Luke Ford

9-9-25

The YT video catches Shapiro doing in real time what the book does on the page. Rav Kook is a founder figure who needs to break with the standard rabbinic coalition technology of humility theater. The technology requires that great rabbis disclaim greatness and let others attribute it to them. Weinberg models the convention: “I try not to chase kavod, but if they give it to me I’ll take it.” Rav Kook breaks with the convention. He says God put him here for this era, the other rabbis are living in the past, and the lights cannot be held back. Shapiro frames this as prophetic self-conception, and Rav Kook himself uses prophetic language and asks whether he might be a false prophet. The break with humility theater is not vanity. It is a coalition operation. A founder claiming authority to overturn the existing arrangement cannot do so from within the arrangement’s deference rules. He has to step outside and claim the warrant from God.
The Amital aside on kavod sits adjacent to this and deserves separate attention. Amital tells his students he loves kavod. The South African student cannot accept it. Amital frames himself as a “simple person” rather than a baal nefesh. The student’s distress maps the coalition expectation. The rebbe is supposed to perform a certain attitude, and the performance is part of how rabbinic standing gets transmitted. Amital declines the performance, but he can decline only because his standing is already secure. A junior figure declining the performance reads as arrogant. The senior figure declining it reads as refreshingly honest. The same content in different mouths receives opposite ratings.
The suppression apparatus around Rav Kook’s radical writings is its own coalition data. Tzvi Yehuda did not publish the Shmonah Kvatzim. Three explanations circulate. He thought his father had abandoned the radical positions. He feared haredi attack on the legacy. He thought religious Zionism itself was not ready. The third explanation is the most analytically loaded. It treats the coalition’s tolerance as a moving target and the gatekeeper’s job as managing the publication schedule against that target. The family released the Kvatzim after Tzvi Yehuda’s death. Aviner first said the material could not be studied because it had not been edited by Tzvi Yehuda. Twenty-five years later Aviner cites it. The boundary moves and the official line moves with it, but the official line never acknowledges the move. Each new release gets framed as the master’s work rather than as the gatekeepers changing their minds about what could be shared.
The most aggressive thread Shapiro pulls runs through the discussion of Talmud as exile product. Rav Kook says the Mishna and Talmud were created because Israel lost ruah hakodesh. When prophecy returns, the dialectical apparatus retires. The Bavli is darkness. The Yerushalmi has less pilpul because the land of Israel runs closer to the original logic. This is not a marginal aside. It attacks the Lithuanian yeshiva project at the root. The Lithuanian system treats Talmud study as the highest form of religious life. Rav Kook treats Talmud study as a workaround Jewish history adopted because direct access to God shut down. The workaround was indispensable for two thousand years and produced great figures. Rav Kook himself was a great talmid hakham. But the workaround was a workaround. When the original returns, the workaround retires. This claim, made in public in the Lithuanian-Orthodox world, might have ended a lesser figure. Rav Kook makes it because he believes he has the prophetic warrant to make it.
The Twersky typology sharpens the picture. Talmudist, kabbalist, philosopher. Where does the figure locate his spiritual essence. Rav Kook had Lithuanian training, served as rav, decided halakhic questions, and produced standard rabbinic literature. But his diaries say his joy comes from kabbalah and aggadah, not from gemara. Shapiro rejects Hillel Goldberg’s claim that Rav Kook’s posek status was part of his essence. Rav Kook himself contradicts the claim. The Goldberg framing is coalition flattery. The Lithuanian-derived religious Zionist coalition wants Rav Kook to fit its highest category. He does not. He fits Twersky’s kabbalist-philosopher box, with halakha as service rather than essence. The same is true of hasidic rebbes generally, who do not need to be great talmidei hakhamim because their job is spiritual leadership rather than legal technical work. Rav Kook follows the hasidic role-shape inside a Lithuanian institutional shell.
The curriculum critique reads as the most empirically vindicated of Rav Kook’s predictions. He warned that a Talmud-only curriculum would lose people drawn to other domains. The contemporary Israeli haredi shabbabniks Shapiro describes are the confirmation. The boys dress the part but spend nights in the video game shops because the system gave them no legitimate path other than gemara. Rav Kook said this would happen and identified the cause. The haredi world has begun acknowledging the problem in its own vocabulary, but the institutional response remains stuck on the same Talmud-only premise.
The closing aside on Yosef Blau and Rav Muskin’s father in 1956 is doing real-time coalition analysis. Shapiro disagrees with Blau’s letter on Gaza but admires the willingness to take the coalition damage. Shapiro himself refused to sign on substantive grounds and procedural grounds. The Muskin parallel is sharper. Muskin’s father did a joint Yom Ha’atzmaut program with Mizrachi in Cleveland in 1956 and got attacked for it. The coalition police patrol the seam between the agudah and religious Zionist worlds, and any figure who crosses the seam pays. Both Blau and Muskin show what speaking the truth costs inside the coalition, which is the same cost Rav Kook paid in larger form.

9-17-25

This second installment runs deeper than the first because Shapiro is working closer to the bone of what makes Rav Kook structurally different from the Lithuanian rabbinic order he came out of.

The chapter on mitzvot as potential damage to certain tzaddikim is the most analytically loaded material in the session. Rav Kook says some great souls find their stature shrinks when they enter the world of details, and that if the entire world were at their level, the mitzvot would be abolished. Shapiro is careful to say Rav Kook is not antinomian in practice. The tzaddik observes the law because he is part of klal Yisrael and his connection to the community runs through shared observance. But the theoretical concession is enormous. The mitzvot as a system, in this picture, exist for those who need them, and the highest souls are doing something else when they observe. They observe out of solidarity. The law functions for them as a coalition obligation rather than as the road to God. The road to God runs higher and would run unobstructed if the world were not what it is.

This is the frame Shapiro is right to compare to the Izhbitzer. The Izhbitzer’s “yere shamayim suffers” passage is the same move in different vocabulary. There exist souls for whom the prohibition is not the right shape of life, but they accept the suffering because their neighbor needs the prohibition. The law is calibrated for the coalition’s median member, and the exceptional figures pay a real cost in their own spiritual development to keep the coalition intact. Both Rav Kook and the Izhbitzer let this come to the surface in writing. Both are coalition founders or near-founders. Neither could have said it from inside a standard Lithuanian yeshiva position. Shapiro’s instinct that no rosh yeshiva could ever express himself this way is correct and structurally important. The Lithuanian rosh yeshiva’s authority depends on the law as the highest road. He cannot say the law is sometimes a downgrade for the highest souls without dismantling his own position.

The Amital aliyah aside fits this same pattern. Amital said he did not move to Israel because of the Ramban or because midrashim describe the land’s special status. He moved because the Jewish people were being reborn there and that was the center of Jewish life. This is the move Shapiro flags as different from the standard religious Zionist framing, and it is indeed different. The standard framing locates the value in the land itself as halakhic-theological object. Amital’s framing locates the value in the people-process and treats the land as the place where the process happens. The first framing is portable to any pious religious Zionist. The second is closer to the secular Zionist’s framing with theology added. Amital’s willingness to say it openly tracks the same pattern as Rav Kook saying mitzvot can damage certain souls. Senior figures with secured standing can voice the more honest formulation. The convention does not require it of them and would penalize a junior figure for it.

The kiruv at sneakers passage about the Tisha b’Av is doing real work even though Shapiro tosses it off. The leather prohibition was a stand-in for the comfortable shoes of the time. We now have comfortable non-leather shoes. The original purpose was discomfort. The current practice produces comfort while preserving the form. A Sanhedrin could fix this. There is no Sanhedrin. The result is a practice that has lost touch with its purpose but cannot be updated because the coalition has no procedure for updating. The same is true of stam yenam in current conditions. The same is true of many practices Shapiro could list. The Lithuanian model treats this stasis as continuity. Rav Kook treats it as a temporary settlement waiting for the renewal of authority. The framing matters because the Lithuanian model has to defend the current practice on its own terms while Rav Kook can acknowledge it as a workaround.

The chapter on broad philosophical knowledge and the dangers of a limited curriculum is doing something subtler than Shapiro spells out. Rav Kook says a posek who lacks philosophical training will be machmir on belief just as an undertrained posek will be machmir on practice. He will treat every unfamiliar idea as heresy because his only category for an unfamiliar idea is heresy. The Slifkin episode confirms the prediction in real time. The haredi establishment treated Slifkin’s positions as heresy because the establishment had no internal vocabulary for distinguishing iqarei emunah from inherited beliefs that lived alongside the iqarim but were not load-bearing. The same establishment that produced the ban probably lost some members to actual heresy because the ban left them no path between accepting demonstrably false propositions and exiting the coalition entirely. Rav Kook predicts this exact outcome a century earlier and identifies the cause. The cause is the curriculum. A curriculum that excludes philosophy produces poskim who cannot distinguish core belief from accidental belief, and the inability to distinguish forces every challenge into the binary of acceptance or heresy.

The Kafih point Shapiro slips in is sharper than the surface. Kafih reads the Mishneh Torah’s astronomy chapter as Greek science Maimonides accepted on the best evidence of his day, which means it should be revised when better evidence arrives. The conventional Orthodox reading treats anything in the Mishneh Torah as Sinai-derived Torah and therefore non-revisable. The conventional reading puts the entire enterprise on a collision course with any future correction of the science. Kafih’s reading lets the system survive the correction by relocating the science from Sinai to historically situated human knowledge. This is the same move Shapiro will explore in Herzog later in the book. The Modern Orthodox theological project always needs a procedure for distinguishing what the tradition is really committed to from what the tradition happened to believe at a given moment. Rav Kook saw the need for this procedure. He did not produce it in finished form. Herzog tried to produce it and never wrote the book. The procedure remains the missing infrastructure of Modern Orthodox theology.

The closing exchange on tefillah is the lighter coda but tracks the same theme. Rav Schachter saying do not force teenagers to daven is the senior figure exercising the senior figure’s privilege to voice what the system cannot fully accommodate. Forcing davening produces the burnout Shapiro and Kelman both observe in college kids who walk away the moment parental enforcement ends. The system requires davening three times a day. The pastoral situation suggests letting some students sit out. The senior figure can voice the latter without dismantling the former. The Rambam framing Kelman invokes — that prayer is an act of God’s grace giving us the chance to ask, not a strict obligation — is the procedural escape valve that lets the senior figure relax enforcement without rewriting the rule. This is the same architecture Rav Kook identified for Sanhedrin: a coalition with the right authority can update without breaking, and a coalition without it must either pretend nothing has changed or hand the change over to senior figures using their personal authority.

Two smaller items worth flagging. Shapiro’s correction on Kerem b’Yavneh is graceful and instructive. He had said Yeshivat Hadarom was first and got pushback. The actual story is that Hadarom’s teachers’ seminary section joined Hesder before Kerem b’Yavneh existed as a Hesder yeshiva, but Kerem b’Yavneh was the first full yeshiva in the program. The distinction is real and Shapiro is right that Hesder under Lichtenstein and Amital became something different from the Kerem b’Yavneh model. The Kerem b’Yavneh model treated Hesder as an accommodation for those not going to a full yeshiva gedolah. The Gush model treated Hesder as the ideologically correct position. The shift in framing matters because it converts what looked like a compromise into a positive program, and that conversion is what made Hesder ideologically defensible to the Religious Zionist mainstream. The data point about haredi soldiers stopping the recent terror attack is the Lichtenstein argument arriving in practice. The coalition that does not carry the load eventually has to explain why it does not, and the explanation gets harder when the load-carrying coalition includes haredi gunmen who happen to have been at the scene.

The Yosef Blau aside from the previous session continues here in the form of Shapiro recalling Rabbi Muskin senior and the 1956 Cleveland Yom Ha’atzmaut episode. Both Blau and Muskin senior paid coalition costs for crossing the agudah-Mizrachi seam. Shapiro’s “I am a big believer in lo techanu” is the operative principle, and the principle traces back through Rav Kook’s claim that the lights cannot be held back. The figure who has something to say must say it and pay the cost. The coalition’s job is to make the cost smaller than the silence cost would be. Most coalitions in practice make the cost larger.

10-1-25

This third installment is where Shapiro starts opening the question about how Modern Orthodoxy can read the early chapters of Genesis without producing either heresy or fundamentalism, and what it costs the coalition that no one has finished the job.

The Kafih point Shapiro returns to is the structural foundation. Maimonides put Greek astronomy into the Mishneh Torah because it was the best available science of his time. Kafih reads it that way and tells his readers not to mistake the science for the Torah. The conventional Orthodox reading treats anything in the Mishneh Torah as Sinai-derived. The conventional reading puts the whole system on a collision course with any future correction of the science, and the system loses every collision because the science is what gets corrected. Rav Kook generalizes the Kafih move into a principle. Torah and science cannot conflict. If they appear to conflict, either we have misread the Torah or we have misread the science. Most heretics, Rav Kook says, are not rejecting Judaism. They are rejecting the simplistic version of Judaism their teachers gave them and which their teachers told them was Judaism in full. Refined teaching would have kept them inside. Coarse teaching pushes them out. The cost of coarse teaching is borne by the coalition in lost members.

The principle is right. The execution requires drawing a line between what is Torah-essential and what is historically situated belief. Rav Kook acknowledges to Sidel that he cannot draw the line. The Jewish people’s general intuition will draw it over time. This is the right answer for a writer who knows the work has to be done and that he cannot finish it alone. It is also a coalition admission. The boundary between core and accidental belief is not specifiable in advance. It will be settled by what the religious community in fact comes to find livable. The procedure is not deductive from sources. It is sociological in the sense that the coalition’s continuing life under new conditions decides which old beliefs are load-bearing. This is what Aviner and Sherlo would later theologize as moral progress aligned with God’s will. Rav Kook had the same architecture for cosmology and history.

