What happens when the words we pray clash with the values we hold?

Just in time for the High Holidays, this week on Identity/Crisis Yehuda Kurtzer speaks with Ethan Tucker, president of Hadar and co-author of Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law, about what it means to pray ancient words in a world shaped by present fears and political tensions and how we can navigate the frameworks of tradition and modern egalitarian commitments.

A transcript of this episode is available below.

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God as King in an Age of Authoritarianism Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Monday, September 15th, 2025. If you’re going to a synagogue in, I’m guessing, the majority of synagogues or temples in North America this week or next for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, you’ll almost definitely hear and sing this piece of musical prayer, Avinu Malkeinu, at least once. The prayer, and specifically the tunes you heard from Barbra Streisand or Theodore Bikel, from the recording by Phish made countless more options to choose. They’re part of the stuff that I like to call the common Judaism that most of us share. We as a Jewish community spend a lot of time focusing on our areas of division, and not nearly enough on the majority of stuff that we believe or practice or sing or eat in common. Now, not all of us will sing this particular tune. It’s far more common in the Ashkenazi tradition than in the Sephardic rite, but for those that sing it, it’s part and parcel of the high holiday experience. So much so, I think, that if the cantor decides this year to mix it up with a different tune for Avinu Malkeinu, or if the hip young rabbi decides to sub in a new poem instead, it wouldn’t just be missed, I think it could start a riot. It helps if you don’t really pay attention to the words. The hymn is a series of supplications to God, each of them repeating the opening formula, “our father, our king.” It’s old school monarchy and patriarchy stuff. And I suppose that the vast majority of liberal Jews who sing the song out of memory do so for all of the imaginable reasons. It’s enchanting. It feels emblematic of the holiday and nostalgic. The poetry is actually beautiful. The melody is sweeping and uplifting. And maybe we ignore the patriarchy stuff because we give Judaism and God a pass in the moment. Maybe a lot of folks don’t notice or don’t care. Elana Stein Hain introduced me to a distinction from the work of Adam Seligman, scholar of religion at Boston University, who draws the distinction between our ritual selves and our sincere selves. Sincerity is rooted in intention and meaning. Ritual is the performance of duty or obligation. Maybe those of us who think too much can be permitted to sway and tear up a bit about a song with a killer melody that characterizes the holidays, even if probing its theology as rational beings might make us a little squeamish. Meanwhile, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but democracy is in a bit of a valley these days. Those of us who believe in liberal democracy are increasingly aghast at the return of ideas in the Western mainstream, of the valuing of authoritarianism in government. Those ideas are often wed to other ideas, rooted in Christian nationalism of male superiority. All of the stuff that makes for Avinu Malkeinu to feel less like a nostalgic tune to sway to once a year, and more like its own dystopian vision of politics, less like the imaginative fiction of Handmaid’s Tale and more like an hour of Christian Bro podcast culture. Are we altered or even just informed as political beings in the world based on our religious imagination? What does it mean about the sincerity of our religious commitments if we laugh off the seriousness of this monologue that I’m giving by saying, don’t be foolish, that’s just Judaism; it’s not real life. ow, I know that there are prayer books that try to square this circle between our political biases and instincts of the present and the religious imagination of our liturgy. In plenty of other parts of the liturgy, liberal prayer books for decades have stopped rendering God as king, but rather using the more neutral sounding term “sovereign,” or gesturing towards other progressive or democratic descriptors. The liturgy itself balances between hard and fast male images of God with other images, including the divine feminine. I’m partial to a liturgical poem that we recite at Colnigere that describes God as a series of craftspeople that we and our fates are in God’s malleable hands like glass in the hands of a glassblower, where God’s power in the world is manifest without the language of sovereignty and without the framework of gender. But still, for all these efforts, for all the advances we liberal diaspora Jews have pioneered over the past few centuries, and especially the past few decades, the core metaphors die hard. And there we will be singing along when the time comes, and maybe even still humming the tune of Avinu Malkeinu over bagels long after the fast is over. I wanted to spend some time this morning thinking about the theology of the High Holidays. In Hebrew, a better phrase than “high holidays” is Yamim Nora’im, translated as “Days of Awe”; I prefer “Awesome Days,” and about what it means to carry in all of our political fears and concerns, all of our biases and ideologies into this encounter with the tradition. In the world in which I live, in the micro-denomination in which I practice my Judaism, that tension finds expression in the practice of Judaism known as traditional or halachic-egalitarianism. But you can find the same struggles along the denominational spectrum, from Reform Jews to Orthodox Jews using sometimes similar and sometimes different adjectives. It results in a number of really important questions. Who are we when we pray? What do we carry in? What do we leave behind? What does it mean to live in the present and to choose sometimes to pray in the language of the past? I’m joined this morning by my dear friend, Rabbi Ethan Tucker, the president of the Hadar Institute, returning guest to our podcast. We’ve been talking for decades now, right, about Jewish law and the way that it stretches in relationship to our ethical orientations and values. We also have the joy this year of leading services together in our literal library minyan at CSAIR in Riverdale. Ethan is joining the podcast now as he’s also promoting the re-release of his book Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Life, which he co-authored with Rabbi Michael Rosenberg. The book is a comprehensive study of the halachic literature on the intersection of the value of gender equality with traditional Jewish communal prayer. Let me start personally, Ethan, and thanks for coming back on the show. What do you think about, not when you sing Avinu Malkeinu in services, but when you lead it, when you know that you’re responsible not just for picking the key that the congregation is going to sing over the high holidays, but you’re responsible for really inspiring or shaping, in some ways, the religious imagination of the people in the room?

