The Imperatives to Reinvigorate Torah Im Derech Eretz; the Challenges in Applying TIDE to Our Times

First, IYH, in a series of webinars by the 

Torah Im Derech Eretz Movement and Institute 

Panelists:

Rabbi Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer 

Rabbi Avrohom Aharon Elias 

Rabbi Moshe Y. Miller

Gershon Seif

Rochel Alpert

Jeremy Schwartzbaum

Can a Hirschian Be a Kahanist? TIDE and the Ethics of Jewish Power

This post was extracted from the TIDE WhatsApp group.

https://chat.whatsapp.com/FNbFs4JEXZkIzVNLJx3HuM

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the biblical category of Amalek at the outset of the Gaza war, the statement reverberated far beyond its immediate military context. It was cited as a central piece of evidence in the genocide case brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice. And it crystallized a question that had been building within observant Jewish communities for years: what does Jewish tradition actually say about labeling contemporary enemies with the most dangerous category in its moral vocabulary — and what does it say about those who do so while wearing a kippah and claiming to speak in Torah's name?

For the Hirschian tradition, the answer begins with a fundamental premise. A Hirschian cares about all of humanity. Period. The Mensch-Yisroel ideal is not a pleasant supplement to Jewish religious life — it is a core requirement. The aspiration to be a "priest of pure humanity," to regard every human being as a bearer of the divine image, is not a liberal sentiment imported from outside Torah. It is, on Hirschian terms, what Torah itself demands. An ideology that systematically dehumanizes whole populations — that treats entire nations as enemies by nature, that encourages contempt for non-Jewish life — is not a stricter or more authentically Jewish position. It is a fundamental failure of the Jewish religious mission.

This does not mean that Jewish tradition is without categories of genuine enemies, or that every act of military force is morally equivalent. Hirsch and his son Mendel addressed the category of Amalek directly in their writings, acknowledging it as a divinely decreed exception to the general principle of universal human dignity. But the tradition is equally clear that this exception has no halachic application in the contemporary world. No one has the halachic status of Amalek today. When Rav Soloveitchik cited his family mesorah in the twenty-fifth footnote of Kol Dodi Dofek — that any nation conspiring to destroy the Jewish people acquires the status of Amalek — the precise scope and implications of that claim remain actively debated within serious Torah scholarship. What that debate means for how the category may or may not be applied in contemporary military contexts is a question that has not been resolved, and invoking Amalek loosely against entire civilian populations, including children, goes well beyond anything the tradition has sanctioned.

The political expression of this tendency — associated in recent years with figures such as Itamar Ben Gvir and the broader Kahanist movement within Israeli politics — has provoked sharp responses from within the Orthodox world. Rav Yitzchak Yosef, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel and himself a committed Zionist, publicly called Ben Gvir "hevel" — worthless — and described his conduct as a chillul Hashem, a desecration of God's name. If an acting Israeli Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Iraqi descent could speak out so sharply against a national-religious minister in the current government, one tradition-minded analyst observed, one can scarcely imagine how much more severe the response of Rav Hirsch — a burning opponent of nationalist ideology who placed the dignity of every human being at the center of his worldview — would have been.

The Hirschian critique of Kahanism is not primarily political. It is philosophical. Hirsch's vision of the Mensch-Yisroel cannot coexist with a worldview that labels contemporary humans as Amalek, that celebrates violence against civilian populations, or that treats military and political power as the primary vehicle of Jewish redemption. These represent not a stricter form of Jewish commitment but a different and incompatible one. As Rav Henkin has written, since the destruction of the Temple we are no longer a warrior nation — a perspective that bears directly on how Torah ethics apply to the conduct of a modern Jewish state and its citizens.

