The Jews: Next Year in Which Jerusalem?

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Pentateuch, you dropped the idea of revelation altogether." But the consensus of the Covenant theologians is that God does reveal himself to man, and that he has, in one way or another, established some kind of special covenant with the Jews. For the traditionalist, that may mean the literal, biblical Covenant first made by God with the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—and later confirmed with the Hebrew people as a whole at Sinai. For others it may mean a more existential relationship, perhaps with a less personal God.

For Reform Jew Petuchowski, the Covenant theology of revelation means that denominational lines are often irrelevant. His own life illustrates the blurring of those lines: his wife keeps a kosher kitchen, unusual for Reform Jews, and he volunteers his services to a small Reform congregation in Laredo, Texas, on the first night of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), then moves on to a nearby Conservative synagogue for the next night of the high holy days.

The Covenant theologians—and many other religious Jews newly interested in Halakhic observance—generally agree that the Jews' special relationship with God demands some kind of loyalty to traditional Jewish law. "Without law the Covenant is empty and even meaningless," says Seymour Siegel. "There can be no Covenant without observance." That, of course, is an old question in Judaism, and it divides even those devoutly observant Jews whom the outside world paints with the broad brush of "Orthodoxy."

ORTHODOX JUDAISM

While more liberal Jews are willing to search for the common denominator of faith within a broader idea of Jewish peoplehood, the Orthodox are more demanding: faith must come first, peoplehood second. Indeed, for the strict est Orthodox, their rigidly sectarian faith actually separates them from other Jews. Even so, the basic Orthodox concept of Jewish identification is far healthier today than was expected just a few decades ago. Now it is burgeoning, partly because the melting pot is passe, but also partly because the Orthodox birth rate is unusually high.

Rabbi Soloveitchik, Orthodoxy's most brilliant interpreter in the U.S., in sists that Orthodoxy and modern life can go hand in hand. A pre-eminent Talmudic authority at Manhattan's Yeshiva University, Soloveitchik sees the "divine disciplines" of Orthodoxy as part of "a great romance between men and God." Halakhic Precepts, he argues, are a natural dialectic of "advancement and withdrawal" — six days of work, one of rest; 16 days of the month when husband and wife can have intercourse, twelve when they cannot because of restrictions surrounding the menstrual period. "Detail is important," says Soloveitchik. "Ethics pays attenion to detail. Some people call us pe dantic; perhaps we are. But if you pay attention to detail you cannot be misled." Soloveitchik acknowledges that Orthodox belief is not always easy to understand: "We don't believe because it is absurd, but sometimes in spite of the fact it is absurd."

Soloveitchik tirelessly commutes between New York and Boston, where he supervises the enlightened Yeshiva he founded there, the Maimonides School. It is designed to give students from kindergarten through twelfth grade the best in both secular education and Jewish