The evolution material is more radical than its conclusion. Rav Kook adopts the Maimonidean strategy: argue from the position of your opponent for their benefit, even if you do not hold the position yourself. He does this for evolution and for an old earth and a non-historical Adam. He explicitly says the Torah may need to be read with millions or billions of years in view, that Adam may stand for the species rather than an individual, that the deep sleep stands for the long emergence of civilizational ideas, and that the Eden story may be allegory throughout. He hedges by saying he does not commit to these readings. The hedge is what made the writing publishable. The substance is what makes the writing useful. A reader looking for permission to read Genesis non-historically finds it here without having to leave the tradition. The hedge gives the gatekeepers something to point to when they want to deny that Rav Kook said what he said. Both functions matter. A figure trying to keep room open for more than one possibility cannot foreclose either possibility, and the hedge is how he keeps both alive.

Shapiro’s attack on Schroeder and Aviezer is the right correlate. Their position looks traditional because they treat Genesis as scientifically informative. The position is in fact untraditional because they claim to be the first readers in history to grasp what the verses meant. The classical commentaries, on their picture, missed the point that only modern physics could supply. This is a coalition tell. Genuine traditionalism has continuity with prior reading. Schroeder-Aviezer is a modern apologetic invention dressed in traditional clothes. Rav Kook’s reading is the opposite. It does not claim novel scientific insight from the verses. It frees the verses from the obligation to deliver scientific insight. The verses are doing something else and have always been doing something else. The classical commentaries who read Eden allegorically were reading correctly. The literalists were reading badly.

The Soloveitchik passage Shapiro quotes from the lecture notes is the same architecture in a different vocabulary. Revelation discloses God’s will, not God’s wisdom. Where the Torah uses Ptolemaic cosmology, it speaks to the people of its time and does not commit them to the cosmology. The procedure is identical to Kafih and Rav Kook. The Rav held the Modern Orthodox position on the science question and apparently treated it as settled enough that he taught it in graduate seminars. He did not develop it into a published systematic statement. The reasons matter. The Rav had multiple coalition constituencies, including a haredi-adjacent one that would have read a published systematic theology of accommodation as betrayal. The lecture notes circulate. The book never appears. This is the same pattern Shapiro flagged with Herzog: the project that everyone agrees needs doing remains undone because doing it in public costs the figure too much coalition standing. Modern Orthodox theology has functioned for seventy years on lecture notes, occasional letters, and offhand remarks rather than on finished works. This is not an accident.

The Norman Lamb archive opening is its own data point in the same pattern. Lamb operated at the seam where coalition costs are highest. Correspondence about ending Shabbat at coordinated times across Manhattan synagogues, candidacy for chief rabbi positions that he did not take, drafts of internal Aguda meeting minutes — these are the materials of Modern Orthodox coalition management in the mid-twentieth century. The fact that they sat in a private archive until 2025 is the corresponding fact about how much of this work happened in correspondence rather than in print. Shapiro’s instinct to save copies before someone takes the materials offline tracks the historian’s awareness that coalition memory edits archives too, and that what is freely available now may be edited later when current keepers retire.

The Rav Kook tension with his own yeshiva is worth dwelling on. He preached broad curriculum and minimal inheritance for the wider movement. He ran a yeshiva that taught Tanakh and emunah in a fairly narrow slice. The Nazir met privately with selected students for Kuzari but the curriculum did not include Jewish philosophy as a regular subject. Sidel got an academic education only because Rav Kook personally directed him toward it, not because the institution provided it. The pattern is recognizable from many founder figures. The public theology runs ahead of the institutional practice. The institution is built for transmission to the next generation under current conditions, and current conditions in Mandate Palestine did not yet include the educated cohort the theology was written for. The theology was an investment in a population that would arrive later. The yeshiva’s job was to keep the line of transmission open until the population could use the material. This is why founder writings frequently outrun the institutions founders build, and why the writings often do their fullest work two or three generations after publication.

Weinberg’s line that great thinkers do not regard absence of inner tension as a compliment is one of the more useful things in Shapiro’s whole project. The Lithuanian rabbinic ideal of consistency across decades treats stability as evidence of correctness. Weinberg treats it as evidence of stagnation. The healthy intellectual life produces contradictions because conditions change and thinking has to keep up. Rav Kook produces contradictions in abundance. Soloveitchik produces them. Weinberg produces them. The figures who produce coherent unchanging systems are usually doing so by refusing to read the new material the system would have to absorb. The coalition that demands consistency is selecting for figures who decline to update. The coalition that allows tension is selecting for figures who can stay in conversation with what is happening outside. Modern Orthodoxy in its strongest moments has been a coalition of the second kind. Many of its current pressures come from drift toward the first.

The setup for Herzog at the end is the right place to leave the thread. Cosmology is the easier problem because the days of creation can be allegorized without disturbing the historical record beginning with Abraham. Continuous human habitation for tens of thousands of years is harder because it falls inside the genealogies. The biblical line from Adam to Abraham wants to read as continuous human history. If it cannot bear that weight, the question is what to do with it, and the answer cannot be the answer that worked for the days of creation. Herzog saw this. He had the historical training to see it precisely, the philosophical instincts to see the procedure for resolving it, and the institutional position that would have given the resolution authority. He did not write the book. The reason he did not is the same reason Soloveitchik did not write his half. The cost of writing it inside the coalition was higher than the cost of leaving the work for someone else. No one has done it since. The unwritten Modern Orthodox guide is the architectural feature Shapiro keeps circling, and the right way to read his book on Rav Kook is as one more attempt to map what the unwritten book would have had to contain.

10-21-25

This fourth installment is where the architecture Shapiro has been laying out begins doing its serious work. The chapter on Torah, history, and science is the central engineering problem of Modern Orthodox theology, and Shapiro is using Rav Kook and Herzog to show that the engineering specifications were drawn up a long time ago, the right people understood what the building needed to look like, and no one ever finished construction.

The yefat toar parallel Rav Kook draws is the analytically important move. Yefat toar is openly framed in the Talmud as a concession to human weakness rather than as the Torah’s ideal. The morality of the yefat toar passage is not absolute morality. It is law calibrated for actual soldiers in actual conditions. Rav Kook generalizes the principle. If the Torah’s morality can be a concession to the conditions of its addressees without losing its sacred status, the Torah’s descriptions of history and cosmology can also be concessions to the conditions of its addressees without losing their sacred status. Both compromises serve the higher purpose of bringing the message to the people who could in fact receive it. The Torah is calibrated for its readers in the same way the yefat toar law is calibrated for its soldiers. The procedure is not novel. It is generalized from a procedure already inside the system.

The Yirmiyahu and the breach-of-the-walls discrepancy is the textual lever Rav Kook uses to make the move respectable. The verse says the ninth of Tammuz. The Mishnah says the seventeenth. The Yerushalmi says there was an error in calculation, and the standard commentaries treat the prophet as recording the people’s mistaken date because that was the date the people believed. The principle this exposes is enormous. Tanakh can record factually mistaken information when recording it serves the higher purpose of meeting people where they are. Once that principle is admitted in any single case, the question becomes how widely it applies, and the answer cannot be specified in advance. Rav Kook acknowledges this directly to Sidel. He cannot draw the line. The Jewish people’s sense over time will draw it. This is the procedural concession that makes the work both possible and unfinished. The work is possible because the procedure is real and traceable to canonical sources. The work is unfinished because no figure has the authority to specify the line in a way that the coalition will accept as binding.

The Rambam-Shemtov reading Rav Kook invokes is doing more work than its surface allows. Shemtov reads Maimonides as saying that Yechezkel made a scientific error in his prophetic vision because he received the divine message in his own conceptual vocabulary, and the conceptual vocabulary of his time included the spheres-make-sounds belief that Aristotle correctly rejected. The form of prophecy is the prophet’s. The matter of prophecy is God’s. The form can be wrong about the science of the time without compromising the matter. Rav Kook adopts this reading and applies it to all biblical descriptions of history and cosmology. The implication is direct. Genesis can be scientifically wrong about cosmology and historically wrong about the age of the earth without ceasing to be revelation, because revelation works through the conceptual vocabulary of its addressees. The radical force of the position is muted by the formal endorsement of Maimonides. The conservative readers can defend the position as classical. The progressive readers can use the position to do the work that needs doing. Both functions are served by the same textual move.

The Aderet Hayakar passage Shapiro foregrounds is unusually direct for a published Rav Kook source. The Torah does not teach Copernican or Ptolemaic astronomy. It does not teach geological history. It does not teach scientific or historical truths. It teaches knowledge of God and ethics through the conceptual frame of its addressees. Schatz’s summary that Shapiro quotes is correct: the position opens the possibility that the biblical accounts are factually false in detail while remaining the vehicle of the truths the Torah actually intends. This is the Modern Orthodox position on Torah and science, and it has the textual warrant Shapiro is showing it has. The position has not been adopted across Modern Orthodoxy as the official line because the official line in Modern Orthodoxy is mostly absent on these questions. Individuals hold the position. The institutions teach around it. The schools Shapiro describes use public-school history textbooks for social studies and Torah for the morning, and no one in the school has the authority to integrate the two for the students. The integration would be the unwritten guide.

The Reuven and Bilhah passage Shapiro pulls in is the boundary case that should disturb traditional readers and shows that Rav Kook is willing to follow the principle to its uncomfortable applications. The Torah states that Reuven slept with his father’s concubine. A talmudic position holds that he did not in fact do this, and this position becomes the dominant rabbinic reading. Rav Kook accepts the dominant rabbinic reading, which means that the Torah states something that did not happen because the statement serves a higher purpose. This is the same architecture Shapiro flagged in the second installment about the Mussar teachers’ rereadings of biblical sins. The Chazon Ish rejected the move when nineteenth-century figures tried it because the move requires authority to override the plain sense of the text, and the Chazon Ish did not grant nineteenth-century figures that authority. The Talmud has the authority. Rav Kook accepts a talmudic exercise of the authority and uses it as a precedent for a more general principle. The Chazon Ish would have rejected the generalization. Rav Kook accepts it.

Herzog is the figure Shapiro is right to treat as the central tragedy of the Modern Orthodox theological project. He had every qualification. He had the historical training, the scientific literacy, the philosophical instincts, the institutional position as chief rabbi of Israel, and the personal relationships with the people who would have had to contribute to the project. He identified the right problem. Continuous human habitation for tens of thousands of years presses harder on the biblical chronology than any cosmological question, because cosmology can be allegorized through the days of creation while continuous habitation falls inside the genealogies. He had the right procedure from Maimonides. If proven, reinterpret. He had the right collaborator in Soloveitchik for the philosophical work he could not do himself. He acknowledged that he could not do the philosophical work alone. He approached Soloveitchik through Zev Gold rather than directly because he expected Soloveitchik to refuse if approached personally. The expectation was probably correct. Soloveitchik never wrote his half. Herzog never wrote his half. The book that everyone agreed needed writing remained unwritten.

The reasons matter and Shapiro keeps circling them without quite stating them. Herzog and Soloveitchik were both chief figures with constituencies that would not tolerate publication of a systematic Modern Orthodox accommodation theology. Herzog’s constituency included the haredi-adjacent Religious Zionist mainstream that had not yet absorbed the implications. Soloveitchik’s constituency included the Yeshiva University students whose families were sometimes one generation removed from European haredi Orthodoxy. Publishing the book would have produced immediate coalition damage that neither figure was willing to absorb. Writing privately was acceptable. Lecturing on the material to graduate students was acceptable. Corresponding with other senior figures about the project was acceptable. Publishing was not. The result is that the Modern Orthodox theological position on Torah and science has functioned for seventy years on the basis of lecture notes, private letters, and offhand remarks rather than on a finished work that the coalition could point to. The position is real. The infrastructure is missing.

The closing observation Shapiro makes about Modern Orthodox schools is the right empirical confirmation of the architectural failure. Every Modern Orthodox school in America teaches its students that human civilizations existed ten thousand and twenty thousand years ago. The textbooks come from the public-school world. The history class teaches one thing. The Torah class teaches another. No one integrates the two for the students because no one in the school has the authority to do so. The students figure out their own integration or fail to. The ones who figure out an integration are usually doing some informal version of the Rav Kook position without knowing they are doing it. The ones who do not figure out an integration sometimes leave Orthodoxy when the contradiction becomes too pressing. The Slifkin episode showed what happens when someone tries to do the integration formally inside the more right-wing Orthodox world. The episode also confirmed Rav Kook’s prediction that machmir-on-belief poskim produce heretics. The students who lost their faith over the Slifkin ban lost it because the ban told them their honest reading of the evidence was incompatible with Orthodoxy. The ban was the cause. The bannees identified the cost.

The Tendentially-Right move Shapiro makes when he draws together Maimonides on Plato, Rav Kook on evolution, and Herzog on continuous habitation is one of the strongest moves in the book. All three are using the same procedure: argue from your opponent’s position for your opponent’s benefit, even when you do not hold the position yourself. Maimonides explains the verses in accord with Plato while not committing to Plato. Rav Kook explains the verses in accord with evolution while not committing to evolution. Herzog plans to explain the verses in accord with the historical record while not committing to the historical record’s full extent. The procedure is consistent. It preserves the writer’s own position while opening room for readers who hold the contrary position to remain inside the system. The strategic value of the procedure is enormous. The textual cost is the hedge. Each writer hedges to keep both possibilities alive. The hedge is what keeps the gatekeepers willing to publish the work and what keeps the right-wing readers willing to attribute the work to the master rather than to a heretic. The progressive readers do the work the writer left room for. The conservative readers preserve the writer’s traditional bona fides. Both audiences are served. Neither is fully satisfied. The position remains under-specified, and the under-specification is what keeps it usable.