Ethan: Thanks, Yehuda, good to be back with you. Yeah, when I’m leading, which I’ve done so many years in so many different contexts, to be honest, this may sound strange, but the meaning of the words is often very far from my mind, in terms of my responsibilities in the moment. What I feel is most important as a leader is to project my sincerity, to use a word that you introduced the conversation with, to project the sense that I am in it; I am not at a remove from it. And that’s the key thing, I think, as a leader, you have to offer in order to draw other people in. It doesn’t mean the words are irrelevant, but it means the cadence of the word is just as important as their decoding. Now, the words, of course, do matter. And I think I think about them almost less for myself and more refracted through the people in the room. It could be, what is my daughter thinking of these words? What is that person I’ve had some discussions or arguments with thinking of them? What would my parents want me to think of the words? In that sense, there is actually a certain luxury to being leader. I feel sometimes the difficulty of not leading on Yamim Nora’im, when you’re sort of trapped there as it were with the words themselves, without the ability to transcend them and build on them with all those other dimensions.

Yehuda: Yeah, I feel similarly as a prayer leader, I’m not a particularly theological person. I don’t know what that actually means. I feel like I’m a ship captain. I’m helping people to have a particular religious experience or spiritual experience or whatever term you want to use, partly out of a sense of obligation, we all have to be there, but more out of a sense of like we have the opportunity to participate in something transcendent and let’s do that together. But then let’s confront the words themselves. In all of your years of teaching and your writing, you have been a very strong advocate to be a… I’ll use the term a “sympathetic reader,” an engaged reader, right? Taking the tradition, not at its face value and leaving it there, but not walking in and saying, how do I kind of counteract what it’s trying to do by doing something different? So now let’s take that mode, and I want to hear your kind of thinking about what it means to pray a liturgy, and it can be Avinu Malkeinu, but it can be plenty of other things in the liturgy that live at odds with some of our instinctual ethical sensibilities.