What makes this question pressing for the TIDE community specifically is not merely the theological debate but the communal silence that surrounds it. The major Orthodox institutions — the Agudah, the Orthodox Union — have, as far as can be determined, said little publicly about Jewish violence against Arabs in Judea and Samaria, or about the ideological currents that produce it. The frum media presents a consistently one-sided narrative. A Hirschian voice would say something genuinely different — grounded not in political liberalism but in the claim that Torah itself, properly understood, demands the moral clarity that other Orthodox institutions have been reluctant to provide.

Whether public statements are the right instrument for delivering that voice, however, is itself a matter of principled disagreement within the TIDE community — and not merely a practical one. Some argue that public declarations of protest are not only premature for a nascent organization but are fundamentally the wrong approach: that tochacha, moral reproach, is ineffective and possibly forbidden when delivered in that format, and that the Hirschian tradition is better served by patient internal education and the articulation of positive values than by reactive condemnation of other communities. Others hold that silence in the face of chillul Hashem is itself a form of complicity, and that Hirsch's own willingness to fight publicly for his principles — his Open Letters were, as one participant observed, the nineteenth-century version of the internet — provides a clear model for engaged public witness. That debate remains open, and its resolution will say much about what kind of organization a revived TIDE movement intends to be.

Torah in Derekh Eretz and Torahu-Madda: Roads that Diverge or Converge? by Yocheved Friedman

https://hakirah.org/vol37Friedman.pdf

Below is the first page of the article. 

The full article is at the link above.

Our More "Cerebral" Site, the TIDE Journal https://torah-im-derech-eretz-journal.blogspot.com

https://torah-im-derech-eretz-journal.blogspot.com

See the call for essays at 

https://torah-im-derech-eretz-journal.blogspot.com/2026/03/call-for-essays-torah-im-derech-eretz.html

TIDE and Zionism — An Unresolved Tension

This post was extracted from the TIDE WhatsApp group.

https://chat.whatsapp.com/FNbFs4JEXZkIzVNLJx3HuM 

The word "Zionism" did not exist when Samson Raphael Hirsch was alive. It was coined by Nathan Birnbaum in the 1880s, and Hirsch died in 1888, just before the movement coalesced into the organized political force that would reshape Jewish history. Yet Hirsch's position on the central question Zionism would later pose — whether Jews should actively work to establish a national home in the Land of Israel before the messianic era — is not difficult to reconstruct. He stated it clearly, and the tradition he founded carried it forward with considerable force.

The clearest statement came in his response to Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, an Orthodox German rabbi who in the 1860s was advocating for organized Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel as a religious obligation and a prelude to redemption — a position historians now classify as proto-Zionist. Hirsch refused to cooperate, and according to a reported Breuer family testimony published in Jewish Action, what appeared to Kalischer as a mitzvah appeared to Hirsch as "nothing less than an aveira." Hirsch also wrote directly on the matter in a letter in Hebrew, published in a collection called Shemesh Marpeh, which remains one of the primary sources for understanding his position. The argument turned not on hostility to the Land of Israel — Hirsch affirmed that the totality of Torah-shaped Jewish life reaches its fullest flowering there — but on the nature of the return. Organized, activist settlement, undertaken through political and social means rather than through the divinely ordained process of redemption, was, for Hirsch, a transgression of the proper boundaries of Jewish agency in history.

This position placed Hirsch squarely within the camp that Zionism's own architects recognized as their opponents. Norman Lamm, in his 1984 assessment, described TIDE as "decidedly anti-Zionist" and closer to the Agudah than to Mizrachi. The Satmar movement, the most uncompromising anti-Zionist strand of twentieth-century Orthodoxy, recognized the kinship: Der Yid, the Satmar-published Yiddish newspaper, ran a tribute to Hirsch on his hundredth yahrzeit that expressed great reverence for his legacy — seeing in his anti-Zionism a point of genuine ideological overlap, even while the two traditions differed sharply in other respects. Rabbi Domb of Neturei Karta used respectful language about Hirsch and his son-in-law Rav Shlomo Breuer as well, though he attacked subsequent members of the Breuer family, especially Isaac, for what he regarded as their departures from principle.