Two smaller items worth flagging. The Lubavitcher Rebbe correspondence with Herzog is the data point Shapiro flags but does not fully exploit. The Rebbe gave Herzog the standard old-Lubavitch line — the world is six thousand years old, fossils were planted, the literal reading of Genesis stands. Herzog could not have used the answer. The Rebbe could not have given any other answer without breaking with his own coalition’s commitments. The Rebbe and Herzog were both senior figures with serious scientific training who reached opposite conclusions because their coalitions demanded opposite conclusions. The same intellectual capacity in different coalition positions produces different theology. This is the most direct evidence available for the coalition-shaped character of theological positions in twentieth-century Orthodoxy, and Shapiro should pull it harder than he does.

The Norman Lamb archive opening Shapiro flagged in the previous session and returns to here is the same architecture in another medium. The archive contains seventy years of Modern Orthodox coalition management in correspondence: candidacies for chief rabbi positions never accepted, Shabbat-ending coordination among Manhattan synagogues, internal Aguda meeting minutes from a friendly outsider’s perspective, drafts of letters that were sent privately rather than published. The archive going live in 2025 is the first time most of this material has been visible to anyone outside the immediate participants. The fact that almost none of this work appeared in published form in Lamm’s lifetime is the empirical confirmation that the Modern Orthodox coalition operates predominantly through correspondence rather than through publication, and that the visible publication record systematically understates the coalition’s actual intellectual and political work. Shapiro’s instinct to save copies before the archive is edited is the historian’s recognition that coalition memory edits archives too. What is freely available now will not necessarily be available later.

The unwritten guide Shapiro keeps circling is starting to look less like a single missing book and more like the structural condition of Modern Orthodox theology. The work has to be done. Doing it requires authority. Authority in Modern Orthodoxy is distributed across figures who individually do not have enough of it to publish the work without coalition damage. The figures who could collectively have done it have repeatedly declined to do it because the collective project would expose each of them to costs none of them was willing to absorb. The result is a theology that runs on fragments, hedges, and correspondence rather than on systematic statement. Shapiro’s book on Rav Kook is one more attempt to assemble the fragments. The assembly is useful. The book is not the unwritten guide and Shapiro is honest about this. The unwritten guide remains unwritten because the structural conditions that prevented its writing in the 1950s are still in place. Maybe the AI-and-archive moment Shapiro is working in will lower the cost enough that the next generation can finally produce it. Maybe not.

10-28-25

This fifth installment is where Rav Kook’s coalition strategy comes into clearest view, and where the cracks in it become hardest to paper over. The chapter on heresy is the place where the architecture has to handle the population it was designed for, and the handling is more strained than the earlier chapters acknowledged.
The Riva critique Shapiro foregrounds is the move that makes the whole project work. Maimonides treats heretical belief as heresy regardless of what the believer practices. The Raavad treats heretical belief held by an otherwise-observant Jew as error rather than heresy. Rav Kook sides with the Raavad and pushes the move further. Heretical belief that does not translate into heretical practice does not produce a heretic in the halakhic sense. The orthoprax Jew is exonerated from the theological category. This is not a minor adjustment. It dismantles the Maimonidean Thirteen Principles as a working halakhic category. The Thirteen Principles remain on the page. They no longer determine who counts as inside. Practice determines who counts as inside, and belief becomes a private matter the coalition does not police.
The strategic value of this move is enormous and the costs are real. The strategic value is that the move keeps the coalition tent open at exactly the seam where Modern Orthodoxy bleeds members. The standard Lithuanian-Maimonidean position requires assent to propositions that many otherwise-observant Jews cannot honestly assent to. The alternative is either to lose the members who cannot assent or to teach them that their honest doubts disqualify them. Rav Kook’s position lets them stay. They keep Shabbat, eat kosher, raise their children inside the community, and contribute their human capital. The community absorbs them rather than expelling them. The cost is that the community no longer has a theological core that everyone is required to share. Belief becomes negotiable. Practice becomes the only thing the coalition enforces. Levitt’s “social Orthodoxy” describes the resulting population. Rav Kook constructed the theological space that the population would later occupy. He probably did not anticipate how large the population would become.
The Geneva-by-thoughts critique Lichtenstein leveled at Rav Kook is the sharpest move in the whole installment. Rav Kook tells the secular pioneers that their ethical work is really divine service even though they describe it as something else. Lichtenstein calls this stealing their thoughts. The pioneers said they were rejecting Torah and building a secular national civilization. Rav Kook tells them they were really doing God’s work without knowing it. The framing denies them their own self-understanding. The framing is paternalistic in a structural sense, not just in tone. It tells the addressees that their conscious commitments do not matter and that the speaker has access to their real motivations through theological insight they do not share. Lichtenstein’s instinct that this is a form of theft is correct. Rav Kook is taking the pioneers’ work and crediting it to a system the pioneers explicitly rejected. The move serves the religious community by recruiting the pioneers’ achievements into the religious narrative. It does not serve the pioneers, who lose authorship of their own commitments.
The move is also strategically necessary for Rav Kook’s project. Rav Kook needs to make the case that the secular pioneers belong inside klal Yisrael despite their open rejection of religious commitment. The case requires reframing their work as religiously significant. The reframing requires overriding their self-description. There is no version of the move that respects their stated commitments while producing the conclusion Rav Kook needs. Lichtenstein sees this and refuses the move. Rav Kook accepts the cost because he sees no alternative path to the conclusion. The two figures are working different problems. Lichtenstein is working the problem of how to honor the pioneers as the autonomous agents they understood themselves to be. Rav Kook is working the problem of how to keep the religious-secular coalition together at a moment when the secular side held the demographic and political momentum. Both problems are real. The solutions are incompatible.
The atheism-cleanses-superstition argument is the most coalition-strategically interesting move in the installment. Rav Kook treats atheism as a purifying force that strips away inadequate conceptions of God so that better conceptions can replace them. The argument is theologically generous and historically accurate as a description of what happened in nineteenth-century European religion. The atheist critique forced religious thinkers to abandon anthropomorphic and superstitious accretions and to articulate what they actually believed. The post-atheist religious position is generally more defensible than the pre-atheist position. Rav Kook is right about this. The argument also serves a coalition function. It allows him to credit atheism with a positive religious role without endorsing atheism, which keeps both the religious and the formerly-religious inside the same conceptual space. The atheist who has not yet returned can be told that his atheism was preparing the way for his return. The religious traditionalist can be told that the atheist’s work was ultimately serving the religious project. Both audiences are addressed without giving either what they want.
The reward-and-punishment argument shows the same architecture at higher voltage. Rav Kook says the pioneers’ rejection of reward and punishment lets them do good for its own sake, which is a higher religious level than doing good for reward. The argument is genuinely deep. It is also genuinely paternalistic in the same way Lichtenstein flagged. The pioneers did not reject reward and punishment because they wanted to reach a higher religious level. They rejected it because they did not believe the system was true. Rav Kook reframes their honest disbelief as religious advance. The reframing is generous. It is also still Geneva-by-thoughts. The pattern is consistent. Wherever the pioneers’ self-understanding conflicts with the religious narrative, Rav Kook overrides the self-understanding. The conflict between Rav Kook and Lichtenstein is exactly the conflict between a coalition founder who needs to incorporate the pioneers and a careful ethicist who refuses to do the incorporation on terms the pioneers would not have accepted.
The biblical criticism strategy is structurally identical to the evolution and history strategies. Rav Kook argues from the position of his opponent for the opponent’s benefit while declining to commit to the position himself. If you accept biblical criticism, the argument runs, you still have reasons to remain observant. The reasons are nationalism, communal continuity, the wisdom embedded in the practices, and the authority the Jewish people has invested in the system. Shapiro is right that the argument does not work as Rav Kook hopes. If you reject the divine origin of Torah, you can also reject the Jewish people’s authority to bind you to the practices. The argument has rhetorical force only for someone who already wants to remain inside. For someone genuinely deciding whether to leave, the argument provides no traction. But the argument was probably not designed to convince actual departures. It was probably designed to give the wavering members a stable place to stand and to give the religious community a vocabulary for keeping the wavering members in. As coalition rhetoric it succeeds. As philosophical argument it does not.
Mirsky’s misreading of this material is the kind of error Shapiro is right to flag. Mirsky writes that Rav Kook suggests one may accept biblical criticism and still keep faith with tradition. Rav Kook is not endorsing biblical criticism. He is providing fallback positions for people who have accepted it against his recommendation. The distinction matters because it determines what the position is doing. If Rav Kook endorsed biblical criticism, the position would be radically progressive on textual questions. He does not endorse it. He treats it as error. The position is conservative on the textual question and progressive only on the question of how to handle members who hold the error. This is the consistent shape of all of Rav Kook’s accommodation moves. The substantive position remains traditional. The pastoral handling becomes generous. The tradition is preserved. The coalition is kept open. The logical tension between the two moves is left for the reader to absorb.
The Shemtov-on-Maimonides reading the previous installment unpacked is doing the heavy lifting again here in the background. The Torah speaks in the conceptual vocabulary of its addressees. The addressees of Genesis worked with a primitive cosmology and the Torah used their cosmology. The addressees of the heresy chapters worked with a different conceptual vocabulary and Rav Kook is using theirs. The principle is internal to the system. Rav Kook is just extending it from the addressees of Sinai to the addressees of the present generation. The pioneers work with secular ethical vocabulary. Rav Kook addresses them in their vocabulary while preserving the religious meaning underneath. This is what coalition founders do. They speak the available languages while maintaining the underlying commitments. The coalition expands when the founder is good at this and contracts when the founder is bad at it. Rav Kook was unusually good at it. The pioneers did not become religious because of him. The religious community became able to honor their work without becoming secular because of him. The coalition expansion is real even if the conversion never happened.
The Shapiro thread on the difference between the pioneers and contemporary anti-Israel Jewish activists is doing real coalition work in the closing minutes. Rav Kook’s framework was designed for Jews who rejected the religion but committed themselves to the people. The framework does not extend to Jews who commit themselves against the people. The Neturei Karta application Shapiro flagged in the earlier installments returns here in updated form. The Hatam Sofer’s claim that klal Yisrael can write people out of the Jewish people is the procedure the framework eventually requires for the population that walks against the coalition rather than alongside it. Rav Kook needed the inclusive procedure for the secular pioneers. Shapiro is suggesting that the contemporary moment may need the exclusive procedure for the anti-Israel activists. Both procedures are part of the inheritance. Different conditions require different procedures. The coalition has the right to use both, and the question is which one the present moment calls for.
The closing exchange about Angela Buchdahl and patrilineal Jews is the place where Shapiro and Kelman are both feeling for the limits of the framework Rav Kook constructed. The framework was built for a Jewish people whose membership was defined unambiguously by halakha and whose internal divisions were religious. The contemporary American Jewish community’s membership is defined by mixed criteria, and the practical Jewish community includes substantial numbers of people who are not Jewish by halakha but are functioning members of Jewish life. The Hatam Sofer’s procedure for moving people out of klal Yisrael has its mirror image in a procedure for moving people effectively in. Shapiro and Kelman are both reaching for the mirror procedure without quite naming it. Rav Kook would not have endorsed the move. His framework had room for non-religious Jews but assumed the Jewishness was halakhically settled. The framework’s extension to the patrilineal and converted-by-non-Orthodox-procedures population is a development Rav Kook did not undertake and probably could not have undertaken in his time. The development is being undertaken now, ad hoc, in conversations like this one, by senior figures speaking in their own voices because the institutions have not yet authorized the move.
The reconstructionist comparison Kelman makes at the close is more than a casual observation. Mordecai Kaplan’s reconstructionism is the explicit twentieth-century articulation of the position Rav Kook developed implicitly. Kaplan said openly that Judaism is the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people, that the practices are valuable for what they do for the community rather than for their divine origin, and that belief is negotiable while practice is what matters. Rav Kook said much the same thing in his fallback arguments to biblical critics, but he said it as a fallback rather than as the primary position. The structural similarity between the two positions is striking and has been mostly ignored by both Modern Orthodox readers of Rav Kook and Reconstructionist readers of Kaplan. Rav Kook is sometimes read as an Orthodox figure who happened to be intellectually adventurous. He is more accurately read as the Orthodox figure who articulated the structural position that Kaplan articulated explicitly a generation later. The Orthodox community absorbed Rav Kook by foregrounding the religiously conservative parts of his work. The Reconstructionist community took up Kaplan’s articulation of the structurally similar position because it had no need to maintain the conservative side. Both communities ended up with comparable positions and quite different self-understandings. The convergence is the data point.
Shapiro’s project across the five installments is starting to read as a sustained argument that the structural conditions of Modern Orthodox theology have been visible to the relevant figures for a hundred years and that the coalition costs of articulating the conditions in finished form have been too high for any of them to pay. Rav Kook left fragments. Herzog left correspondence. Soloveitchik left lecture notes. Kafih left commentaries. Lichtenstein left published critiques of specific moves without a constructive alternative. The unwritten Modern Orthodox guide remains unwritten because the coalition that needed it could not afford the cost of producing it, and the coalition that could afford the cost did not need it. Shapiro’s book is one more contribution to the collective draft. The contribution is real. The collective draft is still incomplete. Whether anyone finishes it is a question about the structural conditions of the coalition over the next decade or two, not about whether any individual figure has the capacity. The capacity is widely distributed. The willingness to pay the costs of finishing is not.