Ethan: Yeah, absolutely. The reading sympathetically is, I think, also another way of expressing the desire to speak in the dialect of eternity. If I can use an overly profound phrase, you talked about, you know, sort of praying in the present with the language of the past. I think it’s also about how do we locate ourselves? This is what it means to have a liturgy. I’m not writing the words, right? I could say other stuff that just comes to me. On some level, the choice to be in liturgy in any form is to say, I’m going to receive something and imagine that by speaking through these words, what I feel and what I have to say will be more profound. Now, how does one do that? I mean, there’s a lot of different ways. Look, sometimes there’s got to be, if not changing, supplementing, right? That is to say, you encounter certain prayers. I was just talking about this with my daughter a few days ago. You encounter certain prayers, specifically in the days of awe-liturgy, that are full of men, and women are completely absent, even though all the way back to the Bible, women have been among the most significant supplicants to God in our narratives. You think about at the end of the Yom Kippur service at night, a passage said by many people, the Mi She’anah prayer, “the one who answered.” And then you get this litany of people who called out to God, God answered them, and we say, “hu ya’aneinu,” God will also answer us. And it is glaring. It is simply glaring how Rebecca is missing from there. Hannah is missing from there. People who are core models for the sages and for us in terms of what it means to pray. Certainly when I’m leading Davening, we always hand out a supplement with that and we fill out the words and many communities have begun to do that. Sometimes there is just more to be said. Actually, the old expressions will not exhaust what you need to do. And some people, as you pointed out, will do that with Avinu Malkeinu. They’ll shake it up in the translation or the original. And I agree with your assessment that in the wrong configuration of mucking with certain things on the holidays, you will get a spiritual riot, if not a physical one. So there, I think part of also what it is to be a sympathetic reader is to actually have the humility of realizing you are probably not the first person to have the problem. And so instead of going for the jugular of the text and modifying it or deleting it, to have the patience and the good fortune of guides who can point you to this, to find interpretations or rereadings that just give it a different interpretation. I’ll share one that I only encountered as an adult, but which was extremely and is extremely meaningful for me. And a reminder of how our takes on these Tefillot can change year after year, depending on what we learn. Rav Yitzchak Hutner, one of the great and underappreciated 20th century rabbis, in one of his discourses around Rosh Hashanah is puzzling over the fact that in the Talmud, God is presented as saying, say the Malchuyot verses, say the verses about kingship, about sovereignty—I think we can extend it to “invoke that theme throughout the holiday”—“Kedei she-tamlichuni aleichem,” so that you will crown or coronate me over you. And Rav Hutner notes that this is a little tautological. What do you mean? You’re saying the verses in order to say the verses to proclaim God as king. How is that provoking some kind of divine response? Like when we blow the shofar, we want God to remember us. And he says something quite profound, which is clearly speaking as a modern Jew responding to a world without kings, without kings that are serious role models or holders of authority. And he says, Rosh Hashanah is actually not the time where Jews acknowledge God as king. It’s the time where Jews are coronating God as king. And just like that, he sort of flips the whole metaphor to a consent of the govern model, where when you’re saying “malkeinu,” you are less reflecting on some objective reality of God serving as a sovereign; you are actually being offered by the tradition this profound right, this profound place of establishing God as your ruler. And from that perspective, you take something that is a profoundly disempowering metaphor in a certain way and turn it into, again, the notion that the people are actually on some level what makes the king.

Yehuda: You said a lot of profound things there that I want to pull out. I want to pull out two different threads. One is going to be around egalitarianism, one is going be about prayer. Not surprisingly, given the topic of your work. So let’s start with the prayer piece. The suggestion that we, the way that you were describing the experience of this kind of prayer and that interpretive process is almost like you can’t step in the same river twice, the river of course is the same, you are not, right? And when this year that I step into the river, this experience looks a particular way and the river has evolved in time and so have I. So that implies that there’s something incredibly elastic about this vessel that we describe as the prayers and the liturgy themselves. Where is the resistance for you? I assume you—just because I know you—there are certain limits to what you want out of people in terms of their in terms of the elasticity of how they’re using the theology of the prayers, how where where it stretches beyond what you would feel comfortable in, and not just in—I’m changing the prayers themselves—but even in the—I’m walking in assuming that because I’m carrying this certain set of questions or concerns to the world that the prayers are automatically capable of changing in the moment to meet what I’m thinking about. Where’s that resistance for you of like, you’re not always the one coronating the king?

Ethan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think for me the resistance and it’s very hard to point to where this line is, so it’s maybe more of a standard than a guideline. It’s the difference between when prayer is an experience of rebelling and resisting and outsmarting the words, as opposed to genuinely feeling like you are their heir and are speaking a truth they wanted you to speak. And if it’s the latter, I’m not sure I have any limits, assuming we talk about a shared set of words, I’m not sure I have any limits on what someone imagines those words to project. As you say, when the business becomes one of figuring out what to change, what to modify, in all kinds of ways that will become contentious. I remember, this actually sits at an interesting intersection of gender and liturgy, I remember years and years ago when I was a much younger, less tolerant, even less wise person, that I was sitting with someone who was very active in a Chavurah in Boston where they did a lot of creative liturgical work. And I would say as a liturgical conservative—small C—I viewed this with a tremendous degree of skepticism and a sense, you know, you’re, changing things around. And one of the points of contention often has been—forget about Avinu Malkeinu. Just our regular brachot our regular blessings, which point us to say “Melech Ha’Olam, and let’s just translate it simply as “King of the Universe.” Over every single action that we do, that demands a bracha, a blessing, and that’s been vexing for people for whom both the hierarchy and the gender image of that have been upsetting. And so you’ll find in any number of liberal prayerbooks, shifting “Melech Ha’Olam” to “Ein Ha’Chayim,” you know, the source of life, the spring of life. This always seemed to me like a sort of playing fast and loose, you know, modification of the prayer book. And I remember sitting down with someone and talking about this and asking, you know, sort of pointed critique from the angle of halacha on this. And he said to me, yeah, that’s a great question. You know, actually, if you look in Kabbalistic literature, the essence of Malchut is not actually really about kingship. It’s about there being a single source of authority. And so when we say, Ein Ha’Chayim, and invoke the image of a spring, which is the notion of all the water comes from that ayin, that spring, that eye, we’re really actually emphasizing the critical element of malchut. And I remember leaving that lunch and saying, I don’t think I’m ever going to say that, but wow, that person completely changed my entire perspective. And what they did in that conversation was show me, I care about this and the meaning of this just as much as you. If anything, I’m concerned that the maleness and hierarchy of this is leading us to lose malchut.

