Do you accept historicism (that everything is a product of a time and place)? If not, on what grounds? The question is simple to state. It is difficult to answer. It is the question Modern Orthodox scholarship will not ask, and the refusal to ask it is the central fact about contemporary MO intellectual life.
Modern Orthodoxy uses academic-philological methods to study parts of its own tradition. The methods detect editorial layers. They detect changes in halakhic categories across centuries. They detect rabbinic falsifications. They show the Talmud developing rather than arriving fixed. They show the chain of mesorah as a sequence of contested negotiations whose participants believed they were transmitting what they were partially constructing. The methods work. The findings stand. The MO scholar accepts them.
The methods do not stop at the edge of comfort. If they are valid against the editorial work of seventeenth-century printers, they are valid against the editorial work of redactors of the Mishnah. If they apply to Tosafot, they apply to the Mekhilta. If they apply to the Mekhilta, they apply to the Bible. If they apply to the Bible, they apply to Sinai. The chain has no natural stopping point. The MO scholar stops anyway. He stops at the place where stopping protects what he wants to protect. The stopping is not principled. It is institutional. He uses the methods up to the line that institutional life can absorb. He refuses the methods past that line. He calls the refusal balance, integration, faithfulness.
The question is whether the refusal can be defended. The deeper question is what historicism does to MO’s foundational claims. MO claims revelation at Sinai, divine authorship of the Torah, divine command as the ground of halakha, divine continuity in the chain of mesorah. The consensus of academic scholarship is that there was no miraculous Exodus, that Torah is a composite document edited together by post-exilic redactors from earlier sources, that Sinai as the text describes it did not happen, that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, that the mesorah is a sequence of contested negotiations rather than a continuous transmission of divine teaching. These claims are not fringe. They are the working assumptions of the discipline whose methods MO scholars use on selected materials. The MO scholar reads the discipline. He uses its methods. He does not affirm its findings about the foundational texts. The non-affirmation is the question. If he accepts the methods, on what grounds does he reject the findings? If he accepts the findings, what becomes of divine command, divine authorship, divine revelation, divine continuity?
R. Aviad Hollander does not ask this. He frames the Sperber controversy in academic-sociological terms. He talks about structural tensions, charismatic authority within a traditional system, modern religious life. He does not address what historicism does to the foundational claims his MO readers live by. The methods he deploys on rabbinic-period materials are continuous with the methods that produced the documentary hypothesis. He does not extend the application. He does not write that the Torah is a composite document. He does not write that Sinai did not happen. He does not write that halakha rests on textual layers redacted in the Persian period rather than on commands given at Sinai. He does not say these things and he does not say their opposites. He performs neither affirmation. He keeps the foundational question outside his prose. The keeping-outside is institutional. Bar-Ilan operates as an Orthodox university. Its scholars use academic methods up to the line that institutional Orthodoxy can absorb. They do not extend the methods past the line. Hollander’s career depends on not pressing the question. He does not press it. He writes about Sperber as a sociological development. He does not write about what Sperber’s halakhic confidence rests on, given what biblical scholarship has done to the texts that supposedly ground halakha. The unwritten thing is the question. The writing about other things is the avoidance.
The question, in another form: are your commitments held because they are true, or because your institutions reward them?
R. Daniel Sperber does not ask this. He has built a career as the public intellectual posek of liberal Modern Orthodoxy. He has issued rulings. He has signed legitimating responsa. He has taught generations of students that humane halakha is what halakha is. If he concluded that his framework was a coalition power move executed by educated MO elites against haredi authority, that humane principles tracked the secular intuitions of the universities his readers attend rather than the inner logic of Torah, that his communal-spirit detection method amounted to consultation with his own coalition, the rulings would have to be retracted. The students would feel betrayed. The friendships would shift. The invitations would dry up. The legacy would be reframed from the recovery of authentic Torah to the importation of contemporary moral fashion under cover of philological scholarship. Sperber would have to spend his last years repudiating his life’s work. He will not do this. No one would.