11-3-25

This sixth installment is where the architecture finally accommodates the population it has been designed for, and where the political consequences of the architecture become impossible to hide.

The natural-morality move is the most ambitious thing Rav Kook does, and Shapiro is right to treat it as the core of the chapter. The standard rabbinic position treats Torah as the source of moral knowledge and treats moral intuitions outside Torah as either confirming Torah or being suspect. Rav Kook reverses the polarity. Natural morality is a divine revelation in its own right, parallel to and partially independent of textual revelation. The two revelations have to be coordinated. When they conflict, the conflict signals a problem on one side or the other, and the problem may be on the textual side as much as on the intuitive side. Yirat shamayim that pushes aside natural morality is not real yirat shamayim. The piety that produces less moral conduct is corrupted piety. This is a structural claim about how the religious system is supposed to work, not a pastoral observation about how to handle individual cases.

The structural claim has consequences Rav Kook does not fully spell out and that Shapiro is correct to draw. If natural morality is a parallel revelation, the textual tradition has lost its monopoly on moral authority. Wherever the textual tradition produces a result that conflicts with widespread moral intuition among the religiously serious, the conflict is presumptively evidence that the tradition has been read incorrectly. The Sanhedrin Rav Kook envisions will find the textual basis for the new understanding because the new understanding was always latent in the textual tradition. The procedure is open-ended. Anything that current religious moral intuition rejects can be rejected. The textual tradition will be reinterpreted to accommodate the rejection. The textual tradition cannot in principle resist a sufficiently widespread moral intuition because the moral intuition itself is a revelation that the tradition was always meant to encode.

Shapiro is right that this is conservative Judaism in everything but name when stated this generally. Mordecai Kaplan’s reconstructionism comes out of the same architectural commitments. Conservative Judaism’s halakhic project rests on the same procedural assumption that widespread moral intuition among the religiously committed has a claim on the textual tradition. The difference between Rav Kook and the non-Orthodox movements is not the architecture. The difference is what Rav Kook attaches the architecture to. Rav Kook attaches it to the religious masses living traditional Jewish lives within an Orthodox observance frame. Conservative Judaism attached it to the religious masses living non-traditional Jewish lives within a more flexible observance frame. The architecture itself is shared. The population the architecture serves is different. This is why Rav Kook reads as Orthodox to readers who pay attention to the population and reads as something else to readers who pay attention to the architecture. Both readings are correct. The architecture is shared with non-Orthodox movements and the population is the Orthodox population.

The population dependence makes Rav Kook’s architecture work where Conservative Judaism’s architecture failed. Conservative Judaism’s architecture could not retain a population large enough or observant enough to ground the moral intuitions the architecture treated as authoritative. The intuitions of Conservative Jews who did not in fact keep Shabbat or kashrut had no authority within the system because the system ran on the intuitions of those who took the practices seriously. Conservative Judaism could not produce that population in sufficient size. Modern Orthodoxy can. Rav Kook’s architecture works in Modern Orthodoxy because Modern Orthodoxy has the observant population whose moral intuitions can carry authority. The architecture would not work in Conservative Judaism even if Conservative Judaism endorsed it explicitly, because Conservative Judaism does not have the population to carry it. The structural lesson is that the procedural architecture and the population that grounds it cannot be separated. A theology of natural morality requires a community whose moral intuitions are formed by serious observance. Without the community, the architecture has no input.

The Tamuz draft application Shapiro and Shayot independently make is the political payoff and the most important real-time use of the framework available right now. The haredi position on draft exemption is structurally the position of someone whose moral intuitions have been formed exclusively inside the beit midrash and are not corrected by the natural-morality input that Rav Kook says the system requires. The position is internally coherent within talmudic discourse. It is incoherent against any moral intuition that includes the recognition that one’s children should not be exempt from defending their families and communities. Shapiro is right that this is not about Western values intruding on Jewish thinking. The intuition is more elementary than that. Anyone who has not been trained out of it possesses it. Trained out of it is the diagnostic. The training that produces the haredi exemption position is the training that severs the gemara from the natural-morality check that Rav Kook said the system needs.

The diagnosis explains the data Shapiro reports. Polls show that the haredi masses understand the exemption position is wrong. Younger haredim are entering the army in growing numbers. The shift is happening from the bottom up because the population’s natural morality is intact even when the leadership’s is compromised by training. This is exactly Rav Kook’s prediction running in real time. The masses are correcting the scholars. The scholars who run the major institutions cannot easily acknowledge the correction because acknowledging it would require admitting that the institutions’ theological position has been wrong for several generations. The acknowledgment will probably come anyway, but it will come slowly, in fragments, with face-saving formulations, and only after enough younger haredim have already shifted the practice on the ground that the leadership has no alternative but to ratify what has happened. The framework Rav Kook constructed predicts the dynamic and identifies the levers.

The sexual abuse scandal application Shapiro flags works the same way. The talmudic categories of mesirah and lashon hara, applied without the natural-morality check, produce results that protect abusers and harm victims. The application is internally coherent within the talmudic discourse. It is monstrous against any moral intuition that has not been trained out. The haredi second-tier rabbis and the haredi masses who refused to accept the protection of abusers were exercising the natural-morality check on the failing first-tier rabbis. The check eventually prevailed. The first-tier rabbis lost authority on the issue because the masses recognized that the rabbinic category-application was producing morally intolerable results. Rav Kook would say the masses were doing their structural job. The system requires the check. The check worked. The cost was that some abusers got away with their abuse for an extra generation while the system processed the correction. The cost was real. The check eventually held.

The Geneva-by-thoughts critique Lichtenstein leveled in the previous installment returns here in inverted form. Lichtenstein worried that Rav Kook was telling secular pioneers their work was really religious without their consent. The natural-morality framework runs the same risk in reverse. Rav Kook is now telling traditionalist scholars that the moral intuitions of secular and modern Jews have authority over their textual interpretations. The traditionalist scholar might say that this is theft of his interpretive authority by people who do not share his commitments. The traditionalist’s complaint mirrors Lichtenstein’s complaint about the pioneers. In each case, Rav Kook treats one group’s self-understanding as needing correction by reference to a higher framework only Rav Kook fully sees. The pioneers are told their work is religious despite their secular self-understanding. The traditionalists are told their interpretations are inadequate despite their textual mastery. Both groups have grounds for objection. Both objections are grounded in the same structural complaint. Rav Kook is willing to override anyone’s self-understanding when the framework requires it.

The willingness is what makes Rav Kook a coalition founder rather than a coalition member. Coalition members defer to other members’ self-understandings because that is what the coalition’s reciprocity rules require. Coalition founders override other members’ self-understandings because the founder’s job is to articulate the framework that other members do not yet see. The founder pays the cost of being accused of presumption. The founder accepts the cost because the alternative is to leave the framework un-articulated and to let the coalition fragment along the seams the framework would have held together. Rav Kook’s framework holds together a coalition that includes the textual scholars and the religious masses, the religious and the secular Zionists, the cosmologically and historically traditional and the cosmologically and historically progressive. No other framework available to him would have held this coalition. The cost of his framework is that everyone inside it has grounds for accusing him of overriding their self-understanding. The benefit is that the coalition holds.

The developing-morality move is more radical than the natural-morality move and Shapiro is right to flag the radicalism. Natural morality could in principle be a stable timeless faculty that simply checks the textual interpretation. Developing morality means the moral truth itself unfolds over time and earlier generations’ moral knowledge was less complete than later generations’. Shapiro is right that Rav Kook tries to soften this with the latency framing — the moral truth was always there, hidden in the text, awaiting the development that would let us see it. The latency framing preserves the formal commitment to the eternity of Torah while allowing substantive moral progress. The framing is sincere. It is also a hedge that lets Rav Kook hold both the conservative and progressive readers in the same tent. Conservative readers can take the latency claim at face value. Progressive readers can recognize that latency-plus-time is functionally equivalent to development. Both are right.

The slavery example is the cleanest case. The Torah and the rabbinic literature accommodate slavery. The medieval Jewish tradition accommodates slavery. No major rabbinic figure in the medieval period writes against slavery as a moral matter. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries produce widespread Jewish moral rejection of slavery without exception among the religious. Rav Kook would say the moral rejection was always latent in Torah and emerged when the conditions for its emergence were met. The traditional reading would say the moral rejection is a Western importation that has overridden the authentic Jewish position. Both readings are available on the historical evidence. Neither can be conclusively refuted by the other. The choice between them is a coalition choice, not a scholarly determination. Rav Kook’s coalition choice is that the moral rejection is the Torah position properly understood. The traditional reading’s coalition choice is that the moral rejection is foreign. The choice determines what the textual tradition can be made to say. The choice cannot be made on textual grounds alone because the textual tradition supports either reading.

This is the structural insight Shapiro’s whole project has been building toward across the six installments. Modern Orthodox theology is not undecided between progressive and traditional positions because the relevant figures have failed to do the necessary intellectual work. It is undecided because the relevant figures have done the work and have discovered that the work cannot in principle settle the question. The textual tradition supports both readings. The choice between the readings is a coalition decision. The coalition’s authority to make the decision rests on the coalition’s existence, and the coalition’s existence requires holding both readings open long enough for the coalition not to fragment. The figures who could have written the systematic theology declined to write it because writing it would have forced the coalition decision and would have fragmented the coalition. The unwritten guide remains unwritten because writing it would destroy what the writing was supposed to preserve. Shapiro is one of the few people writing about this honestly enough to let readers see the dilemma rather than papering over it.

The Amital and Lichtenstein closing material is doing the work that the rest of the installment cannot quite do. Amital admitting he loves kavod, Amital saying he is a simple person rather than a baal nefesh, Lichtenstein admitting that being honored bothers him both when it happens and when it does not — these are senior figures voicing exactly the natural-morality check Rav Kook said the system needs. They are not pretending to be other than what they are. They are letting the population see them as the population sees itself, with mixed motives and uncertain self-knowledge and the ordinary range of human reactions. The transparency is what makes them effective coalition figures. Their authority increases rather than decreases when they acknowledge the gap between their actual states and the idealized states the system formally requires. The acknowledgment lets the population recognize that the system is being run by people like themselves and that the system therefore can accommodate them. The senior figures who maintain the formal idealization in public lose authority over time because the population recognizes that the idealization is a performance. Amital and Lichtenstein do not do the performance. The framework Rav Kook constructed requires figures who do not do the performance. The framework’s continuing operation depends on enough such figures continuing to exist.

The framework, finally, is starting to look less like a theology of religious Zionism and more like the structural theory of how a religious community survives modernity without either capitulating to modernity or sealing itself off from it. The two failure modes are obvious. Capitulation produces Conservative and Reform Judaism, which gradually lose the population that grounds the moral authority the architecture needs. Sealing produces contemporary haredi Judaism, which preserves the population but produces moral monstrosities that the population’s own intuition rejects when the population is allowed to exercise its judgment. Modern Orthodoxy in its strongest moments does what Rav Kook’s architecture says it should do: it maintains observant practice as the population marker, lets natural morality among the observant check the textual tradition, accepts development of moral understanding as part of the system’s operation, and trusts that the textual tradition will yield up the resources needed to ratify the morally demanded changes. The architecture works. The institutional work to make it work fully is incomplete. Shapiro’s six installments together amount to a sustained argument that the work has been incomplete for a hundred years and that the costs of completing it remain too high for any individual figure to absorb. The work continues anyway, in fragments, in lecture halls, in correspondence, in books like Shapiro’s own. Whether the fragments coalesce into the unwritten guide is a question about the next twenty years rather than a question about the past hundred. The capacity is present. The willingness is what is in question.

11-10-25

This session captures the analytical pivot of the whole Kook chapter and clarifies what Shapiro is and is not willing to say in his own voice.

The structural move is clear. Rav Kook holds that natural morality precedes Torah and that the Sanhedrin has authority to update halacha when moral intuition becomes widespread. The mechanism is drasha. The constraint is the Sanhedrin. Shapiro spends most of the session laying that framework out, then names four cases Kook himself flags as time-bound: discretionary war, slavery, Amalek, and yefat toar. He adds a fifth of his own following Shadal: cities of refuge. He then cites Rabbi Ronen Neuwirth’s extension to sotah and immediately distances himself from it. “I never would have occurred to me to think that way.” But he keeps quoting Neuwirth because the door is open and he knows it.

That is the most revealing moment in the talk. Shapiro recognizes that Kook’s framework, once accepted, generates extensions Shapiro himself will not author. He licenses without authorizing. This matches the institutional position the prior analysis identified. Shapiro stays within the historical method because the method allows him to present findings as facts about Kook rather than structural claims about how Orthodox law works now. The “I never would have” formulation does the coalition management work. He gets credit for honesty about what the framework permits without paying the cost of proposing it himself.

The Lichtenstein-Sabato exchange is the cleanest illustration of the coalition line in operation. Sabato presses moral progress directly, citing Kook. Lichtenstein refuses. He says he will not sit in judgment of his forefathers, will not say we are more moral than the sages, will only concede that we do not want slavery in our world. Shapiro pushes back at Lichtenstein but cannot say what he wants to say without conceding the framework Lichtenstein blocks. Lichtenstein understands the stakes. To grant moral progress through divine providence is to grant that contemporary moral intuitions outrank inherited textual authority on at least some questions. That is the destabilization Lichtenstein refuses to license. Shapiro thinks Lichtenstein is wrong but also acknowledges Lichtenstein’s reason: it opens a Pandora’s box. The disagreement is not really about Kook. It is about how much destabilization the system can absorb without collapsing into a denomination Shapiro and Lichtenstein both reject.

