a limb to predict that it will not be long before we have Orthodox women rabbis.
The reality is that Orthodoxy is not so much a concept as a social construct. With this understanding, it should not be surprising that what the Torah-true population regard as unacceptable in one era, could very well be regarded differently among at least some of this population at another time. It is vital to bear this in mind when considering the works of R. Joseph Messas (1892-1974). Messas served as a rabbi in Tlemcen, Algeria and Meknes, Morocco, and at the end of his life as Sephardic chief rabbi of Haifa.