The question, asked of the dead: what would R. Shlomo Goren have said if he had asked it?
Goren is the absent figure in the set. The cost he avoided by not asking is now hypothetical, but it should be named. If Goren in 1980 had concluded that his redemptive reading of 1948 and 1967 was naive historicism, that Strauss was right, that Freyer’s deradicalization was a warning, that the structure of his theology of history was identical to the structure of secular philosophies of history that had failed, he would have had to renarrate his life. The wars he served in. The rabbinic career he built. The religious-Zionist movement he helped lead. The Chief Rabbinate. All of it would have been recategorized. He would have remained a religious Jew. He would have remained a halakhic decisor. He would have been a different figure: a Leibowitz, perhaps. A respected critic rather than a beloved guide. He chose otherwise. The choice was rational given the costs.
The question turned on the method itself: are the academic tools that detect Orthodox falsification grounded, or are they the same normative commitment in academic disguise?
Marc B. Shapiro documented Orthodox publishers altering earlier texts to fit later sensibilities. He has shown rabbis revising their predecessors. He has written on the limits of Orthodox theology, on the variety of medieval positions later Orthodoxy concealed, on the changes in halakhic practice across centuries. The work is meticulous. The work is honest. The work is courageous. The line is the line where the methods stop. Shapiro applies philological-historical methods to seventeenth-century printers, nineteenth-century editors, twentieth-century rabbinic biographers. He does not apply them, in writing, to the redactors of the Pentateuch. He does not affirm in print that the documentary hypothesis is correct, that Sinai did not happen as described, that the Torah is a composite document, that the mesorah is a sequence of contested negotiations rather than a continuous transmission of divine teaching. These claims, on the consensus of scholarship, are correct. The methods that produced the consensus are the methods Shapiro uses on later materials. The non-extension is the issue. Why does the philological method that detects Orthodox falsification stop at the door of the Pentateuch? On what grounds does Shapiro affirm critical scholarship of the rabbinic period while declining to engage critical scholarship of the biblical period in his own writing? The answer is not philosophical. It is institutional. Shapiro’s audience is Orthodox. His career depends on staying within the boundary that lets him be read as the licensed dissident rather than the heretic. Maimonides counted divine authorship of the Torah as the Eighth of his Thirteen Principles. Stepping past the boundary would put Shapiro in conflict with that principle in the most direct way. He stops short of the conflict. The stopping is what defines his licensed-dissident position. He performs courage on the rabbinic-period questions whose answers MO can absorb. He declines the biblical-period questions whose answers would dissolve the framework. The pattern is the same as Hollander’s, only more visible because Shapiro has built his reputation on near-the-line work. The further line is right there. He stops short of it. The stopping is what makes him publishable in MO venues.
I wrote May 1, 2026:
Historian Marc B. Shapiro keeps finding things strange. A photograph of the Chazon Ish wearing a tie. A passage from Rabbi Kook removed in a later edition. A biography of a haredi gadol that omits his secular education. A halakhic position the current consensus has reversed without acknowledgment. Shapiro documents these cases with care. He calls them remarkable. He pauses on them. He flags them for readers as worth attention.
…Shapiro’s Changing the Immutable (2015) runs three hundred pages of documentation of Orthodoxy’s editing operation. Photographs altered. Books reissued with passages removed. Biographies sanitized. Halakhic rulings retrojected. The pattern stays consistent across decades and across communities. Shapiro traces it. He gives names, dates, editions, comparisons of original and revised texts.
The structural account never appears in his work.
The pattern stays consistent because the coalition needs it to stay consistent. Haredi authority rests on a claim that the gedolim transmit unchanging Torah. The historical record shows the gedolim as embedded men responding to modernizing contexts, often with secular educations, with relatives outside the community, with views the current consensus has discarded. The record threatens the legitimating story. The coalition edits the record. The edits are not a defect of the operation. The edits are the operation.
Shapiro’s framing keeps the edits separate from the legitimating story. He treats the censorship as a problem the coalition has rather than as a function the coalition performs. The framing lets him document everything while challenging nothing structural.
