[Avodah] Normal People Don't Care About Those Things

[Meir Shinnar]

> On Jan 26, 2026, at 5:12 AM, Micha Berger <micha at aishdas.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 09:08:58PM -0500, Meir Shinnar via Avodah wrote:
>> Looking at my post, I wasn't sufficiently clear. I fully agree with
>> Ilana that Mendelson is Orhtodox My point is that while Mendelson was
>> considered Orthodox in hisletime, late on more and more people considered
>> him trade -- and my guess is that most haredm or hared adjacent who know
>> who Mendelson was would think of him as trafe.
> 
>> RMB first agrees with me then in a second post, disagrees.
> RMB
> Kind of. I think it is true that Mendelsohn the person belonged in
> the O community, but whether or not I would consider his beliefs
> Orthodox depends on whether they were more likely to evolve the way
> they did or not.
> 
> I happen to think his seeds were far more likely to leed to Reform
> than not.
> Meir
So now whether you are Orthodox depends on your ability to predict the future??  RMB is describing the modern issue of”cancel culture”, that he s wiolingmto apply to [past major fgures ( as secular culture culture applies to Washington and Jefferson)
> I happen to have recently learned that RSRH thought that it wasn't what
> Mendelssohn wrote that led to Reform, but what he didn't write; that it
> was because his work remained uncompleted.
> 
> But in any case, my whole thesis is that "Orthodox" means a bunch
> of things (and this list grows with each post):
> 
> 1- having a place in the O community.
> 
> 2- having beliefs that justify being observant.
> 
> 3- having beliefs that conform to pesaqim about who the rest of us
>   can accept with regrad to stam yeinam, shechitah, geirus... Which
>   AFAIK, is a loose defintion of the 13 Iqarim. (Pace R Melech
>   / Dr Marc Shapiro)

The Rumbam’s definition of ikkarim, with whatever flaws one may think they have, had two major features.
a) they were formulated as actual principles
b) They were precise. 
Now. I don’t know what a loose definition of the ikkraim means.  I thought that Halacha (and surely Brisker halsach - but not just Brisk insists  on precise definition, so a loose definition of ikkarim is not really halachic.   People need to know what is expected of them


>   Although most of us hold lequlah, that it's not only the beliefs
>   that actually decide whose wine we can drink, it's still a
>   component of the din. But look at the next bullet item.
> 

> 4- not being an actual min, apiqoreis or kofeir because one's beliefs
>   don't conform (#3, but for reasons that don't make one culpable
>   for that lack of belief (Radaz)
>   This definition includes the previous as a criterion, but shifts
>   from discussing "one who has O beliefs" to one we can actually treat
>   as O by adding culpability.
So you agree that Orthodoxy does not mandate beliefs - it mandates that for some beliefs, other actions now become unorthodox
> 
> 5- according to the Rambam and those who follow him to link olam haba
>   to belief / knowledge rather than primarily being about ethics /
>   intended behavior, having beliefs that cause one to reach gan eden.
>   I think this is best left to (1) people who agree with the Rambam
>   who are also (2) Hashem's accountants, or looking at themselves
>   only.
> 
It is not merely whether one agrees or not with the Rambam.  It is difficult to argue that for the vast majority of am yisrael, the Rambam’s position does not violate your second bullet point - having beliefs that justify being observant..  Of coursed, this was understood early on, and is a major part of the Maimonodean controversy in the 13th century - and it seems that logically, you would agree with the antiMaimonideans - that the Rambam should be banned … Of course, this was tried, and I would argue that with all the problems the Rambam raises for the amcha, there seems fairly universal agreement that the attempt to ban the Rambam wa wrong….and it seems peculiar (at the least) that one would, today, reraise those arguments…

Mendelsohn’s admirers applied the phrase Mimoshe (Rambam) ad Moshe (Mendelsohn), lo kam keMpshe - which I always thought was wild overpraise.  However, RMB seems tosuggests that there is a similarity - just as wet should ban Rambam we should ban Mendelsohn, as neither of them seem to have beliefs that justify observance in the amcha….
> And without paying attention to this distinction, I will seem to 
> contradict myself more often than I actually do. (Which still isn't 0,
> which is how the list of possible referents of the word "Orthodox"
> keeps on growing.)
> 
>> Nor do I personally think that believing heresy always makes one
>> halachically someone we must treat like a min, apikoreis or kofer...
> 
> But it could be grounds for avoiding what they teach, anyway. Afte
> all, you don't want to absorb such heresy.
> 
> As I said, I think that with 20:20 hindsight, we can see that much of
> what Mendlsohn thought violate the second definition I ofered for being
> Orthodox -- his beliefs did not sufficiently justify observance. And
> that's why R evolved from his writings. Contrary to RSRH and R Ezriel
> Hildesheimer's opinions of Moses Mendelssohn, with the advantage
> of hindsight, I think the writing was on the wall.