Yehuda: But I would say in that example, I don’t want to impose this on you, but I’m guessing that one of the things that helped sway your response was that the person said “in the Kabbalistic tradition.” In other words, what they didn’t say was, I don’t like it. It doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t sound good. Now, they of course are saying that. They’re saying, can’t utter these words, right? And maintain a sincere sense. Like I feel almost victimized by them, right? So there is a strong personal moral instinct that’s driving this, but it may be that the reason that that makes sense to you is because it captures that sticky word authenticity. It’s still old, right?

Ethan: Yeah, I think also besides the old, it goes back also to that word of sincerity, combined with being an heir of something, right? In other words, because you can be sincere and stand outside. You can be sincere as a critic. We also, I think, it’s important to note, we all start as critics whenever we notice a problem, whenever anything is difficult for us. We begin from a stance of—that doesn’t feel right. That’s not working for me. For me, what’s been my spiritual path and my scholarship in this area has intended to promote is can we start from that place of critique and ultimately sublimated into being a faithful heir of the tradition, a lot of the work of which is figuring out what are the voices that grappled with this before. I don’t think anyone around that lunch table would have suggested that Lurianic Kabbalah was dealing with the same concerns that a late 20th, early 21st century Jew was dealing with, but the whole point of our tradition is that there are unexpected resonances of our concerns with other voices across time and space. And that’s the beauty of Talmud Torah, of study, of being in that larger tradition.

Yehuda: There’s a second religious value that seems to be at stake here when we confront a liturgy or a tradition in general and feel this dance between the desire to make it speak an intelligible language to us versus, as you said, being the heirs of it, which is the question also of humility. Are the prayers meant to humble us in some sense? Yes, if you, when you have to say the words “sovereign of the universe,” or “king of the world,” right? You are, you are, you are subordinating something in yourself. Whereas if your instinct is to make it sound a little bit different and a little bit more palatable, you are elevating the desire for autonomy and empowerment in yourself. And I will say as a, as a davener, as a person who prays and a person who prays for others, I actually, I feel this pretty acutely like, there’s one line I detest in the in right at the end of the silent prayers that we say before the repetition, which is “Before I was created, I was undeserving, and now that I am created, I am undeserving. I am dust of the earth,” etc. I find itt kind of appalling. Like gross. I don’t like talking about the human condition that way. And by the way, having been and led services in a room with people who feel very vulnerable because of their lack of self-worth, I find it to be like a violent text. So in that moment, how do I dance between, I’m not gonna say that, I don’t like it, it’s hurtful, I don’t want to say it, versus, well, somebody wants you to say it and thinks it’s important for you to say it, and who the hell are you to tell that imagined person of the past that you’re better than it?