He has explained the framing himself. He says he cannot challenge the gedolim on lomdus. He can challenge them on history. The distinction lets him stay inside Orthodoxy while doing work that, under coalition analysis, dissolves the inside.
The distinction does not hold.
Lomdus produces the halakhic conclusions the coalition needs. The historical sanitization presents those conclusions as eternal. They are one operation working in two registers. The lomdus generates the answer the coalition requires. The history erases the contingency of the answer. Together they produce the appearance of unbroken transmission. Pull on either thread and the package unravels.
Shapiro pulls on the historical thread. He pulls gently. He shows that a particular photograph was edited. He stops before saying the editing serves a structural function in the coalition’s claim to authority. He shows that a particular halakhic position was revised. He treats the revision as a curiosity rather than as a coalition requirement. He treats each case as an interesting historical fact rather than as evidence of a coordinated legitimation operation.
…Turner’s convenient beliefs framework applies. The coalition needs the gedolim to be timeless. The historical record contradicts the need. The coalition edits the record. The edited record becomes the convenient belief. Members experience the edited record as the true record. Shapiro documents the editing without naming the convenience. The naming would expose his own position as a coalition position rather than as a neutral historian’s standpoint.
Pinsof’s Alliance Theory explains the haredi belief package. Why does opposition to women’s Torah education cluster with opposition to secular study and with rejection of Zionism and with hostility to Hassidic rivals and with characteristic positions on gentile relations? The package does not follow from a single principle. The package marks coalition membership. The gedolim get presented as having held the package. The historical record shows them holding pieces of it, holding modified versions, holding views the current package excludes. The editing closes the gap.
Shapiro flags the gaps case by case. The reader sees the gaps accumulating. The structural argument stays unmade because Shapiro will not make it. The argument sits in the data, waiting.
The lecture series proceeds the same way. Each week Shapiro pauses on something strange. A passage edited. A photo altered. A position revised. The pause is the coalition tell. He has trained his attention to notice the spots where the legitimating story rubs against the historical record. He stops short of generalizing from the spots to the operation. The generalization would name what cannot be named from his position.
Shapiro’s careful tone has a coalition reason. The tone marks him as a member who has discovered something rather than as a critic exposing something. The discovery framing keeps him inside. The exposure framing would push him out. He has chosen the discovery framing across decades of work.
MO sells itself as the path of integration. Religious commitment plus secular learning. Tradition plus modernity. Halakhic life plus university degree. The self-presentation includes the claim that MO has earned this integration through honest engagement, that its scholars are willing to ask hard questions, that its rabbis can absorb critical scholarship without losing faith. The selling point is that you do not have to choose. You can have everything.
The price of having everything is not asking the question that would force a choice.
MO sells itself as the path of integration. Religious commitment plus secular learning. Tradition plus modernity. Halakhic life plus university degree. The self-presentation includes the claim that MO has earned this integration through honest engagement, that its scholars are willing to ask hard questions, that its rabbis can absorb critical scholarship without losing faith. The selling point is that you do not have to choose. You can have everything.
The price of having everything is not asking the question that would force a choice. The choice is between accepting what biblical scholarship has established about the Torah and continuing to operate under MO’s institutional claims about divine command, divine authorship, and divine continuity. At first glance, the two are not compatible. The MO scholar manages the incompatibility by silence. He does not affirm the scholarly consensus in his Orthodox capacity. He does not deny it in his academic capacity. He keeps the two capacities separate. The separation is the avoidance. The avoidance is the unasked question.
The question, restated for the marriage table: does our life rest on something we can defend, or only on something we agreed not to interrogate?
Begin with the material costs of asking. The career goes. Academic positions in Jewish studies, where MO scholars have made their professional homes, depend on a certain ambiguity. The scholar can use academic methods. The scholar can also be a religious Jew. The combination is functional as long as the methods do not turn on the religious commitments. The moment they do, the position becomes untenable. Either you are a religious Jew teaching academic methods, or you are an academic teaching about Judaism. The both-and breaks down. Most MO scholars cannot afford the breakdown. They have mortgages. They have children. They have professional identities that took decades to build. They will not blow up the position in late career.
