In a recent opinion piece on Haaretz.com, R. Asher Lopatin, the new president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, protested what he sees as a “flurry of activity …to try to declare that elements of the Orthodox community are no longer part of the Orthodox world.” Much of that, in his view, focuses on Open Orthodoxy, the segment of Judaism with which he identifies. One strategy he might have adopted in response would be to show why the claims about Open Orthodoxy are false, overblown, or unfair, but he sets his sights differently.

He says instead that the “values and traditions of our Masoret (sic) declare starkly that no one has the authority or religious standing to write someone out of Orthodoxy.” I aim to show that this statement, as written, is so obviously false it is hard to imagine R. Lopatin himself believes it. If I am correct, my biggest problem with his piece is not whether he’s right or wrong about Open Orthodoxy, it’s that he tries to slip by his readers claims he himself doesn’t believe.

Leading in to a reference to Netziv, R. Lopatin writes: “Attempts to write people off as heretics and disbelievers are not new.” That seems to me to give up the game—unless he plans to prove that every such attempt was so wrong as to be a violation of our values and traditions, he has casually informed us that the opposite is true, that various thinkers and writers have in fact felt the need to call out others’ views or actions as having left Orthodoxy.

The Tradition of Writing People Out of Orthodoxy

R. Lopatin might read Netziv as opposing all such activity, a claim itself open to question, but he has to know of others who have done exactly that, making it clear that publicly protesting the violation of existing standards of Orthodoxy is very much within the bounds of tradition. For two examples he doesn’t mention, Chatam Sofer and R. Samson Raphael Hirsch both felt the need to oppose Reform Judaism (at a time when denominations were not yet fixed, so it wasn’t clear that Reform was outside of any tent) publicly and energetically. R. Lopatin can think their strategy was misguided or unfortunate, but can he really claim they arrogated to themselves rights the tradition denied them, or anyone?

Not to mention that Rambam—the model for what we today call Modern Orthodoxy, the one who most forcefully and adamantly argued for accepting the truth wherever we find it—was also one of the most vigorous proponents of defining what today we call Orthodoxy carefully, and recognizing that certain people write themselves out by their actions and beliefs. While some in Open Orthodoxy argue that Rambam’s ideas were so heavily debated as not to obligate us to follow them (full disclosure: I analyzed this question in my We’re Missing the Point: What’s Wrong with the Orthodox Jewish Community and How to Fix It), R. Lopatin’s ignoring Rambam’s focus on faith and action as definitive of being in or out raises questions about whether he means what he’s writing.

Rabban Gamliel’s Brachah

R. Lopatin then cites Rabban Gamliel as having “set the model for finding who is in and…out: Let people self-select;…identify…say so; it is not for us to make these declarations.” He bases this on Rabban Gamliel’s having instituted a blessing in the daily prayers which would be recited only by those who think of themselves as believers.

His construction of how that blessing came about ignores the backstory the Talmud itself gives. It wasn’t that Rabban Gamliel hesitated to identify heretics, it was that the heretics of his time refused to self-select, refused to admit they were heretics. Instead, they showed up for prayers, acted like other Jews, worked their way into communities’ good graces, and then convinced others to join their heresy.

The point of the blessing wasn’t that you would only say it if you believed it, it was that it cursed your kind so strongly, you couldn’t fluently get the words out of your mouth if you were a member of the targeted movement. Nothing in the story suggests that Rabban Gamliel, no wallflower, worried about identifying these people—he was struggling with how to act when the people he saw as being out of the religion didn’t have the good grace to admit who they were.

Fighting Lubavitch, Then and Now

R. Lopatin then brings up the jailing of the first Lubavitcher Rebbe since, obviously, we wouldn’t want to be grouped with those who did that. He is right that Jewish tradition has long resisted handing over Jews to secular authorities; when, in the thirteenth century, an internal debate about whether Rambam’s writings were heretical led to the secular authorities burning some of those writings, that tragedy stopped the debate in its tracks.

That doesn’t mean they, or those who came after, rejected the need to identify heretics. R. Lopatin is certain we wouldn’t identify early Hasidim as problematic, yet the Gaon of Vilna, an otherwise private man, went public with a battle against them on exactly those grounds, even refusing to meet with that same Lubavitcher Rebbe. R. Lopatin can disagree with the Gaon’s choice, but to refrain from mentioning it in a piece whose thesis is that it is against our tradition to battle deviations from Orthodoxy at best flirts with the other side of disingenuous.

His further examples are similarly problematic. He wonders whether we shall “model ourselves after those who condemn today’s Lubavitch Hasidim who venerate their deceased rebbe, zt”l?” This sentence alone makes the article worthy of condemnation, since the person most identified with that issue today is Professor David Berger, who has waged a lonely and unrewarded fight against what he sees as a serious heresy that is more than a small minority of Lubavitch.

One could argue that Prof. Berger is wrong on the facts, that what he calls heresy isn’t, or that the heresies he identifies either don’t exist or exist among such a small percentage of Lubavitch that his reaction is unwarranted. But if his facts are accurate (and he makes clear how hard he worked to ascertain the facts before he leveled any accusations), how could R. Lopatin recommend any other reaction? If these and other Lubavitchers falsely pretend heresies don’t exist among them, wouldn’t R. Lopatin think we’d need to call them out?

The Lines of Orthodoxy

I find it surprising that R. Lopatin states that he doesn’t have lines beyond which he’d have to say that someone was outside of Orthodoxy, when he clearly does. A few years ago, on the Morethodoxy website, he felt the need to distill what he called the Five Pillars of Orthodox Judaism. I don’t have to know what they are to know that that means that rejecting one of those pillars, in R. Lopatin’s own view, implies a person has left Orthodoxy.

What would R. Lopatin do if someone denied those pillars and yet called him or herself Orthodox, and attracted followers who wanted to be Orthodox and were misled into thinking that qualified? What would he do if an HUC-JIR trained rabbi, who never departed from those teachings or practices, identified as Orthodox and attracted followers who thought they were still Orthodox? What if the Pope announced the time had come for Christians to recognize they were really Jews, started calling himself Orthodox, and Orthodox Jews began buying into it?

There is ample reason to wish for a big tent, for much tolerance, and to debate how tightly we draw the lines around what we call Orthodox. R. Lopatin is free to argue that it is unfair to exclude Open Orthodoxy on the merits. But when he argues that tradition didn’t believe in such drawing of lines or of opposing those who cross those lines, when he suggests he could live in a world with self-identification the standard of Orthodoxy, he’s just wrong and he knows it.