The slavery footnote deserves attention. Shapiro mentions in passing that Kook has another letter where he echoes something close to Aristotle’s natural-slaves view, holding that some nations need slavery to elevate them morally. Shapiro brackets this as “100 years ago” and says it does not contradict the progressive reading because Kook still anticipates emancipation. This is precisely the curated emphasis the earlier coalition analysis predicted. Kook’s progressive passages get the analytical attention. The hierarchical and particularist passages get a footnote and a temporal apology. The academic coalition sympathetic to Modern Orthodoxy needs the liberal Kook. Shapiro delivers him while acknowledging the other Kook exists. The acknowledgment itself functions as a credibility signal: Shapiro is honest, therefore the curated emphasis is trustworthy. The structure is the same in his Kook book as in his earlier work.

The “decline of the scholars, ascent of the masses” claim is a bit of historical sleight of hand that deserves more pressure than Shapiro gives it. He cites Daf Yomi participation, twelfth-grade Torah education, and a year in Israel as evidence the masses have risen. Kelman concurs, then notes that the rise of laymen learning has produced a distancing from other Jews and a denominational fragmentation that did not exist in Eastern Europe. Both observations might be true at once, but they pull against Kook’s frame. If textualization is replacing mimetic transmission, the masses have not risen morally. They have substituted book-knowledge for the embedded ethical formation that Shapiro himself praises in the Eastern European derech eretz tradition. Soloveitchik’s rupture-and-reconstruction thesis, which Shapiro invokes at the end, says exactly this. The yoke of the law replaced the yoke of God’s presence. That is not moral progress in Kook’s sense. It is a different mode of religious life with its own losses. Shapiro wants both readings: the masses are ethically more sensitive than their grandparents (Kook’s progress thesis), and the masses have lost the primal connection their grandparents had (Soloveitchik’s rupture thesis). The two claims sit uneasily together and the talk does not reconcile them.

The Moshe Feinstein-on-homosexuality example is the strongest contemporary illustration of the framework Shapiro endorses. Reb Moshe wrote, within living memory, that homosexuality cannot be a real orientation, only a rebellion against God. Today even Haredi posekim suppress that response or work around it. Shapiro reads the suppression as a moral advance. A more deflationary reading is available: the suppression is coalition management. Public defense of Reb Moshe’s position carries reputational cost in environments the Haredi world has to navigate (employment, funding, legal exposure). The position itself has not been refuted within Haredi theology. It has been bracketed. Whether bracketing is moral progress or coalition adaptation depends on whether you accept Kook’s framework that natural moral intuition reveals the divine will. If you accept it, suppression is progress. If you do not, it is selective enforcement. Shapiro accepts it but does not engage the alternative reading.

The Morris Raphall reference is the right kind of historical gut-punch and Shapiro uses it well. A leading Orthodox rabbi defended slavery from a New York pulpit in the nineteenth century and his sermon circulated through the South. The example does the work of refuting any “Orthodoxy was always against slavery” narrative. It also makes the harder argument Shapiro will not quite make: if the leading Orthodox rabbi of his day got it that wrong on a question this fundamental, then the authority structure Shapiro otherwise defers to has a much weaker claim on contemporary moral judgment than its self-presentation suggests. Shapiro flirts with this implication and pulls back.

Two smaller things worth flagging.

The Rabbi Neuwirth detail is a real loss. He died at fifty in 2021, head of Beit Hillel, the leading institutional voice for moderate religious Zionism. His willingness to extend Kook’s framework to sotah is the kind of move that would have shifted the conversation had he lived another twenty years. Shapiro mentions him almost in passing, but Neuwirth represents the next-generation use of Kook that Shapiro’s book makes possible without Shapiro authoring it.

The Manoach example from Judges 13 is interesting as a pattern Shapiro keeps returning to: women’s intuition as natural sense, set against men’s textual learning. Rav Mazuz’s reading is consoling toward men, treating intuition as compensation for not learning Gemara. The pattern Kook describes runs the other way. Intuition reveals the divine will more directly than text. Shapiro does not press this, but his framework makes it impossible to maintain the consolation reading. If natural morality is revelation, then the people with the strongest natural moral intuitions have the strongest claim to read the divine will, and that pulls against the textual hierarchy the system runs on. Kook resolves this by saying the Sanhedrin must ratify intuition through drasha. With no Sanhedrin, the question is who ratifies it now. Shapiro does not answer that question, and the answer is part of what determines whether Kook’s framework is a resource for renewal or a license for fragmentation.

The strongest thing in the talk is Shapiro’s recognition that the time-bound mitzvot section is the most subversive part of Kook, more so than the natural morality section. He says it explicitly: the natural morality stuff is theorizing, but the time-bound mitzvot claim goes to the system that runs Jewish life. He is right about that. The chapter’s sequence buries the most radical claim in the middle of a discussion that looks like it is about ethics and ends up being about which mitzvot future authorities can suspend. That is the chapter’s load-bearing claim, and Shapiro’s willingness to name it as such is the kind of honesty his work consistently delivers.

11-17-25

This eighth installment is where the framework Shapiro has been building stops being theoretical and starts naming the practical levers that determine which way Modern Orthodoxy moves over the next decade or two. The cannibalism case is the analytical center even though it sounds like a curiosity, and Shapiro is right to make it the centerpiece of the chapter.

The Glasner-Kaminetsky-Amital position is the one Shapiro is endorsing, and it is the right place to draw the line. The standard Maimonidean reading says cannibalism is a positive-commandment violation at most and not a negative prohibition, and pork is a clear negative prohibition with malkot attached. The textbook calculus says you eat the human flesh and skip the pork. Glasner, Kaminetsky, and Amital all reach the opposite conclusion. The reasoning is that the textbook calculus does not capture what the Torah actually wants. There is something about eating a human body that is more severe than what the explicit prohibitions can register, and the textual silence is not because the practice is permitted but because the practice is so obviously wrong that the Torah did not need to say so. Weinberg’s formulation is the cleanest. There is no isur on the books. The act is against the will of the Torah anyway. The will of the Torah and the explicit prohibitions are not coextensive.

This is exactly the architecture Rav Kook built. Natural morality is a parallel revelation. The textual revelation does not exhaust what the Torah requires. Where the textual calculus produces a result that natural morality rejects, the natural-morality reading wins, and the textual tradition will be reinterpreted to confirm the result. Glasner, Kaminetsky, and Amital are running Rav Kook’s procedure on a hard test case. They are not appealing to Western values. They are appealing to a moral reading of Torah that the textual surface does not capture but that the deeper structure requires. Lichtenstein’s position — eat the human flesh because the textual calculus is clear — is the consistent textualist answer. He pays the price of being right by the rules and wrong by the deeper reading. The price is real. He absorbs it because his framework does not have a procedure for treating natural morality as a parallel authority. Rav Kook’s framework does, and the Glasner line is the result of running it.

Tragerman’s reading of Amital is the analytical move that does the most damage to the framework, and Shapiro is right to flag it. Tragerman wants to defend Amital but ends up undermining the position. He concedes that personal moral sensitivity cannot suspend halakhah in normal cases, and then he tries to carve out an exception for the desert-island case on the grounds that the situation is already compromised. The carve-out collapses on the burning-building case Tragerman discusses next. Running out naked involves no halakhic violation at all. The whole question is whether dignity can override a discretionary halakhic concern that does not reach the level of a clear prohibition. The Dor Revii says yes — wear the wife’s gown, the dignity concern is more serious than the cross-dressing concern, even though only the cross-dressing concern is a clear prohibition. Tragerman cannot accept the move because his framework does not allow non-textual considerations to outweigh textual ones. So he ends the discussion by saying the Dor Revii’s reading “raises questions” and dropping it.

The two cases are the same case. The Dor Revii is treating dignity and the moral revulsion against cannibalism as the same kind of authority — natural-morality considerations that the textual tradition has not encoded but that the system requires us to honor. Tragerman accepts the move on the desert island and rejects it in the burning building, which means he does not actually have a principle, only a willingness to defer to Amital where Amital reached the right conclusion and a refusal to defer where the implications would extend further. Shapiro is right to call this missing the forest for the trees. The framework Amital was running is the framework Rav Kook built, and the framework cannot be applied selectively without losing its coherence.

The Yaarot Devash material Shapiro opens with is the analytically most surprising thing in the installment, and it cuts harder than Shapiro lets on. Eybeschütz says — in print, as a published derashah — that non-Jews observe the natural mitzvot better than Jews. The natural mitzvot are the ones rooted in basic moral intuition rather than in textual command. The claim that non-Jews handle these better than Jews has to be set against the standard Orthodox formulation that Jews have privileged access to morality through Torah. Eybeschütz says the standard formulation is wrong as a description of how Jews actually behave. Whatever the theoretical advantage Torah gives, Jews in practice underperform on the moral baseline that any human being should be able to reach.

Shapiro flags the tension with Rav Kook’s position and lets it sit, but the tension is more productive than he acknowledges. Rav Kook says natural morality is a divine revelation that Jews have privileged access to through their Torah formation. Eybeschütz says Jews in his time were performing worse on natural morality than the surrounding non-Jews. Both can be true. The privileged access is theoretical. The actual performance depends on whether the community has built itself in a way that lets the access translate into conduct. Eybeschütz’s point is that eighteenth-century Prague Jewry had not built itself this way. The textual access was there. The performance was not. The same diagnosis applies in any generation where the community has organized itself around textualism in a way that severs the textual tradition from the moral check Rav Kook said the system requires. The haredi draft-exemption position from the previous installments is a contemporary instance. The texts support the position. The natural-morality check that should have caught the position does not catch it because the community has trained the check out.

The Norworth move on sotah is the place where Shapiro’s caution about opening the door becomes most exposed. Norworth follows Rav Kook explicitly and says the rabbis in the messianic era will find a way not to actualize the sotah ritual. Shapiro is uncomfortable with the move because sotah does not obviously offend natural morality the way slavery and amalek and discretionary war do. Shapiro’s instinct is right that the move is harder to justify on Rav Kook’s own terms. The sotah ritual is a public legal procedure with a defined trigger and a defined outcome. Whether it offends natural morality depends on whether you find the ordeal procedure intrinsically offensive or only offensive because of how it is gendered. The first reading puts it in the same category as discretionary war. The second reading puts it in a category Rav Kook does not address — practices that natural morality rejects because of their distributional effects rather than because of their intrinsic content.

Shapiro is right to flag that the door is now open and that the implications are unbounded. The Norworth move on sotah, the Aviner-Sherlo moves on developing morality, the contemporary moves on agunah that the Sanhedrin would solve if it existed — these are all running the same procedure. Once the procedure is granted, the question of which mitzvot remain operative becomes a coalition decision rather than a textual one. Shapiro’s worry is that the coalition decisions will not stop at amalek and slavery and discretionary war. The worry is realistic. The framework does not contain its own brake. The brake is supposed to be the Sanhedrin, which does not exist. In the Sanhedrin’s absence, individual figures take individual positions, and the cumulative effect is that the line drifts.

The drift is the actual condition of contemporary Modern Orthodoxy. Tucker’s argument that women count for a minyan is the same architectural move that Norworth makes on sotah and that Glasner makes on cannibalism. The textual surface gives one result. A natural-morality reading combined with a willingness to override the standardized halakhic conclusion gives a different result. Tucker accepts the override. Hadar functions as the institutional home for figures willing to make the override. Modern Orthodoxy as Shapiro is writing about it does not formally accept the override but does not formally reject the architecture that makes the override available. The result is that the override is in the air, available to any individual figure willing to absorb the coalition cost of making it explicit, and the institutional structure cannot stop it from being made.

The Berkat ha-mazon orach material Shapiro brings up at the end is the small example that actually shows the structural problem most clearly. The Talmud has a guest’s blessing for the host that should be added to bentching. The blessing is in the standard sources. For most of the last several centuries it was not said. The current generation is bringing it back because it is in the books and the books are the controlling authority. The previous generation’s tradition that did not say the blessing has lost its standing. Soloveitchik’s “rupture and reconstruction” is the diagnostic. The chain of transmission through grandparents and parents that gave living traditions their authority has been broken. The book authority that replaced it is the only authority left, and the book authority is producing practices that the previous generations did not have because the books say things that the living tradition had quietly set aside.

The structural insight Shapiro keeps circling — and that this installment makes most explicit — is that the choice between book authority and tradition authority is not a choice between two things on the same level. Book authority is what you have when tradition authority has failed. Tradition authority requires grandparents who lived the tradition, parents who absorbed it from them, and a community that takes the parents’ transmission as authoritative. The combination is hard to maintain across an immigrant generation, a war-displacement generation, or a denominational-reorganization generation. Shapiro is right that the current Orthodox community has all three of these working against it. The grandparents are gone, the European community that produced them is gone, and the denominational reorganization in America has rebuilt the community around the books because the books are the only thing that survived intact.

The cost of this rebuild is that Rav Kook’s framework cannot work in the rebuilt community in the way it was supposed to work. Rav Kook’s framework requires a population whose moral intuitions have been formed by serious observance and whose intuitions can therefore carry authority. The contemporary Orthodox population’s moral intuitions are formed partly by serious observance and partly by the books that the community has reorganized itself around. The book-formed intuitions reproduce what the books say. They do not exercise the natural-morality check the framework requires. The framework was designed for a population whose intuitions developed alongside but not under the books. That population was the Eastern European masses Rav Kook addressed. Those masses no longer exist. The masses that exist now have been reformed under book authority and produce intuitions that are downstream of the books rather than independent of them.

