Past Imperfect

For traditional communities, the past is normative. The past, rather than the present, is the guide to daily life. As a standard-bearer of the past, the traditionalist may even question the very legitimacy of the present: Leaving aside technological advances, what moral or spiritual value can modernity offer compared to the timeless legacy of the past?

Religious traditions especially, which are by nature highly conservative, judge new trends by their conformance to time-honored ways of life. Intellectual innovation, to be sure, may be encouraged, as long as it remains within the boundaries of tradition. In our own society, for example, a hallmark of Talmud scholarship has long been the ability to formulate novel legal analyses. But their implications are normally theoretical. Regarding practical matters, custom rules (there are notable exceptions among halakhists of great stature; the Vilna Gaon, for example, often ruled against common practice based on Talmudic sources).

Still, we have been able observe the evolution of attitudes toward religious tradition, and changes to the tradition itself, within a single lifetime. Over the last few decades, while its religious observance has become stricter, Orthodox society has increasingly turned to texts, rather than prevailing custom, for guidance. This trend has been thoroughly defined and interpreted in Haym Soloveitchik's 1994 Tradition essay, “Rupture and Reconstruction.” Soloveitchik contrasts the pre-war European Jewish religious culture -- a “mimetic” society where behavior was transmitted by example and imitation -- with the more recent text-based culture. While previous generations absorbed the rules of Jewish observance from the home, street, and synagogue, much of Orthodox society has now come to rely on books, thought to be more authoritative and reliable sources of Halakhah. Among other factors, this represents a desire to restore the more religiously authentic world of Europe before the Holocaust, based on a reconstituted image -- supposedly captured in halakhic texts -- of what it was really like.

It would seem that tradition itself should view this phenomenon favorably. After all, what we are describing is an ostensibly deeper and more meticulous commitment to tradition. What could be truer to the traditionalist than a religious life restored to its original state, to a period of history unweakened by dislocation and acculturation? In a religious context, how could the old-world ways of our great-grandparents and grandparents not be superior to those of our parents, which were often diluted by compromise?

But some of these assumptions do not hold up under scrutiny. What many perceive as restoration -- a more rigorous observance derived from the past -- may be, in fact, religious innovation.

In “Minhagei Lita: Customs of Lithuanian Jewry,” the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel (Manuel) Poliakoff of Baltimore sets out to correct misconceptions about the yeshiva culture of pre-war Lithuania. Rabbi Poliakoff, a participant in that culture, studied at the Telshe Yeshiva during the 1930’s. He cites several modern religious practices wrongly assumed to have been followed in the great Lithuanian yeshivot and in their surrounding communities. For example, the wide adoption of the Upsherren custom (allowing a boy’s hair to grow uncut until the age of three) and the “glatt kosher” standard (based on a kosher meat stricture), he says, are recent innovations -- unknown in Europe or confined to particular communities -- that gained currency only after World War II. He also points to rulings of R. Israel Meir Kagan in the “Mishnah Berurah” -- today considered the most authoritative code -- which were never followed in Lithuania, or even in the author’s hometown, despite his great prestige.

If certain customs which appear restorative are in fact innovative, we are also witnessing in broad segments of Orthodox society the acceptance of practices which are undeniably new. Bat Mitzvah and Simhat Bat celebrations, for example, were unknown in Ashkenazic Orthodoxy a generation ago (Simhat Bat has some precedent among Sephardim). These innovations are drawn primarily from the present; they are the product of egalitarian notions of gender and greater public visibility of women -- both modern phenomena -- and regarded as consistent, if not continuous, with tradition.

Under the right conditions, tradition can successfully assimilate the best modern values. That is one way to leave our children a more perfect past.