The community goes. Modern Orthodox social life is dense and tight. Shabbat invitations, school carpools, marriages of children, summer camps, youth movements, davening minyanim. The infrastructure runs on shared commitment. The Jew who decides he can no longer affirm the foundational claims becomes an awkward presence at the table. He may still be welcome, but he is welcome differently. His children’s dating prospects shrink because the families they would marry into are uncomfortable with the patriarch who undermines the framework everyone else lives by. His name acquires a slight edge of caution when it comes up. He has not been excommunicated. He has been quietly relocated from the center of the network to the periphery.
The schools go, in a different sense. MO day school costs $30,000 to $50,000 a year per child. The expense is justified by treating MO as a coherent religious-intellectual project worth funding at that level. If a parent comes to believe the project is incoherent, the cost becomes punitive. He pays the same money for an education he no longer believes is what it claims to be. He cannot easily put the children in public school because the social network punishes that move. He cannot send them to haredi school because the worldview is too foreign. He stays. He pays. He resents.
The marriage strains. Many MO marriages are built on shared institutional commitment as much as on personal compatibility. The husband who loses confidence in the framework finds his wife wondering whether the life they built rests on something he now describes as fictive. The wife who loses confidence finds her husband afraid that the children are at risk. The conversations get hard. The marriage absorbs the strain or it does not.
The identity goes. The MO Jew defines himself as someone who has the religious commitment and the modern engagement, who has thought about it, who has integrated. The identity rests on the integration holding up. Once it stops holding up, the identity has to be rebuilt around something else. Many people cannot rebuild it. They live with the cognitive dissonance. They go through the motions. Shabbat comes. They do shabbat. They do not interrogate. They are not happy. They are functional.
The replacement problem is the deepest material cost. If you conclude that MO is intellectually unstable, where do you go? Haredi requires a wholesale change of life few MO Jews can stomach. Conservative is widely perceived as a failed institutional project that has lost its base. Reform is too far for those raised Orthodox. Secular humanism leaves the meaning structure empty. So you are stuck. You have delegitimated the framework you live in and there is no framework to move to. This is psychologically unbearable. Most people will not even start down the road of asking the question because they sense the dead end at the bottom of it.
The question as Yeshayahu Leibowitz put it: have you chosen revelation, or have you chosen the appearance of having chosen it?
Leibowitz paid the cost of the question. He asked something close to the deepest version and reached an honest answer. Revelation is what the religious Jew commits to. History has no theological significance. The integration MO promises is not philosophically real. You must choose what you commit to and not pretend the choice has been finessed. He paid the social price. He was a respected critic. He was not a beloved community figure. He was admired and avoided. He had standing because his Jewish commitment was unimpeachable and his philosophical seriousness was undeniable, but he was not the rabbi people wanted at their table. He was the conscience people pointed to from a distance. He was tolerated because tolerating him was easier than answering him. He was not influential in the way Sperber is influential. The tradeoff was the cost of his honesty.
This is the cost MO scholars look at and decline. They prefer the warm community to the cold honesty. The preference is rational. The dishonesty enters when they pretend they have not made the trade. They tell themselves they have integrated tradition and modernity. They have not. They have selected a comfortable middle that requires not asking the question that would test the integration. They have built careers on asking lower-order questions whose answers do not threaten the structure. They have called this courage.
The question as Pascal might have put it: are you living in the framework because you have chosen it under uncertainty, or because you have refused to look at the uncertainty?
There is a defensible version of the position MO holds. One could say: the deepest questions cannot be answered by individuals or even by communities. The prudent response is to live faithfully within a framework while remaining humble about its foundations. Pascal would understand. Burke would understand. The epistemic humility is real. There is wisdom in living within a tradition rather than constantly trying to verify it from outside.
