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RECONCEPTUALIZING THE ROLE OF MORALITY IN HALACHA BASED ON THE LICHTENSTEIN–BOROWITZ DEBATE

2016; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/mj/kjw023

1086-3273

Daniel Reifman,

Classical Studies and Philology

Within the past two years, the Jewish world has mourned the passing of two of the most influential Jewish theologians of our generation: Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, the Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion and a leading student and son-in-law of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Rabbi Eugene Borowitz, a longtime faculty member at the Hebrew Union College and one of the most influential scholars in the American Reform Movement. Then as now, there were few contexts in which a Reform and an Orthodox theologian would have engaged in substantive religious dialogue. Yet Borowitz and Lichtenstein’s work intersected in one of the most prominent issues in modern Jewish thought: what is the role of ethics within halachic discourse? Lichtenstein addressed this topic in his 1975 essay, “Does Jewish Law Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halachah?”1 Borowitz subsequently critiqued Lichtenstein’s position in his essay, “The Authority of the Ethical Impulse in ‘Halacha’,”2 and offered his own view of the role of ethics within halacha and contemporary Jewish life.