This is the problem Shapiro keeps reaching for and that the installment makes visible. The framework remains correct as architecture. The population the framework requires has eroded. The Glasner-Kaminetsky-Amital line on cannibalism still works because the moral intuition against eating human flesh is so deep that no amount of book reformation has overridden it. The application to less obvious cases — sotah, agunah, draft exemption, women’s role in the minyan — depends on whether moral intuitions on those cases survived the book reformation strongly enough to carry authority. On some of them the intuitions have survived. On others they have been replaced by book-driven positions that present themselves as intuitive but are actually downstream of the textualism the framework was supposed to check. Telling which is which becomes the actual analytical work, and the framework does not contain a procedure for telling.

The Lichtenstein-Bleich diagnosis Shapiro lands on at the end is the right summary of where this leaves things. Lichtenstein wrote a whole essay on human and social factors in halakhah, was capable of bringing those factors into halakhic decision-making in ordinary cases, and refused to do so in the cannibalism case because the cannibalism case asked him to override settled textual law rather than to apply textual law in a humane way. The distinction matters. Lichtenstein’s framework lets natural-morality considerations shape interpretation. It does not let them override settled conclusions. Amital’s framework lets them override. The two frameworks produce the same results on most ordinary cases and produce divergent results on hard cases. The hard cases are where the framework actually pays out, and the divergence between Lichtenstein and Amital on hard cases is the divergence between two readings of Rav Kook that both have textual support and that the coalition has not decided between.

The closing exchange about Berber’s tradition essay and the loss of the local rav is the small institutional fact that fits this whole picture. The local rav used to absorb the coalition cost of marginal decisions because the local rav had relationships with the people the decisions affected and because the decisions were not visible to anyone outside the community. The internet made the decisions visible to everyone immediately. The visibility made the local rav unwilling to make the decisions because making them would expose him to coalition costs from people he did not have relationships with. The decisions migrated upward to the gedolim who could absorb the costs. The gedolim, lacking the local relationships, applied book-driven standards. Book-driven standards reproduce the textual surface that the local rav’s relationships used to soften. The community got more uniform, more book-bound, and more textual at exactly the moment when the framework Rav Kook constructed needed local discretion most.

Shapiro’s closing point is more pessimistic than he quite says. The framework requires institutions that no longer exist — Sanhedrin, local rav with autonomy, communities organized around tradition rather than text. The institutions are not coming back. The framework therefore runs in fragments rather than as a system. Individual figures make individual moves. Some of the moves are in the spirit of the framework. Others are not. The community has no procedure for distinguishing them. The procedure was supposed to be the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin requires conditions that contemporary Modern Orthodoxy cannot produce. The fragments accumulate. The line drifts. Whether the drift settles into a stable new equilibrium or continues indefinitely is the actual question about the next twenty years, and Shapiro is honest enough to leave the question open at the end of the chapter rather than claiming to answer it.

11-25-25

This ninth installment is where the framework Shapiro has been building turns outward and confronts the question the previous chapters were structured to delay. The natural-morality machinery that the chapter on heresy and the chapter on Jewish law both ran on was always going to have implications for how Rav Kook positioned Judaism against the rest of the world’s religions. The implications turn out to be more extensive than most readers of Rav Kook have been told, and Shapiro is honest about how far they extend.
The Berkat ha-orach and women-in-shul material at the opening is doing more work than it looks like. Shapiro is using the small examples to demonstrate the structural point that the previous installments left implicit. The Talmudic basis for the guest’s blessing is straightforward and has been on the page for two thousand years. The blessing was not said in living Ashkenazi practice within memory. The new bentchers are restoring it. The restoration is presented as a return to the sources. What the restoration actually is is a reorganization of authority. The living tradition that did not say the blessing has been overruled by the textual tradition that did. Mishnah Berurah noticed the gap and asked why we do not say the version the Gemara prescribes. The Mishnah Berurah did not change the practice. The contemporary bentcher publishers did. The change happened not because new evidence appeared but because the population that gave the living tradition its authority is no longer there to give it.
The women-in-shul material runs the same diagnostic. The textual tradition has women present in synagogue from the Yerushalmi forward. Masechet Soferim has the safer Torah elevated so men and women can see the script. The women’s gallery is a real architectural feature in Sephardic synagogues that goes back centuries. Then in some Middle Eastern communities women stopped attending entirely, and the absence got read backwards as the original tradition. Shapiro is right to flag this as a divergence rather than a baseline. What it shows is that Rav Kook’s framework is correct on the small scale even when no one has explicitly applied it. The masses lose touch with a practice. The textual tradition keeps the practice on the page. Eventually someone notices the gap and the practice gets restored or theorized. The restoration cycle is real and operating at the level of small details all the time.
The Mei Hashiloach passage Shapiro pulls in is the antinomian extreme of the same architecture, and Shapiro is right to call it dangerous. The Yehudah figure who looks toward God to know what to do regardless of what the law says is the framework’s worst-case mode. The Glasner-Kaminetsky-Amital position from the previous installment said that natural morality can override the textual surface where the will of the Torah is more demanding than the explicit prohibitions. The Mei Hashiloach pushes the move further. Sometimes the will of God runs against the law itself and the elite figure has to follow the will against the law. This is what Shapiro means when he says it opens a can of worms. Once the principle is granted at all, the boundary between Glasner-on-cannibalism and Mei-Hashiloach-on-anything-the-superior-soul-feels-called-to is a matter of who is doing the calling rather than a principled distinction. Rav Kook does not go this far. The framework Rav Kook built lets him not go this far. But the framework does not contain a principled stop, and the Mei Hashiloach is the example of where the framework goes when no one stops it.
The Zohar-authorship material is the analytically least surprising thing in the chapter and the most diagnostic. Rav Kook holds that the authorship question does not bear on the work’s holiness. The Nazir reports that this was Rav Kook’s position even though Rav Kook never said so in print. The Nazir himself follows Yaavetz in saying that parts of the Zohar are clearly medieval and that the medieval origin does not detract from the work’s status because the holiness lives in the content rather than the chain of transmission. The Nazir adds that this position cannot be stated openly because the masses would lose their reverence for the work if they knew, so the elite holds the position privately while saying publicly that the work is from Rashbi.
This is exactly the structural condition Shapiro has been describing across all the installments. The serious figures hold positions they cannot publish. They publish positions they do not fully hold. The publishable positions become the public theology. The serious positions stay in private letters, lecture notes, and after-the-fact reports by students. The Nazir is the data point that confirms the diagnosis. He tells you both what Rav Kook actually thought about the Zohar and why Rav Kook never said so in print. The reasons are the coalition reasons Shapiro has been identifying since the first installment. The chief rabbi of the Yishuv could not publish the view that the Zohar was partly medieval without breaking the religious-Zionist coalition’s credibility with the haredi-adjacent population that needed the Zohar’s antiquity to be a settled question. The view was correct. The publication was unaffordable. The unwritten record is the real record.
The body of the chapter on other religions is where the framework’s implications run furthest from where most contemporary Modern Orthodox readers expect Rav Kook to be. The standard Orthodox reading of non-Jewish religions has been the Maimonidean reading sharpened by Meiri. Christianity and Islam are stages on the path from paganism to monotheism. They serve a providential function but they are theologically wrong, and serious truth is in Judaism. Modern non-Jews who follow the Noahide laws have a relationship with God through that observance. Outside of the Noahide framework there is no relationship with God for non-Jews to have.
Rav Kook’s position is not this position. Rav Kook says the founders of Christianity and Islam may have been divinely inspired in a sense more substantive than providential management of pagan populations. He says they may have performed actual wonders that confirmed their messages to their addressees. He says most religious founders may have had ruach hakodesh, and possibly even prophecy. He says religions that lack idolatry are authentic divinely inspired religions in their own right and can serve as vehicles of authentic relationship with God for the populations they address. He says even religions that do contain idolatry have value, because the populations following them are at a stage where the idolatrous element is what makes the religious message accessible to them, and the religion as a whole is moving them toward a higher relationship with God that they could not reach directly. He cites Micah’s “let each people walk in the name of its god” and reads it the way Abarbanel and others read it, as an authentic divine tolerance for the religious development of populations not yet ready for full monotheism.
This is religious pluralism on terms that no major Orthodox figure of the last several centuries has stated in public. Sacks tried to state something close to it in The Dignity of Difference and had to retract it under haredi pressure. The retracted version was not as far out as Rav Kook’s published guide-to-the-perplexed material. The published guide-to-the-perplexed material was itself probably suppressed because of these passages. Shapiro is right that the suppression suggests the position was understood at the time to be dangerous. The position is dangerous because it removes the foundation for the standard Orthodox treatment of non-Jewish religions as failed approximations of Judaism. If non-Jewish religions are independent vehicles of authentic relationship with God for their addressees, the missionary instinct that says non-Jews should ideally come to Judaism cannot be sustained. Rav Kook does not sustain it. He says non-Jews should not generally convert to Judaism, that conversion is for special cases, and that the average non-Jew finds religious fulfillment best in his native religion. This is structurally the position John Hick or Wilfred Cantwell Smith would defend in twentieth-century Christian theology, except that Rav Kook is defending it from inside Orthodox Judaism and grounding it in cabalistic theology rather than in pluralist philosophy of religion.
The grounding matters. The cabalistic position Rav Kook is operating from says holy sparks are scattered throughout creation and the work of religious life is to gather and elevate them. The position generalizes naturally to the religions of the world. Every religion contains some divine spark because every religion is responding, however imperfectly, to the same underlying reality. The work of monotheism is not to destroy the imperfect religions but to gather their sparks. This is a structural reading of religious diversity that does not require the imperfect religions to be replaced. They contain the work the divine has placed in them, and that work is for the populations they address. The framework lets Rav Kook respect what is true in other religions without pretending the falsehoods are true. He preserves the supremacy of Judaism as the highest religion while denying that the highest religion is the only religion through which the divine works in the world.
The position Shapiro is most careful about is the position on Jesus. Rav Kook treats Jesus as a complicated case where the published material has to be sharply negative because the religious community Jesus founded has turned him into a god, and any positive Jewish appraisal of Jesus would feed back into the idolatrous use Christianity has made of him. The melted-gold image Shapiro previews is the right structural picture. While the gold is in the form of an idol it cannot be admired. Once the idol is melted down the gold can be examined on its own merits. The structural implication is that contemporary Christianity, where it is trinitarian and incarnational, cannot be the venue for Jewish positive engagement with Jesus. Unitarian Christianity, or post-Christian readings of Jesus as a Jewish teacher, can be. The contemporary trend in New Testament scholarship that reads Jesus inside his Jewish context is the venue Rav Kook’s framework would license for positive Jewish engagement, and Shapiro is right to flag that this trend has been gathering for the last fifty years and that figures like Daniel Boyarin and others have been doing the work without invoking Rav Kook.
The Eliyahu Soloveitchik commentary on the Gospels Shapiro mentions at the close is the data point that confirms the framework was operating in serious Orthodox circles even when not publicly acknowledged. A cousin of the Beis Halevi wrote a commentary on the New Testament treating Jesus’s message as kosher Jewish content directed to non-Jews to civilize them. Yaavetz held a structurally similar position. Benamozegh did. Yehudah ha-Nasi ben Rabbi Fumi did. The Italian-Sephardic-North-African line of liberal positions on other religions runs through these figures without ever consolidating into an institutional position because the Ashkenazi mainstream that consolidated theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not pick up the line. The line existed. It was held by serious figures. It did not become the public Orthodox position because the public Orthodox position formed under different coalition pressures in different communities.
Shapiro’s installment makes the structural point clear without quite saying it. The Modern Orthodox position on other religions has not been settled by serious theological argument. It has been settled by which figures got published and which did not, which positions got institutional support and which did not, which communities had the demographic weight to make their positions feel like the default. The position that has won is the conservative Maimonidean-Meiri position that limits non-Jewish religious authenticity to the Noahide framework. The position that has lost is the pluralist cabalistic position that Rav Kook represents alongside the Italian-Sephardic line. The pluralist position has not been refuted. It has been outweighed institutionally. Sacks felt the institutional weight when he tried to publish a moderate version of the position. The moderate version was unsustainable. The full version stays in Rav Kook’s unpublished material and in the Nazir’s notes and in scattered Italian-Sephardic commentaries.
The position is in an interesting state right now. The contemporary moment has features that the older institutional pressures did not. The internet has made the older suppressed positions accessible to anyone who searches for them. Shapiro’s own book is one of several recent works pulling Rav Kook’s material into general circulation. The Soloveitchik commentary on the Gospels has been translated and published with Magid’s annotations. Sacks is dead. Magid is at Dartmouth writing about Boyarin and the Jewish Jesus. The Stone Edition translation of the Hebrew volume on liberal religious approaches is out. The institutional pressures that kept the pluralist position out of Modern Orthodox public discourse are weaker than they were a generation ago. Whether the position consolidates into a recognized stream within Modern Orthodoxy or stays as a permanent minority position is a question that depends on whether figures with institutional standing decide to absorb the cost of saying so in public.
Rav Kook would be on the side of saying so in public, in his elite mode. He stayed silent in his published mode because the costs were unaffordable in his lifetime. The costs are lower now. Shapiro’s book is a partial test of how much lower. The Sacks Book Prize finalist status Shapiro mentions is the small institutional confirmation that the academic-Orthodox space has room for the material. Whether the broader Modern Orthodox community has room for the material is the question the next generation of figures will answer. The framework Rav Kook built can support the answer either way. The framework requires the population willing to absorb the costs of the answer, and that population is the actual variable.
The closing thread on the cabalistic suffusion of contemporary Orthodox practice that Firestein flagged is the small structural fact that closes the loop. Contemporary Orthodox Jews mostly do not study cabala but their practice is saturated with cabalistic provenance. Kabbalat Shabbat, ushpizin, the order of putting on tefillin, the structure of much of the siddur — all cabalistic in origin. The community has absorbed the practice without absorbing the theory. Rav Kook would say this is exactly what should not be. The framework requires the theory to be present so that the practice has its proper meaning. The community has the practice as ritual and the theory as suspect arcana that elite figures do behind closed doors. The split between practice and theory is the same split as the split between published positions and serious positions on other religions, on developing morality, on the Sanhedrin’s role, on natural morality as a parallel revelation. The community runs its religious life on the surface of the framework while the depths are accessible only to figures willing to do the private work.
Shapiro’s project across the full nine installments now has a clear shape. He is documenting the gap between the published theology of contemporary Modern Orthodoxy and the actual theology that the relevant figures have privately held, with Rav Kook as the central case study because Rav Kook left the largest unpublished record. The published theology is conservative on most of the questions where the private theology is liberal. The conservative public position has institutional support that the liberal private position does not. The institutional support comes from the population that needs the conservative position to be the official one. The population’s needs reflect coalition conditions that Shapiro has been describing across the whole series — the loss of grandparents, the rebuilding of community around books, the migration of authority from local rav to remote gadol, the internet’s flattening of internal community discourse into globally visible positions. The conditions produce the conservative public theology. The serious figures hold the liberal private theology and pay the cost of not publishing it. The next generation will decide whether the cost has shifted enough to make publication possible. Shapiro’s book is one of the inputs to that decision. The book exists. The decision is downstream.