This is a respectable position. MO does not adopt it. MO does not say: we know the foundations may be unstable, we are choosing to live within them anyway because the alternative is worse, the choice is existential rather than rational. That would be honest. MO instead says: we have integrated, we have asked the hard questions, our scholars are courageous truth-seekers, our framework is intellectually respectable, you can have everything. The claim is what makes the silence on the deepest questions a form of dishonesty rather than a form of humility.
Are the reigning academic methods of reading text such as the Bible historically produced? Of course.
A historian can believe that all traditions develop historically without concluding that no enduring truths exist. A philologist can detect layers in the Pentateuch without proving that revelation is impossible. A sociologist can explain why a coalition holds a belief without disproving the belief itself.
Stephen Turner attacks reified collectivities and tacit-practice mysticism. He does not thereby prove nihilism. He destabilizes claims that social continuity can explain itself through mysterious inherited essences. But Turner’s framework also destabilizes secular moral orthodoxies. The same acid dissolves progressive inevitabilism, Enlightenment teleology, liberal procedural sanctimony, and academic moral consensus.
The reigning academic methods for reading the Bible such as the historical-critical method and its descendants—source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, emerged in specific times and places as tools shaped by Enlightenment rationalism, 17th–19th century European intellectual currents, and the institutional needs of specific coalitions. They are not timeless, neutral scalpels dropped from the sky; they carry the fingerprints of their origins.
Ernst Troeltsch (early 20th century) formalized the core principles—criticism (doubt until proven), analogy (events must resemble known experience), and correlation (events explained by natural chains of cause and effect). These explicitly bracketed supernatural claims and treated the Bible like any other ancient Near Eastern document. This was not an ontological discovery about texts; it was a methodological choice aligned with the era’s positivism and anti-dogmatic mood.
Biblical scholarship has gone through recognizable paradigm changes (pre-critical to higher criticism to literary/post-structural turns), each driven by coalition interests. What counts as “reigning” today—emphasis on composite authorship, redaction layers, ideological critique—is the product of post-Enlightenment secular interests.
Academic biblical studies operates within the secular university system, which functions as a coalition with its own status markers, boundary maintenance, and sacred values (buffered identity, rational autonomy, progress away from “pre-modern” authority, naturalistic explanations). Applying historicist tools to sacred texts signals membership in educated, cosmopolitan, liberal/progressive coalitions. It delegitimizes traditional religious claims (divine authorship, historical reliability of Sinai/Exodus as described) while leaving secular humanist commitments (human dignity, moral progress, academic freedom) unexamined.
Academic methods also track real features of the texts better than pre-modern assumptions in many cases. They are tools forged in a particular historical moment, wielded by humans in coalitions, yet capable of delivering ontological payoffs. The honest position is to use them where they work, acknowledge their contingency, and admit that no human knowledge system—academic or religious—escapes the hero-system/coalition/historicist realities. The question is not whether methods have interests; it is which interests we choose to serve.
The question as the honest scholar might put it to himself in the small hours: have I built my life on what is true, or on what was convenient?
The honest move is available. It is not taken. The reasons for not taking it are good reasons in their own terms. They are reasons of life rather than reasons of truth. Career, marriage, children, community, identity, the warm shabbat table, the friendships that have lasted decades. These are real goods. The MO scholar weighs them against the truth he would have to acknowledge if he asked the question, and chooses the goods. The choice is human. It is also the choice MO refuses to admit it has made.
Much of the appeal of MO is the quality of life and community. The question that would test the framework would damage that quality of life. So the question does not get asked. The unaskedness then gets reframed as the framework’s stability rather than as the community’s structural avoidance. Anyone who tries to ask gets characterized as a malcontent or as someone whose own life has gone wrong. The redirection protects the framework. The framework protects the quality of life. The quality of life protects the redirection. The circle is closed.