The figure of Isaac Breuer — Hirsch's grandson, Rav Shlomo Breuer's son — is where the tension becomes most interesting and most unresolved. Isaac Breuer was the most intellectually sophisticated heir of the Hirschian tradition in the twentieth century, and he modified the tradition significantly in response to the realities of his age. Unlike his father, who insisted after the Balfour Declaration that the Three Oaths be upheld and treated the World Zionist Organization as forbidden territory under the principles of Austritt, Isaac Breuer came to engage with the question of the Land of Israel in a different register. He remained anti-Mizrachi — even the most Zionist Hirschian could not legitimize that organization's structure — but he grappled seriously with the theological significance of Jewish history moving in the direction it was moving, and with what it meant that God seemed to be giving the Jewish people a state. His position was not his grandfather's, and this gap within the tradition itself has never been cleanly resolved.

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 confronted the entire Hirschian tradition with a reality Hirsch himself never had to face. His writings could not have addressed it directly. The question of how a Hirschian should relate to a sovereign Jewish state — not to a movement or an ideology but to an existing political reality with implications for every aspect of Jewish life — is one the tradition has not answered with a single voice. Some hold that the theoretical anti-Zionism of the Hirschian framework shifts necessarily when there is a functioning Jewish state: the relevant question is no longer whether to support a Zionist project but how Torah should shape Jewish sovereignty. Others insist that the core Hirschian commitments — Austritt, the Mensch-Yisroel ideal, the primacy of Torah over nationalist ideology — require a position of careful distance from a state whose founding ideology and institutional character remain, in significant ways, at odds with Hirschian principles.

What is notable is that the trajectory of the debate within the Hirschian world has run toward engagement rather than rejection. The tradition's most serious twentieth-century heir engaged with the question of the state seriously and thoughtfully, even while remaining outside the Zionist consensus. Whether that engagement constitutes a modification of Hirsch's position or a legitimate application of his principles to new circumstances is itself a matter of ongoing dispute — and it is precisely the kind of question that a living Hirschian tradition must be prepared to address, rather than to defer indefinitely.

Why Literature Matters — TIDE's Case for the Humanities

  This post was extracted from the TIDE WhatsApp group. https://chat.whatsapp.com/FNbFs4JEXZkIzVNLJx3HuM

There is a question that sounds almost comically parochial until you realize how much rides on the answer: does a great poem have religious value? Not practical value, not instrumental value — not "it teaches us about the human condition in ways useful for understanding Torah" — but genuine, intrinsic value as an expression of something true and worthy of a Jewish person's serious attention? For most of the Orthodox world today, the honest answer is no. Literature is, at best, a concession to necessity. At worst, it is a spiritual hazard. Torah im Derech Eretz, in its fullest Hirschian form, says otherwise.

Hirsch's most direct engagement with this question came in a speech about the German poet Friedrich Schiller — delivered to his Frankfurt congregation and later published in his Collected Writings. The Schiller speech is understood within the Hirschian tradition as expressing something deeper than cultural accommodation: that great secular literature, which illuminates the human condition and cultivates moral imagination, belongs within the category of Derech Eretz itself — part of the divine heritage of humanity that a Mensch-Yisroel is called to engage with seriously, not merely to tolerate. It is a claim about the nature of human wisdom, not simply a concession to the social pressures of nineteenth-century German-Jewish life.

The most searching elaboration of this claim in the twentieth century came from Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, one of the preeminent Torah scholars of his generation and also a man of deep literary culture. In a celebrated lecture built around Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," Lichtenstein made an argument that goes to the heart of why literature matters for the religiously serious person. The poem depicts a narrator momentarily arrested by the beauty of a dark and snowy forest — enchanted, drawn in, tempted toward passive contemplation — before pulling himself away to honor his obligations and continue on his way. Drawing on Kierkegaard's distinction between ethical man and aesthetic man, Lichtenstein read the poem as a precise description of the moral challenge facing anyone who takes both the world and Torah seriously.