12-2-25

This ninth installment is where the framework Shapiro has been building turns outward and confronts the question the previous chapters were structured to delay. The natural-morality machinery that the chapter on heresy and the chapter on Jewish law both ran on was always going to have implications for how Rav Kook positioned Judaism against the rest of the world’s religions. The implications turn out to be more extensive than most readers of Rav Kook have been told, and Shapiro is honest about how far they extend.
The Berkat ha-orach and women-in-shul material at the opening is doing more work than it looks like. Shapiro is using the small examples to demonstrate the structural point that the previous installments left implicit. The Talmudic basis for the guest’s blessing is straightforward and has been on the page for two thousand years. The blessing was not said in living Ashkenazi practice within memory. The new bentchers are restoring it. The restoration is presented as a return to the sources. What the restoration actually is is a reorganization of authority. The living tradition that did not say the blessing has been overruled by the textual tradition that did. Mishnah Berurah noticed the gap and asked why we do not say the version the Gemara prescribes. The Mishnah Berurah did not change the practice. The contemporary bentcher publishers did. The change happened not because new evidence appeared but because the population that gave the living tradition its authority is no longer there to give it.
The women-in-shul material runs the same diagnostic. The textual tradition has women present in synagogue from the Yerushalmi forward. Masechet Soferim has the safer Torah elevated so men and women can see the script. The women’s gallery is a real architectural feature in Sephardic synagogues that goes back centuries. Then in some Middle Eastern communities women stopped attending entirely, and the absence got read backwards as the original tradition. Shapiro is right to flag this as a divergence rather than a baseline. What it shows is that Rav Kook’s framework is correct on the small scale even when no one has explicitly applied it. The masses lose touch with a practice. The textual tradition keeps the practice on the page. Eventually someone notices the gap and the practice gets restored or theorized. The restoration cycle is real and operating at the level of small details all the time.
The Mei Hashiloach passage Shapiro pulls in is the antinomian extreme of the same architecture, and Shapiro is right to call it dangerous. The Yehudah figure who looks toward God to know what to do regardless of what the law says is the framework’s worst-case mode. The Glasner-Kaminetsky-Amital position from the previous installment said that natural morality can override the textual surface where the will of the Torah is more demanding than the explicit prohibitions. The Mei Hashiloach pushes the move further. Sometimes the will of God runs against the law itself and the elite figure has to follow the will against the law. This is what Shapiro means when he says it opens a can of worms. Once the principle is granted at all, the boundary between Glasner-on-cannibalism and Mei-Hashiloach-on-anything-the-superior-soul-feels-called-to is a matter of who is doing the calling rather than a principled distinction. Rav Kook does not go this far. The framework Rav Kook built lets him not go this far. But the framework does not contain a principled stop, and the Mei Hashiloach is the example of where the framework goes when no one stops it.
The Zohar-authorship material is the analytically least surprising thing in the chapter and the most diagnostic. Rav Kook holds that the authorship question does not bear on the work’s holiness. The Nazir reports that this was Rav Kook’s position even though Rav Kook never said so in print. The Nazir himself follows Yaavetz in saying that parts of the Zohar are clearly medieval and that the medieval origin does not detract from the work’s status because the holiness lives in the content rather than the chain of transmission. The Nazir adds that this position cannot be stated openly because the masses would lose their reverence for the work if they knew, so the elite holds the position privately while saying publicly that the work is from Rashbi.
This is exactly the structural condition Shapiro has been describing across all the installments. The serious figures hold positions they cannot publish. They publish positions they do not fully hold. The publishable positions become the public theology. The serious positions stay in private letters, lecture notes, and after-the-fact reports by students. The Nazir is the data point that confirms the diagnosis. He tells you both what Rav Kook actually thought about the Zohar and why Rav Kook never said so in print. The reasons are the coalition reasons Shapiro has been identifying since the first installment. The chief rabbi of the Yishuv could not publish the view that the Zohar was partly medieval without breaking the religious-Zionist coalition’s credibility with the haredi-adjacent population that needed the Zohar’s antiquity to be a settled question. The view was correct. The publication was unaffordable. The unwritten record is the real record.
The body of the chapter on other religions is where the framework’s implications run furthest from where most contemporary Modern Orthodox readers expect Rav Kook to be. The standard Orthodox reading of non-Jewish religions has been the Maimonidean reading sharpened by Meiri. Christianity and Islam are stages on the path from paganism to monotheism. They serve a providential function but they are theologically wrong, and serious truth is in Judaism. Modern non-Jews who follow the Noahide laws have a relationship with God through that observance. Outside of the Noahide framework there is no relationship with God for non-Jews to have.
Rav Kook’s position is not this position. Rav Kook says the founders of Christianity and Islam may have been divinely inspired in a sense more substantive than providential management of pagan populations. He says they may have performed actual wonders that confirmed their messages to their addressees. He says most religious founders may have had ruach hakodesh, and possibly even prophecy. He says religions that lack idolatry are authentic divinely inspired religions in their own right and can serve as vehicles of authentic relationship with God for the populations they address. He says even religions that do contain idolatry have value, because the populations following them are at a stage where the idolatrous element is what makes the religious message accessible to them, and the religion as a whole is moving them toward a higher relationship with God that they could not reach directly. He cites Micah’s “let each people walk in the name of its god” and reads it the way Abarbanel and others read it, as an authentic divine tolerance for the religious development of populations not yet ready for full monotheism.
This is religious pluralism on terms that no major Orthodox figure of the last several centuries has stated in public. Sacks tried to state something close to it in The Dignity of Difference and had to retract it under haredi pressure. The retracted version was not as far out as Rav Kook’s published guide-to-the-perplexed material. The published guide-to-the-perplexed material was itself probably suppressed because of these passages. Shapiro is right that the suppression suggests the position was understood at the time to be dangerous. The position is dangerous because it removes the foundation for the standard Orthodox treatment of non-Jewish religions as failed approximations of Judaism. If non-Jewish religions are independent vehicles of authentic relationship with God for their addressees, the missionary instinct that says non-Jews should ideally come to Judaism cannot be sustained. Rav Kook does not sustain it. He says non-Jews should not generally convert to Judaism, that conversion is for special cases, and that the average non-Jew finds religious fulfillment best in his native religion. This is structurally the position John Hick or Wilfred Cantwell Smith would defend in twentieth-century Christian theology, except that Rav Kook is defending it from inside Orthodox Judaism and grounding it in cabalistic theology rather than in pluralist philosophy of religion.
The grounding matters. The cabalistic position Rav Kook is operating from says holy sparks are scattered throughout creation and the work of religious life is to gather and elevate them. The position generalizes naturally to the religions of the world. Every religion contains some divine spark because every religion is responding, however imperfectly, to the same underlying reality. The work of monotheism is not to destroy the imperfect religions but to gather their sparks. This is a structural reading of religious diversity that does not require the imperfect religions to be replaced. They contain the work the divine has placed in them, and that work is for the populations they address. The framework lets Rav Kook respect what is true in other religions without pretending the falsehoods are true. He preserves the supremacy of Judaism as the highest religion while denying that the highest religion is the only religion through which the divine works in the world.
The position Shapiro is most careful about is the position on Jesus. Rav Kook treats Jesus as a complicated case where the published material has to be sharply negative because the religious community Jesus founded has turned him into a god, and any positive Jewish appraisal of Jesus would feed back into the idolatrous use Christianity has made of him. The melted-gold image Shapiro previews is the right structural picture. While the gold is in the form of an idol it cannot be admired. Once the idol is melted down the gold can be examined on its own merits. The structural implication is that contemporary Christianity, where it is trinitarian and incarnational, cannot be the venue for Jewish positive engagement with Jesus. Unitarian Christianity, or post-Christian readings of Jesus as a Jewish teacher, can be. The contemporary trend in New Testament scholarship that reads Jesus inside his Jewish context is the venue Rav Kook’s framework would license for positive Jewish engagement, and Shapiro is right to flag that this trend has been gathering for the last fifty years and that figures like Daniel Boyarin and others have been doing the work without invoking Rav Kook.
The Eliyahu Soloveitchik commentary on the Gospels Shapiro mentions at the close is the data point that confirms the framework was operating in serious Orthodox circles even when not publicly acknowledged. A cousin of the Beis Halevi wrote a commentary on the New Testament treating Jesus’s message as kosher Jewish content directed to non-Jews to civilize them. Yaavetz held a structurally similar position. Benamozegh did. Yehudah ha-Nasi ben Rabbi Fumi did. The Italian-Sephardic-North-African line of liberal positions on other religions runs through these figures without ever consolidating into an institutional position because the Ashkenazi mainstream that consolidated theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not pick up the line. The line existed. It was held by serious figures. It did not become the public Orthodox position because the public Orthodox position formed under different coalition pressures in different communities.
Shapiro’s installment makes the structural point clear without quite saying it. The Modern Orthodox position on other religions has not been settled by serious theological argument. It has been settled by which figures got published and which did not, which positions got institutional support and which did not, which communities had the demographic weight to make their positions feel like the default. The position that has won is the conservative Maimonidean-Meiri position that limits non-Jewish religious authenticity to the Noahide framework. The position that has lost is the pluralist cabalistic position that Rav Kook represents alongside the Italian-Sephardic line. The pluralist position has not been refuted. It has been outweighed institutionally. Sacks felt the institutional weight when he tried to publish a moderate version of the position. The moderate version was unsustainable. The full version stays in Rav Kook’s unpublished material and in the Nazir’s notes and in scattered Italian-Sephardic commentaries.
The position is in an interesting state right now. The contemporary moment has features that the older institutional pressures did not. The internet has made the older suppressed positions accessible to anyone who searches for them. Shapiro’s own book is one of several recent works pulling Rav Kook’s material into general circulation. The Soloveitchik commentary on the Gospels has been translated and published with Magid’s annotations. Sacks is dead. Magid is at Dartmouth writing about Boyarin and the Jewish Jesus. The Stone Edition translation of the Hebrew volume on liberal religious approaches is out. The institutional pressures that kept the pluralist position out of Modern Orthodox public discourse are weaker than they were a generation ago. Whether the position consolidates into a recognized stream within Modern Orthodoxy or stays as a permanent minority position is a question that depends on whether figures with institutional standing decide to absorb the cost of saying so in public.
Rav Kook would be on the side of saying so in public, in his elite mode. He stayed silent in his published mode because the costs were unaffordable in his lifetime. The costs are lower now. Shapiro’s book is a partial test of how much lower. The Sacks Book Prize finalist status Shapiro mentions is the small institutional confirmation that the academic-Orthodox space has room for the material. Whether the broader Modern Orthodox community has room for the material is the question the next generation of figures will answer. The framework Rav Kook built can support the answer either way. The framework requires the population willing to absorb the costs of the answer, and that population is the actual variable.
The closing thread on the cabalistic suffusion of contemporary Orthodox practice that Firestein flagged is the small structural fact that closes the loop. Contemporary Orthodox Jews mostly do not study cabala but their practice is saturated with cabalistic provenance. Kabbalat Shabbat, ushpizin, the order of putting on tefillin, the structure of much of the siddur — all cabalistic in origin. The community has absorbed the practice without absorbing the theory. Rav Kook would say this is exactly what should not be. The framework requires the theory to be present so that the practice has its proper meaning. The community has the practice as ritual and the theory as suspect arcana that elite figures do behind closed doors. The split between practice and theory is the same split as the split between published positions and serious positions on other religions, on developing morality, on the Sanhedrin’s role, on natural morality as a parallel revelation. The community runs its religious life on the surface of the framework while the depths are accessible only to figures willing to do the private work.
Shapiro’s project across the full nine installments now has a clear shape. He is documenting the gap between the published theology of contemporary Modern Orthodoxy and the actual theology that the relevant figures have privately held, with Rav Kook as the central case study because Rav Kook left the largest unpublished record. The published theology is conservative on most of the questions where the private theology is liberal. The conservative public position has institutional support that the liberal private position does not. The institutional support comes from the population that needs the conservative position to be the official one. The population’s needs reflect coalition conditions that Shapiro has been describing across the whole series — the loss of grandparents, the rebuilding of community around books, the migration of authority from local rav to remote gadol, the internet’s flattening of internal community discourse into globally visible positions. The conditions produce the conservative public theology. The serious figures hold the liberal private theology and pay the cost of not publishing it. The next generation will decide whether the cost has shifted enough to make publication possible. Shapiro’s book is one of the inputs to that decision. The book exists. The decision is downstream.