Ethan: Yeah, look, it’s always helpful when things are tucked away in the private, quietly rid section of things. But you both intrinsically have more license and also no one’s really gonna know exactly what happens. But your point stands, 100%, we could go through the whole machzor and find all kinds of things that have a different kind of impacts for different people. I think the way I think about that and you touched on at the end of your question here. There are two dimensions that feel really important for the liturgy sort of being allowed, more or less, in the public space to remain whole. Number one is there are so many different people with different needs. I would say I used to feel the way you just described about tachanun on most mornings. The practice of falling down and saying things about how horrible it is and my bed has been stained with tears, etc. It felt to me over the top, you know, even on a national level at a time of Jewish power, it seems irresponsible. And I remember when one of the students in the early years of the yeshiva at Hadar, when she got up giving like a dvar tefillah, a little comment on the service at the end of the morning, saying her favorite prayer was tachanun. And why? Because it was a place that she felt gave her license to cry and to name the fact that there were a lot of things in her life that were horrible. And she spent so much of her life having to pretend everything was fine and uplifted. And actually she just wanted to be seen by God as having a tear-stained bed. And that really stopped me in my tracks because I said to myself, well, I can decide at home, any given morning, to invoke the strong rabbinic precedent that tachanun is optional, and if you’re not moved on a given morning to say it. But who am I to cut even one word from the public recitation if this will resonate with this person? That’s one. The other thing is, I think, there is no text that doesn’t have its moment. And even the text you talk about of the worthlessness of the human being. I remember many times with my older son as a little kid, he hated other versions of that too in the davening. “I don’t want to say I’m dust and ashes. Like I’m not, I’m a person. I’m trying to build myself up.” And I look around the world now and I see figures with massive power, arrogance, a sense that they can do whatever they want. And I think to myself, boy, do we need a dose of human worthlessness and humility. Now, I think the pastoral work here, and this is sometimes done by rabbis and sometimes done with various resources, is the folks in the room that you’re rightly concerned—will these texts be violent towards? Well, you have to have a way of also spreading this message, if what I’m saying is right, there’s also a way to say to people, yeah, I’m not sure that text is for you. I’m not sure that text is speaking to you. The challenge of prayer, of course, is we’re not there for everyone’s intimate moment with the words or with God. And yeah, it can be tough and damage can sometimes happen. But I think the liturgy is aiming for that broad impact, horizontally across the diversity of community and vertically through the axis of time for challenges and needs that are not yet clear to us.

Yehuda: I think you’re helping me understand maybe my own bias as to why I so strongly prefer the collective experience of prayer, and even the activity of singing, as part of the collective experience of prayer, because I find that it kind of thatches us together in something that seeks to not leave anybody behind in that place where of a kind of vulnerability, right? When people are saying their prayers silently, some people do need that and want it and do weep. Otherwise, I find it a little bit scary that we’re leaving people kind of on their own to struggle through this, and then we kind of get to pull it back together and lift them up. Rabbi Soloveitchik distinguishes between what he calls the prayer of the individual… It’s not just the prayer of the individual and then as though you have the individual prayer rendered in community, but it’s tefillat hatzibur, it is the prayer of the congregation, and it’s a totally different animal than the individual experience. And maybe my own bias has just been to lean on that side of things, because we then have more… it feels to me almost like there’s more safety and control that nobody, in theory, nobody gets left behind.

Ethan: Yeah, you know, look, one of the things that particular prayer that you’re referring to, I think this is the irony, of course, that prayer about “before I was created, I was nothing”—this was the personal prayer of an individual Talmudic sage, which then was found compelling enough by later people that they started saying it, and then by the time you get to them printing things, they decide this is going to remain and go in. And in that sense, it is a deviation from what ought to be a little bit more of a, there’s a little bit of personal variety, there’s meant to be some degree of personal variety, even in a liturgical context. And I think the reason that prayer hits hard and betrays that origin is it’s in the first person. The other way we shield ourselves from things, not always helpfully, we shield ourselves from things by putting them in the plural. I think that subjects itself to the danger of the classic thing of the rabbi who gets up and gives a sermon of rebuke and then the congregate comes over afterwards and says, I’m so glad you said that because, you know, Cohen really needed to hear that. And actually, it was for you too. And, you know, the communal prayer in that sense is tricky when we say, “al chet shechatanu,” the sins we have sinned. You can easily say, well, I don’t really do any of these, but a collective repentance, you say, “al chet shechatati,” which is not the way we say it, you’re much more exposed. I think it is interesting that for the most part, whether for your concerns or others, there is this bias of we don’t really pray in the individual, in the singular that much, but then the moments where that appears, they hit us even harder.