The honest writers in this terrain are the ones who have stepped outside the circle. They are usually no longer participating in the burning core of MO life when they write. They have left, or they have stayed but stopped pretending, or they were always outside. The view from outside is sometimes unflattering. The view from inside is comfortable and blinkered. People who would have to live with the unflattering view if they wrote it tend not to write it. The tendency is selection rather than choice. The community produces certain writers and not others. The writers it produces describe what the community can absorb. The writers it does not produce describe what the community cannot.
The community is good. The blindness is how the community remains good.
On the other hand, while one can practice historicism, one cannot live it.
Historicism is a method one can use on certain texts. It is not a worldview one can inhabit. No one has lived historicism. The historicist’s life refutes the historicist’s theory.
We’re wired to see eternal essences. We treat our moral judgments as binding. We love our children, defend our tribe, hate our enemies, mourn our dead, demand justice, and despise betrayal. None of this is consistent with historicism.
The secular humanist who deploys historicist methods against religious commitments exempts his own commitments to human rights, equality, dignity, progress. The asymmetry is the coalitional move. The honest position is to admit that human rights, like Torah, are commitments held under conditions of essence-perception. The wiring is the same. The selective application is the dishonesty.
The Jew who bets his life on God as the author of the Torah does what every human does — he selects an essence-perception. The only choice was which one. He chose divine Torah. He admits the choice. He commits. The commitment is not philosophically weaker than any alternative because no alternative is philosophically stronger. They are all essence-perceptions.
I accept historicism as a method to use on texts and I experience Torah as the voice of God. I live as though Torah comes from God, and I welcome truth from any source.
This is the honest answer to the historicism question.
This position has a name in the philosophical tradition. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) called it the wager. I commit to the religious life under conditions of irreducible uncertainty because the commitment is rational under those conditions even if the metaphysical claim cannot be proven. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) called it the leap. The religious life is chosen, not deduced. The choice is the existential act that makes the religious self real. The leap does not require that historicism be refuted. The leap requires that you act in spite of knowing historicism cannot be refuted.
My formulation has four parts.
“I accept historicism.” I concede that the methods reach everything, including the foundational texts. I do not claim that some halakhic firewall protects Sinai from the criticism that reaches the Talmud. I give up the institutional pretension that MO has integrated tradition and modernity through scholarship.
“I experience Torah as the voice of God.” This is a phenomenological claim, not a metaphysical one. I am not claiming I have proven that Torah is divine. I report that I encounter it that way. The encounter is real. The encounter is also historicizable, and I know this. I experience Torah this way because of my lived experience. The encounter does not lift me out of history. It is a historical phenomenon. Within history, this is the encounter I have. The phenomenology is descriptive, not justifying.
“Live as though they come from God.” This is the Pascal move and the Kierkegaard move and the Yeshayahu Leibowitz move. I commit to the form of life appropriate to the religious claim without requiring that the claim be verified. The “as though” is honest in a way that “because” is not. “Because” claims I have established the truth. “As though” admits I have chosen the form of life consistent with the truth as I experience it. The two stances look identical from outside. They differ from inside. The first is brittle because it depends on the claim holding up under criticism. The second is durable because it does not depend on the claim being verified at all.
“I welcome truth from any source.” This is the Maimonidean move from the Eight Chapters: accept the truth from whoever speaks it. The commitment to revealed Torah does not require that I wall off inquiry. The commitment is to live the religious life under uncertainty, not to defend the religious life by foreclosing inquiry. If something is true and comes from a non-Jewish source, you accept it. If something is true and comes from biblical criticism, you accept it. If something is true and comes from anthropology of religion, you accept it. The acceptance does not dissolve the commitment because the commitment is not held on the ground that nothing else is true.
Why don’t MO scholars say this?
First, saying it concedes that MO has not philosophically integrated tradition and modernity. MO sells the integration. Public adoption of the wager position would force a revision of the institutional self-presentation. The institutions would have to stop claiming integration and start claiming wager. The selling point evaporates. The selling point is what attracts the dues-paying members and the day-school families.
