Word: halakah
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...joined the Zionist underground in 1936, was a sniper in Jerusalem during the Palestine war. and became chief rabbi of the Israeli army when it was formed in 1948. Throughout the fighting, Goren also played an active role in a rabbinical committee assigned to study the modernization of Halakah. The committee's findings proved too controversial even to be published, let alone adopted, in Israel. One closely reasoned recommendation by Goren held that the Biblical proscription against the use of fire on the Sabbath should not prevent Orthodox Jews from using electricity, since modern physics had proved that electricity...
Goren is also a brilliant Talmud scholar whose unorthodox approach to Orthodox Judaism has caused some concern in Israel's ultraconservative chief rabbinate, which demands strict observance of ancient Halakah (religious law) and fears him as a "reformer." Last week, however, by a vote of 46 to 41, a council of rabbis and civic representatives elected him chief rabbi of Tel Aviv's Ashkenazi (European) Jews, the second most powerful rabbinicai post in the Jewish nation. The election makes Goren the man most likely to succeed Isser Unterman, 82, as Ashkenazi chief rabbi of all Israel...
Orthodox Jews, of course, are generally the stern and unbending champions of an almost literal approach to Halakah. "On it and on it alone," says Halakah Scholar Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz of Jerusalem, "we base our lives, our thoughts and our actions." "Without Halakah," Israeli Author Abraham Kariv told a Jerusalem symposium on Halakah last week, "we do not know how to believe, let alone how to express our faith in everyday life." The Orthodox regard any watering down of Halakah as "the Gallup-poll approach to Judaism"-making the law conform to practice and thus, for example, permitting the eating...
Stretching a Bit. Still, the demands of modern life are such that even the Orthodox have had to stretch Halakah a bit. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, parachutist chief rabbi of the Israeli armed forces, has ruled that soldiers can work on the Sabbath for the sake of national security and that electricity may be used on holy days because it is not the same as the fire whose kindling on the Sabbath was forbidden by Exodus. England's newly elected Orthodox Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits (TIME, Aug. 26) recently got around the traditional Orthodox opposition to birth control by ruling...
Cutting the Branches. Though their differences in approach to the law have frustrated anything like Jewish theological ecumenism, most Jewish scholars agree that the way must be cleared to make Halakah more meaningful for Jews. "The Jew," says Rabbi Jack J. Cohen of Israel, "was not made for the law but the law for the Jew." Israel's Deputy Chief Justice Moshe Silberg believes that the time has come for a new Halakah code that would be "a secular legal creation based on principles of Jewish law with a clear dissociation from all the archaic layers that were heaped...