His key observation deserves to be quoted at length: "It is easy to devote yourself to Torah if you are convinced that everything else is nonsense. Nonsense is easy to give up. But one who sees the beauty in God's creation, who comes to love it, must be strong in order to devote himself to learning Torah. One must not divorce the world, but rather bear in mind one's 'lover's quarrel with the world.'" The phrase — borrowed from Frost's own epitaph for himself, written at the conclusion of another poem — captures the relationship precisely. Not rejection, not surrender, but the engaged, clear-eyed tension of someone who knows what he loves and what he has chosen to place above it. Rubbish, Lichtenstein noted, can be dismissed without a second thought. But in order to have a lover's quarrel with the world, you must first see its value.

This is what Hirsch meant by Derech Eretz as a dimension of Torah rather than a supplement to it — and it stands in sharp contrast to the position that dominates much of contemporary Orthodox education. The practical consequences of the disagreement are visible in Jewish schools. Where secular subjects are regarded as intrinsically valuable, they are taught with genuine investment — as worthy of the same intellectual seriousness brought to Torah study, capable of cultivating the mind and the moral imagination in ways that reinforce rather than compete with Jewish commitment. Where they are regarded as instrumental necessities, they are treated accordingly: adequate for college preparation, sufficient for government requirements, but not something a serious educator would bring genuine passion to.

This ambivalence crystallizes in a precise and revealing distinction: the difference between treating secular subjects as limudei chol — secular studies, a necessary but spiritually inert component of Jewish education — and treating them as expressions of divine wisdom at varying levels of holiness. Professor Cyril Domb, one of the most distinguished physicists of the twentieth century and a deeply observant Jew, put it sharply: he objected to the very phrase limudei chol. All chochma, in his view, is imbued with divine light emanating from the central stem of the Menorah. It is all, properly speaking, limudei kodesh — sacred learning — at different levels of kedusha. To call science or literature "secular" is to misname it.

The Chabad and mainstream yeshivish positions offer a contrasting view. Science and mathematics reflect divine wisdom in a relatively direct way — they describe the structure of God's creation. Literature, however, is man's chochma, not divine. One can acknowledge the skill involved in great literature without regarding it as spiritually significant. On this reading, Hirsch's engagement with Schiller was a pragmatic accommodation to German culture, not a template for Jewish education in all times and places. Rabbi Shimon Schwab, who grew up in the Hirschian environment, published a pointed critique along similar lines arguing that engagement with German culture was a temporary emergency measure designed for circumstances no longer applicable. Schwab later became an important figure in American TIDE — though the transcript of his intellectual development is itself telling: he was significantly influenced by Eastern European Torah scholarship, and his version of TIDE bore that imprint. The tension between the full Hirschian embrace of humanistic culture and a more limited, Torah-centered engagement with secular knowledge was never fully resolved even in those most committed to the tradition.

What is clear is that dismissing the Hirschian claim misses the depth of what both Hirsch and Lichtenstein were arguing: that the God who gave the Torah also gave humanity its literary and artistic inheritance, and that a Jew who walls himself off from both is not more holy but less whole — and, crucially, less tested. Commitment forged in genuine encounter with the world's beauty is of a different and deeper quality than commitment achieved by simply declaring the world worthless.

TIDE vs. Torah u-Madda — A Sibling Rivalry

  This post was extracted from the TIDE WhatsApp group. https://chat.whatsapp.com/FNbFs4JEXZkIzVNLJx3HuM

They are often treated as interchangeable — two names for the same broad commitment to combining Torah observance with engagement in the wider world of human knowledge. They are not interchangeable. Torah im Derech Eretz and Torah u-Madda share a family resemblance close enough to cause persistent confusion, but the differences between them are real, consequential, and worth understanding precisely — because getting them right clarifies not just intellectual history but the actual landscape of contemporary Orthodox life.

