NEW YORK A liberal Orthodox rabbinical schools response to the controversial action of one of its graduates highlights the challenge facing progressives in the Modern Orthodox community.
Rabbi Darren Kleinberg participated this summer in a mixed-denominational beit din, or religious court, in Phoenix, where he runs an adult education organization, that oversaw the conversion of a girl less than a year old and her immersion in a mikvah.
Kleinberg, a 2005 graduate of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a liberal Orthodox rabbinical academy in New York City, was approached by a couple who had adopted a child they planned to convert under the auspices of a female Conservative rabbi. Though he knew his participation in the beit din would not grant the conversion Orthodox legitimacy, Kleinberg still agreed to participate in the conversion ceremony because he felt close to the couple.
Chovevei Torah issued a statement distancing the school from Kleinbergs action. The Riverdale seminary had considered declaring that it could no longer recognize Kleinberg as an Orthodox rabbi.
This violates the standards and principles of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and YCT categorically rejects this action, said the statement, published in October on several blogs.
Rabbi Kleinbergs statements and actions should not be assumed to be representative of YCTs positions and principles.
The Kleinberg episode illuminates the challenges facing Chovevei Torah, which as an avatar of so-called open Orthodoxy occupies a fragile perch at Orthodoxys left-wing frontier.
The institution, founded by the Orthodox activist Rabbi Avi Weiss, repeatedly has been a target of elements who charge that the school has drifted beyond the Orthodox pale.
Established to foster a less insular, less exclusivist and more intellectually open brand of Orthodoxy than its mainstream competitor, Yeshiva University, Chovevei Torah has had to perform a delicate dance to preserve its Orthodox credentials.
I think Chovevei is trying to move the community forward, but it has to be concerned that if it goes too far, too fast that its graduates will be jeopardized, said Rabbi Irving Yitz Greenberg, the founding president of Michael Steinhardts Jewish Life Foundation. I think theyre doing their best to protect their students.
Since its establishment in 1999, Chovevei Torah has struggled for acceptance in the Orthodox mainstream. Some Orthodox synagogues that considered hiring Chovevei Torah graduates as rabbis have been pressured not to do so.
Weiss applied to the main centrist Orthodox rabbinical group, the Rabbinical Council of America, to have Chovevei Torah accredited as an Orthodox rabbinical school, but said he pulled the schools application when the process become too arduous.
Instead, Weiss and another liberal Orthodox rabbi, Marc Angel, founded the International Rabbinic Fellowship in an effort to provide an institutional umbrella for Chovevei Torah rabbis and to advance a more liberal rabbinic approach to a variety of hot-button issues.
Weiss has been an outspoken critic of the mainstream Orthodox rabbinical establishment, which he says limits the discretion of local rabbis in rendering decisions on Halachah, or Jewish law.
Yet even Weiss, who has placed the liberalization of conversion standards at the top of his reform agenda for Orthodoxy, would not countenance Kleinbergs cooperation in a mixed-denominational beit din.
There are limits and there are standards, Weiss told JTA. And participating in a non-halachic beit din violates those standards.
Kleinberg long has been Exhibit A in the conservative Orthodox case against Chovevei Torah, which has graduated 43 rabbinical students. He has written articles that Orthodox critics charge border on heresy, such as suggesting that the concept of Jewish chosenness be revisited and that the Bible portrays G-d as imperfect.
He participated in a panel discussion about the film Sentenced to Marriage, a scathing critique of the Israeli Orthodox Rabbinates grip on civil matters of marriage and divorce.
Kleinberg says his actions this summer were not contrary to Jewish law and that Choveveis reaction is emblematic of the narrow approach to Halachah that open Orthodoxy was supposed to reject.
At issue here, Kleinberg says, is whether Jewish law requires a kosher beit din that is, one at the mikvah portion of the conversion ceremony. Kleinberg says it does not and that his action therefore was in line with Orthodox strictures.
It is a common misconception that when Orthodox men on a beit din witness a female convert immersing in the mikveh, the men witness the woman naked. This is not so. Rather, typically, the woman positions herself with her back to one wall of the mikveh. The men are standing in back of that and cannot see the woman at all. Then the woman moves forward very slowly from the edge of the mikveh until only the back of her head is visible to the men. Then she immerses. Since her head is under water, her entire body must be under water, too. Thus her total immersion has been witnessed by the men on the beit din without them having seen any part of her body, except the back of her head.
Kleinberg readily concedes, if he had been asked to participate in a ceremony that went even further than witness of the immersion, such as one that accepted the testimony of women as witnesses which also violates Orthodox strictures he would have gone ahead anyway.
The way this issue has been dealt with suggests that the same lines in the sand between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform, between us and them, are still in place, Kleinberg said, suggesting that Chovevei is not more progressive than institutional Orthodoxy on the big issues the issues that validate non-Orthodox rabbis as legitimate rabbis and non-Orthodox movements as bona fide expressions of Judaism.
While Kleinberg is concerned primarily with Jewish peoplehood and lowering barriers between denominations, for his relatively young alma mater establishing clear boundaries may be integral to its success.
When you have a new institution like Chovevei Torah, then it has a public that wants to know what it stands for, said Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard, a teacher of Jewish thought at Chovevei Torah.
That audience does want to know where the edges are.
Because YCT is an open Orthodox yeshiva, they want to know how open are you.
IJN Executive Editor Rabbi Hillel Goldberg contributed to this story.
