Noah Feldman? Not the Whole Picture

by Rabbi Darren Kleinberg

In Noah Feldman's already infamous - at least in the blogosphere - New York Times Magazine article "Orthodox Paradox" (July 22), he describes, for reasons that are still inexplicable to this writer, the experience of having his and his then-girlfriend's (now wife) photos cropped out of a school-reunion picture.

Why? Because, he maintains, she is not Jewish and the reunion was for a well-known Modern Orthodox day school he attended in Massachusetts.

I imagine that there is no therapist in the world with a couch quite as comfortable as the pages of the New York Times, and, in the course of his piece, we manage to get a clearer glimpse of what might really be going on inside his head.

Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard University, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and, of course, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. For a person of such importance it is easy to understand the pain that must come with the realization that one has been cut out of a picture with the stroke of a mouse. After all, wouldn't his high school want to show off their illustrious graduate?

In response to this feeling of rejection, Feldman compensates by suggesting that he would rather have been treated like Baruch Spinoza, with all the ceremony and attention that goes with a public excommunication. And he doesn't settle only for self-aggrandizement. He also manages to imply that the Modern Orthodox community that he grew up in is not only guilty of airbrushing "intermarrieds" out of pictures, but also Baruch Goldstein-esque massacres and Yigal Amir-style assassinations, implying that he himself had been (character?) assassinated in some fashion.

And why all this pain? Because he mistakenly assumed that "the individual human beings who make up the institution and community where I spent so many years of my life (would) put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries." There is no doubt that it takes a certain type of person, with a certain sense of self, to assume that he or she should or could override or undermine the defining values of a specific religious community.

It is also noteworthy that, although his then-girlfriend was ostensibly the reason for the ill-fated cropping, she is never again mentioned after the second paragraph of this lengthy piece. Nothing about her relationship to Judaism or her feelings about being cut out.

Although Feldman's piece purports to be about intermarriage, exclusion and the boundaries between the religious and secular in the Modern Orthodox community, the fact is that it is about only one thing: Noah Feldman.

And in writing only about himself, he missed an opportunity to ask some real questions.

One question he could have posed is whether or not Orthodoxy (Modern or otherwise) will be able to maintain its strident position when it comes to intermarriage. It may be that, with the Orthodox community growing in numbers and feeling a heightened sense of security that it will be able to continue to take a hard line.

At the same time, with a growing interest in conversion, Orthodoxy may be moving toward a more nuanced view of the issue. Maybe there is room to take a position that states that the issue is not as much whether someone marries a person who is Jewish but rather a person who wants to be Jewish. The desire to be Jewish is not a given for born-Jews and is sometimes to be found in greater measure in those who choose to be Jews.

Another question Feldman could have posed relates to Jewish peoplehood. What does intermarriage and the way we respond to it say for our commitment to ahavat Yisrael - loving all Jews?

A third question: Is there a way for intermarried Jews like Feldman to find a place in a Modern Orthodox community that he so obviously craves?

A fourth: How does a community that, as Feldman writes, "seeks to preserve its traditional structure (by) maintain(ing) its boundaries using whatever independent means it can muster," find a way to relate to those that have stepped outside of those boundaries?

These are some of the questions that might be asked of the Modern Orthodox community by someone who has found him- or herself on the outside looking in.Unfortunately, the only question Feldman posed was, "Isn't everyone's life a mass of contradictions?" It sounds like he may need some more time on the couch but, please, keep it out of the New York Times.