The clearest formulation of the distinction came from an unlikely source: Rabbi Norman Lamm, the scholar and longtime president of Yeshiva University who did more than anyone else to articulate and defend Torah u-Madda as a philosophy in its own right. Speaking at a Samson Raphael Hirsch conference held at Yeshiva University in 1984, Lamm stated the contrast with unusual directness. Torah im Derech Eretz, he said, was decidedly anti-Zionist, closer in orientation to the Agudah, and communally separatist — committed to the policy of Austritt. Torah u-Madda, by contrast, was much more hospitable to Zionism, more likely to find its adherents aligned with Mizrachi, and characteristically sought linkages to the rest of the Jewish community rather than separation from non-Orthodox elements within it. Lamm was not criticizing either position. He was mapping the terrain with the precision of someone who inhabited one camp and respected the other.

Lamm was also candid about his dissatisfaction with both terms. Derech Eretz, he observed, is too broad a concept — it admits of a large variety of interpretations, from business conduct to conjugal relations, and does not adequately describe the world of culture to which Hirsch meant it to refer. Madda, on the other hand, is too narrow — in modern Hebrew it refers primarily to science, while the cultural engagement both philosophies have in mind is far greater than science alone. These terminological difficulties are not merely cosmetic. They point toward a genuine conceptual complexity that neither label fully resolves.

The practical differences between the two philosophies are most visible at the level of institutional and communal commitments. TIDE is coupled, in the Hirschian tradition, with Austritt — some principled form of separation from institutions that misrepresent Torah — and with a theoretical non-Zionism that Torah u-Madda does not share. Even the most pro-Land of Israel Hirschian, Isaac Breuer, could not bring himself to legitimize Mizrachi — because Mizrachi's organizational structure entailed precisely the kind of institutional association that Austritt prohibits. An RCA rabbi who participates in organizations alongside non-Orthodox rabbis cannot, on strict Hirschian grounds, be a true Hirschian — regardless of how much he values secular education and engagement with the wider world. Torah u-Madda, by contrast, typically seeks linkages across the Jewish community rather than separation from non-Orthodox elements within it. These are not peripheral distinctions. They mark the boundary between the two philosophies clearly.

The Zionism question cuts even deeper. Torah u-Madda, as practiced at Yeshiva University, has generally been aligned with Religious Zionism and with a positive orientation toward the State of Israel as a religious and national project. TIDE, in its Hirschian formulation, carries a non-Zionist or anti-Zionist orientation that makes this alignment impossible. The two philosophies thus inhabit different positions within the broader map of Orthodox Jewish life — TIDE closer to the Agudah end of the spectrum on questions of Zionism and communal separatism, TuM closer to the Mizrachi end.

Which raises an uncomfortable question about the present. The question of whether TIDE is simply the more yeshivish version of Torah u-Madda, or Torah u-Madda's pathway into the yeshivish world, has been posed directly within the Hirschian community. A very broad tent of TIDE — one that sets aside Austritt, that accommodates Zionism, that softens the anti-Reform separatism — risks becoming indistinguishable from American Modern Orthodoxy. There is nothing wrong with American Modern Orthodoxy. But it is not Hirschian TIDE, and those committed to the latter are necessarily committed to maintaining distinctions that much of the Jewish world finds either puzzling or unnecessary. Hirschian TIDE also provokes discomfort in the other direction: its insistence on engagement with general culture and on universal human concern places it at odds with the more insular tendencies of the yeshivish world it otherwise resembles on questions of Zionism and communal separatism.

The irony is that Yeshiva University itself hosted the 1984 conference at which Lamm mapped these distinctions so precisely. He called it, in that same address, "a historic occurrence which is long overdue" and "an act of mutual legitimation" — acknowledging that YU was in some sense a fulfillment of Hirsch's teachings, even as Hirschian insiders pushed back sharply on exactly that claim. That tension — of genuine kinship alongside real and important difference — has never been fully resolved, and it remains one of the defining features of the relationship between these two sibling philosophies.