Second, the wager position weakens halakhic authority. The traditional posek’s authority depended on the claim that the law was God’s law, fully and without qualification. The wager-based posek interprets a tradition he commits to but does not know to be true. His pesak has the same content. The authority behind the pesak is different. He cannot say “this is what God commands” with the same confidence. He can say “this is what we who are committed to the tradition take to be required.” Many congregants will find the second formulation thin. Many poskim will not operate under it.
Third, the wager position relativizes the comparative claim. If your wager rests on your phenomenological encounter, the Christian who has the analogous encounter has an analogous wager. The Hindu who has the analogous encounter has an analogous wager. You cannot say your wager is more rational than theirs because the wagers are not held on rational grounds in the strong sense. You can say your wager is yours and theirs is theirs and that the wagers are not commensurable. Many religious Jews are committed to a stronger claim than this. They want their religion to be more true than others, not more authoritative for them. The wager position cannot deliver the stronger claim.
Fourth, the wager position requires more honesty about uncertainty than most religious leaders will model. Communities want confidence from their leaders. The leader who says “I commit under uncertainty and you should too” is not the leader most communities want. The leader who says “this is the truth and our tradition delivers it” is the leader most communities want. The wager-based leader is in Leibowitz’s position. Admired and avoided. Few will choose Leibowitz’s position when Sperber’s position is available.
Fifth, the wager position is socially solitary. It does not build the warm community in the same way that confident religious certainty builds it. The community that knows it is on the path to redemption holds together differently than the community that is wagering under conditions of uncertainty. The first community is energetic and self-reproducing. The second community is contemplative and recruits with difficulty. MO scholars who privately hold the wager position publicly perform the certainty position because the institutions they serve depend on the certainty position. The performance is not entirely cynical. The performance also serves the community’s actual functioning. The cost of dropping the performance is the loss of the community.
So my formulation is honest in a way the MO institutional formulation is not. It is also lonely in a way the MO institutional formulation is not. Most MO scholars cannot publicly hold it because they are paid to produce a different formulation. They produce the formulation. They tell themselves it is what they believe. Some of them, in the small hours, may believe what you have just said. They do not say it in writing. They do not say it from the pulpit. The space where it gets said is the private conversation among friends after the kids are in bed and the wine has loosened the institutional vocabulary. In that space some MO scholars probably say something close to your formulation. In writing, in public, in the institutional framing of MO life, the formulation does not appear.
My position is not the only honest position. Leibowitz’s position is honest in a more austere way. Leibowitz refused even the phenomenological warrant. He did not say “I experience Torah as the voice of God.” He said “I obey halakha because the religious Jew obeys halakha.” He grounded the commitment in the act of obedience without invoking religious experience because he did not trust religious experience as a source of authority.
My formulation does something the MO institutional formulation cannot do. It tells the truth about the relationship between religious commitment and religious certainty. The two are not the same. The MO institutional formulation conflates them, claiming that scholarship has produced certainty and that commitment follows from the certainty. My formulation separates them, allowing commitment to operate without certainty and allowing inquiry to operate without dissolving commitment. This is closer to how religious life is lived by serious people in any tradition. The conflation is the institutional fiction. The separation is the honest description.
The reason my formulation is rarely articulated in MO is not that it is unknown. It is that articulating it ends a particular institutional career path. The career path requires the conflation. The honest description undoes it. So the description does not get written by people who would lose their careers for writing it. It gets written by people like me who do not have those careers to lose.
Hero Systems All the Way Down: The Becker Addition to the Wager
The wager position looks vulnerable only if the secular alternatives are taken to have escaped the wager structure. They have not. Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death makes this point with as much force as anything written in the twentieth century. Humans cannot live without hero systems. The hero system grants the individual symbolic immortality by linking him to a transcendent project that outlasts his life. Every culture supplies one. Every functioning person operates inside one. The choice is not whether to have a hero system. The choice is which hero system to have, and whether to admit you have one.
Religion is the most explicit hero system. The Torah Jew commits to a transcendent project that gives his life meaning. The commitment grants him a place in the chain of mesorah that began before he was born and will continue after he dies. The shabbat table is a participation in something larger than the individual. The halakhic life is an enactment of cosmic significance. This is the hero system in plain form.