Yehuda: So let’s go back to the egalitarianism conversation because it really is one of the modern cruxes of the theological weight, the ethical consequences. It’s such a deep part of human experience, of people’s own sense of empowerment and their worlds in which they live. I want to offer you a kind of taxonomy of how people do egalitarianism. And I want you to, I want you to reflect a little on the strengths and weaknesses and one of them is going to be… the fourth take is yours. I’m going to read back your own words. There’s one strategy, I think, that exists in the world which is, no, we don’t actually tinker with the core material of liturgy or ritual, but everybody gets to lead it and everybody gets to say it. People of all genders get to speak in the language of the masculine, right? I would classify that as kind of where a lot of orthodoxy is evolving, right? It’s not a real interrogation of the liturgy itself or the practice of Judaism, but it is licensing different people to be able to have a position of authority over that material. A second is a retrieval method, right? Look, earlier in the tradition, I can find a source that women did the following or said this, or earlier in the tradition I can find a source that says “the source of life” as opposed to “king of the world,” and now I can kind of peg onto that and now I can make this change. A third strategy which I will say personally I gravitate more towards as I get older, which is, stop trying to make it work. Those are words of a famous film. “Stop trying to make fetch happen.” This is not gonna work. The only thing you need to do is just say—I’m not saying those words anymore, or I’m not abiding by the procedural norms of how I would get to a place to permit this person to do something. I’m just committing axiomatically to a principle of egalitarianism; the rest of the world will follow. And the fourth is yours, which is very subtle. I’m going to quote something you said in a 2017 interview with Alan Brill. You said, “Think of halacha as an eternal light refracted through changing lenses of reality.” Maybe you’ve said this before or remember saying it.

Ethan: I do.

Yehuda: You place a light bulb on a roadway with a red lens and all drivers know to slam on the brakes. Take the same light and put a green lens in front of it and the same law-abiding drivers floor the gas pedal. This is not a shifting law, but a shifting reality. Our claim—and this is to your and Mikey’s book—“Our claim is that the halacha never cared about biology per se when it came to public prayer, rather gender was a proxy for other categories of significance, categories that are themselves grounded in social realities. A shifting response to gender and prayer may then be an actually more faithful fidelity to the underlying values of the halacha.”

Ethan: Sounds familiar.

Yehuda: So run through, yeah, run through the first three and then play out this fourth because what you’re, feels to me like you’re arguing is it’s not really about gender at all, and I’m using a very different approach to make possible a gender re-interrogation of Jewish law. So I want you to walk us through that.

Ethan: Yeah, there’s so much to say on this. I’ll say, I guess, to build up to the last approach. I think if I can make a general statement about this, I think what we want to do is be honest and sympathetic readers of our tradition and honest and sympathetic readers of our reality and lived experience. And the pitfalls often happen when we give up one or the other of those, or we essentially reduce halacha to some sort of game where I just need to find this secret passcode that will, you know, let me get to where I need to go, and let me maybe sort of try to take that apart. Without getting into, I think it’s actually very complicated to talk about who is in what camp. But I think it is helpful to talk about approaches. There is an approach that essentially sees the lived experience of gender equality in the world as a distraction, maybe even a seduction, maybe something that’s leading us astray. And there’s a certain kind of counterculturalism that the halacha is meant to provide on this. And I’m actually sympathetic to that when it’s articulated with full sincerity and consistency. And there’s a sense of, I actually don’t really want to live in that world. I think if you live in a world where you delegate serious leadership roles to women in all areas of life other than tefillah, the result will probably not be a deep honoring of the tradition in the long run, but a sidelining of the tradition, what Professor Vered Noam has talked about putting halacha and Jewish practice in a museum as opposed to making it a normal part of life. In its worse iterations that can be just sort of like a you know… a locker room or a, you know, just sort of fun, fun place to hang out, but not anything that has an analog with the other ways we run things. You can also, on the other hand, I think, you know, sort of despair. Again, I’m not projecting this onto you or anyone else, but you can despair that the language of the tradition and its insights and values really does speak to the contemporary moment. You can say, actually just live in a different time. I need a certain kind of paradigm shift. There, aside from the fact that I don’t think that’s correct on this topic, I also think it’s dangerous, which is to say, at the end of the day, I’m not sure Judaism has a long-term vitality without constantly reinserting its commitments back into the discourse of the ages. Now, that doesn’t mean there can’t be moments of disjuncture, but I think moments of conscious disjuncture that are allowed to fester for too long end up doing lots of undermining work. We can look at, you know, various Talmudic passages with you and other of our listeners may be familiar with where the rabbis seem to do a sort of outrageous rabbinization of biblical characters. They go back, they imagine David in the study hall arguing with Avishai, his bodyguard. And there is something that to the historically-trained mind, you know, smirks and finds amusing. But they are actually doing something profound there, which is asserting, we’ve made up something new here. We think of ourselves as basically being in an unbroken tradition in the past. And I think that generates a tremendous amount of energy for moving forward, for building things. You know, even before, I think this is important, you lovingly described the place we’ll daven for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and others like it as belonging to a micro-denomination. And it’s not how I think of it. I think of it as the tip of the spear of the way that halacha is and must be understood. And like all new insights or ways of synthesizing traditions and realities, it’ll start with a certain group of people that are ready to do it. And it will be born out, hopefully on the wings of eagles with great, great influence in much broader ways. I think bringing it to my approach, I do think that quote that you brought really does capture my thinking on this, which is, I’m not interested in looking for some stray precedent that I can hang my hat on and say, great, now I have a token, authentic place to park. I really want to understand—what did the sages of old want of me? What would they have done today? It requires me, yes, to stretch them beyond their own time, just as it requires me to stretch myself beyond my own time. But to me, that’s the whole thing. And we could go through, and the book goes through, what are the arguments I would make from the text themselves that indicate that this is the case. One of the things in the second edition of the book is there’s a new appendix, which goes through the sort of analysis at a core level of—how do you read texts that talk about women, slaves, and minors as a legal category, as three people who belong together. It’s uncomfortable. You would never say that triad in polite company today. The argument that we make there is that that itself, as we say in Hebrew, “hi ha-notenet,” that actually proves the point that the category here was a sociological category with various proxies. The very thing that makes that triad uncomfortable for us to hear today is the very social change that makes the underlying value there get applied differently. Just to say the underlying value is, if you’re not a full social economic independent stature, you may not have the full panoply of obligations. When that shifts, when gender actually goes to a different place in our society we can say, thank God, the obligations follow or the circle of expectation expands. But I think what’s really important to me is whether or not someone buys that argument on that point or is going to change their practice, I do really believe that the work of these discussions around halacha, around liturgy is to try to understand what is that metaphor of “our father, our king” getting at? Right? What is it meant to do in us? I think one of the things is it makes us humble. It makes us feel loved. Right? I may also feel loved by my mother, but just focus for—what does the image of father do for me? And on some level, it doesn’t mean that the words don’t get in the way, right? I can acknowledge they can get in the way, but much more important than the word “avinu,” is—how does your father, right, make you feel at the best moments, and how are you trying to channel that into your relationship with God? And then maybe other images and other texts and other things we need to add to that. But that’s how I try to think about it.

