The forthcoming installation of a new president at Yeshivat
Chovevei Torah is scheduled to include a “Roundtable” entitled “Training New Rabbis
for a New Generation,” featuring the newly installed YCT president alongside
four representatives of the non-Orthodox rabbinate as presenters.
This is a
deeply troubling, and telling, development.
Throughout its history, our people have been afflicted with
schismatic movements and sects at odds with the mesorah, or religious
tradition, bequeathed to us at Har Sinai.
Sometimes such “new approaches” openly rejected the Jewish
religious heritage, like the movement that introduced itself in the nineteenth
century as “Reform.” On other occasions, the break with the Jewish past was
more subtle, as in the case of the “Conservative” movement, whose name, though,
was quickly belied by its actions.
Torah giants of decades past warned us to not allow any blurring
of lines between the world of Jews who maintain fealty to the Jewish past and
“new Judaisms” espousing theologies incompatible with our mesorah.
They
accordingly forbade “multidenominational” religious ventures of any sort.
Groups that ignored that wise counsel have come and gone,
even as the movements they sought to treat lightly have gone on to even more
blatant rejection of our heritage, redefining their “Judaisms” according to
their own lights and the whims of the times.
Countless Jews have been led down the path toward Jewish
oblivion by the mesorah-rejecting rabbis of the non-Orthodox movements.
That an
ostensibly Orthodox rabbinical seminary would now provide a prominent public
platform for leaders of those movements to share their wisdom on the subject of
training new rabbis is irony of the most bitter kind.
A yeshiva is a place where Jews rigorously pursue the
timeless truths of Torah.
That leaves no room for those who reject the very
concept that such timeless truths exist. The forthcoming YCT installation
ceremony does violence to this essential principle.
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