Secular alternatives are hero systems too. The scientific naturalist commits to a project of knowledge accumulation that grants him symbolic participation in a transcendent enterprise: the species’ growing understanding of the universe. He does not call it transcendent. The structure is transcendent. The progressive commits to the arc of history bending toward justice. The arc is the transcendence. The Marxist commits to the revolution that will redeem humanity. The revolution is the transcendence. The liberal humanist commits to human dignity as an unconditional value. The unconditional value is the transcendence. None of these commitments rests on philosophically secured foundations. Each is a wager. Each is held under conditions of irreducible uncertainty. Each functions as a hero system. Each grants its holder a place in something larger than the individual life.
The Strauss critique applies to all of them. The scientific naturalist’s confidence in reason is a historical product of the European Enlightenment. The progressive’s confidence in moral progress is a secularization of Christian eschatology, as Karl Löwith (1897-1973) documented. The Marxist’s revolution is Christian apocalypse with the supernatural cap removed, as Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) and others have shown. The liberal humanist’s human dignity floats free of any foundation it can defend; dignity turns out to be a placeholder for whatever the relevant educated coalition treats as morally serious. None of these positions has escaped historicism. Each pretends it has. The pretense is the form their hero system takes when challenged.
So the Orthodox Jew who states the wager position is in better standing than he is usually given credit for. He is doing what every functioning person does: committing to a hero system that grants his life meaning. He differs from his secular interlocutors in that he admits the structure of his commitment. He says: I commit to this under conditions of uncertainty. The secular interlocutor usually does not say this. He says: science is just true, progress is just real, dignity is just self-evident. The Orthodox Jew with the wager position is not below the secular interlocutor on the scale of intellectual honesty. He is above it. He has admitted what the secular interlocutor has refused to admit.
I stand on the communal experience of God. It is no less impressive a place to stand than any other place to stand. It may be more impressive because it is honest about what it is.
The atheist’s stand on reason is a stand on a communal experience: the experience of those for whom reason functions as the supreme value and who together constitute a community of commitment to it. The progressive’s stand on justice is a stand on a communal experience: the experience of those for whom moral progress is real and who together constitute a community of commitment to it. The scientist’s stand on the explanatory power of physics is a stand on a communal experience: the experience of those for whom physics gives the deepest account of reality and who together constitute a community of commitment to it. None of these communal experiences provides external validation for the commitment. Each is the commitment finding its native shape. The Orthodox Jew’s communal experience of God is doing the same work. The work is hero-system work. The work is what humans do.
This puts the wager position in the strong intellectual position of admitting its own structure. The secular alternatives that claim to be more rigorous have refused to admit theirs. The Orthodox Jew who stands on the communal experience of God under the wager structure is therefore standing on as defensible a foundation as any human stands on. He is also being more honest about his foundation than most of the people who would dismiss him.
The dismissal usually takes a particular form. The secular interlocutor says: your commitment rests on an experience that cannot be verified. The wager Jew should respond: yours does too. The interlocutor’s commitment to reason rests on an experience that cannot be verified. The interlocutor’s commitment to progress rests on an experience that cannot be verified. The interlocutor’s commitment to human dignity rests on an experience that cannot be verified. Every meaningful commitment a human can make rests on an experience that cannot be verified. The wager Jew has admitted this. The interlocutor has not. The honesty advantage is with the Jew.
The wager Jew is not playing the game on weaker ground than his interlocutors. He is playing it on the same ground while being more honest about the ground. The communal experience of God is a transcendence claim. It is not embarrassing. The embarrassing position is the secular position that pretends it has escaped the need to make a transcendence claim. That position is incoherent. The wager position is coherent. The wager position is also honest about its incoherent neighbors.
The wager position is lonely only because it admits what others refuse to admit. The admission is not weakness. It is honesty about the human condition.
The wager Jew should not be intimidated by the sneer. The sneer is the move of someone who has lost the argument and refuses to admit the loss.