Yehuda: Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve really struggled with this. When I first journeyed from an Orthodox background into egalitarian contexts, your approach was not, I mean, literally your approach was vital to me. As you know, you came and stayed in our house in Brookline with a screaming infant who was being sleep trained. I’m still sorry about that. It cost you a night of sleep. And you taught a lot of this Torah. What I would say psychologically that Torah did for me at the time was like, it can work. It can work. You don’t have to feel bad about leaving behind the Judaism that you know kind of works, you now can’t abide anymore, but this can work. And since shifting to egalitarian contexts and my own drifting, my own impatience, maybe for those who have not gone there, the shift towards, no, I just think this is right, not, it’s right because you’ve helped identify that these categories in the past were used as related to social class and now we’re mapping them differently onto gender. It’s just not right. It’s just not how human beings should operate. What has been very liberating for me is… so by default, I’ll put in an Egalitarian context. Once in a while, you know, my boys like to go to a local Orthodox synagogue. Oftentimes I’ll go with them. When I go there, it enables me to no longer feel like this is kind of the real thing. And what I’m stretching to do when I daven egalitarian is to make it work. And instead I can walk into that room and be like, oh, these people are choosing to not make it work. These people are choosing in the perpetuation of a more patriarchal tradition, they are making their own choice. And I find that really liberating. It’s when Rachel Adler says, the theologian Rachel Adler says, the Torah has to speak to us in a language of human. You reclaim an immense amount of dignity in being able to resist some of that. And maybe it’s just that you and I ultimately have a little bit of a, it’s not just different strategies. Maybe it’s just a different set of orientations, but I don’t know. I don’t know.

