Hillel Halkin writes in the New York Sun:
Judaism is a religion with a universalist and a particularist side that do not harmonize easily with one another, and it is alone among the world’s great monotheistic religions in having such a conflict. Neither in Christianity nor in Islam does one encounter the belief that God is more interested in one small family of the human race than in all the others combined and that his laws are not meant equally for all.
…If you don’t believe that the creator of the universe would choose to base his entire game plan for humanity on one little branch of it, you are wasting your time by being an Orthodox Jew. And if you do believe it, your time would be better spent in working out and cogently articulating your basis for such a belief than in complaining about Mr. Feldman’s silliness. His article will be forgotten in a month. The fact of Jewish particularity will remain and will need to be addressed anew in every generation by Orthodox Jewish thinkers.
Shlomo Greenwald blogs for The Jewish Press:
First, let’s stop pretending that what Noah Feldman wanted to accomplish was to have a dialogue with the Modern Orthodox community. The entire Orthodox community constitutes what percentage of the 1.6 million households that receive The New York Times Magazine? 5% is probably generous. Obviously, had he really wanted that, he’d have much better options available.
No. Noah Feldman wanted to preach, to rant, and yes to get back at the Orthodox community and his high school that snubbed him. I can’t know this for sure, obviously. But between the two possibilities I just mentioned, the latter is far more likely.
Second, while there are a good number of positive memories and reflections about Orthodoxy, and in particular the Modox striving for balance, the essay is also filled with awful descriptions of Orthodox Jews and our practices–we engage in "quirky," "outré" and "cinched cilice-like" practices and he wonders how “visitors from the real world” must view us.
…So far the best responses written about the affair have been those by Ralph Lieberman in The Jewish Press, Rabbi Norman Lamm in the Forward, and Paul Shaviv on looked, the Jewish education forum.
And of course, Rabbi Gil Student over at hirhurim has been keeping a reliable watchful eye on the whole business.