12-9-25

This tenth installment is where the framework starts paying out on its hardest test cases and where the institutional question Shapiro has been circling becomes impossible to ignore. The chapter on change in halakhah and secular knowledge is structurally the keystone of the book, because everything Rav Kook said about natural morality in the heresy chapter and everything he said about other religions in the previous chapter requires a procedure for translating the moral and theological insights into actual halakhic change. Without the procedure, the framework remains aspirational. The procedure is the Sanhedrin, and the Sanhedrin is exactly what does not exist.
The opening Soloveitchik citation is doing the architectural work for the chapter. The diagnosis from “Rupture and Reconstruction” is that contemporary Orthodox practice rests on the yoke of the law because the experiential connection to God that previous generations had has been lost. The yoke fills the void where the experience used to be. This is the conservative side of Soloveitchik. The Rav Kook side that Shapiro is pulling against it is that the yoke without the experience is not enough — that the system requires the natural-morality check, the developing moral consciousness, the openness to other religions, the prophetic dimension that the Nazir was trying to recover. The two diagnoses are pointing at the same data. Soloveitchik says the experiential dimension has been lost and the law has filled the gap. Rav Kook says the law without the experiential dimension is corrupted piety. Soloveitchik treats the situation as the condition we have to live with. Rav Kook treats it as the condition the next stage of religious development is supposed to repair. The repair requires institutional infrastructure that does not currently exist.
The Mei Hashiloach material from the previous installment was the antinomian extreme of one side of the framework. The Sanhedrin material in this installment is the institutional extreme of the same side. Rav Kook says the Sanhedrin can change the law through new derashot, that the new derashot do not require the new Sanhedrin to be greater than the previous one because the procedure is internal interpretation rather than legislative override, and that the new Sanhedrin in the messianic era will operate with a level of prophetic wisdom that earlier post-Talmudic generations did not have. He even argues — in the response to Alexandrov — that the binding force of the Talmud was always conditional on the exile-framework of Jewish life, and that the return to the Land of Israel as a free people unbinds us from that authority in principle, even if a future Sanhedrin will likely affirm most of the Talmudic content in practice.
Shapiro is right that this is more radical than most readers of Rav Kook have absorbed. The standard Modern Orthodox reading treats the Sanhedrin as a future hope that will affirm the existing halakhic structure with minor modifications. Rav Kook is saying the Sanhedrin will be the institution through which the framework actually operates — through which natural morality becomes binding law, through which developing moral consciousness gets translated into derashot, through which the textual tradition gets reread in light of the moral intuitions that the religious community has settled. The Sanhedrin is not optional infrastructure. It is the procedural mechanism the framework requires. Without it, the framework runs in fragments — individual figures making individual moves, no one with the authority to make any move binding, the line drifting from below without ever consolidating from above.
The example Shapiro gives — women as witnesses — is the diagnostic test case. The standard halakhic position rests on a derashah from the Gemara. The derashah reads the relevant verses in a way that excludes women. The exclusion has had practical consequences for two thousand years. A future Sanhedrin, on Rav Kook’s account, could read the same verses differently and produce a derashah that includes women. The new derashah would not require the Sanhedrin to be greater than its predecessor because Maimonides’s procedure for derashot does not require seniority. The new reading would simply be a different reading, with the same textual warrant as the old one and a different practical implication. The implication would be authoritative because the Sanhedrin would have ratified it. The exclusion of women would end not because the textual basis had been refuted but because the institution had decided to read the text in a way that does not produce the exclusion.
This is the procedure operating cleanly. It is also the procedure that no current institution can run. The Sanhedrin does not exist. The attempts to revive it — sixteenth-century Tzfat, mid-twentieth-century Israel under Rabbi Maimon — failed for political reasons that Shapiro and Kelman are right to identify in the closing exchange. The opposition was not principled. It was about who would sit on the Sanhedrin once it was constituted. The Brisker Rav and the figures aligned with him understood correctly that whoever constituted the Sanhedrin would shape its decisions, and the decisions would have authority that the constituting parties could not override. They preferred the situation where no Sanhedrin existed and individual gedolim retained their personal authority over decisions in their domains. The preference is comprehensible as coalition strategy. It is also the structural condition that prevents Rav Kook’s framework from operating as designed.
The conversation Shapiro reports between his interlocutor and the haredi friend who fears a Sanhedrin would issue stringencies the community would not want is the second-order confirmation of the same dynamic. The fear is rational. A Sanhedrin constituted by current haredi gedolim would not be a liberalizing body. It would be a stringency-imposing body, and the stringencies would have authority that the current community can resist precisely because they are issued individually rather than institutionally. The current arrangement — gedolim issuing positions, communities filtering them through informal practice — is a coalition equilibrium that lets each side preserve its preferences. A Sanhedrin would force a decision. The decision would go in some particular direction. The direction would close off the alternatives. Neither the haredi side nor the religious-Zionist side wants the closure, because each side has more to lose from being on the wrong side of an authoritative decision than to gain from being on the right side. The mutual disinterest in resolution is what keeps the question open. Rav Kook’s framework needs the resolution. The communities the framework would have to operate through prefer the question to remain unresolved.
The other-religions material in the chapter is doing parallel work to the Sanhedrin material. The chapter is pulling together Rav Kook’s specific positions on Christianity, Islam, idolatry, the conquest of the Land of Israel, conversion, and the messianic vision of religious development among the nations. The positions are individually radical and collectively coherent. The collective coherence is what Shapiro keeps coming back to. Rav Kook is not a tolerant liberal who wants Judaism to be one religion among many. He is a particularist who holds that Judaism is the highest religion and the source of divine light in the world. He combines the particularism with a pluralism about the religious situation of non-Jews that the standard Orthodox position does not allow. Non-Jews can have authentic religious lives within their native religions. Their religions can be vehicles of authentic relationship with God. The religions can contain idolatry and still be appropriate for their addressees because the addressees cannot yet ascend to non-idolatrous religion and the idolatry is what makes the religious content accessible to them.
The Toledot Yeshu material Shapiro flags is the historically interesting confirmation that medieval Jews held positions about Jesus that contemporary Orthodox Jews would find shocking. The medieval Jews believed Jesus performed actual miracles. They explained the miracles by saying he stole the divine name. The explanation is theologically problematic — it grants Jesus capacities that the official position denies — but it was the price of accepting the testimony of the New Testament’s reports, which medieval Jews took to be reliable in the way they would take any widely-attested historical claim to be reliable. The contemporary Orthodox position is that Jesus did not do miracles and the New Testament reports are fabrications or exaggerations. Rav Kook’s position is closer to the medieval position than to the contemporary one. He says the founders of Christianity and Islam may have done actual wonders that God enabled them to do as part of the providential management of their addressees. The wonders are real. They serve a function that the official position cannot accommodate.
Aryeh Kaplan’s 1966 letter to B’nai B’rith Adult Jewish Education is the data point that closes this loop in interesting ways. Kaplan tells the audience that Jews can acknowledge the truth of the miracles ascribed to Jesus without undermining their own faith, because Jesus’s message was not to the Jews. The position is structurally identical to Yaavetz’s position and Rav Kook’s position and Eliyahu Soloveitchik’s position. Kaplan is presenting it to a non-yeshiva audience because he understands that the audience can hear it in a way that a yeshiva audience could not. The stratification of audiences is the same stratification Shapiro has been documenting throughout the book. The serious figures hold positions they do not state in print. They state them to selected audiences. They state different positions to different audiences. The published record systematically understates what the figures actually held. Kaplan died young, did not have the opportunity to consolidate his positions in published form the way Sacks did and Sacks could not even sustain. The unpublished record continues to grow. The published record continues to lag.
The Erica Brown event Shapiro mentions is the small contemporary example of the same dynamic in operation. The book Shapiro wrote can be discussed at Kingsway Jewish Center because the audience there is selected and the discussion will be moderated. The discussion will not be the same as the discussion Shapiro has had in the chapter-by-chapter classes that this transcript is drawn from. The classes are for an audience that has signed up to absorb the difficult material. The synagogue event will be for an audience that has come for the conversation but not necessarily for the difficult material. Shapiro will calibrate. The calibration is the contemporary version of what Rav Kook did with his published guide and his unpublished writings, what Kaplan did with his B’nai B’rith letter and his yeshiva teaching, what Soloveitchik did with the published essay and the lecture notes. The audiences differ. The positions are stable. The presentations vary.
The secular-studies material at the close of the chapter is where the structural problem becomes most explicit. Rav Kook said in his published material that secular studies are valuable, that closing oneself off from worldly knowledge diminishes the divine image, that the great medieval figures combined Torah scholarship with broad secular learning. He never instituted secular studies at Merkaz HaRav. The yeshiva remained kulo kodesh with a broader internal curriculum than the standard Lithuanian model — Tanakh and emunah were taken seriously alongside Talmud — but the broadening did not extend to actual secular subjects. The gap between the published position and the institutional implementation is exactly the structural condition Shapiro keeps documenting. Rav Kook believed the broader curriculum should exist. He could not institute it without coalition costs he was unwilling to absorb. The position remained published and the institution remained unchanged. Subsequent religious-Zionist yeshivot have largely followed the institutional model rather than the published position. The position is in the literature for anyone who looks for it. The institutions reproduce the older Lithuanian shape.
The closing exchange about which mitzvot a future Sanhedrin might change is where Shapiro and Kelman both feel for the limits of how far the framework can be pushed. Kelman wants to keep yom tov sheni even though Rav Kook’s framework would license its abolition. The preference is honest and reasonable. Yom tov sheni serves real purposes — communal solidification, the texture of the festival cycle, the diasporic memory it carries forward. The framework does not require its abolition. The framework permits it. The permission is the issue. Once the permission is on the table, the question of which mitzvot to retain becomes a coalition question rather than a textual one. The coalition might decide to keep yom tov sheni and end the agunah problem and revisit the witness question and not touch the others. The coalition might make different decisions. The framework does not specify the decisions. It specifies the procedure for making them. The procedure requires institutions the community cannot currently produce. The decisions therefore do not get made institutionally. They get made by individuals in different communities producing different positions, and the positions accumulate without consolidating.
The closing arc of Shapiro’s book — moving toward sacrifices, vegetarianism, the messianic king, the State of Israel — is going to test the framework on the questions that Rav Kook held back from publishing the most explicit positions on. The animal-sacrifice material is structurally the same case as the Norworth-on-sotah material from the earlier chapter. Rav Kook believed, the Nazir held, Norworth followed Rav Kook in saying that the third temple’s sacrificial service might not include animal sacrifices because human moral consciousness will have developed past the point where animal slaughter can serve a religious function. The position is internally consistent with everything else Rav Kook said about developing morality. It is also a position that the current Orthodox community — which prays daily for the restoration of the sacrificial service — cannot publicly accept without coalition damage. The position therefore stays in the unpublished and elite-only material. The published material affirms the standard expectation. The gap between the two is, again, the structural condition.
The State of Israel material Shapiro previews is going to push on a different test case. Rav Kook referred to the future Jewish polity as Medinat Yisrael in his pre-1935 writings. The reference has been read by his followers as prophetic. The reference is also evidence that Rav Kook was already thinking about the political form the return would take in terms that the eventual founders did not work out for another decade. Whether the prophetic reading is correct or whether Rav Kook simply identified the obvious name for the obvious entity, the engagement with the idea of the State as a religious category is part of the framework. The State is not a means to a religious end. It is itself a religious category in the framework’s terms — the institutional vehicle through which the renewed Jewish polity makes the framework operative. The Sanhedrin would be one institution within the State. The educational system would be another. The relationship to the Land of Israel and to the non-Jewish populations within and around it would be governed by the framework’s principles.
The framework requires the State to function in ways the State does not currently function. The State has not constituted a Sanhedrin. The State has not adopted the broader curriculum Rav Kook envisioned. The State has not implemented the natural-morality check on the textual tradition. The State has not handled the non-Jewish religious populations in its territory in the way the framework would prescribe. The framework’s relationship to the actual State is the same relationship Rav Kook’s framework has to every existing institution — the framework prescribes what the institution should be, the institution has not done what the framework prescribes, the gap between the prescription and the institution is the structural condition the framework cannot itself close.
Shapiro’s project across the ten installments is now nearly complete. The shape is clear. Rav Kook constructed a framework that requires institutional infrastructure to operate. The institutional infrastructure does not exist. The framework therefore operates in fragments. The fragments are real and the figures who hold them are real. Shapiro’s book is a reconstruction of the framework from the fragments and from the unpublished material that Rav Kook and his immediate students left behind. Whether the framework can be made operative again — whether the institutions can be built, whether the Sanhedrin can be constituted, whether the broader curriculum can be implemented, whether the natural-morality check can be institutionalized — is a question about the next several decades rather than a question Shapiro can answer in a book. The book is one of the inputs to whoever in the next generation will try to answer the question. The book exists. The decision is downstream. Shapiro is writing in the same position Rav Kook himself wrote in — preparing the materials for figures who do not yet exist to use in conditions that have not yet arrived. The materials are good. Whether they will be used is not in Shapiro’s control or in Rav Kook’s. The next generation will decide, or not.