Ethan: Yeah, maybe different orientations. I think there may also be different human experience. I’m always very open when talking about this in a personal way of noting that I grew up in two different homes. What they shared in common was shmirat mitzvot, traditional Jewish practice and Shabbat observance. And in one, I went to a non-egalitarian synagogue, and when I went to an egalitarian synagogue. In that sense, my journey is less one of starting in one place and going to another. It’s more about trying to find a way to articulate language that can unite as much of Am Yisrael as possible around things that feel important to me and feeling very much a part of both of those spaces or having grown up and davening in those different spaces. And in that sense, no one can really find a way to speak equally effectively to everyone, right, with a different kind of journey. I think, yes, what you are tapping into is that for me, I want the common journey to be that we are trying to be Avdei Hashem, we’re trying to be servants of God, of the King, of the Sovereign. And I strive to see that striving in what other people are doing. And I know they see in me sometimes that I’m going too far on something, or I haven’t pushed far enough on this. And I can see that in others also. I can feel that frustration of people who, you know—anyone who writes a book has a fantasy of, “Now that I’ve written this book the world will change, because people will read it and they will be convinced!” And anyone who’s written a book knows that’s not that’s not actually how it goes. But you do offer people, I think, a way of talking and thinking. I think my humility on this topic, and maybe it goes back also to my humility with the liturgy, also, is, it’s hard to fully foresee what all the consequences of different choices will be. And certainly you can walk into a non-egalitarian space and be disappointed with that piece of it that feels misaligned with what you want the world to be. And you will also often find in those spaces, you know, metrics of commitment and devotion in other ways that are the gold standard to be adopted by everyone. And that’s true of every space. I think every sincere Jewish space with energy has something you walk into and you say, wow, this is really being done well here. How could I bring that in? The critique I will fully accept is, this way of thinking requires a great degree of self-confidence and patience, not to feel overly threatened by different models, different words, not to feel that a certain paragraph in the davening is coming for me. And instead to say, here I am, I’m trying to understand what I can get from this. And I don’t pretend that everyone’s equally equipped to do that at every moment in their life, right? I think one of the things that is interesting is when we think about who is equipped to lead davening on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it’s quite striking that formally, the codes talk about you needing to be a certain age, to have kids, any number of details, which I would say to you are quite explicitly proxies for people who have felt pain and had deep responsibility. It’s not a light enterprise and it requires someone, whether they’re, they may reach that wisdom before 30, they may have plenty of responsibility without having kids, but you want someone up there who has some skin in the game and I think can bear the knocks that the liturgy may deal as they’re going through it.

Yehuda: Last question, which is going back to Avinu Malkeinu, “Our sovereign, our king.” This year in particular, lot of Jews are going to be walking into synagogue with a lot of feelings about authoritarianism and politics and… and truth and all of their values at stake. What advice would you offer the Jew in the pew in coming into a prayer experience this year? In other words, not just those who are showing up just to hear the speech, which is fine, I have no judgment, but for those who are coming to pray. What advice might you give them, all of us, on how to bring in the heaviness and the weight of the world that we feel is slipping away from us in the present as we kind of confront this prayer dialogue with eternity?

Ethan: Yeah, it’s such a hard question. There’s what I don’t think is a facile answer because I really do believe it’s deep, but it has its limits. When we pray for God to rule over the whole world, I think it’s important to note particularly what the image of divine kingship means going back to the Bible and going back to the earliest narratives about the flesh and blood monarchy in contrast to divine kingship, right? When the people ask for a king under Samuel, he excoriates them because essentially they were supposed to be living under a regime of divine anarchy, if you can describe it that way. And the choice of an earthly sovereign is sort of selling out to human power, which will ultimately corrupt. If you take that seriously, when we say, “meloch al kol ha’olam kulo b’chvodecha,” we beg for God to be the ruler, that is implicitly a demotion, right, of the centrality of all the other rulers. I think, you know, as Jews, as human beings, that shouldn’t mean chaos. It shouldn’t be what we think of when we say the word anarchy. But a sense of a world that is not governed by self-seeking, self-serving individuals, that, I think, is a central piece. And to the extent there’s some righteous disappointment, maybe we can call it, with the world that comes in, I think the liturgy is there to amplify that. That said, you know, that can be escapist. There’s no question you sit there and you go into your little ritual hive on Rosh Hashanah and you emerge feeling much better. But the world was the same. It’s going to be just a regular Tuesday and Wednesday. It’s not even on a weekend this year. The world’s just going to be going about. And there, I think it’s important to remember that davening doesn’t do all the work. You know, I think davening centers us with a certain set of values, of vision, of what the destiny of the world is meant to be. But at the end of the day, it’s got to be translated into—what kind of world are you building on the ground? I think from my own exposure to politics as a kid, and my family, you have this too, I’m always skeptical of—if you go deep into that work, I think you can make a big difference. If you’re not directly in the work of high level politics, opinion shaping, et cetera, I think actually the call is that we do most of our significant work by building the families, the communities, the local spaces we’re in, and we model what we can in those places. And that’s not going to get you a Nobel Peace Prize, but it is going to get you divine favor on the ultimate day of judgment because that’s what matters. That’s how I think about it.

Yehuda: Thanks for coming on the show, Ethan. It should be a shana tova, a gut gebentsht yor.

Ethan: Thank you, Yehuda. Amen ve-Amen.