Again I would argue that Mendelsohn was not actually the basis of Reform.  Mendelsohn argued that the essence of Judaism was practice - not theology.  I am not aware that Reform agrees with that- they rejected both practice and theology.  If anything, Reform values core ideological principles more than practice (eg, Hermann Cohen’s work A Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism) -just their core ideological principles are based on what they call the “prophetic tradition” rather than halal.

So yes, blamnng reform on Mendelssohn, and many Reform may even have claimed to base themselves on Mendelsohn - given his stature in their community, claiming to rely on him gave them intellectual credibility- but the actual relationship is problematic.  They claimed him as their “gadol” something that we should be familiar with…..

Mendelsohn is one of the first to try to deal with the challenge that “modern” thought - in his case Enlightenment ideology - posed to the traditional community.  That challenges was also also thought necessary for fuller economic participation of the Jews.  That challenge only increased — althoggh the nature of the challenge of modernity changed - and the options were either to remain in a separated close community, find a way to integrate being modern and halachic - or assimilate maintaining vestiges of tradition that didn’t conflict with the zeitgeist.  We may disagree with the particular formulation that Mendelssohn chose - kol hatchalot kahot - but Mendelsohn is far more the basis for Rav Hirsch, even though he chose a very different approach to deal with modernity




> 
> That doesn't mean I think he was a min, apiqoreis or kofeir. Or even that
> he believed something heretical -- although I haven't a position either
> way on that one, not having read enough of his writings. But because he
> didn't give sufficient logical reason to observe, he did end up crossing
> what I called definition #2.
> 
> Getting back to the original claim, I think that Mendelssohn's position
> that Judaism is a "revealed legilsation" consisting of law, behavior and
> action, to the exclusion of "religion" and beliefs, directly led to R.
> Because behaviors without justifying beliefs never stand unchanged.
> 
> And therefore even after all the thought this conversation has generated
> (so far) I still think it's fair to say it is an idea promulgated
> by Reformists.
> 
This is quite a leap.  Again, Reform is a rejection of the rabbinic tradition of law far more than just  of theology. - they actually embrace theology, just not traditional theology….

> Personal opinion, of course.
> 
> That said, I also still stand by Mendelsshon having a place in the
> Jewish community, having beliefs that allow us to drink his wine
> (never mind the question of culpability for not having such beliefs).
> 
> I will ignore the Rambam and beliefs necessary for olam haba because
> frankly, I think it's a product of his Aristotilianism that no
> significant part of our chevrah buys into anyway. (Ranking middos
> and mentchlachkeit as secondary to yedi'ah might be something
> many of us subconsciously do, but I don't think any of us actually
> want to have those values.)
There are real Aristotelians today, but most of us think banning the Rambam was (and is) a bad idea, even if it isn’t now popular, and would extend that more generally - even to those who don’t have halachic weight of the rRambam behind them

If one looks at modern Orthodox thinkers Yeshaya Leibovits comes closes to Mendelsohn, in arguing that the real definition of emunah is not theology, but doing mitzvot as avodat hashem.  This includes rejecting  any factual claims (my father, who knew Yeshaya Leibovits in the 40s), used to cite what was apparently a common phrase he used - lo yard hashm al har sinai lelamed et bne Yisrael astrophysica….and the fairly explicit corollary that thiose who try to learn astrophysics, science, or even history from tanach are misundertndig tanach ( the Kantian dichotomy between facts and values)

 I know of many members of the Orthodox community, including RW YU members, that in the 1960w and 1970s, when the conflict between Torah and madda was a big issue on college campuses, Yeshaya Leibowitz’s position, with the separation of the domains of truth of each, solved for them the conflict.  The conflict is still there, and we keep losing people to it, but much of community has learned to compartmentalize their lives without an ideological basis.  Rejection of Mendelsohn actually leads to the loss of of justification of mitzvot.  Eg, a la Slifkin, if being Orthodox required belief that th world was literally 5786 year old -you would lose many.

Meir Shinnar